"The Administration's ACLU Approach to the War on Terrorism « The Enterprise Blog
JOHN YOO
Following up on Marc Thiessen's post on Senator Collins's AEI speech, there are a few other points raised by the diagnosis of the failures to identify and stop Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
1. Not only have we failed to obtain timely intelligence because we don't capture and interrogate al Qaeda leaders anymore, but we don't even interrogate the operatives that we do capture. Abdulmutallab was read his Miranda warnings and his right to a lawyer after only a few minutes of questioning, because the Obama administration reflexively considered him to be a criminal suspect and not an enemy combatant. It shows that the administration has the ACLU approach to the war on terrorism—it's crime, not war—hardwired into its DNA. But this denies our intelligence agencies access to information that could be acted upon swiftly. By the time Abdulmutallab told authorities what he knew, probably thanks to plea bargain offers, al Qaeda had time to close its safe houses and move its agents and accounts.
2. The administration's approach, informed by the anti-war criticisms from their campaign, exactly reverses the incentive structure that should apply to the war on terrorism. We allow our intelligence agencies and military agencies broad discretion abroad—to the point where the Obama administration, rather than capturing and interrogating al Qaeda leaders, would rather fire missiles at their suspected locations and kill not just them, but civilian bystanders. But as the enemy agents get closer to the United States, this administration's mindset seems determined to give them more and more rights. The safest place to be an al Qaeda terrorist, legally, is once you have landed inside the United States.
3. I wonder where Senator Collins and others stand on the issue of data mining. What her speech is calling for is more effective data mining of information already in the databases of our intelligence agencies. But what about data mining of information such as credit card receipts, travel reservations, banking accounts, and so on? Democrats excoriated Defense Department proposals under the Bush administration to use powerful government computers to sift through the millions of innocent transactions to find patterns of terrorist activity. More effectively sorting through government databases is one thing, but we must also bring more new information into the system to detect operatives like Abdulmutallab earlier and faster. The net should be tighter, but also sweep wider."
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