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Obama military adopts take no prisoners policy
The Nabhan decision was one of a number of similar choices the administration has faced over the past year as President Obama has escalated U.S. 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.Senior administration officials say that no policy determination has been made to emphasize kills over captures. 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," Sen. Christopher S. Bond (Mo.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said Friday. "If given a choice between killing or capturing, we would probably kill." 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." Even during the Bush administration, "there was an inclination to 'just shoot the bastard,' " said a former intelligence official briefed on current operations. "But now there's an even greater proclivity for doing it that way. . . . We need to have the capability to snatch when the situation calls for it." What are the instructions to the troops on the ground? Are they in conformance with GC? Will we take prisoners in Marjah or are ANA involved in Marjah operation so that all prisoners can be turned over to them? Battlefield rendition? What personal liability does the military face if it hands prisoners over to the ANA and they are subsequently tortured, and I don't mean waterboarding? Paging Lt. Morant, Lt. Breaker Morant ... Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2010-02-14 |
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