I have repeatedly criticized our terrorism policy as incoherent, see e.g., here, here, and here. I must now confess error. It's not so much incoherent as flat-out chaotic.
This afternoon we learn that the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, is, after a very brief stay on the job, on the way out, probably in 24 hours. MSNBC says:
Blair's tenure as the overseer of the nation's intelligence agencies was marked by turf battles with CIA Director Leon Panetta and controversial public comments in the wake of the Christmas Day airliner bombing attempt.
Blair's resignation comes in the wake of a scathing Senate Intelligence Committee report regarding intelligence failures and the Christmas Day bombing attempt. That report was highly critical of the DNI's National Counterrorism Center.
The evidence of chaos is everywhere. This is not going to end happily.
Today's news comes hard on the heels of Eric Holder's fumbling response to the question whether we should Mirandize captured terrorists. First he says it's a moot point, since the world's top terrorist, Osama bin Laden, will be a corpse by the time we get to him. This was followed by a quick retraction when contradicted by our military leaders. Then he says on the weekend talk shows that Miranda does apply, sort of, but there's an emergency exception we can use for terrorists and that he will ask Congress to codify it. Only the emergency exception was created for an interrogation that lasted less than a minute, and the Supreme Court said ten years ago in the Dickerson case that only it, and not Congress, could modify Miranda -- a position that DOJ supported while Holder himself was in its top command as Deputy Attorney General (and that I opposed, leading to my resignation from the Department).
Meanwhile, the Secretary of Homeland Security refuses to let the word "terrorism" pass her lips, referring instead to mysterious "man-made disasters." The near-successful Christmas Day airline bombing proved that "the system worked," even though the system was actually turning itself into a pretzel and what "worked" was luck. The cause of all these attacks likewise remains mysterious, since the Secretary seems never to have heard of radical Islam.
This Keystone Kops routine would be a farce if it weren't headed for tragedy, which it is. Under President Bush, after 9-11, and for more than seven years, there was not a single terrorist attack on American soil. Some might believe that was because Bush was, among other things, serious about gathering intelligence rather than apologizing for gathering it.
In the 16 months Obama has been President, we have had three terrorist attacks on American soil, one of which resulted in mass murder. With the Director of National Intelligence in a food fight with the head of the CIA -- and now headed for the door -- and with our Attorney General still unable to figure out even where to try terrorist mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, it's impossible to believe that a major (but preventable) terrorist strike is that far off.
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