How Do You Think We Catch the Bad Guys?

By Charles Krauthammer

Recent revelations about the actions of the Bush Administration in the war on terror have given it the image of a cross between Big Brother and Torquemada. Most recently comes the story of the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepting and monitoring communications from overseas to al-Qaeda operatives in the U.S. This followed reports of "black sites" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, where high-level al-Qaeda operatives were kept incommunicado and under stress in conditions well below even Motel 6 standards. Which followed reports of various "coercive interrogation" techniques (most notoriously, water boarding, or mock drowning) used to get information out of the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, architect of the 9/11 attacks.

This has all been variously portrayed as trampling on civil liberties, violating the Constitution, jeopardizing the very idea of freedom and otherwise destroying all that is sacred in America. Well, that's one way to look at it. But there's another way to look at itas a triumph of counterterrorism, the beginning of the answer to the question that for the past four-plus years has been on everyone's mind but that no one could figure out: Why haven't we been hit again?

On Sept. 12, 2001, there wasn't a person in Washington who did not think that it was only a matter of days or weeks or at most months before the jihadists would strike again. It has been more than four years. Al-Qaeda knows its inability to repeat 9/11 is a blow to its prestige and pretensions of leading a global jihad. Anyone can put a bomb in a Bali discotheque. But in more than four years, al-Qaeda has not been able to do anything in America even on the scale of Madrid or London.

Why? It turns out there were people who knew the answer but couldn't say, lest they blow the secret programs that were behind our current interval of safety. But now that the programs are blown, the Administration should stop being defensive about its secret prisons and intercepted communications. It should step forward and say, "O.K. You got us. We didn't want to talk about this stuff openly, but now you know. We have not been hit again because we've been capturing high-level operatives and getting them to talk in secret prisons, where they're incommunicado and disoriented and desperate. We've been using interrogation techniques that will probably be outlawed by John McCain but have got us important information.

"How do you think we caught Jose Padilla, who was sent to the U.S. to explode a dirty bomb and spread radiation throughout an American city? He was sent by a couple of captured al-Qaeda big shots, Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, whom we interrogated using techniques that Senators have ostentatiously decried and that sparked the McCain amendment. You connect the dots. And then there were the two attacks thwarted by the NSA eavesdropping: a plot to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge and a plot to bomb pubs and train stations in Britain. Historians will have to tell you about the other plots that were stopped. But the former NSA director already said that 'this program has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States.'"

So now we know. What we already knew, to explain the absence of a second 9/11, was the offense part, not the defense. We knew about the war in Afghanistan, which had scattered al-Qaeda and degraded its capacities. We knew about the war in Iraq, which has become a magnet worldwide for jihadists, diverting energy to that front from the American front. But the defensive part, gathering critical preventive intelligence through all kinds of techniques--savory, unsavory, high tech and clandestine--had not been known.

Now we know. In this light, let's have the debate. Have we gone too far? Do we want to back off? It is interesting that the Democrats, who have been braying about presidential arrogance, law breaking and even possible impeachment over the NSA spying, dare not suggest that the program be abolished.

Why? Because, according to a Rasmussen poll, 64% of Americans, a free and very sensible people, support eavesdropping on calls between suspected terrorists abroad and people in the U.S. Because even Democrats know that the once clandestine activities they denounce so floridly are the once obscure answer to the question everyone has been asking: How did Bush keep us safe?