Still Time to Get It Right by Andrew C. McCarthy on National Review Online

Still Time to Get It Right by Andrew C. McCarthy on National Review Online

To have failed to interrogate this terrorist effectively is thus inexcusable.

And more salt was thrown on the wound by Dennis Blair, the national intelligence director, lord of an already bloated fiefdom created just five years ago, at the insistence of the 9/11 Commission, to help the government “connect the dots” better. A year ago, at the start of his term, President Obama ordered the creation of a “high-value interrogation group” (HIG), which, Blair said, was established “for exactly this purpose — to make a decision on whether a certain person who’s detained should be treated as a case for federal prosecution or for some of the other means.” But HIG was not invoked in Abdulmutallab’s case — because, as Blair conceded, it never occurred to the administration to apply it to terrorists captured inside the United States (apparently, it’s just for Mirandizing overseas prisoners). And, as it turns out, after a year the ballyhooed HIG is not even fully operational yet.

Blair wasn’t consulted on Abdulmutallab’s case. Neither, apparently, was FBI director Bob Mueller. All the decisions were made by agents and prosecutors on the ground. So who decided to take the case to the civilian system? Whose call was it to Mirandize Abdulmutallab? Whose heads ought to roll over this tragicomedy of errors?

All worthy questions, but they miss the main point. The germane decisions are not the ones that were made in Abdulmutallab’s case. The big decision is the one made at the beginning of the Obama administration, by the president and nobody else: It is the default position of the administration that law enforcement is the preferred approach for dealing with international terrorism. The standing rule is that, if a person is apprehended in the United States — even if he is an al-Qaeda operative unleashed here to kill massively — he is to be regarded as a criminal defendant, not as a prisoner of war.

Just as asked before, Which side is He on?