The Case of the Exploding Trousers
On Christmas Day, Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23 year old Nigerian man, tried to destroy Northwest Airlines Flight 253 with explosives hidden in his pants. Thankfully, the attempt was unsuccessful and the bomb misfired. The 300 people on flight 253 were extremely lucky.
When apprehended, Farouk began babbling about his Al Qaeda ties. The immediate response from the Feds was to Mirandize him, lawyer him up, and lock him in a jail cell.
So, we have a foreign national, subdued while attempting a terror attack, who swore fealty to Al Qaeda, and who was ready to talk. The first act of law enforcement officials? To ensure that he has the right to remain silent. If pressed for information, Farouk might have given us names, addresses, or hints of future attacks. Instead, he gets a cot and a sandwich, and we get bupkis.
Never mind the fact that he is not an American, and therefore has zero Constitutional rights. Never mind his professed ties to terror. His lawyer has entered a not guilty plea on his behalf, and the circus tent is now under construction.
Arbitrarily granting Farouk de-facto citizenship not only undermines the value of our rights, but places all of us in greater jeopardy. Without extracting information from Farouk – information that he seemed genuinely eager to share, by the way – we increase the likelihood and potential effectiveness of future attacks.
Consider this; if Farouk had approached our soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan with an explosive device, he would have been shot on the spot. No trial, no lawyer, and no one would have said a word. But, since he targeted innocent civilians on an airliner instead of trained troops in a combat zone, he is now worthy of full Constitutional rights. Insanity.
Michael Kinsley of the New York Times states that “We have nothing to be ashamed of, little to fear and much to be proud of treating captured foreign terrorists as we would treat any upstanding American who tried to blow up an airplane full of people.”
Sadly, this myopic outlook is par for the course. It is clear that the powers that be have decided to prosecute the war on terror as a police action.
First came the announcement that Khalid Sheik Mohammad, mastermind of 9-11, would face a civil trial in New York City. Then came the bumbling attempts to blame the Fort Hood shootings on post traumatic stress rather than a manifestation of islamofacism. Now Farouk gets his day in court. As if these men are all merely law breakers – petty thieves or thugs who steal purses – rather than fanatical soldiers in a hyper-religious movement aimed at world domination.
I understand the rationale, naïve as it is. The Left believes that if we magnanimously extend our hard-won rights to men who do not desire or deserve them, the rest of the world will see how serious we are in pursuing peace, and will therefore be less likely to attack us in the future.
But this contradicts everything we know about Muslim fanaticism. The central and consistently avowed aim of Al Qaeda and its ilk is the establishment of an ultra-repressive theocracy extending from Spain to Russia. Our beloved rights do not exist in this state – everything is subservient to a religious oligarchy that rules the rabble with medieval severity.
If the eradication of human rights is the aim of islamofacism, then how, pray tell, does granting those rights to would-be bombers compel them to be more peaceful? If anything, we incite anger and contempt from the promulgators of terror by insisting on clothing their captured brethren in Western garb and forcibly gifting them with due process.
In short, terror loathes human rights. By insisting that captured terrorists accept these rights, we are not quenching the fires of fanaticism, we are fanning them.
One last minor detail – cost. The cost of pursuing Farouk’s trial over the next several years, and then incarcerating Farouk for the rest of his life, is significant. Whisking him off to an interrogation room, milking him for information, kicking him through a military tribunal, and then standing him in front of a firing squad would be far cheaper.
A prolonged trial and thirty years of imprisonment runs about $3 million. Granted, with the billions flying out of Washington, this is a pittance; but it is another salient example of this administration valuing appearance over practicality.
A 20 round box of Springfield 30.06 ammunition goes for about $19. I bet we could create a couple dozen jobs with that $3 million. Maybe we could call it a ‘Bullet-Fed Stimulus Package’.