Detroit Bomber Should Be in Military Hands

The most alarming thing about the administration's unimpressive response to the Detroit terror incident was its failure to immediately hand the suspect over to the military, writes Michael Mukasey. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should have been treated like a valuable source of information instead of a mere criminal suspect, the former attorney general notes in the Wall Street Journal.

Turning the suspect over to the military would have been legal, and would have allowed authorities to gain vital information instead of having him clam up in custody on a lawyer's advice, Mukasey writes. Administration officials, with their avoidance of terms like "Islamic terrorism" and their treatment of Abdulmutallab as a civilian, seems "focused more on not sounding like their predecessors than they are on finding and neutralizing people who believe it is their religious duty to kill us," Mukasey concludes.
(More Detroit terror incident stories.)