“Underwear Bomber” Gets Lawyer – Stops Talking
In what can only be seen as the continuation of amateur hour at the White House and in the Obama administration Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has retained defense counsel and decided to keep quiet. He is the “Underwear Bomber” apprehended in Detroit on Christmas Day after other courageous passengers subdued him on an inbound flight. His detonator failed during what was an otherwise successful terrorist attack. With Abdulmutallab saying there were 20 more planned attacks before he retained counsel it’s a shame the Obama administration didn’t use already existing laws to question him outside the civil system to gain more information…
The Daily Telegraph reports:
“He was singing like a canary, then we charged him in civilian proceedings, he got a lawyer and shut up,” Slade Gorton, a member of the 9/11 Commission that investigated the Sept 2001 terror attacks on the US, told The Sunday Telegraph.
“I find it incomprehensible that this administration is treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue. The president has finally said that we are at war with al-Qaeda. Well, if this is a war, then Abdulmutallab should be treated as a combatant not a criminal.”
Abdulmutallab could have been held and interrogated in military custody under existing US legislation before a decision was taken whether to charge him before a military tribunal or a civilian court.
Why wasn’t that opportunity taken? I believe the saying that actions speak louder than words comes to mind. Obama may be saying in his speeches we’re at war with terror, but his actions show us he doesn’t believe it. Al-Qaeda is clearly still at war with us yet we continue to treat their combatants as criminals to be prosecuted in civil courts.
The Daily Telegraph continues:
Mr Mukasey argues that it was crucial to gain intelligence from him immediately as details about locations, names and other plots is subject to rapid change. For the same reason, he dismissed the argument by John Brennan, Mr Obama’s chief counter-terrorism adviser, that investigators will garner valuable data during any plea-bargaining talks.
“He certainly should know that the kind of facts that Abdulmutallab might be expected to know have a shelf life that is a lot shorter than the plea bargaining process,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week.
This could be a fatal error for Americans if valuable intelligence information wasn’t extracted from Abdulmutallab. Had he been properly questioned by our intelligence agencies before Obama released him to the civilian system we could have made quick and precise strikes against Al-Qaeda in Yemen and elsewhere. The decisions made here by the Obama administration put us in more danger as a country and he should be challenged as to his reasoning.
Unfortunately this is only one in a long string of poor decisions made by the Obama administration when it comes to the detainment and prosecution of the terrorists we are at war with. Not long ago Attorney General Eric Holder released Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to the criminal court system to be tried in New York for his role in planning the 9/11 attacks. Until the most recent attack Obama was planning to release more than 100 Al-Qaeda Yemeni’s back to their home country because they were no longer viewed as a threat.
As a nation we know Al-Qaeda and their terrorists are at war with us, sadly for us Obama and his administration do not seem to understand what is so clearly obvious.
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Not surprising. We have a President and Attorney General (Eric Holder) that would rather prosecute CIA agents and Navy Seal teams that are doing their best to protect us then to wage a war on terrorism.
Obama is making us less safe?
Let’s begin.
1. Republicans have blocked additional funding to purchase TSA explosive-detection machines. Senator Jim DeMint-R placed a hold on the appointment of a new TSA chief because of fears the nominee is pro-union.
2. Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times and none of his statements elicited as a result of torture will be admissible. The purely voluntary statements that Sheikh Mohammed made, however, before his capture, in April 2002, to Al Jazeera-London reporter Yosri Fouda may be used against him in court. Sheikh Mohammed’s admissions which came almost a year before he was captured and tortured. Although Dick Cheney falsely claimed that waterboarding was essential to getting information from Sheikh Mohammed.
3. Abdulmutallab’s father had warned U.S. and British officials of his son’s radicalization. The British were so concerned they denied him a visa and put him on their no-fly list. In the U.S., the 23-year-old Nigerian merely went on a watch list with half a million other names, so officials could investigate whether any future student visa requests could be denied. It’s important to get to the bottom of why the U.S. and British responses to the information were so different.
4. A reason for releasing Yemeni’s back into their home country, is that Al-Qaeda is successfully using their detainment as propaganda to recruit a new crop of terrorists by trying to justify hatred for America.
Let’s stop playing politics with our safety.
[...] first obvious lack of leadership that Obama displayed was in December when the Christmas Day “Underwear Bomber” attacked a plane readying to land in Detroit. As the country wondered again if we were being hit [...]