Update: I just read this analysis of a speech by Army Col. Gary Cheek, who seems to think that "GWOT" promotes erroneous ideas about terrorism and how the U.S. should fight it...
The New Yorker has an excellent article profiling one FBI witness against Al-Qaeda who has cooperated with the government for many years -- Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl. From the article:
'According to the F.B.I., Fadl has continued to provide assistance to government officials working to understand and combat Al Qaeda. Dan Coleman, a senior consultant at Harbinger Technologies Group, who was the F.B.I.'s top specialist on Al Qaeda until 2004, when he retired, said of Fadl, "He's been very, very important to us. When it comes to understanding Al Qaeda, he's the Rosetta stone... Michael Anticev, an F.B.I. special agent on the New York-based Joint Terrorism Task Force, told me that as soon as U.S. authorities started to interrogate him "we realized we had struck gold." He went on, "He spoke to us in great detail, and everything that he told us panned out." Anticev likened Fadl's value to that of Joseph Valachi, the government informant on organized crime who, in 1962, became the first member of the Mafia to acknowledge its existence to law-enforcement officials.' (source: http://www.newyorker.com/...)
This is exactly the sort of intelligence we need if we are to be successful at bringing folks like Bin Laden to justice. There are many great lessons one can take away from the article, both about Al-Qaeda specifically and intelligence gathering generally. Some of these are:
1.) While religion plays an important role in Al-Qaeda, it is often subservient to a more earthly goal -- reduction or elimination of U.S. political influence in the Middle East. From the article:
'. . . bin Laden issued a secret fatwa at a meeting in Sudan: "It say, 'We cannot let the American army stay in the Gulf area and take our oil, take our money, and we have to do something to take them out. We have to fight them.'"'
2.) Not all members of Al-Qaeda are even motivated by religion. Several mentioned in the article worked for Al-Qaeda because, quite simply, they were paid good money to do so. So, not only is the organization itself focused on more earthly goals, but its members exhibit all of the usual human foibles and motivations. From the article:
". . .Dan Coleman, the former Al Qaeda specialist at the F.B.I., spent many hours debriefing Fadl. "He's a lovable rogue," he said. "He's fixated on money. And he loves women." U.S. officials allegedly exploited the latter enthusiasm during Fadl's initial interrogations, in order to cement his loyalty"
'. . .Coleman was surprised to learn that Fadl wasn't particularly religious. "I never saw him pray once," he said. For Fadl, jihad was less a spiritual quest than "a socially acceptable form of bad behavior." As Coleman put it, "You get to blow stuff up and kill people, and your colleagues and peers think you're good. It's fun, and you can be a hero." . . .'
3.) The cost-benefit ratio for the information provided by these informants can be quite high. The article states that the U.S. Government has spent about $1mil on Fadl and his family since he started cooperating. He also has an FBI agent assigned to him full-time. That is a small price to pay considering the wealth of information he's provided. It is microscopic in comparison to the amount we've paid for much poorer results so far in our "war on terror" under Bush et. al. The human toll is also astronomically less. From the article:
'. . .Mike Anticev, Fadl's designated handler, has spent the most time with the former terrorist. Sitting at a small conference table earlier this month at the F.B.I.'s headquarters in lower Manhattan, Anticev, a powerfully built man with high cheekbones and brown eyes, said that keeping Fadl and taking care of him have been "absolutely worth it for the government. Junior wrote the book on Al Qaeda, and the well still isn't dry." He paused. "But for me? What a lot of headaches! I have a very good relationship with him, but he's a full-time job. I'm his big brother, his coach, his psychiatrist, and his marriage counsellor. If he has trouble with his family, I'm almost like a parent--I have to be the bearer of bad news. At times, I spend hours a day on the phone. Weekends. Nights. Whatever the problem of the day is, I have to deal with it."'
4.) Professionals whose job it is to get information from informants know that torture doesn't work. There are many quotes to this effect from the article. For example:
'Coleman, for his part, believes that "people don't do anything unless they're rewarded." He says that if the F.B.I. had beaten a confession out of Fadl with what he calls "all that alpha-male shit," it would never be able to talk to him now. Brutality may yield a timely scrap of information, he conceded. But in the longer fight against terrorism such an approach is "completely insufficient," he says. "You need to talk to people for weeks. Years."' [emphasis original]
There are many more lessons for the taking for the willing and alert reader. This, to me, is what a "war on terror" ought to look like. It's not flashy, it doesn't require billions of dollars in high-tech weaponry. It does require intelligence, subtlety, skill, and lots of patience. While I doubt we'll get this sort of effort under the Bush administration, I hold out hope that it could happen in the future.