American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the guy who had a bomb in his underpants, plead guilty,
A Nigerian man charged with trying to blow up a Detroit-bound plane with a bomb in his underwear two years ago pleaded guilty on the second day of his trial Wednesday.
He now faces a possible life sentence.
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,
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.
Treat a terrorist as a criminal instead of as an enemy combatant, and lose valuable time and intelligence-gathering opportunities:
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!
Not that this should come as a surprise,
Not Guilty Plea Entered for Christmas Day Bombing Suspect
A not guilty plea was entered on behalf of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian man charged with attempting to blow up a Detroit-bound U.S. airliner on Christmas Day.
Mr. Abdulmutallab was arraigned Friday on six charges. The most severe carries up to life in prison — the attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction to kill nearly 300 people.
The hearing at federal court in Detroit was brief. Mr. Abdulmutallab walked into the courtroom wearing a white T-shirt, pants and tennis shoes. He answered “yes” in English when asked if he understood the charges against him. After that, his lawyer said Mr. Abdulmutallab would stand mute to the charges. The U.S. magistrate judge said a not guilty plea would be entered on his behalf.
U.S. Marshals Service said Mr. Abdulmutallab was in a dark Chevy Suburban that drove into an underground entrance. Outside the courthouse, authorities set up metal barricades outside the courthouse and limiting foot traffic in the area. A protester stood holding a sign that read: “No U.S. Rights For Terrorists.”
Experts say that with so much evidence stacked against Mr. Abdulmutallab, his defense team is left with few options as the case moves forward. Attorneys outside the case say Mr. Abdulmutallab can challenge incriminating statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, seek a mental-health exam for Mr. Abdulmutallab — and seriously consider a plea deal.
Yup, that they’ll do.
Obama Calls for Intelligence Shakeup
Mr. Obama sketched four steps the intelligence community will take: assigning specific responsibility for following leads on terror threats; distributing intelligence reports more rapidly; strengthening the analytical process; and enhancing the criteria used to add people to terror watch lists.
I have a couple of questions:
How is what he proposes any different from what’s being done now?
How is that different from simply ordering people what to do?, or, as Drew points out,
So far it sounds like he’s saying, “I’ve directed we do things better”. Ah well, if only we had thought of that sooner.
He says he’s going to hold people accountable when they screw up but this time no one was directly responsible but the system failed. So, um, no one is held accountable if everyone is at fault? Ok.
But hey, at least he said we’re at war with al-Qaeda.
Boy, now he’s in real trouble; Obama administration revokes U.S. visa of accused Nigerian bomber. I guess they had to wait until they got back from Christmas break.
As Tommy Christopher Andrew Malcolm (with apologies!) puts it,
That will show him and who knows how many others that the Obama administration really means business.
Yup, “the system worked,” alright.
Actually, a tie:
What’s more ridiculous,
a. arresting Michael Yon for refusing to say how much money he makes,
or,
b. Keeping Joan Rivers from boarding a plane because her passport is under her married name?
You choose!
Is this what Janet Napolitano means when she says “the system worked“?
(h/t Michelle Malkin)
UPDATE
Ace:
But… um, this sort of highlights how utterly stupid our practice of ignoring the fact that it is, Muslims, period, who are going to be terrorists, and particularly Muslims from 1) overseas or 2) who travel to a lot of sketchy places overseas.
Instead of focusing on those people — which could get you fired for doing, by the way, which is why they don’t do it — they hassle someone they know for a fact is not a terrorist, just to log it in their quota book that they really asked tough questions of someone.
Someone they knew who could not possibly be a terrorist. They deliberately hassle the guy who can’t be a terrorist and don’t even look at the guy who may be because they continue to act under a jackass set of rules: 1) never give a Muslim any hassle (or it’s your ass, buddy), but 2) go through the motions and pretend you are looking for terrorists by hassling non-Muslims, so the administration can offer the PR that you hassled some people today.
And just to clarify: I think that question — how much do you make? — is obviously out of bounds, just because so many people consider it a None of Your F’n’ Business question. And maybe you could ask it if you have a strong reason to think you’re dealing with a terrorist.
But for some guy who plainly isn’t? Stupid.
And slapping on the cuffs for someone who doesn’t answer? Firable.
