Mirandized Security Risks
- 0 Comments
Remember Greg Craig?
Before his recently
announced return to the private sector, Craig was White House
counsel in the Obama administration, and also the President’s
designated point-man on smoothing the way for fulfilling an
ill-conceived presidential campaign promise: the closure of the
terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay by January 2010.
It is widely acknowledged
that the “resignation” Craig tendered in November of last year
was the result of his failure to manage the difficult politics
involved in shutting Gitmo down.
There were numerous indications along the way that Craig
had fundamentally misread Congress and the American people on
this issue. We were recently reminded of just how bad the
miscalculation was: reports
indicate that the administration will likely be backing down
from the idea of putting 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
— currently held in Gitmo — on trial in New York City, because
it rightfully believes Congress will not hand over the funds for
such a misguided, politically suicidal endeavor.
But when it comes to Craig’s removal, one thing is more
telling than Congress’s repudiation of his overtures. Craig was
shown the door because of his failure to sell a bad
policy that, were it to be realized, would jeopardize our
national security and make us less safe.
Compare that outcome with the Obama national security
team’s handling of Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian al
Qaeda operative who attempted to blow up a plane over Detroit on
Christmas Day. From the moment Abdulmutallab got on the plane to
the moment he was Mirandized and allowed to lawyer up like a
common criminal, key individuals with principal responsibility
for preventing these incidents — Secretary of Homeland Security
Janet Napolitano; Assistant to the President for Homeland
Security and Counterterrorism John Brennan; Attorney General Eric
Holder; and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair –
proceeded to mishandle the attempted bombing and its aftermath in
trainwreck fashion:
Napolitano: Shortly after a
few brave passengers thwarted Abdulmuttalab’s underwear
detonation, Secretary Napolitano proclaimed
on CNN: “..the system worked. Everybody played an
important role here. The passengers and crew of the flight took
appropriate action.” This prompted widespread
ridicule and bipartisan calls for her resignation. She
subsequently
backtracked, stating that the system clearly had not worked,
and that her comments to the contrary were taken out of
context.
Given that Napolitano began her tenure by replacing the
word “terrorism” with the decidedly sterile phrase “man-caused
disasters” in the DHS lexicon, and then proceeded to issue a
report
indicating that soldiers returning from service in Iraq or
Afghanistan were a security threat, it is perhaps not surprising
that, consistent with her inverted view of the threat landscape,
this near-catastrophe was seen as a demonstration of
success.
Brennan: Mr. Brennan
initially suggested there was “no smoking gun” to indicate that
Abdulmutallab intended to board a plane and blow it up. Brennan’s
own
report was released days later, indicating:
The information available to the CT community over the
last several months — which included pieces of information
about Mr. Abdulmutallab, information about [al Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula] and its plans, and information about an
individual now believed to be Mr. Abdulmutallab and his
association with AQAP in its attack planning — was obtained by
several agencies. Though all of that information was available
to all-source analysts at the CIA and the [National
Counterterrorism Center] prior to the attempted attack, the
dots were never connected, and as a result, the problem appears
to be more about a component failure to “connect the dots,”
rather than a lack of information sharing.
But is it not precisely the job of the counterterrorism and
intelligence community to connect such dots? As homeland security
expert James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation
aptly put it prior to the report’s release:
There is almost never a smoking gun. There was no smoking
gun in 26 of the 28 terrorist attacks foiled by the US since
9/11 (Abdulmutallab and Richard Reid were stopped by dumb
luck). We built the post-9/11 security system because we never
expect to have a smoking gun, because we expect the
administration to connect-the-dots.
Holder: The first FBI agents
on the scene interrogated Abdulmutallab for about fifty minutes
before the Holder Justice Department intervened from Washington
and
instructed a team of new agents to read Abdulmutallab his
Miranda rights, after which he promptly stopped talking
and did not start again for several weeks. As Thomas Joscelyn
points out in the Weekly Standard, Abdulmutallab
potentially knows a great deal about al Qaeda
operations overseas and here in the United States, including
those involving American recruits — he could have disclosed
valuable intelligence on this much sooner had he not been
Mirandized. Ironically, while this administration insists
on, in the words
of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, never letting a serious crisis go
to waste, the Attorney General proceeded to waste this serious
crisis in less than an hour.
What precipitated the switch? Because the Justice
Department is being run by an Attorney General who insists on
using our criminal justice system to handle terrorists,
interrogations must now stand up to more stringent,
defendant-oriented rules of evidence to obtain a conviction. The
result: the same ideology that had driven Holder to try the 9/11
perpetrators in Lower Manhattan made it harder to gather timely,
accurate intelligence and possibly stop future attacks.
Blair: Dennis Blair is the
Director of National Intelligence. According to the DNI website: “the
Office of the DNI’s goal is to effectively integrate foreign,
military and domestic intelligence in defense of the homeland and
of United States interests abroad. “
Given that integration is in the job description, it is
more than a bit alarming that Blair, when testifying before the
Senate on the Detroit flight incident, indicated that the
so-called High Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG), rather
than the FBI, should have taken custody of Abdulmutallab. As
Blair
put it:
[The HIG] was created for exactly this purpose — 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.
Why is this alarming? Because not only is the HIG, as Blair
himself later
clarified, not yet operational, but it had not been
operational since President Obama mandated its creation in August
of 2009 — information that one would hope the Director of
National Intelligence can keep straight in assessing what went
wrong.
So…Craig is out because he could not spin a bad policy;
Napolitano, Brennan, Holder and Blair stay put even though they
have demonstrated an inability to fulfill the most basic
component of their job descriptions: protecting us. Put another
way, the ability to sell a policy that threatens our national
security is of greater value to this White House than the ability
to actually prevent terrorists from getting on our planes and to
extract intelligence from those we manage to catch. Fail to do
the former, pack your bags. Fail to do the latter, stick around
and chalk the whole thing up to “systemic failure” in which
everyone is responsible, and therefore no one is
responsible.
The Christmas Day bomber incident underscores that after a
full year in office, the time has come for President Obama to
fundamentally reorient his outlook on national security, to value
performance over spin and appoint others who do the same.
National security needs to be entrusted to individuals who
understand that we are at war — that the
terror-prevention system is not working if the passengers have to
stop the bomber themselves; that bureaucratic inertia and
ineffective communication between intelligence agencies are
unacceptable vulnerabilities; that allowing a terrorist operative
the right to remain silent as if he was caught robbing a
convenient store will cut off the flow of critical intelligence;
that those in charge of coordinating intelligence operations
across the federal government must understand fully which assets
are available for leveraging.
In the days following 25 December 2009, President Obama
himself
announced “we are at war with al Qaeda.” If he truly believes
that, then for the sake of national security he needs to exercise
the authority, as presidents before him have done after their
first year in office, to remove for the right reasons those
serving under him who cannot do their jobs — in this case
Napolitano, Brennan, Holder, Blair, and those on their staffs
directly responsible for the errors made in this instance. Stop
prioritizing spin over security.
