WHO KNEW?

Establishing that detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba - for all its bad press, may actually be our most brilliant move in getting folks to talk.

The path to the top targets on the U.S. government's list of most-wanted Iraqi fugitives — such as former President Saddam Hussein's sons, who were killed Tuesday in an Army raid in the northern city of Mosul — has come through the lower-ranking Baath Party operatives who were protecting them, according to U.S. military officials.

For more than two months, U.S. forces had been trying in vain to zero in on the location of Saddam and his sons, Odai and Qusai.

Then, two weeks ago, U.S. military commanders switched the emphasis of their major operations by carrying out raids and gathering intelligence from captured lower-level members of Saddam's Baath Party who were attacking U.S. forces with sniper fire, mortar shells, rocket-propelled grenades and mines...

"In the past two weeks, we have been getting the midlevel leadership in a way that is effective," Abizaid later told reporters in Baghdad.

An unexpected benefit of that crackdown was the flood of information that captured Baathists provided about their organization and contacts.

Some gave details about their financing and their means of communication, officials said. Others identified members of their networks. Some described the routes and contacts that fugitive leaders were using.

Threats to ship the recalcitrant captives to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay on the eastern end of Cuba were especially helpful in encouraging them to talk, officials said.

"You get a tip, you pull a couple of guys in, they start to talk," a Central Command official said. Then, based on that information, he continued, "you do a raid, you confiscate some documents, you start building the tree" of contacts and "you start doing signals intercepts, and then you're into the network."

Read it all here.