Exclusive: Obama’s Terror-Fighting Fantasies:

Democrat Typifies the ‘September 10′ Mentality

According to Sen. Barack Obama, there is a relatively painless solution to the terrorism problem America faces today: going back to the anti-terrorism tactics of the Clinton years.

“It is my firm belief that we can track terrorists, we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution,” the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee told ABC News last week. “And you know, let’s take the example of Guantanamo [Bay]. What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks, for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated. And the fact that the administration has not tried to do that has created a situation where not only have we never actually put many of those folks on trial, but we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to rule of law around the world, and given a boost to terrorist recruitment, in countries that say, ‘Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims,’ ” Obama added, “We could have done the exact same thing, but done it in a way that was consistent with our laws.”

It would be difficult to imagine a more perfect example of the “September 10″ mentality - including the notion that the United States could pretend that terrorism was just another form of criminal behavior, another problem for police and prosecutors to handle as best they can. Mr. Obama’s premise that the World Trade Center bombing trial could serve as a model for today’s war is nonsense - dangerous nonsense. On February 26, 1993, a terrorist cell affiliated with al Qaeda detonated a bomb in a parking garage below the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring 1,000. From the beginning, the investigation of the World Trade Center bombing was crippled by the Clinton Administration’s disorganization: It had only been in office one month, and Janet Reno had not been confirmed as attorney general. But the problems with the administration’s handling of the case ran much deeper than that. Senior officials insisted on treating the case as if it were merely a law enforcement issue and avoiding the question of foreign state sponsorship. Senior administration officials rebuffed efforts by CIA chief James Woolsey to investigate evidence that foreign governments may have been behind the bombing.

In point of fact, there were two trials that took place in mid-1990s involving members of the terrorist cell that conspired to bomb the World Trade Center. The spiritual leader of the terrorist network was Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman (the blind sheik), a radical cleric who emigrated from Egypt to the United States and had been comrade-in-arms to Ayman al-Zawahiri, who later became Osama bin Laden’s deputy in al Qaeda. In the mid-1990s, the blind sheik and members of his terror cell were convicted in the bombing of the World Trade Center and conspiracy to bomb prominent New York City landmarks, including the United Nations, the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels and the FBI’s Manhattan headquarters.

Obama suggests that by trying members of the terror cell in open court, the U.S. government was able to fight terrorism in an enlightened, internationally popular way that did not that did not damage U.S. security. He could hardly be more wrong. During the 1995 prosecution of the blind sheik, prosecutors turned the names of 200 unindicted coconspirators over to the defense, as they were required to do under the discovery rules of the civilian criminal justice system. U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey, who currently serves as attorney general of the United States, presided over the case. He warned defense attorneys that the information could only be used to prepare for trial - not for other purposes. But within 10 days, according to Mukasey, the list was in downtown Khartoum and bin Laden, then operating out of Sudan, knew that the government was on his trail.

“By providing classified evidence to the defense in that terrorism case, we had effectively informed al Qaida as to which of its agents we had uncovered,” Republican Sens. Jon Kyl, Jeff Sessions, Lindsey Graham, John Cornyn and Tom Coburn wrote last year. The five Republicans, all members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, were making the case against legislation pushed by the panel’s chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, Vermont Democrat, that would give habeas corpus rights to aliens detained as enemy combatants. The Republican senators added: “In another case in which terrorists were tried in the civilian criminal justice system, testimony about the use of cell phones tipped off terrorists as to how the government was monitoring terrorist networks. Again according to Judge Mukasey, ‘there was a piece of innocuous testimony about the delivery of a cell phone.’ This testimony alerted terrorists to government surveillance, ‘and as a result, [their] communication network shut down within days and intelligence was lost to the government forever, intelligence that might have prevented who knows what.’ ”

Another critical component of the problem was the “wall” that developed as a result of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the primary federal law governing the surveillance of
suspected terrorist communications. As a special FISA review court held in 2002, FISA “as passed by Congress in 1978 clear did not preclude or limit the government’s use or proposed use of foreign intelligence information, which included evidence of certain kinds of criminal activity, in a criminal prosecution.” (emphasis in the original.) But beginning with a series of judicial rulings in the 1980s, bureaucratic custom began to take hold: Criminal investigators and intelligence agents should be kept apart whenever possible, lest a criminal prosecution become “contaminated” by intelligence information that could not be admitted in court.

All of these problems with FISA existed well before the Clinton Administration. But they were exacerbated by Jamie Gorelick, the number two person in the Clinton Administration Justice Department. Mrs. Gorelick authored a 1995 directive that made it more difficult for the FBI to locate two of the September 11th hijackers who had already entered the United States by the summer of 2001. In April 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft, declassified a four-page directive sent by Gorelick to Mary Jo White, the New York-based U.S. attorney investigating the first World Trade Center bombing, as well as FBI Director Louis Freeh. In the memo, Gorelick ordered White and Freeh to to follow information-sharing procedures that “go beyond what is legally required” in order to avoid “any risk of creating an unwarranted appearence” that the Justice Department was using FISA warrants instead of ordinary criminal investigative procedures in an effort to undermine the civil liberties of terrorism suspects. In testimony before the September 11th commission, Ashcroft explained how Jamie Gorelick’s wall made it much more difficult during the summer of 2001 to find Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, two of the September 11th hijackers.

One might counter that Ashcroft is a partisan Republican who spent eight years in the Senate fighting against virtually every major policy proposal made by the Clinton Administration. Yet his testimony dovetails almost perfectly with that of Stewart Baker, who served under President Clinton as general counsel of the National Security Agency in 1993-94. In 1994, after leaving his NSA job, Baker argued in favor of leaving in place the “wall” between law enforcement and intelligence and even suggested that the wall be raised even further (which is exactly what Gorelick did with her 1995 directive). In retrospect, “I was wrong, but not alone, in assigning a high importance to theoretical privacy risks,” Baker wrote in Slate magazine on December 31, 2003. “In hindsight, that choice seems little short of feckless, for it made the failures of August and September 2001 nearly inevitable.” What “failures” was he referring to? The inability to locate al-Mihdhar and Alhazmi. Two and a half weeks before the September 11th attacks, the U.S. government knew that the two men were inside the United States. They were living here under their own names, which they were using to carry out financial transactions, go to flight school, earn frequent flier miles and obtain a California identity card. Despite an extensive paper trail, the U.S. government failed to find them.

The reason for that, Baker demonstrated, was the fact that the FBI, acting on legal advice, refused to involve its criminal agents in the investigation. When an FBI intelligence agent looking for the two terrorists requested help from the criminal division just weeks before September 11th, FBI headquarters sent him a memo warning him that members of the FBI’s criminal division could not participate in the investigation. In a reply message, the New York agent protested the decision, in what turned out to be disturbingly prescient terms: [S]omeday someone will die - and wall or not - the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems.’ Let’s hope the [lawyers who gave the advice] will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL [Usama bin Laden, is getting the most ‘protection.’ ”

In short, the disaster of September 11th resulted in no small part from the very policies of the 1990s that Obama is so proud of: the failed U.S. government effort to fight terrorism as if it was simply another problem to be “solved” by law enforcement, judges and the courts. John McCain understands that this is foolish - dangerously so. Whether he is capable of articulating this to the voters is anyone’s guess.

Lee ADDS: Obama…The DELUSIONAL…A better Title!