On Friday, Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law and former spokesman plead not guilty in federal court Friday to charges that he conspired to kill Americans.
Sulaiman Abu Ghaith was arraigned with little prior public notice after being apprehended days ago in Jordan.
However, the leader of the U.S.prosecution team against the 1993 World Trade Center bombers says the Obama administration wasted a golden opportunity to glean critical intelligence and damaged the credibility of U.S. military commissions.
Andrew C. McCarthy says Congress established that military commissions would be the destination for captured enemy combatants after setting up the system in the wake of 9/11, but the Obama administration found a loophole.
“Public funds were not supposed to be used to bring enemy combatant terrorists into the United States for civilian trial, but the statute we’re talking about applied to the people who were in custody in Gitmo,” said McCarthy. “When it fell into the Obama administration’s lap that there was someone who fit the definition of an enemy combatant but yet was not at Gitmo that was a golden opportunity for the administration to end-around the congressional ban and usher an enemy combatant terrorist into the United States to give him a civilian trial.”
McCarthy admits that he and fellow prosecutors have amassed a strong conviction record against terrorist suspects, but possible exoneration is not his biggest concern. He says trials in civilian court always trigger intelligence flows that make our nation more vulnerable.
“You have to turn over discovery, meaning all of our intelligence files under the due process rules. You’re also, in effect, rewarding the worst actors. Basically, we’re taking the insane position that if you’re a foreign or even an American enemy combatant, and we happen to catch you in Yemen, we can take you out with a drone strike with no due process, no anything, even if you haven’t actually carried out a terrorist attack yet. But if you hit the jihadist jackpot and manage to get to the United States and kill 3,000 Americans, we’ll bring you into Manhattan and give you the bells and whistles civilian trial. That’s a pretty perverse set of incentives to give our enemy,” said McCarthy.
The case of the first World Trade Center bombings proved to McCarthy that terrorists who have full legal protections in U.S. courts have no incentive to reveal vital information. He says the military commissions system is very different.
“One of the best benefits of the law of war paradigm that we switched to after the 9-11 attacks is that if you treat people like enemy combatants, you can detain them and interrogate them counsel,” said McCarthy, noting that this concept has nothing to do with enhanced interrogation techniques.
“I’m talking simply, over a long period of time, to try to question people and glean information. When you’re in a terrorist war, as the war that we’re in right now is, intelligence is really your number one asset,” he said.
According to McCarthy, Obama is squandering chance after chance of picking up valuable intelligence.
“You can’t really foresee a traditional end to this war. The only thing you can do is get whatever intelligenceis available to you to try to identify the cells and stop the plot. That’s how we protect the country,” said McCarthy. “Unfortunately, the Obama administration has really adopted a posture where when they can kill or capture, they generally kill. When they capture or when someone falls into their lap as happened this week, they bring the person right into the civilian justice system, which means you don’t get to interrogate them.”