More CYA From The Obama White House…Christmas Day Bomber Now Talking Because Of Family

Covenient …. and it is probably going to cost us a fortune. I wonder how rich the feds made his family?

Not to mention that now this information is two months old. I am pretty sure the terrorist cell he was part of is not still waiting around for people to stop by for a visit.

Note this: “The family persuaded Abdulmutallab to work with the FBI, believing he would be treated fairly in U.S. courts.”

U.S. courts? An obvious dig at the designation of his loon as an enemy combatant.

There is a further question as to what kind of plea deal they might be offering him to talk.

But the bottom line is that we get the intelligence right?

Well, most of what he says now, A MONTH AFTER THE ATTACK, is now worthless. The plotters who sent this nut to do his job never expected him to live. And had we been able to question him more thoroughly immediately after the fact what he told us might have led us directly to the plotters who have now had plenty of time to cover their tracks.

This news is nothing more than an Obama damage control operation. What a shame they don’t spend as much time working on national security than they do spinning their failures.

One major problem with this turn around is that critical moments in intelligence gathering were lost when Abdulmutallab clammed up after only 50 minutes of interrogation. Once his al Qaeda cohorts realized he was captured alive and not martyred, they are racing against the clock to cover up email traces, purging phone numbers, and alerting operatives/associates who might have been in danger of being apprehended.

One of the last high-value detainees we had been interrogating (back when enhanced interrogation was allowed) was held for 3 months before al Qaeda finally learned of his capture and interrogation. Because they were unaware, during this period, they continued on with operational plans they deemed secure. And the information we were able to get from the 3-month luxury did foil plots.

In August of 2009, the Obama administration shut down our ability to detain high-value captures in secrecy, forcing us to report within 2 weeks to the International Red Cross the identity of who we capture. Before, our CIA and military could file one-week extensions to the Secretary of Defense that the detainee’s identity not yet be revealed, so long as the detainee was still ripe with intell information.

On a related note:

* FEBRUARY 1, 2010, 7:11 P.M. ET

A Tale of Two Terrorists

By DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. AND MARC A. THIESSEN

The Obama administration’s decision to read the Christmas Day bomber his Miranda rights has rightly come under withering criticism. Instead of a lengthy interrogation by officials with al Qaeda expertise, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was questioned for 50 minutes by local FBI agents and then later advised of his “right to remain silent.”

It’s well understood that the focus on gaining evidence for a criminal trial was an intelligence failure of massive proportions. Not well understood is that the most powerful recent argument for aggressively interrogating terrorists, keeping them in military detention, and prosecuting them in military commissions comes to us from the Obama Justice Department itself.

On Dec. 18, 2009, days before the Christmas attack, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, made a secret filing in federal district court that was aimed at saving the prosecution of Ahmed Ghailani, another al Qaeda terrorist. Ghailani is facing charges for helping al Qaeda bomb U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Ghailani argues that those charges should be dropped because lengthy CIA interrogations have denied him his constitutional right to a speedy trial.

Mr. Bharara, on behalf of the Justice Department, filed a memorandum with the court stating that Ghailani’s claims are dangerous and off the mark. Interrogating terrorists must come before criminal prosecution, he wrote in language so strong that even a redacted version of his filing (which we have obtained) serves as a searing indictment of the administration’s mishandling of Abdulmutallab.

“The United States was, and still is, at war with al Qaeda,” Mr. Bharara argued. “And because the group does not control territory as a sovereign nation does, the war effort relies less on deterrence than on disruption—on preventing attacks before they can occur. At the core of such disruption efforts is obtaining accurate intelligence about al Qaeda’s plans, leaders and capabilities.”

Mr. Bharara is right. The interrogation of a high-value terrorist is a critical opportunity to obtain intelligence. As Mr. Bharara pointed out in regards to Ghailani, “the defendant was . . . a rare find, and his then-recent interactions with top-level al Qaeda terrorists made him a potentially rich source of information that was both urgent and crucial to our nation’s war efforts.” Abdulmutallab’s recent interactions with leaders of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula made it likely he could give up actionable intelligence. He possessed unique information about those who deployed him, bomb makers who prepared him, and operatives who trained with him.

As Mr. Bharara’s memorandum notes, “The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 . . . naturally resulted in a heightened focus on intelligence gathering to preempt another attack.” He went on to say that “when the United States took custody of the defendant . . . and it justifiably believed that he had actionable intelligence that could be used to save lives, it reasonably opted to treat him initially as an intelligence asset.”

The Justice Department did not bring Ghailani to a civilian court immediately after he was captured in 2004, preferring, after his lengthy interrogation was completed, to prosecute him in a military commission. It wasn’t until June that his case was shifted to the criminal justice system.

Moreover, the government “did not Mirandize the defendant at any point to preserve the possibility of later using his inculpatory statements. It did not maintain a strict chain of custody with respect to physical evidence in the manner of a law enforcement agency. . . . Indeed, the goal of the [CIA interrogation program] was remote from law enforcement; the program’s purpose was to gain intelligence, not to get admissible confessions or to gather admissible evidence.”

This, according to Mr. Bharara’s filing, was the right approach: “the defendant . . . did in fact have actionable intelligence about al Qaeda,” and thus “the interest in national security plainly justified holding the defendant in this case as an enemy combatant, interrogating him, and prosecuting him for violations of the laws of war, even if that meant delaying his criminal trial.”

Days after Mr. Bharara’s filing, as the Abdulmutallab fiasco unfolded, Attorney General Eric Holder and other senior administration officials made it clear in congressional testimony and numerous media appearances that their focus was no longer on gathering intelligence to pre-empt an attack, but on prosecuting terrorists in the criminal justice system. That change in focus likely grew out of President Barack Obama’s early decision to close the prison complex at Guantanamo, and to transfer high-value detainees like Ghailani who have been held there to the criminal justice system.

One immediate consequence of the president’s approach is the effort by Ghailani’s lawyers to take full advantage of a bevy of constitutional rights that are available to him in the civilian justice system, but which he would have never received in a military commission. Ghailani’s demand that charges against him be dropped because of the long delay in getting a trial is likely only the first of a torrent of filings to come from al Qaeda members if the administration persists on trying them in civilian courts.

Administration officials have rejected robust interrogation methods and announced that those remaining Guantanamo detainees who would be neither tried nor released are slated to be transferred to a prison in Thompson, Ill.

These decisions have been accompanied by intensified investigations of, and threats to prosecute, career and political officials from the previous administration. So it is ironic that the assessments laid out in the Ghailani memorandum were not proffered by the administration’s conservative critics, but by Mr. Bharara, who was appointed by Mr. Obama, and the career Justice officials who helped draft his filing. In other words, it was written by those who have been forced to deal with the consequences of trying terrorists in civilian courts.

This administration’s approach greatly impairs our ability to obtain vital intelligence and puts us all at greater risk of suffering another terrorist attack. Hopefully, the administration will consider the arguments of its own prosecutors and change course before it’s too late.

@OLDPUPPYMAX — ‘They’ will find a way. . .NoBama should just start abbreviating Blame It On Bush — BIOB.

I think I even saw John McCain uttering this acronym to a colleague at the recent SOTUS. . after NoBama spewed yet another BIOB declaration.

Sorry for all the C&P, this is a good article from amazingly, CBS. Now we are witnessing “damge control.”

The Holder/Obama decision to mirandize the terrorist was wrong and in his five pages of single spaced letter, he’s basically attempting to profess, IMHO, ignorance of the law regarding combatant terrorists. Man up, or should I say “Cheney-up?” There are animals out there trying to kill us.

Although he still may have some intelligence to offer, the five-week delay in questioning him diminished it, they say, because it gave al Qaeda time to adjust to whatever he revealed—changing safe houses, closing down email accounts, adopting new pseudonyms.

That’s why questions were raised immediately when agents read Abdulmutallab his rights and Holder opted to charge him with a crime like an ordinary murder suspect, instead of detaining him in a military process, with continued interrogations by intelligence experts.

Aware of needed damage control, the White House and Attorney General are now taking the position that, legally, it was “highly questionable” whether they could have detained the terror suspect and continued to question him without a lawyer, even if they wanted to. Holder, in his letter to the Senators, said that legal authority “is far from clear.”

Many legal experts, however, agree the law is, in fact, pretty clear: It’s not that highly questionable at all. Under existing law, the Obama Administration had the authority to detain and question Abdulmutallab more extensively. And it chose not to.

If the Obama Administration wants to make a policy decision to treat al Qaeda operatives as common criminals and not as enemy combatants, that’s a position it could take—and some advocate they should. They’ve argued that giving rights to these terrorists, for example, will enhance our standing in the world and deter future terrorist acts.

But those are policy arguments and policy decisions, and they have consequences. They should stand or fall on the merits. They aren’t required by law.
To argue, instead, that the law essentially tied has their hands—that the law all but required this course of action in Detroit–ignores the cases that have been decided.

And there’s a danger in that. Whether or not the Obama Administration made the right call on Christmas Day, it’s a problem to see top officials now make incomplete or misleading legal arguments to justify their decision after the fact.

Today’s legal argument that it was “far from clear” they could continue interrogating Abudulmutallab, even if they wanted to, could set this administration down a fixed path on the most pressing issues facing this nation, based in no small measure on old-fashioned damage control.

There is clear legal basis to detain al Qaeda combatants. Congress expressly authorized force against “nations, organizations, or persons” who carried out the 9/11 attacks, and two Presidents have made it clear this is a war. Federal courts have either endorsed or not questioned the government’s authority to detain al Qaeda members and actual combatants in wartime.

As Gregory Katsas, an assistant attorney general in the Bush Administration pointed out to me, Abdulmutallab is an actual combatant. He’s not some money guy or a facilitator. He tried to blow up a plane with nearly 300 people on board. And he’s not a U.S. citizen. Sure, he’s being held in this country, Katsas notes, but so were three enemy combatants during the Bush Administration—Yaser Esam Hamdi, Jose Padilla and Ali Salah Al Marri–and courts have said those detentions were lawful.

And while it’s true that a New York-based federal appeals court said the government had no authority to detain Padilla, a U.S. citizen arrested in the United States, the Supreme Court specifically rejected that rationale in another case involving Hamdi. A separate, Richmond-based federal appeals court later upheld his detention in the military process.

Bottom line: the government prevailed in every case involving enemy combatants being held in this country.

And while it’s true, as Holder points out, that a federal judge could someday say that a non-U.S. citizen like Abdulmutallab had a right to a lawyer, even in the military process, the Supreme Court has never ruled those rights kick in immediately or at the same time as in the criminal process. At a minimum, they could have gotten days longer to question him by putting him on the military track.

One of the most fascinating undercurrents in this entire debate is seeing White House officials defend themselves by saying the Bush Administration decided to Mirandize attempted shoe bomber Richard Reid and try him in a criminal court. I didn’t realize the Obama Administration had decided to adopt wholesale Bush’s policies, yet they’re arguing that since Bush did it with Reid, it’s ok. But has anyone ever thought maybe Bush was wrong? He certainly wasn’t arguing, as the Obama Administration is, that it was legally questionable to detain and extensively interrogate terror suspects without lawyers present.

“Quite a turnabout,” Katsas said, “in rhetorical strategy.”

And that’s before you get to the real differences between Reid, whom many believe was more of a lone actor, and Abdulmutallab, who was an operative trained with and directed by al Qaeda abroad. Abdulmutallab presumably would have valuable, actionable intelligence—about his handlers, their locale, and his own individualized training–if interrogators had moved quickly to extensively question him before al Qaeda readjusted.

But that wasn’t the path this administration took with Abdulmutallab. And the legal arguments top officials now are making to justify it suggest there won’t be a course correction anytime soon.

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2010/02/03/crossroads/entry6170994.shtml?tag=cbsnewsLeadStoriesAreaMain;cbsnewsLeadStoriesHeadlines

Reid was arrested three months after 911, prior to all the years of court rulings, he also pled guilty sparing us the spectacle of trying him in Federal Court, nothing like the current case. Obama and Holder blew it and now they are trying to redirect attention hoping the “American people” will swallow the “he’s talking” story instead of the wasting 6 weeks letting actionable intelligence rot on the vine story.

When Richard Reed was arrested, there was NO Guantanamo. This makes this issue ‘moot’.

Now if we can get Bin Ladens Mom and Dad to smack him around a little bit and get him straightened out, all our problems will be solved.

@Missy: Thanks for that link to the Weekly Standard which also had a link to Holder’s letter in PDF. At least Holder finally responded to Sen. Mitch McConnell even though the response was filled with the typical excuses and phony justifications.

Holder also admits using plea bargaining (with a terrorist who willingly would have sacrificed his won life in the attack) as a “lever” to get him to cooperate. How stupid is that?

He totally ducks the issue of lost opportunity to gain time sensitive actionable intelligence.

Holder closed with this:

“The criminal justice system has proven to be one of the most effective weapons available to our government for both incapacitating terrorists and collecting intelligence from them.”

Is there a better example of how the Obama Administration treats this war as a criminal matter? It’s such a glaring September 10th mindset!

P.S. I love your “C&P” additions to these threads. Don’t ever stop!

does anyone know about that man who jump on the terrorist and by his action prevented all the people to explode with the plane?if i would be in the plane i realy would like to know that hero and i would demand that the company gives him free pass in his future travel ,thank you