Law and Order OCO ("Overseas Contingency Operations")

Andrew McCarthy, the former federal prosecutor, knows what he's talking about when it comes to prosecuting terrorists. He's the guy who put the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman (the Blind Sheikh), in jail.

McCarthy thinks that the Obama administration's decision to have the Department of Justice and FBI edge "the CIA out of the business of fighting international terrorism" means that "[s]lowly but surely, it’s September 10 again, a retreat into Clinton-era counterterrorism, when radical Islam prosecuted a war while we tried to prosecute radical Islam in court, playing cops-and-robbers while jihadists played for keeps." ("Wrong Then, Wrong Now").

As prosecutor McCarthy played a critical role in the government's handling of the 1993 attack as a law-enforcement matter. It was hardly enough when Radical Islam planned to follow up that attack with still more.

[B]y 1994, plans were under way to murder the pope, murder the president, and blow up U.S. jumbo jets in flight over the Pacific. By 1996, Osama bin Laden was publicly calling for the global slaughter of Americans while Hezbollah and Iran were killing 19 members of the U.S. Air Force at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

The government’s response? Its obsession at the time was the fear that federal judges might think the FBI was abusing its national-security wiretapping power — using it as a pretext for conducting ordinary criminal investigations. So in 1995, the Justice Department raised a regulatory “wall.” The effect was to bar intelligence agents and criminal investigators from “connecting the dots.” More significant, the wall fostered an ethos of risk-aversion. The message to career-minded agents was: “Take heed: The mere hypothetical (and highly unlikely) possibility of civil-liberties violations is of greater concern to us than the potential of jihadist mass-murder attacks.”

And what good is risk-aversion if you can’t export it? In 1995, President Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 39, making the FBI, with its matrix of law-enforcement procedures, the government’s lead counterterrorism agency — even overseas, which had been the preserve of the CIA and the military, agencies operating under the quaint notion that where you have enemies and exigencies, rather than criminals and crime-scenes, you need a different, less onerous set of rules.

The difference between recognizing this struggle as a war, or thinking of it as a crime problem, isn't just in the choice of words we use. As McCarthy said, while we're playing cops-and-robbers the jihadists are at war, playing for keeps.

Where Supermax Meets Supermosque

One thing about last week’s thwarted terror attacks in New York state is what is says about America's prisons being the Billy Graham Crusades of Muslim outreach.

Steven Emerson writes:

Amid all the shocking details in the disrupted plot to bomb Bronx synagogues and fire missiles at American military aircraft, one component of the case should come as no surprise - three of the alleged culprits converted to radical Islam in prison.

Radical Islamists have targeted prison populations for recruitment for years. That's where Jose Padilla, suspected of plotting to detonate a dirty bomb and convicted of conspiracy to murder people overseas and of providing material support to terrorists, converted and was radicalized.

That's where a California man, Kevin James, created his own cell, called the Jam'iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh (JIS), and recruited other inmates to plot attacks against military and Jewish targets in and around Los Angeles.

In New York, the man who was the head Muslim chaplain for state prisons considered the 9/11 hijackers to be martyrs. Warith Deen Umar spent 20 years working with New York prisons, overseeing the hiring of Muslim chaplains and leading prayer services.

As for it being unlikely that a terrorist could escape from a supermax prison when no one else has been able to do so, there are still plenty of ways to do damage from inside.

We saw this in the case of the Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, whom Obama’s defenders like to point to as an example of a terrorist tucked harmlessly away in an American jail.

But Lynne Stewart, attorney for the Blind Sheikh, used her access to her incarcerated client to assist the Sheikh Omar in getting his murderous fatwas out to his terrorist supporters.

Andrew McCarthy, the federal prosecutor who put the Blind Sheikh in prison, describes it:

Stewart was convicted of providing material support to terrorists — specifically, of providing the Egyptian Islamic Group (Gamaat al Islamia, one of the world’s most barbaric terrorist organizations and an al Qaeda ally) with the guidance of its leader, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman . . . . And we are not talking here about just any kind of support. The message she conveyed was that Abdel Rahman no longer supported the Islamic Group’s ceasefire in Egypt. Translation: Let’s get back to slaughtering innocents, like we did in the 1997 Luxor massacre, in which the Islamic Group brutally killed nearly 60 tourists, inserting into some of the mutilated corpses pamphlets demanding the blind sheikh’s release.

Nor do terrorists like KSM compare, in kind, with even the worst of the violent convicts being held in supermax prisons. Personally dangerous as some of those inmates are, they don’t enjoy martyrdom status with armies of suicidal sympathizers around the world ready to annihilate themselves and other people to try and break them out.

Who knows what all the risks and additional problems will have to be faced by the President's decision to close Gitmo and bring these guys here? The only thing certain is that we wouldn’t have to face any of those problems if President Obama had left Gitmo alone. Of all the things he said in his speech last week at the National Archives, his charge that the Bush administraton “made decisions based upon fear rather than foresight,” was the most upside-down.

How can he accuse the Bush administration of lacking foresight, when even eight years ago Bush and his advisers showed their foresight of these very problems, and how to pre-empt them, by setting up the detention center at Guantanamo Bay? This President’s foresight hasn’t even extended to his own Senate shooting him down out of political fear.