How Obama Has Mishandled the War on Terror

Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged

Michael Bernard Mukasey

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781594034893
• eBook ISBN: 9781594034992
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

IN this illuminating Broadside, former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey shows how Barrack Obama has taken the war on terror from the adult realities of George W. Bush, where hard choices were faced and made, and the nation kept safe, to an adolescent fantasy world where we can at once be nobler than the law requires and safer than we were before. Obama rejects as an unnecessary sacrifice of our ideals the stern measures adopted by his predecessor, and offers instead to limit our intelligence gathering and provide terrorists with better conditions than common criminals, in the name of lofty idealism. Instead of protecting Americans, he builds castles in the air and invites us to stay safe by living in them.

EARLY ONE AFTERNOON in the mid- 1990s, a then-colleague of mine, Judge John Sprizzo of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and I were returning from lunch, and as we walked up Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, he surveyed the scene - a dump truck blocking vehicular access to the street; concrete barriers in front of the courthouse; deputy U.S. marshals brought in from other districts around the country, clad in black SWAT uniforms and bulletproof vests, carrying firearms of a sort more associated with the battlefield than the cityscape. Sprizzo shook his head: “What the hell are we doing here? This is a military problem, not a legal problem.” That casual comment has seemed, at least in retrospect, like lightning in the middle of the night, suddenly and starkly illuminating the landscape before darkness envelops it again. Of course, even the darkest night gives way to dawn, and it should by now be clear to all but the most obtuse that terrorism is substantially a military problem, and military means and measures, even military tribunals, are the appropriate way to deal with some or all of it.

It should by now be clear to all but the most obtuse that terrorism is substantially a military problem, and military means and measures, even military tribunals, are the appropriate way to deal with some or all of it.

The scene Judge Sprizzo was looking at and reacting to had been precipitated by the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center that killed six people; injured more than a thousand and caused tens of millions of dollars in damage; and led to the trial of four of the perpetrators. Among the plotters’ announced goals was securing freedom for El Sayyid Nosair, who had been convicted in the state courts of New York in connection with the November 1990 murder of Meir Kahane, a right-wing Israeli politician shot by Nosair just after delivering a speech in a midtown New York hotel. Oddly, the prosecutors had presented so many overlapping witnesses with contradictory accounts of the shooting that Nosair was actually acquitted of the murder but convicted of using the weapon involved. At the time he committed his crime, Nosair had been dismissed as a lone misfit. The contents of his apartment, including jihadist literature and writings containing fantasies about attacking the United States by toppling tall buildings, had sat largely unexamined in a warehouse until after the 1993 bombing. Indeed, an amateur video of Kahane’s November 1990 speech, examined in 1993, would show that present in the hall, in addition to Nosair, was Mohammed Salameh, who would later participate in the 1993 bombing to help free Nosair. Other evidence would show that Nosair was supposed to have made his escape by getting into a cab driven by Mahmud Abouhalima, another 1993 bomber, and was captured when he jumped into the wrong cab and eventually had to flee on foot.

There would be later plots, successful and unsuccessful. A partial list includes the plot in December 1994 and January 1995 to blow up airliners over the Pacific, which actually resulted in one bombing in December 1994 that killed a Japanese engineer on a flight from the Philippines to Tokyo. In addition, there were the 1998 car bombings, moments apart, at the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that killed 224 people and wounded thousands, and the millennium plots that included a plan to blow up Los Angeles International Airport, foiled when Ahmed Ressam, betrayed by his nervous demeanor, was captured aboard a Seattle ferry with a bottle of explosives in the trunk of his car. An attempt to blow up the destroyer USS The Sullivans in Aden, Yemen, failed when the would-be suicide bombers overloaded their skiff with explosives and it sank. The follow-up of that attack, in October 2000, was the bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, which killed 17 sailors.

And there would be other trials, including the trial of Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and architect of the Pacific airliner bombings. There was also the trial of Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called “blind sheikh,” and several codefendants, including Nosair, for a wide-ranging terrorist plot that encompassed the Kahane murder in 1990; the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; and a plan to blow up various critical sites in New York City, including the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, FBI headquarters in Manhattan, and the United Nations. Finally, there was the prosecution of millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam.

Th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• .
• Copyright Page