A characteristically strong column from Andy McCarthy, author of Willful Blindness, on Barack Obama’s comments yesterday.
This is June 2008. That means it marks the ten-year anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s indictment. He was first charged by my old office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, in June 1998. That was before the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (hundreds killed), before the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole (17 U.S. members of the U.S. Navy killed), and before 9/11 (nearly 3000 Americans killed). So it’s fair to ask: How is that strategy of prosecuting him in the criminal-justice system working out? That’s a question Sen. John McCain ought to be putting to Sen. Barack Obama every day. Sen. Obama, the Democrat’s presumptive nominee, made some astounding statements yesterday which provided his views on confronting the most urgent challenge facing the American people – that of radical Islam.
McCarthy continues:
In point of fact, while the government managed to prosecute many people responsible for the 1993 WTC bombing, many also escaped prosecution because of the limits on civilian criminal prosecution. Some who contributed to the attack, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, continued to operate freely because they were beyond the system’s capacity to apprehend. Abdul Rahman Yasin was released prematurely because there was not sufficient evidence to hold him – he fled to Iraq, where he was harbored for a decade (and has never been apprehended).
He concludes:
A successful counterterrorism strategy makes criminal prosecution a subordinate part of a much broader governmental response. Most of what is needed never happens in a courtroom. It happens in military operations against terrorist strongholds; intelligence operations in which jihadists get assassinated – without trial; intelligence collections in which we cozy up to despicable informants since only they can tell us what we need to know; and aggressive treasury actions to trace terror funds. That is how you stop the homeland from being attacked, which is what we have done for the last seven years. And it is that from which Obama wants to move away. Obama would bring us back to September 10th America. And September 10th is sure to be followed by September 11th .
