The news that a team of law enforcement officials arrested four men in New York on terrorism charges is, of course, reassuring. But it's also an important reminder that we have an effective way of dealing with terrorists: old-fashioned investigatory police work. Admittedly, we have yet to learn if any of the broader surveillance powers the government has were used in this investigation, but the impression you get from reading the article is that a human intelligence source was cultivated successfully by counter-terrorism agents who then provided actionable intelligence to them. Nobody even got water boarded! Coming on the day of, man, it hurts to type this, "dueling" national security speeches from President Obama and former Vice President Cheney, it's a reminder that we have one method of approaching the problem of terrorism that works to provide a more secure America and one that drags the country into immoral and self-defeating behaviors. Realizing that the problem of terror does not imply World War III (or IV, depending on your zaniness level) shouldn't be so hard. I'm not sure what the statistics are on this (maybe Adam or Attackerman knows?) but it will be interesting when we eventually learn how many of the Guantanamo prisoners can't be properly tried due to controversies surrounding their capture versus those that can't be properly tried due to illegal methods used after they were captured. I imagine our problems would be a lot smaller if we hadn't been mistreating people in search of connections that weren't there. Makes John Kerry look increasingly prescient. To be sure, there is room for military force appropriately deployed to prevent terrorists from using failed states as launching points for international attacks -- I'm thinking Afghanistan here. But it's also clear from our current entanglement there that we haven't yet figured out the overall strategy for approaching these kinds of operations and limiting them to the possible -- it's an ongoing debate. Meanwhile, Hilzoy beats me to the punchline:
I assume that if it's too dangerous to move people at Guantanamo to the United States, it must be much too dangerous to allow these jihadists to run loose in our prisons. After all, they might provide financing for other jihadists from their supermax cells, or radicalize other prisoners, or use special Terrorist Mind Control Techniques to create a whole army of brainwashed convicts under their complete control.
-- Tim Fernholz
