This seemed a badly timed speech a month ago, given just before the IRS scandal broke. After yesterday's revelations, that the NSA is capturing "metadata" on virtually all of our calls and e-mails, the speech nears world record irony:
The NSA data mining of virtually all phone calls in, into and out of the U.S. is the latest flash point. It involves the NSA collecting the "meta-data" on these communications (as well as, it seems, programs relating to e-mails and credit card usage) ostensibly solely to sift through for "patterns" that should raise a national security flag. It is a fishing expedition that could have come right out of Orwell's "1984." But it is also a long running national security program that the WSJ, as well as virtually all of the Congresscritters read into the program, are at pains to defend.
Whether one supports or decries this program, there can be no argument that it at least stands at the outer boundary of our Fourth Amendment right to be free from "unreasonable" searches. Given that the threat we face today is existential and diffuse, all things being equal, I would look at this program as a necessary evil. But all things aren't equal today. The left doesn't want to win political fights, it wants to destroy those on the right as illegitimate and drive them wholly from the public square. They argue and act with virtually no intellectual honesty. Thus my concern, as I sit here, is that the government would use the NSA program to target their political enemies. I do not have anywhere near the information to give me confidence that this program could not be misused.
Moreover, there are two collateral aspects worthy of note. First, there was DNI James Clapper who, several weeks ago, in public hearings before the Senate Intelligence committee, flatly "denied allegations by panel members the NSA conducted electronic surveillance of Americans on U.S. soil." Given that this has been an ongoing program for years - and an open secret - clearly what Clapper said in his testimony was false. To give him a limited defense, he never should have been asked about that in a public forum by members of a Senate committee who were or should have been read into the program. His answer should have been to completely demur, offering to answer all questions about methods and practices in closed session. The fact that he didn't do that looks bad, but it is not one I would consider scandalous under the circumstances.
Two, just a reminder, from PJM today, this was Obama in a 2007 speech:
[The Bush] Administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom.
That means no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists. The FISA court works. The separation of powers works. Our Constitution works. We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary.
The utter, shameless moralizing and hypocrisy of Obama and the left certainly is a scandal - but it is one aspect of this that the MSM will ignore.
Mubarak hasn't been out office 24 hours, and already the left is making their paean's to Obama's leadership as being one of the decisive factors in motivating the Egyptian revolution and bringing down Mubarak. Wolf Blitzer pondered on CNN whether "Obama’s Cairo speech had something to do with this." Chris Matthews, apparently with tingles up both legs, stated that, "in a way it’s like it took Obama to have this happen." And one unnamed Dem operative e-mailed to Politico:
Great news for the administration/president. People will remember , despite some fumbles yesterday, that the President played an excellent hand, walked the right line and that his statement last night was potentially decisive in bringing this issue to a close. The situation remains complicated and delicate going forward, but this is a huge affirmation of the President's leadership on the international stage.
This is historical revisionism on a scale with writing today that the South won the Civil War. First off, Obama's Cairo speech wasn't a call for democracy. It wasn't even a walk back from promoting democracy in the Middle East. It was a run back from it. Condi Rice, at a speech in Cairo in 2005, called for democracy. This is what it sounded like:
For 60 years, . . . the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the [Middle East]. And we achieved neither. Now we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of the people.
What Obama did in Cairo was pay lip service to human rights and democracy after announcing that "no system of government can or should be imposed by one nation by any other." If there was any ambiguity in that statement, it should have been clarified in 2009 when Obama cut funding for promoting democracy throughout the Middle East.
As to Iran, as I wrote back when the Green Movement was dying in the streets while Obama played golf:
Obama defunded all the programs to promote democracy in Iran and has not reinstated their funding. Obama actively prevented other countries from imposing sanctions on Iran, and as recently as two months ago, cut off funding to an organization documenting human rights abuses in Iran. He has given legitimacy to the regime by reaching out to them, even after they brutally repressed demonstrations. And, of paramount importance, he has been all but silent when he should have been using the bully pulpit to excoriate the bloody mad mullahs for their murderous acts at every opportunity. When the world needs a Churchill, we instead have a Chamberlain.
And Obama did essentially the same with funding for promotion of democracy in Egypt. Bush left office with a budget of $45 million for promoting democracy in Egypt. In 2009, Obama not only slashed that amount to $7 million, but in a tip of the hat to Mubarak, he limited its dispersion only to civil groups that were approved by the Egyptian government. This from Jake Tapper at ABC News:
The Obama Administration has not done what they should have in terms of support for civil society,” said Jennifer Windsor, associate dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, who served for ten years as the executive director of Freedom House, an independent group dedicated to the advance of freedom. . . .
Says Windsor: “The attitude of Obama administration toward the pro-democracy movement was to put them at arm’s length, and make sure that US interaction with the pro-democracy movement did not in any way ruffle the feathers of a dictatorial regime.” . . .
So anyone that suggests that Obama played a unique role in motivating the revolution in Egypt is being far less than honest. As to Obama's performance during the past eighteen days of the revolution, this from Jennifer Rubin:
One can scarcely imagine how the U.S. in its handling of the Egyptian revolution could look more inept and less effective. If the stakes were not so high the last few weeks would be material for high farce. (And indeed, a recounting of events by a faux "Joe Biden" does just that.)
Initial caution was followed by insistence that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak "transition now." That, in turn, morphed into agreement to a very gradual transition. . . .
Ross Kaminsky at American Spectator is equally as critical of the Obama administration's performance during the 18 days of revolution. I am inclined to cut the Obama administration far more slack in this difficult situation, but perhaps that is only be because of how the situation ended. This from the WSJ yesterday, prior to the coup, gives a bit more insight into the pressures the administration was under and how difficult it was to influence events:
. . . The White House is now squeezed between Arab and Israeli allies, who have complained that Mr. Obama was pushing Mr. Mubarak too hard to step down, and lawmakers who accuse the White House of not pushing hard enough. Now, the White House finds itself largely a bystander.
"This is really bad," a senior U.S. official said after Mr. Mubarak's address. "We need to push harder—if not, the protests will get violent." The official advocated raising U.S. pressure to force Mr. Mubarak from power, though other officials acknowledge Washington had little clout in Cairo. . . .
In the White House, frustration is giving way to a sense of powerlessness.
"The mystique of America's superpower status has been shattered," said Steve Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program of the New America Foundation, who has attended two meetings with the National Security Council on Egypt.
At a meeting with outside advisers Monday, four National Security Council officials were pressed on what U.S. diplomacy had accomplished. The officials said their efforts had helped avoid "catastrophic" bloodshed by helping to restrain Egyptian security forces, two participants said.
Possibly the real lesson of the Egyptian Revolution is that we need to reinstate the Bush policy of aggressively promoting democracy throughout the Middle East. That would likely leave us in a much stronger position than we find ourselves in Egypt, where there the secular parties are disorganized and we have very limited influence over the events.
All of that said, the Obama administration, from Sec. of State Clinton calling Mubarak stable to Biden stating that Mubarak was "not a dictator," were clearly caught flat footed when the massive demonstrations began in Egypt on January 23. And between Gibbs suggesting that the Muslim Brotherhood needed to be included in a "reform government" and the DNI portraying the Brotherhood as peaceful and "largely secular," it was clear that the administration was not exactly on top of the events in Egypt. Indeed, those latter two examples suggest that the Obama administration was considering pushing a contingency that would have proven disastrous.
In the end, the school solution to this revolution was, as I wrote from day one, a military coup that could then oversee time for secular parties to organize. That is what seems to have happened - and indeed, it was the most likely outcome from the day the Army replaced the police on the streets, then refused to act against the protesters. I saw nothing to suggest that Obama was anything more than following these events, rather than leading them. That said, he didn't get in their way, and that has to count for something. Thus while I am far less critical of the administration than Jennifer Rubin, I think anyone who credits the Obama administration for a successful conclusion to this stage of Egypt's revolution is being disingenuous in the least.
Today, our Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, referred to the Muslim Brotherhood as a "peaceful" and a "largely secular organization". Really. On a related note, today is "Islamic Revolution's Victory Day" in Iran. It was this day in 1979 that the last of the Shah's forces fell. As we ponder the Obama administrations apparent willingness to countenance the Muslim Brotherhood as a benign organization and potential partner for the U.S. in Egypt, it would do well to remember just a few of the highlights from the Iranian Revolution.
Like the Muslim Brotherhood (see, e.g., here, here, here), Khomeini left a long paper trail of books setting forth his true radical Islamist views:
In the 1960s and 70s Khomeini had already talked about almost everything he did. Even in 1944 he talked about how evil democracy and modernity are, how evil the rule of law is. He talked about the establishment of Velayat-e faqih, the rule of Islamic jurists.
Yet, like the Brotherhood of today, as the opportunity to take power presented itself, Khomeini articulated a very benign viewpoint, portraying himself as a freedom lover, willing to tolerate complete freedom of speech, and expressly disavowing any role for himself or the Shia clergy in the government. For example:
"In Iran's Islamic government the media have the freedom to express all Iran's realities and events, and people have the freedom to form any form of political parties and gatherings that they like." Interview with the Italian newspaper PaeseSera, Paris, November 2, 1978
"In the Islamic government all people have complete freedom to have any kind of opinion." Interview with Human Rights Watch, Paris, November 10, 1978
"In Islamic Iran the clergy themselves will not govern but only observe and support the government's leaders. The government of the country at all levels will be observed, evaluated, and publicly criticized." -- Interview with Reuters news agency, Paris, October 26, 1978
The secular opposition to the Shah was disorganized in Iran, but it was widespread, from liberal democrats to labour. "Khomeini worked to unite this opposition behind him by focusing on the socio-economic problems of the Shah's regime (corruption and unequal income and development), while avoiding specifics among the general public that might divide the factions — particularly his plan for clerical rule . . ." And while the Khomeinists were significantly outnumbered amongst many protesters against the Shah, they were by far the most organized.
Khomeini did not reveal his true colors until after taking power, when he became hyper-militant in stamping out all opposition to his theocracy. For example, in his own words:
"Those who are trying to bring corruption and destruction to our country in the name of democracy will be oppressed. They are worse than Bani-Ghorizeh Jews, and they must be hanged. We will oppress them by God's order and God's call to prayer." -- In a talk at the Fayzieah School, Qom, August 30, 1979
"Those who have not voted for the Islamic Republic, it means that they want the previous system. Those who boycott the election so no one votes for the Islamic Republic are seditious. We will treat them like enemies, and we will oppress them. You are enemies that you want to cause trouble. You are enemies that you are conspiring against Islam and against the country. Your comings and goings are controlled. We have been informed that you are in contact with those who want to bring our country back to its previous system. Now that your conspiracy has been proven, we will destroy you all. If you don't stop your evilness, we will mobilize an even higher mobilization, and we will clean out all of you. We will not allow you groups of corrupt people to remain and continue your activities. -- In a message at the end of the month-long Islamic fasting celebration, September 3, 1979
As one observer put it, in terms that parallel the situation in Egypt today:
What began as an authentic and anti-dictatorial popular revolution based on a broad coalition of all anti-Shah forces was soon transformed into an Islamic fundamentalist power-grab," that significant support came from Khomeini's non-theocratic allies who had thought he intended to be more a spiritual guide than a ruler — Khomeini being in his mid-70s, having never held public office, been out of Iran for more than a decade, and having told questioners things like "the religious dignitaries do not want to rule."
Khomeini's consolidation of power between 1979 and 1982 was bloody and deliberate. Khomeini initially threw his entire authority behind secular moderate MehdiBazargan as the new head of state while he built up his own, separate revolutionary apparatus loyal only to him. On March 30, 1980, Khomeini arranged for a national vote on whether to replace the monarchy with an "Islamic Republic." The term "Islamic Republic" was left undefined, and it was only after winning the vote with a 98% majority vote did Khomeini have a Constitution drawn up - for a theocracy. And before the next vote on the Constitution, Khomeini moved into full force, crushing the opposition, murdering thousands once associated with the shah, closing down newspapers opposed to a theocracy, and threatening with death any who would vote against him. In the end, it was Khomeini and his "radicals who won. Because they were the most ruthless. They were the most brutal."
Given the organization and popularity of the Brotherhood today in Egypt, there is little reason to think that they could not achieve similar results over time. We should have no misconceptions. As to the nature of the Brotherhood, this from ZhudiJasser, issued today after DNI Clapper's dangerously ridiculous characterization of the Muslim Brotherhood:
"The Muslim Brotherhood is the antithesis of a secular organization as asserted today by James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence. Clapper's statement presents a significant concern that our primary Intelligence officer has a complete lack of understanding of an organization that presents the greatest threat to the security of the United States. The Director of Intelligence is either grossly naïve or covering up for an ideology that is in an ideological war with the United States and western society.
The Muslim Brotherhood is built on the ideology of political Islam which adheres to a belief in Islamic Supremacy. To be a secular organization the Brotherhood would have to completely disavow the very beliefs that define the organization.
Further, the Muslim Brotherhood is a threat to the political process in a post-Mubarak Egypt and throughout the middle-east. Thugs like Mubarak have created an atmosphere that has allowed the Brotherhood to thrive. The United States needs to be active within the country of Egypt countering the ideology of the Brotherhood helping the people of Egypt develop liberty-minded, democratic infrastructure to secure the country's future. We need to demonstrate to Egyptians that freedom does not come in the form of Islamic law or in the rule of theocratic clerics.
Our Intelligence community cannot afford to allow political correctness or this severally mistaken understanding of the Brotherhood to enter the conversation of how we will confront the changes in Egypt."
As we deal with political Islam domestically and abroad it has hundreds of permutations from the most violent (Al Qaeda) to the non-violent (Islamist groups in the west). They all are pursuing the same goal which is the Islamic state based in Sharia Law. This is because they all share the same roots - The Muslim Brotherhood. This very conflict is what defines our American Islamic Forum for Democracy. If America gets this conflict wrong we are doomed to become accomplices in the ascendancy of Islamic theocracy throughout the world which ultimately threatens our national security.
As I wrote below, Mubarak's decision today, refusing to step down, makes a violent revolution exponentially more likely - and nothing would more favor the Brotherhood. Obama should be doing all in his power to encourage a coup by the military that would forestall such an event, and that would allow time for secular opposition to organize prior to elections. Hopefully that would be enough to prevent a repeat of Iran.
The above video shows Director of National Intelligence James Clapper this morning telling a House hearing that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is a "secular" organization that eschews violence. Who's briefing this idiot, Tariq Ramadan and CAIR? This organization is dedicated to imposing a world wide caliphate. They have as recently as a week ago advocated the formation of a govenment like Iran's. Virtually every Sunni terrorist organization is an offshoot of the Brotherhood. They were calling for war with Israel a week ago. Any of that sound secular and peaceful to you? This joker needs to go. He is either lying to America or a fool of immense proportions. In either event, occupying the position of DNI, he presents a danger to our nation.
What further chaffed was when FBI Director Mueller offered to brief the Congress critters on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood - in a closed hearing. Bullshit. The people of America have a right to know the answers about the Brotherhood, particularly after the suicidal fantasy woven by Clapper this morning.
Update: The administration is trying to explain away the utterly ridiculous comments of Clapper. This Jake Tapper at ABC News:
The Muslim Brotherhood is quite obviously not a secular organization.
Jamie Smith, director of the office of public affairs for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence later said in a statement to ABC News: “To clarify Director Clapper’s point - in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood makes efforts to work through a political system that has been, under Mubarak’s rule, one that is largely secular in its orientation – he is well aware that the Muslim Brotherhood is not a secular organization.”
How much the Muslim Brotherhood has eschewed violence and decried al Qaeda is subject to debate. Critics of the group point to its ties with Hamas, a terrorist organization according to the US State Department, for instance.
A Council on Foreign Relations background on the Muslim Brotherhood recently stated that “like other mass social movements, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is hardly a monolith; it comprises hardliners, reformers, and centrists, notes terrorism expert Lydia Khalil. And some hardline leaders have voiced support for al-Qaeda or use of violent jihad. For instance, as recently as 2006, Khalil points out, a member of Brotherhood elected to parliament, Ragib Hilal Hamida, voiced support for terrorism in the face of Western occupation. Instances like these raise questions over the group's commitment to nonviolence.”
Yeah, well, its the hardliners that have had me nervous since 1979 - when they ended up hijacking the Iranian Revolution. As to Clapper, his statement this morning was clear. To claim otherwise now beggars belief. If Obama has any sense of self-preservation, it is time to toss Clapper under the bus.
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.
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.
Intelligence is the key to stopping terrorist plots. Ask the 9-11 Commission to describe 9-11 in three words and they would no doubt be "an intelligence failure." Ask Dick Cheney, Michael Hayden, George Tenet or Mike McConnel what has kept us safe these past eight years, and their answer would no doubt be "actionable intelligence." In the shadow war we are in - one which could conceivably at some point involve nuclear or biological attacks on the U.S. - to forego opportunities to collect and act on intelligence would be a grotesque dereliction of duty.
Thus it is troubling indeed to learn today from the NYT that the CIA, limited as it is to non-coercive means of interrogation and no longer able to run holding facilities for terrorists, both thanks to the January executive order of President Obama, is now outsourcing virtually all interrogations of captured al Qaeda members to other countries. The only benefit of this that I can tell is that it allows President Obama to maintain his illusory position atop the moral highground, his conscience pristine. Meanwhile, we have lost control of intelligence sources, and the job of breaking them now falls to nations whose historical methods of interrogation have been coercive indeed. It is then up to those nations to decide what intelligence to share with us.
When it comes to waterboarding and other evils, necessary though they may be to keeping us safe, we are told by Obama that these things are immoral and must not be done - by us at least. It is a measure of the boundless hypocrisy of President Obama that he presents himself as the supreme moral being and will take no position that will sully his utopian self, but then he allows captured al Qaeda operatives to be interrogated by other countries for whom waterboarding would, historically at least, be viewed as mild.
What is the price we must pay so that Obama and the far left can sleep each eve with pristine conscience, secure in the knowledge of their own superior self-righteousness? For if the bill comes due, the price will be in the blood of innocent Americans.
For those who buy into Obama's vacuous utopian moralizing, know that the harsh realities of history paint a very different picture. One example I find incredibly grating is Obama's oft repeated claim that we won World War II because we "stayed true to our values."
In making that claim, Obama never defines the "values" to which he refers, though it is implicit that he defines them as the values du jour that he is pumping in his speech that day. Nor does he explain the nuance of our supposed fidelity to such values in the context of such things as interring all Japanese Americans for the duration of the War, the fire bombing of Dresden, the decision to drop the atomic bomb, nor the execution of German spies. And neither does he explain the seeming dichotomy in how our fidelity to his value du jour that he would have us believe caused us to win over Germany did not conversely cause the Soviet Union to lose to Germany, given that the Soviet's values in terms of civil liberties, torture, etc. were antithetical to ours.
At any rate, I will go to sleep tonight with a small worry deep in the back of my head over the safety of my family and my country. Obama will go to sleep tonight apparently untroubled, his conscience pristine. Are not those roles dangerously reversed?
Update: And do see the 'better late than never' Dafydd ab Hugh's take on this at Big Lizards. As he notes, even this turn of events is not enough to satisfy the hard left base of Obama who are "hoping to achieve their life goal of completely disarming the United States in the midst of an existential war."
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