Manhattan Says No to Terror Trials
Today, Politico Arena asks:
Terror trials: Is it time for the administration to retreat and rethink? Is it generally mishandling the terrorism issue?
My response:
On no issue is President Obama getting acquainted with reality more clearly than terrorism, or so it seems. He blazed into office, guns holstered, as the anti-Bush, putting Eric Holder’s Justice Department in charge, not of the War on Terror, a phrase he banished from his administration’s lexicon, but of “bringing those who planned and plotted the [9/11] attacks to justice,” as Holder put it in November when he announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others would be given civilian trials in downtown Manhattan. But as the manifold costs of such a trial became increasingly apparent, and as even New York Democrats have grown increasingly restive, the White House, it seems, has backed down. We await the line of congressmen saying “Bring the trial to my district.”
How could it be otherwise? The administration’s law-enforcement approach to terrorism has been unserious and folly from the start. In an understated yet devastating piece in yesterday’s Washington Post, former CIA director Michael V. Hayden cataloged that folly, nowhere more evident than in the FBI’s handling of the would-be Christmas Day bomber, who was Mirandized and lawyered up long before he could be seriously interrogated by agents with the background to elicit the intelligence we need — not to prosecute terrorists, but to prevent future terrorist attacks. The most telling revelation in Hayden’s piece came at the end, however. In August, the government unveiled its High Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) designed to interrogate people like the Christmas Day bomber, and it announced also that the FBI would begin questioning CIA officers about alleged abuses in the 2004 inspector general’s report. Was the HIG called in to interrogate the Christmas Day bomber? No — it has yet to be formed. But the interrogations of CIA officers are proceeding apace. So much for the administration’s priorities. Is it any wonder that Scott Brown’s pollsters report that terrorism, and the administration’s mishandling of the issue, polled better even than Brown’s opposition to ObamaCare?
Cheney’s Worldview
Former vice president Richard Cheney gave his big address on national security (pdf) over at AEI last week. He covered a lot of ground, but this passage, I think, tells us quite a bit about Cheney’s worldview:
If fine speech-making, appeals to reason, or pleas for compassion had the power to move [al-Qaeda], the terrorists would long ago have abandoned the field. And when they see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don’t stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along. Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for — our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity.
So we shouldn’t let the terrorists see us get “caught up in arguments” about the wisdom of our foreign policy, about whether our country should go to war, about our country’s treaty obligations, about the parameters of government power under our Constitution? What is this former vice president thinking?
Does it matter if Charles Manson appreciates the fact that he got a trial instead of a summary execution? No. It does not matter what’s in that twisted head of his. Same thing with bin Laden. The American military should make every effort to avoid civilian casualties even if bin Laden targets civilians. Similarly, it does not matter if bin Laden scoffs at the Geneva Convention as a sign of ”weakness.” The former VP does not get it. It is about us, not the terrorists.
An obsession with the mentality of the enemy (what they see; what they hope for, etc.) can distort our military and counterterrorism strategy (pdf) as well. Cheney wants to find out what bin Laden’s objective is and then thwart it. I certainly agree that gathering intelligence about the enemy is useful, but Cheney seems so obsessed that he wants to thwart al-Qaeda’s objectives — even if some pose no threat to the USA, and even if some of al-Qaeda’s objectives are pure folly.
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