AMERICAN.COM

Drones don’t take prisoners. They also cannot interrogate high-ranking al Qaeda leaders. As a result, the United States today is killing more terrorists abroad, but it is losing our most valuable source of intelligence on the enemy. Meanwhile, the enemy has only redoubled its efforts to launch unconventional attacks on the U.S. homeland: witness the failed Christmas Day 2009 and Times Square bombings, among others.

These events are the inevitable consequences of President Obama’s naive decision two years ago: to close the terrorist detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Apparently convinced by the anti-war Left’s irresponsible allegations of widespread abuse and torture at Gitmo, Obama surely believed that his decision would help our anti-terrorism efforts, by making the United States more popular abroad and removing a terrorism recruitment tactic.

Instead, Obama has produced the opposite result. While Congress has succeeded in keeping Obama from closing the base and transferring enemy prisoners to the United States for trial in civilian court, he has stopped the United States from bringing any more prisoners to Cuba. This creates a strong incentive, if not command, to the troops in the field not to capture any more terrorists. Not only does this mean that more people die—not just al Qaeda leaders but nearby innocent civilians—but we lose the information they might provide us. And that is the most valuable weapon in this war, for only by learning al Qaeda’s plans can we take action to preempt their attacks on the U.S. homeland.

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.

Rumors abound that the Obama administration is going to shift the location of the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of al Qaeda’s top leaders and the mastermind behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, from federal court in New York City to another location. If true, it shows how ill-considered the original decision was. Public attention has focused on the costs of providing security for the trial, which are estimated to run up to $250 million per year (more, apparently, than the cost of constructing the detention facility and courtrooms at Guantanamo Bay, where al Qaeda leaders and operatives are currently held). Obama and his advisors clearly rushed their decision to appeal to their ACLU base without considering even the basic difficulties of holding the trial of the decade in one of the nation’s most important and congested locations.

But simply moving the trial to another federal court somewhere in the country will not cure the more fundamental errors in the decision to try KSM in New York City. Trying KSM in civilian court will be an intelligence bonanza for al Qaeda and hostile nations. Prosecutors will be forced to reveal U.S. intelligence and the methods and sources for acquiring its information. The information will enable al Qaeda to drop plans and personnel when their cover is blown. It will enable al Qaeda to detect our means of intelligence-gathering, and to push forward into areas we know nothing about. Even more harmful to our national security will be the effect a civilian trial of KSM will have on future intelligence officers and military operations. Reading al Qaeda terrorists their Miranda rights, securing the “crime scene” under battlefield conditions, and gathering witness statements and physical evidence will handicap our intelligence officers and soldiers in a war zone as they work to complete their missions.

Exit questions: How are these decisions being made? Who is making them? Is the president the decision maker, or does the buck stop with Attorney General Eric Holder?

The loudest silence from the administration on its decision on trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City is its failure to explain what the benefits are.

The administration claims that critics of its decision fear what Mohammed will say on the public platform provided by a civilian trial. “I have every confidence that the nation and the world will see him for the coward that he is,” Holder said. “I’m not scared of what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has to say at trial, and no one else needs to be, either.”

This red herring distracts from the administration’s failure to explain why the benefits of using civilian courts outweigh the costs to the war effort. The only benefit of the trials mentioned, usually by unidentified administration sources, is improving America’s international image. But America’s place in the world did not suffer after World War II when President Harry S. Truman used military commissions throughout occupied Germany and Japan, or during the Civil War when President Abraham Lincoln used them to try Confederate spies and saboteurs. America’s victories in those wars, sometimes against prevailing opinion, were far more important to its world standing. Defeating al Qaeda will do far more for the United States’ image than trying Mohammed in civilian court. For more, see my column in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court will be an intelligence bonanza for al Qaeda, tie up our courts for years on issues best left to the president and Congress, and further cripple our intelligence agencies’ efforts to fight terrorists abroad.

KSM and his co-defendants will have all of the benefits and rights that the U.S. Constitution accords those who live here, most importantly the right to demand that the government produce in open court all of the information that it has on them, and how it was obtained.

Arrested spies commonly use this right to get a better deal out of the government, which will want to avoid opening up its intelligence sources and methods on KSM, what information it got from him, and what else it knows about his fellow al Qaeda operatives.

Finding out what the U.S. intelligence agencies know about al Qaeda will be an incalculable boon to the terrorist organization, which will be able to drop plans and personnel it knows are compromised, and push harder in areas we appear to know nothing about.

Our intelligence agents and military personnel will now have to conduct their capture of the enemy—often in battlefield conditions—under all of the strictures that apply to arrests of garden-variety criminals in the United States. Knowing that al Qaeda leaders may be tried in court, our soldiers and agents will have to gather evidence at the scene of “arrest” and secure it to the standards of a civilian court, all while entering a hostile environment, protecting their own personnel, and leaving without casualties.

This is no idle prediction. All one has to do is look at what happened in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the twentieth hijacker who was captured before 9/11 in the United States—his desire to learn how to take off but not land jetliners while at flight school tipped off the FBI. His trial never reached a single proceeding before a jury, and he tied up the court in knots for four years (the case had to go back and forth between the trial and appellate courts several times), because he too demanded that the government produce all of its intelligence on him in public. The only reason the trial ended was because Moussaoui decided to plead guilty at the last minute. KSM, his co-defendants, and their lawyers will not save the government from itself this time, and our intelligence agents and soldiers will be the ones to suffer.