Good morning. This is Finn McRedmond, staff writer at the New Statesman and editor of the Saturday Read. I wanted to draw your attention to one more piece from our Easter Special – just in case you missed it over the weekend.
Alfreda Bikowsky may not be a household name – not least because she operates under a pseudonym now. But my colleague Faye Curran knows exactly who she is: once the leader of the CIA unit that captured Bin Laden, turned women’s life coach. Or to the New Yorker? The “queen of torture”. Over the course of several months Faye spoke with Bikowsky, and found a woman "unfailingly polite” but gripped by a profound cognitive dissonance. What emerges is this twisty piece of old school, long form reportage. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
You can read an extract of the piece down below, or click through to read it in full. The New Statesman is only available to paying subscribers at the moment. The good news is that you can save some money if you buy now. I will be back with you on Saturday, as usual, for a rundown of the week. Until then, happy Easter. And as ever, thanks for reading and have a great week.
What she did next
To the clients of her women’s life coaching business, YBeU Life Coaching, she is Freda Scheuer. For $397 for three sessions or $597 for six, you can “feel heard, understood and supported as you get clear on exactly what you want, what is holding you back, and how you will overcome it”. A lot of the women who want to work with Bikowsky are from similar career backgrounds – some law enforcement or military officers.
For both business and personal reasons, it makes perfect sense for Bikowsky, now 61, to no longer use her birth name. That name and various other pseudonyms she has been known by over the years – Frances (her middle name), deputy chief of Alec Station, or as she was referred to in the New Yorker, the “Unidentified Queen of Torture” – carry some weight.
As the former deputy and head of Alec Station – a specialised CIA unit that was dedicated to tracking Osama bin Laden and his associates between 1996 and 2005 – and later the global jihad unit, Bikowsky has been widely reported to have been among the senior officials associated with the development, implementation and defence of what the CIA described as “enhanced interrogation techniques”…
Thanks again, see you on Saturday.
The most frightful example of the philosophical justification ‘the end justifies the means’ is the pogrom, the primary implementers of which know they’re committing mass murder yet still genuinely perceive it all as part of an ultimately greater good. In the case of contemporary Israel, it is ethnic-/religious-purity and material/land/natural-resource interests.
One wonders how many more Gazan non-combatants would have been slaughtered, and sooner, by the Israel Defense Forces had Hamas unconditionally released the Israeli hostages as Western politicians/governments and news-media immediately demanded? And then there's the former IDF soldier, Benzi Sanders, who told CNN's Christiane Amanpour in an interview [Amanpour & Company, PBS, November 6, 2023] that Israel “facilitated” transfers of weapons to Hamas militants — arms likely intended for use against Israel!
... Many Palestinians, including children, have been (over the many decades since the creation of Israel) held, if not brutalized, in Israeli detention centers or jails without being charged for long periods of time, even many years. Most of them eventually get released, albeit many of those as part of a trade or human exchange by the Israeli state. To me that sounds a bit like ‘hostage’ treatment. And it’s much easier for a conscience to do when one considers another an innately lower lifeform who also looks different from you (notably skin color).