NRO's Andy McCarthy, ace terror prosecutor, wonders why the Justice Dept. filed a public complaint that alerts possible confederates (if any), when the law does not so require, and fears that politics is at work....
Manhattan Institute scholar Judith Miller raises ten questions re the Times Square bomber, all of which merit answers. Her full list I leave to LFTC readers. Here are my favorites:
2. When law-abiding citizens are having their toothpaste, tweezers, and mouth wash confiscated by over-zealous TSA airport screeners, how did Shahzad manage to board a flight, especially one bound for the Middle East, less than 24 hours after law enforcement had circulated his name and photo as someone being sought in connection with the failed bombing attempt?
3. Why did his name not come up on the TSA’s notoriously problematic “no fly” list? Or on any list? And why did neither Emirates nor U.S. security personnel at JFK not double check the name and passport photo of a guy paying cash for a ticket to Dubai 53 hours after Shahzad nearly turned Times Square into what Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, describing his explosives-laden Pathfinder, called “one big Hurt Locker”?4. Why did the 80-plus surveillance cameras at Times Square catch the image of a 40-something-year-old white guy furtively removing one shirt to reveal an underlying red one, but miss what must have been an obviously nervous Shahzad running away from his illegally parked Pathfinder, the engine still running and its hazard lights on?
5. And why has New York not invested in the sophisticated surveillance system that London uses, which as former police commissioner Bill Bratton noted today, was able to track (albeit after the fact) the movement of the Islamic militants in the deadly July 7, 2005 attack from the trains they took into London to the subways and buses they targeted?
By the end of this year the Transportation Security Administration's Secure Flight program should be fully in place. It will transfer flight list issues management to TSA from the airlines; it is already being implemented in pilot programs at selected airports.
Here is a crisp Wednesday Fox All-Star panel terrorism discussion on Fox News Special Report. The New York Times presents a portrait of the suspect & his life. A Los Angeles Times front-pager reveals that since 2008 the CIA has had clearance to target with drones unarmed terror suspects, based upon analysis of their movements and behavior.
And here is a New York Times video clip (2:58) featuring the suspect's native village in the Waziristan province of Pakistan's Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATAs), located on the country's northwest frontier border with Afghanistan. The video is instructive less on the suspect than on how difficult a task we face dealing with Pakistanis who are highly suspicious of America and prone, like so much of the Islamic world, to favor conspiracy theories. Which bodes ill for our hope to prevail against islamist terror emanating from the region. A Washington Post front-pager adds detail in the same vein. One Pakistani journalist sees North Waziristan today as more of an incubator of terror than was Afghanistan a decade ago.
Ann Coulter does a neatly acid take on our homeland security & immigration policies:
Meanwhile, on that same Monday at JFK airport, approximately 100,000 passengers took off their shoes, coats, belts and sunglasses for airport security.
But the "highly trained federal force" The New York Times promised us on Oct. 28, 2001, when the paper demanded that airport security be federalized, failed to stop the only guy they needed to stop at JFK last Monday -- the one who planted a bomb in the middle of Times Square days earlier.
So why were 100,000 other passengers harassed and annoyed by the TSA?
The federal government didn't stop the diaper bomber from nearly detonating a bomb over Detroit. It didn't stop a guy on the "No Fly" list from boarding a plane and coming minutes away from getting out of the country.
If our only defense to terrorism is counting on alert civilians, how about not bothering them before they board airplanes, instead of harassing them with useless airport "security" procedures?
Both of the attempted bombers who sailed through airport security, I note, were young males of the Islamic faith. I wonder if we could develop a security plan based on that information?
And speaking of a "highly trained federal force," who's working at the INS these days? Who on earth made the decision to allow Shahzad the unparalleled privilege of becoming a U.S. citizen in April 2009?
Our "Europeans Need Not Apply" immigration policies were absurd enough before 9/11. But after 19 foreign-born Muslims, legally admitted to the U.S., murdered 3,000 Americans in New York and Washington in a single day, couldn't we tighten up our admission policies toward people from countries still performing stonings and clitorectomies?
Former NYPD counter-terrorism ace Michael Sheehan urges deployment of more surveillance cameras in New York, citing London's successful use of them. He notes that had the car bomb detonated, the only way to positively ID the vehicle would have been from camera footage. A WSJ op-ed notes that legal tools to track US citizens are very limited. Charles Krauthammer writes that the Miranda rule should be modernized for the war we are fighting:
The public safety exception should be enlarged to allow law enforcement to interrogate, without Mirandizing, those arrested in the commission of terrorist crimes (and make the answers admissible) -- until law enforcement is satisfied that vital intelligence related to other possible plots and threats to public safety has been sufficiently acquired.
This could be done by congressional statute. Or the administration could, in an actual case, refrain from Mirandizing until it had explored the outer limits of any plot -- and then defend its actions before the courts, resting its argument on the Supreme Court's own logic in the Quarles case: "We conclude that the need for answers to questions in a situation posing a threat to the public safety outweighs the need for the [Miranda] rule."
CK prefers treating all terror detainees as unlawful combatants in military courts, but if we are to be stuck in civilian courts--surely the case in liberal administrations--at least the rules should be updated to permit intelligence-gathering without prejudicing prosecution of terror detainees by forcing exclusion of interrogation evidence.
Bottom Line. Someday P.C. will get Americans killed by the carload. It is not too late to cast P.C. away and face reality squarely.
Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, 9/11, National Security, Terrorism, Homeland Security, WMD, Foreign Policy, Conservative Politics,
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