Drones, Torture, Detention Show What US Intelligence Isn't Doing

Seven years after 9/11, and CIA efforts against Al Qaeda appear to be narrowed down to exactly two major focus areas.

One is CIA's campaign of assassination by flying killer robots in the remote hills of Afghanistan and Pakistan that has unfortunate byproduct of killing lots of bystanders.

The other is CIA's terrorist detention program, in which terrorist suspects are held for years and occasionally tortured in secret prisons located outside the reach of US courts. Detention and torture have had the unfortunate byproduct of destroying US credibility and prestige, inflaming anti-US sentiment in the Islamic world, and making any US government utterance about human rights and the rule of law sound hypocritical.

Both programs probably had promising early moments, so CIA chiefs and policymakers ordered more drone strikes, more detentions, and more torture. But the moment for each of these programs has certainly passed.

Hardly a week passes without another report of an Al Qaeda leader taken out by a drone-launched missile. Too often, the drone attacks level an adjacent Pakistani or Afghan wedding or market.

Meanwhile, a cascade of documents released by the Obama White House and CIA paint a picture of torture and detention that looks increasingly slipshod and ineffective. Marcy Wheeler of the Emptywheel blog at the Washington Independent has been tirelessly analyzing the memos, briefs, redacted cables, and the redactions themselves to uncover a dizzying tangle of contractors, bad lawyering, and naked bureaucratic hind-end covering.

Neither program appears to have gotten the US any closer to capturing Al Qaeda leaders Bin Laden and Zawahiri or shortcutting to a safer, Islamic Extremist-free world.

But there is a compelling internal logic to CIA's over-reliance on these two programs. Unfortunately, self-criticism or an innovative spirit does not drive that logic. Repeating past glories and thinking inside the bureaucratic box, however, explain how CIA chiefs chose to keep the focus on drones and detentions.

To understand the killer drone program, one need only visit the CIA compound near McLean, Virginia, where there's a monument to the A-12 Oxcart spy plane, an early version of the Air Force's SR-71 Blackbird. The A-12/SR-71 is trumpeted in internal CIA training as success story that jointly combined the efforts of CIA, the Air Force, and industry to produce a game-changing intelligence collection program.

What the A-12/SR-71 hagiography shows is an uncritical devotion to high-tech intelligence platforms. But there's another side to the A-12/SR-71 mythos: acknowledgment of the shortcomings of traditional human intelligence collection and analysis. US policymakers needed the SR-71 to give them photographic proof of Soviet missile bases and disappointing beet harvests, instead of shaky information handed to CIA case officers by drunken, ill-attired Soviet bureaucrats.

The missile-toting Predator drone, which can keep its relentless eye on terrorist training camps and safe houses for hours and days on end, is the legacy of that uncritical devotion to high-tech intelligence platforms and attendant disconnection from the human aspects of conflict.

So CIA bureaucrats and engineers are much better at developing and deploying cutting edge technology than developing human intelligence.

Those CIA bureaucrats are also good at bureaucracy, which is how rendition, detention and torture emerged as the other focus area in the war on Al Qaeda.

Early, or ordinary renditions, from the early 90s and presumably through the first few months of Bush II, were fancified extraditions of terrorists facilitated by a combination of CIA, FBI, and the Departments of State and Justice. Typically, those 90s-era renditions involved transferring a terrorist suspect already in custody in one foreign country -- usually where terrorist criminal charges would not stick -- to another foreign country where an outstanding arrest warrant or other recognized judicial process would justify detention of the terrorist suspect. Often, the human rights credentials of the countries involved were questionable (at best) and the thinnest of reasons were employed to justify arrests and ongoing detention.

Above all, pre-9/11 renditions were bureaucratic and legal exercises for the US officials involved. US intelligence arranged for actual transfers of suspects, but US and host country law enforcement personnel -- backed up with thousands of pages of lawyering and diplomacy -- were the official face of US terrorist rendition policy. Abduction by US intelligence officers and detention in secret US-run facilities simply were not part of the pre-9/11 rendition regime.

In the bizarro world of Washington bureaucracy, the rendition process -- serviceable but nonetheless cobbled-together, Rube Goldberg-style -- became the cornerstone of US human intelligence operations against Al Qaeda.

After 9/11, US intelligence sought to take Al Qaeda members into US custody, so the old-style rendition evolved from a facilitation of extradition to a court-free imprisonment program. US policymakers and intelligence officials dumped legal niceties so important in pre-9/11 renditions to allow US intelligence to play an active, rather than facilitating, role in torture and detention.

For all the political capital and national prestige poured into concealing and/or defending CIA's terrorist detentions and killer drones, the strategies are limited in what they can achieve.

The drone program assumes, for example, that Al Qaeda is just like the Iraqi Army, circa 1991: kill enough of the generals and colonels and the organization will just crumble and surrender by the hundreds. Or maybe the strategists think that Al Qaeda and its supporters in Pakistan and Afghanistan will fold up their tents and go back to being peaceable farmers or shopkeepers if enough of them get killed by missiles fired from drones. It also discounts or ignores the ill will caused by civilian deaths that are perceived by rural Pakistanis and Afghans as indiscriminate, regardless of explanations offered by Americans.

Similar overconfidence and faulty logic permeates CIA's reliance on terrorist detention and interrogation as a source of intelligence. The intelligence value of an out-of-circulation terrorist mastermind decreases quickly, which takes a bite out of claims that detainees are valuable sources of intelligence and must be subjected to years of interrogation or debriefing. Although advocates of the torture and detention policies have vociferously claimed that valuable intelligence has emerged from prolonged detention and torture conditions, the known record and knowledgeable observers tell a different story.

Aside from a few names, codewords, and other miscellanea of day-to-day Al Qaeda activities, precious little has emerged from detention and torture -- let alone one of those legendary ticking time bombs or secret hostage locations.

In short -- there's no smoking gun that shows terrorist activity against Americans has ever been disrupted by the drones, the torture, or the detention.

At least, no smoking gun visible to those of us out here in fact-based reality.

What's worse, reliance on detainees as a source of intelligence and drones for acting against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan betrays to America's enemies significant weaknesses in US intelligence capabilities.

One of the reasons CIA flies drones around Pakistan: the agency's capabilities for mounting operations on the ground are hobbled by a well-known shortage of officers fluent in critical languages such as Urdu and Pashto, as well as an aversion to operations in rough conditions, which one former CIA officer attributes to fear of diarrhea.

The reliance on post-capture interrogation also suggests significant weakness, specifically that CIA, Defense Intelligence, and FBI are likely having a hard time recruiting actual, functioning Islamic extremists as reporting sources. This reliance also shows a lack of imagination, and ignores the reality of relying on what are essentially jailhouse snitches.

Unfortunately, Obama's national security team has shown little stomach for tipping over CIA's or other intelligence sacred cows. The administration has threatened to veto legislation expanding Congress's intelligence oversight from the "Gang of Eight" to a gaggle of nearly 40 lawmakers might shake things up for CIA chief Panetta and his operations chief, Steve Kappes.

Five times as many questions, though, ought to get those spy chiefs thinking harder about how to do better by their country.

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Cross-posted from Examiner.com

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Comments

[ThinkCreeps]

Better human intelligence in Pakistan would certainly be very useful, but the sense of being owned by unseen players in the sky has to have an effect on both the innocent and the guilty.

Hearts and minds have been long lost, so withdrawing the air assets would just lose the chance to pick away at genuine enemies. The onus must be on the operators to hit more funerals and fewer weddings.

Likewise on custody: people join Al Qaeda for profit or ideology; the knowledge that they risk being consigned to an endless invisible incarceration if captured might sway some of the saner minds away. The still needs to be some process for releasing those captured by mistake.

Politics, war and intelligence are all arts of the possible. The mess needs to be unscrambled, but how best to do it in practical terms?

[jsgaetano]

Just goes to prove, conservatives have no idea how to keep a nation safe. Or how to run a government. Or an economy. Or do anything except whine, really.

[ostrom808]

As a so-called progressive, and Obama supporter, I don't think that the current administration is doing any better.

Despite the mellifluous rhetoric, I have yet to see any substantive difference between Obama and Bush in this arena as far as actions are concerned. Just words so far.

[jsgaetano]

If you can't see a difference between Obama and Bush, you must go through life with blinders on.

Now I'm not happy with a lot of things going on right now (environment or re-regulating the markets), but to say there's no difference is crazy.