More than six years into his presidency, Barack Obama still has yet to close a terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo in Cuba. Arthur Herman examines the reasons for the president’s foot-dragging in a Commentary magazine feature.

Among Herman’s most interesting passages is one that contrasts the 44th president’s policies with those of his predecessor.

There is another problematic aspect of Obama’s handling of Gitmo. The prison is far more than a terrorist detention camp. After its opening, Gitmo slowly grew into one of the “most advanced intelligence platforms in the world,” according to Colonel Rester. He and his colleagues quietly established a pattern of routine interrogation of detainees and discreet eavesdropping far different from the spectacular “enhanced interrogation techniques” that grabbed the headlines and convulsed the American left.

Conducting tens of thousands of separate interviews, the interrogators at Gitmo were able to piece together what its commandant, General Jay Hood, called “a rich mosaic” of intelligence that its administrators were able to convey directly to American forces in Afghanistan and then Iraq. Despite attempts by radical lawyers such as Michael Ratner and Clive Stafford Smith to disrupt the intelligence-gathering from existing inmates, and despite the granting of writs of habeas corpus that inserted lawyers into virtually every interrogation session, Guantánamo was still poised at the start of the Obama administration to gather valuable information from any new inmates it took in.

That didn’t happen. The anti-Gitmo creed made putting new captured terrorists in the facility impossible, especially for a liberal president. Yet Obama was discovering that, despite his loudly proclaimed reversal of Bush-era policies, the war on terror was not going away—and neither were the terrorists and jihadists. Since capturing and interrogating top terrorists was now all but closed as an option, the Obama administration decided to blow them up instead. The use of missile-firing unmanned aerial vehicles to fight the war on terror, which began with the very first Predator strike in 2004, skyrocketed. During the two terms of George W. Bush, there were a total of 51 drone strikes; in the first Obama term, there were 330. Although the number of strikes has decreased since 2013, estimates say they’ve killed between 2,300 and 2,500 terrorists, including some 84 members of al-Qaeda and three of the organization’s four heads in Pakistan. The policy was one of the reasons Obama was able to boast during his reelection campaign that al-Qaeda was “on the run.”

Yet with the remote strikes came another problem, that of civilian “collateral damage.” The numbers of civilians inadvertently killed in the Predator strikes set off a major outcry, although the actual numbers killed remain unclear. The Bureau of Investigative Journalists has estimated that as of January 2014, between 416 to 951 civilians had been killed, including as many as 200 children. American officials point out that al-Qaeda leaders and other terrorists are only too aware of drones, hovering over their heads like GPS-guided swords of Damocles, and so they take care to surround themselves with civilians in order to make the hit harder to authorize—which makes avoiding the deaths of innocents all but impossible. Still, the drone-strike strategy, especially in Pakistan during the height of the campaign in 2010–11, has been a recruiting tool for terrorists—probably far more so than Gitmo ever was. Even more significant, one must cold-bloodedly accept the fact that every terrorist killed rather than captured represents a lost opportunity when it comes to garnering intelligence.