Mukasey on Obama's Antiterrorism Policies: 'A World Inhabited Only by Children'

While visiting the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay in 2008, then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey stopped by the cell of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM). What he saw startled him: KSM had his own exercise center adjoining his cell, which included the same make and model of elliptical machine Mukasey used at his apartment building in Washington.

That wasn’t the only experience the terrorist and the attorney general shared that day. Mukasey also ate lunch from the same halal menu the prisoners choose their meals from every day.

What struck Mukasey was the extent to which those who demonized the Bush administration’s efforts to fight terrorism were intentionally misinforming and propagandizing the public with no regard to the damage they might do to America’s safety.

President Obama famously ordered the closure of the facility at Guantanamo immediately upon taking office. But he also signed other executive orders–including restricting interrogation techniques to those outlined in the Army Field Manual.

Obama’s prosecution of the war on terror inspired Mukasey’s extended essay How Obama has Mishandled the War on Terror. The essay is part of a series of critical pamphlets published by Encounter Books called Broadsides.

Before the Bush administration took the helm of the war on terror, terrorism was considered to be a law enforcement issue. Mukasey writes that when we called for someone to be brought to justice, “justice” was taken to mean a courtroom. But this could be disastrous for American security, because the discovery phase of any trial could–and did–put sensitive military information in the hands of our enemies.

So the Bush administration began making both semantic and structural changes right there. Mukasey notes that to “bring them to justice” was added “bring justice to them… the administration went to war.”

The Obama administration decided that top terrorists were to return to our courtrooms, openly encouraging the establishment of the courts as the prime battlefield.

“But the willingness of the courts to step in where the legislative branch has abdicated means that the outcome of a deadly struggle is as likely to turn on who has more or better lawyers as on who has stronger forces,” Mukasey writes.

Perhaps the decision to allow only techniques approved by the Army Field Manuel presents the starkest difference between the two approaches–and the most glaring weakness in Obama’s tactics.

Mukasey writes that the courts constrain the gathering of both human intelligence and signals intelligence. The reason we seek to gather human intelligence, he points out, is because we are essentially putting together a puzzle without looking at the box. Occasionally we capture someone who has seen the full picture.

When the U.S. captured al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, he began giving up some important information. But he soon clammed up. American interrogators then introduced what became known as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the most controversial of which was waterboarding. The techniques were effective and did not violate U.S. torture statutes. Waterboarding was performed on only three captives–Abu Zubaydah, KSM, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

Zubaydah’s interrogation was particularly successful. The information he gave us led to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was in the process of completing plans for a 9/11-style attack on Heathrow Airport in London. Zubaydah’s questioning also resulted in the capture of Jose Padilla, who was planning the detonation of a “dirty bomb” as well as a series of apartment bombings in Florida.

KSM’s interrogation led to the disruption of plans to fly planes into L.A.’s Library Tower and yielded information on a biological weapons program. Al-Nashiri also provided important information after the enhanced interrogations.

Mukasey stops here to refute the claim that the tactics aren’t valuable supposedly because a prisoner will say anything to make the pain stop.

“But the object is not confessions; it is intelligence,” Mukasey writes. “Facts disclosed by detainees under interrogation are not taken at face value. They are fit into the matrix of other facts known to intelligence officers in order to test their reliability.”

Obama’s executive orders aren’t the only targets for Mukasey; he also takes aim at the man appointed to carry out the president’s will on these matters, Attorney General Eric Holder.

First came the release of previously classified memos detailing our interrogation policy, enabling our enemies to learn our methods. Then Holder appointed a prosecutor to reopen the cases of CIA interrogators that had already been deemed lacking grounds for prosecution. That was followed by Holder’s declaration that KSM’s trial would be moved from a military commission to a Manhattan courthouse.

This approach to fighting terrorism undoes a century’s efforts to civilize the rules of warfare, treats unlawful combatants better than lawful ones, and weakens our security in the process, Mukasey says.

“A world like that, where choices have no consequences, is a world inhabited only by children, and then only in their fantasies,” Mukasey concludes. “If we try to live in it, we do so at peril to ourselves and our children.”