The Administration has ways of making terrorists not talk.
6th January 2010
We now know that when Yousef was captured, in 1995, al Qaeda leaders were working feverishly to attack American targets. Yousef’s uncle is none other than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11 and one of Yousef’s co-conspirators in the failed Bojinka plot to blow up airliners across the Pacific Ocean.
Yet as far as we know, Yousef told U.S. interrogators little or nothing about KSM’s plots and strategy once he was in U.S. custody. This isn’t surprising, since once he was in the criminal justice system Yousef was granted a lawyer and all the legal protections against cooperating with U.S. interrogators. To this day, we don’t recall any official claim that Yousef has provided useful intelligence of the kind that KSM, Abu Zubaydah and other al Qaeda leaders later did when they were interrogated by the CIA.
All of this is directly relevant to the Administration’s rash decision to indict Abdulmutallab on criminal charges immediately after his arrest in Detroit on Christmas weekend. The Nigerian jihadist could have been labeled an enemy combatant, detained indefinitely, and interrogated with a goal of discovering who he had met in Yemen, whether other plots are underway, and much else that might be relevant to preventing the next terror attempt. This is a far higher priority than convicting Abdulmutallab and sending him to jail.