Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

Why didn’t we capture Zarqawi instead of killing him? (photo: Reuters)

ABC News got a big scoop on the other broadcast networks tonight by being the first by an hour or more to report that U.S. and Iraqi forces had located Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a Baquba safehouse and killed him along with seven lieutenants who were meeting there. U.S. helicopter gunships may’ve provided the firepower which killed him. CNN is now reporting that Jordanian intelligence and possibly members of Zarqawi’s Iraqi network may’ve provided intelligence information beginning as early as two weeks ago allowing the Iraqis to pinpoint his location.

I find it hard to believe that NBC continued broadcasting Jay Leno and CBS continued with David Letterman while a competitor scooped them with news that the third most wanted man in the world had just been killed.

But what astonishes me even more is that the U.S. decided to blow him to smithereens instead of capturing him. After all, this is the second or third most wanted terrorist in the world. Wouldn’t capturing him alive have been an extraordinary coup? Either he provides you with extremely helpful information about his network and activities as some captives have done; or if he clams up you put him on trial before the world for his crimes as an example of what happens to people who do the things he’s done.

Not knowing the background for this operation, there may’ve been some reason that rockets were called in instead of forces to capture him. But on the face of it this looks like a typically rash and hasty decision by the Bush Administration at the expense of a future potential intelligence bonanza. In fact, it makes you wonder whether Bush and Cheney looked at the mess the Iraqis have made of the Saddam Hussein trial and said: “It’s just not worth it to capture and try him. Let’s just get it over with and embrace rough justice.”

UPDATE: Glad to report that this NY Times reporter is asking the same question as I. Here’s the answer U.S. forces provided to him:

As American commandos surrounded the house where they believed Mr. Zarqawi to be, the commander on the ground decided to call in the airstrike. It was not clear why the American officer decided against storming the house and capturing Mr. Zarqawi, which would have given the Americans a chance to interrogate him.

One reason, General Caldwell said, was that such an assault might have cost many American lives without any guarantee of taking Mr. Zarqawi alive. Another reason, asserted by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld on Thursday, was that Mr. Zarqawi might have escaped, as he had many times before when the Americans had him in their sights.

“You have to ask yourself: is it worth putting American men and women’s lives at risk to go in to what was probably a heavily fortified and guarded thing, in order to grab him?” General Caldwell said.

If I were in U.S. intelligence the answer to that question for me would be: “hell yes.” If you take this guy alive and you get him to talk think how many lives you save. Think how many Al Qaeda operations you thwart. Think how many Al Qaeda operatives you freak out by letting them think that Zarqawi is spillinghis guts to you. I’m for a little less blood lust and a little more consideration of the long-term benefits of bringing him in alive. But blood lust appears to have won out.

Another warning: no doubt the Bush Administration is going to be crowing tomorrow as they did after Hussein’s capture. But i say here exactly what I said then. Zarqawi was an important agent of terror in Iraq. Things can’t help but be a little better without his catalytic influence. But I see Zarqawi as a symptom of Iraq’s problems, not as a major cause. Zarqawi resonated in Iraq because its underlying problems presented him such fertile ground for terror operations. Nothing in the conditions on the ground in Iraq have changed with his death. His network will undoubtedly go on. I see very little changing there unless and until the U.S. decides to leave and/or the various Iraqi factions of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds figure out a way they can live with each other. I don’t see either one of these developments happening anytime soon. Therefore, the chaos we’ve witnessed there over the past few years will continue and very little will change.

So if you hear talking heads tomorrow talking about a new day in Iraq, don’t you believe it.

In tonight’s Colbert Report, Steven Colbert turned me onto a report by Brian Ross, Federal Source to ABC News: We Know Who You’re Calling, about widespread FBI monitoring of reporters’ phone records in order to ferret out government sources who provide confidential information for stories embarrassing to the Bush Administration. Many reporters from various news outlets face the same surveillance:

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

“It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick,” the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

The Bushites have good reason to be mad at annoying journalists for these inconvenient stories:

Our reports on the CIA’s secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials. The CIA asked for an FBI investigation of leaks of classified information following those reports.

People questioned by the FBI about leaks of intelligence information say the CIA was also disturbed by ABC News reports that revealed the use of CIA predator missiles inside Pakistan.

Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for the government to keep track of numbers dialed by phone customers.

Add to that the Washington Post’s breaking of the CIA secret prison scandal and NYT’s breaking of the NSA surveillance story and you’ve got plenty of good reasons for the G-men to want to snoop on their reporters.

I’m sure there are ways for the media organizations to protect their privacy and circumvent this illegal surveillance. Isn’t it ironic though that this takes journalists into the same “territory” as terrorists. The government gains a technological advantage against the latter. The terrorists find out and adapt accordingly in order to protect themselves. Now, journalists will be doing the same in order to stay one step ahead of the feds. Seems a crying shame that the Bush Administration is so willing to criminalize journalism and treat it as if it’s no different than Al Qaeda.

In a subsequent blog item, FBI Acknowledges: Journalists’ Phone Records are Fair Game, Ross notes that the FBI is using National Security Letters to obtain access to the reporters’ phone call records:

Officials say the FBI makes extensive use of a new provision of the Patriot Act which allows agents to seek information with what are called National Security Letters (NSL).

The NSLs are a version of an administrative subpoena and are not signed by a judge. Under the law, a phone company receiving a NSL for phone records must provide them and may not divulge to the customer that the records have been given to the government.

According to yet another Ross blog post, FBI Secret Probes: 3,501 Targets in the U.S., The Patriot Act “innovated” a new use for NSLs. Before then, they were only used to surveil terrorists. But now, thanks to the spineless Congress which approved the Big Brother Act, thereby allowing itself to be run roughshod over, NSLs have a whole new panoply of uses:

The Department of Justice says it secretly sought phone records and other documents of 3,501 people last year under a provision of the Patriot Act that does not require judicial oversight.

The records were obtained with the use of what are known as National Security Letters, which can be signed by an FBI agent and are only for use in terrorism cases.

The letters require telephone companies to keep secret even the existence of the request for records.

Assistant Attorney General William Moschella told Congress last month that 9,254 National Security Letters were issued in 2005 involving 3,501 people.

Federal law enforcement sources say the National Security Letters are being used to obtain phone records of reporters at ABC News and elsewhere in an attempt to learn confidential sources who may have provided classified information in violation of the law.

That’s progress for you.