Washington Post Confirms We Are No Longer Capturing & Interrogating High-Value Terrorists

The Washington Post reported yesterday morning front-page, above the fold that the Obama administration has stopped capturing and interrogating senior al-Qaeda leaders, killing them instead with Predator drones. This confirms my story last week in Foreign Policy, “Dead Men Tell No Tales,” explaining the danger of this approach.

The Post tells the story of a senior leader of al-Qaeda in East Africa named Saleh Ali Nabhan who was located last September. The White House was given the choice of either killing him or capturing him alive for interrogation. The military wanted to take him alive. But the White House chose instead to take him out. A senior military officer is quoted as saying: “We wanted to take a prisoner. . . . It was not a decision that we made.”

The Post adds: “The opportunity to interrogate one of the most wanted U.S. terrorism targets was gone forever.”

And the paper quotes a senior miltiary officer explaining why the opportunity to interrogate this senior al-Qaeda leader for intelligence was sacrificed: We “don’t have a detention policy or a set of facilities” to hold high-value terrorists.

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.

Today, we no longer have the ability to see the picture on the cover of the box — a fact that is confirmed by this morning’s story in the Washington Post. And that is putting our country at grave risk.