If there is a temptation in the United States to return to secret jails abroad, to Guantanamo Bay, to interrogation techniques that amount to torture, in the wake of a failed terrorist attack on a Detroit-bound jetliner on Christmas Day, it should be strenuously avoided. President Barack Obama, in his televised address to his nation yesterday afternoon, made that timely point.
The optimal route for the U.S. is the one that Mr. Obama set out: trying to improve an intelligence system that by its nature will never be perfect, and working with other countries to develop more secure airports.
Mr. Obama has been criticized by the Republican Party as being soft on terror in the wake of the attempted attack. The implication is that such supposedly soft-hearted policies on torture and Guantanamo encouraged the would-be bomber.
The attack could just as easily have happened during a Bush administration. A more pertinent point is that the jails, torture and Guantanamo Bay prison served as an international recruiting tool for al-Qaeda. No successful attacks have occurred after Sept. 11, 2001, on U.S. soil, but the enemy, far from vanquished, appears to have grown stronger.
The most forceful part of Mr. Obama's address came near the end, as he described al-Qaeda's attempts to recruit young people with no terrorist affiliations. The U.S., he said, must communicate to the world's Muslims that al-Qaeda offers only a bankrupt vision of misery and death. "We will not succumb to a siege mentality," he said. Great nations do not hunker down behind walls of mistrust. "We will define the character of our country," rather than allow the killers of al-Qaeda to define it.
On the international partnerships it wishes to improve, the Obama administration has some work to do. Last Sunday, the Transportation Security Administration publicly released a brief statement outlining its directive to foreign airports with U.S.-bound flights. That directive spoke of more intensive screening of passengers flying from or through one of 14 countries, 13 of them with Muslim majorities. But it said nothing of extra screening for people from those countries. Yet that appears to be what the order directs.
Canada doesn't seem to have implemented the directive, which was supposed to have been put into effect on Monday. The Minister of Transport, John Baird, said he is still talking to the U.S. about the "specifics." Europe hasn't budged on it, either. As Mr. Obama urges his people not to stomp on civil liberties, he should be careful about what he asks other nations to do.
Mr. Obama needed to show why the intelligence failures occurred, and his release of a preliminary review was a commendable act of transparency. The U.S. may not be much safer from terrorism today than it was yesterday, but it is on the right track.