Dead men tell no tales

Since the September 11 attack on the Benghazi consulate, and quite frankly for a long time before that, the president's political defenders have been loudly touting the administration's record of drone attacks against senior jihadists.  South Carolina Democrat Party chair Dick Harpootlian was particularly graphic when he boasted of the president's sending Osama Bin Laden and hundreds of other terrorists "to Hell," as if the drones' body count somehow insulates the administration from criticism for an intelligence/security failure like Benghazi.

The problem I have with this line of argument - and I haven't heard any journalists or pundits raise this yet - is that you can't interrogate people in Hell.  While Obama has been dispatching jihadists to Hades, he hasn't sent any to Gitmo that I'm aware of.

Defense against terror requires an aggressive human intelligence program.  Terrorists prepare their operations in secret.  They blend into the surrounding population.  There are no armored columns that can be spotted by satellite or aerial reconnaisance.  Security and counter-terror officials need to get hold of people with inside information and extract that information from them.  Obama's early and vocal opposition to key elements of the Bush counter-terror strategy, like Gitmo, classified overseas detention facilities and enhanced interrogation have likely compromised our ability to gather information from jihadists who fall into our hands.  Obama's heavy reliance on killing rather than capturing Al Qaeda's senior leadership seems designed to avoid embarrassing questions about the handling of prisoners.  Several highly-publicized leaks have made potential sources and allied intelligence services wary of trusting us with sensitive information.

Did any of this contribute to the intelligence failure at Benghazi?  I don't know.  In fact recent revelations in the news suggest that there really wasn't a failure of intelligence since the CIA and Ambassador Stevens were both warning of an increased threat level in Benghazi.  Instead there might have been plain old negligence in failing to take proper precautions in the face of a known threat.  But I think we should be asking to what extent our intelligence operations have been degraded, in this specific incident as well as in the wider war on terror.