In my column this morning, I jump into the killing v. grilling debate that Rich and Jonah (among others) have been weighing in on. Obviously, we have to go back to a preference for capturing and interrogating terrorists, rather than killing them, if we are going to prevent terrorist attacks. But, as I argue, bin Laden was in a very small category of iconic jihadists who needed killin’, as they used to say in those great old Westerns. Being able to question him might have been a coup — if we had in place an effective interrogation program and a swift means of executing him after some summary legal process. But we don’t, and you need both — and with a figure like bin Laden, not having either makes the kill v. grill question not a close call.

I couldn’t agree more with Jonah on the matter of Obama blabbing about the bin Laden intel haul. A couple of days after the raid, I argued here that it would have been better to keep what had happened quiet, at least for a few days:

The real intelligence lapse here is not the failure to interrogate bin Laden (as much a coup as that may have been). It is the haste to get in front of the cameras and take credit. Not that Obama doesn’t deserve credit — that’s not my point. The reports coming out today indicate that the “motherlode” of intel (computers, hard-drives, discs, documents, etc.) was found in bin Laden’s compound. Officials are saying it may be the most significant trove of information about al-Qaeda ever seized. Well, if that is the case, there is a good chance that it could have helped analysts figure out where other top Qaeda leaders (like Zawahiri) are, where important camps are, and where active cells are located. But the only way you can exploit that kind of information is by keeping quiet about bin Laden for a few days while the analysts go through it and get the leads to the military and intelligence operatives so they can act on it — maybe roll up other key parts of the organization. Once you go public on bin Laden, it tells everyone else in al-Qaeda to get in the wind. The intel trove will still be very valuable for other reasons, but you’ve lost the opportunity to capture other big fish….

A friend of mine who knows this stuff took slight issue with this, pointing out that during the operation a chopper crashed and our guys had to destroy it, making a lot of noise and drawing a lot of attention, no doubt. (Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that none of the Pakistanis knew we were coming ahead of time.) That is an excellent point, and it undoubtedly would have shortened the timeframe in which you could have kept this quiet. But precious few people knew where bin Laden was — it was probably a better kept secret than the 9/11 plot, which was not widely known even among al-Qaeda members. And, unfortunately, attacks and explosions in Pakistan happen with some frequency. It’s not like bin Laden’s disappearance would have been immediately noticed in terrorist circles or that people would have assumed that whatever happened in Abbottabad must have involved bin Laden. As Jonah observes, “hours or days could be extremely valuable.” It could have been enough time to pursue valuable leads on terror leaders and active cells — and how great would it be to be debating whether we should have killed or captured additional top al-Qaeda terrorists?

Even if one were to dismiss out of hand the possibility of keeping the raid hush-hush, it makes no sense to brag publicly about the breadth of the intel haul. Let’s say the president thought it important for some reason to dispel the theory (popular in the intelligence community) that bin Laden had been reduced to the status of a symbol who no longer had an operational role in al-Qaeda. Personally, I don’t see how making that point would much improve the approval bump Obama was sure to get for authorizing a successful operation against a man Americans despise, but let’s concede for argument’s sake there is some marginal political benefit in it. All the president needed to say was, “The circumstances of the raid confirm that bin Laden was still playing a very active role in al-Qaeda’s terrorist activities.”

To be clear, I’d have winced even if he had limited his remarks to that. But there is no good reason to go public on the nature and extent of the seizures — it doesn’t help Obama at all, and it compromises the ability of the armed forces, the intelligence community, and law enforcement to exploit the information.