The 9/11 Panel chiefs joined a growing chorus of criticism of Team Obama's mishandling of the Flight #253 XMAS bomber. Author Marc Theissen surveys the wreckage of our detainee interrogation policy under Team Obama and finds a gaping hole.
Why was Team Obama's High-value Interrogation Group (HIG) not yet operational, given that the Bush-=era program was immediately shut down in 2009 when 44 took office? Theissen explains:
Why was the HIG not ready? Because the Obama administration did not think it necessary. Under Obama, the administration is no longer trying to capture high-value terrorists alive for questioning. So when (much to their surprise) they found themselves with a high-value detainee in their custody, they were caught completely unprepared. Without consulting intelligence and counterterrorism officials, Attorney General Eric Holder directed that he be given a lawyer and told he had the “right to remain silent” — a right he has duly exercised.
COPS can use more interrogation tools than Team Obama allows for terrorists:
As I explain in Courting Disaster, even if the HIG were “fully operational,” we might be better off with Abdulmutallab in the hands of the Detroit Police Department — because under the rules established by the Obama administration, local law-enforcement officials actually have more tools at their disposal to interrogate common criminals than our military and intelligence officials have to interrogate captured terrorists. The Obama administration has limited the techniques available to the HIG to those contained in the Army Field Manual — a document that governs the interrogation of enemy prisoners of war with full Geneva Convention protections — even though there is a wide universe of lawful techniques beyond those included in the Army Field Manual that could be used to question high-value terrorists.
Local police use techniques beyond the Army Field Manual every day. For example, police detectives and district attorneys regularly use the threat of execution to get ordinary criminals to confess — offering to take capital punishment off the table if a criminal cops a plea or turns in his accomplices. Under the Army Field Manual this is not permitted; detainees cannot be threatened in any way. In other words, President Obama has so denuded our intelligence agencies’ interrogation capabilities that putting the HIG in charge of his interrogation would likely have been a useless exercise.
And here is what we lost by Mirandizing the XMAS bomber:
This is a massive intelligence failure on a number of levels. It cost us invaluable time-sensitive intelligence. From al-Qaeda’s vantage point, Abdulmutallab was supposed to be dead — vaporized with the plane that he was planning to explode. As soon as they learned that he was in custody, they began scrambling to cover his tracks — closing their e-mail accounts, cell-phone numbers, and bank accounts; putting terrorist leaders and operatives he knew about into hiding; and shutting down other trails of intelligence he might give us to follow. Every minute, every hour, every day that passed while Abdulmutallab exercised his “right to remain silent” cost us invaluable counterterrorism opportunities. Obama officials have said that they can still get information from him in the plea-bargaining process. Putting aside the question of why we should reduce his punishment in exchange for information, by the time we reach a plea deal it will be too late — the information will be useless.....
On Christmas Day, we were given an unexpected gift. A terrorist fell into our hands who possessed invaluable intelligence: the locations of the camps where he trained; the names of the people who trained him; the identities of those who trained alongside him for follow-up missions; the phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and bank-account numbers of those who sent him to kill Americans and may be sending others to do the same. We questioned him for 50 minutes, then read him his rights. If we get hit again, we will look back at that decision as the worst intelligence failure since Sept. 11, 2001.
Byron York reports in the Washington Examiner that a growing number of senators want the XMAS bomber transferred to military custody and interrogated. The "Last straw" for some senators was WH press flack telling Chris Wallace that 50 minutes of questioning fully sufficed. But York notes, citing two Reagan administration veteran legal aces, that it is unclear that the courts would allow the switcheroo:
But it raises a critical question: Once Abdulmutallab has been given the Miranda warning, can the administration take it back?
"Of course," says David Rivkin, a lawyer who served in the Reagan and Bush I administrations. "To the extent that the facts justifying his designation as an enemy combatant are there, you can always designate him as such. Miranda rights are relevant only to interrogations in the criminal justice system. If he were transferred to the military justice system, it wouldn't be taking those rights back -- it would be just irrelevant."
Others worry that it wouldn't be so easy. "The problem is, once you get them into the civilian system, the federal courts have made very clear that they're not going to let go easily," says Lee Casey, another veteran of the Reagan and Bush I administrations who has co-authored several articles with Rivkin. "While I think it would be a great idea, given how solicitous the courts have been of these detainees, I doubt the federal courts would cede jurisdiction."
Rich Lowry of NRO puts in even sharper perspective how monumental Team Obama's foolishness was:
Intending to die in the act of destroying a jetliner, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab instead landed alive in Detroit as a kind of message in a bottle from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He knew more about its recruiting, training, and operations than anyone who is ever likely to fall into our arms babbling like a scared 23-year-old.But the Obama administration shut him down. It didn’t go so far as to tell the Customs and Border Protection officers to cover their ears and try not to listen when Abdulmutallab made incriminating statements on the initial ride to the hospital, but it came close. It had an FBI team inform Abdulmutallab of his right to remain silent, after which he predictably remained silent.
This is brazen self-sabotage. We are in a war of intelligence. People risk their lives every day to get the information to understand the terror networks arrayed against us and identify specific threats. Why would we pre-emptively silence a priceless source of timely intelligence?
It literally didn’t even occur to the administration to do otherwise. Top terrorism officials weren’t consulted. The director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the director of National Intelligence, the FBI director, and the secretary of Homeland Security were all out of the loop. Some as-yet-unidentified top Justice Department official, who probably is known around the office as “general,” made the call.
"General" as an...Attorney-General Eric Holder, who is turning out to be the worst-ever A-G, with the possible exception of Clinton's Frankenstein's monster A-G, Janet Reno. Holder's January 2002 statement to CNN had presented a refreshingly realistic view of the limits of using Geneva Convention rules to govern treatment of unlawful combatants held in detention:
One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located; under the Geneva Convention that you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people.
It seems to me that given the way in which they have conducted themselves, however, that they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war. If, for instance, Mohamed Atta had survived the attack on the World Trade Center, would we now be calling him a prisoner of war? I think not. Should Zacarias Moussaoui be called a prisoner of war? Again, I think not.
Why did Holder change his mind? My jaundiced guess: Holder above all wanted to be A-G. In an Obama administration, any A-G candidate had to repudiate this. For Holder, who helped negotiate the pardon deal that spared Marc rich the inconvenience of going to jail, it was all too easy to change sides, and step up to a Cabinet title.
Bottom Line. The damage this time is already done--in the words of long-ago Yankee sportscaster Mel Allen's on-air call on home runs, "It's going, going, gone!" Al-Qaeda has had a month's time to cover its tracks and recalibrate to avoid damage from XMAS bomber spillage. What we can learn from him might tell us where al-Qaeda was, operationally, a month ago, but likely is of far less value going forward.
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