THE TERROR THIS TIME….
HELLO? IS IT NOT TIME TO NAME THE ENEMY AND STOP HIDING BEHIND THE “WAR ON TERROR” WHICH IS ALSO A FIG LEAF….WHY NOT CALL IT THE WAR ON JIHAD….RSK
The Terror This Time
Janet Napolitano says the system worked. No, we were brave and lucky. A U.S. government that has barred the phrase “war on terror” has nonetheless acknowledged that a failed Christmas day bomb attack on an airliner was a terrorist attempt. Can we all now drop the pretense that we stopped fighting a war once Dick Cheney and George W. Bush left the White House?
The attempt by 23-year-old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab follows the alleged murders in Ft. Hood, Texas by Islamist-inspired Major Nidal Hasan in November. Brian Jenkins, who studies terrorism for the Rand Corporation, says there were more terror incidents (12), including thwarted plots, on U.S. soil in 2009 than in any year since 2001. The jihadists don’t seem to like Americans any better because we’re closing down Guantanamo.
Northwest Airlines flight 253 sits on the tarmac after requesting emergency help at Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Romulus, Mich.
This increasing terror tempo makes the Obama Administration’s reflexive impulse to treat terrorists like routine criminal suspects all the more worrisome. It immediately indicted Mr. Abdulmutallab on criminal charges of trying to destroy an aircraft, despite reports that he told officials he had ties to al Qaeda and had picked up his PETN explosive in Yemen. The charges mean the Nigerian can only be interrogated like any other defendant in a criminal case, subject to having a lawyer present and his Miranda rights read.
Yet he is precisely the kind of illegal enemy combatant who should be interrogated first with the goal of preventing future attacks and learning more about terror networks rather than gaining a single conviction. We now have to hope he cooperates voluntarily.
Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, told CNN yesterday that “one thing I’d like to point out is that the system worked.” Yet the terrorist screening system seems to have failed in at least two crucial ways: first, in failing to revoke a visa to the U.S. that Mr. Abdulmutallab had obtained last June despite a later warning to U.S. consular officials from his own father that he was becoming radicalized and might have terror network ties; and second, in not adding him to a no-fly list from a lower-level watch list.
The episode is a reminder that the fight against terrorism requires even more interagency cooperation, and Congress should investigate whether such communication was lacking in this case. No one should leap to conclusions about who is responsible for any mistakes, but Ms. Napolitano isn’t reassuring when she utters happy talk that it all “went very smoothly.” The day was saved not because of the antiterror “system” but because the explosive failed to ignite and because a Dutch passenger and flight attendants acted heroically to subdue the man, put out the fire and detach the explosive.
The lesson here is the same as Flight 93 on 9/11 and shoe-bomber Richard Reid, which is that civilians willing to act in their own self-defense are a crucial part of “homeland security.” The willingness of passengers and crew to identify potential threats seems more useful than more onerous airport screening, which only gives terrorists the satisfaction of knowing they have made air travel even more unbearable. The new rule to keep passengers in their seats in the final hour of some flights seems all too typical of arbitrary rules that inconvenience innocents but not terrorists.
On that score, the settlement reportedly won earlier this year by the so-called flying imams against a U.S. airline for knocking them off a flight in 2006 sends exactly the wrong message. The interests of nonradical Muslims will hardly be served if political correctness allows the next terror attack to succeed.
Mr. Abdulmutallab’s alleged links to Yemen also raise questions about why the Administration is now returning Guantanamo detainees to that unstable Middle East nation. Pentagon officials have raised alarms about Yemen as an emerging al Qaeda sanctuary for at least a year, and now we may have the first case of a terrorist trained there to strike at U.S. airline or domestic targets. The Yemen government says it is cooperating with the U.S., and the CIA is said to be providing intelligence for some of Aden’s anti-al Qaeda efforts. But at this point the repatriation of Gitmo detainees to Yemen seems dangerous, and recklessly so.
No doubt in the days ahead we’ll learn more about how the young Nigerian became radicalized. Like many of the 9/11 murderers, he came from an affluent family and was highly educated. We know by now that the poverty-causes-terrorism school is false, but this is one more reminder. Authorities will also want to know how he was recruited—whether in person during a trip to Yemen or other sanctuary, through al Qaeda agents elsewhere, or perhaps via the Internet like Major Hasan. The report that the Nigerian turned more radical only in the last 18 months shows that our antiterror vigilance will have to continue for years, if not decades, to come.
Such vigilance is easier to sustain, and likelier to succeed in deterring attacks, if we understand that we are still fighting a multifront war against the various elements of radical Islam. This time, thanks to luck and bravery, the 278 passengers and crew of Northwest Flight 253 avoided death. We’d rather take the luck out of it.
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