No wisdom in giving terrorists a civilian judicial process
On Tuesday, top U.S. intelligence officials flanked Dennis C. Blair, the national intelligence director, as he delivered his threat assessment to an open session of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Whether the appearance of heads of the FBI, CIA, and Defense Intelligence Agency was at the White House’s urging or Blair’s own desire to share the pain, the entourage was useful in handling a barrage of questions emerging from Blair’s announcement that Al Qaeda has placed a high priority on making an attack on U.S. soil within the next three to six months.
The group also reported to the committee that success in the drone war that has targeted high-value enemy targets in Afghanistan has caused Al Qaeda to place greater prominence on its operations is Yemen and Somalia. The Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and alleged Fort Hood attacker, Maj. Nidal Hasan, have each been linked to Al Qaeda-affiliated individuals inside of Yemen.
CIA director Leon Panetta affirmed Blair’s grim appraisal of Al Qaeda’s intentions, adding that the terrorist syndicate had adapted its tactics “in ways that oftentimes make it hard to detect.”
As the sole purpose of intelligence is to protect American citizens and interests at home and abroad, any committee hearing about intelligence is implicitly one about security. Intelligence gathering locates a threat, defines its mode, and hands the information off to whatever forces are capable of interdiction. Because the White House policy in handling captured Al Qaeda or other terrorists now defaults to referring to a civilian procedure in which our enemies are not dealt with as combatants but as suspects with Constitutional protections, it was inevitable that questions of how intelligence will be gathered from Miranda-shielded defendants would be raised by members of the Intelligence Committee.
Even Blair — already on the hot seat for missteps and the lack of disclosure about who ultimately made the decision to read Abdulmutallab his rights after only an hour of interrogation — left the door open for the position of starting each case with the presumption of civilian prosecution, particularly if a terrorist detainment is rapidly attended to by a specially trained interrogation team.
“What I’m interested in is getting the intelligence out so that we can do a better job against the groups that send these people,” Blair said. “[T]he degree to which we back them up … quickly with an intelligence team which can help them with their requirements, I think that’s the key thing from my point of view.”
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) hammered the issue of civilian treatment of terrorist further, suggesting that not only was there a solid rationale and precedent for avoiding civil prosecution entirely. Sen. Hatch exposed the fallacy in the current belief among the assembled intelligence chiefs that the U.S. policy of non-civilian detention, symbolized by the detainment center at Guantanamo Bay, had been a powerful tool for Al Qaeda to use in its recruiting.
Sen. Hatch reminded the committee and the intelligence heads that prior to September 11 Al Qaeda used the civilian imprisonment and trial of the blind sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahmann, for his involvement in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, in their recruiting script. The “fair” treatment of the blind sheikh did nothing to either weaken Al Qaeda of prevent the deaths of almost 3,000 Americans. It was a point that Director Blair and the other agency chiefs did not have to answer. Sen. Diane Feinstein pulled rank and shuffled the hearing past Sen. Hatch’s difficult argument.
If Hatch’s common sense and logic fail to seep into the “smartest administration in history” at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, perhaps the efforts Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) — ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee — to learn more about how the executive branch is instructing its agents to make a decision to quickly escalate a case to advanced interrogation prior to the irreversible reading of rights, an option the intelligence director himself appeared to favor placing in the hands of enforcement and intelligence officers in the field.
Since December 9, Sen. Sessions and fellow Republican senators have sent a series of five letters to President Obama and members of his staff requesting further justification for their policy stance, urging for a reversal of the decision to try the Christmas Day bomber as a civilian, among other key items. One letter in particular was addressed to Attorney General Eric Holder asking for details about the response to the Christmas Day bombing attempt and requesting that he testify before the judiciary committee. To date, not one of the letters has received any sort of response. Sen. Sessions described his experience of throwing paper at the White House black hole on Fox News’ On The Record with Greta Van Susteren, a dialogue worth watching.
Although the apparent revisiting by the White House in its previously definitive call to hold civilian trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other high-value detainees in New York City may be an indication that reality has begun to take up residence in the Oval Office, the efforts of Sen. Hatch and Sen. Sessions should still be supported.
The White House’s current ad hoc policy is unreliable and defaulting to handling organized enemies of the United States as though they were just like gangsters running booze or drugs across the border is reckless. Al Qaeda, and its many-tentacled network of splinter groups, is an non-uniformed, decentralized army that wages war for a common purpose against the United States and is our enemy. In the words of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, “War is the remedy our enemy has chosen and I say let us give them all they want.”
If KSM had been captured under different circumstances, and during the Obama presidency, would U.S. interrogators have had the same opportunity to interrogate him in ways that yielded information that absolutely saved American lives and prevented attacks that had made it off the drawing board and into pre-attack staging phases? That question need never be answered if the Obama administration reverses itself and elects to treat terrorists as what they are – soldiers fighting a war against us and as such deserving of basic standards of fairness but not Constitutional protections.
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