When Saddam Hussein was captured in December, several people pointed towards evidence that suggested that he had actually been seized at an earlier date and that the actual “capture” was a staged event. At the time I dismissed those reports as simply the nonsensical ravings of tinfoil-hat liberals. Now I’m not quite so sure. The more I think about it, there would be a great deal of sense in keeping the capture of a major figure like Saddam (or Osama Bin Laden) a secret for some length of time. And, contrary to the assertions of a radical left desperate to turn everything into a cause for hatred of George W. Bush, I see nothing at all wrong with such a scenario.

Consider for a moment the tactical advantages available in such a situation. If you were to capture Bin Laden tomorrow, and that capture was initially known only to a very small circle of people, his interrogation could potentially provide a great deal of actionable intelligence. Why should such a chance be thrown away for the sake of immediate disclosure?

Think back to the capture of top al-Qaeda planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, nearly two years ago now. Many people suspect that he was captured (and interrogated) at an earlier date, and that the intelligence he provided led to any number of further captures. I have no idea as to whether or not this is true, but it makes a great deal of sense.

The idea that Bin Laden has already been captured and is being held for a politically opportune moment is a popular one on the left. I, for one, wonder why that would be so wrong. Were Bin Laden to be captured in such circumstances that it could be kept a secret (say by a Special Forces A-Team in a battle where all his accompanying bodyguards were also captured or killed) he could be interrogated at the leisure of the United States and, even better, he could potentially be used to send confusing or disruptive messages throughout the network.

Naturally, the great problem with this is that the uncovering of such happenings would create a political uproar. The left would accuse the President of lying to the American people, of running the war for ‘political gain’, and of every other form of perfidy that they could imagine. Herein one can see the real dangers created by the deliberate effort of the left to politicize the war: the President could be constrained from taking actions which would save American lives for purely domestic political reasons.

I am often mindful of Churchill’s remark that, in war, the truth must be protected by a bodyguard of lies. Deception of all sorts is a central strategy in conflict. I doubt if it would be possible to run an equivalent of the Manhattan Project today. Some fool would decide to be a “whistleblower” on the project, the New York Times would run it on the front page, and angry Congressional committees would haul the leaders of the project before it for lengthy questioning.

One of the key reasons for the success of the Normandy invasion was the creation of a fictional army group in England which was supposedly going to attack at Calais. As the Allies waded ashore at Omaha, Utah, Sword, and Juno beaches the Germans kept invaluable armored divisions tied up to defend against an assault by the fictional First US Army Group. The plan was sold to the Nazis, in part, by taking the corpse of a dead homeless man, dressing him up in the Royal Marine uniform, and dumping him in the waters off Spain with a suitcase containing fictional invasion plans handcuffed to him. If such an event were to be repeated today, I imagine that everyone involved would end up hauled before a variety of human rights tribunals and served with papers from all sorts of civil liberties groups.

The greatest danger we face now is that we will allow our warfighting capacity to be restrained by the politically nonsensical theories of the modern left. If we can gain by keeping Bin Laden hidden away in irons for a bit (and revealing him at the appropriate time), then we ought to do just that.

Already we have seen this in at least one case in this war. When the Pentagon set up an office to fight the propaganda side of this war, howls from the left (and from supposed ‘centrists’ and ‘principled’ conservatives) forced its shut-down on the grounds that it might (shock of shocks!) spread disinformation.

In order to win this war we’re going to have to give the Federal Government a lot of running room. They might have to lie to us, and we ought to accept that.