EDITORIAL: Obama remembers to forget

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In criticizing the Bush administration's approach to fighting terrorism, Barack Obama is calling for a return to the terror-fighting tactics of - the Clinton years. "What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks - for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center [on Feb. 26, 1993] - we were able to arrest those responsible, and put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated. And the fact that this administration has not tried to do that has created a situation where not only have we never actually put many of these folks on trial, but we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to the rule of law all around the world," Mr. Obama said June 16. "We could have done the exact same thing, but done it in a way that was consistent with our values."

But Mr. Obama's suggestion of the World Trade Center bombing trial as a model for fighting terror today makes no sense. For one thing, evidence gathered by prosecutors and the FBI was not shared with intelligence agencies; the investigation was hampered by the Clinton administration's approach - which was to consider the bombing as the action of freelance terrorists operating without government sponsorship. Efforts by then-CIA Director James Woolsey to investigate evidence that foreign governments may have been behind the bombing, in which six people died and nearly 1,000 were injured, were rebuffed by senior administration officials. Cooperation between prosecutors and intelligence agencies was effectively cut off by a series of judicial rulings that made it virtually impossible to use intelligence information in criminal cases.

Moreover, the prosecution of the case yielded a treasure-trove of intelligence for al Qaeda - aiding its war against the United States. In the course of prosecuting Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and his associates for their roles in the WTC bombing and other planned attacks - the government was forced to turn over a list of unindicted co-conspirators to the defense. That list included the name of Osama bin Laden. Within 10 days, a copy of that list reached bin Laden at his headquarters in Sudan, tipping him off that the U.S. government was searching for him and that he should take extra precautions for his own safety.

In addition, during the trial of Ramzi Youssef, the mastermind of the WTC bombing, "an apparently innocuous bit of testimony in a public courtroom about delivery of a cell phone battery was enough to tip off terrorists still at large that one of their communication links had been compromised," wrote Judge Michael Mukasey, who presided over the Abdel-Rahman trial, in the Wall Street Journal last year. Added Mr. Mukasey, current attorney general of the United States: "That link, which in fact had been monitored by the government and had provided enormously valuable intelligence, was immediately shut down, and further information lost."

Yet Mr. Obama wants to take the United States down this road once again.