Barack Obama said this today about prosecuting terrorists in an interview with ABC News. "And, you know, let's take the example of Guantanamo. What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks -- for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated."
No, not all of them. Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi native, was twice interrogated by the FBI and then allowed to walk away a free man. He fled the United States in the days after that attack and returned, with the assistance of officials at the Iraqi embassy in Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad. He lived openly in Baghdad with his father and a neighbor interviewed in 1994 by an ABC News/Newsweek investigative team told the reporters that he was working for the Iraqi regime.
There are conflicting reports about how Saddam Hussein treated Yasin after these reports were made public, with some documentation suggesting the Iraqis were holding him under some form of house arrest and other documents that seem to indicate he was being actively harbored -- given housing and living allowances -- by Saddam Hussein's regime.
What is not in dispute, however, is that Saddam Hussein's intelligence services helped Yasin return to Iraq mere days after he helped orchestrate the 1993 World Trade Center attack. According to the 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee report on Prewar Intelligence (signed by all of the panel's Democrats): "Abdul Rahman Yasin, a fugitive from the attack, is of Iraqi descent, and in 1993, he fled to Iraq with Iraqi assistance."
Beyond the fact that Obama seems to have been unaware of Yasin's flight and the role Saddam Hussein's regime played in it is his odd embrace of law enforcement as the proper way to treat terrorists. It's as if he wasn't paying attention in the 1990s.
John McCain's foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann has this to say: "Barack Obama's belief that we should treat terrorists as nothing more than common criminals demonstrates a stunning and alarming misunderstanding of the threat we face from radical Islamic extremism. Obama holds up the prosecution of the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 as a model for his administration, when in fact this failed approach of treating terrorism simply as a matter of law enforcement rather than a clear and present danger to the United States contributed to the tragedy of September 11th. This is change that will take us back to the failed policies of the past and every American should find this mindset troubling."
