Under Obama, US opts for more killings, not captures, of terrorists
WASHINGTON - When a window of opportunity opened to strike the head of Al Qaeda in East Africa last September, US special operations forces prepared several options. They could obliterate his vehicle with an air strike as he drove through southern Somalia. 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 US ship off the Somali coast blew up a car carrying Saleh Ali Nabhan. 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 US 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 US 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.
Although senior administration officials say that no policy determination has been made to emphasize kills over captures, several factors appear to have tipped the balance in that direction. The Obama administration has authorized such attacks more frequently than the Bush administration did in its final years, including in countries where US ground operations are officially unwelcome or especially dangerous.
Improvements in electronic surveillance and precision targeting have made killing from a distance more of a sure thing. At the same time, options for where to keep US captives have dwindled.
Republican critics, already scornful of limits placed on interrogation of the suspect in the Christmas Day bombing attempt, charge that the administration has been too reluctant to risk an international incident or a domestic lawsuit to capture senior terrorism figures alive and imprison them.
“Over a year after taking office, the administration has still failed to answer the hard questions about what to do if we have the opportunity to capture and detain a terrorist overseas, which has made our terror-fighters reluctant to capture and left our allies confused,’’ Senator Christopher Bond of Missouri, the ranking Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said Friday
Some military and intelligence officials, citing what they see as a new bias toward kills, questioned whether valuable intelligence is being lost in the process. “We wanted to take a prisoner,’’ a senior military officer said of the Nabhan operation. “It was not a decision that we made.’’
One problem identified by those within and outside the government is the question of where to take captives apprehended outside established war zones and cooperating countries.
The administration has pledged to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; Congress has resisted moving any of the roughly 190 detainees remaining there, let alone terrorism suspects who have been recently captured, to this country. .
