Memo to all those critics of Guantánamo Bay: beware what you wish for. The nomination of John Brennan to head the CIA was put on hold, in no small part because of the growing debate over the use of drone strikes to kill suspected high-value al-Qaeda operatives and other alleged terrorists. President Barack Obama’s administration defends these strikes as “legal”, “ethical”, “wise” and even “humane”. Opponents characterise them as an aggrandisement of executive power in which the president becomes judge, jury and executioner. Sound familiar? It should – because it parallels the debate over the policy of detaining terrorist suspects at Guantánamo that punctuated most of George W. Bush’s time in office.
In the past four years, there has been a dramatic shift from detention to drone strikes as the tool of choice for removing al-Qaeda operatives from the field of battle. They have reportedly been used more than 300 times in Pakistan alone by the Obama administration, at least six times more than under Mr Bush. They inevitably come with collateral damage. Meanwhile, not one detainee has been transferred to Guantánamo, and the US has largely outsourced the running of the detention facility at Bagram air base to the Afghan government. Rather than capture enemies and collect valuable information, this administration prefers to pick them off. In short, every successful drone strike is another wasted intelligence-gathering opportunity.
Lost amid recent hysteria over the drone programme is the question of why – when detention produces little collateral damage – there appears to be little appetite for capturing and questioning suspects. The answer: it poses hard choices for an administration fearful of the criticism directed at its predecessors – one that in effect abandoned its efforts to close Guantánamo, and came round largely to defending Bush-era policies regarding detention, but only very reluctantly.