Blunders Fighting Terrorists Due To Non-Interrogation
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
President Obama pauses as he speaks in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House on Thursday. AP View Enlarged Image
The global war on terror is not a video game. But the Obama administration is waging it like one — that is, when it's waging the war at all.
Drones are a very useful military tool and will become even more so in the years ahead. Their "pilots" sit safely at consoles half a world away from the kill. Their computerization and robotics permit a level of accuracy and patience impossible for flesh-and-blood pilots.
But it's like the too-common illusion that visual and audio technology has rendered on-the-ground intelligence gathering, conducted by actual human agents, obsolete. In fact, oversubstituting drones for soldiers, Marines or special forces can spell trouble.
President Obama on Thursday told the nation, "I take full responsibility for all our counterterrorism operations, including the one that inadvertently took the lives" of Warren Weinstein, an elderly contractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development, and Italian Giovanni Lo Porto.
They were "tragically killed in a U.S. counterterrorism operation" in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region in January, as the president described it.
Weinstein's being a Jew apparently had much to do with the Islamist terrorist group taking him hostage and boasting publicly of it.
"I profoundly regret what happened," Obama added, revealing that he "directed that the existence of this operation be declassified and disclosed publicly ... because the Weinstein and Lo Porto families deserve to know the truth" and "because even as certain aspects of our national security efforts have to remain secret in order to succeed, the United States is a democracy committed to openness in good times and in bad."
Obama blamed "the fog of war" for such "deadly mistakes," and actually exploited the tragedy to claim to embrace what he himself rarely does:
"One of the things that makes us exceptional," he said, "is our willingness to confront squarely our imperfections and to learn from our mistakes."
But this administration rarely learns from its mistakes. The "hundreds of hours of surveillance" that led the U.S. to the false belief "that no civilians were present and that capturing these terrorists was not possible" didn't result from the fog of war but from the fog of this president's certainty in his own faulty thinking.
If the U.S. would do more to capture rather than "take out dangerous members of al-Qaida," as the president put it Thursday, we might be able to glean information from them that would prevent blunders that leave Americans or other Westerners dead.
And one key method of doing so is by getting tough on captured terrorists via enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) — a useful way that Obama has forsworn.
Obama's own CIA director, John O. Brennan, only last December stressed, "There was information obtained subsequent to the application of EITs from detainees that was useful in the bin Laden operation." He added, "As a matter of fact, the information that they provided was used" in the Navy SEAL assault that took out Osama bin Laden nearly four years ago.
Enhanced interrogation, wrongly characterized as torture, could also have provided timely intelligence that would help stop al-Qaida from seizing power in a destabilized Yemen, where Iranian-backed Houthis have a weak hold on power.
Instead, in this country where the whole objective of U.S. policy was to constrain al-Qaida, the terrorist group this month seized a major airport, a sea port and an oil terminal. So our policy has failed.
Unfortunately, whether on domestic or foreign policy, this is a dronemaster-in-chief who can't learn from his mistakes, because neither he nor those who surround him believe he makes any.
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