EDITOR:
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on New York, Congress established the 9/11 Commission to see what went wrong. Sen. Joe Lieberman took the lead in drafting what would become the largest reorganization of government in our lifetime. Sen. Lieberman and others stated the reorganization was necessary because the CIA and the FBI did not talk to each other.
In the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, 22 legacy agencies were rolled in to one massive department with a compliment of over 174,000 personnel. The FBI and CIA were not part of this reorganization. How did that happen if it was the CIA and the FBI that didn't talk to each other about what they knew about the 9/11 suspects? Politics perhaps?
Fast forward to the events at Fort Hood and it turns out that the FBI and CIA were not communicating with each other regarding the information each had on the domestic terrorist who murdered 12 people. How could that happen after the massive reorganization of the government to protect us from all enemies foreign and domestic?
Forward again to the Christmas Day terrorist in Detroit and people are wondering what went wrong again.
Part of the answer is one of the first things the president did upon entering office was to eliminate the term "War on Terror" from usage by anyone in his cabinet and effectively, by anyone who works in the government. The president made it clear that enemy combatants would be treated as common criminals.
Remember, some of those Guantanamo Bay prisoners are going to be tried in U.S. Federal Court in Manhattan, including the mastermind of the 9/11 attack. Criminals? Not enemy combatants?
This president is trying to prove to the world that the U.S. does not have the resolve to go after Muslim extremists as enemies of the United States.
Now the government has to deal with a huge mess the president created when he announced his goal to close down Guantanamo Bay Prison: What to do with the inmates?
Especially now that we know when we return them to their home countries many of them get right back into the business of trying to murder Americans.
The Christmas Day bomber could not have done anything more to point out how flawed the president's policy is. Treated as a criminal, the Christmas Day bomber "lawyered up" denying our intelligence agencies the ability to encourage him to talk about the other 25 Muslim extremists he trained with in Syria and what their plans were. Under Miranda the Christmas Day bomber doesn't have to say anything and there are no incentives for him to act against his self interest. It would be a totally different story if he were being treated as an enemy combatant and was being held in Guantanamo Bay Prison under the watchful eye of U.S. Marines and under the interrogation of U.S. intelligence agencies.
It's going to be a long three years and I hope we survive the rest of the Obama administration. It's been a fascinating experiment to elect someone with no experience to the highest office in the land, unfortunately, it's not working out for the security of the United States. God help us all.
Ron Landmann
Minden
