Ambinder on Manhunt

Tonight, HBO premieres Greg Barker's documentary Manhunt*, based largely on Peter Bergen's book of the same name with some additional interviews/reveals.

In his column for The Week, Marc Ambinder sneak previews what he believes is the documentary's key message, titilatingly titled "How the CIA really caught bin Laden's trail." Ambinder says the key moment in the search was the 2004 capture of Hassan Ghul by Kurdish forces. The documentary reveals that although the Kurds eventually remanded Ghul to U.S. custody, he willingly told the Kurds "that bin Laden uses a single courier with the nomme de guerre 'Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti'" before the CIA could interrogate him (and, by implication, was subsequently tortured).

This account is certainly plausible, but I have three brief observations:
1- Ghul's role in the evidence chain is hardly news . . . hell, even I mentioned it in Wanted Dead or Alive (p. 224, tyvm) in a section that my publisher gave me three days to put together in the week following Bin Laden's death on May 1, 2011. (Oh, btw, Happy Anniversary!)

2- I love the Kurds. I've been a guest of their hospitality in the KRG and Baghdad, and I believe they will be one of America's key allies in the Middle East for decades to come. But given the reputation of their intelligence services -- which emerged in order to counter Saddam Hussein's attempts to infiltrate the Kurdish leadership before Operation Iraqi Freedom -- I'm a little skeptical that Ghul gave up such critical information . . . voluntarily. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but just that it would be surprising somebody so highly placed in al-Qa'ida (Ambinder claims he was sent by bin Laden to supercede Zarqawi) would give up such important information without a glove being laid on him. Whatever one thinks about the morality of enhanced interrogations, I can not think of another example of somebody from al-Qaida core singing so quickly.

3- Regarding Ghul's role, this is the first account I've seen that put him at a level above courier, much less bin Laden's "envoy to personally supervise" al-Qa'ida in Iraq. Most accounts place Ghul being arrested on the Kurdish-Iranian border carrying a CD with a letter from Zarqawi to bin Laden, which would be very odd given Ambinder/Barker's version of events. Again, this may be correct. But if, as Ambinder claims, the CIA knew he was high-level enough that he would be given command of al-Qa'ida's most important affiliate, why would the Agency turn around and hand him over to Pakistan's ISI, who subsequently released him! It seems equally plausible that he may have given al-Kuwaiti up in an attempt to say something like "Hey, I didn't know I was carrying this stuff. The guy who would be carrying it is that al-Kuwaiti guy!" in other words, as a smoke screen to minimize his own importance as a courier.

(As I noted when this story broke in June 2011, imagine how awkward it must have been for Ghul trying to explain to his al-Qa'ida buddies that he was the one who gave up bin Laden's courier. If he somehow survived that revelation by the Associated Press, for his sake I hope they don't get HBO in wherever in Pakistan he is hiding!

In all, Ambinder seems to be leaning a little too far forward to destroy the claims that enhanced interrogations had anything whatsoever to do with finding Osama bin Laden.

I'll withhold judgment on the documentary itself until I see it*, but I find some elements of Ambinder's account here to be highly dubious.

* Note: And just by coincidence, my household recently switched from a cable company that featured HBO and Starz to one featuring Showtime and Cinemax. @#$! Although to be honest, I'm a little more bummed about missing the final season of Spartacus and the next season of Boardwalk Empire than the documentary.