Why Grill Embassy Bomber Abu Anas al-Liby?

The alleged mastermind behind U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, now captured, is about to experience a legal circus that comes with any trial of a notorious character. Politics aside, is such a trial a good idea from the perspective of gaining intelligence out of him?

To answer this question, one must first come to grips with what intelligence he has to offer. There is tactical intelligence about impending attacks, active networks, methods, logistics, and financing. Strategic intelligence may include insight into long-range plans, support networks, and identification of terrorist leaders and their vulnerabilities. As for the 15-year-old attacks themselves which have already been investigated and studied, there is still something important he can reveal. Specifically, the details of his target selection process can inform our future defenses. Why is this important?

In the unclassified world of security thought and rumination, it has long been held that terrorists bent on attacking U.S. embassies in Africa zeroed in on perhaps four likely targets and then ultimately chose Kenya and Tanzania as the easier targets. We think -- or have speculated -- that the target selection process boiled down to picking softer targets where security was more relaxed because there had been no attacks or threats of attack prior to the targeting. Effective interrogation of Abu Anas al-Liby can illuminate this inference, thereby giving us useful insight into how terrorists pick their targets.

Now, if this individual has valuable information, will a public, media-rich trial contribute to or inhibit loosening his tongue? Individuals with a prosecutorial bias will argue that trials do wonders to encourage captured traitors to talk. To some extent this argument has merit. The reason is that traitors who are caught generally have nothing left to trade that the government cannot confiscate. Why would they want to trade anyway? Usually they have one or more family members left devastated by their act of treason, and trading something of value is all that they can bargain with to keep authorities from legitimate confiscations that can be exceptionally hard on these families. Thus, the traitors' one card to play becomes cooperation in failure analysis aimed at determining what happened and how much damage the traitor actually caused. This is called damage assessment, and a trial can nudge traitors into cooperating in damage assessment as a condition of a plea bargain. Traitors know that they face a life sentence if not execution, so sentencing offers little incentive for cooperation because it just does not change. However, in exchange for full cooperation in the failure analysis debriefings, traitors can sometimes get authorities to go easier on the family members who had nothing to do with their perfidy, as an alternative to, say, leaving spouses homeless and destitute.

What about terrorists attacking Americans abroad who have no such ties within our country, however? Sadly, an American trial offers no such inducement to cooperate. Indeed, it offers counterproductive incentives to turn a legal proceeding into a platform for railing against the United States and chanting manifestos in an effort to rally like-minded and aspiring jihadists. Meanwhile, prosecutors eager to honor the playbook of legal fairness accorded U.S. citizens deserving protections under the law, may well bar legitimate intelligence interrogation on the theory that this may impede successful prosecution. Alternatively, if the embassy bomber were to publicly disappear, materializing in a facility approximating Guantanamo where he could be treated humanely while facing questioning that will take as much time as he has left on earth, perhaps he will disgorge information that will save American lives.

Prosecution is a fine objective, but it does not take on the same priorities as protection, and protection accords a greater premium to preventing the next attack than to avenging the last one.

-- Nick Catrantzos