Fire John Brennan!

There has been much debate whether or not Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should have been read his Miranda rights when he was captured aboard the Detroit-bound Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day after attempting to explode a bomb he hid in his underpants. Proponents and critics alike make it appear that once someone has been Mirandized there is no turning back; that it’s an all or nothing proposition. How wrong they are. In a USA Today Op/Ed piece last week, John Brennan, the Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, defended the FBI’s decision to Mirandize Abdulmutallab after only 50 minutes of “interrogation.” Mr. Brennan wants you to believe that the FBI dispatched its most highly skilled interrogators to verbally work over Abdulmutallab, and that the agents gleaned highly actionable intelligence that the military can use to kill or capture other terrorists around the world. In reality, if you’re the new guy right out of the academy at the local FBI office, you will be the on-call duty agent on Christmas. The more senior agents are enjoying the holiday. New agents pay their dues by working on Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Day and other federal holidays as well as long boring stake outs after midnight. Mr. Brennan and pundits don’t seem to realize this. Mr. Brennan cites the federal civilian trial of Richard Reid, the so-called “shoe bomber,” who was given his Miranda rights “five-minutes after being taken off a plane he tried to blow up,” as evidence why military tribunals are unnecessary. He fails to mention that Reid pled guilty in federal court, so we will never know what the outcome of trial would have been. Considering the training all FBI agents receive, it’s no wonder the newbie agent read Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights. That’s what he’s trained to do. FBI agents are not trained to be military strategists or military intelligence analysts. Mr. Brennan wrote, “It’s naive to think that transferring Abdulmutallab to military custody would have caused an outpouring of information. There is little difference between military and civilian custody, other than an interrogator with a uniform.” This is probably the most incredibly naïve statement a presidential advisor for Homeland Security could make. How could the FBI agent possibly tell if Abdulmutallab was lying to him or not about high interest targets and locations? How would the FBI agent recognize a high interest target or location if he was given the information? Only a military interrogator, with access to military intelligence, could corroborate Abdulmutallab’s information. Weeks after the event, Mr. Brennan said that Abdulmutallab was now cooperating after the FBI went to Nigeria and asked his father to travel to the U.S. to convince him to cooperate. Why was this necessary if Abdulmutallab already told FBI agents all that he knew? Obviously Mr. Brennan’s first version of the story was fantasy. As I have written before, Mr. Brennan’s idea of an effective interrogation technique is to offer a terrorist a lesser prison sentence in return for actionable intelligence. The Bush administration thought it was better to confine terrorists overseas and use enhanced interrogation techniques, like waterboarding, to extract information to prevent future attacks and save American lives. There is no better illustration of how Democrats and Republicans differ on their approach to fighting the war on terror – wimpy vs. iron fist. Mr. Brennan wrote, “Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda.” No, Mr. Brennan, being a wimp and silencing administration critics serve the goals of al-Qaeda. On February 13th, the case to fire him was enhanced when he told an audience that a 20 percent recidivism rate of released Guantanamo Bay detainees “was not bad” compared to the 50 percent recidivism rate of federal convicts. He fails to understand that no federal convict wants to kill all Americans, but all terrorists do, so recidivism among terrorists is unacceptable. It’s not too late to transfer Abdulmutallab to Gitmo where military interrogators with intimate knowledge about Yemen and al-Qaeda can have a crack at him before he’s tried by a military tribunal. Only then will the American public think this administration is serious about winning the war on terror. Mr. Brennan doesn’t have the stomach for the job.