THE FAILED CHRISTMAS-DAY ATTACK
A Wake-up Call and an Opportunity for President Obama
Ed Ross | January 4, 2010
On Christmas Day a combination of luck, incompetence, and quick reaction prevented the scattering of 300 bodies from Northwest Flight 253 across the Michigan landscape. The breakdown in security that allowed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board the aircraft and reports that there are hundreds more like him in Yemen waiting to martyr themselves should serve as wake-up call to President Obama and his administration. It also provides him an opportunity that he should not fail to take advantage of.
Since President Obama took office he has done everything possible to distance himself from George W. Bush's policies for dealing with captured terrorists. He’s denounced and banned enhanced interrogation techniques. He’s relieved the CIA of principal responsibility for interrogating high-value terrorist detainees. His Justice Department is investigating Bush administration CIA contract interrogators. He’s committed to closing Guantanamo. He’s decided to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 terrorists in a civilian court in New York. He’s replaced the “war on terror” with a return to the pre-9/11 criminal-justice approach.
He has done all this for the stated purposes of improving America’s image in the Muslim world and “restoring American values.” Unfortunately, the Islamist-Jihadists committed to the destruction of America have not been swayed, and the overwhelming majority of Americans disagree with his assessment of American values.
Attempted terrorist attacks during the Obama administration continue at the same pace they occurred during the Bush administration--two to three a year. The first since Obama took office and the first successful terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11 happened on November 5, 2009, when al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist US Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 people and wounded 30 more at Fort Hood, Texas. The Christmas-Day attack was the second. There are many more to come on Obama’s watch.
Absolutely no credible evidence exists to support the belief that the Obama criminal-justice counterterrorism strategy, based on liberal ideology rather than facts, will reduce the terrorist threat to the United States. To the contrary, there is compelling evidence to support the argument that it only denies US intelligence and counterterrorism agencies critical information needed to thwart terrorist attacks.
Certainly, since December 25th, Obama has considered the difference a successful Christmas-Day attack, in the wake of the Fort Hood shootings, would have made for the country and his presidency, and he wants to do everything possible to ensure the terrorists don’t succeed in the future.
But if all President Obama does when he returns from his Hawaii vacation and meets with administration homeland-security officials in the White House is focus on a single hole in the dike, then he will waste a valuable opportunity. Tightening up on intelligence sharing and airport security procedures to prevent another Abdulmutallab are important and necessary tasks. They are not enough, however, to protect Americans from a resourceful and determined enemy.
If Obama is to thwart future terrorist attacks on the United States he must have every scrap of intelligence it is possible to legitimately collect; and that includes intelligence from captured terrorists like Abdulmutallab.
The 23-year-old Nigerian certainly is no Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and he already may have provided some useful information when US law-enforcement officers first took him into custody. Nevertheless, the minute he was read his Miranda rights and provided with a lawyer, opportunities to obtain intelligence information ceased. Abdulmutallab spent several months in Yemen; no doubt he has additional information that would help foil future attacks.
While desirable, it's not necessary that President Obama reverse his decisions on closing Guantanamo or the use of enhanced interrogation techniques.
When the Attorney General announced that the Department of Justice would try Mohammed in New York, he also announced that a military tribunal would try Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri--a Saudi Arabian of Yemeni descent, who has been held at Guantánamo since 2006 for the October 2000 USS Cole bombing. Thus, Obama decided to try terrorists who attack civilian targets in civilian courts and terrorists who attack military targets in military courts, an unnecessary distinction but one that validated the legitimacy of military tribunals to try terrorists.
Classifying all captured terrorists with ties to al-Qaeda and similar terrorist organizations as illegal enemy combatants, regardless of their targets, will allow
Terrorists like Anwar al-Awlaki, who had ties to both Hasan and Abdulmutallab, could care less whether the US gives the suicide bombers he recruits all the constitutional rights of an American citizen and a trial in a civilian court.
As for American values, according to a Rasmussen Reports Survey conducted following the Christmas-Day incident, “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.”
What distinguishes great presidents, indeed all great leaders, from mediocre ones is their ability to recognize their mistakes and correct them before it is too late. President Obama now has the rare opportunity to do that before more American lives are lost. If he chooses not to he’ll have no one to blame but himself.
COPYRIGHT © Edward W. Ross 2010, All Rights Reserved