Washington Transcript Service
06-17-2008
McCain campaign foreign policy advisers:
Senior Campaign Adviser Randy Scheunemann, senior adviser
Campaign Adviser, Former CIA Directory James Woolsey
Campaign Senior Policy Adviser, Kori Schake
Campaign Adviser, John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy
Good morning, everybody. This is Randy Scheunemann. I'm director of foreign policy and national security at McCain 2008. We're here this morning to talk about Senator Obama's comments that were first reported last night, where he cited the response to the first attack against the World Trade Center as an exemplary model for response to the threat posed by radical Islamic terrorism. We're joined today by Jim Woolsey, former director of central intelligence, as well as John Lehman, former secretary of the Navy and member of the September 11th Commission, as well as Dr. Kori Schake, who is a senior policy adviser to the campaign. At this point, I'd like to turn it over to Jim Woolsey to make some opening remarks.
Yes. I want to stress that the approach that Senator Obama is suggesting, that we do everything through the law enforcement system, is precisely what failed in the 1990s. I was director of central intelligence for the first two years of the first Clinton administration. And, of course, just a few months into that, we had the first World Trade Center bombing. And the administration proceeded with an almost complete law enforcement focus. It did not work. We were able, after I left in '95, in '96, it was at least possible to indict Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, because of his involvement with the Bojinka plot to blow up American airliners over the Pacific, and actually it also included plans to assassinate President Clinton and Pope John Paul II. But he continued to, although under indictment, to plot murder and mayhem.
And then Osama bin Laden himself was indicted in '98. That was, however, before the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and before the bombing of the USS Cole, and before 9/11. The criminal justice -- totally criminal justice approach to dealing with international terrorists, particularly when they are suicidal and are able to pull off plots like 9/11, has not worked. It was tried for essentially eight years, from the first year of the first Clinton administration up until 9/11, during the first year of the first Bush administration.
It was a miserable failure. And we need an approach that combines law enforcement, where appropriate, with intelligence, with going after terrorists where they are, with an approach toward the war that we are, in fact, in, and not an approach that ignores that we are in a war against Islamist terrorism, sometimes suicidal, and therefore not really deterrable under the normal criminal justice procedures.
Thank you, Jim. At this point, let me turn it over to Secretary Lehman. John, if you have some comments?
Yes, certainly, I would agree with Jim, but the investigations of the 9/11 bombing certainly made clear that the way the criminal justice system as applied to the perpetrators of the '93 bombing, the way it operated, it was a material cause of the greater tragedy of 9/11, because it was treated as an law enforcement issue. Evidence gathered and intelligence used was put under grand jury seal and kept specifically from the director of central intelligence, who personally told me -- Jim's successor -- personally told me -- that is Director Tenet -- that he did not get to see the evidence, which would have linked some of the perpetrators of the '93 bombing to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- in fact, they were relatives -- and would have enabled many of the dots to have been connected well before 9/11 and, in my belief, would have given a good chance to have prevented 9/11.
But since they were under grand jury seal and no one wanted the evidence and intelligence tainted in order to get a conviction, the CIA was not allowed to see that evidence and neither was President Clinton. And that is what happens when you apply the criminal justice system to the problem of terrorism. It just doesn't apply. It went on for five years. It wasn't until the trial was over that the evidence was unsealed. And Tenet was flabbergasted at what he found in that material.
Also, it cost the taxpayer to prosecute seven individuals -- and there are more than 500, for instance, down in Guantanamo -- it cost the taxpayers well over $100 million to prosecute those cases. And so certainly the terrorists should have due process, but what Senator Obama said, that this is the right approach, the way we went about it in the '93 bombing was the correct approach, shows a very deep, first, ignorance of the facts and a very, very dangerous policy.
Thank you, John. Now we'll hear comments from Kori Schake, who's senior policy adviser to McCain 2008 campaign.
I think it's important to emphasize two points that the 9/11 Commission concluded: first, that the existing mechanism for handling terrorist acts had been trial and punishment and that that's inadequate to the threat posed by Al Qaida; and that, second, by favoring just one tool by neglecting others, we leave ourselves vulnerable and weak in our national effort.
If a law enforcement approach were adequate, you wouldn't have had September 11th, and that Senator McCain favors good-faith efforts, like the Military Commissions Act, to better protect Americans.
Thank you. This is Randy Scheunemann. Let me just close before we open up to questions.
To put this in a little bit of a larger context, I mean, once again we have seen that Senator Obama is a perfect manifestation of a September 10th mindset. He brings the attitude, the failures of judgment, the weakness and the misunderstanding of the nature of our adversary and the dangers posed by them to a series of policy positions. This is just his latest statement of how the 1993 World Trade Center case was handled in a long line of positions that reveal he does not understand the nature of the enemies we face. He wants to retreat from Iraq, which Al Qaida has called the central front in their war against us. He opposed FISA and terrorist surveillance program because he wants to have folks be able to sue the telecommunications industry that cooperated with American national security officials in good faith. He opposed the designation of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist group.
And the reality is, he is not even factually right in his statement, when he says that the people responsible for the World Trade Center bombing are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated. As a bipartisan 2004 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report pointed out, one of the individuals -- Abdul Yasin -- got away to Iraq and has not been brought to justice. So whether it's ignorance of the facts, misunderstanding of the threat we face, the only conclusion we can reach is if Senator Obama did receive that 3 a.m. phone call that was so often talked about in the primaries, I guess his response would be to call the lawyers in the Justice Department.
And with that, let me open it up to questions.
Hi, can you hear me?
Yes, we can.
Hi, thanks. So clearly, you know, one of the ways that this was brought to the fore last week was with the Supreme Court's ruling on Guantanamo Bay, as to the question as to what kind of rights should be given to detainees.
Can you walk us through a little bit what Senator McCain's position is? I mean, early in the primaries, he spoke about closing Guantanamo Bay down and bringing people to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Would they have had habeas corpus rights there?
And also, later in his speech in Los Angeles, he spoke about trying to work with the international community to find an agreement on the disposition of detainees. And I was wondering if that meant sending some of them back to their original countries. What's his position? How would it work?
Senator McCain has never favored giving the detainees at Guantanamo habeas and full access to the federal court system. He has always favored working out a process where their cases are adjudicated.
There was a good-faith effort to do that in a bipartisan way in Congress with the Military Commissions Act. Senator McCain also believes that Guantanamo should be closed and, had Guantanamo been closed and those individuals moved to Leavenworth or other federal facilities, does not believe they should have had habeas rights.
The Supreme Court decision, obviously, disagrees with the -- by the 5-4 decision -- with the bipartisan judgment of Congress in enacting the Military Commissions Act. And, clearly, there will need to be greater efforts to sort out what we do moving forward.
Senator McCain continues to believe that that case was wrongly decided. He agrees with the dissent, as he said last week, that Justice Roberts wrote so eloquently about striking down the most generous set of protections ever afforded to unlawful combat in American history. He continues to have grave reservations about giving the terrorist -- suspected terrorist detainee full access to the federal court system, with habeas and free lawyers, years of pre-trial proceedings, access to intelligence through discovery, and all of the other implications that remain to be worked out in the aftermath of this decision. Finally, on your question on the international disposition of detainees, Senator McCain has been clear in talking with our allies that we need to understand a couple of basic things about the nature of the individuals at Guantanamo.
They are very dangerous people. They include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was the mastermind of the September 11th attack. These aren't just your run-of-the-mill drug dealers picked up on the streets of the South Side of Chicago that Senator McCain believes should be given full protections of -- that a U.S. citizen has.
They're very dangerous people. If they are released, they are very likely to go and commit terrorist acts again, as some 30 of the individuals already released from Guantanamo have done and rejoined the battlefield.
So we've got a very serious problem. He wants to work with our allies. He wants to fashion a solution that passes constitutional muster and is committed to doing that moving forward.
And so is the idea that they would still go to federal facilities in the United States? Or does "working with the allies" mean they might go somewhere else overseas?
Well, there are a number at Guantanamo that we would like to ship back to their countries of origin, but the problem is a number of the countries involved do not want to take them. And so when he talks about reaching some international understanding, part of it is to share the burden, if you will, of detaining very dangerous terrorists who have -- we have very sound reason to believe have committed terrorist acts against Americans and our allies. QUESTION: Good morning. This is some of the most severe language I guess we've heard yet describing the difference on approaches that the two candidates would take towards national security.
I'm curious, just judging from what we've heard from you gentlemen this morning, should we -- ladies and gentlemen -- should we read this to believe that, if Senator Obama were to win the presidency and implement this approach, then we should expect another terrorist attack?
Could I answer that? John Lehman here.
I can't believe that Senator Obama will not change his position on this, because it is a totally unsupportable position. It would provide such an opening for terrorism that, no matter how naive he is, he would not go forward with it, in my belief. If he did, it would certainly make it far more dangerous in the United States.
This is Jim Woolsey. I don't say this lightly: This is an extremely dangerous and extremely naive approach toward terrorism, international terrorism and toward dealing with prisoners captured overseas who have been engaged in terrorist attacks against the United States.
This is Randy Scheunemann. I have no doubt that we will hear in the course of the day that the Obama campaign will say we're practicing the, quote, "politics of fear." And the reality is what Senator Obama's statement reflects last night is that he's advocating a policy of delusion that ignores what happened in the failed approach of the 1990s, which allowed Al Qaida to thrive and prosper unmolested, and that policy clearly made America less safe and more vulnerable.
A question to the panel, but in this interview, Senator Obama also says that the approach of the administration for not putting terrorists on trial has destroyed our credibility when it comes to the rule of law around the world and given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in countries that say, "Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims."
Did you all agree with that, that Bush's approach has ultimately led to the recruitment of more terrorists? And, you know, this is for Woolsey, or Lehman, or Randy.
Well, this is Jim Woolsey.
Hi.
You know, we held a large number of German prisoners of war in the United States during World War II at federal facilities. Some of them were S.S. Some of them were extremely dangerous people. We did not grant them habeas corpus rights and full criminal trials one-by-one before American civilian courts and tribunals. And we did not develop, I think, thereby, a reputation for being anti- German or anti-Teutonic. We were fighting a war.
And we are now fighting a war, and we need to recognize that.
I think that the record shows that the response to the '93 bombings, which was, in effect, "let the police handle it," was part of the encouragement of Osama bin Laden that he talked about in several fatwa, starting -- he cited, beginning with the '83 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut by Hezbollah, to exhort people to rise to the cause, because the United States was so afraid of jihad that they could not retaliate and they would not do anything.
And so recruitment was undoubtedly greatly encouraged by the lack of retaliation, the lack of effective action, and the reliance on the criminal justice system after the '93 bombings. So it's the opposite of what Senator Obama said.
And just to go back to Jim's remarks, one of the many precedents that the Supreme Court casually flipped over last week was the Ex Parte Quirin decision by the court during World War II, when the terrorists, the saboteurs landed on Long Island and were tried by military tribunal.
And Justice Jackson, speaking for the court, said that this was perfectly within the rights of the executive branch to set up these courts, because under international law saboteurs had no standing in the U.S. courts and denied habeas corpus.
Hi, thanks for taking my question. I'm wondering if I'm sort of reading between the lines. I don't want to be saying something that you're not saying.
Could you clarify your thoughts on the recent Supreme Court decision, as it relates to Osama bin Laden -- and this is a hypothetical -- but if he were captured and taken to Guantanamo Bay, would he have habeas rights, under your understanding of that?
This is Randy Scheunemann answering that question. It appears that all detainees held at Guantanamo do have the habeas rights. And this is one of the reasons -- under the Supreme Court's closely divided and strongly argued decision -- and this is one of the reasons Senator McCain is so concerned about it.
And I think somebody should, frankly, as Senator Obama if he believes, if Osama bin Laden were captured and taken to Guantanamo, whether he should have habeas rights.
It has been Senator McCain's position that he should not, that the individuals we hold at Guantanamo are very, very dangerous people, and to give them full access to the federal courts and the criminal justice system is fraught with danger, moving forward, and likely to make America less safe, unlike Senator Obama's claim of supporting the decision that it made America safer.
Thanks.
Hi. I was just -- I wanted to make sure I understood right all your comments earlier about the '93 prosecutions. Senator Obama seems to be limiting his comments last night to those prosecutions, saying that they were essentially successful, I guess, because most of the suspects were prosecuted and are in custody.
Are you arguing, saying that there should have been a different approach taken then? What approach should have been taken, if not what we did in '93 and thereafter? Would we have already sent them to Gitmo? Would we have sent them to Leavenworth?
I mean, how do you send some bombers to Leavenworth in '93 and then, if there's a domestic terrorist act the next year, say, in Oklahoma City, we prosecute that in the courts? How would that work?
Well, first of all, it would depend on the -- if a person had -- was a U.S. citizen, they ipso facto have the right, their constitutional rights. And this is where the Bush administration made a very large error, in my judgment, by denying treating U.S. citizens who were enemy combatants the same as non-U.S. citizens.
So if they were U.S. citizens, they should have been given the rights and tried under the U.S. judicial system. But if -- and, by the way, tried for treason, as well as terrorist acts.
But if they were not, they should -- under the established international law, where combatants out of uniform who are foreign nationals have less rights than POWs and are normally quickly given military tribunals and very often executed.
But what should have been done was that those who were not U.S. citizens should have been given military tribunals, as they have in wars past, and not given the free publicity, and tying up the courts, and sealing all of the intelligence and evidence, and, by some reports, thereby compromising a lot of the evidence, a lot of the intelligence sources that had to be turned over to the defense counsel.
So we would have done it -- recommended doing it very differently than it was done.
This is Jim Woolsey. I agree with that. The foreign terrorists who were involved in '93 should have been treated like the Nazi saboteurs who were out of uniform, on U.S. soil, during World War II and as the Supreme Court ruled they were properly treated in Ex Parte Quirin.
And now it -- this is Randy Scheunemann with the campaign -- I mean, what is amazing about Senator Obama's statement -- and he makes it clear that he views the World Trade Center as an example. He says, "In previous terrorist attacks, for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center," he said they put them on trial, not most of them.
But more fundamentally, the fact that he would say this 15 years after that attack -- we now, unfortunately, have the benefit of hindsight and we've seen what radical Islamic terrorists could do. And six-and-a-half years after September 11th, he's still arguing that this was a successful approach.
And, frankly, that is shocking. That's like saying, because we indicted Osama bin Laden in 1998, we're moving on the right road in a law enforcement strategy against a criminal, instead of moving on the wrong road against a terrorist organization leader that went on to bomb our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, attack the USS Cole, and ultimately be behind the September 11th attack that killed 3,000 Americans.
Hi, Randy. I'm looking for some clearer lines in your case against Senator Obama.
I understand how, in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, you take issue with the way he would handle terrorists once they're captured, but I don't necessarily see evidence in what he said for what you do before you capture them.
And I know that's the case you're making, is that he wants just some sort of law enforcement approach, but Senator McCain has also attacked Senator Obama for his theory about potentially going into Pakistan, even if the Pakistani government doesn't give us permission to, and said that's reckless.
So if on the one hand, he's reckless for storming into Pakistan, how can he then also have a sort of mere law enforcement approach, which is weak, in going after the terrorists, leaving aside the question of what you do once you've got them?
Let me just answer first the slight mischaracterization of Senator McCain's position on Pakistan. What he said was reckless was to talk about publicly from a podium to demonstrate how willing you are to counter terrorists that we would engage in unilateral actions on Pakistani soil. That has repercussions in our ability to cooperate with Pakistan.
You don't see President Bush or Secretary Rice or Secretary Gates going to podiums and talking about how we're willing to engage in unilateral actions in Pakistan.
We have engaged in those actions. They are necessary and appropriate, and Senator McCain has supported them. But what is reckless is to talk about it in public, to kind of demonstrate your counterterrorist bona fides, when, in fact, it gravely complicates our ability to cooperate with Pakistani authorities.
But, OK, I take your point, but Senator McCain and Senator Obama seem to be then in agreement on this approach to catching terrorists. And that seems to be anything but a law enforcement approach, which I guess is -- I'm trying to figure out the contradiction between Senator Obama, who can be storming into Pakistan, which Senator McCain agrees with, and then the characterization of him as only wanting a law enforcement approach, which suggests a bunch of lawyers marching into...
Well, this is Jim Woolsey. If you are following an exclusively law enforcement approach, then when you capture a terrorist abroad, including on the battlefield, that means that you have to go through all of the business of forensic propriety with respect to evidence, chain of custody of evidence, all of that sort of thing, which it's really almost impossible to do in a battlefield environment or in the mountains along the Pakistani-Afghan border and so on.
So the way in which you would handle a terrorist once caught has a lot to do with the willingness and your ability to take them into custody. And how you go about it, it's not just something that crops up at the last minute by applying one set of procedures rather than the other. You have to skew your entire way of operating in such a way as, for example, not to utilize intelligence information in a lot of circumstances in the field, because that might have to be disclosed as part of a legal process, if the terrorist is being treated with full civilian rights.
All right. Thank you, everybody, for joining the call. Appreciate your time this morning. And thank you, John, Jim and Kori, for participating. Have a good day.
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