I Hate to Say I Told You So...

Benjamin Wittes
Tuesday, April 12, 2011, 9:21 PM
...but nobody who has read Detention and Denial (which, judging by the fact that it is burning up the Amazon sales ranking at #183,999, is not that many people!) can be remotely surprised by this Los Angeles Times story.

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...but nobody who has read Detention and Denial (which, judging by the fact that it is burning up the Amazon sales ranking at #183,999, is not that many people!) can be remotely surprised by this Los Angeles Times story. It begins as follows:
He's considered one of world's most dangerous terrorism suspects, and the U.S. offered a $1-million reward for his capture in 2005. Intelligence experts say he's a master bomb maker and extremist leader who possesses a wealth of information about Al Qaeda-linked groups in Southeast Asia. Yet the U.S. has made no move to interrogate or seek custody of Indonesian militant Umar Patek since he was apprehended this year by officials in Pakistan with the help of a CIA tip, U.S. and Pakistani officials say. The little-known case highlights a sharp difference between President Obama's counter-terrorism policy and that of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Under Obama, the CIA has killed more people than it has captured, mainly through drone missile strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas. At the same time, it has stopped trying to detain or interrogate suspects caught abroad, except those captured in Iraq and Afghanistan. "The CIA is out of the detention and interrogation business," said a U.S. official who is familiar with intelligence operations but was not authorized to speak publicly.

Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books.

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