How Obama Has Mishandled the War on Terror

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Michael Bernard Mukasey. How Obama Has Mishandled the War on Terror

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The 1993 World Trade Center bombing was described at the time as a wake-up call to this country to take notice that it was dealing with something broader than random criminal acts. That something was Islamic violence to which this country was no longer immune. Unfortunately, our response to each subsequent act was framed in the argot of conventional criminal prosecution: a stern declaration that we would “bring to justice” those responsible. The ongoing assumption was that “justice” meant a trial in a federal court, with attendant discovery for the defendants and their supporters outside the courtroom of not only the evidence the government would introduce to convict them but also of some of the means and methods used to gather that evidence. This presented a trove of intelligence for those on the outside. For example, when the government followed the standard practice in conspiracy cases of disclosing to the defense the unindicted conspirators in the prosecution of Omar Abdel Rahman, the “blind sheikh,” the list included Osama bin Laden; it was learned years later that that list found its way within weeks to bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan.

Perhaps not unnoticed during all of this, but certainly not taken at face value, was the declaration by Osama bin Laden, first published in a London newspaper in August 1996 and reissued in 1998, that included a call to “every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.”

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