Underpants bomber rights

Richard Miniter:

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Let's trace the underpants bomber case, noting that at each step along the way the rights-obsessed got in the way of the life-saving instincts of ordinary people... until the very end.

A Yemen Embassy spokesman confirmed to me that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab made two trips to the desert republic, where he went to study Arabic in a known al Qaeda sanctuary. This was reported to American intelligence. So why did a U.S. consular officer grant the young man a U.S. visa? Well, I was told, it wouldn't be fair to single someone out just for visiting suspicious places. Who knows, he could be a budding journalist? In other words, U.S. embassy officials treat entry into the United States on a less exclusive basis than a garden party—to do any differently wouldn't be right or fair.

What about that dodgy cleric who was tied to the 9/11 bomber, the Ft. Hood shooter and now the underpants bomber? Helpfully, he's fled to Yemen, where that nation's intelligence service can freely wiretap him. If he returned to the United States, getting a warrant for his cellphone and email accounts would be very difficult. It would violate his right to privacy and require that the FBI show probable cause that the cleric is committing a crime. Inspiring young men to kill scores of Americans is not a crime; it is free speech.

And let's consider those wiretaps a little more closely. When 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in 2003, there were two cellphones and a laptop with him. Those cellphones showed hundreds of calls to and from the United States in the nine months after the 9/11 attacks. Who was talking to KSM in the United States? Getting a warrant for those phone numbers proved difficult. After all, to get a FISA judge to grant a warrant, you at least need to know the name of the person you want to wiretap. But to know the name of the person using these phones (which are often pay phones, disposable cellphones, or phones in immigrant group houses) one must first listen in. A perfect catch-22.

Or consider student visas, which the 9/11 attackers and the underpants bomber proved adept at getting. The hundreds of thousands of foreign students who come to the United States every year to study are not tracked once they arrive. No one verifies that they are actually attending classes at the school listed on their visa applications. Why? Universities earn a lot of money from these students and rights activists fume that foreign students shouldn't be treated any differently from their American counterparts.

Finally, there are those who want to close Gitmo and give every inmate a proper civilian trial. Never mind that each and every one of them is legally entitled to be released on the rock-solid ground that they were denied their constitutional right to a speedy trial. Next, the accused have a right to confront the witnesses and evidence against them—forcing the government to either reveal what it knows about al Qaeda and the suspects or exclude the evidence and lose the case. In other words, the government either gives an intelligence windfall to its sworn enemy or release trained and experienced terrorists. This is how the rights-obsessed turn the Constitution into a suicide pact.

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There is much more.

The terrorist rights crowd is more concerned abut those rights than our right to resist the war they are making against us. They choose lawfare over warfare and the enemy uses that lawfare to continue his war against us.