Bloodthirsty Liberal

Poor US

Charles Krauthammer tries to explain reality to the Obama White House regarding terrorism. The government is almost biblical in its failure to bring honesty to the situation. Let’s cover the basics.

Propaganda:

For late-19th-century anarchists, terrorism was the “propaganda of the deed.” And the most successful propaganda-by-deed in history was 9/11 — not just the most destructive, but the most spectacular and telegenic.

And now its self-proclaimed architect, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, has been given by the Obama administration a civilian trial in New York. Just as the memory fades, 9/11 has been granted a second life — and KSM, a second act: “9/11, The Director’s Cut,” narration by KSM.

Hypocrisy:

So why is Attorney General Eric Holder doing this? Ostensibly, to demonstrate to the world the superiority of our system where the rule of law and the fair trial reign.

Really? What happens if KSM (and his co-defendants) “do not get convicted,” asked Senate Judiciary Committee member Herb Kohl. “Failure is not an option,” replied Holder. Not an option? Doesn’t the presumption of innocence, er, presume that prosecutorial failure — acquittal, hung jury — is an option? By undermining that presumption, Holder is undermining the fairness of the trial, the demonstration of which is the alleged rationale for putting on this show in the first place.

Moreover, everyone knows that whatever the outcome of the trial, KSM will never walk free. He will spend the rest of his natural life in U.S. custody. Which makes the proceedings a farcical show trial from the very beginning.

Reckless:

Apart from the fact that any such trial will be a security nightmare and a terror threat to New York — what better propaganda-by-deed than blowing up the entire courtroom, making KSM a martyr and making the judge, jury and spectators into fresh victims? — it will endanger U.S. security. Civilian courts with broad rights of cross-examination and discovery give terrorists access to crucial information about intelligence sources and methods.

That’s precisely what happened during the civilian New York trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers. The prosecution was forced to turn over to the defense a list of two hundred unindicted co-conspirators, including the name Osama bin Laden. “Within ten days, a copy of that list reached bin Laden in Khartoum,” wrote former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, the presiding judge at that trial, “letting him know that his connection to that case had been discovered.”

Unethical:

Finally, there’s the moral logic. It’s not as if Holder opposes military commissions on principle. On the same day he sent KSM to a civilian trial in New York, Holder announced he was sending Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole, to a military tribunal.

Bearing False Witness:

…Holder tried to make the case that he chose a civilian New York trial as a more likely venue for securing a conviction. An absurdity: By the time Obama came to office, KSM was ready to go before a military commission, plead guilty and be executed. It’s Obama who blocked a process that would have yielded the swiftest and most certain justice.

Indeed, the perfect justice. Whenever a jihadist volunteers for martyrdom, we should grant his wish. Instead, this one, the most murderous and unrepentant of all, gets to dance and declaim at the scene of his crime.

Holder himself told The Washington Post that the coming New York trial will be “the trial of the century.” The last such was the trial of O.J. Simpson.

As every young student eventually discovers, failure to study and learn from past mistakes leads to more failure. This is the most arrogant administration of my lifetime. They seem to have a flat learning curve. They are obsessed with world opinion, with “what will the neighbors think?” I wonder if Mr. Holder asked himself this question: What will world opinion be if KSM is acquitted but remains in US custody? Imagine the headlines in Europe!

- Aggie

He preaches violence in American English

In nearly a dozen recent terrorism cases in the United States, Britain and Canada, investigators discovered the suspects had something in common: a devotion to the message of Anwar al-Awlaki, an eloquent Muslim cleric who has turned the Web into a tool for extremist indoctrination.

Mr. Awlaki, 38, the son of a former agriculture minister and university president in Yemen, has never been accused of planting explosives himself. But experts on terrorism believe his persuasive endorsement of violence as a religious duty, in colloquial, American-accented English, has helped push a series of Western Muslims into terrorism.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist charged with killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., on Nov. 5, is only the latest suspect accused of perpetrating or plotting violence to be linked to the cleric.

In 2006, for example, a group of Canadian Muslims listened to Mr. Awlaki’s sermons on a laptop a few months before they were charged with plotting attacks in Ontario to have included bombings, shootings, storming the Parliament Building and beheading the Canadian prime minister.

There are days when I wake up and feel like I’m still dreaming. Isn’t the modern world surreal?

In 2007, one of six men later convicted of plotting to attack Fort Dix in New Jersey was picked up on a surveillance tape raving about Mr. Awlaki’s audio clips. “You gotta hear this lecture,” said the plotter, Shain Duka. Mr. Duka called the cleric’s interpretation of Muslim duties “the truth, no holds barred, straight how it is!”

Go to the link and read up. We in the United States are relatively fortunate, because we have so few of these bozos. But in Europe, in England, they are common and they are a bigger problem. And, as every terrorist knows, they only have to be successful once. Our FBI can make arrests and interrupt plots, and we are safe for the moment. But sooner or later they fail, as we saw in the Fort Hood case, and the bad guys win.

- Aggie

Farrakhan… Hasan… Al Jazeera…: this can’t possibly go well:

Interviewer: … To what extent might this incident affect the Muslims in the U.S. and make them targets of persecution?”

[…]

Louis Farrakhan: “As you know, since 9/11, in America and in other parts of the world, those anti-Islamic forces have stepped up their efforts to make Muslims… to cause the Muslims to be looked at as uncivilized, savage, or wicked people. This is an attempt by anti-Islamic forces, and some members of the Jewish community, and some members of the Christian community, who have united to condemn Islam and to speak ill of our Prophet Muhammad, and to even go so far as to say that the Muslims worship the devil.

[…]

“This recent unfortunate event, which took place at the Fort Hood base in Texas, has only added fuel to the fire. On behalf of all the Muslims in the Muslim world, we are saddened by the loss of these 13 American soldiers and the 30 others who were wounded in the incident. No human being would be pleased to see that kind of slaughter, coming from a fellow officer in the U.S. Army.

“However, we have to look at Major Nidal Hasan. What happened to him? What kind of stress was he under? What kind of insults had he borne?

[…]

“When there are Muslims who love America, and who join the armed forces to protect America, and to serve the interests of America, and then America, unfortunately, under the falsehoods of the George W. Bush administration, launches attacks against Iraq and against Afghanistan, and now, those soldiers are killing Muslims… So when they go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the kind of hatred that is built up in the American forces, when they call the Muslims ‘ragheads’ and ‘desert niggers,’ and then, in the Abu Ghreib prison, Muslim women were raped, and Muslim men were sodomized… All this affects Muslims serving in the army. So when you are being insulted by your superior officers or by your fellow soldiers, at some point, a person might break. Unfortunately, I believe this is what happened to Captain [sic] Nidal Hasan.”

Don’t forget being buried with pig entrails, Lou. Didn’t we do that, too, or did we miss a trick? I even have it on good authority that one sergeant at Guantanamo once urinated while thinking of a Koran. That’s one hell of an insult to be borne, a whole lot of stress to be under.

But thanks for your kind words on “this unfortunate event”. We’ll never forget them.

Ignorance is bliss

On an eight-day Asia trip, President Obama turned his attention home and pleaded for lawmakers to “resist the temptation to turn this tragic event into the political theater.”

In this Thursday, Nov. 6, 2009 photo, emergency personnel transport an unidentified soldier from the Soldier Readiness Center following a shooting at Fort Hood, Texas. (AP)

President Obama on Saturday urged Congress to hold off on any investigation of the Fort Hood rampage until federal law enforcement and military authorities have completed their probes into the shootings at the Texas Army post, which left 13 people dead.

On an eight-day Asia trip, Obama turned his attention home and pleaded for lawmakers to “resist the temptation to turn this tragic event into the political theater.” He said those who died on the nation’s largest Army post deserve justice, not political stagecraft.

“The stakes are far too high,” Obama said in a video and Internet address released by the White House while the president he was flying from Tokyo to Singapore, where Pacific Rim countries were meeting.

Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, was charged on Thursday with the shooting spree at Fort Hood last week. Army investigators have said Hasan is the only suspect and could face additional charges.

Obama already had ordered a review of all intelligence related to Hasan and whether the information was properly shared and acted upon within government agencies. Several members of Congress, particularly Michigan Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, have also called for a full examination of what agencies knew about Hasan’s contacts with a radical Muslim cleric in Yemen and others of concern to the U.S.

Hoekstra confirmed this week that government officials knew of about 10 to 20 e-mails between Hasan and the radical imam, beginning in December 2008.

Why would the President of the United States want to hide what happened there?

- Aggie

Watch him state that KSM will get a full military trial. Are we safer now than during the Bush era?

- Aggie

Wouldn’t want to disturb “sensitive negotiations”

This is even more interesting when we consider that the same administration just confiscated hundreds of millions worth of Iranian real estate in the United States.

On Veterans Day, Christine Devlin stood in the cold in Westwood for the unveiling of a new memorial to local soldiers lost overseas, including her son Michael, one of the 241 servicemen killed in the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983.

Devlin is among 30 Massachusetts relatives of victims of the Beirut attack who have been fighting for more than a decade to get compensation for what many consider the first major terrorist attack against the United States. After a federal judge ruled in 2007 that Iran was liable for $2.65 billion in damages to be shared by 150 families seeking restitution, they believed they were on the cusp of victory.

But now, the Obama administration is going to court to try to block payments from Iranian assets that the families’ lawyers want seized, contending that it would jeopardize sensitive negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program and establish a potentially damaging precedent.

In a little-noticed filing in federal court, the Justice Department is arguing that giving the money to the victims “can have significant, detrimental impact on our foreign relations, as well as the reciprocal treatment of the United States and its extensive overseas property holdings.’’

The Obama administration’s position is a blow to those like Devlin, who is still waiting for some measure of justice for her son, who was 21 when Hezbollah terrorists rammed a suicide truck bomb into the peacekeepers’ headquarters.

I wonder why they are “terrorists” when they murder Americans but something entirely more gentle when they murder Israelis? I would be interesting to do a search of descriptors tied to the word Hezbollah in the Boston Globe, especially during the period when they were sending rockets into Haifa. I guess I’ll never understand.

- Aggie

But Barry isn’t listening.

- Aggie

To add to Aggie’s post below, I just have to pass on what Rush observed today: that KSM and his fellow jihadis have already admitted to their guilt, confessed without coercion in open court, and asked to be martyred for their crimes.

So why the dog and pony show?

Easy. The terrorists aren’t on trial. We are. Bush is. This production is supposed to be an Andrew Lloyd Weber extravaganza for the legions still under the influence of Bush Derangement Syndrome: it might as well feature cats on roller skates in the Paris Opera House.

The defendants won’t be the Islamic fascists, but instead a chorus line of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and enough high-kicking CIA agents to fill Radio City Music Hall.

If any of the terrorists is even put on the stand it will be only to tickle them with a feather duster.

“After you slit Daniel Pearl’s throat, Mr. Mohammed, did you yourself receive brutal and inhuman treatment by having a wet washcloth placed over your mouth and nose? I’m sure it must have been positively beastly.”

I can only hope and pray that by their base appeal to the unreconstructed Stalinists in our population (Hello, Cambridge! Hiya, Seattle!) with this obscenity—plus so many others—this party of traitors and their leader, Baradict ArnObama, will be turned out into the cold by the rest of the country.

They are trying the guy who planned the 9/11 attacks in NY City

Two quick thoughts: 1. The people of NY City are made much less safe by this decision, since any lunatic terrorist will surely become more frantic to attack during the trial. 2. Any lawyer can credibly claim that it is not possible for the defendant to receive a fair trial in that city. This is akin to building a jury pool from the relatives of the murder victim. Can you imagine a jury comprised of the spouse, parents, siblings and close friends of the deceased?

WASHINGTON —Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and four other men accused in the plot will be prosecuted in federal court in New York City, a federal law enforcement official said early on Friday.

But the Obama administration has decided to prosecute Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — the Guantanamo detainee accused of planning the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen — and several other detainees before a military commission, the official said.

Both decisions are expected to be announced at the Department Justice later on Friday by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because that press conference has not yet taken place.

Mr. Obama, asked about the decision during a news conference on his week-long trip to Asia, declined to comment directly, but said that Mr. Mohammed would face justice.

“I’m absolutely convinced that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed will be subject to the most exacting demands of justice,” Mr. Obama said. “The American people insist on it and my administration insists on it.”

Obama is a lawyer. Maybe he knows something that I do not.

- Aggie the Perplexed

It’s only a fragment, but a tantalizing one. Imagine the literary possibilities if the Taliban gave up jihad and adopted… how shall I put this… culture, civilization, human development:

Poem in Pakistani Jihadist Magazine:

Then We Will Go Inside America,
We Will Blow up the Earth of New York;
By Using the Plough of Jihad We,
We Will Eliminate the Infidels from Earth

“The plough of jihad”: I was an English major, and that’s what you call a metaphor! Way to go, guys! (We can assume it’s only guys; women would be stoned for committing the sin of poetry, especially this poetry.)

I might ask the author to reconsider the text of the second line: there really is no earth in New York, unless he means Central Park; and blowing up Central Park only annihilates a few infidel squirrels and pigeons.

Can I essay a few lines? Don’t worry, I’m not getting all John Walker Lindh on you. I’ve just never tried turning my not-insignificant imagination toward genocide and fiery holocausts. Sounds like fun.

Ahem.

America, you steaming heap of camel dung,
May you be buried by the spade of jihad;
New York will crumble, especially the Yankees and the Jets
(Not the flying kind, the football kind, if you call what they play football).
Infidels might as well just slit their own throats (figuratively),
Because Islam rules (literally).

Go ahead and try it yourself. As you can see, it’s not that hard.