In retrospect, and this is saying something, Michael Mukasey was a worse Attorney General than John Ashcroft, and also a worse person. His opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal is beneath someone who served in such a prestigious office. It shows all the intellectual depth of Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity. It’s history as told by Glenn Beck. Little more than a recitation of right-wing quibbles, gotchas, and distortions, it has no moral arc at all. He begins by poisoning us against the elder terrorist’s very name:
The elder, Tamerlan—apparently named for the 14th-century Muslim conqueror famous for building pyramids of his victims’ skulls to commemorate his triumphs over infidels—is dead.
Yes, undoubtedly, his name is relevant to the crime, just as anyone named Alex is motivated to raise Greek armies and conquer Asia.
For starters, you can worry about how the High-Value Interrogation Group, or HIG, will do its work. That unit was finally put in place by the FBI after so-called underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up the airplane in which he was traveling as it flew over Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009 and was advised of his Miranda rights. The CIA interrogation program that might have handled the interview had by then been dismantled by President Obama.
We are supposed to be concerned that the Torture Group at the CIA was dismantled by our president. We are supposed to be concerned that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallah was read his Miranda rights even though he subsequently confessed to eight charges against him and is currently serving four consecutive life sentences plus 50 years, and even though he cooperated with authorities, and even though the man who is alleged to have inspired him, Anwar al-Awlaki, was drone-blasted out of existence despite being an American citizen.
Next comes an unsubstantiated smear against CAIR:
At the behest of such Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups as the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America, and other self-proclaimed spokesmen for American Muslims, the FBI has bowdlerized its training materials to exclude references to militant Islamism. Does this delicacy infect the FBI’s interrogation group as well?
These so-called affiliations are established using the same principles applied in the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. In other words, twenty years ago some CAIR members met with some Hamas members and had a discussion that is sinister even though Hamas had never committed a single terrorist act at the time and was not designated as a terrorist organization. That kind of evidence might be enough for Michele Bachmann and Louis Gohmert, but it should be inadequate for a former chief of the Justice Department.
Next up is another iteration of an old complaint that the Pentagon’s after-action study of the Fort Hood Massacre didn’t adequately address the motive of the killer.
Will we see another performance like the Army’s after-action report following Maj. Nidal Hasan’s rampage at Fort Hood in November 2009, preceded by his shout “allahu akhbar”—a report that spoke nothing of militant Islam but referred to the incident as “workplace violence”? If tone is set at the top, recall that the Army chief of staff at the time said the most tragic result of Fort Hood would be if it interfered with the Army’s diversity program.
That brief paragraph manages to combine a call for double standards in how Muslims are treated in our military with mockery of the idea of diversity in our armed forces. If all it takes is one Muslim going berserk to cast official suspicion on all Muslims, then Muslims aren’t equal citizens in this country. It’s that kind of panicked thinking that led to the Japanese detention camps that Michelle Malkin so admires.
Moving on…
If the intelligence yielded by the FBI’s investigation is of value, will that value be compromised when this trial is held, as it almost certainly will be, in a civilian court? Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s lawyers, as they have every right to do, will seek to discover that intelligence and use it to fashion a case in mitigation if nothing else, to show that his late brother was the dominant conspirator who had access to resources and people.
Now this former Attorney General is calling into question our entire civilian court system. Does trying people in court compromise intelligence? Is the government the only entity in this country that is supposed to know if the brothers were given resources by other people? An American citizen is in custody, but he should be defined as the enemy because “Jihad”?
There is also cause for concern in that this was obviously a suicide operation—not in the direct way of a bomber who kills all his victims and himself at the same time by blowing himself up, but in the way of someone who conducts a spree, holding the stage for as long as possible, before he is cut down in a blaze of what he believes is glory. Here, think Mumbai.
I am unfamiliar with obvious suicide missions in which one of the perpetrators willingly surrenders to police rather than die in a hail of bullets. That would appear to be the opposite of a suicide mission. It was certainly a mission in which the suspects risked death, but also one in which they furiously attempted to avoid capture. And why does this matter, anyway? Would their crime have been different if they had blown themselves up along with their victims? It seems that, if anything, we would be more concerned if they had, since such attacks are even harder to prevent.
Can we have a non-sequitir?
Until now, it has been widely accepted in law-enforcement circles that such an attack in the U.S. was less likely because of the difficulty that organizers would have in marshaling the spiritual support to keep the would-be suicide focused on the task. That analysis went out the window when the Tsarnaevs followed up the bombing of the marathon by murdering a police officer in his car—an act certain to precipitate the violent confrontation that followed.
It wasn’t a suicide attack, but let me tell you why is was a suicide attack. Because they killed a police officer.
There is also cause for concern in the president’s reluctance, soon after the Boston bombing, even to use the “t” word—terrorism—and in his vague musing on Friday about some unspecified agenda of the perpetrators, when by then there was no mystery: the agenda was jihad.
Ah, yes, that old trope about using the ‘T’ word. When did the president use it? Did he use it as an adjective or a verb. Benghazi!!
And the ‘J’ word explains everything. You can use it to identify every warning sign in the book. Lost your job? Jihad!! Flunking out of college? Jihad!! Parents abandoned you? Jihad!! It’s not comforting to know that this man was once in a position of responsibility for our safety.
Mukasey finishes with a quick history of the Muslim Brotherhood that would make any Muslim laugh.
For five years we have heard, principally from those who wield executive power, of a claimed need to make fundamental changes in this country, to change the world’s—particularly the Muslim world’s—perception of us, to press “reset” buttons. We have heard not a word from those sources suggesting any need to understand and confront a totalitarian ideology that has existed since at least the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s.
The ideology has regarded the United States as its principal adversary since the late 1940s, when a Brotherhood principal, Sayid Qutb, visited this country and was aghast at what he saw as its decadence. The first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993, al Qaeda attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, on the USS Cole in 2000, the 9/11 attacks, and those in the dozen years since—all were fueled by Islamist hatred for the U.S. and its values.
Also, too, the Muslim Brotherhood played no direct role in the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993, al Qaeda attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, on the USS Cole in 2000, the 9/11 attacks, and those in the dozen years since. Sayid Qutb is not synonymous with the Muslim Brotherhood and his influence on al-Qaeda leaders like Usama bin-Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri doesn’t preclude him from being widely admired by Muslims who have no intention of harming anyone. We may not like the Muslim Brotherhood’s values and it is true that they hold anti-American views, but they are not al-Qaeda. They are not interested, as a group, in waging jihad against marathon spectators in Boston. It’s oversimplified to even consider the Muslim Brotherhood as a cohesive multinational group without considering its particular manifestations in places like Egypt and Syria where their primary role has been in opposition to the ruling government. Egypt was our close ally. Syria was not. Therefore, the history unfolded differently in each country.
This essay is just garbage. It’s an embarrassing display of simplistic fear-mongering that calls on us to abandon our values. It’s pure unadulterated Bushism, and we are trying to leave that disastrous way of understanding the world behind us.
