01/10/2010
Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey appeared on Fox News on Saturday and analyzed the many problems with the current administration’s legalist approach to Islamic terrorists. He was particularly appalled that the Obama strategy is to do plea bargains with terrorists, rather than gather intelligence as the first priority.One disturbing possibility Mukasey mentioned is that Gitmo terrorists transferred to Illinois might later be released into this country after a successful habeas petition if no foreign country would be willing to take them. This dangerous future is the result when the government gives citizen rights to foreign enemy combatants. Our national security should not be in the hands of judges or the ACLU. For more, see Michael Mukasey’s January 7 opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, What Does the Detroit Bomber Know?
Had Abdulmutallab been turned over immediately to interrogators intent on gathering intelligence, valuable facts could have been gathered and perhaps acted upon. Indeed, a White House spokesman has confirmed that Abdulmutallab did disclose some actionable intelligence before he fell silent on advice of counsel. Nor is it any comfort to be told, as we were, by the senior intelligence adviser referred to above–he of the "no smoking gun"–that we can learn facts from Abdulmutallab as part of a plea bargaining process in connection with his prosecution.Mukasey was a serious public servant in a position that has become more and more politicized (from Bush’s Mexophilic pal Alberto Gonzalez to Obama’s creature of the far left Eric Holder). When new on the job of Attorney General, Mukasey spoke honestly about his first briefings regarding national security threats, describing them as "way beyond anything that I knew or believed."Whatever that official thinks he knows about the plea bargaining process, 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, assuming such a process ever gets started.
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