Steny Goes Pelosi

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.

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Michael Mukasey - Shovel Ready

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.

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Comparing Apples and Rocks

Here is Newsweek's Michael Isikoff's opening paragraph of a short article telling us about the Justice Dept.'s review of the legal work of OLC attorney's:

For weeks, the right has heckled Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. for his plans to try the alleged 9/11 conspirators in New York City and his handling of the Christmas bombing plot suspect. Now the left is going to be upset: an upcoming Justice Department report from its ethics-watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), clears the Bush administration lawyers who authored the “torture” memos of professional-misconduct allegations.

Having actually read the memo's on enhanced interrogation - not "torture" - I would have been amazed to find a result by any neutral agency that was different. What really struck me about the above paragraph was Isikoff's incredibly inappropriate comparison between complaints about dangerous procedures with far left complaints about an outcome that they wanted. It is comparing two completely different things as if they were mere polar opposites along a linear scale.

The right's complaint as regards the Undiebomber is that valuable intelligence of the kind that could save American lives was not farmed. We now know that is because, after a year in office, Obama has utterly emasculated our national security apparatus, at least as regards interrogation of captured enemy combatants. As to KSM, the complaint was about giving him a civilian trial that would risk exposing national security secrets and that would provide KSM with the world's greatest platform to spread al Qaeda propaganda. The right's complaint, in both instances, is about what procedures will best protect our nation.

The left's complaint is of a wholly different cloth. The left wants an outcome - the lynching of the OLC attorneys. They want the blood of those attorneys and they do so wholly irrespective of the law regarding what does and does not constitute "torture." The left, from Obama on down, have demagogued this issue, slapping a bald label on enhanced interrogation of "torture." They have used it as a tool to crush the right politically, regardless of the ramifications for our national security. Thus Isikoff forecasts their unhappiness that the final bloodbath will be denied them.

How Isikoff conflates these complaints and casually reduces them to their lowest common denominator is troubling indeed. It gives moral relevance to two things that stand on wholly different moral planes. But then again, that seems to be a habit of those on the left.

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Andy's At It Again

Poor Andy is having another snit. His dream lover, Obama, has fallen on his face over the undiebomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. 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 al Qaeda 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.

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