Lucky for How Long? Obama Needs to Lead Fight Against Radical Islam
by Joel Mowbray

Because of smoke and “pop, pop, pop” noises coming from the Nissan Pathfinder parked in the heart of Times Square, alert street vendors knew to flag down a police officer, averting catastrophe.

While the celebration that has ensued is understandable, the incident this past weekend is actually a sobering reminder of just how vulnerable we are.

The combination of aggressive law enforcement and plain luck have prevented any major, successful attack in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, but we cannot expect our good fortune simply to continue indefinitely.

Even though the Pakistani Taliban has claimed credit for the car bomb, there is not substantial enough evidence to confirm their boast. It should be of greater concern, however, if the suspected bomber, Faisal Shahzad, was a “lone wolf” with little or no outside support or training, given how close the car bomb came to wreaking havoc on perhaps the most instantly recognizable neighborhood in America, if not the world.

Consider that Times Square is a true hard target, with highly trained police officers on every corner. Not only that, but it’s in the center of a city protected by the New York Police Department’s counterterrorism unit, which is easily the best in a local police force, and arguably even more effective than the FBI’s.

Yet, had the bomb been made correctly and detonated as presumably intended, a “significant fireball” could have claimed dozens or even hundreds of lives on the busiest night of the week in Times Square.

As heroic as the street vendors and the responding police officers were, luck was still the single biggest factor in averting disaster.

Luck has been essential in several close calls. The Christmas Day underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was able to get his explosives past security, but it was our luck that he could not ignite his bomb. Similarly, shoe-bomber Richard Reid evaded security, only to fail in detonating his explosives on the flight.

In October 2005, University of Oklahoma student and Islamic convert Joel Hinrichs III detonated himself less than 200 yards from the football stadium during a Sooners football game. Over 80,000 people were inside. It stands to reason that Hinrichs, who reportedly attended the same mosque as the would-be 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, had something much grander in mind than mere suicide.

Since Sept. 11, there have been more than 800 terror-related arrests in the United States, according to New York University’s Center on Law and Security. The onslaught is constant.

Two key factors have enabled law enforcement to protect us:

• First is that most of the plots thus far have involved either existing networks or people reaching out to terrorist organizations or known radical communities, giving the FBI a chance to monitor or infiltrate the terrorist plots.

• Second is a cultural shift away from the mentality that prevented the FBI from seeking a search warrant to inspect Moussaoui’s laptop, which the agency had in its possession nearly a month before September 11.

Unfortunately, both of these ingredients are endangered.

Radical messages of Islamic victimization at the hands of an evil America (or an evil Israel, with the help of America) abound on the Internet and in Muslim communities across the U.S.

The sense that the Islamic world is under attack by the West has been the stated motivation of most captured jihadists, who believe they are acting quite nobly, as they see it, in defending supposedly defenseless fellow Muslims.

Law enforcement’s success in preventing attacks—and consequently, jihadists’ failure in executing them—only increases the odds of a “lone wolf” deciding to take matters into his own hands in defending Muslims. Lone wolves are naturally harder to track, as they can more easily stay off the radar until they act.

Despite the preposterous findings of a Department of Defense report this January, an abundance of evidence suggests that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan went on a shooting spree last year at Fort Hood in order to, quoting from his own Internet posting about the virtues of suicide bombers, “help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers.”

Based on what the public learned about the government’s knowledge of Maj. Hasan’s words and deeds before his murderous rampage, it is clear he never should have been in a position to wage his jihad in the first place. Debilitating political correctness kept him in uniform, as his superiors were more worried about bad PR or potential lawsuits than dealing with an obvious threat.

That’s why leadership matters. President Obama, to his credit, has not enacted many changes to the Bush administration counterterrorism policies. But the rhetorical shift has been pronounced.

Given the Muslim background of his father and stepfather, and his own formative years in predominantly Islamic Indonesia, President Obama actually has the best position of any U.S. leader to tackle Islamic radicalism head-on. So far, however, he has declined to do so. His administration has instead engaged in a coordinated campaign to soft-pedal the threat of radical Islamic ideology.

Most likely, the number of potential lone wolves will grow over time. As we could have learned in far more painful fashion this weekend, even the best policing can fall short. The key to stopping lone wolves is defeating the ideology that motivates them to act.

It’s only a matter of time before our luck runs out.

Corruptocrat Eric Holder’s National Security Cover-Up
by Michelle Malkin

The White House wants to play Transparency Olympics with the Tea Party movement. President Obama’s Chief Technology Officer Andrew McLaughlin dared Tea Party activists and conservatives last week to “push the administration to make its policies more open” and make it a “political competition … to see who can be more radical in their openness,” The Hill reported. So, let’s start by knocking down Attorney General Eric Holder’s national security stonewall at the Department of Justice, shall we? Let the sun shine in.

For more than a year, I’ve been writing about the looming national security and conflict-of-interest problems posed by Holder’s status as a former partner at the prestigious law firm Covington and Burling. The company currently represents or has provided pro bono representation and sob-story media-relations campaigns in the past to more than a dozen Gitmo detainees from Yemen who are seeking civilian trials on American soil.

The firm wasn’t just a bit player. It led the charge, contributing more than 3,000 hours to Gitmo litigation in 2007, according to The American Lawyer. At least one known Covington big shot and fellow former Clintonite, Lanny Breuer, now works for Holder as head of the DOJ’s criminal division. Though he himself did not participate in the detainee cases, Holder’s celebrity undoubtedly boosted company-wide prestige.

How many of Holder’s former colleagues and associates are now on the DOJ payroll? How many like them, who worked at other law firms or for left-wing lobbying groups, now inhabit DOJ offices? How many of them have been allowed to work on government terrorism cases related to their past crusades for al-Qaida-tied clients? How many have had to recuse themselves — and have those recusals been full and forthcoming? How can the public judge whether these lawyers are representing America’s best interests — or those of the jihadis?

GOP Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa has been trying to get answers. DOJ information suppressors have snubbed him repeatedly. As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York reported on Friday, Holder has now acknowledged that “at least” nine Obama appointees in the Justice Department “have represented or advocated for terrorist detainees before joining the Justice Department.” But the tight-lipped, taxpayer-funded litigators at the agency won’t name names or cough up any relevant details.

Grassley asked for “the names of political appointees in the Department who represented detainees (or) worked for organizations advocating on behalf of detainees … the cases or projects that these appointees worked on with respect to detainees prior to joining the Justice Department … and the cases or projects relating to detainees that they have worked on since joining the Justice Department. …” Beyond two DOJ appointees whose work for jihadi defendants had already been made public, Holder gave up nothing. Zip. Zilch.

It’s not even clear that the Gitmo Nine are the end of the line. The list is not a comprehensive tally of DOJ appointees, Holder told Grassley and other GOP senators who pressed for public disclosure. Why not? What are they trying to hide? Who are they trying to spare?

Americans have a right to know whether they are subsidizing jihadi sympathizers, and whether their Justice Department is now a sanctuary for human rights transnationalists and little terrorists’ helpers in the mold of Lynne Stewart, who was convicted of abetting Muslim terrorist mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and spreading messages inciting violence on his behalf while representing him.

Americans have a right to know whether Holder — who put political interests ahead of security interests at the Clinton Justice Department in both the Marc Rich pardon scandal and the Puerto Rican FALN terrorist debacle — has made hiring decisions that provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare.

Tellingly, Holder has treated the GOP’s national security concerns dismissively. He’s hoping his nonresponsive blow-off of Grassley’s request will die on the vine. And just as he used his past lapses in judgment during the Clinton era to argue that they made him more qualified for the job he holds now, Holder argues that the phantom jihadi lawyers on the DOJ payroll are a good thing for the country, so we should just shut up:

“A prosecutor of white-collar fraud cases may have previously represented defendants in such cases. This familiarity with and experience in the relevant area of law redounds to the government’s benefit.”

As usual, Holder puts ordinary civilian crimes on the same footing as terrorism plots and acts of war against our country. But why not let the people decide for themselves whether his staff decisions redound to their benefit? “The American people have the right to information about their government’s activities,” Holder himself said in a press release trumpeting new freedom of information rules last year. Put up or shut up, Mr. Attorney General.

Playing Freedom Cheap
by Thomas Sowell

If eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, incessant distractions are the way that politicians take away our freedoms, in order to enhance their own power and longevity in office. Dire alarms and heady crusades are among the many distractions of our attention from the ever increasing ways that government finds to take away more of our money and more of our freedom.

Magicians have long known that distracting an audience is the key to creating the illusion of magic. It is also the key to political magic.

Alarms ranging from “overpopulation” to “global warming” and crusades ranging from “affordable housing” to “universal health care” have been among the distractions of political magicians. But few distractions have had such a long and impressive political track record as getting people to resent and, if necessary, hate other people.

The most politically effective totalitarian systems have gotten people to give up their own freedom in order to vent their resentment or hatred at other people– under Communism, the capitalists; under Nazis, the Jews.

Under extremist Islamic regimes today, hatred is directed at the infidels in general and the “great Satan,” the United States, in particular. There some people have been induced to give up not only their freedom but even their lives, in order to strike a blow against those they have been taught to hate.

We have not yet reached these levels of hostility, but those who are taking away our freedoms, bit by bit, on the installment plan, have been incessantly supplying us with people to resent.

One of the most audacious attempts to take away our freedom to live our lives as we see fit has been the so-called “health care reform” bills that were being rushed through Congress before either the public or the members of Congress themselves had a chance to discover all that was in it.

For this, we were taught to resent doctors, insurance companies and even people with “Cadillac health insurance plans,” who were to be singled out for special taxes. Meanwhile, our freedom to make our own medical decisions– on which life and death can depend– was to be quietly taken from us and transferred to our betters in Washington. Only the recent Massachusetts election results have put that on hold.

Another dangerous power toward which we are moving, bit by bit, on the installment plan, is the power of politicians to tell people what their incomes can and cannot be. Here the resentment is being directed against “the rich.”

The distracting phrases here include “obscene” wealth and “unconscionable” profits. But, if we stop and think about it– which politicians don’t expect us to– what is obscene about wealth? Wouldn’t we consider it great if every human being on earth had a billion dollars and lived in a place that could rival the Taj Mahal?

Poverty is obscene. It is poverty that needs to be reduced–and increasing a country’s productivity has done that far more widely than redistributing income by targeting “the rich.”

You can see the agenda behind the rhetoric when profits are called “unconscionable” but taxes never are, even when taxes take more than half of what someone has earned, or add much more to the prices we have to pay than profits do.

The assumption that what A pays B is any business of C is an assumption that means a dangerous power being transferred to politicians to tell us all what incomes we can and cannot receive. It will not apply to everyone all at once. Like the income tax, which at first applied only to the truly rich, and then slowly but steadily moved down the income scale to hit the rest of us, the power to say what incomes people can be allowed to make will inevitably move down the income scale to make us all dependents and supplicants of politicians.

The phrase “public servants” is increasingly misleading. They are well on their way to becoming public masters– like aptly named White House “czars.” The more they can get us all to resent those they designate, the more they can distract us from their increasing control of our own lives– but only if we sell our freedom cheap. We can sell our birthright and not even get the mess of pottage.

Soft on Terror
by Charles Krauthammer

The real scandal surrounding the failed Christmas Day airline bombing was not the fact that a terrorist got on a plane — that can happen to any administration, as it surely did to the Bush administration — but what happened afterward when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was captured and came under the full control of the U.S. government.

After 50 minutes of questioning him, the Obama administration chose, reflexively and mindlessly, to give the chatty terrorist the right to remain silent. Which he immediately did, undoubtedly denying us crucial information about al-Qaeda in Yemen, which had trained, armed and dispatched him.

We have since learned that the decision to Mirandize Abdulmutallab had been made without the knowledge of or consultation with (1) the secretary of defense, (2) the secretary of homeland security, (3) the director of the FBI, (4) the director of the National Counterterrorism Center or (5) the director of national intelligence (DNI).

The Justice Department acted not just unilaterally but unaccountably. Obama’s own DNI said that Abdulmutallab should have been interrogated by the HIG, the administration’s new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.

Perhaps you hadn’t heard the term. Well, in the very first week of his presidency, Obama abolished by executive order the Bush-Cheney interrogation procedures and pledged to study a substitute mechanism. In August, the administration announced the establishment of the HIG, housed in the FBI but overseen by the National Security Council.

Where was it during the Abdulmutallab case? Not available, admitted National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, because it had only been conceived for use abroad. Had not one person in this vast administration of highly nuanced sophisticates considered the possibility of a terror attack on American soil?

It gets worse. Blair later had to explain that the HIG was not deployed because it does not yet exist After a year! I suppose this administration was so busy deploying scores of the country’s best lawyerly minds on finding the most rapid way to release Gitmo miscreants that it could not be bothered to establish a single operational HIG team to interrogate at-large miscreants with actionable intelligence that might save American lives.

Travesties of this magnitude are not lost on the American people. One of the reasons Scott Brown won in Massachusetts was his focus on the Mirandizing of Abdulmutallab.

Of course, this case is just a reflection of a larger problem: an administration that insists on treating Islamist terrorism as a law-enforcement issue. Which is why the Justice Department’s other egregious terror decision, granting Khalid Sheik Mohammed a civilian trial in New York, is now the subject of a letter from six senators — three Republicans, two Democrats and Joe Lieberman — asking Attorney General Eric Holder to reverse the decision.

Lieberman and Sen. Susan Collins had written an earlier letter asking for Abdulmutallab to be turned over to the military for renewed interrogation. The problem is, it’s hard to see how that decision gets reversed. Once you’ve read a man Miranda rights, what do you say? We are idiots? On second thought …

Hence the agitation over the KSM trial. This one can be reversed and it’s a good surrogate for this administration’s insistence upon criminalizing — and therefore trivializing — a war on terror that has now struck three times in one year within the United States, twice with effect (the Arkansas killer and the Fort Hood shooter) and once with a shockingly near miss (Abdulmutallab).

On the KSM civilian trial, sentiment is widespread that it is quite insane to spend $200 million a year to give the killer of 3,000 innocents the largest propaganda platform on earth, while at the same time granting civilian rights of cross-examination and discovery that risk betraying U.S. intelligence sources and methods.

Accordingly, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Rep. Frank Wolf have gone beyond appeals to the administration and are planning to introduce a bill to block funding for the trial. It’s an important measure. It makes flesh an otherwise abstract issue — should terrorists be treated as enemy combatants or criminal defendants? The vote will force members of Congress to declare themselves. There will be no hiding from the question.

Congress may not be able to roll back the Abdulmutallab travesty. But there will be future Abdulmutallabs. By cutting off funding for the KSM trial, Congress can send Obama a clear message: The Constitution is neither a safety net for illegal enemy combatants nor a suicide pact for us.

“Notional” Security
by Thomas Sowell

The latest “screw-up” that let a man with explosives get on a plane on Christmas day is only part of a larger laxness and irresponsibility when it comes to national security. This administration pays lip service to national security and gives out with a lot of rhetorical notions that makes it notional security instead of national security.

The Muslim major who was arrested for the murders of American soldiers at Fort Hood had left so many clues to his hatred of this country that all you had to do was count the dots, without even connecting them, to see where he was coming from. But for a fellow officer to alert higher authorities to the danger would have meant risking damage to his own career moreso than to that of Major Nidal Hasan.

That is because we have become so obsessed with political correctness that both common sense and self-preservation have to take a back seat. We don’t dare “profile” anybody going through security checks because that’s not politically correct. Far better to be blown to smithereens than to be politically incorrect.

Probably the country with the strongest security checks for airline passengers– and the strongest reason for such checks– is Israel. Israel profiles. I have been to Israel more than once and it is clear that they profile.

Fortunately, my wife and I obviously don’t fit their profile, whatever that may be. Others who have been to Israel are amazed when I tell them that we have gone through Israeli security four times and they have never opened our luggage.

That is all the more surprising, since we take a lot of luggage. We have stopped in Israel while on trips completely around the world, including countries both above and below the equator, so we had to have clothing for hot weather and cold weather, since the seasons are the opposite in the northern and southern hemispheres. Moreover, I carry a lot of photographic equipment in a large, separate piece of luggage.

In short, our luggage could carry enough explosives to blow up any building in the country. But, whatever their security system and whatever their profile, they didn’t seem to want to waste any time on us.

The last time we flew into Israel was from Cairo, where the Israeli security officials at the Cairo airport detained the lady in line in front of us for 45 minutes, opened her luggage, spread the contents across the counter, and asked her all sorts of questions. When they had finally finished with her and my wife and I stepped up to the counter, the official in charge waved us on impatiently, saying, “Hurry up, you’ll miss the plane.”

This was no special treatment for us. They had no idea who we were. We were just not the kind of people they spent time on, for whatever reason.

Recently, an Israeli security official was interviewed on Fox News Channel by Mike Huckabee. The official said that he has testified before Congress and offered to help with suggestions on how the American airport security system could be improved– and he clearly thought it needed a lot of improvement.

Apparently the only response he got from American security officials was a polite letter. “They didn’t tell me to go to Hell,” he said. “They were polite.”

There is no stronger indication of danger than officials who don’t want to hear what anybody else has to say, even when those who offer to help have a system that works better than ours.

The fundamental issue goes beyond the Fort Hood massacre or the Christmas bomber. These are just symptoms of a larger set of attitudes and expediences reflecting the same outlook.

Putting terrorists on trial in American criminal courts, under rules designed for American citizens, tells you all you need to know about whether the Obama administration is serious about security or is still playing the political correctness game.

Terrorists are not covered by the Geneva convention for the simple reason that they do not abide by the Geneva convention. They are enemy combatants and you do not turn enemy combatants loose to go back to killing Americans while the war is still on– not if you are being serious, as distinguished from being political or ideological.

What I Saw At the Napolitano “Revolution”
by Austin Hill

Two terrorist attacks on American soil within les s than sixty days. Administration officials declare that “the system worked” after the Christmas day attack, only to be contradicted by the President days later. The President notes on December 29th that the Christmas day attack was carried out by merely an “isolated extremist,” but then declares on January 7 that “we are at war,” and that we must stay “one step ahead of a nimble adversary,” in complete contradiction of his Homeland Security Secretary and his own previous remarks.

Oh, my –how does America’s liberal media explain it all away?

One of the most extraordinary accounts of this chaos was served up by Washington Post columnist David Broder. In the aftermath of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s sweep-it-under-the-rug “the system worked” analysis of the Christmas day attack, Broder published a column on January 1 explaining her terrific handling of the crisis.

“In the years I have known her,” Broder wrote, “she has managed every challenge that has come her way with the same calm command that she showed in this instance. If there is anyone in the administration who embodies President Obama’s preference for quiet competence with ‘no drama,’ it is Janet Napolitano.”

Well, – gosh! – I can’t claim to have known Napolitano for “years” like the super-cool Mr. Broder does. However, I was an Arizonan for all six years of Napolitano’s tenure as Governor in that state, so I know some things about Ms. Napolitano.

As Arizona Governor, Napolitano was all over the road with policy positions on security. Early in her first term in 2003, she voiced support for a proposal to allow illegal immigrants to be issued state driver’s licenses. When public outcry turned against her, she fell silent on the issue, and later refused to take a position on the matter when her fellow Democrats introduced legislation to actually make the driver’s license “dream” a reality.

And while 2003 saw the states of California and Texas contemplate whether or not to send state National Guard Troops to the U.S. / Mexico border, Napolitano opposed the idea for Arizona, arguing at the time that border security is a “federal issue” and not the job of state government. Yet three years later, in the midst of her 2006 re-election campaign, Governor Napolitano shocked Democrats and Republicans alike by dispatching the Arizona National Guard to the Mexican border, to “help” with the flood of illegal immigrants.

One of the most extraordinary components of Napolitano’s Arizona legacy has to do with her attempt to monetize state security. With virtually no input from the state legislature, Governor Napolitano used her executive powers to mandate the purchase and installation of speed-limit enforcing “photo radar” cameras which are now dispersed literally everywhere in Arizona – - in the city, and throughout the state’s vast rural regions as well.

Napolitano’s approach to speed enforcement is bad enough for its draconian, big-brother approach. But worse still, in a blatantly cynical move, Napolitano established that citations from the statewide “speed cameras” would carry with them no penalty to one’s driving record – - just a monetary fee. As long as offending drivers are willing to write the check and pay off the government, they can continue to violate speed limit laws with no restrictions on their driving privileges, and the state “profits” all the more.

In 2009 during her last few days as Arizona’s Governor, Napolitano explained that her “speed cameras” were a “solution” to the state’s budget woes. And this should raise concerns for all Americans today: as Governor of Arizona, our current Secretary of Homeland Security took the moral imperative of “public security” and reduced it down to a matter of mere revenue generation.

Had David Broder waited a couple more days before publishing his “I love Janet” piece, he may have seen the New York Times report on January 3rd noting that Napolitano’s “Arizona security experiment” is likely headed for the trash heap. As if the intended purposes of the program aren’t bad enough, Napolitano’s “photo radar” program has also failed to save Arizona from its budget woes, producing less than a third of Napolitano’s projected $120 million in annual “revenues.”

In the aftermath of the Christmas day terrorist attack, there has been chatter about shake-ups among President Obama’s security team. But don’t look for Napolitano’s departure any time soon. She “earned” a secure position in the Obama Administration by defying her long-standing friendship with the Clintons (President Clinton once appointed Napolitano as a “U.S. Attorney”) back in 2008 and endorsing Obama over Hillary. It is political cronyism at its worst – but it is the way things work in Washington.

And this is why we need a security professional heading-up the DHS – and not a politician.

Gitmo Closure, Terrorist “Rehab” Take Hits
by Jillian Bandes

The White House’s decision to stop the transfers of Guantanamo Bay detainees back to their home base in Yemen jeopardizes President Obama’s executive order – and campaign promise – to close the controversial prison facility.

The decision also brings into question Attorney General Eric Holder’s multiple affirmations that “rehabilitation” of already-repatriated ex-detainees has been “successful.”

But the White House and Holder are already playing a game of political rigmarole they hope will reconcile their hypocrisy on the canceled transfers.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters Tuesday that delaying transfer of Gitmo prisoners would not delay the closing of Guantanamo Bay. It was not clear what would happen to them in lieu of being transferred. One option could be to ship more of them to the Thomson Correctional Facility in Illinois, where other Gitmo prisoners will be housed.

But that facility won’t be ready until 2011, and putting any prisoners into a facility inside the United States has been met with controversy. There is also the legal issue of whether it’s appropriate to ship homeward-bound Gitmo detainees to another prison, given that original plans to ship them back to their countries of origin presumed they were safe.

That leads directly into the issue of the Saudi Arabian program for “rehabilitating” terrorists, which has released dozens of prisoners back into their countries of origin after “graduation.” Many of those “graduates” simply continue committing terrorism against the United States after their release, a fact that Attorney General Eric Holder conveniently overlooks.

Instead, Holder has repeatedly called the programs “effective,” allowing him to justify the transfer of Gitmo detainees back to their hometowns. Stopping the transfers, as he did Tuesday, represents a conflict for the Attorney General.

Holder addressed those concerns in a statement Tuesday.

“This Administration works to ensure that Guantanamo transfers are conducted in a manner that takes into account any and all concerns about threat mitigation and security, irrespective of the country to which they are sent,” he said.

The Administration’s decision to halt transfers seemed to indicate a responsiveness to Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Sen. Jeff Sessions. Sessions led the call to stop transfers after a Christmas Day terrorist attack in Detroit was conducted by a Yemeni al-Quaeda operative.

“The list of failed participants in the Saudi [terrorist rehabilitation] program reads like a “who’s who” of al Qaeda terrorists on the Arabian Peninsula,” said Sessions.

War? What War?
by Charles Krauthammer

Janet Napolitano — former Arizona governor, now overmatched secretary of homeland security — will forever be remembered for having said of the attempt to bring down an airliner over Detroit: “The system worked.” The attacker’s concerned father had warned U.S. authorities about his son’s jihadist tendencies. The would-be bomber paid cash and checked no luggage on a transoceanic flight. He was nonetheless allowed to fly, and would have killed 288 people in the air alone, save for a faulty detonator and quick actions by a few passengers.

Heck of a job, Brownie.

The reason the country is uneasy about the Obama administration’s response to this attack is a distinct sense of not just incompetence but incomprehension. From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to downplay and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face. Napolitano renames terrorism “man-caused disasters.” Obama goes abroad and pledges to cleanse America of its post-9/11 counterterrorist sins. Hence, Guantanamo will close, CIA interrogators will face a special prosecutor, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed will bask in a civilian trial in New York — a trifecta of political correctness and image management.

And just to make sure even the dimmest understand, Obama banishes the term “war on terror.” It’s over — that is, if it ever existed.

Obama may have declared the war over. Unfortunately al-Qaeda has not. Which gives new meaning to the term “asymmetric warfare.”

And produces linguistic — and logical — oddities that littered Obama’s public pronouncements following the Christmas Day attack. In his first statement, Obama referred to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as “an isolated extremist.” This is the same president who, after the Ford Hood shooting, warned us “against jumping to conclusions” — code for daring to associate Nidal Hasan’s mass murder with his Islamist ideology. Yet, with Abdulmutallab, Obama jumped immediately to the conclusion, against all existing evidence, that the bomber acted alone.

More jarring still were Obama’s references to the terrorist as a “suspect” who “allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device.” You can hear the echo of FDR: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — Japanese naval and air force suspects allegedly bombed Pearl Harbor.”

Obama reassured the nation that this “suspect” had been charged. Reassurance? The president should be saying: We have captured an enemy combatant — an illegal combatant under the laws of war: no uniform, direct attack on civilians — and now to prevent future attacks, he is being interrogated regarding information he may have about al-Qaeda in Yemen.

Instead, Abdulmutallab is dispatched to some Detroit-area jail and immediately lawyered up. At which point — surprise! — he stops talking.

This absurdity renders hollow Obama’s declaration that “we will not rest until we find all who were involved.” Once we’ve given Abdulmutallab the right to remain silent, we have gratuitously forfeited our right to find out from him precisely who else was involved, namely those who trained, instructed, armed and sent him.

This is all quite mad even in Obama’s terms. He sends 30,000 troops to fight terror overseas, yet if any terrorists come to attack us here, they are magically transformed from enemy into defendant.

The logic is perverse. If we find Abdulmutallab in an al-Qaeda training camp in Yemen, where he is merely preparing for a terror attack, we snuff him out with a Predator — no judge, no jury, no qualms. But if we catch him in the United States in the very act of mass murder, he instantly acquires protection not just from execution by drone but even from interrogation.

The president said that this incident highlights “the nature of those who threaten our homeland.” But the president is constantly denying the nature of those who threaten our homeland. On Tuesday, he referred five times to Abdulmutallab (and his terrorist ilk) as “extremist(s).”

A man who shoots abortion doctors is an extremist. An eco-fanatic who torches logging sites is an extremist. Abdulmutallab is not one of these. He is a jihadist. And unlike the guys who shoot abortion doctors, jihadists have cells all over the world; they blow up trains in London, nightclubs in Bali and airplanes over Detroit (if they can); and are openly pledged to war on America.

Any government can through laxity let someone slip through the cracks. But a government that refuses to admit that we are at war, indeed, refuses even to name the enemy — jihadist is a word banished from the Obama lexicon — turns laxity into a governing philosophy.

Obama Brings the Gitmolympics Home
by Michelle Malkin

President Obama’s hometown cronies lost their bid to bring the 2016 Olympic Games to the Windy City. But this week they got a consolation prize: the Gitmolympics. On Tuesday, the White House went public with its official plans to purchase the Thomson Correctional Facility from financially strapped Illinois to house Guantanamo Bay detainees. The War on Terror meets the Chicago Way.

Political boosters of the Illinois budget bailout masquerading as a national security program can’t wait to roll out the jihadi welcome mat. Unions representing federal prison workers also cheered the move. Leading the lobbying delegation for the new Gitmo-in-the-heartland located a few hours west of Chicago: Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, last seen on the international stage in 2005 likening American interrogators and military staff at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis, Soviet gulag operators and genocidal maniac Pol Pot.

And co-chairing the bid to bring suspected jihadis to American soil: beleaguered Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn (D), who is salivating at the prospect of an estimated $1 billion injection into the local economy over four years. (Never mind that the jobs predictions from the Council of Economic Advisers use the same fuzzy math methods that gave us bogus porkulus numbers.)

Sensibly, the people of Illinois who will have to live with this raw deal aren’t waving their pompoms. A Rasmussen poll shows that 51 percent of voters in the state oppose the transfer of suspected terrorists from the Cuban detention facility to their backyard — including 70 percent of Republicans, 37 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of independents.

Left-wing advocates of closing Gitmo accuse these Americans of “NIMBYism” and groundless fear. But can you blame anyone who watched the Crashergate debacle at the White House or the Scare Force One debacle in New York City for choking on disbelief when Team Obama promises airtight safety, security and competence?

Moreover, Illinois is already suffering its own severe prison-overcrowding crisis — which Quinn has alleviated by secretly releasing more than 850 inmates, including violent offenders, since September, according to the Associated Press.

GOP gubernatorial candidate Dan Proft pointed out that “the state’s 28 current prisons are 32 percent over capacity. Why not alleviate the overcrowding and bring the Thomson prison online” for existing criminals instead of importing them from abroad? Kirk Dillard, another Republican candidate, blasted Quinn’s fiscal desperation: “I think al-Qaida needs to stay in Cuba. It shows how pathetic the state of Illinois’ finances are, where we have to stand with our hat in hand and have the federal government give us money to open a penitentiary that the Democrats have let sit vacant for years.”

Obama officials stress that the prison would house Gitmo detainees separately from federal inmates, and that the two would be “managed separately” with “no opportunity to interact” between them. Which entirely misses the point that Gitmo detainees’ lawyers and translators have been the primary security concerns — not just other inmates:

– Last month, jihadist-enabling lawyer Lynne Stewart was finally ordered to jail after her conviction in 2005 for aiding and abetting imprisoned blind Egyptian sheik Omar Abdel Rahman by smuggling coded messages of violence to terrorist followers abroad — in violation of an explicit pledge to abide by her client’s court-ordered isolation.

– Earlier this summer, the Justice Department launched an inquiry into photographs of undercover CIA officials and other intelligence personnel taken by ACLU-sponsored researchers assisting the defense team of Guantanamo Bay detainees. The pictures of covert American CIA officers — “in some cases surreptitiously taken outside their homes,” according to the Washington Post — were shown to jihadi suspects tied to the 9/11 attacks in order to identify the interrogators.

– As investigative journalist Paul Sperry reported recently, a number of Arabic and Pashtu interpreters who served at Gitmo are “under active investigation for omitting valuable intelligence from their translations of detainee interrogations, among other security breaches.”

The corruptocratic Attorney General Eric Holder is, of course, in no position to raise any principle objections to the Gitmo-in-the-heartland plans. Remember: He served as senior partner with Covington and Burling — the prestigious Washington, D.C., law firm that represents 17 Yemenis currently held at Gitmo. And top attorneys at his Justice Department have had to recuse themselves numerous times over their conflicts of interest in Gitmo-related cases. Holder has failed to provide a full recusal list of all the Gitmo detainee cases from which current Justice Department political appointees have had to recuse themselves.

Meanwhile, Team Obama is now championing the very same indefinite detention powers for detainees deemed untriable that it condemned the Bush administration for exercising — and for which it targeted Gitmo for closure in the first place. Give the White House a gold medal for costly incoherence and reckless redundance.

Why Won’t We Face Iran’s Evil?
by Mona Charen

When tens of thousands of Iranians took to the streets last spring and braved the most brutal repression the regime could inflict, Michael Ledeen was the least surprised man in Washington. In season and out, Ledeen has chronicled the profound weakness of the mullahocracy and its deep unpopularity with the Iranian people. Impatiently, year after year, he has identified opportunities for the United States to help the people of Iran replace their sinister and menacing rulers. After each new post on the subject, Ledeen signed off with “Faster please.”

In “Accomplice to Evil,” Ledeen seems almost out of patience. The failure to grapple with the challenge of Iran is more than a strategic failure, he argues; it’s a moral failure. Just as few in the democratic countries took Adolf Hitler at his word when he repeatedly promised to dominate the world and kill all the Jews, and few could squarely acknowledge the genocidal lengths to which the communists would go, so today the threat from the radical Islamists is minimized, whitewashed, or wished away.

Of the Carter administration, Ledeen writes, “The failure to comprehend what Khomeini was all about contributed mightily to the American debacle in Iran, and to subsequent failure of American policy, for the policy makers — from Carter down — did not take seriously the possibility that Khomeini might be worse than the shah.” Incomparably worse as it turned out. During the war with Iraq, Iran sent tens of thousands of children to their deaths “clearing” minefields. Before departure, they were issued plastic keys — to open the gates of paradise.

But Americans have doggedly refused to recognize the nature of the regime or the Islamist movement it spearheads. Ledeen writes of the Carter State Department: “In what was to become a great leitmotif of the next 30 years, American diplomats desperately worked for an agreement at all costs.” When the Iranians presented brutal demands that the U.S. turn over all Iranian “criminals” who had taken refuge in America, an assistant secretary of state — in words that could have been ghostwritten by the current occupant of the Oval Office — explained “… the Iranian suspicions of us were only natural in the post-revolutionary situation … but after a transition period common interests could provide a basis for future cooperation.”

Even after the regime had held our diplomats hostage in Iran for more than a year, the Carter administration “approved a series of humiliating concessions” in the hope of securing their release. It was that way to the bitter end. On the day before he left office, Carter issued Executive Order 12283, which immunized the Iranian government from lawsuits arising from the seizure of the embassy.

President Obama deludes himself that “outreach” to the mullahs represents some sort of new departure in American policy. In fact, every administration since Carter’s has repeatedly attempted to “engage” the mullahs. Even the Bush administration “pursued accommodation … as vigorously as any of the others.” From pages 155 to 159, Ledeen lists the scores of publicly reported meetings between top Iranian and U.S. officials in just the seven years between 2001 and 2008. One example gives the flavor: On Nov. 17, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell praised the efforts of “my three colleagues, the EU three, (who) played a very, very helpful role in going to Tehran … and coming back with a very, very, positive and productive result.”

It was nothing of the kind. But that didn’t prevent the Bush administration from continuing to lower its bucket into this dry well. The Obama administration, seasoning its approach with fawning genuflections, is taking accommodation to a new level — a fact that is not lost on the Iranian people who chant “Obama. Obama. Either you’re with us or you’re with them” as they dodge the batons and bullets of the Basij militia.

Ledeen’s advice is to offer strong moral support to the Iranian people. Reagan’s open advocacy for the dissidents in the Soviet empire gave them courage and hope. He would also supply reliable news about what is happening in Iran through every available outlet. The Iranians are huge consumers of Internet news (Farsi is the fourth most common language online), but they need cell phones, satellite phones, laptops, servers, and BlackBerrys. Every successful revolution, Ledeen reminds us, “including ours,” required outside assistance. Third, he would destroy the assembly sites for the weapons Iran is providing to the Taliban, Mahdi Army, and al-Qaida.

Defeating those he has elsewhere called the “terror masters” in Tehran would drive a stake through the heart of radical Islam. “The defeat of the principal sponsor sends shock waves through the movement and discredits the ideology.” But only if we can overcome our self-delusions about the enemy first. Faster please.

MSNBC Exclusive: Fort Hood Never Happened!
by Ann Coulter

It’s been weeks since eyewitnesses reported that Maj. Nidal Hasan shouted “Allahu akbar” before spraying Fort Hood with gunfire, killing 13 people.

Since then we also learned that Hasan gave a medical lecture on beheading infidels and pouring burning oil down their throats (unfortunately not covered under the Senate health care bill). Some wondered if perhaps a pattern was beginning to emerge but were promptly dismissed as racist cranks.

We also found out Hasan had business cards printed up with the jihadist abbreviation “SOA” for “Soldier of Allah.” Was that enough to conclude that the shooting was an act of terrorism — or does somebody around here need to take another cultural sensitivity class?

And we know that Hasan had contacted several jihadist Web sites and that he had been exchanging e-mails with a radical Islamic cleric in Yemen. The FBI learned that last December, but the rest of us only found out about it a week ago.

Is it still too soon to come to the conclusion that the Fort Hood shooting was an act of terrorism?

Alas, it is still too early to tell at MSNBC. For Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews — at least two of whom would be severely punished under Shariah law — the shooting of George Tiller was an act of terrorism, no question. The death of a census taker in Kentucky was also an act of terrorism. (We learned this week that it was a suicide/insurance scam.) But as to Maj. Hasan, the jury is still out — and will be out for many, many years.

Actually, according to Keith, the Fort Hood massacre may not have happened at all. He has argued persuasively, on several occasions, that it is impossible, literally impossible, to commit mass murder at a military base.

Like many on the left, Keith loved to sneer at all terrorist plots allegedly foiled by the Bush administration. He was particularly contemptuous of the purported plan of six aspiring jihadists to sneak onto the Fort Dix army base and kill as many soldiers as they could.

On Nov. 11, 2008, he explained why the Fort Dix terrorist plot was a laughable fraud, saying the “morons” apparently didn’t realize that “all the soldiers have these big guns.”

Keith, the moron, apparently doesn’t realize that on military bases on U.S. soil only MPs have guns. (Special authorization is required for soldiers to carry a firearm, which can be granted only in the case of a specific and credible threat against military personnel in that region. Thank you, Bill Clinton.)

Again on May 21 this year, Olbermann ridiculed the Fort Dix terror plot, pointing out that the six alleged terrorists seemed to be “forgetting that every man there was armed.”(Curiously, even though ROTC was offered at the ag school Keith attended, he appears not to have investigated it.)

But it was not until Aug. 21 of this year that Olbermann hit upon the true reason for the Bush administration’s hyping of this implausible terror plot. According to Keith — and I’m not kidding — it was to distract from Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’ announcement that her state had been unable to respond adequately to a tornado because Bush had diverted the National Guard to his crazy war in Iraq!

The Bush administration, you see, had revealed the arrest of the Fort Dix conspirators the day after Sebelius’ world-reverberating bombshell about Kansas’ decimated National Guard! Eureka!

This little theory of Keith’s, adorable though it is, has problems apart from his insistence that it would be impossible to kill army personnel on “a closed compound full of trained soldiers with weapons.” The other problem is Gov. Sebelius was full of crap.

First, Sebelius wasn’t in much of a position to know how well Kansas responded to the tornado, inasmuch as she had been partying at New Orleans’ Jazzfest the day after the tornado hit — while Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts and both local congressmen were on the scene, helping the rescue efforts.

Second, the manager of the actual rescue team soon contradicted Sebelius, saying: “We have all the staff that we need and can manage at this time. If we had more people right now, it would just start being a cluster.”

The Kansas National Guard had 352 Humvees, 72 dump trucks and more than 320 other trucks, which would seem to be sufficient for the town hit by the tornado, Greensburg, Kan., population 1,574. That’s almost one National Guard truck for every two people. (This is the same tornado that Obama claimed had killed 10,000 people. He was off by 9,988.)

Third, it turned out that Gov. Sebelius had rejected offers of additional help from neighboring National Guard units.

Consequently, the day after her dramatic cri de coeur for more National Guard resources, Sebelius’ office completely reversed course, telling The Associated Press that the rescue efforts were going “just fine.”

What the governor had meant, her office explained, was that Kansas’ National Guard might be stretched thin if, hypothetically, another natural disaster were to strike immediately after the tornado.

Keith, unfortunately, was unaware of Sebelius’ humiliating about-face, as it was not carried on Daily Kos.

Last December, five of the Fort Dix plotters were found guilty by a federal jury of conspiring to kill American soldiers. The sixth had already pleaded guilty.

Still, compare the macho posturing of the Bush administration over thwarting the Fort Dix terror plot to the masterful handling of domestic terrorist plots since the angel Obama has taken the helm. Why, the Obama administration managed to capture and arrest Maj. Hasan without violating a single American’s civil liberties!

For Whom The Bell Tolls
By Mark Steyn

Shortly after 9/11, there was a lot of talk about how no one would ever hijack an American airliner ever again — not because of new security arrangements but because an alert citizenry was on the case: We were hip to their jive.

The point appeared to be proved three months later on a US-bound Air France flight. The “Shoebomber” attempted to light his footwear, and the flight attendants and passengers pounced. As the more boorish commentators could not resist pointing out, even the French guys walloped him.

But the years go by, and the mood shifts. You didn’t have to be “alert” to spot Major Nidal Hasan. He’d spent most of the last half-decade walking around with a big neon sign on his head saying “JIHADIST. STAND WELL BACK.”

But we (that’s to say, almost all of us; and certainly almost anyone who matters in national security and the broader political culture) are now reflexively conditioned to ignore the flashing neon sign. Like those apocryphal Victorian ladies discreetly draping the lasciviously curved legs of their pianos, if a glimpse of hard unpleasant reality peeps through we simply veil it in another layer of fluffy illusions.

Two joint terrorism task forces became aware almost a year ago that Major Hasan was in regular email contact with Anwar al-Awlaqi, the American-born but now Yemeni-based cleric who served as imam to three of the 9/11 hijackers and supports all-out holy war against the United States.

But the expert analysts in the Pentagon determined that this lively correspondence was consistent with Major Hasan’s “research interests”, so there was no need to worry. That’s America: Technologically superior, money no object (not one but two “joint terrorism task forces” stumbled across him). Yet no action was taken.

On the other hand, who needs surveillance operations and intelligence budgets? Major Hasan was entirely upfront about who he was. He put it on his business card: “SOA.” As in “Soldier of Allah” — which seems a tad ungrateful to the American taxpayers who ponied up half a million bucks or thereabouts in elite medical school education to train him to be a Soldier of Uncle Sam.

In a series of meetings during 2008, officials from both Walter Reed and the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences considered the question of whether then Captain Hasan was psychotic. But, according to at least one bigwig at Walter Reed, members of the policy committee wondered “how would it look if we kick out one of the few Muslim residents”. So he got promoted to Major and shipped to Fort Hood.

And 13 men and women and an unborn baby are dead.

Well, like they say, it’s easy to be wise after the event. I’m not so sure. These days, it’s easier to be even more stupid after the event. “Apparently he tried to contact al Qaeda,” mused MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. “That’s not a crime to call up al Qaeda, is it? Is it? I mean, where do you stop the guy?” Interesting question: Where do you draw the line?

The truth is we’re not prepared to draw a line even after he’s gone ahead and committed mass murder. “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy,” said General Casey, the US Army’s Chief of Staff, “but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.” A “greater tragedy” than 14 dead and dozens of wounded?

Translating from the original brain-addled multicult-speak, the Army Chief of Staff is saying that the same fatuous prostration before marshmallow illusions that led to the “tragedy” must remain in place. If it leads to occasional mass murder, well, hopefully it can be held to what cynical British civil servants used to call, during the Northern Irish “Troubles”, “an acceptable level of violence.” Fourteen dead is evidently acceptable. A hundred and forty? Fourteen hundred? I guess we’ll find out.

“Diversity” is one of those words designed to absolve you of the need to think. Likewise, a belief in “multiculturalism” doesn’t require you to know anything at all about other cultures, just to feel generally warm and fluffy about them.

Heading out from my hotel room the other day, I caught a glimpse of that 7-Eleven video showing Major Hasan wearing “Muslim” garb to buy a coffee on the morning of his murderous rampage. And it wasn’t until I was in the taxi cab that something odd struck me: He was an American of Arab descent. But he was wearing Pakistani dress — that’s to say, a “Punjabi suit”, as they call it in Britain, or the “shalwar kameez”, to give it its South Asian name.

For all the hundreds of talking heads droning on about “diversity” across the TV networks, it was only Tarek Fatah, writing in The Ottawa Citizen, who pointed out that no Arab males wear this get-up — with one exception: Those Arab men who got the jihad fever and went to Afghanistan to sign on with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In other words, Major Hasan’s outfit symbolized the embrace of an explicit political identity entirely unconnected with his ethnic heritage.

Mr Fatah would seem to be a genuine “multiculturalist”: that’s to say, he’s attuned to often very subtle “diversities” between cultures. Whereas the professional multiculturalist sees the 7-Eleven video and coos, “Aw, look. He’s wearing … well, something exotic and colorful, let’s not get hung up on details. Celebrate diversity, right? Can we get him in the front row for the group shot? We may be eligible for a grant.”

The brain-addled “diversity” of General Casey will get some of us killed, and keep all of us cowed. In the days since the killings, the news reports have seemed increasingly like a satirical novel the author’s not quite deft enough to pull off, with bizarre new Catch 22s multiplying like the windmills of your mind:

If you’re openly in favor of pouring boiling oil down the throats of infidels, then the Pentagon will put down your emails to foreign jihadists as mere confirmation of your long established “research interests.” If you’re psychotic, the Army will make you a psychiatrist for fear of provoking you. If you gun down a bunch of people, within an hour the FBI will state clearly that we can all relax, there’s no terrorism angle, because, in our over-credentialized society, it doesn’t count unless you’re found to be carrying Permit #57982BQ3a from the relevant State Board of Jihadist Licensing.

Ezra Levant, my comrade in a long battle to restore freedom of speech to Canada, likes to say that the Danish cartoons crisis may one day be seen as a more critical event than 9/11. Not, obviously, in the comparative death tolls but in what each revealed about the state of western civilization. After 9/11, we fought back, hit hard, rolled up the Afghan camps; after the cartoons, we weaseled and equivocated and appeased and signaled that we were willing to trade core western values for a quiet life.

Watching the decadence and denial on display this last week, I think in years to come Fort Hood will be seen in a similar light. What happened is not a “tragedy” but a national scandal, already fading from view.

Muslim Suffers Bruised Ego in Fort Hood Tragedy
by Ann Coulter

The massacre at Fort Hood last week is the perfect apotheosis of the liberal victimology described in my book “Guilty: Liberal ‘Victims’ and Their Assault on America.”

According to witnesses, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan entered a medical facility at Fort Hood, prayed briefly, then shouted “Allahu akbar” before he began gunning down American troops. Now I don’t know which to be more afraid of: Muslims or government-run health care systems.

President Obama honored the victims by immediately warning Americans not to “jump to conclusions” — namely, the obvious conclusion that the attack was an act of Islamic terrorism. As conclusions go, it wasn’t much of a jump.

But the mainstream media waited for no information — indeed actively avoided learning any information — before leaping to the far less obvious conclusion that the suspect’s mass murder was set off by “stress.”

The day after the slaughter, The New York Times ran one editorial and two of three op-eds asserting as much — which was at least one more than the Times usually runs about psycho-killer soldiers going on rampages.

Two days after the mass shooting, the Times’ laughably predictable headlines about the Fort Hood bloodbath were:

• “Preliminary Inquiry Finds No Link to Terror Plot”
• “Painful Stories Take a Toll on Military Therapists”
• “When Soldiers’ Minds Snap”

The Los Angeles Times jumped to the exact same conclusion, running an article on the massacre titled: “Fort Hood Tragedy Rocks Military as It Grapples With Mental Health Issues.” Time magazine followed suit, posting an article titled: “Stresses at Fort Hood Were Likely Intense for Hasan.”

Inasmuch as Maj. Hasan had never been deployed overseas, much less seen combat, liberals seem to have discovered the first recorded case of “pre-traumatic stress syndrome.”

Their point was: The real victim of Fort Hood was Maj. Hasan. Indeed, all Muslims were the victims that day.

The media quickly set to work assembling lachrymose accounts of taunts Hasan had been subjected to in the military for being a Muslim, the most harrowing of which seems to have been his car being keyed at his off-base apartment complex.

I suppose we should be relieved that liberals weren’t claiming Hasan snapped because of the dimming prospects for a health care bill by the end of the year.

The evidence for the manifestly obvious conclusion we were supposed to avoid jumping to is rather more extensive.

According to numerous eyewitness accounts, Hasan denounced the “war on terror” as a war against Islam, said Muslims should attack Americans in retaliation for the war in Iraq, defended suicide bombers and said he was “happy” when a Muslim murdered a soldier at a military recruiting center in Arkansas earlier this year.

Stranger still, he wasn’t auditioning for his own show on MSNBC when he made these statements.

Hasan shared a “spiritual adviser” with two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Imam Anwar al-Awlaki, whose unseemly enthusiasm for jihad got him banned from speaking in Britain, even by video link.

A few years ago, Hasan delivered an hour-long PowerPoint lecture to an audience of doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, arguing that non-Muslims should be beheaded and have burning oil poured down their throats.

He had tried to contact al-Qaida, and at least one U.S. intelligence official says the Army knew it.

Despite being well aware of Hasan’s disturbing views and conduct, the Army did nothing.

Far less offensive speech has been grounds for discipline or even removal from duties in the military. In the aftermath of the Tailhook scandal, for example, two Navy officers were reprimanded and reassigned after putting up a sign with the words of a nursery rhyme altered to include a vulgar sexual reference to liberal congresswoman Patricia Schroeder.

But a Muslim Army doctor can go around a military installation somberly advocating the beheading of infidels, and the girls running the military treat him like he’s Nicole Kidman and they’re press junket reporters.

The Army’s top brass, Gen. George Casey, responded to the military’s shocking decision to keep a terrorist-sympathizing Muslim in the Army by announcing: “Our diversity … is a strength.” And I thought gays couldn’t openly serve in the military.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Muslims moved to the top of liberals’ victim pantheon on the basis of having slaughtered 3,000 Americans. Muslims were “victims” of Americans’ displeasure with them for the biggest terrorist attack in world history. The only American deserving of more coddling than a Muslim is the first African-American president.

So, now any dyspeptic expression toward a Muslim is grounds for calling in a diversity coordinator. And when the “victim” attacks, as at Fort Hood, the rest of us are supposed to feel guilty because Hasan’s car got keyed once. As with all liberal “victims,” it is the victim who is massively guilty.

ACLU: Spying for America’s Enemies
by Michelle Malkin

Savor the silence of America’s self-serving champions of privacy. For once, the American Civil Liberties Union has nothing bad to say about the latest case of secret domestic surveillance — because it is the ACLU that committed the spying.

Last week, The Washington Post reported on a new Justice Department inquiry into photographs of undercover CIA officials and other intelligence personnel taken by ACLU-sponsored researchers assisting the defense team of Guantanamo Bay detainees. According to the report, the pictures of covert American CIA officers — “in some cases surreptitiously taken outside their homes” — were shown to jihadi suspects tied to the 9/11 attacks in order to identify the interrogators.

The ACLU undertook the so-called “John Adams Project” with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers — last seen crusading for convicted jihadi assistant Lynne Stewart. She’s the far-left lawyer who helped sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, convicted 1993 World Trade Center bombing and N.Y. landmark bombing plot mastermind, smuggle coded messages of Islamic violence to outside followers in violation of an explicit pledge to abide by her client’s court-ordered isolation.

The ACLU’s team used lists and data from “human rights groups,” European researchers and news organizations that were involved in “(t)racking international CIA-chartered flights” and monitoring hotel phone records. Working from a witch-hunt list of 45 CIA employees, the ACLU team tailed and photographed agency employees or obtained other photos from public records.

And then they showed the images to suspected al-Qaida operatives implicated in murdering 3,000 innocent men, women and children on American soil.

Where is the concern for the safety of these American officers and their families? Where’s the outrage from all the indignant supporters of former CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose name was leaked by Bush State Department official Richard Armitage to the late Robert Novak? Lefties swung their nooses for years over the disclosure, citing federal laws prohibiting the sharing of classified information and proscribing anyone from unauthorized exposure of undercover intelligence agents.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero refused to comment on Project CIA Paparazzi and instead whined some more about the evil Bush/CIA interrogators. Left-wing commentators and distraction artists are dutifully up in arms about such “inhumane” tactics as blowing cigar smoke in the faces of Gitmo detainees. But it’s Romero blowing unconscionable smoke:

“We are confident that no laws or regulations have been broken as we investigated the circumstances of the torture of our clients and as we have vigorously defended our clients’ interests,” he told the Post. “Rather than investigate the CIA officials who undertook the torture, they are now investigating the military lawyers who have courageously stepped up to defend these clients in these sham proceedings.”

Courage? What tools and fools these jihadi-enablers be. Civil liberties opportunism is literally a part of the al-Qaida handbook. A terrorist manual seized in a Manchester, England, raid in 2005 advised operatives: “At the beginning of the trial … the brothers must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by state security before the judge. Complain of mistreatment while in prison.” Jihadi commanders rehearsed the lines with their foot soldiers “to ensure that they have assimilated it.”

Since 9/11, the selective champions of privacy have recklessly blabbed about counter-terrorism operations, endangered the lives of military and intelligence officials at Gitmo, and undermined national security through endless litigation. They accused Bush immigration officials of xenophobia for pursuing visa over-stayers from jihadi-friendly countries. They accused local law enforcement, FBI and other homeland security officials of “racial profiling” for placing heightened scrutiny on mosques and jihadi-linked charities.

Now, caught red-handed blowing the cover of CIA operatives, they shrug their shoulders and dismiss it as “normal” research on behalf of “our clients.”

But don’t you dare question their love of country. Spying to stop the next 9/11 is treason, you see. Spying to stop enhanced interrogation of Gitmo detainees is patriotic. And endangering America on behalf of international human rights is the ultimate form of leftist dissent.

Obama In Bush Clothing: America Fights On
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

“We were able to hold it off with George Bush. The idea that we might find ourselves fighting with the Obama administration over these powers is really stunning.” — Unnamed and dismayed human rights advocate, on legalizing indefinite detention of alleged terrorists, New York Times, May 21

If hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, then the flip-flops on previously denounced anti-terror measures are the homage that Barack Obama pays to George Bush. Within 125 days, Obama has adopted with only minor modifications huge swaths of the entire, allegedly lawless Bush program.

The latest flip-flop is the restoration of military tribunals. During the 2008 campaign, Obama denounced them repeatedly, calling them an “enormous failure.” Obama suspended them upon his swearing in. Now they’re back.

Of course, Obama will never admit in word what he’s doing in deed. As in his rhetorically brilliant national-security speech on Thursday claiming to have undone Bush’s moral travesties, the military commissions flip-flop is accompanied by the usual Obama three-step: (a) excoriate the Bush policy, (b) ostentatiously unveil cosmetic changes, (c) adopt the Bush policy.

Cosmetic changes such as Obama’s declaration that “we will give detainees greater latitude in selecting their own counsel.” Laughable. High-toned liberal law firms are climbing over each other for the frisson of representing these miscreants in court.

What about disallowing evidence received under coercive interrogation? Hardly new, notes former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy. Under the existing rules, military judges have that authority, and exercised it under the Bush administration to dismiss charges against al-Qaeda operative Mohammed al-Qahtani on precisely those grounds.

On Guantanamo, it’s Obama’s fellow Democrats who have suddenly discovered the wisdom of Bush’s choice. In open rebellion against Obama’s pledge to shut it down, the Senate voted 90 to 6 to reject appropriating a single penny until the president explains where he intends to put the inmates.

Sen. James Webb, the de facto Democratic authority on national defense, wants the closing to be put on hold. And on Tuesday, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, no Gitmo inmates on American soil — not even in American jails.

That doesn’t leave a lot of places. The home countries won’t take them. Europe is recalcitrant. Saint Helena needs refurbishing. Elba didn’t work out too well the first time. And Devil’s Island is now a tourist destination. Gitmo is starting to look good again.

Observers of all political stripes are stunned by how much of the Bush national security agenda is being adopted by this new Democratic government. Victor Davis Hanson, writing for National Review, offers a partial list:

“The Patriot Act, wiretaps, e-mail intercepts, military tribunals, Predator drone attacks, Iraq (i.e. slowing the withdrawal), Afghanistan (i.e. the surge) — and now Guantanamo.”

Jack Goldsmith (the New Republic) adds: rendition — turning over terrorists seized abroad to foreign countries; state secrets — claiming them in court to quash legal proceedings on rendition and other erstwhile barbarisms; and the denial of habeas corpus — to detainees in Afghanistan’s Bagram prison, indistinguishable logically and morally from Guantanamo.

What does it all mean? Democratic hypocrisy and demagoguery? Sure, but in Washington, opportunism and cynicism are hardly news.

There is something much larger at play — an undeniable, irresistible national interest that, in the end, beyond the cheap politics, asserts itself. The urgencies and necessities of the actual post-9/11 world, as opposed to the fanciful world of the opposition politician, present a rather narrow range of acceptable alternatives.

Among them: reviving the tradition of military tribunals, used historically by George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Winfield Scott, Abraham Lincoln, Arthur MacArthur and Franklin Roosevelt.

And inventing Guantanamo — accessible, secure, offshore and nicely symbolic (the tradition of island exile for those outside the pale of civilization is a venerable one) — and a quite brilliant choice for the placement of terrorists, some of whom, the Bush administration immediately understood, would have to be detained without trial in a war that could be endless.

The genius of democracy is that the rotation of power forces the opposition to come to its senses when it takes over. When the new guys, brought to power by popular will, then adopt the policies of the old guys, a national consensus is forged and a new legitimacy established.

That’s happening before our eyes. The Bush policies in the war on terror won’t have to await vindication by historians. Obama is doing it day by day. His denials mean nothing. Look at his deeds.

Survival Optional
by Dr. Thomas Sowell

It used to be said that self-preservation is the first law of nature. But much of what has been happening in recent times in the United States, and in Western civilization in general, suggests that survival is taking a back seat to the shibboleths of political correctness.

We have already turned loose dozens of captured terrorists, who have resumed their terrorism. Why? Because they have been given “rights” that exist neither in our laws nor under international law.

These are not criminals in our society, entitled to the protection of the Constitution of the United States. They are not prisoners of war entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention.

There was a time when people who violated the rules of war were not entitled to turn around and claim the protection of those rules. German soldiers who put on U.S. military uniforms, in order to infiltrate American lines during the Battle of the Bulge, were simply lined up against a wall and shot.

Nobody even thought that this was a violation of the Geneva Convention. American authorities filmed the mass executions. Nobody dreamed up fictitious “rights” for these enemy combatants who had violated the rules of war. Nobody thought we had to prove that we were nicer than the Nazis by bending over backward.

Bending over backward is a very bad position from which to try to defend yourself. Nobody in those days confused bending over backward with “the rule of law,” as Barack Obama did recently. Bending over backward is the antithesis of the rule of law. It is depriving the people of the protection of their laws, in order to pander to mushy notions among the elite.

Even under the Geneva Convention, enemy soldiers have no right to be turned loose before the war is over. Terrorists– “militants” or “insurgents” for those of you who are squeamish– have declared open-ended war against America. It is open-ended in time and open-ended in methods, including beheadings of innocent civilians.

President Obama can ban the phrase “war on terror” but he cannot ban the terrorists’ war on us. That war continues, so there is no reason to turn terrorists loose before it ends. They chose to make it that kind of war. We don’t need to risk American lives to prove that we are nicer than they are.

The great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that law is not some “brooding omnipresence in the sky.” It is a set of explicit rules by which human beings structure their lives and their relationships with one another.

Those who choose to live outside those laws, whether terrorists or pirates, can be– and have been– shot on sight. Squeamishness is neither law nor morality. And moral exhibitionism is beneath contempt, when it sacrifices the safety of those who live within the law for the sake of self-satisfied preening, whether in editorial offices or in the White House.

As if it is not enough to turn cutthroats loose to cut throats again, we are now contemplating legal action against Americans who wrung information about international terrorist operations out of captured terrorists.

Does nobody think ahead to what this will mean– for many years to come– if people trying protect this country from terrorists have to worry about being put behind bars themselves? Do we need to have American intelligence agencies tip-toeing through the tulips when they deal with terrorists?

In his visit to CIA headquarters, President Obama pledged his support to the people working there and said that there would be no prosecutions of CIA agents for prior actions. Then he welshed on that in a matter of hours by leaving the door open for such prosecutions, which the left has been clamoring for, both inside and outside of Congress.

Repercussions extend far beyond issues of the day. It is bad enough that we have a glib and sophomoric narcissist in the White House. What is worse is that whole nations that rely on the United States for their security see how easily our president welshes on his commitments. So do other nations, including those with murderous intentions toward us, our children and grandchildren.