No more "suspect" ?
No more "allegedly" ?
No more "lone actor" ?
Say it ain't so, O !
But oh yes, some more gratuitous blame game Bush bashing must be included:
The video also contains thinly-veiled criticism of the counter-terror strategy of George W. Bush. Obama says that the current administration has “refocused the fight” against al-Qaeda on Afghanistan and Pakistan, while “bringing to a responsible end to the war in Iraq, which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.”
(such an asshole !)
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGZkMjA0YzZiNjhmNWVmNDUyYWU0NzZhNjZhYjRiYTQ=
Re: Obama Fingers al-Qaeda, Finally [Andy McCarthy]
It's good that the president is conceding that the Christmas terrorist plot was an al Qaeda operation, hatched in Yemen. It would be even better if he therefore stopped releasing trained jihadists now detained at Gitmo to Yemen.
As Dan recounts, the president also asserted: “We know that [Abdulmutallab] travelled to Yemen, a country grappling with crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies.” A few things about that. First, to the extent Obama is suggesting that the terrorism is caused by the crushing poverty, it is worth remembering that Abdul Mutallab — like many jihadist terrorists, bin Laden himself included — is a person of means. The principal challenge in Yemen, like everyplace else, is Islamist ideology, not poverty. Perhaps the president could stop worrying so much about poverty and rethink things like cozying up to the Muslim Brotherhood (and its tentacles in the U.S., like the Islamic Society of North America) and bowing to Brotherhood's banker, Saudi King Abdullah. Just a thought.
Second, about those "deadly insurgencies": Part of what makes them so deadly is the support that what passes for the Yemeni government gives to al Qaeda. As is the case in Pakistan, Sunni jihadists in Yemen have a strong base of support in the Yemeni military and intelligence services — and Yemeni President Abdullah Ali Saleh uses the Sunni terrorists to help fight the other "deadly insurgency," the Houthi Shiite terrorists backed by Iran. As usual, at the Long War Journal, the invaluable Bill Roggio provides a program so folks can sort out the players. But before we break the bank and give goo-gobs of money to a "government" that is much a life-line as a foe of al-Qaeda, mightn't we demand a modest demonstration of Saleh's seriousness? Like, how about Yemen hands over to us the U.S.S. Cole bombers, Jamal al Badawi and Fahd al Quso (it's only been 10 years), along with Jaber Elbaneh of the Lackawanna Six?
Finally, behold, yet again, the folly of President Obama's law-enforcement approach to terrorism. Not only has the assignment of counsel in the criminal case denied us whatever intelligence Mutallab could be giving us about Yemen. The criminal case is complicating the President's ability to do his jobs as president and commander-in-chief. This morning, Obama declared flatly that Mutallab conspired with al Qaeda in a heinous attempted terrorist attack. It was refreshing to hear the president not hedge with "alleged" this and "alleged" that. FDR never suggested that the "fear itself" we needed to fear was "alleged." But, of course, defense counsel will now claim the president is hopelessly prejudicing Mutallab's ability to get a fair trial — in Detroit or anyplace else — by smearing him in the press and eviscerating the presumption of innocence. The usual judicial reaction to such claims is not to dismiss an indictment but (a) to postpone the trial indefinitely until the negative (to the defendant) publicity dies down, and (b) to direct the executive branch to stop making statements that prejudice the case (on pain of having the indictment dismissed due to "government misconduct").
The Mutallab case is an unnecessary, insignificant distraction from the real business of protecting the United States. And it is all so unnecessary. It will be forever until we can have a trial of Mutallab, anyway: From here on out, everytime something happens in Yemen, Mutallab's lawyers will try to use it to their litigation advantage, repeating that the president has so tied Mutallab to terrorism in Yemen that there is no prospect of a fair trial. So why not transfer him to military custody as an enemy combatant, detain and interrogate him for as long as it is useful to do so, and then, in a year or three, either charge him with war crimes in a military tribunal or, if you insist, indict him the criminal justice system? There is no reason to have a criminal case pending right now — it will only tie the president's hands and be grist for judicial criticism of Obama while he has a war to fight. He doesn't need that in his life right now.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Friday, January 1, 2010
Obama's Terrorism problem: Enemy Combatants; Not Ordinary Criminals !
This administration continues to act in a reckless and inconsistent manner when it comes to the issue of how to detain and prosecute TERRORISTS ... enemy combatants, usually non-US citizens that have no Miranda rights and should be tried by military commissions and not in US civilian courts.
Obama's (and Holder's) policies are incoherent ... it is lunacy.
Here's some more commentary on the issue:
It's Not Yet Friday, But It Is New Year's Eve — What Better Time to Release an Iran-Backed Terror Master Who Murdered American Troops? [Andy McCarthy]
I can't believe I am writing this while Iranian tyrants are brutally suppressing a revolt by the Iranian people . . . and only days after the Obama administration made a fiasco of a terrorist attack that nearly killed 289 people.
Back in the early summer, I wrote about how, even as the Iranian regime continued killing American troops, the Obama administration had engaged in shameful negotiations with an Iran-backed terror network (the League of the Righteous) in Iraq — negotiations that resulted in the release of Laith Qazali, one of the terrorists responsible for the murders of five American soldiers in Karbala, in exchange for the remains of two British hostages.
Shortly thereafter, the Obama administration released the "Irbil Five," commanders from the Iranian IRGC's elite "Quds Force" who had been captured by our military after coordinating terrorist attacks in Iraq that have killed hundreds of American soldiers and Marines.
Today, New Year's Eve, while everyone's attention is understandably on family and friends, we learn (thanks to the ever alert Bill Roggio, reporting on the Standard's blog) that the administration has now released Qais Qazali, Laith's brother, who is the head of the Iran-backed terror network, in addition to a hundred other terrorists. In violation of the long-standing, commonsense policy against capitulating to kidnappers and terrorists because it just encourages more hostage-taking and murder, the terrorists were released in exchange for a British hostage and the remains of his three contract guards (whom the terrorists had murdered).
So, as the mullahs, America's incorrigible enemies, struggle to hang on, we're giving them accommodations and legitimacy. And the messages we send? Terrorize us and we'll negotiate with you. Kill American troops or kidnap civilians and win valuable concessions — including the release of an army of jihadists, and its leaders, who can now go back to targeting American troops.
As Bill elaborated in the Long War Journal: “We let a very dangerous man go, a man whose hands are stained with US and Iraqi blood,” a military officer said. “We are going to pay for this in the future.”
It is just astonishing.
The 'Fire Napolitano' Debate [Andy McCarthy]
A couple of months back, Sean Hannity invited me on his nightly panel on a special show that was dedicated to ten of the more problematic figures in the administration — Van Jones, Kevin Jennings, Carol Browner, John Holdren, and some others. (Napolitano was not egregious enough to be included.) Sean pressed me on whether this one or that one should be fired, and I just shrugged my shoulders. The suggestion (not by Sean, but in a lot of the public debate) had been that these people had not been properly vetted. My reaction was that they had been extensively vetted — the "czars," like Jones, were made czars rather than cabinet nominations precisely because they were the people President Obama wanted but he knew they'd never get through a confirmation hearing. Sure, you could fire those ten, but the same guy who picked them would be picking their replacements.
I never thought we should have created a Department of Homeland Security. People's memories are short. The original idea behind DHS was to solve "the Wall" problem — the impediments to intelligence-sharing that were making the FBI, our domestic intelligence service, ineffective. But while DHS was being debated and built, the FBI and the intelligence community furiously called on their allies on Capitol Hill and protected their turf. By the time DHS formally came into being, they made sure it had no intelligence mission — in fact, it had no real clear mission at all except to be the unwieldy home of a huge agglomeration of federal agencies. Basically, we moved the deck chairs around on the Titanic but did nothing to improve homeland security.
Napolitano is an apt representation of Obama-style detachment from national security: She doesn't know where the 9/11 hijackers came from; she doesn't know illegal immigration is a criminal offense; she won't utter the word "terror" (it's a "man-caused disaster," just like, say, a forest fire); she thinks the real terrorists are "right-wing extremists" aided and abetted by our soldiers returning home from their missions; when a jihadist at Fort Hood massacres more people than were killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, she won't call it terrorism and worries mostly about racist blow-back against innocent Muslims; she doesn't see any indications of a larger terrorist conspiracy even after a captured — er, arrested — terrorist tells agents he was groomed for the airplane operation by al Qaeda in Yemen; she thinks the "system worked" on Christmas when every element of it failed; and even her walk-back on the "system worked" comment — i.e., that it worked after the fact because all the planes then in the air were notified to take extra precautions "within 90 minutes" of the attack — is pathetic. You may recall that on 9/11, the first plane hit the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. and the second at 9:16 a.m.; the Pentagon was struck at 9:37 a.m., and, thanks to the heroic passengers of Flight 93, the last plane went down a little after 10 a.m. — about 20 minutes from its target in Washington. A lot can happen in 90 minutes.
When DHS came into being, a good friend of mine put it perfectly: "We already have a Department of Homeland Security and its address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue." It is there, not at DHS, that the problem resides. The President has in place exactly the team he wants. To clamor for Napolitano's firing when she is just carrying out the boss's program is to shift the blame from where it belongs.
12/30 04:47 PM
Enemy Combatants, Not Criminal Defendants [Andy McCarthy]
Marc has already made a lot of the points I'd like to make in his response to Josh Marshall. Let me just make a few others.
It's remarkable to hear Obama's apologists defend him on the ground that he's simply doing what Bush did when Obama's appeal for most of them was that he was the anti-Bush. But, in any event, it wasn't just Richard Reid. The Bush administration also turned John Walker Lindh and Zacarias Moussaoui over to the criminal justice system. These decisions were what are known in the biz as mistakes.
I was still at DOJ when Reid and Lindh were disposed of, but I was very critical of the decision to prosecute Moussaoui in civilian court — often calling him the "poster child for military commissions." On many panels I was on at the time, Bush critics pointed to the disparate treatment of Moussaoui and Padilla — the first an alien combatant apprehended in the U.S. but given a civilian trial, the second an American citizen apprehended in the U.S. but made an enemy combatant. They argued that the administration's standards were incoherent and arbitrary. I thought there was a lot of persuasive force to that contention. But the mistake — as the eventual trial showed — was treating Moussaoui as a criminal defendant, not treating Padilla as an enemy combatant.
Admittedly, I'm predisposed to be sympathetic to Bush, but here I think it's warranted. These cases happened very close to 9/11. I was still in government, so I know we were scrambling. The November 2001 executive order authorizing the military commissions did not get them up and running. That took time — and the Defense Department had to do it while trying to fight a war. The Justice Department circa 2001-03 was thus in a very strong position to argue that it had significant experience handling terrorism cases while DoD still hadn't gotten its act together. That was true, and remember that Reid and Lindh pled guilty, so the cases were basically over before you knew they were on. But Justice vastly overrated its ability to control the amount of intelligence that the courts would order disclosed in the Moussaoui case. It was a circus, and if he hadn't pled guilty it might have been a disaster.
Now, however, we have eight years of experience, including the cautionary Moussaoui tale. There are no longer any excuses; the right answer is obvious: If preventing terrorist attacks is our priority, we have to be in a law-of-war rather than a criminal-justice model.
This should not be hard to swallow: President Obama occasionally acknowledges that we are nation at war, and Congress has overwhelming authorized the use of force against al Qaeda and its confederates. If we capture an al Qaeda operative, the default position must be that he is an enemy combatant. We can then detain and interrogate him without the interference of a defense lawyer. Defense lawyers shut down effective interrogation — any competent defense lawyer will tell you that, and Michael Ratner, the head of the leftist Center for Constitutional Rights that has coordinated representation from the combatants, has flatly admitted that a goal of interposing lawyers is to prevent the government from being able to interrogate the detainees.
Enemy combatants should be tried by military commission, but even if the President insists that he wants the civilian courts to be his default system for prosecution, that does not mean they have to be his default system for detention. As the cases of Padilla and al-Marri demonstrate, holding a combatant as an enemy combatant, even for a period of years, is not a bar to eventual prosecution in the civilian system.
Detention in the civilian system not only shuts down intelligence collection; it empowers the terrorist and helps his confederates. A terrorist submitted to the criminal justice system immediately after arrest must be brought to court and have counsel assigned promptly — generally, within six hours. As a defendant, the terrorist is empowered because once he has counsel and a case to fight, he realizes he has cards to play — he is incentivized to hold back the most critical, fresh, operational intelligence in order to pressure the prosecutors into dropping charges, dropping the death penalty, and agreeing to various other accommodations. His confederates are empowered because the discovery provided for his criminal case, and then the public trial, provide a window into what the government knows about the enemy.
By contrast, military detention — which the Supreme Court reaffirmed in the 2004 Hamdi case — allows us to take our time, months or years if necessary, to create the atmosphere of isolaton and dependence needed for thorough-going interrogation. Even after the detainee's current, operational intelligence is exhausted and stale, we can continue going back to him to help us identify newly discovered players and break the code on newly discovered plots. (Insiders know much more about how al Qaeda works than government agents, and they usually remain valuable resources for years.) Plus, postponing discovery and trials denies al Qaeda valuable intelligence about our state of knowlege, methods of intelligence gathering, and sources of information.
The law of war framework maximizes our ability to prevent terrorist attacks while maintaining our ability to prosecute at the time and in the system of our choosing — rather than according to the rigors of the civilian system's Speedy Trial Act. Adopting it would enable President Obama to prioritize his first responsibilities — protecting the nation and fighting the war — without compromising his important but subordinate interest in prosecuting war criminals.
That is, it's a no-brainer.
12/30 06:14 PM
Josh Marshall Strikes Out [Marc Thiessen]
Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall is hard at work exposing his ignorance. He’s got three posts up that attempt to rebut mine here on the Corner regarding the Obama administration’s decision to read Abdulmutallab his rights and give him a lawyer — thus ending his cooperation with investigators.
Where to begin? My post responded to critics who claim Obama is just doing to Abdulmutallab what Bush did to shoe bomber Richard Reid. I pointed out that Reid was captured a few months after 9/11, when we did not know all our options, and explained that the better comparison is Jose Padilla — who was captured in Chicago on a mission from KSM to blow up apartment buildings, designated an enemy combatant, sent to the Charleston brig, and interrogated.
Gotcha, says Josh, pointing out that “President Bush okayed military tribunals a month before Reid tried to blow up the plane.” This is true — and irrelevant. The existence of this order does not prove his point. A decision had been made to create military commissions, but the complex policy questions about who would go to military commissions vs. civilian courts, how to handle detainees captured in the United States vs. those captured abroad, etc., had not been settled, and were not settled for some time. Josh clearly has no idea how this policy developed, or he would not make such ludicrous claims.
Keep reading this post . . .
Re: Let the Man Golf [Rich Lowry]
I'm with Ramesh on Obama's vacation. Also, I don't particularly care what his affect is when he makes a statement about terrorism. It won’t matter how passionate he seems, if the policy is flawed (as it is in this case — it's utterly senseless to kick away an opportunity to learn more from a terrorist who seems vulnerable enough to have given up everything he knows even under mild interrogation). Finally, I think Obama was right to condemn the failures so frankly yesterday. One thing Bush never seemed to realize — partly out of excessive loyalty — is that you don't have to take ownership of every bureaucratic foul-up in your administration. We'll see if Obama's posture results in anything meaningful. What he should be doing is re-evaluating the view of the world he brought to office with him, and re-aligning it with reality given the events of the last year. I'm not hopeful.
12/30 05:42 PM
Risky Business [Cliff May]
A few more thoughts regarding the Talking Points Memo, in which Josh Marshall chides National Review and asserts:
There's no reason beside GOP electoral strategy for not trying AbdulMutallab in a regular American Court.
It is not clear how Josh arrived at this conclusion, but certainly logic was not the vehicle in which he traveled.
Consider:
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has reportedly told investigators:
There are more just like me who will strike soon.
If he knows that, he may also be in possession of information that would help investigators locate these individuals before they strike. Indeed, it is likely that UFA attended suicide-bomber school with some of them in Yemen between August and September.
But because UFA is being treated as a criminal suspect to be tried in a regular American court, he has been told he has a “right to remain silent.” And his attorney, presumably, has told him to exercise that right until such time as it is possible to determine how much leniency his cooperation may be worth.
Keep reading this post . .
Charles Krauthammer's Take [NRO Staff]
From Fox News on the last night of 2009:
On the systemic failures surrounding the Christmas Day bombing:
To me, the scandal is what happened after this guy was apprehended. He got sent to a civilian jail, lawyered up, and he's not speaking.
He is the guy who allegedly had said immediately after he was apprehended that there are others like him in Yemen who are training [for similar suicide missions]. He has information on all this.
Instead of treating him as an enemy combatant, we have a mania in this administration of treating people like him as a criminal — and we lose all access to any information which would save American lives.
New Poll: 58 Percent Say Waterboard Abdulmutallab, 71 Percent Say Hand Him to the Military [Marc Thiessen]
New Rasmussen poll:
Fifty-eight percent (58%) of U.S. voters say waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques should be used to gain information from the terrorist who attempted to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 30% oppose the use of such techniques, and another 12% are not sure.
Men and younger voters are more strongly supportive of the aggressive interrogation techniques than women and those who are older. Republicans and voters not affiliated with either major party favor their use more than Democrats.
Seventy-one percent (71%) of all voters think the attempt by the Nigerian Muslim to blow up the airliner as it landed in Detroit should be investigated by military authorities as a terrorist act. Only 22% say it should be handled by civilian authorities as a criminal act, as is currently the case.
As my old boss, Secretary Rumsfeld used to say, Americans have a pretty good “inner gyroscope.” It likely would not be necessary to use the waterboard to get Abdulmutallab to talk — only three terrorists underwent it and only 30 had any enhanced techniques used at all. But the vast majority of Americans have it right: You don’t put an enemy combatant who just committed an act of war into the criminal-justice system — and you certainly don’t give him a lawyer and tell him, “You have the right to remain silent.” You make him tell you what he knows so you can prevent new attacks.
— Marc Thiessen’s new book, Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama In Inviting the Next Attack, will be published in January by Regnery
Americans Support Waterboarding [Jonah Goldberg]
Those poll results must be incredibly disheartening for opponents of waterboarding. Not only do 58 percent support it, another 12 percent aren't sure. That means 70 percent of Americans either support waterboarding the Christmas bomber or think it's an open question whether it's necessary. For the record, I'm in the against or not-sure camp. I'd want to know for sure whether other techniques couldn't get relevant information and I'd want a better sense that this guy knows about an imminent threat. Marc's right to note that only three captives were waterboarded for a reason: It should be a last resort. My hunch is that at least some of those 30 percent opposed to waterboarding Abdulmutallab oppose it for the same reason. And I'd bet that if this was a more dramatic ticking-bomb-type case the numbers supporting waterboarding would go up.
This is after two years of glowing speeches from Obama and a relentless media campaign to treat waterboarding as cruel and unusual torture. I think opposition to waterboarding is an honorable point of view, just like opposing the death penalty. But I think opponents to both are going to have to live with the fact that the American people disagree with them now and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Obama's (and Holder's) policies are incoherent ... it is lunacy.
Here's some more commentary on the issue:
It's Not Yet Friday, But It Is New Year's Eve — What Better Time to Release an Iran-Backed Terror Master Who Murdered American Troops? [Andy McCarthy]
I can't believe I am writing this while Iranian tyrants are brutally suppressing a revolt by the Iranian people . . . and only days after the Obama administration made a fiasco of a terrorist attack that nearly killed 289 people.
Back in the early summer, I wrote about how, even as the Iranian regime continued killing American troops, the Obama administration had engaged in shameful negotiations with an Iran-backed terror network (the League of the Righteous) in Iraq — negotiations that resulted in the release of Laith Qazali, one of the terrorists responsible for the murders of five American soldiers in Karbala, in exchange for the remains of two British hostages.
Shortly thereafter, the Obama administration released the "Irbil Five," commanders from the Iranian IRGC's elite "Quds Force" who had been captured by our military after coordinating terrorist attacks in Iraq that have killed hundreds of American soldiers and Marines.
Today, New Year's Eve, while everyone's attention is understandably on family and friends, we learn (thanks to the ever alert Bill Roggio, reporting on the Standard's blog) that the administration has now released Qais Qazali, Laith's brother, who is the head of the Iran-backed terror network, in addition to a hundred other terrorists. In violation of the long-standing, commonsense policy against capitulating to kidnappers and terrorists because it just encourages more hostage-taking and murder, the terrorists were released in exchange for a British hostage and the remains of his three contract guards (whom the terrorists had murdered).
So, as the mullahs, America's incorrigible enemies, struggle to hang on, we're giving them accommodations and legitimacy. And the messages we send? Terrorize us and we'll negotiate with you. Kill American troops or kidnap civilians and win valuable concessions — including the release of an army of jihadists, and its leaders, who can now go back to targeting American troops.
As Bill elaborated in the Long War Journal: “We let a very dangerous man go, a man whose hands are stained with US and Iraqi blood,” a military officer said. “We are going to pay for this in the future.”
It is just astonishing.
The 'Fire Napolitano' Debate [Andy McCarthy]
A couple of months back, Sean Hannity invited me on his nightly panel on a special show that was dedicated to ten of the more problematic figures in the administration — Van Jones, Kevin Jennings, Carol Browner, John Holdren, and some others. (Napolitano was not egregious enough to be included.) Sean pressed me on whether this one or that one should be fired, and I just shrugged my shoulders. The suggestion (not by Sean, but in a lot of the public debate) had been that these people had not been properly vetted. My reaction was that they had been extensively vetted — the "czars," like Jones, were made czars rather than cabinet nominations precisely because they were the people President Obama wanted but he knew they'd never get through a confirmation hearing. Sure, you could fire those ten, but the same guy who picked them would be picking their replacements.
I never thought we should have created a Department of Homeland Security. People's memories are short. The original idea behind DHS was to solve "the Wall" problem — the impediments to intelligence-sharing that were making the FBI, our domestic intelligence service, ineffective. But while DHS was being debated and built, the FBI and the intelligence community furiously called on their allies on Capitol Hill and protected their turf. By the time DHS formally came into being, they made sure it had no intelligence mission — in fact, it had no real clear mission at all except to be the unwieldy home of a huge agglomeration of federal agencies. Basically, we moved the deck chairs around on the Titanic but did nothing to improve homeland security.
Napolitano is an apt representation of Obama-style detachment from national security: She doesn't know where the 9/11 hijackers came from; she doesn't know illegal immigration is a criminal offense; she won't utter the word "terror" (it's a "man-caused disaster," just like, say, a forest fire); she thinks the real terrorists are "right-wing extremists" aided and abetted by our soldiers returning home from their missions; when a jihadist at Fort Hood massacres more people than were killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, she won't call it terrorism and worries mostly about racist blow-back against innocent Muslims; she doesn't see any indications of a larger terrorist conspiracy even after a captured — er, arrested — terrorist tells agents he was groomed for the airplane operation by al Qaeda in Yemen; she thinks the "system worked" on Christmas when every element of it failed; and even her walk-back on the "system worked" comment — i.e., that it worked after the fact because all the planes then in the air were notified to take extra precautions "within 90 minutes" of the attack — is pathetic. You may recall that on 9/11, the first plane hit the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. and the second at 9:16 a.m.; the Pentagon was struck at 9:37 a.m., and, thanks to the heroic passengers of Flight 93, the last plane went down a little after 10 a.m. — about 20 minutes from its target in Washington. A lot can happen in 90 minutes.
When DHS came into being, a good friend of mine put it perfectly: "We already have a Department of Homeland Security and its address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue." It is there, not at DHS, that the problem resides. The President has in place exactly the team he wants. To clamor for Napolitano's firing when she is just carrying out the boss's program is to shift the blame from where it belongs.
12/30 04:47 PM
Enemy Combatants, Not Criminal Defendants [Andy McCarthy]
Marc has already made a lot of the points I'd like to make in his response to Josh Marshall. Let me just make a few others.
It's remarkable to hear Obama's apologists defend him on the ground that he's simply doing what Bush did when Obama's appeal for most of them was that he was the anti-Bush. But, in any event, it wasn't just Richard Reid. The Bush administration also turned John Walker Lindh and Zacarias Moussaoui over to the criminal justice system. These decisions were what are known in the biz as mistakes.
I was still at DOJ when Reid and Lindh were disposed of, but I was very critical of the decision to prosecute Moussaoui in civilian court — often calling him the "poster child for military commissions." On many panels I was on at the time, Bush critics pointed to the disparate treatment of Moussaoui and Padilla — the first an alien combatant apprehended in the U.S. but given a civilian trial, the second an American citizen apprehended in the U.S. but made an enemy combatant. They argued that the administration's standards were incoherent and arbitrary. I thought there was a lot of persuasive force to that contention. But the mistake — as the eventual trial showed — was treating Moussaoui as a criminal defendant, not treating Padilla as an enemy combatant.
Admittedly, I'm predisposed to be sympathetic to Bush, but here I think it's warranted. These cases happened very close to 9/11. I was still in government, so I know we were scrambling. The November 2001 executive order authorizing the military commissions did not get them up and running. That took time — and the Defense Department had to do it while trying to fight a war. The Justice Department circa 2001-03 was thus in a very strong position to argue that it had significant experience handling terrorism cases while DoD still hadn't gotten its act together. That was true, and remember that Reid and Lindh pled guilty, so the cases were basically over before you knew they were on. But Justice vastly overrated its ability to control the amount of intelligence that the courts would order disclosed in the Moussaoui case. It was a circus, and if he hadn't pled guilty it might have been a disaster.
Now, however, we have eight years of experience, including the cautionary Moussaoui tale. There are no longer any excuses; the right answer is obvious: If preventing terrorist attacks is our priority, we have to be in a law-of-war rather than a criminal-justice model.
This should not be hard to swallow: President Obama occasionally acknowledges that we are nation at war, and Congress has overwhelming authorized the use of force against al Qaeda and its confederates. If we capture an al Qaeda operative, the default position must be that he is an enemy combatant. We can then detain and interrogate him without the interference of a defense lawyer. Defense lawyers shut down effective interrogation — any competent defense lawyer will tell you that, and Michael Ratner, the head of the leftist Center for Constitutional Rights that has coordinated representation from the combatants, has flatly admitted that a goal of interposing lawyers is to prevent the government from being able to interrogate the detainees.
Enemy combatants should be tried by military commission, but even if the President insists that he wants the civilian courts to be his default system for prosecution, that does not mean they have to be his default system for detention. As the cases of Padilla and al-Marri demonstrate, holding a combatant as an enemy combatant, even for a period of years, is not a bar to eventual prosecution in the civilian system.
Detention in the civilian system not only shuts down intelligence collection; it empowers the terrorist and helps his confederates. A terrorist submitted to the criminal justice system immediately after arrest must be brought to court and have counsel assigned promptly — generally, within six hours. As a defendant, the terrorist is empowered because once he has counsel and a case to fight, he realizes he has cards to play — he is incentivized to hold back the most critical, fresh, operational intelligence in order to pressure the prosecutors into dropping charges, dropping the death penalty, and agreeing to various other accommodations. His confederates are empowered because the discovery provided for his criminal case, and then the public trial, provide a window into what the government knows about the enemy.
By contrast, military detention — which the Supreme Court reaffirmed in the 2004 Hamdi case — allows us to take our time, months or years if necessary, to create the atmosphere of isolaton and dependence needed for thorough-going interrogation. Even after the detainee's current, operational intelligence is exhausted and stale, we can continue going back to him to help us identify newly discovered players and break the code on newly discovered plots. (Insiders know much more about how al Qaeda works than government agents, and they usually remain valuable resources for years.) Plus, postponing discovery and trials denies al Qaeda valuable intelligence about our state of knowlege, methods of intelligence gathering, and sources of information.
The law of war framework maximizes our ability to prevent terrorist attacks while maintaining our ability to prosecute at the time and in the system of our choosing — rather than according to the rigors of the civilian system's Speedy Trial Act. Adopting it would enable President Obama to prioritize his first responsibilities — protecting the nation and fighting the war — without compromising his important but subordinate interest in prosecuting war criminals.
That is, it's a no-brainer.
12/30 06:14 PM
Josh Marshall Strikes Out [Marc Thiessen]
Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall is hard at work exposing his ignorance. He’s got three posts up that attempt to rebut mine here on the Corner regarding the Obama administration’s decision to read Abdulmutallab his rights and give him a lawyer — thus ending his cooperation with investigators.
Where to begin? My post responded to critics who claim Obama is just doing to Abdulmutallab what Bush did to shoe bomber Richard Reid. I pointed out that Reid was captured a few months after 9/11, when we did not know all our options, and explained that the better comparison is Jose Padilla — who was captured in Chicago on a mission from KSM to blow up apartment buildings, designated an enemy combatant, sent to the Charleston brig, and interrogated.
Gotcha, says Josh, pointing out that “President Bush okayed military tribunals a month before Reid tried to blow up the plane.” This is true — and irrelevant. The existence of this order does not prove his point. A decision had been made to create military commissions, but the complex policy questions about who would go to military commissions vs. civilian courts, how to handle detainees captured in the United States vs. those captured abroad, etc., had not been settled, and were not settled for some time. Josh clearly has no idea how this policy developed, or he would not make such ludicrous claims.
Keep reading this post . . .
Re: Let the Man Golf [Rich Lowry]
I'm with Ramesh on Obama's vacation. Also, I don't particularly care what his affect is when he makes a statement about terrorism. It won’t matter how passionate he seems, if the policy is flawed (as it is in this case — it's utterly senseless to kick away an opportunity to learn more from a terrorist who seems vulnerable enough to have given up everything he knows even under mild interrogation). Finally, I think Obama was right to condemn the failures so frankly yesterday. One thing Bush never seemed to realize — partly out of excessive loyalty — is that you don't have to take ownership of every bureaucratic foul-up in your administration. We'll see if Obama's posture results in anything meaningful. What he should be doing is re-evaluating the view of the world he brought to office with him, and re-aligning it with reality given the events of the last year. I'm not hopeful.
12/30 05:42 PM
Risky Business [Cliff May]
A few more thoughts regarding the Talking Points Memo, in which Josh Marshall chides National Review and asserts:
There's no reason beside GOP electoral strategy for not trying AbdulMutallab in a regular American Court.
It is not clear how Josh arrived at this conclusion, but certainly logic was not the vehicle in which he traveled.
Consider:
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has reportedly told investigators:
There are more just like me who will strike soon.
If he knows that, he may also be in possession of information that would help investigators locate these individuals before they strike. Indeed, it is likely that UFA attended suicide-bomber school with some of them in Yemen between August and September.
But because UFA is being treated as a criminal suspect to be tried in a regular American court, he has been told he has a “right to remain silent.” And his attorney, presumably, has told him to exercise that right until such time as it is possible to determine how much leniency his cooperation may be worth.
Keep reading this post . .
Charles Krauthammer's Take [NRO Staff]
From Fox News on the last night of 2009:
On the systemic failures surrounding the Christmas Day bombing:
To me, the scandal is what happened after this guy was apprehended. He got sent to a civilian jail, lawyered up, and he's not speaking.
He is the guy who allegedly had said immediately after he was apprehended that there are others like him in Yemen who are training [for similar suicide missions]. He has information on all this.
Instead of treating him as an enemy combatant, we have a mania in this administration of treating people like him as a criminal — and we lose all access to any information which would save American lives.
New Poll: 58 Percent Say Waterboard Abdulmutallab, 71 Percent Say Hand Him to the Military [Marc Thiessen]
New Rasmussen poll:
Fifty-eight percent (58%) of U.S. voters say waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques should be used to gain information from the terrorist who attempted to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 30% oppose the use of such techniques, and another 12% are not sure.
Men and younger voters are more strongly supportive of the aggressive interrogation techniques than women and those who are older. Republicans and voters not affiliated with either major party favor their use more than Democrats.
Seventy-one percent (71%) of all voters think the attempt by the Nigerian Muslim to blow up the airliner as it landed in Detroit should be investigated by military authorities as a terrorist act. Only 22% say it should be handled by civilian authorities as a criminal act, as is currently the case.
As my old boss, Secretary Rumsfeld used to say, Americans have a pretty good “inner gyroscope.” It likely would not be necessary to use the waterboard to get Abdulmutallab to talk — only three terrorists underwent it and only 30 had any enhanced techniques used at all. But the vast majority of Americans have it right: You don’t put an enemy combatant who just committed an act of war into the criminal-justice system — and you certainly don’t give him a lawyer and tell him, “You have the right to remain silent.” You make him tell you what he knows so you can prevent new attacks.
— Marc Thiessen’s new book, Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama In Inviting the Next Attack, will be published in January by Regnery
Americans Support Waterboarding [Jonah Goldberg]
Those poll results must be incredibly disheartening for opponents of waterboarding. Not only do 58 percent support it, another 12 percent aren't sure. That means 70 percent of Americans either support waterboarding the Christmas bomber or think it's an open question whether it's necessary. For the record, I'm in the against or not-sure camp. I'd want to know for sure whether other techniques couldn't get relevant information and I'd want a better sense that this guy knows about an imminent threat. Marc's right to note that only three captives were waterboarded for a reason: It should be a last resort. My hunch is that at least some of those 30 percent opposed to waterboarding Abdulmutallab oppose it for the same reason. And I'd bet that if this was a more dramatic ticking-bomb-type case the numbers supporting waterboarding would go up.
This is after two years of glowing speeches from Obama and a relentless media campaign to treat waterboarding as cruel and unusual torture. I think opposition to waterboarding is an honorable point of view, just like opposing the death penalty. But I think opponents to both are going to have to live with the fact that the American people disagree with them now and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Obama & Interpol ... more fishy-ness
Does that WH website (fishy@whitehose.gov) still apply ?
Let's start w/ the always thorough & incisive Andrew McCarthy:
Why Immunity for Interpol? [Andy McCarthy]
I asked here a week ago why President Obama decided it was suddenly necessary to place the international police agency, Interpol, above the constraints of American law. There has been no answer, but the question is is not going away — not until the President explains himself.
This morning, I had the pleasure of spending a few minutes with Rick Santorum, who — even on New Year's Day — was pulling his usual Friday duty as host of Bill Bennett's show. The plan was to talk about the Christmas airplane terror attack, but the first caller, who was very well-informed and alarmed, wanted to talk about Interpol. I don't blame her.
Mark Tapscott has thoughts at the Washington Examiner. Mark points out something I'd forgotten: "Interpol and ICC [the Intenrational Criminal Court] ... took seriously Iran's Oct. 3, 2009, request that 25 top Israeli civilian and military officials be placed on the international 'Most Wanted' list because of their actions in Gaza against murderous Palestinian radicals."
Mark also observes that an Obama offical told the New York Times that the administration has not explained the President's decision to immunize Interpol because — notwithstanding that the President took pains to amend a longstanding, Reagan-era executive order (EO 12425) and the White House issued a press release announcing tha the had done so — "there is nothing newsworthy here."
[By the way, I love the fact that, to Charlie Gibson and the rest of the Obama press office at the Times, the interesting part of this story is not the immunization of a police force but the fact that Obama's decision "irks conservatives."]
Mark counters:
If there is nothing newsworthy involved, then why won't the White House answer these basic questions regarding the EO?
* Every other international organization granted such exemptions deals with mundane issues like fish - the International Pacific Halibut Commission - or disaster aid - the Red Cross. But Interpol is a law enforcement operation. Why does President Obama think it appropriate to give such exemptions to an international law enforcement operation, and what does he want Interpol to do here in the U.S. in the future with the exemptions that it cannot do now without the exemptions?
* Does the search and seizure exemption extend to the activities and documents created by U.S. Department of Justice employees working with and for Interpol in New York and Washington, D.C.? If these employees and activities were already exempt from coverage of the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), why have FOIA requests concerning them been previously answered?
Good questions. When do we get the answers?
Jake Tapper at ABC news attempted to cover the story earlier this week, in a manner that I and others deem unsatisfactory (and Jake is one of the few WH correspondents who actually does a good job at not taking WH BS at face value):
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/12/just-what-did-president-obamas-executive-order-regarding-interpol-do.html#comments
Let's start w/ the always thorough & incisive Andrew McCarthy:
Why Immunity for Interpol? [Andy McCarthy]
I asked here a week ago why President Obama decided it was suddenly necessary to place the international police agency, Interpol, above the constraints of American law. There has been no answer, but the question is is not going away — not until the President explains himself.
This morning, I had the pleasure of spending a few minutes with Rick Santorum, who — even on New Year's Day — was pulling his usual Friday duty as host of Bill Bennett's show. The plan was to talk about the Christmas airplane terror attack, but the first caller, who was very well-informed and alarmed, wanted to talk about Interpol. I don't blame her.
Mark Tapscott has thoughts at the Washington Examiner. Mark points out something I'd forgotten: "Interpol and ICC [the Intenrational Criminal Court] ... took seriously Iran's Oct. 3, 2009, request that 25 top Israeli civilian and military officials be placed on the international 'Most Wanted' list because of their actions in Gaza against murderous Palestinian radicals."
Mark also observes that an Obama offical told the New York Times that the administration has not explained the President's decision to immunize Interpol because — notwithstanding that the President took pains to amend a longstanding, Reagan-era executive order (EO 12425) and the White House issued a press release announcing tha the had done so — "there is nothing newsworthy here."
[By the way, I love the fact that, to Charlie Gibson and the rest of the Obama press office at the Times, the interesting part of this story is not the immunization of a police force but the fact that Obama's decision "irks conservatives."]
Mark counters:
If there is nothing newsworthy involved, then why won't the White House answer these basic questions regarding the EO?
* Every other international organization granted such exemptions deals with mundane issues like fish - the International Pacific Halibut Commission - or disaster aid - the Red Cross. But Interpol is a law enforcement operation. Why does President Obama think it appropriate to give such exemptions to an international law enforcement operation, and what does he want Interpol to do here in the U.S. in the future with the exemptions that it cannot do now without the exemptions?
* Does the search and seizure exemption extend to the activities and documents created by U.S. Department of Justice employees working with and for Interpol in New York and Washington, D.C.? If these employees and activities were already exempt from coverage of the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), why have FOIA requests concerning them been previously answered?
Good questions. When do we get the answers?
Jake Tapper at ABC news attempted to cover the story earlier this week, in a manner that I and others deem unsatisfactory (and Jake is one of the few WH correspondents who actually does a good job at not taking WH BS at face value):
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/12/just-what-did-president-obamas-executive-order-regarding-interpol-do.html#comments
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Stonewall U
King: Obama's 'Iron Curtain' [Robert Costa]
Rep. Peter King of New York, the leading Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, tells National Review Online that the Obama White House has built an “iron curtain” around national-security information in order to block Congress from investigating Northwest Airlines Flight 253. “This administration is not cooperating,” says King. “They have a stonewalling mentality.”
The Obama administration’s handling of the Christmas Day terror plot has been “schizophrenic” says King. “It’s reflective of their handling of other incidents. They still haven’t given us any information on Fort Hood. Even with the gate crashers, they’ve refused to give us on information on communications between the White House social secretary and the Secret Service. They’re giving us nothing and Democrats in Congress are very reluctant to have any meaningful investigations.” Politics, not national security, is driving these decisions, says King. “They’re holding back because they don’t want to share embarrassing material.”
Obama, says King, “can’t seem to find a balance” on national security. “He’s done a good job on Afghanistan and the Patriot Act yet on the other hand he’s wrong to close Guantanamo Bay, wrong to try 9/11 cases in civilian courts, and certainly wrong to send Gitmo detainees to Yemen.”
Political correctness, adds King, is at the root of the administration’s homeland-security problems. “Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was an Islamic terrorist, not an isolated extremist,” he says. “I could see how a mistake could be made with the Nigerian authorities, but Janet Napolitano still hasn’t said it was a mistake and that’s worrying. When a man turns in his own son, and all we do is put his name on a list with half-a-million others, there need to be major red flags. Why didn’t he at least get a pat down or put through a full-body scanner? Not acknowledging these mistakes is very revealing of Napolitano’s mindset. She sees this as a criminal matter, not as an act of terrorism.”
“Some people call it profiling, but I call it common-sense screening, and that’s what we need to do,” says King. “When the FBI went after the mafia, they investigated Italian groups. When they investigated the IRA, they went to Irish bars. If you’re looking for the Ku Klux Klan, you don’t go to Harlem. When you know that nearly 100 percent of the terrorists coming after us are Muslims, you need to put aside political correctness and focus on young males from Middle Eastern countries. Israel does it and it makes sense. Otherwise, we’re wasting time by grilling the Scandinavian grandmother. The overwhelming majority of Muslims are good people, but we have to be frank. The terrorists are Muslims. We need the president to come out and admit that we’re at war with Islamic terrorism.”
Rep. Peter King of New York, the leading Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, tells National Review Online that the Obama White House has built an “iron curtain” around national-security information in order to block Congress from investigating Northwest Airlines Flight 253. “This administration is not cooperating,” says King. “They have a stonewalling mentality.”
The Obama administration’s handling of the Christmas Day terror plot has been “schizophrenic” says King. “It’s reflective of their handling of other incidents. They still haven’t given us any information on Fort Hood. Even with the gate crashers, they’ve refused to give us on information on communications between the White House social secretary and the Secret Service. They’re giving us nothing and Democrats in Congress are very reluctant to have any meaningful investigations.” Politics, not national security, is driving these decisions, says King. “They’re holding back because they don’t want to share embarrassing material.”
Obama, says King, “can’t seem to find a balance” on national security. “He’s done a good job on Afghanistan and the Patriot Act yet on the other hand he’s wrong to close Guantanamo Bay, wrong to try 9/11 cases in civilian courts, and certainly wrong to send Gitmo detainees to Yemen.”
Political correctness, adds King, is at the root of the administration’s homeland-security problems. “Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was an Islamic terrorist, not an isolated extremist,” he says. “I could see how a mistake could be made with the Nigerian authorities, but Janet Napolitano still hasn’t said it was a mistake and that’s worrying. When a man turns in his own son, and all we do is put his name on a list with half-a-million others, there need to be major red flags. Why didn’t he at least get a pat down or put through a full-body scanner? Not acknowledging these mistakes is very revealing of Napolitano’s mindset. She sees this as a criminal matter, not as an act of terrorism.”
“Some people call it profiling, but I call it common-sense screening, and that’s what we need to do,” says King. “When the FBI went after the mafia, they investigated Italian groups. When they investigated the IRA, they went to Irish bars. If you’re looking for the Ku Klux Klan, you don’t go to Harlem. When you know that nearly 100 percent of the terrorists coming after us are Muslims, you need to put aside political correctness and focus on young males from Middle Eastern countries. Israel does it and it makes sense. Otherwise, we’re wasting time by grilling the Scandinavian grandmother. The overwhelming majority of Muslims are good people, but we have to be frank. The terrorists are Muslims. We need the president to come out and admit that we’re at war with Islamic terrorism.”
Today in ObamaNation - Airplane Terror, Napolitano, Iran
The always eloquent Charles Krauthammer:
From last on the Fox News Network:
On President Obama’s speech in Hawaii on the averted terrorist attack:
It [Abdulmutallab's arrest] means we will learn absolutely nothing. The minute he gets a lawyer and his Miranda rights, it's over.
The question people have to ask themselves is: This guy, who tries to blow up an American airplane, who is a Nigerian, who is not an American, is captured — does he have the right to remain silent or do we have the right to interrogate him in order to find out who sent him, who equipped him, who armed him, and who trained him?
It is a question of whether we're serious about this as a war or whether it's a mere, as President Obama said, [case of an] isolated extremist. He is not an isolated extremist. Obviously he is connected to al-Qaeda. Obviously he was in Yemen. Obviously there is information he has.
And the question is: Are we going to treat him the way that we're treating Khalid Sheik Mohammed with a trial and in this case a right to tell us nothing, or [do] what FDR did when the German saboteurs were captured in the United States and he ordered a secret military trial and they were executed. They had no rights.
This confusion . . . starts at the top with the Obama administration. Remember, he [the president] declared at the beginning of his administration that there's no war on terror. They won't use the term.
Well, he may have called off the war on terror, but al-Qaeda has not.
On Janet Napolitano’s handling of "man-caused disasters":
And remember, her department issued a report early in the year in which she warned of the threat of returning American soldiers who might not fit back in society and who might join right-wing extremists engaged in terror or isolated lone-wolf incidents against the United States.
Is that the threat that America is facing?
On Obama’s comments on the events in Iran at the end of said speech:
Flaccid words, meaningless words. He talks about aspirations. He talks about rights. He talks about justice in the statement he made.
This isn't about justice. It isn't about a low minimum wage. This isn't about an absence of a public option in health care. This is about freedom. This is a revolution in the streets.
Revolutions happen quickly. There is a moment here in which if the thugs in the street who are shooting in the crowds stop shooting, it's over and the regime will fall. The courage of the demonstrators and their boldness isn't only a demonstration of courage, it is an indication of the shift in the balance of power. The regime is weakening.
This is a hinge of history. Everything in the region will change if the regime is changed. Obama ought to be strong out there in saying: It is an illegitimate government. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the people in the street.
He talks about diplomacy. He should be urging our Western allies who have relations [with Iran] to cut them off, isolate the regime, to ostracize it. He ought to be going in the U.N. — at every forum — and denouncing it.
This is a moment in history, and he's missing it.
From last on the Fox News Network:
On President Obama’s speech in Hawaii on the averted terrorist attack:
It [Abdulmutallab's arrest] means we will learn absolutely nothing. The minute he gets a lawyer and his Miranda rights, it's over.
The question people have to ask themselves is: This guy, who tries to blow up an American airplane, who is a Nigerian, who is not an American, is captured — does he have the right to remain silent or do we have the right to interrogate him in order to find out who sent him, who equipped him, who armed him, and who trained him?
It is a question of whether we're serious about this as a war or whether it's a mere, as President Obama said, [case of an] isolated extremist. He is not an isolated extremist. Obviously he is connected to al-Qaeda. Obviously he was in Yemen. Obviously there is information he has.
And the question is: Are we going to treat him the way that we're treating Khalid Sheik Mohammed with a trial and in this case a right to tell us nothing, or [do] what FDR did when the German saboteurs were captured in the United States and he ordered a secret military trial and they were executed. They had no rights.
This confusion . . . starts at the top with the Obama administration. Remember, he [the president] declared at the beginning of his administration that there's no war on terror. They won't use the term.
Well, he may have called off the war on terror, but al-Qaeda has not.
On Janet Napolitano’s handling of "man-caused disasters":
And remember, her department issued a report early in the year in which she warned of the threat of returning American soldiers who might not fit back in society and who might join right-wing extremists engaged in terror or isolated lone-wolf incidents against the United States.
Is that the threat that America is facing?
On Obama’s comments on the events in Iran at the end of said speech:
Flaccid words, meaningless words. He talks about aspirations. He talks about rights. He talks about justice in the statement he made.
This isn't about justice. It isn't about a low minimum wage. This isn't about an absence of a public option in health care. This is about freedom. This is a revolution in the streets.
Revolutions happen quickly. There is a moment here in which if the thugs in the street who are shooting in the crowds stop shooting, it's over and the regime will fall. The courage of the demonstrators and their boldness isn't only a demonstration of courage, it is an indication of the shift in the balance of power. The regime is weakening.
This is a hinge of history. Everything in the region will change if the regime is changed. Obama ought to be strong out there in saying: It is an illegitimate government. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the people in the street.
He talks about diplomacy. He should be urging our Western allies who have relations [with Iran] to cut them off, isolate the regime, to ostracize it. He ought to be going in the U.N. — at every forum — and denouncing it.
This is a moment in history, and he's missing it.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Obama surfaces from golf w/ weak statement on Terror incident
After 3 days, Obama interrupts golf, basketball and working out to offer brief, unemotional statement on airplane terror incident.
clusterstock
Obama Holds Three-Day Late News Conference On Terrorist Attack, Doesn't Wear A Tie http://bit.ly/57AwJ3
Ok, now back to vacation.
Hoekstra: With Napolitano, It's 299,999,999 Vs. One [Robert Costa]
Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, tells National Review Online that he’s “disappointed” with President Obama following the president’s remarks this afternoon on the attempted bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253. “We almost lost 270 American lives on Christmas Day and the president has decided to review a watch list. This is about more than a watch list,” says Hoekstra. “It’s about leadership.”
Criticism of Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security secretary, for her handling of the incident, “should be directed to President Obama, since she’s taking her lead from him on this,” says Hoekstra. “I think she’s made some terrible mistakes. Like many in this administration, she’s reluctant to use the word ‘terrorism.’ Though she may prefer the term, this was not an example of an almost ‘man-made disaster.’”
“Out of 300 million Americans, she is the only one who thinks the system is working when a guy with a bomb gets on a plane,” he says. “The other 299,999,999 of us know it’s not.” Obama, he adds, “needs to articulate a clear, concise strategy” to address “the threat of radical jihadists.”
“After eleven months in office, the president is still sending contradictory messages on national security,” says Hoekstra. “He says he wants to address the threats yet look at how he has responded to this, how he responded to Fort Hood, how he’s open to prosecuting folks in the CIA, how he’s closing Guantanamo Bay, and how he’s bringing terror suspects to New York City.” Such moves, he says, “make no sense” if one is “trying to build a strong national security policy.”
“The president may express his concern but his decisions are the statements that people remember,” says Hoekstra. In coming days, the congressman tells us that he will continue to call for an investigation into Flight 253 and the government’s homeland-security operations.
Janet Napolitano’s Mentality [Daniel Pipes]
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab smuggled 80 grams of PETN in his underwear on a Northwest flight on Christmas Day from Amsterdam to Detroit and almost killed 288 passengers and crew.
How did the geniuses in the Obama administration respond? Janet (“ man-caused disasters”) Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, concluded that the system “worked really very, very smoothly.”
Need one really point out that, had the system worked, Abdulmutallab would not have been allowed on the aircraft, and certainly not with a bomb? When her statement was criticized, Napolitano reversed course and announced a day later that “Our system did not work in this instance.”
While it’s good to see that even Obama appointees can learn from their errors, Napolitano’s original gaffe reveals a state of mind among this country’s top decision makers that so long as hundreds of people do not perish, all is well.
Abdulmutallab’s near-success and Napolitano’s idiotic response tell Americans about the weakness of counterterrorist efforts so many years after 9/11. In brief, because law enforcement refuses to “threat profile” and focus on Muslims, the flying public is both inconvenienced and unsafe.— Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum, Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, and a columnist for the Jerusalem Post.
Napolitano Changes Her Tune [Jonah Goldberg]
She now says that her repeated mantra of "the system worked" was taken out of context. Translation: Her hackish talking points were a flop, so she's pretending she didn't mean what she said and is blaming others for not understanding her.
I thought the head of the DHS was supposed to have the trust of the American people.
Again: This hack should be fired.
Re: Firing Napolitano [Peter Kirsanow]
The effect of firing DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano would be symbolic only.This isn't to say that ritual firings are without value, but replacing a Napolitano isn't likely to improve the security of American citizens. Napolitano's replacement will, after all, report to a boss who thinks it's a splendid idea to send Gitmo detainees to Yemen (or perhaps Illinois), try al-Qaeda's chief operating officer in a New York City civilian court, and credulously engage — almost to the point of supplication— the world's chief state sponsor of terrorism.
As long as the boss remains invincibly callow toward the threat of terrorism, his underlings are likely to reflect that mindset.
Fire Napolitano, Or at Least Grill Her [Daniel Foster]
Sen. Joe Lieberman's (I., Conn.) Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is the third Congressional body to announce that it will hold hearings on the Flight 253 attack:
The hearing will focus on the security measures the alleged bomber, 23-year-old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, evaded in bringing explosives onboard the plane.
"We were very lucky this time, but we may not be so lucky next time, which is why our defenses must be strengthened," said committee Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) in a statement. "I view Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as a terrorist who evaded our homeland security defenses and who would have killed hundreds of people if the explosives he tried to detonate had worked."
Presumably, Secretary Napolitano will be in attendence. Let us hope that Lieberman and the Republicans on the committee give her ample opportunity to further . . . clarify her assertions that “the system worked.”
Ashcroft v. Napolitano [Jonah Goldberg]
Some may not remember the anti-Ashcroft hysteria of yesteryear. Here's a pretty good summary-snapshot from a 2003 Wall Street Journal editorial:
Frenzy mounts uncontrolled over John Ashcroft, now considered—in those quarters touched by the delirium—enemy No. 1 of the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and all that Americans hold dear. What is the cause of these fevers? Is there a doctor in the house?We may exclude Dr. Howard Dean, running for the Democratic presidential nomination, who has already offered his findings, to wit: "John Ashcroft is not a patriot. John Ashcroft is a descendant of Joseph McCarthy." Sen. John Kerry, once properly—and eloquently—infuriated over the campaign of cretinous slanders mounted against John McCain in the last Republican presidential primary, has in turn offered his views on the attorney general. During the Democrats' debate in Baltimore, candidate Kerry said he saw before him "people of every creed, every color, every belief, every religion. This is indeed John Ashcroft's worst nightmare here." Richard Gephardt, eyes similarly on the prize, has let America know which of our great national concerns he considered most pressing—a good thing to know about a candidate. The national priority looming largest in his mind is, Mr. Gephardt has let it be known, to fire John Ashcroft in "my first five seconds as president."On the subject of the attorney general, no candidate has waxed more passionate than John Edwards, who warned, "we cannot allow people like John Ashcroft to take away our rights, our freedoms, and our liberties." And further: John Ashcroft and this administration can "spin their wheels all they want about the Patriot Act. . . . They have rolled over our rights for the past two years," says Mr. Edwards, one of the most uncompromisingly staunch Senate supporters of the Patriot Bill when it was passed after September 11—a fact the candidate seems to have found little or no occasion to mention in the course of his current crusade. Also among those voting for the bill were Rep. Gephardt, and Sens. Kerry, Lieberman and Graham.It's hardly necessary by now to list all the charges and the alarms being raised about Mr. Ashcroft, by those portraying the attorney general as the menace to civil liberties that should haunt the dreams of all Americans who want to preserve our way of life. This is no exaggeration; the fever has spread wide, fed largely by the American Civil Liberties Union and allied sentinels of freedom, its signs clear in the ads calling on citizens to "Save Our Constitution," in emergency rallies led by the ACLU, and such groups as "Families for a Peaceful Tomorrow" and "The New York Bill of Rights Defense Committee."
Never mind that many of Ashcroft's worst alleged sins are now pretty much Obama-Pelosi policies. But the Napolitano-Ashcroft comparison is telling.
Ashcroft was demonized for suggesting that Americans be on the lookout for terrorists. One of Napolitano's main talking points these days is the need for vigilance from the public. Heck, she claimed the "system worked" because a flying Dutchman took out the "alleged" terrorist.
Ashcroft was demonized because he allegedly was turning America into a police state where political enemies were targeted (remember that's why Naomi Wolfe had a years-long mental breakdown). Janet Napolitano oversaw a report that singles out American citizens and returning vets as potential terrorists because of their political views.
Ashcroft was mocked as a provincial hick who didn't know much. Napolitano — who runs our immigration service and was governor of a border state — thinks it's not a crime to illegally cross the border and insists that the 9/11 hijackers came from Canada.
John Ashcroft was a dangerous ideologue because he believed the war on terror is real. But
Janet Napolitano isn't a dangerous ideologue for believing the war on terror isn't real?
What sounds more ideologically blinkered after 9/11?
Ashcroft's view: Organized Islamic terrorists want to kill Americans in a holy war.
Napolitano's view: Islamic terrorist attacks are merely "man caused disasters" by disturbed individuals — who should be assumed to be acting alone as criminals, not terrorists, despite credible evidence — while peaceful "right-wing extremists" should be given extra scrutiny on the assumption they could well be terrorists.
Bad Year Coming? [James Jay Carafano]
Since 2001, there have been 28 failed terrorist attacks against the United States. That averages out to about three foiled attempts per year. That was until this year. This year there were six failed attempts that make 2009 a banner year — the most in one year.
The fact that six attacks were foiled is cold comfort. In stopping #28, America just got lucky. Despite the warning signs, authorities did nothing to impede Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's travel. The plan of attack on the Detroit-bound plane didn't work and the passengers and crew stopped the assailant.
Additionally, in 2009, not every terrorist attack was stopped. In November, Nidal Malik Hasan gunned down a dozen of his fellow soldiers and shot up a score more — despite the fact that there were red flags galore that he was some one to worry about. Others were recruited here to attack over there, including five young men from northern Virginia who shipped-off to Pakistan; youth from Minneapolis enticed to fight Al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda affiliate; and David Coleman Headley, who allegedly helped plan the Mumbai attacks and other potential strikes.
In short, the system has failed a number of times in 2009. To make matters worse, Washington hasn't shown that it cares very much. It doesn't like to call the war a war. It doesn't seem to care that some Patriot Act authorities will expire in 60 days. It would rather the Department of Homeland Security push for a mass amnesty bill than fight terrorists and try control the border.
— James Jay Carafano is senior research fellow for national security and homeland security in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation.
clusterstock
Obama Holds Three-Day Late News Conference On Terrorist Attack, Doesn't Wear A Tie http://bit.ly/57AwJ3
Ok, now back to vacation.
Hoekstra: With Napolitano, It's 299,999,999 Vs. One [Robert Costa]
Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, tells National Review Online that he’s “disappointed” with President Obama following the president’s remarks this afternoon on the attempted bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253. “We almost lost 270 American lives on Christmas Day and the president has decided to review a watch list. This is about more than a watch list,” says Hoekstra. “It’s about leadership.”
Criticism of Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security secretary, for her handling of the incident, “should be directed to President Obama, since she’s taking her lead from him on this,” says Hoekstra. “I think she’s made some terrible mistakes. Like many in this administration, she’s reluctant to use the word ‘terrorism.’ Though she may prefer the term, this was not an example of an almost ‘man-made disaster.’”
“Out of 300 million Americans, she is the only one who thinks the system is working when a guy with a bomb gets on a plane,” he says. “The other 299,999,999 of us know it’s not.” Obama, he adds, “needs to articulate a clear, concise strategy” to address “the threat of radical jihadists.”
“After eleven months in office, the president is still sending contradictory messages on national security,” says Hoekstra. “He says he wants to address the threats yet look at how he has responded to this, how he responded to Fort Hood, how he’s open to prosecuting folks in the CIA, how he’s closing Guantanamo Bay, and how he’s bringing terror suspects to New York City.” Such moves, he says, “make no sense” if one is “trying to build a strong national security policy.”
“The president may express his concern but his decisions are the statements that people remember,” says Hoekstra. In coming days, the congressman tells us that he will continue to call for an investigation into Flight 253 and the government’s homeland-security operations.
Janet Napolitano’s Mentality [Daniel Pipes]
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab smuggled 80 grams of PETN in his underwear on a Northwest flight on Christmas Day from Amsterdam to Detroit and almost killed 288 passengers and crew.
How did the geniuses in the Obama administration respond? Janet (“ man-caused disasters”) Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, concluded that the system “worked really very, very smoothly.”
Need one really point out that, had the system worked, Abdulmutallab would not have been allowed on the aircraft, and certainly not with a bomb? When her statement was criticized, Napolitano reversed course and announced a day later that “Our system did not work in this instance.”
While it’s good to see that even Obama appointees can learn from their errors, Napolitano’s original gaffe reveals a state of mind among this country’s top decision makers that so long as hundreds of people do not perish, all is well.
Abdulmutallab’s near-success and Napolitano’s idiotic response tell Americans about the weakness of counterterrorist efforts so many years after 9/11. In brief, because law enforcement refuses to “threat profile” and focus on Muslims, the flying public is both inconvenienced and unsafe.— Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum, Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, and a columnist for the Jerusalem Post.
Napolitano Changes Her Tune [Jonah Goldberg]
She now says that her repeated mantra of "the system worked" was taken out of context. Translation: Her hackish talking points were a flop, so she's pretending she didn't mean what she said and is blaming others for not understanding her.
I thought the head of the DHS was supposed to have the trust of the American people.
Again: This hack should be fired.
Re: Firing Napolitano [Peter Kirsanow]
The effect of firing DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano would be symbolic only.This isn't to say that ritual firings are without value, but replacing a Napolitano isn't likely to improve the security of American citizens. Napolitano's replacement will, after all, report to a boss who thinks it's a splendid idea to send Gitmo detainees to Yemen (or perhaps Illinois), try al-Qaeda's chief operating officer in a New York City civilian court, and credulously engage — almost to the point of supplication— the world's chief state sponsor of terrorism.
As long as the boss remains invincibly callow toward the threat of terrorism, his underlings are likely to reflect that mindset.
Fire Napolitano, Or at Least Grill Her [Daniel Foster]
Sen. Joe Lieberman's (I., Conn.) Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is the third Congressional body to announce that it will hold hearings on the Flight 253 attack:
The hearing will focus on the security measures the alleged bomber, 23-year-old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, evaded in bringing explosives onboard the plane.
"We were very lucky this time, but we may not be so lucky next time, which is why our defenses must be strengthened," said committee Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) in a statement. "I view Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as a terrorist who evaded our homeland security defenses and who would have killed hundreds of people if the explosives he tried to detonate had worked."
Presumably, Secretary Napolitano will be in attendence. Let us hope that Lieberman and the Republicans on the committee give her ample opportunity to further . . . clarify her assertions that “the system worked.”
Ashcroft v. Napolitano [Jonah Goldberg]
Some may not remember the anti-Ashcroft hysteria of yesteryear. Here's a pretty good summary-snapshot from a 2003 Wall Street Journal editorial:
Frenzy mounts uncontrolled over John Ashcroft, now considered—in those quarters touched by the delirium—enemy No. 1 of the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and all that Americans hold dear. What is the cause of these fevers? Is there a doctor in the house?We may exclude Dr. Howard Dean, running for the Democratic presidential nomination, who has already offered his findings, to wit: "John Ashcroft is not a patriot. John Ashcroft is a descendant of Joseph McCarthy." Sen. John Kerry, once properly—and eloquently—infuriated over the campaign of cretinous slanders mounted against John McCain in the last Republican presidential primary, has in turn offered his views on the attorney general. During the Democrats' debate in Baltimore, candidate Kerry said he saw before him "people of every creed, every color, every belief, every religion. This is indeed John Ashcroft's worst nightmare here." Richard Gephardt, eyes similarly on the prize, has let America know which of our great national concerns he considered most pressing—a good thing to know about a candidate. The national priority looming largest in his mind is, Mr. Gephardt has let it be known, to fire John Ashcroft in "my first five seconds as president."On the subject of the attorney general, no candidate has waxed more passionate than John Edwards, who warned, "we cannot allow people like John Ashcroft to take away our rights, our freedoms, and our liberties." And further: John Ashcroft and this administration can "spin their wheels all they want about the Patriot Act. . . . They have rolled over our rights for the past two years," says Mr. Edwards, one of the most uncompromisingly staunch Senate supporters of the Patriot Bill when it was passed after September 11—a fact the candidate seems to have found little or no occasion to mention in the course of his current crusade. Also among those voting for the bill were Rep. Gephardt, and Sens. Kerry, Lieberman and Graham.It's hardly necessary by now to list all the charges and the alarms being raised about Mr. Ashcroft, by those portraying the attorney general as the menace to civil liberties that should haunt the dreams of all Americans who want to preserve our way of life. This is no exaggeration; the fever has spread wide, fed largely by the American Civil Liberties Union and allied sentinels of freedom, its signs clear in the ads calling on citizens to "Save Our Constitution," in emergency rallies led by the ACLU, and such groups as "Families for a Peaceful Tomorrow" and "The New York Bill of Rights Defense Committee."
Never mind that many of Ashcroft's worst alleged sins are now pretty much Obama-Pelosi policies. But the Napolitano-Ashcroft comparison is telling.
Ashcroft was demonized for suggesting that Americans be on the lookout for terrorists. One of Napolitano's main talking points these days is the need for vigilance from the public. Heck, she claimed the "system worked" because a flying Dutchman took out the "alleged" terrorist.
Ashcroft was demonized because he allegedly was turning America into a police state where political enemies were targeted (remember that's why Naomi Wolfe had a years-long mental breakdown). Janet Napolitano oversaw a report that singles out American citizens and returning vets as potential terrorists because of their political views.
Ashcroft was mocked as a provincial hick who didn't know much. Napolitano — who runs our immigration service and was governor of a border state — thinks it's not a crime to illegally cross the border and insists that the 9/11 hijackers came from Canada.
John Ashcroft was a dangerous ideologue because he believed the war on terror is real. But
Janet Napolitano isn't a dangerous ideologue for believing the war on terror isn't real?
What sounds more ideologically blinkered after 9/11?
Ashcroft's view: Organized Islamic terrorists want to kill Americans in a holy war.
Napolitano's view: Islamic terrorist attacks are merely "man caused disasters" by disturbed individuals — who should be assumed to be acting alone as criminals, not terrorists, despite credible evidence — while peaceful "right-wing extremists" should be given extra scrutiny on the assumption they could well be terrorists.
Bad Year Coming? [James Jay Carafano]
Since 2001, there have been 28 failed terrorist attacks against the United States. That averages out to about three foiled attempts per year. That was until this year. This year there were six failed attempts that make 2009 a banner year — the most in one year.
The fact that six attacks were foiled is cold comfort. In stopping #28, America just got lucky. Despite the warning signs, authorities did nothing to impede Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's travel. The plan of attack on the Detroit-bound plane didn't work and the passengers and crew stopped the assailant.
Additionally, in 2009, not every terrorist attack was stopped. In November, Nidal Malik Hasan gunned down a dozen of his fellow soldiers and shot up a score more — despite the fact that there were red flags galore that he was some one to worry about. Others were recruited here to attack over there, including five young men from northern Virginia who shipped-off to Pakistan; youth from Minneapolis enticed to fight Al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda affiliate; and David Coleman Headley, who allegedly helped plan the Mumbai attacks and other potential strikes.
In short, the system has failed a number of times in 2009. To make matters worse, Washington hasn't shown that it cares very much. It doesn't like to call the war a war. It doesn't seem to care that some Patriot Act authorities will expire in 60 days. It would rather the Department of Homeland Security push for a mass amnesty bill than fight terrorists and try control the border.
— James Jay Carafano is senior research fellow for national security and homeland security in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Terrorist Plane Bombing Fails ... no thanks to DHS / govt
Or was that a "man caused disaster" averted ?
Thank goodness for:
a) Cheers for Jasper Schuringa, the brave passenger who subdued the terrorist bomber; and
b) Plane dumb luck that his bomb didn't work quite as planned.
A big boo for the Feds, DHS, Janet Napolitano, the State Dept., and the airlines who all botched this. Those people on the plane are thankfully lucky to be alive today !
Some commentary:
http://michellemalkin.com/2009/12/27/clown-alert-janet-napolitano-says-the-system-worked/
Let's Roll 2 [Mark Steyn]
On September 11th 2001, the government's (1970s) security procedures all failed, and the only good news of the day came from self-reliant citizens (on Flight 93) using their own wits and a willingness to act.
On December 25th 2009, the government's (post-9/11) security procedures all failed, and the only good news came once again from alert individuals:
"Suddenly, we hear a bang. It sounded like a firecracker went off," said Jasper Schuringa, a film director who was traveling to the US to visit friends.
"When [it] went off, everybody panicked ... Then someone screamed, ‘Fire! Fire!’"
Schuringa, sitting in seat 20J, in the right-most section of the Airbus 330, looked to his left. "I saw smoke rising from a seat ... I didn’t hesitate. I just jumped," he said.
Schuringa dove over four passengers to reach Abdul Mutallab’s seat. The suspect had a blanket on his lap. "It was smoking and there were flames coming from beneath his legs."
"I searched on his body parts and he had his pants open. He had something strapped to his legs."
The unassuming hero ripped the flaming, molten object — which resembled a small, white shampoo bottle — off Abdul Mutallab’s left leg, near his crotch. He said he put out the fire with his bare hands.
Schuringa yelled for water, and members of the flight crew soon appeared with fire extinguishers. Then, he said, he hauled the suspect out of the seat.
If the facts remain broadly as outlined, this incident has serious implications for airline travel: A man is on the no-fly list but is allowed to board the plane. Everyone flying on an inbound long-haul flight to the United States is forced to hand over excessively large amounts of liquids and gels and put the small amounts permitted into separate plastic bags, yet the no-fly guy's material for bomb-making sails through undetected.
This time the last line of defense worked. Next time, the paradise-seeking jihadist might get lucky and find himself sitting next to, say, Charlie Sheen, too immersed in a lengthy treatise on how 9/11 was an inside job to notice the smoldering socks in the next seat; or to the same kind of nothing-to-see-here crowd who thought Major Hasan's e-mails were "consistent with his research interests".
As for the perpetrator:
The young man, who yesterday night attempted to ignite an explosive device aboard a Delta Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, Michigan in the United States has been identified as Abdul Farouk Umar Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old son of Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, former First Bank chairman. Mutallab, a former minister and prominent banker recently retired from the bank’s board...
The family home of the Mutallabs in Central London, is currently being searched by men of the Metropolitan Police. THISDAY checks reveal that the suspect, Abdulfarouk Umar Muttalab who is an engineering student at the University College, London had been noted for his extreme views on religion since his secondary school days at the British International School, Lome, Togo.
So once again we see the foolishness of complaceniks who drone the fatuous cliches about how "in this struggle, scholarships will be far more important than smart bombs". The men eager to self-detonate on infidel airliners are not goatherds from the caves of Waziristan but educated middle-class Muslims who have had the most exposure to the western world and could be pulling down six-figure salaries almost anywhere on the planet. And don't look to "assimilation" to work its magic, either. We're witnessing a process of generational de-assimilation: In this family, yet again, the dad is an entirely assimilated member of the transnational elite. His son wants a global caliphate run on Wahhabist lines.
Laps in Security [Mark Steyn]
Well, the authorities have reacted to the Pantybomber in the usual way:
Passengers getting off both U.S. domestic flights and those arriving from overseas reported being told that they couldn’t get out of their seat for the last hour of their flight. Air Canada also said that during the last hour passengers won’t be allowed access to carry-on baggage or to have any items on their laps.
That's great news, isn't it?
This was a failed terror plot. But with failures like this who needs victories? If that Air Canada rule becomes generally applicable, that last hour will be a big time-waster for some of us. But no doubt some enterprising jihadist will attempt to self-detonate in mid-flight or shortly after take-off, and pretty soon we'll have to sit in isolation for the full seven or eight hours. Another couple of attempted takedowns and they might as well ship us freight.
A couple of years back in NR, in a column I wrote in flight (though not on Air Canada), I related my ill-fated attempt to bring home a souvenir snow globe from Auckland, New Zealand for my daughter:
The Kiwi sales clerk swiped my credit card, wrapped it up, and then said, "Oh, wait. Are you flying to America?" I should have known. She consulted her list of prohibited items and informed me that... the twinkly fluid inside the snow globe had been deemed to count as a liquid. In theory, I could smash the incredibly thick glass, replace the sparkly stuff with something more incendiary, re-glaze it in the airport men's room with help from co-conspirators among the shadowy networks of antipodean jihadist glaziers, and board the plane to explosive effect...
The jihad may never achieve global domination but it has already achieved snow global domination... Next time round, they'll foil some entirely different scheme - explosive suppositories, dirty-nuke hip replacements - and another avalanche of pitiful constraints will fall upon the hapless traveller.
And so it's proved. If only we had a National Snow Globe Association to point out that snow globes don't kill people, people kill people. What will they do after, say, a burka-clad woman boards the flight with breast impants packed with plastic explosives? Playing the game this way lets the terrorists set the rules and forces us to react defensively to every innovation. What difference does it make whether the plot succeeds? After all, long after Richard Reid has died of old age in prison, we'll still be removing our footwear in eternal homage to the thwarted shoebomber.
The arithmetic is very simple: Can we regulate for all faster than they can adapt for some? And remember, whatever new rules they pass about not using the bathroom in the last three hours of the flight, when you're sitting in seat 7B and the guy in 7C starts doing something goofy, the Federal Government won't be up there with you.
Re: re: Laps in security [Andy McCarthy]
Apropos Mark's observations (here and here), I couldn't help but be struck by this ambiguous passage in the Washington Post's report this morning: "The incident marks the latest apparent attempt by terrorists to bring down a U.S. aircraft through the use of an improvised weapon, and set in motion urgent security measures that disrupted global air travel during the frenetic holiday weekend." No doubt the Post means that "the incident" has "set in motion urgent security measures," but it was just as clearly "an attempt by terrorists" — and a successful attempt, at that — to "set in motion urgent security measures." It sounds trite but it's worth repeating: The object of terrorism is to terrorize, and obviously the mission has been accomplished even if the plane was not brought down.
In Willful Blindness, I recount the debacle of repeated entries into the United States by, among others, the Blind Sheikh (Omar Abdel Rahman) and al Qaeda operative Ali Mohammed — the former permitted free entrance, egress and, finally, a green card (as a special religious worker) even though he was one of the world's most famous jihadists and was on the terror watch lists for having authorized the murder of Anwar Sadat; the latter permitted to immigrate from Egypt and join the U.S. army despite having been caught trying to infiltrate the CIA. Now, nearly 20 years later — after 9/11, the 9/11 Commission, etc. — we have Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab: He was in the terrorist "database" because we were warned by his own influential father of his radical ties and proclivities, and he was evidently notorious among associates in Africa and Europe for his jihadist leanings; yet, he was issued a multiple-entry visa. And he claims to have been trained in Yemen — the al Qaeda hub to which the administration has just sent a half-dozen trained jihadists previously detained in Gitmo, and where it hopes to send many more.
I wonder what the media would be saying if George Bush were still president.
Hadn't Abdulmutallab heard that we are closing Gitmo? Hadn't he heard that we're phasing out military-commissions so we can show the world that we give even the worst mass-murderers civilian trials with all the rights of American citizens? Hadn't he heard that President Obama has banned torture (yes, yes, I know, actually Congress banned it 15 years ago — details, details ...)? Hadn't he heard that the president has called for "a new beginning" in America's relationship with the Muslim world? Hadn't he heard that this is our new, smarter strategy to safeguard the nation from man-caused disasters?
I suspect he's heard all those things.
Fire Napolitano [Jonah Goldberg]
Understandbly, the White House is trying very hard to get out in front of the would-be Christmas bomber story. The head of the Department of Homeland Security isn't helping. I watched her on three shows and each time she was more annoying, maddening and absurd than the pevious appearance. It is her basic position that the "system worked" because the bureaucrats responded properly after the attack. That the attack was "foiled" by a bad detonator and some civilian passengers is proof, she claims, that her agency is doing everything right. That is just about the dumbest thing she could say, on the merits and politically. I would wager that not one percent of Americans think the system is "working" when terrorists successfully get bombs onto planes (and succeed in activating them). Probably even fewer think it's fair that they have to take off their shoes, endure delays and madness while a known Islamic radical — turned in by his own father — can waltz onto a plane (and into the country). DHS had no role whatsoever in assuring that this bomb didn't go off. By her logic if the bomb had gone off, the system would have "worked" since it has done everything right.
Napolitano has a habit of arguing that DHS is a first responder outfit. Its mission is to deal with "man-caused-disasters" afer they occur. It appears she really believes it. If the White House wants to assure people that it takes the war on terror seriously (a term Robert Gibbs used this morning by the way), they could start by firing this patenly unqualified hack.
Here she is her own words, over at RealClearPolitics.
Re: Fire Napolitano [Jonah Goldberg]
From a reader:
Jonah,Right on re. Napolitano. She's given herself a job description under which there's no such thing as failure. Must be nice.
The Couch: "Sounds a bit like being 'editor-at-large.'"
Update: From a reader:
Jonah: By the way, under the heading of stereotypes that need rethinking, who would have predicted that the hero of the incident would be:—not a TSA guy at the gate catching the device;—not an air marshal (it looks as if there was none);—not a US military guy on leave;—but a Dutch video producer jumping across four seated passengers to grab the terrorist, grab his burning explosive device with bare hands, and frog march him up to the front of the plane.
Fire Napolitano Cont'd [Jonah Goldberg]
More reax, from a reader:
Jonah,I had the same reaction. I also have noticed Gibbs and others claim that his name was on a watch list data base of 550,000 names. They make it sound like this is a monumental task to query a match. When I make a purchase using a credit card, I swipe my card and within seconds that information is accessed from a data base of millions and my purchase is approved. Now that the US government is in the banking business, what's their excuse?
And, from another reader:
Jonah,I most wholeheartedly agree with your calls for Napolitano to be fired. I have had repeated correspondence with my Congressman (Burgess - TX 26th) in the past on that subject, and Congressman Burgess has repeatedly called for her to step down, so far with no avail. I did write Congressman Burgess and both my Senators again with a renewed call for her to resign.I do think Gibbs' use of the term "War on Terror" represents a concession on the part of the Obama Administration that it realizes this war is far from over, and maybe they are starting to understand that these people hate all Americans, and not just George Bush.Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part.Nonetheless, it's becoming abundantly clear to everyone that this administration must seriously change its amateurish ways or there will soon be a lot of Americans who have to pay with their lives.Keep up the good work!
Missing the Point [Andy McCarthy]
Though I share their outrage, I think outraged readers are missing the point. The people now in charge of our government believe Clinton-era counterterrorism was a successful model. They start from the premise that terrorism is a crime problem to be managed, not a war to be won. Overdone "war on drugs" rhetoric aside, we don't try to "win" against (as in "defeat") law-enforcement challenges. We expect them to happen from time to time and to contain, but never completely prevent, the damage.
Here, no thanks to the government, the plane was not destoyed, and we won't get to the bottom of the larger conspiracy (enabling the likes of Napolitano to say there's no indication of a larger plot — much less one launched by an international jihadist enterprise) because the guy got to lawyer up rather than be treated like a combatant and subjected to lengthy interrogation. But the terrorist will be convicted at trial (this "case" tees up like a slam-dunk), so the administration will put it in the books as a success ... just like the Clinton folks did after the '93 WTC bombers and the embassy bombers were convicted. In their minds, litigation success equals national security success.
It is a dangerously absurd viewpoint, but it was clear during the campaign that it was Obama's viewpoint. The American people — only seven years after 9/11 — elected him anyway. As we learn more painfully everyday, elections matter.
Thank goodness for:
a) Cheers for Jasper Schuringa, the brave passenger who subdued the terrorist bomber; and
b) Plane dumb luck that his bomb didn't work quite as planned.
A big boo for the Feds, DHS, Janet Napolitano, the State Dept., and the airlines who all botched this. Those people on the plane are thankfully lucky to be alive today !
Some commentary:
http://michellemalkin.com/2009/12/27/clown-alert-janet-napolitano-says-the-system-worked/
Let's Roll 2 [Mark Steyn]
On September 11th 2001, the government's (1970s) security procedures all failed, and the only good news of the day came from self-reliant citizens (on Flight 93) using their own wits and a willingness to act.
On December 25th 2009, the government's (post-9/11) security procedures all failed, and the only good news came once again from alert individuals:
"Suddenly, we hear a bang. It sounded like a firecracker went off," said Jasper Schuringa, a film director who was traveling to the US to visit friends.
"When [it] went off, everybody panicked ... Then someone screamed, ‘Fire! Fire!’"
Schuringa, sitting in seat 20J, in the right-most section of the Airbus 330, looked to his left. "I saw smoke rising from a seat ... I didn’t hesitate. I just jumped," he said.
Schuringa dove over four passengers to reach Abdul Mutallab’s seat. The suspect had a blanket on his lap. "It was smoking and there were flames coming from beneath his legs."
"I searched on his body parts and he had his pants open. He had something strapped to his legs."
The unassuming hero ripped the flaming, molten object — which resembled a small, white shampoo bottle — off Abdul Mutallab’s left leg, near his crotch. He said he put out the fire with his bare hands.
Schuringa yelled for water, and members of the flight crew soon appeared with fire extinguishers. Then, he said, he hauled the suspect out of the seat.
If the facts remain broadly as outlined, this incident has serious implications for airline travel: A man is on the no-fly list but is allowed to board the plane. Everyone flying on an inbound long-haul flight to the United States is forced to hand over excessively large amounts of liquids and gels and put the small amounts permitted into separate plastic bags, yet the no-fly guy's material for bomb-making sails through undetected.
This time the last line of defense worked. Next time, the paradise-seeking jihadist might get lucky and find himself sitting next to, say, Charlie Sheen, too immersed in a lengthy treatise on how 9/11 was an inside job to notice the smoldering socks in the next seat; or to the same kind of nothing-to-see-here crowd who thought Major Hasan's e-mails were "consistent with his research interests".
As for the perpetrator:
The young man, who yesterday night attempted to ignite an explosive device aboard a Delta Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, Michigan in the United States has been identified as Abdul Farouk Umar Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old son of Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, former First Bank chairman. Mutallab, a former minister and prominent banker recently retired from the bank’s board...
The family home of the Mutallabs in Central London, is currently being searched by men of the Metropolitan Police. THISDAY checks reveal that the suspect, Abdulfarouk Umar Muttalab who is an engineering student at the University College, London had been noted for his extreme views on religion since his secondary school days at the British International School, Lome, Togo.
So once again we see the foolishness of complaceniks who drone the fatuous cliches about how "in this struggle, scholarships will be far more important than smart bombs". The men eager to self-detonate on infidel airliners are not goatherds from the caves of Waziristan but educated middle-class Muslims who have had the most exposure to the western world and could be pulling down six-figure salaries almost anywhere on the planet. And don't look to "assimilation" to work its magic, either. We're witnessing a process of generational de-assimilation: In this family, yet again, the dad is an entirely assimilated member of the transnational elite. His son wants a global caliphate run on Wahhabist lines.
Laps in Security [Mark Steyn]
Well, the authorities have reacted to the Pantybomber in the usual way:
Passengers getting off both U.S. domestic flights and those arriving from overseas reported being told that they couldn’t get out of their seat for the last hour of their flight. Air Canada also said that during the last hour passengers won’t be allowed access to carry-on baggage or to have any items on their laps.
That's great news, isn't it?
This was a failed terror plot. But with failures like this who needs victories? If that Air Canada rule becomes generally applicable, that last hour will be a big time-waster for some of us. But no doubt some enterprising jihadist will attempt to self-detonate in mid-flight or shortly after take-off, and pretty soon we'll have to sit in isolation for the full seven or eight hours. Another couple of attempted takedowns and they might as well ship us freight.
A couple of years back in NR, in a column I wrote in flight (though not on Air Canada), I related my ill-fated attempt to bring home a souvenir snow globe from Auckland, New Zealand for my daughter:
The Kiwi sales clerk swiped my credit card, wrapped it up, and then said, "Oh, wait. Are you flying to America?" I should have known. She consulted her list of prohibited items and informed me that... the twinkly fluid inside the snow globe had been deemed to count as a liquid. In theory, I could smash the incredibly thick glass, replace the sparkly stuff with something more incendiary, re-glaze it in the airport men's room with help from co-conspirators among the shadowy networks of antipodean jihadist glaziers, and board the plane to explosive effect...
The jihad may never achieve global domination but it has already achieved snow global domination... Next time round, they'll foil some entirely different scheme - explosive suppositories, dirty-nuke hip replacements - and another avalanche of pitiful constraints will fall upon the hapless traveller.
And so it's proved. If only we had a National Snow Globe Association to point out that snow globes don't kill people, people kill people. What will they do after, say, a burka-clad woman boards the flight with breast impants packed with plastic explosives? Playing the game this way lets the terrorists set the rules and forces us to react defensively to every innovation. What difference does it make whether the plot succeeds? After all, long after Richard Reid has died of old age in prison, we'll still be removing our footwear in eternal homage to the thwarted shoebomber.
The arithmetic is very simple: Can we regulate for all faster than they can adapt for some? And remember, whatever new rules they pass about not using the bathroom in the last three hours of the flight, when you're sitting in seat 7B and the guy in 7C starts doing something goofy, the Federal Government won't be up there with you.
Re: re: Laps in security [Andy McCarthy]
Apropos Mark's observations (here and here), I couldn't help but be struck by this ambiguous passage in the Washington Post's report this morning: "The incident marks the latest apparent attempt by terrorists to bring down a U.S. aircraft through the use of an improvised weapon, and set in motion urgent security measures that disrupted global air travel during the frenetic holiday weekend." No doubt the Post means that "the incident" has "set in motion urgent security measures," but it was just as clearly "an attempt by terrorists" — and a successful attempt, at that — to "set in motion urgent security measures." It sounds trite but it's worth repeating: The object of terrorism is to terrorize, and obviously the mission has been accomplished even if the plane was not brought down.
In Willful Blindness, I recount the debacle of repeated entries into the United States by, among others, the Blind Sheikh (Omar Abdel Rahman) and al Qaeda operative Ali Mohammed — the former permitted free entrance, egress and, finally, a green card (as a special religious worker) even though he was one of the world's most famous jihadists and was on the terror watch lists for having authorized the murder of Anwar Sadat; the latter permitted to immigrate from Egypt and join the U.S. army despite having been caught trying to infiltrate the CIA. Now, nearly 20 years later — after 9/11, the 9/11 Commission, etc. — we have Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab: He was in the terrorist "database" because we were warned by his own influential father of his radical ties and proclivities, and he was evidently notorious among associates in Africa and Europe for his jihadist leanings; yet, he was issued a multiple-entry visa. And he claims to have been trained in Yemen — the al Qaeda hub to which the administration has just sent a half-dozen trained jihadists previously detained in Gitmo, and where it hopes to send many more.
I wonder what the media would be saying if George Bush were still president.
Hadn't Abdulmutallab heard that we are closing Gitmo? Hadn't he heard that we're phasing out military-commissions so we can show the world that we give even the worst mass-murderers civilian trials with all the rights of American citizens? Hadn't he heard that President Obama has banned torture (yes, yes, I know, actually Congress banned it 15 years ago — details, details ...)? Hadn't he heard that the president has called for "a new beginning" in America's relationship with the Muslim world? Hadn't he heard that this is our new, smarter strategy to safeguard the nation from man-caused disasters?
I suspect he's heard all those things.
Fire Napolitano [Jonah Goldberg]
Understandbly, the White House is trying very hard to get out in front of the would-be Christmas bomber story. The head of the Department of Homeland Security isn't helping. I watched her on three shows and each time she was more annoying, maddening and absurd than the pevious appearance. It is her basic position that the "system worked" because the bureaucrats responded properly after the attack. That the attack was "foiled" by a bad detonator and some civilian passengers is proof, she claims, that her agency is doing everything right. That is just about the dumbest thing she could say, on the merits and politically. I would wager that not one percent of Americans think the system is "working" when terrorists successfully get bombs onto planes (and succeed in activating them). Probably even fewer think it's fair that they have to take off their shoes, endure delays and madness while a known Islamic radical — turned in by his own father — can waltz onto a plane (and into the country). DHS had no role whatsoever in assuring that this bomb didn't go off. By her logic if the bomb had gone off, the system would have "worked" since it has done everything right.
Napolitano has a habit of arguing that DHS is a first responder outfit. Its mission is to deal with "man-caused-disasters" afer they occur. It appears she really believes it. If the White House wants to assure people that it takes the war on terror seriously (a term Robert Gibbs used this morning by the way), they could start by firing this patenly unqualified hack.
Here she is her own words, over at RealClearPolitics.
Re: Fire Napolitano [Jonah Goldberg]
From a reader:
Jonah,Right on re. Napolitano. She's given herself a job description under which there's no such thing as failure. Must be nice.
The Couch: "Sounds a bit like being 'editor-at-large.'"
Update: From a reader:
Jonah: By the way, under the heading of stereotypes that need rethinking, who would have predicted that the hero of the incident would be:—not a TSA guy at the gate catching the device;—not an air marshal (it looks as if there was none);—not a US military guy on leave;—but a Dutch video producer jumping across four seated passengers to grab the terrorist, grab his burning explosive device with bare hands, and frog march him up to the front of the plane.
Fire Napolitano Cont'd [Jonah Goldberg]
More reax, from a reader:
Jonah,I had the same reaction. I also have noticed Gibbs and others claim that his name was on a watch list data base of 550,000 names. They make it sound like this is a monumental task to query a match. When I make a purchase using a credit card, I swipe my card and within seconds that information is accessed from a data base of millions and my purchase is approved. Now that the US government is in the banking business, what's their excuse?
And, from another reader:
Jonah,I most wholeheartedly agree with your calls for Napolitano to be fired. I have had repeated correspondence with my Congressman (Burgess - TX 26th) in the past on that subject, and Congressman Burgess has repeatedly called for her to step down, so far with no avail. I did write Congressman Burgess and both my Senators again with a renewed call for her to resign.I do think Gibbs' use of the term "War on Terror" represents a concession on the part of the Obama Administration that it realizes this war is far from over, and maybe they are starting to understand that these people hate all Americans, and not just George Bush.Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part.Nonetheless, it's becoming abundantly clear to everyone that this administration must seriously change its amateurish ways or there will soon be a lot of Americans who have to pay with their lives.Keep up the good work!
Missing the Point [Andy McCarthy]
Though I share their outrage, I think outraged readers are missing the point. The people now in charge of our government believe Clinton-era counterterrorism was a successful model. They start from the premise that terrorism is a crime problem to be managed, not a war to be won. Overdone "war on drugs" rhetoric aside, we don't try to "win" against (as in "defeat") law-enforcement challenges. We expect them to happen from time to time and to contain, but never completely prevent, the damage.
Here, no thanks to the government, the plane was not destoyed, and we won't get to the bottom of the larger conspiracy (enabling the likes of Napolitano to say there's no indication of a larger plot — much less one launched by an international jihadist enterprise) because the guy got to lawyer up rather than be treated like a combatant and subjected to lengthy interrogation. But the terrorist will be convicted at trial (this "case" tees up like a slam-dunk), so the administration will put it in the books as a success ... just like the Clinton folks did after the '93 WTC bombers and the embassy bombers were convicted. In their minds, litigation success equals national security success.
It is a dangerously absurd viewpoint, but it was clear during the campaign that it was Obama's viewpoint. The American people — only seven years after 9/11 — elected him anyway. As we learn more painfully everyday, elections matter.
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