Sunday, January 03, 2010
Scandal: Captured Al Qaeda-Connected Bomber Has US Public Defender, Could be Offered Plea Bargain
In case you missed this, the captured Christmas Day bomber--President Obama calls him a "suspect"--has a public defender and could be offered a plea arrangement, as reported here.
According to a recent survey, 58% of U.S. voters favorwaterboarding the Al Qaeda-connected Nigerian terrorist.
Meanwhile, a former CIA officer says the Al Qaeda threat is greater now than it was on 9/11. Click here for the story.Iran Preparing for War
Islamist Iran plans a major military exercise, as reportedhere, which will coincide with the deadline it has set for Western surrender to Iran's nuclear enrichment demands.
China Confidential analysts believe that Iran is not only beefing up what it calls its "defensive capabilities," but preparing a possible first strike on U.S. targets and Israel in response to the anticipated imposition of new sanctions on Iran, which it will brand an act of war.US Focusing on Muslim-Nation Air Travelers
The U.S. still has a long way to go before approaching the Israeli screening system. But today's announcement seems to be a move in the right direction.
China Confidential analysts warn that the Saudi lobby and other special interest groups will try to pressure the Obama administration into scrapping the new security procedures.Toby Harnden on Obama's Vulnerability on Terror
Toby Harnden's piece for the Telegraph is must reading. Here's a key excerpt: There is a pattern in the Obama administration of dismissing Islamist terrorist attacks as regrettable random acts. In his radio address after Major Nidal Hassan's slaughtered 13 at Fort Hood, Texas, Obama made no mention of terrorism or militant Islam, instead blandly promising that the "ongoing investigation into this terrible tragedy" would "look at the motives of the alleged gunman".
Hassan was a committed Islamist who had corresponded with the fanatical Yemeni imam Anwar al-Awlaki. In June, Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad, a Muslim convert being watched by the FBI and who had previously travelled to Yemen, murdered a US Army recruit in Arkansas. That rated only a tepid statement by Obama about a "senseless act of violence".
But the violence wasn't senseless, it had a calculated objective - just as Abdulmutallab was not, as Obama described him, an "isolated extremist". No wonder many Americans want to grab Obama by the lapels and scream: "It's the Jihad, stupid." Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, clearly struck a nerve when he charged last week that Obama was "trying to pretend we are not at war".
Read the whole thing here. And click here to read "It's Islamism, Stupid."
Ominous Terminology
Regarding the administration's ominous use of the word "extremists" to describe Al Qaeda and other Islamist terrorists, as shocking as this may seem to many readers, the White House could be taking initial steps toward conditioning public opinion for eventual "engagement" (code for appeasement) of supposed "moderate" and "reconcilable" factions of Al Qaeda and its affiliates and associated groups. (The PR program probably started withthis 60 Minutes segment.) Al Qaeda is presently the only Islamist group that is clearly beyond the diplomatic pale. But that could change following the fall of Afghanistan to Mullah Omar and the Taliban and the long-awaited (by Americans) death of Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden as a result of military action or natural causes. Killing Bin Laden would ironically give the administration the cover it needs for full-blown, global appeasement of radical Islam, including the incredibly brazen Iranian regime, which, having been given an additional year to achieve its atomic aims, is now issuing its own "ultimatum" to the West on nuclear enrichment. Click here for that story.
Harnden, or another White House reporter with intelligence, courage, and a sense of history, should ask Obama to clearly and unequivocally reassure the American people that just as the Roosevelt administration ruled out a negotiated peace agreement with Nazi Germany (rejecting appeals and proposals from pro-fascist types and appeasers), the Obama administration will never under any circumstances negotiate--directly or indirectly--with Al Qaeda.
A White House reporter should also ask Obama to reassure the American people that should Iran cross the nuclear threshold, any sort of nuclear attack on the United States, even by anonymous terrorists, would result in the immediate obliteration of Iran.
UPDATE: The Obama administration's top counterterrorism advisor, who learned last October that Al Qaeda was developing an underwear bombing technique for smuggling explosives onto passenger jets, blamed human error for the failure to stop the Christmas Day bomber--a known Islamist "extremist" on a watch-list--from boarding a U.S. airliner bound for Detroit. Incredibly, Deputy National Security Advisor John O. Brennan, in appearances on several Sunday-morning television news programs, asserted: "There was no piece of intelligence that said, 'This guy's a terrorist. He's going to get on a plane.' "
Brennan also defended the administration's decision to charge the Nigerian terrorist, whom Obama has referred to as a "suspect," in a U.S. civilian criminal court as well as the administration's plans to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Brennan said Obama still would consider returning ex-Guantanamo prisoners to Yemen, where the Al Qaeda threat has forced the U.S. and the UK to shut their embassies.
Bottom line: the 12/25 Islamist bomb plot was foiled in spite of Obama, just as the American cargo captain was rescued at sea by U.S. Navy SEALs from Islamist-supported Somali Muslim pirates in spite of Obama, who, inexplicably, repeatedly refused the SEAL team commanding officer's requests to shoot the hostage takers.
Similarly, if Iran is prevented from developing nuclear weapons, it will be in spite of Obama--i.e. as a result of regime change from within or military action by Israel, whose successful screening and counterterrorism efforts are anathema to a President who has made appeasement of Islamist Iran--and Islamism in general--and apologizing for alleged American sins the foundation of his odious foreign policy.
More than eight years after 9/11, with the United States still at war with an enemy that attacked it on a scale not seen since Peal Harbor, U.S. national security is in the hands of a brilliant political campaigner--but a grossly inexperienced and inept leader--who has shown himself to be more comfortable quoting "the Holy Koran" than protecting the world's greatest democracy against those who seek its destruction in the name of Islam's central religious text.
POSTSCRIPT: Pamela Geller's powerful piece on the comng, post-American, Jihad decadeis another must read. Geller is the editor and publisher of Atlas Shrugs, and the author (with Robert Spencer) of the forthcoming book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America (Simon and Schuster, July 2010).Saturday, January 02, 2010
Top US Counterterrorism Official Says Al Qaeda and Other 'Extremists' Seek New Ways to Attack Nation
And scroll down or click here to watch the video of how Israeli airport security officers screen for terrorists. One of the experts interviewed for the piece makes a critically important point: Israeli counterterrorism personnel try to think like terrorists in order to prevent attacks and foil plots. No disrespect intended, but this reporter can't help but wonder if the Israelis' U.S. counterparts are nowadays being trained to think like lawyers.Obama Ties Nigerian 'Suspect' to Al Qaeda
Good news and bad news regarding U.S. President Barack Obama's approach to Islamist terrorism.
The good news is that the President has at last tied the Christmas Day passenger jet bomb plot to Al Qaeda.
The bad news is that Obama still refers to the captured Nigerian terrorist who tried to destroy the airliner as a "suspect."
“We’re learning more about the suspect,” Obama said in a taped address from Hawaii Saturday. “We know that he traveled to Yemen, a country grappling with crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies. It appears that he joined an affiliate of Al Qaeda and that this group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, trained him, equipped him with those explosives and directed him to attack that plane headed for America.”
The reason for Obama's use of "suspect" is that his administration has decided to treat non-U.S. terrorists who attack U.S. civilians as criminal suspects entitled to U.S. civilian court trials. Alien terrorists who attack troops are to be treated as enemy combatants entitled to military trials. The planned, $100 million civilian court trial in New York City of KSM and other Al Qaeda war criminals is the precedent-setting case.
So it seems that if the Taliban suicide bomber who massacred seven CIA employees and wounded several others at their forward base in Afghanistan had been stopped and taken prisoner before he blew himself up, he would have been sent to the U.S. for a civilian court trial. The victims included career officers--including the base chief--and civilian contractors, and it is not even entirely clear if CIA officers count as military victims with regard to the administration's bizarre jurisdictional decision.
Could that have been possible? If the bomber had been apprehended in time, would he have been treated like a ... suspect? A White House reporter should raise the question ASAP, as the American people--and the brave men and women who work for the CIA and other intelligence agencies--deserve to know the answer.
Another question worth asking: If the Christmas Day bomber had been killed instead of just stopped by passengers aboard the plane (forced to take matters into their own hands since the aircraft was not protected by a sky marshall and the terrorist had been allowed to fly in spite of being on a watch list and his own father's warning about his son's Islamist indoctrination and associations), would the passengers responsible for his death have been liable to criminal prosecution or a civilian law suit? In the Obama administration's upside-down world of trials and tribunals--and outreach to Islamism--anything is apparently possible. Just ask the three Navy SEALs who are accused of ... punching ... no kidding ... Ahmed Hashim Abed, the Iraqi terrorist monster behind the 2004 ambush and slaughter of four American security contractors whose charred bodies were hanged from a bridge in Fallujah. But that's another story.
By the way, is Abed getting a U.S. civilian court trial?
UPDATE: It now appears that the father of the Christmas Day passenger jet bomber is himself an Islamist--a leader of the movement to impose barbaric Islamic law (sharia) on Nigeria. Read all about it--here--at Atlas Shrugs.
The Obama administration's appeasement of Islamist Iran and Islamism in general--the efforts to identify and "engage" (code for appease and attempt to align with) supposedly moderate Islamists (a concept akin to perfidious proposals for negotiating with supposedly moderate Nazis during World War II that were thankfully rejected out of hand by President Franklin D. Roosevelt )--and to narrow the field of "unreconcilable" Islamists to Al Qaeda alone is backfiring big-time. The policy is emboldening and encouraging the enemy, and confusing and demoralizing the American people and its allies and friends--and armed forces.
Monday, 4 January 2010
Click here for the breaking news--a victory for national security and common sense over political correctness and Islamist infiltration and influence.
Just one day after China Confidential called attention--scroll down or click here--to the wide range of possible specific terrorist threats that face New Yorkers as a result of the Obama administration's outrageous decision to stage a civilian court trial in the city for alien Al Qaeda war criminals, a top U.S. counterterrorism official warned in a statement that Al Qaeda and other "extremists" (the word terrorists has apparently been banned) are seeking new ways to launch attacks on U.S. soil. Read the AP story here.
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