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Islamists Threaten Christmas Attacks

Unsettling news from confessions obtained by Iraqi authorities from captured insurgents warn of various Christmas attacks on American and European soil. This comes from at least 73 insurgents, some of whom represent the, “main structure of the Al Qaeda organization in Iraq.”

There are two observations to be made here:

1) We have to give some credit to the Iraqi Authorities for netting these terrorists – isn’t this a sign that our strategy of training the Iraqis to police themselves, fight terrorism within their own borders, and eventually leave a stable self-sufficient state is working? Of course, no one knows how much of those operations were actually American or coalition operations that were credited to the Iraqis for the sake of political expediency. Hopefully it’s more of the former than of the latter.

2) As documented in his excellent book, Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack, Marc Thiessen shows how the move to outlaw the use of advanced interrogation techniques in order to obtain information to thwart covert terrorist operations is the best way to assure those success of future attacks. The Iraqis didn’t just kill these terrorists, but captured and interrogated them – does anyone believe those captured easily gave up all the information they had in their diseased, corrupted minds? Someone interrogated them, and I imagine they didn’t use the nicest interrogation techniques.

Maybe a conclusion can be drawn from these two observations. Unless I’m missing something (please inform me in the comments if I am), it’s very likely that the captured were given over to the Iraqis exactly for the reason that the interrogation techniques Obama won’t use to defend America are the best method of actually preventing further terrorist attacks.

As Thiessen notes, Obama favors sending drones out to kill terrorists rather than capture them and face criticism from the radical anti-American left in his own party. This prevents us from getting knowledge from them that might prevent attacks that aren’t being made in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, but planned and executed within America’s borders. Further, it doesn’t really take away the supposed moral problem with enhanced interrogation techniques, and may actually be less morally tenable.

The failed Swedish plot was foiled only through the incompetency of the bomber, and not through the competency of our police and military policies. Same for the underwear bomber last Christmas, and the Shoe-Bomber. This year the FBI were able to foil the Oregon tree-lighting bombing plot , and thank God for that.

But how long will we be so lucky?

I hope to God that we are able to make it past this holiday season without any successful terrorist attacks. If we don’t, it won’t be thanks to any improvement in defense policy from the Obama Administration, but due to luck and Providence.