Lawfare as a security breach

Opinion Journal:

President Obama has belatedly declared that the near miss above Detroit constituted "a catastrophic breach of security" and ordered a review of America's intelligence efforts. We're glad to hear it, but let's hope the Commander in Chief also rethinks his own approach to counterterrorism.

Recent events have exposed the shortcomings of treating terror as a law enforcement problem and rushing to close Guantanamo Bay. A new wave of jihadists is coming of age, inspiring last month's deadly attack at Ft. Hood and nearly bringing down Northwest Flight 253, and next time we may not be so lucky.

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U.S. investigators are looking into whether Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian would-be bomber, was in contact with al-Shihri and another Guantanamo alum who turned up at the AQAP, Muhammad al-Awfi. The week before Christmas, Yemen agreed, presumably under U.S. prodding, to take back six more Guantanamo detainees. Ninety-seven of the 210 left at Gitmo are from Yemen, and if this transfer goes smoothly, the Administration wants to repatriate many more. Most are such hard terror cases that this year even Saudi Arabia rejected U.S. entreaties to accept them.

A Pentagon analysis, released in May, showed that one in seven freed Gitmo detainees—61 in all—returned to terrorism. Al-Shihri and Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, the Taliban's operations leader in southern Afghanistan, are merely the best known. The Pentagon has since updated its findings, and we're told the numbers are even worse.

Yet the White House has resisted calls by Members of the House and Senate intelligence committees to declassify this revised report—no doubt because that would make closing Gitmo harder. Congress should insist on its release.

This second generation of al Qaeda also makes good use of modern technology for recruitment. A student from a wealthy family, Abdulmutallab was exposed to radical Islam through the Internet, and according to some reports was a "big fan" of the imam Anwar Al-Awlaki, who ran a popular jihadi Web site and Facebook page. This 38-year-old cleric, who was born in the U.S., is the spiritual leader of AQAP.

Al-Awlaki was also in email contact with Major Nidal Hasan in the months before the Army doctor shot and killed 13 U.S. soldiers at Ft. Hood. U.S. intelligence intercepted emails between the imam and the Major, but the FBI decided that they didn't constitute a threat. We don't know if Abdulmuttab also communicated with al-Awlaki, but this too is something Congress should strive to find out.

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Sending Gitmo's jihadists back to this maelstrom makes no security sense. Yemen has a weak government with mixed loyalties and its prisons are porous. Al-Awlaki himself was released in 2007, having been held at American request. Mr. Obama says we need to close Gitmo because it offends our values, but he's happy to send its detainees back to Yemen where we can target them with smart bombs when they rejoin the fight. Mr. Obama's desire to fulfill his campaign pledge to close Gitmo is an ideological fixation that risks letting killers loose to target Americans again.

More broadly, the Administration's law enforcement mentality is also part of the problem. Its instinct is to attribute every terror incident to a misguided individual—"an isolated extremist," as the President initially said of Abdulmuttalab—as if al Qaeda sympathies require a membership card and monthly meetings. Hasan and Abdulmuttalab are charged with being jihadists bent on murder who were encouraged or facilitated by other jihadists. This is the way the terror threat is evolving, with virtual recruitment over the Web of radicalized individuals from sanctuaries that change as opportunities arise.

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We are giving up valuable intelligence by charging these terrorist with crimes. It is both intelligence we will not get from interrogation and intelligence we must turnover to them in the discovery process. We already know from 9-11 that lawfare will not deter attacks. It puts on on the strategic defensive where we are reacting to acts of the enemy rather than putting him on the defensive.

Closing Gitmo was one of Obama's first screw ups as President and he seems bent on sticking with a policy that will result in sending reinforcement to the enemy in Yemen. Gordon Cucullu has more on our sending al Qaeda reinforcements from Gitmo.