Feb 15 Thiessen Exposing Obama Administration's Aversion To Gathering Intel

Marc Thiessen has done a great job of exposing the Obama administration's aversion to gathering intel. He's done such a good job of it that the Washington Post is reporting about it:

When a window of opportunity opened to strike the leader of al-Qaeda in East Africa last September, U.S. Special Operations forces prepared several options. They could obliterate his vehicle with an airstrike as he drove through southern Somalia. Or they could fire from helicopters that could land at the scene to confirm the kill. Or they could try to take him alive.

The White House authorized the second option. On the morning of Sept. 14, helicopters flying from a U.S. ship off the Somali coast blew up a car carrying Saleh Ali Nabhan. While several hovered overhead, one set down long enough for troops to scoop up enough of the remains for DNA verification. Moments later, the helicopters were headed back to the ship.

The strike was considered a major success, according to senior administration and military officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified operation and other sensitive matters. But the opportunity to interrogate one of the most wanted U.S. terrorism targets was gone forever.

The Nabhan decision was one of a number of similar choices the administration has faced over the past year as President Obama has escalated U.S. attacks on the leadership of al-Qaeda and its allies around the globe. The result has been dozens of targeted killings and no reports of high-value detentions.

Simply put, the Obama admininstration doesn't want to capture terrorists because that'd mean they'd either have to keep Gitmo open or they'd have to find a country willing to house them. As Ed Morrissey notes in this post, there's a simple solution to this question:

We could restore the ability to get that kind of intel if we just admitted we need Gitmo to remain open.

That won't happen because President Obama would lose the support of his political base if he announced that.

A former intelligence official briefed on current operations tells the Post that killing, instead of capturing terrorists is far from ideal, saying "now there's an even greater proclivity for doing it that way...We need to have the capability to snatch when the situation calls for it."

He is right. As I explain in Courting Disaster, the interrogation of high-value terrorists is not just one additional source of intelligence; it is often the only tool we have to connect the dots and stop a terrorist attack. In the book, former CIA director Mike Hayden explains that intelligence is having to put together a puzzle without being allowed to see the picture on the cover of the box. You can't see how the pieces are supposed to fit together. There are lots of ways to get more pieces. But the only way to find out how they fit together is to capture the senior leaders who know what the picture on the cover of the box looks like.

It doesn't require Sherlock Holmes' intuitive skills to know that gathering information on the terrorists' support networks, operations and future terrorist attacks is important information. Larry Holmes could figure that out. Rather than doing everything we can to learn about the terrorists' intentions, this administration insists on playing ostrich with regards to intelligence.

We know for certainty that having a robust interrogation operation during the Bush administration yielded lots of information that was used to thwart terrorist attacks, disrupt or throttle their financing networks and rolling up entire networks. Why this administration insists on dismantling terrorists a leader at a time rather than capturing and interrogating terrorists, then using that intel to roll up entire networks has me questioning their philosophy and their priorities.

The Bush administration's policies undeniably kept us safe while preventing terrorist attacks. We hope that this administration will keep America safe but it's far from certain that that's what will happen.

Comments welcome at LFR.