WSI.com
President Obama fights terrorists by killing them, and it's hard to argue with the results. The U.S. has eliminated Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, and unmanned drones have pummeled terror sanctuaries in Pakistan. But there's an asterisk to this otherwise successful record: Targeted killing has come at the expense of capturing and interrogating terrorists. These ought not to be mutually exclusive. Sometimes the military has no choice but to kill from 10,000 feet. But a dead terrorist is also one that tells no tales. He can't be interrogated to obtain information about his co-conspirators, financiers, state sponsors or plans for future attacks.
This is creating a potentially dangerous lapse in U.S. knowledge about terrorist threats that may pose dangers down the road. The source of the problem is Mr. Obama's bias against terrorist detention, which needs correcting by Congress or the next President.
The record since 2009 speaks for itself. Outside the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, intelligence sources say the U.S. has captured a single suspect, the Somali Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame. Except for the bin Laden operation, U.S. special forces have refrained from raids against Taliban or al Qaeda figures in Pakistan. Meanwhile, Mr. Obama ramped up drone strikes by a factor of 10.
The U.S. is reluctant to detain terrorists for a simple reason: Mr. Obama has rejected the best options to incarcerate them. His campaign promise to close down Guantanamo has been frustrated by reality, but he refuses to put new prisoners there. He closed down the CIA's secret detention sites and its enhanced interrogations unit. And he has ruled out the rendition of terrorists to third countries, a practice used by the Bush and Clinton Administrations.
Parwan prison at the U.S. base in Bagram, Afghanistan was also once a detainee destination. Among the 3,000 prisoners there, 40-odd foreigners are some of the most dangerous enemy combatants in U.S. hands. Yet military officials say that no one captured outside Afghanistan has been moved there in the last two years.
The case of Warsame is instructive, and not in a good way. After the al Qaeda ally was captured last April, the Obama Administration refused to send him to Gitmo. Instead, he was put aboard a U.S. Navy ship in international waters for two months while he was interrogated. He was finally sent to New York and indicted on terrorism charges in a U.S. civilian court.
Think about it: Team Obama is so afraid of appearing to favor Dick Cheney-style detention policies that it is willing to hold a detainee for weeks on the high seas. Whatever else you do, don't call the ship a "secret" prison.
Mr. Obama also replaced CIA interrogators with a new inter-agency group under the FBI called the High-Value Interrogation Group, or HIG. Unlike Israel's specialized units often cited as a model, the U.S. interrogators are detailed from various agencies for temporary tours. The HIG, which has been used in only a couple of cases, deserves a permanent staff. Most interrogations in the Obama years have been done by the Joint Special Operations Command, which killed bin Laden and handles suspects at Bagram. This is not a job that can be left only to the military, and the CIA needs to get back in the action.
A bipartisan group of Senators has tried to improve this Obama policy, and in last year's defense bill included language that required al Qaeda or affiliated terrorists to be held in military custody. But Mr. Obama—echoing Mr. Cheney's views of executive power—issued a statement when signing the bill that he would never let U.S. citizens be detained or interrogated under the law of war.
And last month he issued a series of waivers that would make the transfer of any terrorist suspect to military custody virtually impossible. This political aversion defies logic: The President asserts that the military can legally kill an American citizen like al-Awlaki, but he won't let the military detain him. Congress should keep pressing this issue, even if it means courting a Presidential veto. Mr. Obama will eventually have to bend.
Drones are useful weapons in the war on terror, but surveillance and interrogation are as important. The Bush Administration was able to capture the 9/11 plotters thanks to its interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, who led to Ramzi bin al Shibh, who led to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and so on. Even the killing of bin Laden can be traced to information provided by KSM.
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Sooner or later the interrogation trail that began thanks to Bush policies will end. If the Obama Administration kills every terrorist with missiles from the sky because it fears political embarrassment from holding them, we might miss a warning about the next terror attack.
Al Qaeda is weakened, but it is far from defeated. Offshoots are popping up or reviving in Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria and Iraq. U.S. counterterrorism officials need the means and the political support to capture, interrogate and hold the next generation of bin Ladens.
A version of this article appeared Mar. 31, 2012, on page A12 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Obama's Missing Detainees.
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