We are not safe.
In fact, I believe we are less safe than we were before 9/11. Here is why.
As I write this, al-Qa’ida is still plotting catastrophic terror attacks against the United States and trying to acquire unfathomably destructive nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The Middle East is on fire. ISIS—al-Qa’ida 2.0—is ravaging Iraq and Syria, pillaging cities, looting churches, destroying antiquities, and slaughtering or enslaving everyone who doesn’t follow its version of Islam or refuses to convert. Places such as Libya and Yemen have become hothouses for growing more terrorists.
We have largely stood by with our hands in our pockets while ISIS terrorists who have vowed to kill us and destroy our way of life rob hospitals of radiological material and dig up discarded chemical weapons in the desert. How long will it be before those lethal items are incorporated into improvised explosive devices and used to attack us?
At home, lone wolf terror attacks are becoming common, and our political leaders seem hell-bent on dismantling the protections that prevented the second wave of terror attacks after 9/11.
We are not safe. But the problem isn’t with the men and women of the U.S. military and intelligence communities. Properly led, equipped, and resourced, they can protect us from our enemies. But they cannot protect us from ourselves.
Americans have hard decisions to make.
As a nation we need to decide which is more important, bestowing the rights of American citizens on foreign terrorists who have voluntarily taken up arms to kill our people and destroy our way of life or gathering intelligence to save American lives by stopping upcoming terror attacks. To those who would say, “We can do both,” I ask, “How many intelligence reports have we gotten out of KSM since he lawyered up at Gitmo in 2006?” Answer: not one.
This illustrates one of the fundamental differences between a law enforcement approach to dealing with terrorists and a war-focused, intelligence-gathering approach.
Simply put, law enforcement’s primary focus is taking a perpetrator off the streets and convicting that person in a court of law. That means a crime has already been committed. Americans have already died, and the lawbreaker is being questioned to obtain a confession that will hold up in court. Part of that process is to advise terrorists of their right not to answer questions and provide them with legal representation that serves as a buffer between them and incriminating inquiries by authorities.
In contrast, the initial priority of a war-focused, intelligence-gathering approach is to obtain actionable intelligence to prevent upcoming terror attacks before building a case for prosecution—that comes later. Advocates for this approach argue that terrorists who are not U.S. citizens, especially senior leaders and knowledgeable terror facilitators, captured outside the United States should be held as illegal combatants. While in custody, they should be interrogated for intelligence to prevent future terror attacks before they are given lawyers provided by the American taxpayer who will tell them they don’t have to answer questions and shield them from the authorities.
Americans have to decide how they want to defend themselves against terror attacks or risk having that decision made for them. Do they want to wait for something to happen and treat it like a crime? Or do they want to be proactive and capture or kill the terrorists before they have a chance to act?
There are those among us who say the threat has been blown out of proportion. I attended a conference at which one of the speakers, a college professor, said that terror attacks were rare and that the actual probability of a specific person being killed or injured in one was so remote that as a nation we can absorb the carnage as we do deaths and injuries from other random events, such as floods and tornadoes and lightning strikes and house fires and plane crashes and crimes of violence. It’s just an ordinary part of being alive in America these days. A sporting event is bombed. Law enforcement officers treat it like a crime. They hunt down the bad guys, arrest them, tell them they don’t have to talk, give them lawyers, and then try to build a criminal case. And we’re just supposed to move on because relatively few of us are affected.
An alternative is to treat the fight against violent terrorists killing Americans to establish Islamic supremacy as an illegal act of war rather than a violation of U.S. civilian law. That is what the Bush administration and Congress did in the aftermath of 9/11. Until the process was abandoned by the Obama administration, instead of criminal conviction, the focus was on finding where the terrorists were hiding, destroying their capacity to harm us, and preemptively capturing or killing them to prevent future attacks. CIA interrogators were deployed as warfighters, not law enforcement officers, a fact that often gets lost in the press coverage.
I’ve been asked what I think we should do to protect ourselves in the future. I’m not a legal scholar and don’t pretend to be, but it seems to me that we need an aggressive combination of both law enforcement and intelligence-gathering approaches. For lone wolf attacks and in dealing with U.S. citizens, law enforcement approaches make sense. But in my view, dangerous terrorists from groups such as al-Qa’ida and ISIS who are not citizens of the United States and are by their own declaration at war with us should not be afforded the constitutional rights of American citizens—the very rights they are willing to kill us to destroy.
We need an intelligence-oriented detention and interrogation program for obtaining actionable intelligence from the handful of high-value terrorists with knowledge that could prevent an impending catastrophic terror attack. It would be nice if those terrorists, the ones hiding the most actionable information, would voluntarily tell us what we need to know to stop future attacks, but that’s not likely. Instead, it is probably going to take some legal form of coercion to get them to tell us what they know.
I wouldn’t blame readers who have been following the EIT controversy for thinking there are only three options when it comes to gathering intelligence from captured high-level terrorists intent on protecting secrets: rapport-based techniques (the tea and sympathy approach), the Army Field Manual (an eclectic set of techniques, some psychologically coercive, that evolved over the years to question POWs from the standing armies of nation-states while adhering to the Geneva Conventions), and EITs. These approaches are the only ones that get tossed around in the media and subjected to sometimes heated debate among pundits and lawmakers and political leaders.
But these are not the only choices for gathering actionable intelligence from detained terrorists. In my opinion, a comprehensive approach would include things other than interrogation. It would include means of covertly collecting intelligence from detainees, such as deception, elicitation without revealing interest or intent, and technical collection.
I think the United States should establish a detention facility where detainees are interrogated using the full spectrum of human influence strategies, minus EITs. It would also be a place where deceptive events are individually staged for specific detainees to pull for reactions that reveal intelligence, where seemingly safe places to talk and share secrets among captives are subject to eavesdropping through technical collection, and where like-minded brothers whom detainees encounter elicit seemingly unrelated details that fit into an information matrix that yields actionable intelligence.
Some people ask me whether the next president should consider going back to using EITs. After all, they say, despite the negative spin, the EITs were actually safe and effective. They say that perhaps with more transparency and buy-in from the oversight committees in Congress and closer supervision by the managers in the intelligence communities, EITs could be used again.
To which I say good luck with that! Some form of coercion is apt to be necessary because rapport building and techniques from the Army Field Manual (which are all that is currently permitted) will prove ineffective against terrorists trained to resist interrogation and motivated to protect secrets. But I have a hard time imagining responsible individuals in the intelligence community queuing up to employ EITs after seeing how those of us who did so after 9/11 were treated.
The last time they were used, EITs were judged legal by the highest law enforcement agency in the land not once but multiple times. They were approved by the president of the United States and the national security advisor. They were reported early and often to the members of the House and Senate oversight committees, some of whom thought we should get rougher. Still, when it was politically expedient, some of the same people in our government faithlessly savaged the CIA officers and contractors they had asked to take on this mission on their behalf.
I have looked into the eyes of the worst people on the planet. I have sat with them and felt their passion as they described what they see as their holy duty to destroy our way of life. I have heard their eagerness to convert or kill millions of people in the process. Bruce Jessen and I and a handful of CIA officers and contractors did what we could to stop them. People who don’t understand what we did, how we did it, or why will loudly tell you that our actions were contrary to American principles. It will come as no surprise that I disagree.
We were at war. Our actions were necessary, effective, legal, authorized, and helped save lives in America and in other countries where terror plots were disrupted. We pitched in when our homeland was in a street battle with cowards who blindsided us, trying to decapitate our way of life by simultaneously attacking our most important financial district, our center of military power, and our seat of government. The actions the CIA and intelligence community took helped keep our homeland safe for years after the 9/11 attacks.
Others among us are now in the process of dismantling the safeguards that prevented terror attacks. We no longer capture and interrogate terrorist leaders. Instead we kill them and those around them with missiles and bombs, destroying the opportunity to gather the kind of intelligence about their intentions and priorities that comes from questioning terrorists or from examining terror planning materials seized at capture—intelligence you can’t tell from satellite photographs no matter how fine the camera’s resolution. The intelligence community is being asked to dial back electronic surveillance. Our military is being decimated by budget cuts and personnel reductions.
Apologists in our midst blame America for the unimaginable acts of horror perpetrated by Islamists who, driven by Iron Age religious beliefs, seek to convert, enslave, or slaughter everyone on the planet who does not believe as they do. These apologists even refuse to honestly name those who are trying to destroy our way of life. They seem to worry more about the political correctness of potentially offending moderate Muslims than they do the real death and suffering of the victims of Islamist terror attacks. We are not safe now. And unless difficult steps are taken to protect our way of life, we will be less safe in the future.
We are shoving the problem down the road, forcing our children to deal with it. To pay for our political correctness and dithering, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have to be harsher, more violent, and more ruthless because we didn’t take care of the problem when it was difficult but more doable than it will be for future generations. The cost of appeasement now is the blood of our children in the future.
KSM told me that he thinks that future generations of Americans will be too weak to defend themselves, that they will convert to worship his god or capitulate to subjugation or stand by while jihadists slaughter those around them.
But KSM underestimates us. I have great faith in the American people. My ancestors came to this country before it was founded. They fought in the wars that established our freedoms and protected them and made this country the great nation that it is. I have no doubt that ordinary Americans will not tolerate for long the reckless squandering of our freedoms to put ointment on some political leader’s conscience or the reworking of our way of life to make religious barbarism and deadly terror attacks on our soil a normal part of our daily routine. Ordinary Americans of all races and religions will do what they have always done: they will fight and die and clean up the mess left by our political leaders.