Obama and terrorism

Some disconnected thoughts:

1. The tone of Obama's public statement on Tuesday was generally regarded as firm, or severe, or "smouldering" (David Gergen on CNN). That was not my impression. What he said seemed right, but the delivery seemed to me tired and exasperated more than steely and resolute. The bungled words, the hesitant low-drive delivery: not Obama at his best.

2. The proliferation of agencies post 9/11 is a big part of the problem. We have more information than before, but two things push the other way. The signal-to-noise ratio has fallen, so extracting useful information is harder. And the number of silos for data has gone up. The 9/11 commission emphasised inter-agency communication as a critical weakness. Despite the attention paid to it in the post 9/11 reforms, one wonders if the system is worse in this respect than before.

3. Still we're debating whether we are fighting a "war on terror"? Does it matter what we call it, if everything else is the same? (Roger Pilon at Cato says it does matter, because calling it a war changes the legal regime. Not so. What laws change when you say "war on drugs"? If the government wants it to be mere rhetoric, that is all it need be.) Arguing that this struggle is an ordinary war, and can be fought like an ordinary war, is nonsense. On the other hand, talking loosely of a "war on terror" commits you to nothing, and overtly resisting the term seems to deny the gravity of the problem. The administration has it about right. It doesn't refuse to say "war on terror"; equally, it doesn't argue, "Because we are at war, anything goes...".

4. Turning to conduct as opposed to vocabulary, there is an obvious missing middle between "war on terror" and treating terrorism as an ordinary crime. Why the insistence on right and left that it must be one or the other? Mike Kinsley, defending the decision to treat Abdulmutallab as an ordinary criminal suspect, accepts that premise even while striving to be pragmatic. His concession to pragmatism is to embrace the double standard, arguing that you must draw a line somewhere, and the national border "is as good a line as any". It's war abroad, ordinary criminal investigation at home. How about a triple standard? Countries such as Britain, which some Americans applaud for treating terrorism as a crime, have special anti-terror laws that allow longer-than-usual periods of detentionand questioning without charge for terrorist suspects. I agree with Ruth Marcus on this; she mentions a paper by Ben Wittes and Colleen Peppard (Designing Detention: A Model Law for Terrorist Incapacitation), which describes what such a law might look like for the US.