Yesterday Phil Carter made an important point when he noted that he (and others) believe that the Bush White House is fighting a war on terrorism - but is committing a terrible error in that they are judging progress in that war using metrics better suited to law enforcement operations.
This crossed my mind again today when I was looking at Lyle Denniston's discussion of Judge Robertson's ruling in the Hamdan case (it's a very informative post addressing the nature of the military tribunals - at least as they are currently run). In many ways this administration is prosecuting something between a war and a law enforcement operation - but I don't think it's at all clear that they are drawing the right conclusions about how best to combine the two.
Posted by armand at November 9, 2004 10:19 AM | TrackBack | Posted to International Affairsit's an interesting quandary for an administration that roundly and unequivocally attacked kerry for having the temerity to suggest that treating international terrorism as a quasi-criminal enterprise might better inform the larger effort and lead to better results.
Posted by: joshua at November 9, 2004 10:24 AM | PERMALINKThere was an article by a 16 year FBI veteran in the Washington Post this weekend. It addressed the Cheney perspective directly.
Nothing could be further from the truth. It flies in the face of everything I saw during a 16-year career in the FBI, including undercover operations in two terrorism investigations during the 1990s. The problem was not that the FBI relied too heavily on its criminal investigators, but that it didn't rely on them enough. It's not a matter of trading our guns for gavels; we need both.
He goes through several points, including that the failures in responding to terrorist threats were not from the criminal arm of the FBI (but the intel part), how not treating terrorists as criminals plays into their hands, how abandoning rule of law (ie criminal prosecution) also advantages the terrorists, and how the techniques of tracking organized crime are particularly applicable to tracking terrorists. Of course, he is an FBI guy defending his turf, but it makes sense especially in the organized crime parallels.
Posted by: binky at November 9, 2004 11:04 AM | PERMALINK