To understand the limitations of law enforcement when it comes to terrorism, it’s instructive to look at this issue on a small scale.
Did you see the video of the girl getting her head kicked in my malicious teenagers in the Seattle, WA bus station? That’s distressing enough–seeing security guards watch the assault happen and do nothing. One guard even walked away.
What’s worse? The girl went to police in the mall and begged for help before the crime took place.
You know, like the crotch-bombers dad contacted the consulate in Nigeria. Like that.
What Dick Cheney was banging away at again on This Week, yesterday, is the mentality of the Obama administration. It’s dangerous.
Someone who has knowledge about an act yet to happen, even someone credible (like the girl who is being followed by a gang of other kids), will not get much attention because there is no “proof” or as the Seattle police said:
“Seattle police have said they did everything they could to separate the girl from another group, but did not witness unlawful behavior before the attack.”
Kind of like the roving bands of young men in my neighborhood recently–the guys scoping out homes to rob. They aren’t precisely doing anything wrong because they’re just “taking a walk”, which isn’t illegal.
This mentality informs Janet Napolitano and President Obama and Eric Holder and everyone within the administration.
It makes the country ripe for attacks. It is dangerous.
And so, it’s not really shocking when the bully makes it through the system and then kicks the innocent’s butt in full view of everyone. That will happen more, not less, with the administration’s decisions on terrorism.
The American people have clarified how they want these events handled. After the press railed on and on about civil liberties this and that, Americans thought a law-enforcement approach might be better.
Now, having seen it action, people have are soundly against the civilian trials, closing Guantanamo and the political correctness that get’s us the Ft. Hood killer.
The American people may not like Cheney all that much, but having a badass like that making decisions about evil terrorists is a lot more comforting than a guy like Obama watching as the innocent victim gets kicked in the head because procedure needs to be followed.
UPDATED: And what do you do if you’re afraid of interrogation and capture at places like Guantanamo? You kill suspects instead.
In other words, rendition remains an option, but not Gitmo or CIA detention. For a while, we took them to Bagram, but the US has pledged to turn Bagram back to the Afghanis at the end of next year. We have almost 800 detainees in Bagram, some of whom were captured elsewhere. Karzai no longer allows us to do that, though, which means that anyone captured will have to get sent to a regular military prison, transferred to our criminal-justice system, given to another country with some interest in the detainee, or released altogether. Since capturing a prisoner entails a lot of risk to the personnel that attempt the mission, the US has increasing opted to shoot from a distance and eliminate all of the other headaches.
What do we lose in this transaction? With a network leader like Nabhan, we lose the ability to get information on a wide range of important issues, like funding, network nodes, communications techniques, and of course plots in the pipeline. Killing Nabhan makes it difficult for AQ to operate, but capturing and interrogating Nabhan would have put us in AQ’s OODA loop for a short but critical period of time, which would have led us to more terrorists and a better picture of AQ’s operations.