During a recent interview on ABC News, Vice President Dick Cheney said the following with respect to waterboarding senior al Qaeda terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM):
"There was a period of time there, three or four years ago, when about half of everything we knew about al Qaeda came from that one source [KSM]. So, it's been a remarkably successful effort. I think the results speak for themselves."
Put aside for a moment the debate over waterboarding, which has been discussed ad naseam, and think about what Cheney is saying with respect to the totality of America's intelligence on al Qaeda. Cheney claims that half of everything the United States knew about al Qaeda as late as 2004 or 2005 came from one source: KSM. If true, what does this say about America's intelligence capabilities and the value of human intelligence?
It is, of course, possible that Cheney is exaggerating the amount of intelligence garnered from KSM's interrogation. However, George Tenet, the former Director of Central Intelligence, has made similar comments. In his book, At the Center of the Storm, Tenet discussed at length the value of the intelligence collected during KSM's interrogation. According to Tenet, for example, KSM's interrogation set off a chain of events that led to the capture of an entire cell of al Qaeda terrorists who were involved in plotting the terror network's second wave of attacks.
Let us assume that Cheney's claim is true and half of everything the United States knew about al Qaeda as late as 2004 and 2005 came from this single source. KSM is clearly one of the top five al Qaeda operatives ever, having played an instrumental role in the 9/11 attacks and numerous other plots. Even so, Cheney's claim is remarkable. It means that three to four years after 9/11, everything else the U.S. Government did to learn about al Qaeda equaled, in terms of overall value, the intelligence collected from the interrogations of a single terrorist. This means that all of the other techniques and intelligence programs put in place to understand al Qaeda have been, comparatively speaking, less effective (in terms of a basic cost-benefit analysis). While these other programs certainly led to some successes, they clearly did not produce a relatively large amount of actionable intelligence if KSM's interrogation alone produced half of what they knew.
What is even more remarkable is that there is a lot more to al Qaeda than KSM. There was at the time of 9/11. There was when he was captured. And there is, of course, today. Al Qaeda is a highly compartmentalized organization. Even a well-placed al Qaeda operative like KSM would not know much about what other al Qaeda operatives were doing at the time he was captured. It makes you wonder what we didn't know three or four years ago and how much we have (or have not) learned in the meantime.
The most significant deficiency in America's pre-9/11 intelligence collection was the lack of human intelligence--information garnered from people on the inside of the organization. Prior to 9/11, America had little to no human intelligence inside al Qaeda and the effects of this failure are evident. Moreover, even if KSM's interrogation gave the U.S. Intelligence Community 10 percent, or 25 percent, of everything America knew about al Qaeda in 2004/2005 (as opposed to the 50 percent Cheney claims), the value of human intelligence and interrogations is clear.
The questions going forward are: How will America interrogate terrorists in the future? What techniques will be used? Will those techniques be more or less effective than the controversial ones employed by the Bush administration?
