I have an article in the current edition of NR [if you’re not a subscriber, you should be] on the likelihood that an Obama presidency would turn the clock back to the pre-9/11 days, when prosecution in the criminal justice system was our nation’s principal strategy against Islamic terrorism. Among other things, I note that Obama was heartened by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Boumediene, giving our enemies a constitutional right to access to the civilian courts:
As is his wont upon straying from the TelePrompTer, he dug himself a hole, this time in the form of an impromptu paean to pre-9/11 days, when terrorism was managed as though it were a garden-variety law-enforcement matter. “What we know,” he proclaimed on June 16, “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.”
What we actually know is that everything Obama said was wrong.
We were not able to arrest all of those responsible even for the 1993 WTC bombing — one of the plotters escaped and was harbored for a decade by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (you remember, the place where Obama says there were no terrorists until the U.S. invasion). Of the two dozen terrorists indicted for al-Qaeda’s 1998 American-embassy bombings, which killed more than 200 people, only five have been prosecuted. That number does not include Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, a Qaeda founder who was not tried for his role in the attacks because he exploited the relatively weak security of the civilian criminal-justice system to attempt an escape during a meeting with his lawyers, maiming a prison guard in the process[.]… The Clinton administration did not even bother to file indictments for the attacks on Khobar Towers (19 U.S. airmen killed) and the USS Cole (17 U.S. sailors killed). And the fugitive Osama bin Laden was not exactly incapacitated by his grand-jury indictment in June 1998 — he orchestrated the embassy bombings, the Cole bombing, and 9/11 from Afghanistan, where the FBI has not had much success executing arrest warrants.
Along those lines, the Pentagon is reporting that U.S. forces have killed over 40 Taliban militants today. That’s in a single day of combat.
By contrast, as I recount in in Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad, between the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and 9/11 (i.e., through all the attacks mentioned above) we managed to convict less than three dozen (mostly low level) terrorists. That’s in eight years of prosecution.