Catastrophe - Dick Morris [62]
Nothing better exemplifies how Obama has turned things upside down than the administration’s decision to drop the charges against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, whom the Pentagon had charged with “organizing and directing”219 the bombing of the USS Cole, an attack in which seventeen sailors were killed and thirty-nine injured. On February 5, 2009, Susan J. Crawford, the top authority over the parajudicial commissions Bush had created to try Guantánamo prisoners, dropped the charges against al-Nashiri in order to comply with Obama’s executive order requiring a review of all detention policies and procedures at Guantánamo.220 The United States had sought a delay in the Guantánamo trial, scheduled for February 7, 2009, but the judge had refused to grant it.221 So, rather than proceed to try him, the Obama administration decided it was more important to complete the review than to proceed with the trial.
According to U.S. intelligence, al-Nashiri was the leader of the al-Qaeda network’s operations in the Persian Gulf and was involved in plots against Western targets in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, the Strait of Gibraltar, Morocco, and Qatar. He also fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan and in Chechnya.222
News media reports of the dropping of al-Nashiri’s charges focused not on the mayhem he had committed in killing the sailors and damaging the Cole but rather on the fact that he was one of three prisoners the Bush administration has admitted it waterboarded to get information. The other two are Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and Abu Zubaydah, an al-Qaeda operative tied to 9/11.
What inverted priorities! Waterboarding may have been essential in learning, from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, of al-Qaeda’s plans to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and of its efforts to explode a dirty bomb in the United States. And waterboarding of al-Nashiri was likely important in rounding up all the Cole terrorists. (Waterboarding, by the way, is not the inhuman nightmare many have portrayed it as being. Among other things, it was a long-established hazing ritual at the Virginia Military Institute. General George C. Marshall, the World War II chief of staff and Harry S Truman’s secretary of state, was waterboarded when he entered V.M.I.) To drop charges against a terrorist who killed seventeen service people simply because he was waterboarded is incomprehensible.
Obama has, of course, prohibited the use of waterboarding regardless of the circumstances. Asked at a press conference on April 29, 2009, about interrogations of terrorists, he said that waterboarding was a “shortcut” and that there were other ways to get the information. But what if there aren’t? And what if the terror attack is just around the corner and there is no time for another way to learn the details? Would Obama literally consign hundreds or thousands of Americans to death so as to avoid waterboarding a terrorist who is neither a U.S. citizen or even a legal resident?
Yes he would!
Also outrageous is Obama’s silence on the February 16, 2009, decision of the Pakistani government to let the Taliban govern the Swat valley and neighboring areas in northwest Pakistan using Shariah law. The decision, which effectively concedes to the Taliban exactly the kind of protected zone it had in Afghanistan—the zone where the 9/11 plot was hatched—is a giveaway to the terrorists.
As Reuters has noted, “critics are…saying the deal will encourage Taliban militants fighting elsewhere in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.”223
The British newspaper The Guardian quotes Khadim Hussain of the Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy, a think tank in Islamabad, as describing the deal as “a surrender to the Taliban.”224 The paper also quotes Javed Iqbal, a retired Pakistani judge, as saying that “it means that there is not one law in the country. It will disintegrate this way. If you concede to this, you will go on conceding.”225
The Times of India says that Pakistan was trying to find a “good” Taliban. “According