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.

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.

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.

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!

When Detainees Get Rights They Don’t Deserve
by Michael Barone

It shouldn’t come as a complete surprise that, as Stephen Hayes reported in The Weekly Standard, detainees in Afghanistan are now being advised of their Miranda rights by American interrogators — that they have a right to be silent, a right to a lawyer, a right to have that lawyer paid for, etc. This is, after all, a logical extension of Bush administration critics’ insistence that such detainees — though unlawful combatants under the Geneva Conventions — must be given every jot and tittle of the rights civilian Americans enjoy on American soil.

It’s nonetheless news, if only because Barack Obama on the campaign trail said that “of course” they would not get Miranda warnings. Now, “of course” seems to have been subordinated to the higher principle of “yes, we can.”

This is in line with the Obama administration’s “global justice initiative,” which elevates the role of the FBI and the Justice Department in global anti-terrorism operations. In its pursuit of the future, the administration is going back to 1990s policies of treating terrorism as a matter of solely criminal law and not seeking to go on the offensive against those who hate our civilization and want to do us great harm.

But this is not just a matter of one administration changing the policies of its predecessor. The extension of Miranda rights is also a symptom of two larger maladies that threaten to harm the body public.

The first of these resides in the culture of military law. Hayes’ story is based on the eyewitness testimony of Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., a former FBI agent and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, who actually saw Miranda rights being administered in Afghanistan. But Rogers has said he witnessed this as early as last July, when George W. Bush was still president, though the practice seems far more widespread now. We can’t blame it all on Obama.

Some of the blame belongs to our plethora of military lawyers. Jack Goldsmith, in his book “The Terror Presidency,” which was marketed as a critique of the Bush administration in which Goldsmith served, also lamented our “over-lawyered war.”

“Never in the history of the United States,” he wrote, “had lawyers had such extraordinary influence over war policy as they did after 9-11.” There are, he pointed out, 10,000 lawyers in the Pentagon. That’s probably not something Franklin Roosevelt had in mind when he ordered it built in 1942.

From what I can gather, military lawyers are less inclined to tell our military personnel what they can do than to tell them what they can’t. Even routine military initiatives must be approved by lawyers. And they seem inclined, as one can gather from the attitudes of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who is a longtime military lawyer reservist, to a maximalist interpretation of detainee rights. This was a problem before Obama’s liberals entered the Justice Department, and it will be one after they leave.

The other problem is what I call the sloppy over-generosity of the American people. Except when aroused and alert, we have a tendency to be fat, dumb and happy, and to want to spread that happiness around. So, hey, let’s give these detainees more rights than they’re entitled to under the Geneva Conventions. It’ll make us feel generous, and maybe it will make them like us.

The problem with such an attitude, which is not limited to the left end of the political spectrum, is that the Geneva Conventions are not strengthened but rather are undermined by extending their protections to people who are not entitled to them. Geneva treats unlawful combatants — those not in uniform or in an organized military force — worse than it does uniformed soldiers because it seeks to establish a clear dividing line between soldiers and civilians, to give limited rights to the former and to protect the latter. If you shield unlawful combatants from interrogation, you create an incentive for others to fight unlawfully and so are creating greater risks for civilians.

Of course, as Obama said, it is ridiculous to administer Miranda warnings to unlawful combatant detainees in Afghanistan. And it seems obvious that if we revert to treating terrorism as a matter for primarily criminal law, we risk opening ourselves to another Sept. 11-type attack, or worse. But the problem is not just in the Obama administration — it is in our military establishment and ourselves.

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.