Feb 12 Exposing Holder's & Brennan's Incompetence

The Obama administration, in the person of John Brennan, has fought to defend itself for mirandizing Nigerian terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, with Robert Gibbs and Attorney General Eric Holder playing supporting roles in that fight. Unfortunately for them, the adults have entered the room and the Obama administration looks in over its head...AGAIN.

Two serious adults, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and longtime National Journal columnist Stuart Taylor have weighed in. First, let's look at what Gen. Mukasey said about mirandizing terrorists:

What to do and who should do it? It was entirely reasonable for the FBI to be contacted and for that agency to take him into custody. But contrary to what some in government have suggested, that Abdulmutallab was taken into custody by the FBI did not mean, legally or as a matter of policy, that he had to be treated as a criminal defendant at any point. Consider: In 1942, German saboteurs landed on Long Island and in Florida. That they were eventually captured by the FBI did not stop President Franklin Roosevelt from directing that they be treated as unlawful enemy combatants. They were ultimately tried before a military commission in Washington and executed. Their status had nothing to do with who held them, and their treatment was upheld in all respects by the Supreme Court.

If possible, FBI custody is even less relevant today in determining someone's status. In 1942 the FBI was exclusively a crime-fighting organization. After Sept. 11, 2001, the agency's mission was expanded beyond detection of crime and apprehension of criminals to include gathering intelligence, helping to prevent and combat threats to national security, and furthering U.S. foreign policy goals. Guidelines put in place in 2003 and revised in September 2008 "do not require that the FBI's information gathering activities be differentially labeled as 'criminal investigations,' 'national security investigations,' or 'foreign intelligence collections,' or that the categories of FBI personnel who carry out investigations be segregated from each other based on the subject areas in which they operate. Rather, all of the FBI's legal authorities are available for deployment in all cases to which they apply to protect the public from crimes and threats to the national security and to further the United States' foreign intelligence objectives."

Here's what John Brennan said in defending the decision to read Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights:

Brennan also defended the decision to read Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights, something that Republicans have harshly criticized. Brennan said the decision to do so was "a long-standing FBI policy that was reaffirmed under Michael Mukasey, President Bush's attorney general."

The danger of quoting FBI policy is that an expert on FBI policy has the ability to write an op-ed explaining what policy has historically been and what current policy is. Predictably, Gen. Mukasey did exactly that this morning. As the former Attorney General, he's totally qualified to refute Mr. Brennan's arguments. Mr. Brennan will have difficulty explaining away this statement:

Rather, all of the FBI's legal authorities are available for deployment in all cases to which they apply to protect the public from crimes and threats to the national security and to further the United States' foreign intelligence objectives."

In other words, Sen. Kit Bond is right in saying that capturing a terrorist in U.S. territory doesn't mean that the FBI, as a matter of routine, will read terrorists their Miranda rights. That's certainly an option but it's done on a case-by-case basis. It certainly isn't automatic. At least it wasn't during the Bush administration.

While John Brennan was the target of Gen. Mukasey's op-ed, current Attorney Gen. Eric Holder is the target of Stuart Taylor's scorn. Taylor's column heaps scorn on Gen. Holder:

Reasonable people disagree about how much coercion interrogators should use to extract potentially lifesaving information from terrorists. (None at all, President Obama unwisely ordered soon after taking office.)

But no reasonable person could doubt that starting out with "you have the right to remain silent" is not the way to save lives.

Yet this is essentially the policy into which the Obama administration has locked itself by insisting that it did the right thing when it read Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas Day bomber, his Miranda rights after only 50 minutes of questioning and a hospital visit.

I return to this subject because the rationalizations by Attorney General Eric Holder and other administration apologists have been so breathtakingly bereft of seriousness about the need for aggressive interrogation to protect our country.

Abdulmutallab might have been the first of a dozen Christmas Day bombers seeking to perfect the Bojinka plot, for all Holder and his colleagues knew at the time. It was sheer luck that this was not the case.

And the decision to read Abdulmutallab his rights, bring him a lawyer, and stop asking questions may yet get Americans murdered by his co-conspirators in Yemen, who might have been located and captured or killed but for his five weeks of post-Miranda silence.

Anytime that a terrorist is captured, the first responsibility of any administration's national security team is to thoroughly interrogate the terrorist and learn as much about the terrorist's support system, the type of training he received, where he was trained, etc. This isn't rocket science.

In the aftermath of the failed terrorist plot, Janet Napolitano admitted that she was surprised by how well organized al-Qaeda in Yemen was. Had the Obama administration actually interrogated Abdulmutallab, they might've learned more about AQY.

That Holder put a higher priority on preserving Abdulmutallab's testimony than on gathering intelligence is stunning. Here's why reading Abdulmutallab his rights wasn't a priority:

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey told me in an interview that the CIA and national intelligence directors "and ultimately the president would have been in on the decision in addition to me"; and that "I like to think the default setting would have been toward gathering intelligence rather than worrying about whether a man who did his crime in front of 285 witnesses could be convicted without using his confession."

With 285 eyewitnesses, along with his burns, the chances of conviction would've been close to 100 percent. The only way Abdulmutallab wouldn't have gotten convicted was if the jury was made up of CAIR's board of directors.

The need to mirandize Abdulmutallab wasn't just insignificant. It wasn't necessary. In fact, it was stupid to not collect important information in a timely fashion.

I don't know whether Mssrs. Taylor and Mukasey worked in coordination in writing their articles. What I'm certain of is that they've highlighted the incompetence of Eric Holder and John Brennan for all the political world to see. Their expertise in constitutional and counterterrorism issues make it difficult for Robert Gibbs to question them, though I expect he'll try criticizing them during today's briefing.

Comments welcome at LFR.