House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer's constant proximity to Crazy Nancy has apparently infected him with a similar inability to perceive reality - or at least the same utter willingness to ignore it, as the case may be. The other day, with a straight face, Hoyer claimed that "the Obama administration has been more successful in combating terrorism than its predecessor." Says Hoyer:
We're tough on terrorists. That’s our policy. That’s our performance. And, in fact, we've been more successful.
Killing known terrorists with drones in Pakistan was started by Bush and continued by Obama. It is a good thing. But Obama has made it his centerpiece of combatting terrorism while severly curtailing the most important part of any anti-terrorism campaign - human intelligence.
There were no large scale successful acts of Islamic terrorism in the U.S. during the Bush years. There have already been four acts or attempted acts of significant terrorism on Obama's watch and, as I explained in detail here, Obama is determined, on fatuous grounds using the language of morality - to deconstruct much of our ability to respond to terrorism through acquisition of human intelligence. Indeed, Obama is in the process of making our nation far less safe than it was when he took office.
Obama has been incredibly lucky that the two bombing incidents - the Christmas Day Undiebomber and the Times Square bombing attempt - both of which could have caused massive casualties, failed only through pure luck. Critically, nothing that Obama and the left did impacted on the failure of either bomb to detonate, though apparently Hoyer and the left are claiming that as a successful part of their efforts at "combatting terrorism." It is utterly surreal. [Update: Ann Coulter adds to that in her column today:
. . . [I]t would be a little easier for the rest of us not to live in fear if the president's entire national security strategy didn't depend on average citizens happening to notice a smoldering SUV in Times Square or smoke coming from a fellow airline passenger's crotch.
But after the car bomber, the diaper bomber and the Fort Hood shooter, it has become increasingly clear that Obama's only national defense strategy is: Let's hope their bombs don't work!
If only Dr. Hasan's gun had jammed at Fort Hood, that could have been another huge foreign policy success for Obama.
The administration's fingers-crossed strategy is a follow-up to Obama's earlier and less successful "Let's Make Them Love Us!" plan.]
It is unrealistic to expect that any administration will be able to stop a true lone wolf terrorist. But three of the four acts or attempted acts of terrorism on U.S. soil on Obama's watch have not been lone wolves. Major Hassan, the Ft. Hood shooter, was tied to an al Qaeda cleric. His act of terrorism never should have come to fruition. Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day Undiebomber, was tied directly to al Qaedea and certainly should have been on the no-fly list. And how weak is our intelligence that the most recent would be jihadi, Faisal Shahzad, was apparently never identified as a threat, even though he spent months in Pakistan attending jihadi training camps on how to make a bomb and was in telephone contact with people known to have terrorist ties.
I applaud the efforts of our investigative services to quickly find and apprehend Shahzad after the attempted bombing. I also believe that the Administration's hands were pretty well tied in how they treated Shahzad in terms of Constitutional protections. Those claiming that he shouldn't have been read Miranda are on far more tenuous grounds when it comes to Shahzad, and I for one won't criticize the administation's handling of him at this point.
But what should concern every American is that Shahzad's act occurred to begin with. That is the difference between the Obama and Bush approach. Obama takes a criminal investigative approach to the war on terror which, by its very definition, is reactive. Bush prosecuted this as a war with emphasis on ending terrorist plots before they ever got to the point of failing or succeeding solely on the vagaries of fate.
It is only those vagaries that allow Hoyer to make his ridiculous claim today. However, everything we have seen involving the last three terrorist incidents tells us that it is only a matter of time before masses of Americans die or are injured by terrorist acts on American soil. Hoyer and the left's luck can only hold out so long. Then their spin will fall utterly flat and the debate on how to conduct a war on terror will end. It is a crime that it will take American blood before the left comes to grips with reality. And even then, it is not the blood that will bother them, but the votes. Hoyer and his ilk are contemptible indeed.
This is PC madness. It is wishing the problems away. We will never - repeat never - win the war against Islamic terrorism unless and until we engage in the war of ideas against the ideology driving that terrorism. I criticized Bush for only engaging in the war of ideas half heartedly. But that is a half more than Obama has done. Obama has completely retreated from the war of ideas. That is a dangerous retreat indeed, as to quote former terrorist Dr. Tawfiq Hamid, "the civilized world ought to recognize the immense danger that Salafi Islam poses; it must become informed, courageous and united if it is to protect both a generation of young Muslims and the rest of humanity from the disastrous consequences of this militant ideology."
Let's highlight that for a moment. Let's do a little exercise.
1. Do you know the person pictured at the top of this post?
2. He is a cleric in what denomination of Islam?
3. What is his background?
4. Why is he important?
5. Ideologically, what differentiates him from, say, ZhudiJasser or David Suliman Schwartz, two prominent Muslims in America?
6. What is different about the pictured man's version of Sunni Islam from . . . let's pick the Shafi'i school of Sunni Islam prevalent in Indonesia during Obama's time there?
If you can answer those questions, that puts you ahead of probably 99.99% of all other Americans. Yet these are questions about which most Americans should have at least some idea. The Answers:
1. The man pictured at the top of the post is AnwaralAlaki.
2. Alaki is a Wahhabi / Salafi cleric.
3. He was born in America and raised here until he was 11, then went to Yemen for ten years before returning to receive his college education in America. It is not clear whether he was radicalized here or in Yemen, though that would be very helpful to know. Salafism is the prevalent form of Islam practiced in Yemen, but most mosques in the U.S. are owned by Salafists (compliments of Saudi petrodollars) and there is a strong radical element funded through Saudi Arabia on most campuses.
4. Alaki is a member of alQaeda. He played a central role in both the Ft. Hood Massacre and the attempted slaughter by Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day Undiebomber.
5. Alaki, in full accord with the doctrines of Wahhabi / Salafi Islam, believes Western society is incompatible with Islam and wants to impose sharia law throughout the world. Also in accord with the teachings of Wahhabi / Salafi Islam, he views use of force and terror as legitimate means to that end. ZhudiJasser and David Suliman Schwartz are Muslim reformers. Both seek modifications of Salafi Islam and both practice forms of Islam that they believe are compatible with Western freedoms. Both are highly critical of Salafism and neither wants to see Sharia law imposed in any state.
6. Salafism is militant, triumphalist, and deeply discriminatory. The Shafi'i school, practiced in Indonesia during Obama's stay there, was far less militant and very open to coexisting with other religions. It is changing now as Salafists are being sent to Indonesia in force by Saudi Arabia. They are radicalizing influence on Islam in Indonesia. That said, historically, terrorists have not arisen from practitioners of the Shafi'i school; they have virtually all arisen from the Salafi / Wahhabi school and schools heavily influenced by Salafism.
If most Americans knew the answers to those questions, it would tell us and the world that we are not at war with Islam, but that we are at war with the ideology of Salafists. It would give standing and recognition to those Muslims who are fighting the overtaking of their religion by Salafits. Given the warning signs put out by Major NidalHassan prior to the Ft. Hood massacre, and given that he was a Salafist, it would likely have meant that the warning signs would have been heeded and the massacre aborted months before it occurred. It would place Salafism where it needs to be - in the full and direct light of the public, subject to the strongest force a democratic world can muster, public opinion. It is only that which will force a moderation of Salafi Islam. But if we can't answer those questions, than we can do nothing to "to protect both a generation of young Muslims and the rest of humanity from the disastrous consequences of this militant [Salafi] ideology."
In this, it seems, Obama has thrown not merely us, but all of the non-SalafiIslamic world under the bus. Add that to a national counterterrorism effort in tatters and you have a recipe for disaster - not to mention never-ending war with the law of averages being that one day, these terrorists will succeed in a nuclear attack on America.
Michael Mukasey was the U.S. attorney general from 2007 to 2009 and the presiding judge at initial proceedings against Jose Padilla in 2002. He appears in the pages of the Washington Post today to shovel away the incredible amounts of bull excreta piled high onto the counterterrorism issue by Attorney General Eric Holder and Whitehouse Counterterrorism Advisor John Brennan. Specifically, Mukasey rebuts many of the outrageous claims made by Eric Holder in his letter to Mitch McConnell and the equally outragous charges made by John Brennan in his Sunday morning show appearance and his USA Today opinion piece. This from Mr. Mukasey:
. . . When Abdulmutallab tried to detonate a bomb concealed in his undershorts, he committed a crime; no doubt about that. He could not have acted alone; no doubt about that either. The bomb was not the sort of infernal device readily produced by someone of his background, and he quickly confirmed that he had been trained and sent by al-Qaeda in Yemen.
What to do and who should do it? It was entirely reasonable for the FBI to be contacted and for that agency to take him into custody. But contrary to what some in government have suggested, that Abdulmutallab was taken into custody by the FBI did not mean, legally or as a matter of policy, that he had to be treated as a criminal defendant at any point. Consider: In 1942, German saboteurs landed on Long Island and in Florida. That they were eventually captured by the FBI did not stop President Franklin Roosevelt from directing that they be treated as unlawful enemy combatants. They were ultimately tried before a military commission in Washington and executed. Their status had nothing to do with who held them, and their treatment was upheld in all respects by the Supreme Court.
. . . Guidelines put in place in 2003 and revised in September 2008 "do not require that the FBI's information gathering activities be differentially labeled as 'criminal investigations,' 'national security investigations,' or 'foreign intelligence collections,' or that the categories of FBI personnel who carry out investigations be segregated from each other based on the subject areas in which they operate. Rather, all of the FBI's legal authorities are available for deployment in all cases to which they apply to protect the public from crimes and threats to the national security and to further the United States' foreign intelligence objectives." . . .
Contrary to what the White House homeland security adviser and the attorney general have suggested, if not said outright, not only was there no authority or policy in place under the Bush administration requiring that all those detained in the United States be treated as criminal defendants, but relevant authority was and is the opposite. The Supreme Court held in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that "indefinite detention for the purpose of interrogation is not authorized" but also said in the same case that detention for the purpose of neutralizing an unlawful enemy combatant is permissible and that the only right of such a combatant -- even if he is a citizen, and Abdulmutallab is not -- is to challenge his classification as such a combatant in a habeas corpus proceeding. This does not include the right to remain silent or the right to a lawyer, but only such legal assistance as may be necessary to file a habeas corpus petition within a reasonable time. That was the basis for my ruling in Padilla v. Rumsfeld that, as a convenience to the court and not for any constitutionally based reason, he had to consult with a lawyer for the limited purpose of filing a habeas petition, but that interrogation need not stop.
What of Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber," who was warned of his Miranda rights and prosecuted in a civilian court? He was arrested in December 2001, before procedures were put in place that would have allowed for an outcome that might have included not only conviction but also exploitation of his intelligence value, if possible. His case does not recommend the same procedure in Abdulmutallab's.
The struggle against Islamist extremists is unlike any other war we have fought. Osama bin Laden and those like-minded intend to make plain that our government cannot keep us safe, and have sought our retreat from the Islamic world and our relinquishment of the idea that human rather than their version of divine law must control our activities. This movement is not driven by finite grievances or by poverty. The enemy does not occupy a particular location or have an infrastructure that can be identified and attacked but, rather, lives in many places and purposely hides among civilian populations. The only way to prevail is to gather intelligence on who is doing what where and to take the initiative to stop it.
There was thus no legal or policy compulsion to treat Abdulmutallab as a criminal defendant, at least initially, and every reason to treat him as an intelligence asset to be exploited promptly. The way to do that was not simply to have locally available field agents question him but, rather, to get in the room people who knew about al-Qaeda in Yemen, people who could obtain information, check that information against other available data and perhaps get feedback from others in the field before going back to Abdulmutallab to follow up where necessary, all the while keeping secret the fact of his cooperation. Once his former cohorts know he is providing information, they can act to make that information useless.
Nor is it an answer to say that Abdulmutallab resumed his cooperation even after he was warned of his rights. He did that after five weeks, when his family was flown here from Nigeria. The time was lost, and with it possibly useful information. Disclosing that he had resumed talking only compounded the problem by letting his former cohorts know that they had better cover their tracks.
Many of the points Mukasey raises above I have raised in prior posts, including the two posts I link in the opening paragraph of this post. Regardless, the bottom line is that the Obama counterterrorism effort is a farce. The only thing more farcial is watching Holder and Brennan go on the offensive, attempting to claim that using the criminal justice system to gain wartime intelligence is superior and that, in any event, it was necessary. These people will get Americans killed.
Apparently, taking issue with the Obama Administration's threee-stoogesesque counterterrorism effort is now tantamount to supporting al Qaeda. Yes, yes, it's true. That according to John Brennan, Obama's counterterrorism advisor, who tells us in the USA Today that "[p]olitically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda." Given that the Christmas Day attempted bombing failed to kill hundreds of Americans solely because of jihadi incompetence and that every intelligence chief expects with certainty another al Qaeda effort at a mass casulaty attack in the U.S. in the next six months, it would seem Mr. Brennan has a rather unique definition of "fear mongering." Apparently anything other than blind, unquestioning faith in the Dear Leader's ability to keep us safe based on counterintuitive policies is now "fear mongering."
Be that as it may, the Obama administration is in a full court press to make it seem that the administration acted responsibly when it gave Miranda rights and a lawyer to the Christmas Day Undiebomber, Adbulmutallab, within hours of his arrest, after less than two hours of interrogation, and without notifying or receiving input from the heads of our nation's intelligence and counterterrorism entities. It truly is trying to make chicken salad from the vilest of chicken excreta.
Over the weekend, Brennan appeared on Meet The Press, claiming that the fact Republicans were briefly notified that Abdulmutallab was in custody of the FBI and talking, that these same people should have immediately understood that Abdulmutallab would soon mirandized and given a lawyer. That is a real leap in logic.
One would expect that a terrorist captured in the U.S. to be taken into custody by the FBI. But we are a nation at war as the result of Congressional authorization. We can lawfully hold Abdulmutallab as an enemy combatant, and thus the decision to mirandize Abdulmutallab was certainly not required. The mere fact that FBI standard operating procedures require Miranda Warnings when capturing a common criminal does abosolutely nothing to negate those facts. Mirandizing Abdulmutallab was a choice, and to claim it an inexorable logical step to be divined from the mere fact that he was taken into FBI custody is facetious.
But that is hardly the only disingenouos statement made by John Brennan of late. His op-ed in the USA Today is a string of them.
Immediately after the failed Christmas Day attack, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was thoroughly interrogated . . .
One, possibly two sessions of interrogation lasting a grand total of under two hours and conducted by local FBI agents without speicalized background in the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda constituties "thoroughly interrogated?" How dumb does this joker think we are?
Senior counterterrorism officials from the White House, the intelligence community and the military were all actively discussing this case before he was Mirandized and supported the decision to charge him in criminal court.
Correct me if I am wrong, but didn't every one of the heads of our intelligence and counterintelligence agencies testify before Congress that they were never consulted about Abdulmutallab prior to his being mirandized. And didn't AG Eric Holder, a man who has only an ancillary role in counterintelligence, state that the decision to mirandize Abdulmutallab was his and his alone? It would seem that Mr. Brennan is making things up as he goes along.
The most important breakthrough occurred after Abdulmutallab was read his rights, a long-standing FBI policy that was reaffirmed under Michael Mukasey, President Bush's attorney general. The critics who want the FBI to ignore this long-established practice also ignore the lessons we have learned in waging this war: Terrorists such as Jose Padilla and Saleh al-Mari did not cooperate when transferred to military custody, which can harden one's determination to resist cooperation.
This is utterly ridiculous. It is only through treating terrorists as common criminals that we can hope to gain intelligence? Did Padilla and al-Mari, who were both taken into FBI custody initially, cooperate while in FBI custody? What about KSM, whose first request upon being taken into custody was for his lawyer? What about the five weeks lost in gathering intel when Abdulmutallab was given a lawyer?
It's naive to think that transferring Abdulmutallab to military custody would have caused an outpouring of information. There is little difference between military and civilian custody, other than an interrogator with a uniform. The suspect gets access to a lawyer, and interrogation rules are nearly identical.
Let's see, under the military, Abdulmutallab would have had no right not to answer questions, nor a right to have a lawyer present during questioning. We would be under no compulsion to forgo interrogation when Abdulmutallab decided he didn't want to talk any more. And indeed, his sole recourse to a lawyer would have been to challenge his status as an enemy combatant . . . somehow I find those factors to be pretty substantive. And as to the interrogation rules, that is kind of like the story of the boy that killed his parents then asked for leniency from the Court because he was now an orphan. We have known for eight years that the interrogation tactics used by the police - and in 2002 mirrored by the military - were insufficient to induce most terrorists to talk. That is why the CIA developed enhanced interrorgation techniques - the same one's that Obama took from our inventory with a stroke of the pen a year ago. For Brennan now to use that as a reason to treat Abdulmutallab as a common criminal is mind numbing.
Cries to try terrorists only in military courts lack foundation. There have been three convictions of terrorists in the military tribunal system since 9/11, and hundreds in the criminal justice system — including high-profile terrorists such as Reid and 9/11 plotter Zacarius Moussaoui.
This paragraph from Brennan is significantly disingengous and deceptive in equal measure. There have been three convictions in the military tribunal system because of, one, court challenges during the Bush administration, and once those were finally concluded, the fact that Obama stopped all tribunal proceedings. Further, we are under no compulsion to prosecute anyone. Under the law of war, we can hold all captured enemy combatants until the conclusion of hostilities. Lastly, this claim to "hundreds" of convictions in the "criminal justice system," that is mystifying. As Byron York points out, the administration keeps making this claim, but they have yet to back it up with any facts.
This administration's efforts have disrupted dozens of terrorist plots against the homeland and been responsible for killing and capturing hundreds of hard-core terrorists, including senior leaders in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond — far more than in 2008.
Much of this statement is simply unverifiable. To the extent it is based on an increased tempo of drone attacks - that is merely the continuation a Bush policy from 2008. As to captured individuals, considering we do not even have a High Value Interrogtion Team yet constituted, I'd really like to see the facts underlying that claim and just what we are doing with them.
Brennan concludes this piece of fiction with the statement, "We need no lectures about the fact that this nation is at war." There is no question in my mind that, unless there is intercession by a higher power, we will see Americans killed by terrorist acts over the next three years. And when the next mass casualty event comes, particularly if it is out of Yemen, I expect that the entire population of the U.S. will be providing the lectures to this administration.
Now, do [terrorists] deserve Miranda rights? Do they deserve to be treated like a shoplifter down the block? Of course not.
President Barack Obama, Interview With 60 Minutes, 23 March 2009
HOLDER: Yes, it seems to me this is an argument that is really consequential. One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located; under the Geneva Convention that you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people.
It seems to me that given the way in which they have conducted themselves, however, that they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war. If, for instance, Mohammed Atta had survived the attack on the World Trade Center, would we now be calling him a prisoner of war? I think not. Should Zacarias Moussaoui be called a prisoner of war? Again, I think not.
And yet, I understand what Secretary Powell is concerned about, and that is we're going to be fighting this war with people who are special forces, not people who are generally in uniform. And if unfortunately they somehow become detained, we would want them to be treated in an appropriate way consistent with the Geneva Convention.
ZAHN: So is the secretary of state walking a fine line here legally? He is not asking that the United States declare these men as prisoners of war right now. He's just saying let's abide by the Geneva Convention in the meantime.
HOLDER: Yes, and I think in a lot of ways that makes sense. I think they clearly do not fit within the prescriptions of the Geneva Convention. You have to remember that after World War II, as these protocols were being developed, there seemed to be widespread agreement that members of the French Resistance would not be considered prisoners of war if they had been captured. That being the case, it's hard for me to see how members of al Qaeda could be considered prisoners of war.
And yet, I understand Secretary Powell's concerns. We want to make sure that our forces, if captured in this or some other conflict, are treated in a humane way. And I think ultimately that's really the decisive factor here. How are people, who are in our custody, going to be treated? And those in Europe and other places who are concerned about the treatment of al Qaeda members should come to Camp X-ray and see how the people are, in fact, being treated.
ZAHN: The administration this morning playing down any discord among its team, but if you could, help us understand how you reconcile this.
HOLDER: . . . I can understand the tensions that exist, but I think the way to resolve it is, in fact, the way Secretary Powell has proposed, which is to say these are not people who are prisoners of war as that has been defined, but who are entitled to, in our own interests, entitled to be treated in a very humane way and almost consistent with all of the dictates of the Geneva Convention.
ZAHN: Final question for you, moving onto the issue of John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban. How much pressure should they put on this man to get information out of him as they interrogate him?
HOLDER: Well, I mean, it's hard to interrogate him at this point now that he has a lawyer and now that he is here in the United States. But to the extent that we can get information from him, I think we should. . . .
From the quotes above, we have Obama saying that we should not be treating terrorists as criminals. We have Eric Holder, now and for the moment our Attorney General, not merely acknowledging that giving a terrorist a lawyer and Constitutional rights significantly constrains our ability to interrogate that person, but arguing that "enemy combatants" shouldn't be treated as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention because that too would substantially constrain our ability to interrogate them for vital intelligence. How we get from those statements to today, where Holder and Obama are treating the Christmas Day Undiebomber, Abdullahmuttalab ,as a common criminal, is literally the story of how the far left demagogued and politicized our national security over the past six years.
Intelligence is time sensitive. Information on locations and practices that are true today will be changed tomorrow if the enemy has reason to believe that either has been compromised. Thus, when the Obama administration decided to treat the Christmas Undiebomber as common criminal and give him a lawyer after less than an hour of interrogation, they voluntarily squandered an intelligence asset with information vital to protecting American lives. Abdulmutallab thereafter remained silent for five weeks until he began to answer questions again. While Abdullmutalab may be providing high value intelligence today, it is an utter certainty that, with a five week delay, the value of the intelligence Abdullmutalab can convey is significantly lessened.
Yet the Obama and Holder are trying to defend their indefensible decision to treat Abdullmutulab as a common criminal for purely political reasons. The administration is in full spin mode now - thus the BS meter at the top of this post is pegging.
The administration called a press briefing Tuesday to publicly announce that, after weeks of silence, the FBI had finally induced Abdulmutallab to begin providing intelligence again, apparently involving his family in the process. The purpose of the announcement was "to let Americans 'know that we're doing everything possible to keep the American people safe." and to condemn Republicans for "politicizing" the issue. Amazing. And as an aside, no one has yet asked the question if there are any additional plea agreements that had to be first agreed to by the government before Abdulmutallab agreed now to answer questions. You can bet your life's savings that ink met paper before his lawyer allowed him to say word one, whether his parents were there or not.
The administration followed up the news conference with a letter from Attorney General Eric Holder to House Minority Leader Mitch McConnel in which Holder attempts to justify treating Abdulmutallab as a common criminal rather than an enemy combatant. The main reason he gives for not holding Abdulmutallab:
Some have argued that had Abdulmutallab been declared an enemy combatant, the government could have held him indefinitely without providing him access to an attorney. But the government’s legal authority to do so is far from clear. In fact, when the Bush administration attempted to deny Jose Padilla access to an attorney, a federal judge in New York rejected that position, ruling that Padilla must be allowed to meet with his lawyer. Notably, the judge in that case was Michael Mukasey, my predecessor. . . .
Give me a break. As a threshold matter, Padilla was allowed to see a lawyer to challenge his designation as an enemy combatant - not because he was a criminal defendant with a right not to answer questions during the period in which he was being interrogated for intelligence. And if Holder switched on PBS News last night, he would have been treated to Michael Mukasey arguing that Abdullumutalab is an enemy combatant who should have been put in the military system without benefit of a lawyer or a Constitutional right not to answer questions.
More importantly, the "legal authority" to hold Abdulmutallab as an enemy combatant without Constitutional rights could not be more clear. We are a nation at war against those elements that carried out or otherwise assisted in the Sept. 11 attack. This war was formally authorized in 2001 by Congress in the Authorization For Use Of Military Force (AUMF). What the Undiebomber did in attempting to blow up a plane was an act of war that falls specifically within the ambit of the AUMF. Thus we have every right to hold him in our military system. Even the left wing of the Supreme Court never questioned that right. To the contrary, taking prisoners in war and holding them within the military system until hostilities cease is, to quote the left wing of the Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, "so fundamental and accepted an incident to war as to be an exercise of the ‘necessary and appropriate force."
Indeed, so utterly groundless is Holder's claims that even Jan Crawford of CBS News isn't buying it.
. . . Aware of needed damage control, the White House and Attorney General are now taking the position that, legally, it was “highly questionable” whether they could have detained the terror suspect and continued to question him without a lawyer, even if they wanted to. Holder, in his letter to the Senators, said that legal authority “is far from clear.”
Many legal experts, however, agree the law is, in fact, pretty clear: It’s not that highly questionable at all. Under existing law, the Obama Administration had the authority to detain and question Abdulmutallab more extensively. And it chose not to.
If the Obama Administration wants to make a policy decision to treat al Qaeda operatives as common criminals and not as enemy combatants, that’s a position it could take—and some advocate they should. They’ve argued that giving rights to these terrorists, for example, will enhance our standing in the world and deter future terrorist acts.
But those are policy arguments and policy decisions, and they have consequences. They should stand or fall on the merits. They aren’t required by law. To argue, instead, that the law essentially tied has their hands—that the law all but required this course of action in Detroit--ignores the cases that have been decided.
And there’s a danger in that. Whether or not the Obama Administration made the right call on Christmas Day, it’s a problem to see top officials now make incomplete or misleading legal arguments to justify their decision after the fact.
Holder also makes a laughable pragmatic argument that using the criminal law system is somehow the equal of - if not superior to - interrogations without constitutional rights and a lawyer under the law of war. The Volokh Conspiracy responds to that argument:
Do we think that maybe using the model of ordinary criminal justice questioning and plea bargaining and lawyer negotiation is such a smart idea at a moment in which we have to wonder whether, yes indeed, maybe this guy really does know something crucial? Talk about maximum hold-up value ...
I’m all in favor of such criminal justice rights for our ordinary criminals — and am not silly enough to believe that people like me want them because they will cause people to talk. It’s in order that in our ordinary criminal justice system, people will know they don’t have to and, frankly, won’t without advice from an attorney. I like that for ordinary criminal suspects, but that’s because it’s a limitation. AG Holder makes it sound as though it’s a great way to get them to talk. If it were, I’d think there was something wrong with our existing criminal justice system. It’s a feature of our ordinary criminal justice system; a bug if we think it’s supposed to produce actionable intelligence quickly. DOJ seems to think it’s a feature all the way around; this is unlikely at best.
We Mirandized him ... because otherwise we’d be depriving ourselves of an important tool for gaining actionable intelligence? By urging him not to talk? Really? That appears to be the AG’s argument, on this as on the general point about using the criminal justice system. If we don’t use a tool that is mostly, by comparison to our other possibilities, about limiting our access to him, we are somehow hurting ourselves by not using our full repertoire.
Well, it’s an argument, I suppose. An admirable example, I also suppose, of how to make a legal silk purse from a sow’s ear. I sure hope whoever got stuck writing it at DOJ doesn’t take it too seriously. The whole letter sounds as though it were cut and pasted from some human rights advocacy report, I’m afraid.
Obama and Holder, prior to taking power, had it right. Abdulmutallab should be treated as an enemy combatant. That is what our national security demands and the law allows. It is only politics that is driving Holder and Obama to do otherwise at the moment. If they think that they can keep this up, they had better be hoping and praying to a benevolent God that al Qaeda does not successfully conduct a mass casualty attack in America on their watch. If and when it happens, the public will be demanding their blood.
The situation surrounding our government's handling of Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Undiebomber trained and armed by al Qaeda, has gone from bad to scandalous with the recent revelations regarding the inner workings of those agencies charged with counterterrorism. As a result of these revelations, we now know that:
Nine years after 9-11, Obama has, for all practical purposes, reduced our ability to interrogate al Qaeda operatives for actionable intelligence, to something approaching zero.
Nyuck-Nyuck-Nyuck.
As a threshold matter, intelligence gleaned from captured enemy combatants has been far and away our most important source of actionable intelligence in the war on terror. Yet a recent AP article recounts that the FBI questioned the Undiebomber for less then two hours in toto before reading him his rights. [Update: Former CIA Chief Michael Hayden expands on this in a WaPo op-ed:
. . . In the 50 minutes the FBI had to question him, agents reportedly got actionable intelligence. Good. But were there any experts on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in the room (other than Abdulmutallab)? Was there anyone intimately familiar with any National Security Agency raw traffic to, from or about the captured terrorist? Did they have a list or photos of suspected recruits?
When questioning its detainees, the CIA routinely turns the information provided over to its experts for verification and recommendations for follow-up. The responses of these experts -- "Press him more on this, he knows the details" or "First time we've heard that" -- helps set up more detailed questioning.
None of that happened in Detroit. In fact, we ensured that it wouldn't. After the first session, the FBI Mirandized Abdulmutallab and -- to preserve a potential prosecution -- sent in a "clean team" of agents who could have no knowledge of what Abdulmutallab had provided before he was given his constitutional warnings. As has been widely reported, Abdulmutallab then exercised his right to remain silent.
In retrospect, the inadvisability of this approach seems self-evident.]
That revelation comes in the aftermath of Congressional hearings on how it was that Abdulmutallab, the undibomber went, in about twenty-four hours, from roasting his own chestnuts on an open fire during a Christmas Day flight to Detroit, then to a jail cell, complete with a lawyer, a Constitutional right not to anwwer questions, and presumably the mother of all ice packs. This from Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard:
. . . Four top counterterrorism officials testified before a congressional committee that they were not consulted about how to handle the interrogation of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the al Qaeda operative who attempted to blow up Flight 253 on December 25, 2008.
That group included all three senior Obama administration officials who testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday: Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security; Michael Leiter, chairman of the National Counterterrorism Center; and Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence. It also included FBI Director Robert Mueller.
With surprising candor, Blair, the nation's top intelligence official, explained that these officials were not deliberately excluded from the decisionmaking process in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Rather, he told the Senate Homeland Security Committee, there was no process at all.
"I've been a part of the discussions which established this high-value interrogation unit, [HIG] which we started as part of the executive order after the decision to close Guantanamo. That unit was created for exactly this purpose -- to make a decision on whether a certain person who's detained should be treated as a case for federal prosecution or for some of the other means. We did not invoke the HIG in this case," he said. "We should have."
We learn from NewsWeek that the White House responded with anger to Blair's admissions, calling his testimony incorrect:
[O]fficials who have worked on the issue said Blair was wrong on almost every count. Abdulmutallab couldn't possibly have been questioned by the HIG because the unit doesn't exist yet. The task force had recommended it be created to handle the questioning of "high value" Qaeda leaders who might be captured overseas—a criterion that clearly doesn't apply in Abdulmutallab's case. But the proposal is still being reviewed by the National Security Council, and the actual unit has not yet been created.
The specific recommendation, one source said, was to have a collection of intelligence officers and FBI agents who are knowledgeable about the background of the Qaeda leaders and deploy them—along with language and regional experts—as soon as a Qaeda leader was captured. But since Abdulmutallab was not a Qaeda leader, and was captured in Detroit, not overseas, the HIG wouldn't apply in any case, said the source, who worked closely on the proposal. . . .
Administration officials said the comments by Blair were especially galling because they seemed to vindicate the chief Republican criticism of the handling of the Detroit incident. . . .
Galling?!?!?!? Our Moralizer In Chief has utterly emasculated our ability to gain timely and actionable intelligence from people who have nightly wet dreams about setting off nuclear explosions in every city in our country. Yet the Obama administration shows far more concern about being publicly criticized by Republicans. All emphasis is on the political, none on the substance. The Obama administration has their priorities completely upside down.
To restate the revelations from the hearing and the NewsWeek article, this is the position in which Obama has placed our national security: There is no specific procedure for our government to deal with captured enemy combatants, nor are the tools in place to be able to conduct interrogations coordinated across those agencies charged with countering terrorism. By Executive Order, the CIA cannot interrogate high value detainees and, for the past year through today, the designated replacement for the CIA interrogators, the HIG, a task force under FBI leadership and direct White House oversight, is still on the drawing board. For al Qaeda leaders or operatives captured in the U.S., it is Obama's de facto policy that they would go into the criminal justice system.
The national security imperative of gathering intelligence is no longer the top priority. It is trumped in the Obama administration by the political imperative of giving substance to the far left's calls to treat terrorism as a criminal matter and terrorists as people with constitutional rights. Given Obama's ostentatious grandstanding on terrorism and in particular the issue of interrogating enemy combatants, given Obama's many rhetorical efforts to establish himself as our Moralizer in Chief on this issue, and yet given the reality of his horrid national security effort, it is apparent that while Obama has more than talked the talk, he has stumbled, fallen, stubbed a toe, pulled a hammy and broken both legs on the walk.
To continue from Mr. Hayes:
That's quite an admission. Blair wasn't finished (see the 51:00 mark of this video). "Frankly, we were thinking more of overseas people and, duh!, we didn't put it then. That's what we will do now. And so we need to make those decisions more carefully. I was not consulted and the decision was made on the scene. It seemed logical to the people there but it should have been taken using this HIG format at a higher level." . . .
Blair admitted that Abdulmutallab was not interrogated for intelligence purposes because the Obama administration had not considered using the newly-created elite interrogation unit on terrorist in the United States.
If Blair considered the handling of Abdulmutallab a mistake, FBI Director Robert Mueller, testifying at the same time before the Senate Judiciary Committee, did not. Mueller, like Blair, acknowledged that the crucial decision about how to treat Abdulmutallab was made by local FBI agents.
Now think about that for a second. It's not merely that the Director of the FBI, the DNI, and the DNCC were not contacted and that this was a systemic failure arising out of the lack of any procedure for a very forseeable contingeny. I think (hope and pray) that it is safe to assume these three stellar civil servants had heard about the attempted bombing in real time. But the fact is that after the undiebomber was captured, none of these individuals lifted so much as a finger to insinuate themselves into the situation to ensure that the undiebomber was interrogated for every bit of actionable intelligence that he possessed. Not a one of them made so much as a phone call. They sat with their thumbs up their collective asses in blissful ignorance while the Undiebomber was questioned by local FBI - who may or may not have the slightest background in counterterroism and the specifics of our intel on Abdulmutallab - and shortly thereafter, read his rights and given a lawyer. Lacking a procedure for this eventuality in year nine of the war on terror is unfathomable. Displaying this degree of placidity and lack of proactivity even in the abscence of a procedure is utterly unforgivable.
As an aside, it is not clear what role the DOJ directly played in that decision and, if they played any such role, whether Eric Holder was directly involved. That said, inquiring minds really, really want to know. The administration has refused to answer that question.
It should be noted that the White House, which, as previously noted, publicly trumpeted in August of 2009 that they had assumed a direct oversight role in high value interrogations, equally did nothing to intercede in this case. And let's not forget that the director of the National Counterterrorism Center was on vacation while all of this going on and that he, like Obama himself, saw no reason to cut his vacation short. All of this adds up to incompetence on a cosmic scale, a Three Stooges scale. And our national security is in their hands? Nyuck-Nyuck-Nyuck indeed.
. . . Mueller testified that those FBI agents interviewed Abdulmutallab about "ongoing and other threats." What the FBI director did not mention was that his agents interviewed the terrorist without any input from the National Counterterrorism Center — the institution we now know was sitting on top of a small mountain of not-yet-correlated information about the bomber.
So whatever information Abdulmutallab provided, he gave up in response to general questions about his activities, not in response to specific questions based on the intelligence the U.S. government had already collected on him. And within 24 hours — according to Senator Jeff Sessions, whose tough questioning left Mueller stuttering — Abdulmutallab was Mirandized and he stopped talking. (It would be nice to learn, from Mueller or someone else in a position to know, precisely when Abdulmutallab was read his rights.) . . .
Just unbelievable. If heads don't roll now for this level of ineptitude, we can rest assured that heads will roll in the future. It will be the heads of Americans who have placed their trust in Obama to protect our nation. Soaring rhetoric will stop neither bullets nor blast waves. Nor will Obama's moralizing be sufficient to keep a crippled jet in the sky. It seems inevitable that American blood will be spilled as a direct result of an Obama national security apparatus not merely in disaray, but Three Stooges-esque in its degree of incompetence.
Given that the Obama administration has already found criticism of their performance to be "galling," it is clear that the Obama administration is not going to do anything to correct this situation, Understand that there is no reason the Obama administration cannot, at this very moment, pull the Undiebomber out of our federal justice system, treat him as an enemy combatant, and interrogate him his every waking minute without the presence of a lawyer. Instead, Obama is refusing to pull the undiebombler out of the District Court docket now because it would be a tacit acknowledgement of the the glaring holes in - and gross incompetence of - his national security apparatus.
I documented in detail two weeks ago how Obama had weakened our national security during his first year in office. I was far, far too easy on Obama. I had assumed that our national security apparatus was, nine years on from 9-11, still a well oiled machine, but that Obama had made a command decision to move Abdulmutallab to federal Court. I had no idea that the reality is that Obama had made sufficient changes to the procedures and tone of our national security apparatus that it stands today as uncoordinated, incompetent, operating on autopilot without appropriate procedures in place and unfathomably lacking in proactiveness at the very highest levels. After Obama has had a full year in office, and after he had inherited a functioning system from the Bush administration, this is truly scandalous - not to mention incredibly dangerous for America. Call it Undiegate.
Update: The Washington Post Editorial Board arrives (a bit late) at some of the same conclusions:
. . . The Obama administration had three options: It could charge [the undiebomber] in federal court. It could detain him as an enemy belligerent. Or it could hold him for prolonged questioning and later indict him, ensuring that nothing Mr. Abdulmutallab said during questioning was used against him in court.
It is now clear that the administration did not give serious thought to anything but Door No. 1. This was myopic, irresponsible and potentially dangerous. . . .
According to sources with knowledge of the discussions, no one questioned the approach or raised the possibility of taking more time to question the suspect. This makes the administration's approach even more worrisome than it would have been had intelligence personnel been cut out of the process altogether.
Update: Charles Krauthammer is on precisely the same sheet of music this week.
Update: Maine's Susan Collins - of all people - goes nuclear on the Obama administration over this.
. . . when a moderate like Collins calls the handling of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab “irresponsible,” “dangerous,” and “inconceivable,” that has a broader political impact. When Collins says that “Foreign terrorists are enemy combatants and they must be treated as such,” and calls the current Obama policies a “charade,” that will make it more difficult for people to write it off as knee-jerk, right-wing contempt for Obama instead of his policies:
While Collins is on the money, she does not go quite far enough. Few people, Collins included, seem to be catching on to the degree to which Obama has deconstructed what was once a highly functional national security apparatus, not to mention the equally scandalous degree of institutional passivity at the top of that apparatus now.
Once or twice a year, I compose a post that is in complete sync with a later article by my favorite pundit, Charles Krauthammer. The unfortunate part is that the topic this time around is the scandal that is Obama's national security apparatus. It is a scandal exposed by the Obama administration's handling of the Undiebomber, Abdulmutallab. After nine years, Obama has deconstructed our national security apparatus to the point that it is dysfunctional and passive. What is equally as troubling is that this is being largely ignored by the MSM. This one will get people killed.
The situation surrounding our government's handling of Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Undiebomber trained and armed by al Qaeda, has gone from bad to scandalous with the recent revelations regarding the inner workings of those agencies charged with counterterrorism. As a threshold matter, intelligence gleaned from captured enemy combatants has been far and away our most important source of actionable intelligence in the war on terror. Yet we now know that nine years on from 9-11 and with one year in office, the Obama administration has not constituted an entity to interrogate high value targets. We now know that nine years on and with one year in office, Obama does not have any system in place to interrogate for intelligence an al Qaeda leader or operative caught in the U.S. . Obama took the CIA completely out of the interrogation business for all high level targets in August. He has not patched that gaping hole in our counterterrorism capabilities. Thus when Abdulmutallab, the Christmas undiebomber, was captured, he was by default sent into the criminal justice system and given a lawyer.
Let me restate that.
Nine years after 9-11, Obama has, for all practical purposes, reduced our ability to interrogate al Qaeda operatives for actionable intelligence, to something approaching zero.
Nyuck-Nyuck-Nyuck.
We were treated yesterday to Congressional hearings on how it was that Abdulmutallab, the undibomber went, in about twenty-four hours, from roasting his own chestnuts on a Christmas Day flight to a jail cell in Detroit, complete with a lawyer, a Constitutional right not to anwwer questions, and presumably the mother of all ice packs. This from Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard:
. . . Four top counterterrorism officials testified before a congressional committee that they were not consulted about how to handle the interrogation of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the al Qaeda operative who attempted to blow up Flight 253 on December 25, 2008.
That group included all three senior Obama administration officials who testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday: Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security; Michael Leiter, chairman of the National Counterterrorism Center; and Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence. It also included FBI Director Robert Mueller.
With surprising candor, Blair, the nation's top intelligence official, explained that these officials were not deliberately excluded from the decisionmaking process in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Rather, he told the Senate Homeland Security Committee, there was no process at all.
"I've been a part of the discussions which established this high-value interrogation unit, [HIG] which we started as part of the executive order after the decision to close Guantanamo. That unit was created for exactly this purpose -- to make a decision on whether a certain person who's detained should be treated as a case for federal prosecution or for some of the other means. We did not invoke the HIG in this case," he said. "We should have."
We learn from NewsWeek that the White House responded with anger to Blair's admissions, calling his testimony incorrect:
[O]fficials who have worked on the issue said Blair was wrong on almost every count. Abdulmutallab couldn't possibly have been questioned by the HIG because the unit doesn't exist yet. The task force had recommended it be created to handle the questioning of "high value" Qaeda leaders who might be captured overseas—a criterion that clearly doesn't apply in Abdulmutallab's case. But the proposal is still being reviewed by the National Security Council, and the actual unit has not yet been created.
The specific recommendation, one source said, was to have a collection of intelligence officers and FBI agents who are knowledgeable about the background of the Qaeda leaders and deploy them—along with language and regional experts—as soon as a Qaeda leader was captured. But since Abdulmutallab was not a Qaeda leader, and was captured in Detroit, not overseas, the HIG wouldn't apply in any case, said the source, who worked closely on the proposal. . . .
Administration officials said the comments by Blair were especially galling because they seemed to vindicate the chief Republican criticism of the handling of the Detroit incident. . . .
Galling? GALLING? Our Moralizer In Chief has utterly emasculated our ability to gain timely and actionable intelligence from people who have nightly wet dreams about setting off nuclear explosions in every city in our country. The Obama administration though shows far more concern about being publicly criticized by Republicans. All emphasis is on the political, none on the substance. The Obama administration has their priorities completely skewed. And correct me if I am wrong, but do those conditions on the HIG as to whom they might interrogate sound like Obama is recreating something akin to the infamous Goerlickian wall?
To restate the revelations from the hearing and the NewsWeek article, this is the position in which Obama has placed our national security: There is no specific procedure for our government to deal with captured enemy combatants, nor are the tools in place to be able to conduct fully coordinated interrogations. By Executive Order, the CIA cannot interrogate high value detainees and, for the past year through today, the designated replacement for the CIA, the HIG, a task force under FBI leadership and direct White House oversight, is still on the drawing board. For al Qaeda leaders or operatives captured in the U.S., it is Obama's de facto policy that they would go into the criminal justice system. This is completely gratuitous - and wholly screwed. Given Obama's ostentatious grandstanding on the issue of interrogating enemy combatants, given his many rhetorical efforts to establish himself as our Moralizer in Chief on this issue, and yet given the reality of his horrid national security effort, it is apparent that while Obama has talked the talk, he has stumbled, fallen, stubbed a toe, pulled a hammy and broken both legs on the walk.
To continue from Mr. Hayes:
That's quite an admission. Blair wasn't finished (see the 51:00 mark of this video). "Frankly, we were thinking more of overseas people and, duh!, we didn't put it then. That's what we will do now. And so we need to make those decisions more carefully. I was not consulted and the decision was made on the scene. It seemed logical to the people there but it should have been taken using this HIG format at a higher level." . . .
Blair admitted that Abdulmutallab was not interrogated for intelligence purposes because the Obama administration had not considered using the newly-created elite interrogation unit on terrorist in the United States.
If Blair considered the handling of Abdulmutallab a mistake, FBI Director Robert Mueller, testifying at the same time before the Senate Judiciary Committee, did not. Mueller, like Blair, acknowledged that the crucial decision about how to treat Abdulmutallab was made by local FBI agents.
Now think about that for a second. It's not merely that the Director of the FBI, the DNI, and the DNCC were not contacted and that this was a systemic failure arising out of the lack of any procedure for a very forseeable contingeny. I think (hope and pray) that it is safe to assume these three stellar civil servants had heard about the attempted bombing in real time. But the fact is that after the undiebomber was captured, none of these individuals lifted so much as a finger to insinuate themselves into the situation to ensure that the undiebomber was interrogated for every bit of actionable intelligence that he possessed. Not a one of them made so much as a phone call. They sat with their thumbs up their collective asses in blissful ignorance while the Undiebomber was questioned by local FBI - who may or may not have the slightest background in counterterroism and the specifics of our intel on Abdulmutallab - and shortly thereafter, read his rights and given a lawyer. Lacking a procedure for this eventuality in year nine of the war on terror is unfathomable. Displaying this degree of placidity and lack of proactivity even in the abscence of a procedure is utterly unforgivable.
As an aside, it is not clear what role the DOJ directly played in that decision and, if they played any such role, whether Eric Holder was directly involved. That said, inquiring minds really, really want to know.
It should be noted that the White House, which, as previously noted, publicly trumpeted in August of 2009 that they had assumed a direct oversight role in high value interrogations, equally did nothing to intercede in this case. And let's not forget that the director of the National Counterterrorism Center was on vacation while all of this going on and that he, like Obama himself, saw no reason to cut his vacation short. All of this adds up to incompetence on a cosmic scale, a Three Stooges scale. And our national security is in their hands? Nyuck-Nyuck-Nyuck indeed.
. . . Mueller testified that those FBI agents interviewed Abdulmutallab about "ongoing and other threats." What the FBI director did not mention was that his agents interviewed the terrorist without any input from the National Counterterrorism Center — the institution we now know was sitting on top of a small mountain of not-yet-correlated information about the bomber.
So whatever information Abdulmutallab provided, he gave up in response to general questions about his activities, not in response to specific questions based on the intelligence the U.S. government had already collected on him. And within 24 hours — according to Senator Jeff Sessions, whose tough questioning left Mueller stuttering — Abdulmutallab was Mirandized and he stopped talking. (It would be nice to learn, from Mueller or someone else in a position to know, precisely when Abdulmutallab was read his rights.) . . .
Just unbelievable. If heads don't roll now for this level of ineptitude, we can rest assured that heads will roll in the future. It will be the heads of Americans who have placed their trust in Obama to protect our nation. Soaring rhetoric will stop neither bullets nor blast waves. Nor will Obama's moralizing be sufficient to keep a crippled jet in the sky. It seems inevitable that American blood will be spilled as a direct result of an Obama national security apparatus not merely in disaray, but Three Stooges-esque in its degree of incompetence.
Given that the Obama administration has already found criticism of their performance to be "galling," it is clear that the Obama administration is not going to do anything to correct this situation, Understand that there is no reason the Obama administration cannot, at this very moment, pull the Undiebomber out of our federal justice system, treat him as an enemy combatant, and interrogate him his every waking minute without the presence of a lawyer. Instead, Obama is refusing to pull the undiebombler out of the District Court docket now because it would be a tacit acknowledgement of the the glaring holes in and gross incompetence of his national security apparatus.
The second threat to our national security from Obama's decision to put terrorists in our civilian justice system comes from all the negative ramifications of a trial in our federal courts - as pointed out on numerous occasions by Andrew McCarthy. That brings us to the case of Aafia Siddiqui, once known as the most wanted woman in America for her al Qaeda ties. She is today on trial in NY District Court. You can read about her background here. Siddiqui is a Pakistani national who attended MIT. She was arrested in Pakistan with documents in her possession related to al Qaeda and that dealt with proposed mass casualty attacks. During questioning, she attempted to shoot her U.S. interrogators. Instead of leaving her in the military commission system, she is now being tried soley for the attempted shooting. As an aside, I have no idea whether she was ever interrogated before being given a lawyer and placed in the judicial docket for trial. Regardless, as to be expected, her trial on day 1 is turning into a circus. No Oil for Pacifists has the story. Among other things, she is loudly demanding that Jews be kept off the jury and the Judge, amazingly, has ruled that her ties to al Qaeda cannot be raised in the trial because it would be overly prejudicial. Let that sink in. This is a relatively easy trial. I can't wait to see the judicial rulings in KSM's trial.
I documented in detail two weeks ago how Obama had weakened our national security during his first year in office. I was far, far too easy on Obama. I had assumed that our national security apparatus was, nine years on from 9-11, a well oiled machine, but that Obama had made a command decision to move Abdulmutallab to federal Court. I had no idea that the reality is that our national security team is uncoordinated, incompetent, operating on autopilot without appropriate procedures in place and unfathomably lacking in proactiveness at the very highest levels. After Obama has had a full year in office, and after he had inherited a functioning system from the Bush administration, this is truly scandalous - not to mention incredibly dangerous for America. Call it Undiegate.
Update: The Washington Post Editorial Board arrives (a bit late) at the same conclusions:
. . . The Obama administration had three options: It could charge [the undiebomber] in federal court. It could detain him as an enemy belligerent. Or it could hold him for prolonged questioning and later indict him, ensuring that nothing Mr. Abdulmutallab said during questioning was used against him in court.
It is now clear that the administration did not give serious thought to anything but Door No. 1. This was myopic, irresponsible and potentially dangerous. . . .
According to sources with knowledge of the discussions, no one questioned the approach or raised the possibility of taking more time to question the suspect. This makes the administration's approach even more worrisome than it would have been had intelligence personnel been cut out of the process altogether.
Update 2 - It gets even worse. According to an AP report, the total amount of time the undiebomber was subject to questioning before being read his rights amounted to about two hours divided between two local FBI units, with the second interrogation being done by a unit that was, because of concerns with admissibility, not even briefed on the results of the initial fifty minutes of questioning.
Update 3: Charles Krauthammer is on precisely the same sheet of music this week.
Update 4: Maine's Susan Collins - of all people - goes nuclear on the Obama administration over this.
. . . when a moderate like Collins calls the handling of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab “irresponsible,” “dangerous,” and “inconceivable,” that has a broader political impact. When Collins says that “Foreign terrorists are enemy combatants and they must be treated as such,” and calls the current Obama policies a “charade,” that will make it more difficult for people to write it off as knee-jerk, right-wing contempt for Obama instead of his policies:
While Collins is on the money, she does not go quite far enough. Few people, Collins included, seem to be catching on to the degree to which Obama has deconstructed what was once a highly functional national security apparatus, not to mention the equally scandalous degree of institutional passivity at the top of that apparatus now.
Poor Andy is having another snit. His dream lover, Obama, has fallen on his face over the undiebomber, UmarFaroukAbdulmutallab. The font of all evil, Dick Cheney, has criticized Obama for his 9-10 mindset - giving the undiebomber Constitutional rights and a lawyer instead of transferring him to military custody and interrogating him until the undiebomber provided every bit of intelligence he could on his alQaeda contacts, etc. It does not seem to bother Andy that the undiebomber now sits in a federal prison, and, having been arraigned in the criminal system and provided a lawyer, is not answering questions. Indeed, Andy doesn't even acknowledge the implications of that for our national security.
Andy reasons that, because anyone would want to interrogate the undiebomber without the benefit of full constitutional protections, then that must mean that they want to "torture" them with waterboarding, etc. And while that does not logically follow, apparently most of America does feel that way. Assuming Rassmusen's recent poll is accurate, the vast majority of Americans want to see the undiebomber treated as an enemy combatant and a majority would like to have him being waterboarded for intelligence information at this very moment.
This all has Andy howling in moral self righteousness. Further, Andy, who to the best of my knowledge has never completed a day of law school, nonetheless feels himself fully qualified to tell us in absolute terms what both U.S. and international law is as regards torture. This from excitable Andy:
. . . here's the critical line (from Cheney):
You make him tell you what he knows so you can prevent new attacks.
That's the line that defines torture. If you can impose enough mental or physical pain or suffering to make someone tell you something you want to hear you have forced them to say something, true or false, to get the torture to stop. The fact of the matter is: this is illegal under any rational understanding of domestic and international law. In fact, domestic and international law mandates that governments do not even contemplate such measures, especially in extreme circumstances.
Andy is so far off the reservation it's jaw dropping. Indeed, he is creating definitions out of whole cloth. The legal definition of torture under U.S. law and international treaty is "SEVERE" mental or physical pain or suffering. Andy substitutes for the word "severe," the word "enough." Under Andy's definition of torture, putting even the smallest iota of mental pressure on a person during interrogation would be torture IF it resulted in the person providing full and complete answers to your questions. To put it another way, a successful interrogation would be ipso facto proof of torture, as virtually every interrogation can be cast as causing some iota of mental pain and suffering.
Amazing. Andy must be a very happy man since it appears that, in his closeted Orwellian world, words mean whatever he wants them to mean and reality is whatever he wants it to be. There are no shades of grey for Andy, and those of us who have arrived at different conclusions than he based on facts and reasoning are the embodiment of evil. He seems to operate on pure depth of emotion. Indeed, he concludes his rant with the statement "If you believe in torture, support the GOP. That's what conservatism is now all about." Neither intellectual rigor nor concern for factual accuracy are among excitable Andy's long suits.
You can find the actual legal standards for torture here, as well as a fairly detailed analysis of what torture is and is not under those definitions. I fall in the category of those who, having reviewed the law and the techniques used by the CIA in enhanced interrogation, believe that all of the techniques, including waterboarding, do not constitute torture under U.S. law or International Treaty. But that aside, it cannot be argued that, as to the undiebomber, Obama has made us less safe by gratuitously treating him as a criminal rather than an enemy combatant. That was the thrust of Cheney's criticism of Obama, and it is that criticism that Andy, in puffed up moral outrage, blithely sidesteps.
It honestly mystifies me that Andy still has a job at the Atlantic. I would expect stronger, more reasoned arguments out of juniors in high school. And indeed, one wonders at what the i.q. must be of those who read and actually buy into Andy's highly emotional, substanceless rants.
The Washington Post's op-ed section opens the New Year - and the New Decade - on fire. First, Charles Krauthammer weighs in, excoriating the Obama regime for its 9-10 mindset. Then Bill Kristol writes on why we should be lending full support to Iran's revolution and what forms that support should take. I have made the same arguments repeatedly in this blog, so its nice to see the heavy hitters weighing in likewise. To Krauthammer first:
Janet Napolitano -- former Arizona governor, now overmatched secretary of homeland security -- will forever be remembered for having said of the attempt to bring down an airliner over Detroit: "The system worked." The attacker's concerned father had warned U.S. authorities about his son's jihadist tendencies. The would-be bomber paid cash and checked no luggage on a transoceanic flight. He was nonetheless allowed to fly, and would have killed 288 people in the air alone, save for a faulty detonator and quick actions by a few passengers.
Heck of a job, Brownie.
It was beyond outrageous for our DHS Chief to make a claim that logically implies that acts of God and jihadi incompetence are central parts of our "system" for defeating terrorism. Neither she nor Obama seem to understand that leadership requires not political spin, but a "buck stops here" mentality. They are taking the buck, making it into a paper airplane, and tossing it out the window as fast as they can. And indeed, Napolitano, a purely political animal with no security experience, needs to be removed for the sake of our national security. Doing the same to the entire Obama administration will need to await 2012.
The reason the country is uneasy about the Obama administration's response to this attack is a distinct sense of not just incompetence but incomprehension. From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to play down and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face. Napolitano renames terrorism "man-caused disasters." Obama goes abroad and pledges to cleanse America of its post-9/11 counterterrorist sins. Hence, Guantanamo will close, CIA interrogators will face a special prosecutor, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed will bask in a civilian trial in New York -- a trifecta of political correctness and image management.
And just to make sure even the dimmest understand, Obama banishes the term "war on terror." It's over -- that is, if it ever existed.
Obama may have declared the war over. Unfortunately, al-Qaeda has not. Which gives new meaning to the term "asymmetric warfare."
And produces linguistic -- and logical -- oddities that littered Obama's public pronouncements following the Christmas Day attack. In his first statement, Obama referred to UmarFaroukAbdulmutallab as "an isolated extremist." This is the same president who, after the Fort Hood, Tex., shooting, warned us "against jumping to conclusions" -- code for daring to associate the mass murder there with NidalHasan'sIslamist ideology. Yet, with Abdulmutallab, Obama jumped immediately to the conclusion, against all existing evidence, that the would-be bomber acted alone.
Clearly, this on the job training isn't working out so well. Obama is determined to treat terrorism under a 9-10 mindset and punish the Bushies for doing otherwise. His decision to allow a special prosecutor for CIA interrogators will, I think in retrospect, be the single most destructive decision in all of this. The message to the CIA was, if you follow orders and push the envelope at all, then what was lawful under one administration could lead to your prosecution when administrations change. Nothing else Obama could have done will have such a devestating and long term effect on our national security.
More jarring still were Obama's references to the terrorist as a "suspect" who "allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device." . . .
Obama reassured the nation that this "suspect" had been charged. Reassurance? The president should be saying: We have captured an enemy combatant -- an illegal combatant under the laws of war: no uniform, direct attack on civilians -- and now to prevent future attacks, he is being interrogated regarding information he may have about al-Qaeda in Yemen.
Instead, Abdulmutallab is dispatched to some Detroit-area jail and immediately lawyered up. At which point -- surprise! -- he stops talking.
That is, as I pointed out in a post here, the penultimate travesty of Obama's acts in regards to this latest terrorist attempt. The American people seem to realize precisely the same thing. According to Rasmussen, 71% of Americans think Abdulmutallab should be in military custody, without a lawyer and U.S. Constitutional protections, and subject to interrogations. Indeed, a full 58% of Americans think this jihadi should be being waterboarded as we speak.
This absurdity renders hollow Obama's declaration that "we will not rest until we find all who were involved." Once we've given Abdulmutallab the right to remain silent, we have gratuitously forfeited our right to find out from him precisely who else was involved, namely those who trained, instructed, armed and sent him. . . .
The president said that this incident highlights "the nature of those who threaten our homeland." But the president is constantly denying the nature of those who threaten our homeland. On Tuesday, he referred five times to Abdulmutallab (and his terrorist ilk) as "extremist[s]."
A man who shoots abortion doctors is an extremist. An eco-fanatic who torches logging sites is an extremist. Abdulmutallab is not one of these. He is a jihadist. And unlike the guys who shoot abortion doctors, jihadists have cells all over the world; they blow up trains in London, nightclubs in Bali and airplanes over Detroit (if they can); and are openly pledged to war on America.
Any government can through laxity let someone slip through the cracks. But a government that refuses to admit that we are at war, indeed, refuses even to name the enemy -- jihadist is a word banished from the Obama lexicon -- turns laxity into a governing philosophy.
As I point out here, rather than address these security issues and rethink his position, Obama is now trying to defend his indefensible acts by searching for anything in the Bush administrations history that might show that they reacted even less appropriately than Obama to a similar situation. Indeed, if the American Spectator is reporting this accurately, Obama is quite willing to declassify secret information in this regard if it will help him with his political spin. There can be no question that this man is not merely weak in terms of national security, he is every bit as clueless as his Secretary of the Dept. of Homeland Security. He will get Americans killed, it is only a matter of time.
On a final note, I always check the comments to Krauthammer articles - at least a page of them. No one brings out the fire breathing, utterly incoherent far lefties from under their slime encrusted rocks like Krauthammer. That said, I was more than surprised to see that the vast majority of comments to this article are in support of Krauthammer's position. Between Rasmussen's poll that I reference above and the comments to Krauthammer's article, I really am beginning to sense a groundswell in America the likes of which we haven't seen for more than a decade or more. 2012 can't get here fast enough.
Posts
