Scott Johnson
Power Line
2/12/2010
Anyone who wants to understand the farcical falsehoods promulgated by the Obama administration to justify its treatment of Umar Abdulmutallab as a criminal defendant can’t do better than read former Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s Washington Post column “Where the U.S. went wrong on the Christmas day bomber.”
For starters, however, it seems unlikely to me this was the title Mr. Mukasey gave the column. I would guess that where the Post headline reads “U.S.,” Mukasey may have specified “Holder” or “Obama,” or “the Obama administration.” In any event, Mukasey’s column can best be read as Mukasey’s rebuttal of Attorney General Holder’s highly misleading five-page letter to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Mukasey concedes that it was entirely reasonable for the FBI to be contacted and for the FBI to take Abdulmutallab into custody. “But contrary to what some in government have suggested” — that would include Holder in his letter to McConnell — “that Abdulmutallab was taken into custody by the FBI did not mean, legally or as a matter of policy, that he had to be treated as a criminal defendant at any point.” Here Mukasey cites a relevant case that makes the point:
Consider: In 1942, German saboteurs landed on Long Island and in Florida. That they were eventually captured by the FBI did not stop President Franklin Roosevelt from directing that they be treated as unlawful enemy combatants. They were ultimately tried before a military commission in Washington and executed. Their status had nothing to do with who held them, and their treatment was upheld in all respects by the Supreme Court.
Read the entire article at PowerLine
