Expect this news to get zero media play.
The chance to secure crucial information about al-Qaeda operations in Yemen was lost because the Obama administration decided to charge and prosecute Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as an ordinary criminal, critics say. He is said to have reduced his co-operation with FBI interrogators on the advice of his government-appointed defence counsel.
The potential significance became chillingly clear this weekend when it was reported that shortly after his detention, he boasted that 20 more young Muslim men were being prepared for similar murderous missions in the Yemen.
The lawyer for the 23-year-old Nigerian entered a formal not guilty plea on Friday to charges that he tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on December 25 – even though he reportedly admitted earlier that he was trained and supplied with the explosives sewn into his underwear by al-Qaeda in the Arab state.
“He was singing like a canary, then we charged him in civilian proceedings, he got a lawyer and shut up,” Slade Gorton, a member of the 9/11 Commission that investigated the Sept 2001 terror attacks on the US, told The Sunday Telegraph.
“I find it incomprehensible that this administration is treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue. The president has finally said that we are at war with al-Qaeda. Well, if this is a war, then Abdulmutallab should be treated as a combatant not a criminal.”
Mr. Makes-Boom-Boom-In-His-Pants needs to be treated exactly the same as the Nazi saboteurs who landed in Long Island, NY and Jacksonville, FL in 1942. Captured, handed over to the military, tried by tribunal and executed.
Why is this so hard for some people to figure out? Why would they want it any other way?
Found via the AoSHQ
“Why is this so hard for some people to figure out? Why would they want it any other way?”
I know that’s rhetorical, but I think to use such a soft touch with these guys, one must fully believe that the 15 years of Al Qaeda attacks and 30 years of Islamic radical attacks on the United States were brought on by injustice by the United States as an imperialist nation.
In other words, you’d have to buy into social justice rhetoric that states that we pretty much deserve these attacks. Like if you went to a church where the pastor spouts anti-American rhetoric for 20 years or so.
But it’s hard to believe that a President who spent so much time apologizing for his nation in his first year on the job (while these attacks were being planned) could believe such things…/sarc
I had an argument elsewhere with someone over this. They simply could not grasp how the Geneva Conventions in fact /insist/ that non-uniformed combatants were to be shot.
They’re going to keep pushing this ‘it’s a criminal matter’ until we take another hit like 9/11. And then things are going to get very, very ugly.