The Associated Press reports that Riduan Isamuddin aka Hambali, the mastermind behind the 2002 Bali bombing that killed 202 people, will be put on trial in Washington, D.C.
I think the AP may be overplaying the symbolism a bit here by saying that "the country's most significant terrorism trials in generations will be conducted in the two cities targeted in the Sept. 11. 2001, attacks," given that Hambali wasn't involved in the 9/11 attacks and that his activities have been mostly focused in Southeast Asia.
Torture apologists will seize on this part of the article to defend the utility of Bush's interrogation policies:
Bush said such interrogations, which included the simulated drowning technique of waterboarding, helped crack alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and led authorities to Hambali. Under intense questioning at a CIA ''black site,'' Hambali revealed a plan for another wave of suicide hijackings in the U.S., Bush said.
A lot of hedges right? Bush said. There's a reason for that. As Timothy Noah explained last year, the most prominent example in the supposed "wave of suicide hijackings" supposedly disrupted by waterboarding KSM, the attack on the Library Tower in L.A., had been canceled before KSM was captured. Bush had bragged about disrupting the L.A. Towers plot in 2002, but KSM hadn't been captured in 2003.
Under interrogation by the CIA at a black site, Hambali revealed plans for a "wave" of attacks on U.S. subways and businesses and a planned attack using anthrax -- except as Jane Mayer reported in The Dark Side, those plots had already been disrupted by December 2001, and the scientist developing the anthrax was already in U.S. custody.
As for whether the information KSM gave led to Hambali's capture, some of it may have. It's politically convenient for the the GOP to draw a direct line between KSM being waterboarded and Hambali being captured, but that presupposes that the U.S. had no assistance from overseas partners. In the imaginary world of 24, all you have to do is torture a suspect to get information. But in reality, piecing together intelligence information is a complicated process, and it's highly unlikely that KSM provided the only information that led to Hambali's capture. The Bush administration's prior misleading characterizations of how useful information gleaned through torture was don't exactly inspire confidence.
As for whether the torture wing of the GOP can hurt the president by attempting to provoke mass panic over prosecuting Hambali, they haven't so far, and I doubt the White House is worried. I suspect the fact that the trial is set for D.C. will also blunt the effectiveness of such criticisms, given the optics of the GOP panicking over a terror trial in the nation's capitol while the president himself remains calm and unafraid.
-- A. Serwer
