Posted by
Defend America on Thursday, February 11, 2010 9:30:47 PM
Dead Terrorists Tell No Tales
Is Barack Obama killing too many bad guys before the U.S. can interrogate them?
BY MARC A. THIESSEN |
FEBRUARY 8, 2010
The
CIA reportedly succeeded in killing the head of the Pakistani Taliban -- the
most recent in a flurry of drone attacks the agency has launched in South Asia
and the Middle East. Another strike in Pakistan reportedly took out one of the
FBI's most wanted terrorists; another in Pakistan took out a master bomb-maker
for the al Qaeda affiliate in the Philippines, Abu Sayyaf; and a strike in
Yemen targeted a senior military leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,
the group behind the Christmas Day attack (his fate has yet to be determined).
President Barack Obama's
escalation of drone strikes is one area in the counterterrorism fight where he
has earned plaudits from even his most vocal critics on the right. Hold the
applause. Obama's escalation of the "Predator War" comes at the very same time
he has eliminated the CIA's capability to capture senior terrorist leaders
alive and interrogate them for information on new attacks. The Predator has
become for President Obama what the cruise missile was to President Bill Clinton -- an
easy way to appear like he is taking tough action against terrorists, when he
is really shying away from the hard decisions needed to protect the United
States.
To
be sure, unmanned drones are critical in the struggle against al Qaeda. They
allow the United States to reach terrorists hiding in remote regions where it
would be difficult for special operations forces to reach them, or to act on
perishable intelligence when the only choice is to kill a terrorist or lose
him. Constantly hovering Predator (or Reaper) drones also have a psychological
effect on the enemy, forcing al Qaeda leaders to live in fear and spend time
focusing on self-preservation that would otherwise be used planning the next
attack. All this is for the good.
The
problem is that Obama is increasingly using drone strikes as a substitute for
operations to bring terrorist leaders in alive for questioning -- and that is
putting the country at risk. As one high-ranking CIA official explained to me,
in an interview for my book Courting
Disaster, "In the wake of 9/11, [the CIA] put forward a program that
had a lethal component to strike back at the people who did this. But the other
component was to prevent this kind of catastrophe from happening again. And for
that, killing people -- especially killing senior al Qaeda leaders -- is
potentially counterproductive in that we can't know or learn of future attacks.
You can't kill them all, and you don't want to kill them all from an
intelligence standpoint. We needed to know what they knew."
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/08/dead_terrorists_tell_no_tales