Fausta’s Blog

A bomb scare in the Netherlands,
Report: Attempted Terrorist Attack in The Netherlands – Bomb Found in Train

UPDATE (6:00 AM ET)
Dutch Omroep Brabant now reports that police say no bomb has been found. A man was arrested, but he it’s likely he’s an insane loser with too much time on his hands and not a terrorist. Good news, if true of course.

Having said that, I do hope that this man will suffer the consequences of pulling such a “prank.” The entire train station was evacuated, people couldn’t get to their work, all because of one attention craving idiot. End Update

In other news, Geert Wilders is on trial. Pat Condell comments,

Gates of Vienna and Diana West have more on Geert Wilders. Go read every word.

An Interview With “Torture Memo” Author, John Yoo

JH: Let me ask you a related question about the Geneva Convention. Since we do apply it in practice to groups like Al Qaeda and since no one seems to apply it to the United States, isn’t the treaty basically pointless?

JY: The most important thing, I think, for the treaties like the Geneva Conventions, is that they govern when we fight wars against other countries. Though as you say, when we have fought wars against other countries, they have habitually violated the Geneva Conventions and abused our men and women in uniform.

We saw that in the Iraq wars. We’ve seen it in Afghanistan and saw it in Vietnam and Korea. So one very important point you bring up is there are people who say, “Oh we need to follow the Geneva Conventions because otherwise when we fight, the other side won’t follow them either.” A very important point you make is that we have fought a lot of wars governed by the Geneva Conventions and our enemies don’t follow it anyway.

Go read the rest.

At Public Secrets,

According to Dr. Kifah Al-Ramali of the Gaza Islamic University, beauty contests are yet another part of the eternal Western plot against Islam. The true beauty queen, according to Cousin Itt Dr. Al-Ramali, is the “jihad mother” who waits patiently while her menfolk blow themselves up or otherwise get themselves killed trying to murder Jews

In other news, Terrorists ‘plan attack on Britain with bombs INSIDE their bodies’ to foil new airport scanners

an operation by MI5 has uncovered evidence that Al Qaeda is planning a new stage in its terror campaign by inserting ‘surgical bombs’ inside people for the first time.
…
A leading source added that male bombers would have the explosive secreted near their appendix or in their buttocks, while females would have the material placed inside their breasts in the same way as figure-enhancing implants.

Experts said the explosive PETN (Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate) would be placed in a plastic sachet inside the bomber’s body before the wound was stitched up like a normal operation incision and allowed to heal.

A shaped charge of 8oz of PETN can penetrate five inches of armour and would easily blow a large hole in an airliner.

Security sources said the explosives would be detonated by the bomber using a hypodermic syringe to inject TATP (Triacetone Triperoxide) through their skin into the explosives sachet.

Of course a body cavity search will be useless, but rest assured that the general public will be subjected to them.

The handling of the Christmas Day bombing suspect: the scandal grows

The real scandal surrounding the failed Christmas Day airline bombing was not the fact that a terrorist got on a plane — that can happen to any administration, as it surely did to the Bush administration — but what happened afterward when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was captured and came under the full control of the U.S. government.

After 50 minutes of questioning him, the Obama administration chose, reflexively and mindlessly, to give the chatty terrorist the right to remain silent. Which he immediately did, undoubtedly denying us crucial information about al-Qaeda in Yemen, which had trained, armed and dispatched him.

We have since learned that the decision to Mirandize Abdulmutallab had been made without the knowledge of or consultation with (1) the secretary of defense, (2) the secretary of homeland security, (3) the director of the FBI, (4) the director of the National Counterterrorism Center or (5) the director of national intelligence (DNI).

The Justice Department acted not just unilaterally but unaccountably. Obama’s own DNI said that Abdulmutallab should have been interrogated by the HIG, the administration’s new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.

Perhaps you hadn’t heard the term. Well, in the very first week of his presidency, Obama abolished by executive order the Bush-Cheney interrogation procedures and pledged to study a substitute mechanism. In August, the administration announced the establishment of the HIG, housed in the FBI but overseen by the National Security Council.

Where was it during the Abdulmutallab case? Not available, admitted National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, because it had been conceived for use only abroad. Had not one person in this vast administration of highly nuanced sophisticates considered the possibility of a terror attack on American soil?

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It gets worse. Blair later had to explain that the HIG was not deployed because it does not yet exist. After a year! I suppose this administration was so busy deploying scores of the country’s best lawyerly minds on finding the most rapid way to release Gitmo miscreants that it could not be bothered to establish a single operational HIG team to interrogate at-large miscreants with actionable intelligence that might save American lives.

The decision can not be reversed, either

Lieberman and Sen. Susan Collins had written an earlier letter asking for Abdulmutallab to be turned over to the military for renewed interrogation. The problem is, it’s hard to see how that decision gets reversed. Once you’ve read a man Miranda rights, what do you say? We are idiots? On second thought . . .

The decision to hold the KSM trial in NY can be reversed. The missed opportunity to gather meaningful intelligence from a terrorist can not.

Now Congress gets in the act, Congress and Terror Trials
Use the constitutional power to set court jurisdiction:, since Congress

can pass a law that strips the federal courts of jurisdiction over such unlawful enemy combatants as Abdulmutallab and KSM.

Let’s hope they do.

UPDATE
Newsy has a report on Yemen, where the pantybomber got his training and materials,

Congresswoman Sue Myrick discusses the national security risk posed by Venezuela’s support of allies from Special Interest Countries, such as Iran,

H/t Vlad Tepes.

How do you spell chutzpah in French?
Carlos the Jackal, imprisoned for life, looks in lawsuit to protect his image

Long before Osama bin Laden, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a.k.a. Carlos the Jackal, was the most famous terrorist of his era, bursting onto the scene with a spectacular hostage-taking of 11 OPEC oil ministers in 1975 and feeding his fame with more bloody attacks in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Ramírez, described by the spy novelist Robert Ludlum as “the most dangerous man of all times,” has been the subject of numerous books and films over the past two decades, not all of them flattering. But apparently determined to control his image even from his Paris prison cell, he has brought suit against a French production company shooting a documentary film on his life and legend, demanding a say on the final cut.

Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, the lawyer representing Ramírez, said that Ramírez is demanding that the Film in Stock production company hand over a master copy of the documentary as soon as it is finished and grant him three months to review the content and impose changes. Anything else, she said in an interview Monday, would violate his intellectual property rights to his name and “biographical image.”

Rather than giving him a death sentence, the terrorist is concerned about his civil rights:

Coutant-Peyre, who is Ramírez’s wife as well as his attorney, said the documentary, being shot for France’s Canal Plus television network, would likely be a propaganda film unless she and her husband were granted a right to oversee its accuracy. She charged that statements by the producers indicate they plan to portray Ramírez as the instigator of terrorist attacks for which he has not been convicted, violating his right to presumption of innocence.

Can’t wait for KSM and the pantybomber to invoke the same privilege in a court in New York.

The first blunder:
In today’s Wall Street Journal,
‘Duh’
Another intelligence blunder.

Earlier this month, White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan wrote a damning memo on the government’s failure to “connect the dots” in the days before Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a Christmas day flight to Detroit. On Wednesday, Dennis Blair delivered an equally damning verdict on the government’s handling of the terrorist after he was apprehended.

The Director of National Intelligence told the Senate that by immediately handing Abdulmutallab to the civilian justice system, the government all but slammed the door on its ability to interrogate him thoroughly. Specifically, the feds failed to avail themselves of a unit called the High-Value Interrogation Group, or HIG, which Mr. Blair says was created “to make a decision on whether a certain person who’s detained should be treated as a case for federal prosecution or for some of the other means.”

“We did not invoke the HIG in this case; we should have,” Mr. Blair said. “Frankly, we were thinking more of overseas people and, duh, you know, we didn’t put it [in action] here.”

That’s our emphasis, and we put it there to underscore the scale of the intelligence blunder that was committed when Abdulmutallab was remanded to FBI custody, where he reportedly talked to investigators until advised by counsel not to. Now the government’s only hope for Abdulmutallab to say a bit more is via a plea bargain, by which time his intelligence leads will likely have run cold.

What makes this debacle all the more extraordinary is that it would have been perfectly lawful to hold Abdulmutallab in military custody, which would have given the government time to interrogate him and consider whether it wanted to try him in civilian or military court. Instead, such was the apparent haste by the FBI that Director Robert Mueller testified that “there was no time to get a follow-up [HIG] group in there.” Do our real-life Jack Bauers now travel by Amtrak?

If it were up to Obama, they would travel by Smart Car.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is asking Who Gave the Christmas Day Bomber the Right to Remain Silent?
Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser won’t say who decided to Mirandize Abdulmutallab.

We know — from the testimony yesterday — that four of the nation’s top counterterrorism officials were not asked for their views on handling Abdulmutallab as a criminal — a group that includes Blair, Mueller, Michael Leiter, head of the National Counterterrorism Center, and Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security.

So who, exactly, was consulted? And who — a name would be helpful — made that final decision?

McConnell reveals that he took that question to John Brennan, President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, who refused to answer three times? And that alone raises several additional troubling questions?

*Does Brennan know who made those crucial decisions on Abdulmutallab?

*If not, why not?

*And if so, what reason would he have for refusing to share that information with McConnell?

All good questions; however, Scott Johnson makes an even better point, which brings us to,
The second blunder:

But something can and should be done about the fundamental error underlying Senator McConnell’s questions. On what ground is Abdulmutallab now being accorded the constitutional rights of American citizens? Who is responsible for that? Americans should know the answers to these questions too.

Following up on yesterday’s What’s with Detroit? post, this report: Unruly Passengers Disrupt Northwest Flight 243, via James Joyner,

MyFoxDetroit.com – Sources tell Fox 2 that a flight from Amsterdam into Detroit Metropolitan Airport was held on the tarmac after landing because of unruly behavior by some of the passengers.

The source says four men from Saudi Arabai were saying something in Arabic that alarmed four on-board Federal Air Marshals. The Marshals speak Arabic. A decision was made to stop the plane on the tarmac away from the passenger terminal and remove the men from the plane.

Once the men were removed, the rest of passengers were then taken to the terminal for deboarding.

The Transportation Security Administration says the unruly passengers were interviewed by Customs and Border Protection officials.

But the TSA says the passengers were released and no arrests were made.

If four Arabic-speaking air marshals were alarmed by what they heard, I’ll say that’s reason enough to remove those passengers from the plane.

Oh, yes.

The Christmas pantybomber, the guy locked up in the bathroom, and now this,

Northwest Flight 243 4 Unruly Passengers detained: NW 243 Amsterdam to Detroit

A Detroit station is reporting another unruly passenger on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. This report came in at 2:07 p.m. EST, and said passengers were being “let off” the flight. Update: Four men of Middle Eastern descent caused the disturbance (alleged).

Update 3:40 p.m. CDT: Detroit News says 4 passengers from Saudia Arabia are being questioned.

Maggie’s notebook asks,

Read about Clogging the Intelligence Pipeline. Is that what this is all about? Keeping the pipeline so busy that we run out of personnel to really keep the country safe.

Check out their links.

The question remains,

So it wasn’t a threat, but crew members were worried enough that they felt the need to have authorities meet them at the gate and detain these four, er, noncompliants, who just happen to all be from Saudi Arabia?

Links via Larwyn.

UPDATE, Wednesday 13 January
Follow-up post.

Treat a terrorist as a criminal instead of as an enemy combatant, and lose valuable time and intelligence-gathering opportunities:

Detroit bomber ’singing like a canary’ before arrest
President Barack Obama is under fire over claims that the Christmas Day underwear bomber was “singing like a canary” until he was treated as an ordinary criminal and advised of his right to silence.

The lawyer for the 23-year-old Nigerian entered a formal not guilty plea on Friday to charges that he tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on December 25 – even though he reportedly admitted earlier that he was trained and supplied with the explosives sewn into his underwear by al-Qaeda in the Arab state.

“He was singing like a canary, then we charged him in civilian proceedings, he got a lawyer and shut up,” Slade Gorton, a member of the 9/11 Commission that investigated the Sept 2001 terror attacks on the US, told The Sunday Telegraph.

It’s all about the law enforcement issue:

“I find it incomprehensible that this administration is treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue. The president has finally said that we are at war with al-Qaeda. Well, if this is a war, then Abdulmutallab should be treated as a combatant not a criminal.”

Abdulmutallab could have been held and interrogated in military custody under existing US legislation before a decision was taken whether to charge him before a military tribunal or a civilian court, according to Michael Mukasey, the last Attorney General under President George W Bush.

Mr Mukasey argues that it was crucial to gain intelligence from him immediately as details about locations, names and other plots is subject to rapid change. For the same reason, he dismissed the argument by John Brennan, Mr Obama’s chief counter-terrorism adviser, that investigators will garner valuable data during any plea-bargaining talks.

“He certainly should know that the kind of facts that Abdulmutallab might be expected to know have a shelf life that is a lot shorter than the plea bargaining process,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week.

Marc Thiessen explains why the administration ought to Stop Blaming the CIA:

In the age of terror, our enemies do not have large armies or flotillas of warships that can be observed by spies or tracked by satellites. Instead, the terrorists conspire in secret, hide among civilians, and attack us from within. Their plans to kill innocent men, women, and children are known only to a handful of cruel men.

This means there are essentially three ways to gain information about terrorist attacks:

The first, and hardest, is to penetrate the enemy. This can be done, but it is no easy task. Al Qaeda is a small, secretive network of Arab extremists that is extremely suspicious of outsiders. And we saw this week just how difficult it is to penetrate their ranks. The terrorist who blew up a CIA base in Afghanistan—killing seven operatives—turns out to have been a double agent, a trusted source who was really working for the enemy.

The second method is “signals intelligence”—using advanced technology to intercept and monitor the enemy’s electronic communications. Signals intelligence has been essential to the fight against terror, but it has inherent limitations. When intelligence officials monitor terrorist communications, they are passive listeners to the conversations of others. They cannot ask questions, probe for additional information, or sometimes even identify voices or email addresses in intercepted communications. Moreover, the terrorists know they are being monitored, so they are careful to speak codes that are difficult to break without inside information.

This leaves only one other human intelligence tool: interrogation. The interrogation of senior terrorist leaders has distinct advantages over other forms human intelligence. It allows our intelligence professionals to ask the terrorists direct questions. Because terrorists are held in secret and cut off from the outside world, CIA officials can expose sensitive intelligence to them during questioning without fear it will get back to terrorists at large. CIA officials can use information gained from one detainee to question other detainees—and then go back and confront the first detainee with what they learned. Captured terrorists can also help the CIA verify whether the sources we recruit inside al Qaeda are trustworthy, and providing reliable information. They can identify voices in phone calls and email addresses, and decipher enemy codes that would otherwise remain a mystery. No other tool provides our intelligence community with this kind of dynamic flexibility.

Go read the rest. As Marc points out,

The ability to detain and question senior terrorist operatives is not a luxury we can do without; it is essential to preventing new attacks on our country.

Right now the administration is closing the door on that option.

(Yes, Scott Johnson beat me to the better title for this post, I know why the caged bird isn’t singing. Oh well.)

UPDATE
* Commenter Omnibus Driver came to the rescue with the perfect title, The Silence of the Loins. Thank you!