Kill rather then capture?

[tbburg]

I'm interested in thoughts on this:
I didn't quote either article in it's entirety because they're both fairly long.

OpEd by David Ignatius at the Washington post

...,Every war brings its own deformations, but consider this disturbing fact about America's war against al-Qaeda: It has become easier, politically and legally, for the United States to kill suspected terrorists than to capture and interrogate them,...

...,The pace of drone attacks on the tribal areas has increased sharply during the Obama presidency, with more assaults in September and October of this year than in all of 2008. At the same time, efforts to capture al-Qaeda suspects have virtually stopped. Indeed, if CIA operatives were to snatch a terrorist tomorrow, the agency wouldn't be sure where it could detain him for interrogation.

Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA, frames the puzzle this way: "Have we made detention and interrogation so legally difficult and politically risky that our default option is to kill our adversaries rather than capture and interrogate them?"

Original article at Washingtonpost.com


by Ed Morrissey at HotAir.

...,This isn’t a deformation of war; it’s a deformation of politics. And it really isn’t directly related to the enhanced interrogation techniques at all, but to the insistence of political leadership and the federal courts to insist on a jurisdiction that flies in the face of two centuries of American military and legal tradition. Pushing terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ahmed Ghailani through federal courts perverts the normal operation of war, especially by imposing the same kind of legal liabilities used to restrict law enforcement in regard to American citizens and residents.,...

...,The limits on interrogation are debatable, but those aren’t the problem. We’re not killing terrorists rather than capturing them because we’re restricting interrogation to the Army Field Manual, which has nothing to do with later adjudication; we’re killing them because we have no real rational place to put them. That’s due entirely to Obama’s detention policies and the judiciary’s arrogation of jurisdiction. Thanks to the mess created by the Holder DoJ, we have no way to process them even if we did.

analysis of OpEd here.
Original article at Hotair.com


Now personally, I don't have a problem with splashing some murderer all over the landscape via the "hellfire missile souffle" recipe if that's the most practical way of dealing with him/her/it. But,...
have we made such a goat-f**k out of this that we are now loosing valuable intel, not because it's too hard to get, but because we're too wishy-washy to deal constructively with prisoner housing?