House of Eratosthenes

During an interview on MSNBC Thursday morning, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs defended the Obama administration’s handling of Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Gibbs argued that the administration was right to treat Abdulmutallab as a criminal defendant, instead of as an enemy combatant. “Just because you make somebody an enemy combatant [it] doesn’t make them talk,” Gibbs argued. He then pointed to an example from the Bush years to supposedly support his point.

“Jose Padilla was made an enemy combatant so that we could get him to talk,” Gibbs said. “And guess what happened when we made him an enemy combatant, he didn’t talk. He did talk when he was transferred back into a civilian court.”

President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, made the same point on Tuesday in an op-ed for USA Today. Brennan argued: “Terrorists such as Jose Padilla and Saleh al-Mari did not cooperate when transferred to military custody, which can harden one’s determination to resist cooperation.”

Brennan and Gibbs are wrong. In fact, Jose Padilla only started cooperating once he was transferred into the military’s custody and interrogated.
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On June 1, 2004, the Defense Department released a memo summarizing what was known about Padilla both before and after he was transferred into the military’s custody. The second page of the memo contains two paragraphs concerning what authorities had learned about Padilla up until June 9, 2002, the day he was transferred into the military’s custody. As the aforementioned press accounts make clear, authorities had garnered no information from Padilla himself. The DoD cited “intelligence information” and “our information” but no admissions by Padilla. Nearly all of the information on Padilla up until that point came from other al Qaeda detainees and sources.

The memo then reads: “Since that time [June 9, 2002], additional and more detailed intelligence information about Jose Padilla has been developed and made available in unclassified form.”

That additional information includes several pages of unclassified intelligence, including a number of admissions by Padilla, which were corroborated by other detainees.
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Here we reach the critical distinction between collecting evidence for a prosecution and collecting intelligence for fighting a war. We know that Padilla was here in May 2002 to carry out al Qaeda’s bidding. Padilla and multiple other al Qaeda detainees have confirmed Padilla’s role. But while Padilla was in the FBI’s custody for one month, we did not learn anything at all about Padilla’s plotting from the terrorist himself. Authorities did not complete the puzzle until he was interrogated in the military’s custody.

But by all means, keep on chattering away about people writing things on their hands. That’s what really matters, right?

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Obama Officials Wrong on PadillaFriday, February 12th, 2010

Obama Officials Wrong on Padilla
Friday, February 12th, 2010