A terrorist war Obama has denied
The reason the country is uneasy about the Obama administration's response to this attack is a distinct sense of not just incompetence but incomprehension. From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to play down and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face. Napolitano renames terrorism "man-caused disasters." Obama goes abroad and pledges to cleanse America of its post-9/11 counterterrorist sins. Hence, Guantanamo will close, CIA interrogators will face a special prosecutor, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed will bask in a civilian trial in New York -- a trifecta of political correctness and image management...
Obama reassured the nation that this "suspect" had been charged. Reassurance? The president should be saying: We have captured an enemy combatant -- an illegal combatant under the laws of war: no uniform, direct attack on civilians -- and now to prevent future attacks, he is being interrogated regarding information he may have about al-Qaeda in Yemen.
Instead, Abdulmutallab is dispatched to some Detroit-area jail and immediately lawyered up. At which point -- surprise! -- he stops talking.
People who want to blow up airlines and do the work of Al Qaeda are not the same as penny ante thugs holding up a liquor store and don't deserve the same constitutional protections, since their attempts to harm America will not be stopped with one arrest. But the Obama administration is determined to revert to Bill Clinton's approach to terrorism: it's simply a police action. As Krauthammer notes, any president who can't call a jihadist a jihadist is putting us all in danger's way unnecessarily.
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