Stuart Taylor has defended the use of civilian courts rather than military tribunals to try terror suspects. However, he is severe with the Obama administration over the decision to “Mirandize” the would-be Christmas Day bomber after 50 minutes — and especially the administrations after-the-fact defense that decision.
“Reasonable people disagree about how much coercion interrogators should use to extract potentially lifesaving information from terrorists. (None at all, President Obama unwisely ordered soon after taking office.)
“But no reasonable person could doubt that starting out with ‘you have the right to remain silent’ is not the way to save lives.
“Yet this is essentially the policy into which the Obama administration has locked itself by insisting that it did the right thing when it read Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas Day bomber, his Miranda rights after only 50 minutes of questioning and a hospital visit.
“I return to this subject because the rationalizations by Attorney General Eric Holder and other administration apologists have been so breathtakingly bereft of seriousness about the need for aggressive interrogation to protect our country….”
At the National Journal website, Stuart Taylor writes that two mistakes — the bungled questioning of the would-be Christmas Day bomber, and the decision to try the 9/11 terrorists in New York — have created the mistaken impression that the Obama administration is soft on terror. Taylor holds that the administration should make it clear that terror suspects will be questioned aggressively. There need be no constitutional qualms about doing so, he argues, due to the “recognized ‘public safety’ exception to Miranda.”
Taylor believes that advocates of military commissions have overstated their case, since “the panels have so far been something of an embarrassment, managing to convict only three men, two of whom have since been freed, in the eight years since Bush announced them.”
I suppose I am of two minds about these issues. On the one hand, there is that view that, since nothing can make us absolutely safe, the anti-terrorism and national-security complexes might as well accept some constraints.
On the other hand, it may still be the case that governments are obligated from time to time to do things that otherwise would be beyond the pale, “for reasons of state.” The people involved are not choirboys — and the public, which is disposed to demand that anything and everything be done to protect us from terrorism, and is willing to look the other way at whatever has to be done to accomplish this, does not understand the qualms….
Wednesday’s Washington Post brings news of a new assessment of the threat posed by the Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen. The report carries implications for the ongoing debate over profiling of airline passengers.
At the grassroots, where it looks like “send ‘em all back” sentiment is to be found wherever you turn over a rock, there is a demand to profile anyone who looks “dark and swarthy.” That is understandable, but I am afraid that it will accomplish little, other than to hurt and antagonize a good many innocent people. There are one and one-half billion Muslims in the world. Of those, maybe a couple hundred million are receptive to radical “Islamist” teachings. But, no more than a few hundred, or maybe a couple of thousand, can ever actually have committed terrorist acts. To ferret out potential terrorists is like looking for a needle in haystack. That’s why the appropriate lesson to draw from the recent Christmas Day “underwear bombing” attempt is that absolute security is attainable. It’s only with the benefit of hindsight that it looks obvious that the so-called “dots” should have been connected.
Wednesday’s report cites the threat posed by “a group of nearly 10 non-Yemeni Americans who traveled to Yemen, converted to Islam, became fundamentalists, and married Yemeni women so they could remain in the country.” According to an unidentified US official, these converts are “blond-haired, blue-eyed types” who “fit a profile of Americans whom al-Qaeda has sought to recruit over the past several years.”
And why would Al Qaeda have sought to recruit them? Without a doubt, in order to defeat profiling….
Edward Luttwak is skeptical about the efficacy of full-body scanners at airports – even though scanners have indeed been developed that can detect explosives within body cavities. “Recent research has demonstrated that the cancer risks of radiation have been grossly underestimated, even for medical equipment operated by qualified radiologists and their trained technicians. It is therefore no good showing that in the manufacturer’s tests the level of radiation is only moderately harmful, because once distributed at airports, those machines will not necessarily be perfectly calibrated, nor will they be operated correctly by experts.”
Instead, Luttwak prefers a form of profiling. “To screen passengers as persons would reduce costs and inconvenience very greatly, because entire categories of passengers could be waived through with a rapid examination of travel documents and a few random checks now and then. These include a variety of easily recognizable groups that not even the most ingenious terrorists could simulate: touring senior citizens traveling together (a category that contains a good portion of all American, European and East Asian tourist traffic), airline flying personnel who come to the security gate as a crew, families complete with children, and more…. With such a system that would discriminate only positively—only in favor of groups and categories of passengers, and never against them—we could have real security at a drastically lower cost in money and inconvenience.”
“As terrorist plots against the United States have piled up in recent months, politicians and the news media have sounded the alarm…. But the politically charged clamor has lumped together disparate cases and obscured the fact that the enemies on American soil in 2009, rather than a single powerful and sophisticated juggernaut, were a scattered, uncoordinated group of amateurs who displayed more fervor than skill.” So begins a news analysis by Scott Shane in Wednesday’s New York Times.
According to the experts Shane consulted, “since the goal of terrorism is to spread terror, hyperbole about threats only does the extremists’ work for them.” “We give comfort to our enemies,” said CIA and Homeland Security veteran Charles E. Allen. Hyperbolic news coverage and commentary “creates an atmosphere of tension and fear, and to me that’s exactly the wrong way to go.”
The land is awash with calls to abandon “politically correct” resistance to profiling, racial, religious, or otherwise, in the aftermath of the failed Christmas Day airliner bombing. For a quick summary of the case against profiling, see this post by Peter Beinart at the Daily Beast.
As you ponder the fulminations following upon the failed Christmas Day airliner bombing, consider this offering from Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.
“Most of us are horrible assessors of risk. Travelers at American airports are taking extensive steps due to fears of terrorism. But in the decade of the 2000s, only about one passenger for every 25 million was killed in a terrorist attack aboard an American commercial airliner (all of the fatalities were on 9/11). By contrast, a person has about a one in 500,000 chance each year of being struck by lightning…. Overall, academic and governmental databases report, terrorist attacks killed a total of about 5,300 people in the most highly developed nations since the end of the Cold War in 1991, a rate of about 300 per year. The chance of a Westerner being killed by a terrorist is exceedingly low: about a one in three million each year, or the same chance an American will be killed by a tornado. (The Department of Homeland Security’s budget is 50 times larger than that of the weather service).”
A reporter for the Washington Post foreign service has spoken to a former bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, now working as a business consultant in Yemen after having been released from prison in that country. “Ask him whether jihadists should kill Americans on U.S. soil and he replies without hesitation, ‘America is a legitimate target.’”
Nasser al-Bahri, interviewed a few days before the Christmas Day airliner bombing attempt, says that, while he still admires bin Laden, he does not intend to resume a “life of jihad.” But a Yemeni political analyst speculates that such people, “if they find the country to be under attack from outside, they will find a legitimate reason to go back to jihad.”
Michael Kinsley in Tuesday’s New York Times: “The most repulsive and obviously guilty child molester — or drug kingpin who may also have information that the government could use — gets American justice, while an innocent child killed accidentally in our pursuit of terrorists gets no justice at all. (This second part of the equation doesn’t seem to bother the Cheneys and the Gingriches.)… [The] national border is a ‘bright line,’ and if people captured within the United States are going to be treated as if they were somewhere else — provided that they are certified terrorists — things are going to get complicated quickly.”
Mike Lupica in Monday’s New York Daily News: “Only Cheney looks at a near tragedy on Christmas and sees opportunity. When he does, he doesn’t just sound like some old crank in the park. He sounds like a bum.”