It Wouldn't be Make-Believe if You Believed in Me

By: Mr. Curmudgeon
mrcurmudgeon@inthepublicsquare.com

Standing behind the fictitious emblem for the “Office of President-Elect,” Barack Obama announced his pick for the nation’s next Attorney General, Eric Holder. The choice is proof that Obama’s fabricated seal-of-office isn’t the only example of his future administration’s leap into the realm of make-believe.

In 2001, while serving in the Justice Department as a hold-over from the Clinton administration, then Assistant Attorney General Eric Holder was asked to review a request by the Minneapolis FBI field office for a warrant allowing federal agents to examine a suspect’s laptop computer. The warrant needed would be issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which established a special court in 1978 to grant warrants to investigate suspected foreign agents operating in the United States. Holder, seeing no evidence linking the suspect to a foreign intelligence service, declined to take the warrant applicaton before the FISA court. The laptop, it was later found, contained a wealth of information linking the Minnesota suspect to a shadowy network of terrorists operating in the U.S. and their al Qaida handler. The suspect was Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker. Moussaoui was arrested August 16, 2001, nearly a month before his compatriots crashed three commercial airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a lonely filed in Pennsylvania.

According to the 9/11 commission report:

As a French national who had overstayed his visa, Mousaoui could be detained immediately. The INS arrested Moussaoui on the immigration violation. A deportation order was signed on August 17, 2001.The agents in Minnesota were concerned that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis would find insufficient probable cause of a crime to obtain a criminal warrant to search Moussaoui’s laptop computer…Minneapolis therefore sought a special warrant under FISA.

The Minnesota FBI field agents desperately sought evidence linking Moussaoui to a foreign intelligence service. Between the 16th and 17th of August, they requested the FBI’s legal attachés in London and Paris to ask the secret services of England and France for any information they might have on Moussaoui and his terror contacts. By the August 24, they also contacted the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center.

On August 27, the French informed the Minneapolis FBI agents that Moussaoui was known to have dealt with a Muslim rebel leader in Chechnya, Ibn al Khattab.

According to the 9/11 report, this information failed to impress Washington's intelligence community and “set off a spirited debate between the Minneapolis Field Office, FBI headquarters, and the CIA as to whether the Chechen rebels and Khattab were sufficiently associated with a terrorist organization to constitute a ‘foreign power’ for purposes of the FISA statute. FBI headquarters did not believe this was good enough, and its National Security Law Unit [and Eric Holder] declined to submit a FISA application.”

Tragically, you know the rest of the story.

After the 9/11 attacks, congress passed the Patriot Act to amend the inadequacies in FISA to combat stateless agents of terror.

Holder, however, did not approve: “When you look at some of the things that have been done under the spirit of the [Patriot] Act; where you detain citizens without giving them access to a lawyer; where you listen in on attorney-client conversations without involving a judge; these are the kinds of thing that have been done in the name of the Patriot Act by this administration that I think are bad, ultimately, for law enforcement and will cost us the support of the American people, which is a vital tool to be successful in the war on terrorism.”

During the recent Presidential campaign, candidate Obama signaled his intention to move the fight against international terrorism away the battlefield and into the Alice-in-Wonderland world of judges and lawyers, “…In previous terrorist attacks – for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center – we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial.”

Of course, Obama failed to mention that in the second attack eight-years later, the 9/11 hijackers evaded the jurisdiction of the criminal courts by sacrificing their lives while carrying out their mission of mass-murder. In the real world, as opposed to the make-believe wonderland where Obama and Holder reside, you can only prosecute the living. The Holder pick signals a return to the self-deluded world of September 10, 2001. In light of his expressed disdain for the Patriot Act, is it reasonable to expect an Attorney General Holder to use its provisions to disrupt Islamic terror before it reaches our shores? For the answer to that question, go no farther than Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan or the agents at the Minneapolis field office of the FBI.

--Mr. Curmudgeon