Last week, former Bush speechwriter and full-time torture apologist Marc Thiessen introduced perhaps the most comically hypocritical talking point in the perpetual Republican jihad against the Obama administration's war policies. In "Dead Terrorists Tell No Tales," Thiessen fretted that under President Obama, the United States is killing its enemies before getting a chance to torture them first. Six days later, the Washington Post amplified that line, warning "under Obama, more targeted killings than captures in counterterrorism efforts."
But the revelation that a joint U.S.-Pakistani raid captured Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in Karachi does much more than demolish Thiessen's myths that "Obama's administration no longer does this when it locates senior terrorist leaders today" and "the president is voluntarily sacrificing intelligence that could protect the American people." It shows that Barack Obama can eliminate terrorist leaders "dead or alive."
The New York Times described the outlines and strategic importance of the secret operation which been carried out by Pakistan's military spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, and that C.I.A. operatives had accompanied the Pakistanis." That "sea change" in U.S.-Pakistani cooperation could pay huge dividends:

The commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, is an Afghan described by American officials as the most significant Taliban figure to be detained since the American-led war in Afghanistan started more than eight years ago. He ranks second in influence only to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban's founder and a close associate of Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mullah Baradar has been in Pakistani custody for several days, with American and Pakistani intelligence officials both taking part in interrogations, according to the officials...
His capture could cripple the Taliban's military operations, at least in the short term, said Bruce O. Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer who last spring led the Obama administration's Afghanistan and Pakistan policy review.

That success didn't merely reflect unprecedented cooperation between Washington and Islamabad, but the refutation of an unprecedented Republican talking point.
Earlier this week, Missouri Senator Kit Bond amazingly accused President Obama of killing too many terrorists:

"Over a year after taking office, the administration has still failed to answer the hard questions about what to do if we have the opportunity to capture and detain a terrorist overseas, which has made our terror-fighters reluctant to capture and left our allies confused. If given a choice between killing or capturing, we would probably kill."

That charge came just days after Marc Thiessen took a break from his ongoing debate with Matthew Yglesias over the merits of the Spanish Inquisition to ask, "Is Barack Obama killing too many bad guys before the U.S. can interrogate them?" Thiessen provided the expected answer:

President Barack Obama's escalation of drone strikes is one area in the counterterrorism fight where he has earned plaudits from even his most vocal critics on the right. Hold the applause. Obama's escalation of the "Predator War" comes at the very same time he has eliminated the CIA's capability to capture senior terrorist leaders alive and interrogate them for information on new attacks. The Predator has become for President Obama what the cruise missile was to President Bill Clinton -- an easy way to appear like he is taking tough action against terrorists, when he is really shying away from the hard decisions needed to protect the United States.

Of course, that libel is laughable on its face, as the apprehension of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar shows. More comic still is the prospect of veterans of the Bush White House having any problem at all with the rapidly growing Al Qaeda and Taliban body count.
As he promised during the 2008 presidential race (to much criticism from the McCain campaign), President Obama has significantly ratcheted up the use of Predator drone strikes against Al Qaeda targets in the border areas of Pakistan. While the backlash from civilian casualties makes clear the policy is not without its risks, Obama's aggressive posture has decimated the Al Qaeda's leadership ranks. And as the New York Times reported in December, it's a campaign supported not only by both parties in Congress, but by the CIA itself:

The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.'s drone program in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president's decision, announced Tuesday, to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan...
In the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, C.I.A. officials were not eager to embrace killing terrorists from afar with video-game controls, said one former intelligence official. "There was also a lot of reluctance at Langley to get into a lethal program like this," the official said. But officers grew comfortable with the program as they checked off their hit list more than a dozen notorious figures, including Abu Khabab al-Masri, a Qaeda expert on explosives; Rashid Rauf, accused of being the planner of the 2006 trans-Atlantic airliner plot; and Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban.

Glossing over those successes in eradicating key Al Qaeda figures in their remote Pakistani safe haven, Thiessen instead intentionally confuses the issue by citing those captured in cities the U.S. could never and would never strike from the air:

In the years after the 9/11 attacks, the CIA worked with Pakistani and other intelligence services to hunt down senior terrorist leaders and take them in for interrogation. Among those captured were men like Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ammar al-Baluchi, Walid bin Attash, Riduan Isamuddin (aka "Hambali"), Bashir bin Lap, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, and others...
When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was located in 2003, the United States did not send a Predator to kill him. It captured him alive and got him to give up the details of the plots he had set in motion. That decision saved thousands of lives. The fact that Obama's administration no longer does this when it locates senior terrorist leaders today means the president is voluntarily sacrificing intelligence that could protect the American people -- and that the U.S. homeland is at greater risk of a terrorist attack.

Of course, the only thing President Obama is "voluntarily sacrificing" is the opportunity to torture terror detainees using waterboarding and other so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques." As he's made clear with his repeated embrace of those harsh and illegal measures, their loss is what Marc Thiessen really laments. As he put it last April:

"What will the administration do now that it has shared the limits of our interrogation techniques with the enemy? President Obama's decision to release these documents is one of the most dangerous and irresponsible acts ever by an American president during a time of war -- and Americans may die as a result."

Sadly for conservative mythmakers like Marc Thiessen, it is America's terrorist enemies dying in large numbers. And Thiessen of all people should be able to appreciate that. After all, it was his boss who after 9/11 said of Osama Bin Laden, There's an old poster out west, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.'" Bush, of course, failed to deliver Bin Laden in either state.
For many among the Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership ranks, President Obama is doing both.
UPDATE: The New York Times story follows a Newsweek exclusive detailing another U.S. intelligence breakthrough, this time in the Persian Gulf. The capture of an Al Qaeda operative headed from Pakistan on his way to Yemen reportedly yielded "a significant trove of phone numbers, photographs and documents detailing the links between Al Qaeda's leaders in northwest Pakistan and the terror group's increasingly menacing affiliate in Yemen."