At this point, Charles Krauthammer is like Andy McCarthy, if McCarthy could turn a phrase. Here Krauthammer argues the "system worked" -- for Umar Abdulmutallab:
What he lost in flying privileges he gained in Miranda rights. He was singing quite freely when seized after trying to bring down Northwest Flight 253 over Detroit. But the Obama administration decided to give him a lawyer and the right to remain silent. We are now forced to purchase information from this attempted terrorist in the coin of leniency. Absurdly, Abdulmutallab is now in control.
[...]
This is nuts. Even if you wanted ultimately to try him as an ordinary criminal, he could have been detained in military custody -- and thus subject to military interrogation -- without prejudicing his ultimate disposition. After all, every Guantanamo detainee was first treated as an enemy combatant and presumably interrogated. But some (most notoriously Khalid Sheik Mohammed) are going to civilian trial. That determination can be made later.
So it's not clear to me why Republicans all believe "military interrogation" is the solution to dealing with detainees since the most experienced and effective terrorism interrogators are with the FBI. At any rate, Abdulmutallab was interrogated before he "lawyered up," and the government has him dead to rights as far as evidence of guilt is concerned. How this corresponds to his being "in control" is anyone's guess.
Krauthammer again reiterates the conservative call to try Abdulmutallab by military commission. But Abdulmutallab is no soldier; he was not captured on a battlefield. During the Bush administration, civilian courts convicted 145 terrorists, military commissions convicted 3, and the revised commissions are in disarray. All this makes clear that the civilian court system is the more prudent choice. If Abdulmutallab appealed, his case would end up in front of civilian appellate court judges anyway. I suspect the Obama administration only wants to use the military commissions for Bush "hard case" holdovers, which is why we haven't seen any recent captures being tried by military commission. The GOP would like them to exist as a separate and unequal legal system for Muslims accused of terrorism that would go in perpetuity.
Once, the most common refrain for dismissing the notion that America's foreign policy decisions have any effect on terrorism was that the terrorists "hate us for our freedoms." But frankly, the conservative crusade against fair trials and due process makes me think the above refrain is a case of projection.
At any rate, Krauthammer concludes that there's no reason to close Guantanamo because the terrorists will want to kill Americans anyway. Certainly, this is true of the most committed terrorists. But it's taken pretty much for granted at this point that any effective counterterrorism strategy has to marginalize the extremists and empower the moderates: Guantanamo Bay, military commissions, and torture are all tactics that empower extremists and marginalize moderates.
Again, given all the concessions Obama has made on national security, and how much their policies resemble those of the later years of the Bush administration, it is perhaps more accurate to describe the torture wing of the GOP as a group implacable fanatics with an uncompromising worldview who can't be appeased at any cost.
-- A. Serwer
