Osama bin Laden\u2019s death two weeks ago has prompted a bitter debate on US op-ed pages and cable TV shows over one of the major legacies of the Bush Administration: \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques.\u201d Defenders of the administration (and many of its former officials, who have rarely been heard from over the past two years) have emerged to insist bin Laden\u2019s death vindicates the intelligence-gathering-at-all-costs strategy of the US War on Terror.<\/p>\n
Obama never would have found the guy, they argue, if Bush hadn\u2019t made the hard decisions on water-boarding and building Guantanamo Bay.<\/p>\n
Liberals, on the other hand, have seized on bin Laden\u2019s death as proof that the US can achieve its counter-terrorism ends without sacrificing its values in the process (he was found, after all, only after Obama had repudiated his predecessor\u2019s dubiously legal tactics).<\/p>\n
Enter into this debate brash former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who injected a new twist this week with an op-ed in the Washington Post<\/a>. Bin Laden\u2019s death vindicates Bush\u2019s anti-terrorism strategy, he wrote\u2026 and we have Julian Assange to thank for proving it:<\/p>\n This conclusion was inadvertently reinforced recently by WikiLeaks\u2019 illegal disclosure of more than 700 classified Defense Department files on Guantanamo Bay detainees. Their publication has harmed our security and cemented the impression among allies that America is incapable of keeping secrets. But the material also provides compelling evidence of the effectiveness of Bush administration anti-terror policies after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Those documents reveal, according to Rumsfled, that we first learned about Abbottabad at Guantanamo. They reveal that detained terrorists were chattering about a planned \u201cnuclear hellstorm\u201d, thus motivating the Bush Administration\u2019s desperate actions to protect Americans. They reveal \u201cthe lengths to which military guards accommodated Muslim religious sensibilities\u201d, and that al-Qaeda members turned on each other under questioning, and that detainees said to have been brutally interrogated in fact committed suicide.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was no policy of mistreatment, much less torture,\u201d Rumsfeld writes.<\/p>\n Never mind that this same document cache also reveals that the US detained at Gitmo an Al Jazeera cameraman<\/a> for the primary purpose of grilling him about the network\u2019s news-gathering operation.<\/p>\n Julian Assange hoped that his latest gamble with the lives of intelligence professionals, military personnel and terrorist informants would embarrass the U.S. government and inhibit its ability to strike our enemies. But the WikiLeaks documents, coupled with what we know about how bin Laden\u2019s hiding place was discovered, may be among the clearest vindications yet of the Bush administration\u2019s policies in the struggle to protect America and the free world from more terrorist attacks. They may prove the strongest arguments for keeping open the invaluable asset that is Guantanamo Bay.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This line of thinking actually proves something else: That a large cache of documents published without context can be invoked for official propaganda just as easily as it can be used to expose official wrongdoing.<\/p>\n Ironically, the elastic law-enforcement powers Rumsfeld says Wikileaks has helped to justify in the post-9\/11 world have made it easier for the current administration to investigate WikiLeaks itself. Computer scientist David House, a vocal member of the Bradley Manning Support Network, had his laptop confiscated at the border in November by Homeland Security agents. On Friday, the ACLU announced it was suing the government <\/a>on House\u2019s behalf for violating his First Amendment right to freedom of association and Fourth Amendment protections from unreasonable search and seizure.<\/p>\n