Comparative Interrogation: Ahmed Ghailani and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab

It's still unreal that none in the Democratic Party have taken the Flight 253 Christmas bombing attempt seriously. Especially troubling is the completely amateurish arrest and detention of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. It's not always this bad, and interesting, the Obama administration's epic failures have given us additionally important arugments against the Holder Justice Department's approach to terrorism. So says Rivkin and Thiessen in their new piece at Opinion Journal, "A Tale of Two Terrorists":

The Obama administration's decision to read the Christmas Day bomber his Miranda rights has rightly come under withering criticism. Instead of a lengthy interrogation by officials with al Qaeda expertise, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was questioned for 50 minutes by local FBI agents and then later advised of his "right to remain silent."

It's well understood that the focus on gaining evidence for a criminal trial was an intelligence failure of massive proportions. Not well understood is that the most powerful recent argument for aggressively interrogating terrorists, keeping them in military detention, and prosecuting them in military commissions comes to us from the Obama Justice Department itself.

On Dec. 18, 2009, days before the Christmas attack, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, made a secret filing in federal district court that was aimed at saving the prosecution of Ahmed Ghailani, another al Qaeda terrorist. Ghailani is facing charges for helping al Qaeda bomb U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Ghailani argues that those charges should be dropped because lengthy CIA interrogations have denied him his constitutional right to a speedy trial.

Mr. Bharara, on behalf of the Justice Department, filed a memorandum with the court stating that Ghailani's claims are dangerous and off the mark. Interrogating terrorists must come before criminal prosecution, he wrote in language so strong that even a redacted version of his filing (which we have obtained) serves as a searing indictment of the administration's mishandling of Abdulmutallab.

"The United States was, and still is, at war with al Qaeda," Mr. Bharara argued. "And because the group does not control territory as a sovereign nation does, the war effort relies less on deterrence than on disruption—on preventing attacks before they can occur. At the core of such disruption efforts is obtaining accurate intelligence about al Qaeda's plans, leaders and capabilities."

Mr. Bharara is right. The interrogation of a high-value terrorist is a critical opportunity to obtain intelligence. As Mr. Bharara pointed out in regards to Ghailani, "the defendant was . . . a rare find, and his then-recent interactions with top-level al Qaeda terrorists made him a potentially rich source of information that was both urgent and crucial to our nation's war efforts." Abdulmutallab's recent interactions with leaders of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula made it likely he could give up actionable intelligence. He possessed unique information about those who deployed him, bomb makers who prepared him, and operatives who trained with him.

As Mr. Bharara's memorandum notes, "The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 . . . naturally resulted in a heightened focus on intelligence gathering to preempt another attack." He went on to say that "when the United States took custody of the defendant . . . and it justifiably believed that he had actionable intelligence that could be used to save lives, it reasonably opted to treat him initially as an intelligence asset."

The Justice Department did not bring Ghailani to a civilian court immediately after he was captured in 2004, preferring, after his lengthy interrogation was completed, to prosecute him in a military commission. It wasn't until June that his case was shifted to the criminal justice system.

Moreover, the government "did not Mirandize the defendant at any point to preserve the possibility of later using his inculpatory statements. It did not maintain a strict chain of custody with respect to physical evidence in the manner of a law enforcement agency. . . . Indeed, the goal of the [CIA interrogation program] was remote from law enforcement; the program's purpose was to gain intelligence, not to get admissible confessions or to gather admissible evidence."

More at the link.