What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (33 page)

To Obama and the kooks, this civilized approach set us apart from the enemy and demonstrated how far superior we were to them. Ironically, it had the opposite effect. Obama expected that the enemy as well as the rest of the world would view this as humility, when in fact it displayed a haughty arrogance that only inflamed anti-Americanism. The “we’re better than they are and we’ll show them through our judicial system” attitude did nothing but reinforce our enemies’ belief that America was as arrogant and deserving of violent attack as ever. It also telegraphed to the enemy a sign of weakness that we weren’t interested in going “all in” with the goal of ultimate victory, but instead showed a lack of faith in our own ability to break the enemy’s resolve.

In fact, in March 2009, just two months after Obama signed the executive order to close Guantánamo, five detainees, including KSM, submitted a six-page document to their war crimes court. In it they wrote, “We fight you over defending Muslims, their land, their holy sites and their religion as a whole.” The charges against them were “badges of honor, which we carry with pride.” And they concluded, “We are terrorists to the bone.” They also made a strange request: “Can you please bring back
That ’70s Show
? The character played by Mila Kunis is very hot.” They then added, “Please do not tell other terrorists that we find Jewish girl sexy.”

Their beliefs, motivations, and intentions were never a mystery. They’re engaged in a holy war, as they themselves describe it. This means that we are engaged in a holy war as well, whether we want to see it that way or not. The enemy is calling it like it is, while our leadership is excusing acts of war as the acts of deranged men or of people “upset with the health care bill.” As the so-called twentieth 9/11 hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, said in open court at his trial, “I am not insane. I am al-Qaeda.”

It wasn’t long after Obama had ordered Holder to shutter Guantánamo Bay that Bush’s Black Swan pirouetted directly into the White Swan’s line of sight. It’s all fun and games, idealism and romanticism during the campaign, until you become president and the crud hits the fan. That moment generally occurs when the Threat Matrix hits the Oval Office desk for the first time. Usually delivered to the president at dawn, the Threat Matrix is a phone-book-sized compendium of all the threats against the United States and our interests tracked overnight by our intelligence agencies.

The Threat Matrix is usually enough to scare straight any naive leftist tripping on kook hallucinogens. Within three months of taking office and getting a load of the Threat Matrix, Obama and Holder defended domestic spying, warrantless wiretaps, and the Patriot Act. Quite a trifecta of Bush counterterrorism goodness. It was particularly gratifying given that in 2007, then-senator Obama declared, “No more illegal wiretapping of American citizens. No more ignoring the law when it is convenient.” And in 2008, the future attorney general, Eric Holder, proclaimed, “I … never thought that I would see that a president would act in direct defiance of federal law by authorizing warrantless NSA surveillance of American citizens.” Holder just needed to wait another year and he’d see his boss do the same thing.

While Team Obama was embracing the Bush wiretapping policies, it was still stuck on stupid on what to do about Guantánamo Bay. Bringing top al-Qaeda terrorists to New York to stand trial near ground zero may have satisfied Obama’s kook fantasy of showing the world that we’re “better” than the terrorists who hit us on 9/11, but the policy was advanced without a plan and without a comprehensive new legal structure to deal with the detainees beyond trying them in federal courts.

Interestingly, the Obama administration continued the Bush policy of holding hundreds of enemy combatants at the larger and more secret Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, which, because it was located in an active theater of war, was exempt from the kind of judicial review required in other locales. As it was making a very public show of wanting to close Guantánamo, Team Obama
expanded
Bagram’s role as a terrorist detention center and sought to severely restrict legal avenues for those held there.

Meanwhile, nobody on Team Obama bothered to contact the mayor of New York, the New York Police Department, or the Joint Terrorism Task Force about the wisdom of moving key al-Qaeda leaders such as KSM, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Abu Zubaydah to the city. Nobody on Team Obama thought it critical to secure political as well as law enforcement support for the plan. Nobody thought it important to lay the logistical groundwork for acquiring secure facilities in New York to hold these terrorists during their trials. Nobody thought about the security ramifications for the city and its residents or for the possibility that KSM and the others might turn their trials into propaganda circuses. And of course, nobody on Team Obama believed that as foreign enemy combatants, they weren’t entitled to any of this.

Of course, when KSM got wind that he was movin’ on up to the Big Apple, he immediately got ready for his star turn. He’d heard Sinatra croon that if you could make it in New York, you could make it anywhere. He got a contraband
I HEART NY
T-shirt. He demanded that Guantánamo guards refer to him as “Mr. Mohammed” and avoid eye contact. Like Prince, he changed his name to an undecipherable symbol, or the Terrorist Formerly Known as KSM. He dreamed that pretty soon he’d stroll into a New York courtroom wearing huge Paris Hilton sunglasses, carrying a rhinestone-encrusted cell phone, and tell the judge to hold while he takes a call from Ari Emanuel.

Obama and Holder didn’t anticipate the fact that leftists loved to complain about Guantánamo when Bush was in office, but once they had the chance to close it, most caved. Democrats such as New York senator Charles Schumer called the plan to try top al-Qaeda terrorists in New York “wrongheaded.” Public support for closing Guantánamo dropped into the 30 percent range. While many Democrats supported
in theory
the plan to close Guantánamo, they didn’t want any detainees transferred to their states for trial. If they weren’t going to be sent to New York, where would they go? The Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado? Democratic representative from Colorado John Salazar said no. Fort Leavenworth in Kansas? Democratic governor Mark Parkinson said no. Nobody wanted KSM in his or her backyard, envisioning their head on his sword.

Also engaged in epic “NIMBY”? Foreign countries, including the home nations of the detainees, which refused to take many of them back. Team Obama seemed genuinely shocked that these countries didn’t want them. Duh! They’re terrorists. A December 2010 report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence stated that 25 percent of the detainees who’ve been transferred out of Guantánamo Bay return to the jihad.

Oh wait: somebody did want them. The cities of Berkeley, California, and Amherst, Massachusetts, approved resolutions to invite detainees who had been cleared of “wrongdoing” to live there. “This is one thing we can do to right some wrongs of our federal government,” said Wendy Kenin, the chairwoman of Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission (yes, there is such a thing).

Another major setback to the Obama/Holder terrorist merry-go-round occurred in the fall of 2010, when Ahmed Ghailani, a Guantánamo detainee charged in the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, was acquitted of all 283 terrorism charges against him and convicted on only one count of destroying government property. Sort of like the punishment you’d get if you torched a government-issued pen. If not for that one conviction, Ghailani would have walked free. The possibility that this might happen in the trials of KSM and other top 9/11 plotters put the final nail in the coffin for Obama and Holder’s lunatic plan to try these terrorists in civilian courts.

In another bizarre twist, Holder had said that if any of the Guantánamo terrorists were acquitted in civilian court, he and Obama would order them held indefinitely anyway, so don’t worry. What? Then what was the point of trying them in the first place? To show the world how awesome we are? To make ourselves feel better? “Not guilty!” “Yay, Inshallah!” “Not so fast, Mr. Mohammed. Please follow me back to indefinite detention.” That would’ve had even KSM saying, “What the @$%&! just happened?”

The administration’s protracted indecision on Guantánamo led the military to kill suspected terrorists on the battlefield or through drone strikes or hand off those captured to other countries for detention. They had more due process under President Bush. Special forces on the ground in Afghanistan and the judges handling the cases were clamoring for legislative clarity on detainee policy. Essentially, the Obama/Holder detainee policy became “Crap in One Hand and Wish in the Other to See Which One Fills Up First.” In the end, Obama kept Guantánamo Bay open and operational, although he hasn’t ordered a single terrorist suspect sent there since he became president. He apparently finds it easier to kill them on the battlefield without due process than to have to deal with the mishegas of interrogation and detention.

In early March 2011, Obama overturned his own ban on military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay. Despite repeatedly claiming that such trials were an abomination to our system of justice, Obama and Holder acknowledged that the tribunals “are an available and important tool in combating international terrorists that fall within their jurisdiction while upholding the rule of law.” The military trials of KSM and other key terrorists resumed in mid-2012. Obama was chastened and embarrassed to have to adopt yet another Bush policy, so to make himself feel better, he summoned the “Leave Britney Alone” YouTube sensation Chris Crocker to the White House, and the two of them put on guyliner, crawled under a bedsheet together, and filmed themselves crying out, “Leave Barry Alone!”

There was, however, one major policy that Obama could not abide: enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs), which, despite having been determined to be legal in 2002 and 2003 when they were used, were called “torture” by Obama and the kooks. Following the capture of top al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002, the CIA and the U.S. military developed interrogation techniques that were directly adapted from the training techniques used to prepare our special forces personnel to resist interrogation, such as wall standing, sleep deprivation, facial or “insult” slaps, the playing of loud music, and, until 2003, waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning.

How scary is any of this to a hardened jihadist who thinks nothing of beheading an infidel with a machete? This list of EITs sounds like a run-of-the-mill night at the Clinton White House. And yet, somehow it was all too unacceptable for Obama, Holder, and the leftists—regardless of whether or not these EITs were generating actionable intelligence that was disrupting terror plots and saving American lives. They were not, according to the leftists, “consistent with our values,” so they must end.

Of course, the reason we know what constituted EITs and who was subjected to them is that in April 2009, Obama decided unilaterally to release top-secret Justice Department memoranda from the Bush administration that outlined the methods used by the agency during interrogations. It was unprecedented for the commander in chief to release such high-level secrets when the country was still at war. Obama’s own CIA director, Leon Panetta, opposed the release, along with four former CIA directors who had served under both Republican and Democratic presidents. Obama went ahead with the release anyway, telling the CIA in a speech that the exposure would make us “stronger and more secure” as it showed the “power of our values, including the rule of law.” I’m surprised the president didn’t call up Stan Lee, the founder of Marvel Comics, and ask him if he could make an illustrated pamphlet to show the world’s jihadists what we do when we catch them, and how to prepare themselves to defeat the techniques if they’re caught.

This outrage led to the reemergence of the guy the Left had crucified for years as Beezelbub, former vice president Dick Cheney. Cheney doesn’t come out to shoot the breeze. Cheney only emerges when Obama inflicts a particularly dangerous kind of hell on us, as he did with the release of the DOJ memos. Cheney blistered Obama and Holder for their irresponsibility and launched a formal government process to declassify and release two CIA reports on detainee interrogation, one dated July 13, 2004, and the other June 1, 2005, which Cheney said “showed the success of the effort … what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.”

The government finally released the CIA memos, and the memos clearly showed that the EITs had generated the majority of information we got about al-Qaeda and played a role in nearly every capture of al-Qaeda operatives since 2002. Zubaydah cracked under the pressure and then led the CIA to other high-value targets, including Ramzi bin al-Shibh. Information from bin al-Shibh then led to the capture of top-gun KSM, who in turn coughed up intelligence about a plot to attack the West Coast. “That’s pretty actionable intelligence,” former Bush CIA director Michael Hayden said.

In the CIA inspector general’s report dated May 7, 2004, KSM was described as “probably the most prolific” of the interrogated terrorists. He “provided information that helped lead to the arrests of terrorists including Sayfullah Paracha and his son Uzair Paracha, businessmen whom Khalid Sheikh Mohammed planned to use to smuggle explosives into the United States; Saleh Almari, a sleeper operative in New York; and Majid Khan, an operative who could enter the United States easily and was tasked to research attacks (part redacted).” KSM also gave up information that led ultimately to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. Furthermore, the number of terrorist suspects subjected to EITs was extremely limited. In December 2007 CIA director Michael Hayden stated that “of about 100 prisoners held to date in the CIA program, the enhanced techniques were used on about 30, and waterboarding used on just three.”