We've Noticed a Difference

This isn’t a Republican party site. I’ve thrown out a small forest of Republican requests for donations since dutifully voting for a certain war hero/reacher-across-aisles in November 2008. But I do get peevish at all the comments I hear that there’s no practical difference between the political parties. Here is yet one more example of how wrong that is.

US avoids anti-abortion debate at UN meeting

By EDITH M. LEDERER, Associated Press Writer

UNITED NATIONS – A U.N. meeting to assess progress in advancing the fight for women's equality that ended Friday had a dramatically different slant than a similar session held five years ago: This time, the United States was not trying to make an anti-abortion declaration a crucial theme.

Much of the 2005 meeting to take stock of what countries had done to implement the landmark platform of action adopted at the 1995 U.N. women's conference in Beijing was consumed by the Bush administration's demand that the final declaration make clear that women are not guaranteed a right to abortion.

By contrast, abortion was a non-issue during the two-week session that concluded Friday with a rousing speech by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had electrified the 1995 Beijing conference when she was first lady.

. . . . At the 2005 review conference. . . .The Bush administration questioned the reaffirmation of the Beijing platform because of reproductive rights and the abortion issue, which were "hot issues," she said. But the Obama administration strongly backs the platform, as Clinton stressed Friday.

You can read the entire article here.

Anti-Jihad Bloggers Get Some Well-Earned Respect

It’s good to see some bloggers getting props, instead of the usual disrespect.

The Jawa Report is being credited by mainstream media, like ABC News, (“Internet Posse Tracked 'Jihad Jane' for Three Years”) and the New York Times, (“Views of ‘JihadJane’ Were Unknown to Neighbors”), for having tracked Colleen “Jihad Jane” LaRose for years. Even NPR noted Thursday, with a slight nose of sour grapes, “that “[their] role is getting lots of attention in other media today.” I think “other media” refers to anyone who’s not with public radio.

ABC News wrote:

Groups like JawaReport, Quoth the Raven and the YouTube Smackdown Corps claim they had been monitoring LaRose's growing militancy for three years, and watched as the Internet -- particularly YouTube -- fed her fervor

As reported at Jawa, it was one of their anonymous correspondents who reported Jihad Jane to the Philadelphia FBI in July 2009.

Jawa’s founder writes under the name “Rusty Shackleford,” borrowed from “King of the Hill's” conspiracy-savvy character, Dale Gribble, who used the Shackleford alias whenever he needed to go under cover. Dale was always clueless, but Jawa’s Shackleford is solid. Jawa's been on our blogroll for years.

He tells ABC he’s “a libertarian college professor who created the blog JawaReport in 2004 after he was enraged that Iraqi Islamists had beheaded an American named Nick Berg.”

"It was my way of venting. But mostly it was about countering violent Islamist propaganda, specifically the videos that were being produced by al Qaeda in Iraq and other Salaafist jihadists fighting our troops," he said.

Shackleford said his goal from the beginning was combating violent Islamist material and support on the Web.

"I'm a blogger, but also an activist against violent Islamism.”

And we’re glad of it. Way to go, guys.

More Sanity on Terror Lawyers at DOJ

From NRO Online:

Lawyers or Public-Policy Makers? [Mark R. Levin]

This lawyer issue re DOJ appointees has taken an odd turn. No one is saying or has said that lawyers are not free to represent whomever they wish or that anyone should be denied counsel because of their unpopularity. These are straw men, which made the letter signed by some of my friends all the more specious. The fact is that the lawyers who have represented the enemy have been, for the most part, true believers. They were not picked from a list by a judge. They sought out their clients and several of them have spoken in the past about how the "principles" they were litigating were, in essence, bigger than the individuals they represented. Some of them were part of a strategic group of lawyers who sought out clients for the purpose of fundamentally altering the course of the war. Hence, the identity of the lawyers is certainly relevant not because anyone questions their right to practice law as they choose, but because they are not private-sector attorneys anymore. They are public-policy makers. And as public-policy makers, they are, indeed, answerable to us. The idea that we should not know their identities, their backgrounds, and their agendas is absurd. The lawyers who signed that letter should renounce it as a matter of personal and professional credibility.
. . . .

Lawyers or Public-Policy Makers? Cont'd [Mark R. Levin]
And on what basis do we think the Obama administration selected these seven lawyers (there may be more) from 1 million other lawyers to serve in top political positions at Justice? Is it a coincidence that they had roles (direct or related) in defending detainees? Is it a coincidence that the administration has, in fact, reversed course on a number of settled issues of procedural and substantive law respecting these detainees and other matters involving national security? Personnel makes policy, and that includes lawyers in policy positions. So, while the selection of these lawyers clearly has some relationship to their private practices, the attempt to identify who they are and what they're doing since being appointed is said to be off limits, unless, of course, you appointed them. Preposterous.

'My Dear Abigail, There's a Suicide Bomber in Need of My Counsel'

Maybe you’ve seen the Al Qaeda Seven ad.



The reaction from lawyers (a group hypersensitive to their own privileges) has even drawn in some conservatives.

They’re saying that Liz Cheney, Andrew McCarthy, Bill Kristol, and the Keep America Safe organization have engaged in “a shameful series of attacks” on lawyers for having represented Gitmo detainees and terrorists. Huffs the Brookings Instiution letter: “The American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients is at least as old as John Adams’s representation of the British soldiers charged in the Boston massacre.” Even Ken Starr signed this turkey.

But the American tradition is not under attack. Nor is what John Adams did when he represented the Redcoats after the Boston Massacre quite the same thing as trying to keep bin Ladin’s jihadi driver from facing military justice. To start with, the soldiers Adams defended weren’t enemy combatants, as Massachusetts was still a British colony. And Adams’s clients were charged with murder, not violations of the laws of war. And he didn’t go looking for this case; he was asked to take it, and felt duty-bound as a lawyer to accept it.

Had Adams wanted to defend unlawful enemy combatants during wartime, he could have gone down in history defending Major John Andre, whom Washington hanged as a spy.

The jibes about “zealous representation of unpopular clients” are a red herring. The Keep America Safe critics aren’t condemning the Gitmo lawyers for representing unpopular clients. It’s not what they did then, but what they’re doing now. The ad is aimed directly at Eric Holder for selecting out these particular lawyers from America’s teeming pool of attorneys for appointment to national security positions where their demonstrated views on the detention and treatment of terrorists are certain to exert an influence.

Principal Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal “represented Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's driver, in the landmark case that led to the overturning the Bush Administration's military commissions.”

Then there’s Jennifer Daskal. “As senior counsel for Human Rights Watch, [she] worked on detainee issues.” Now, reports Byron York, she’s at “Justice's National Security Division” very busy at (ta da!) “working on detainee issues.”

Unlike, say, John Adams, Katyal, Daskal, and the other weren’t just accepting terror cases as a selfless offering to our legal system. They did it because they are committed ideologues.

Andrew McCarthy succinctly puts it that, “the salient issue is that they were volunteers.”

As an editorial at NRO Online says, “Holder has chosen to staff his Justice Department with lawyers who not only voluntarily represented the detainees but tirelessly advocated for them.”

Byron York explains it this way:

Private lawyers can choose to take or not take cases. Sometimes they make their decisions based on money, sometimes on principle, sometimes because they are sympathetic to the accused. The lawyers who worked with the terrorist detainees chose to represent people who are making war on the United States. That's certainly their right, but it's entirely reasonable to ask whether they should now be working on detainee issues at the Justice Department.

But Holder’s defenders say it’s not reasonable to ask. In fact, inquiring about these lawyers’ beliefs, according to Ken Gude of the Center for American Progress, “is exactly what Joe McCarthy did with his Communist witch hunts.” (Some progress if he still has to reach for old Joe McCarthy).

Ann Woolner, one of Liz Cheney’s detractors, thinks Cheney would have accused John Adams of being “a Terrorists’ Pal” because he defended the Redcoats:

If he had done the modern-day version of that and then taken a job at the Justice Department, Liz Cheney would complain. She would say that shows the president and attorney general aren’t serious about defeating the enemy.

I disagree. There are much easier ways to show the president and attorney general aren’t serious about defeating the enemy. Besides, and more to the point, Jennifer Daskal and Neal Katyal haven’t just “taken jobs at the Justice Department.” This isn’t like saying some palooka can’t work for the DPW because he once bought a subscription to The Daily Worker. These lawyers have translated their anti-anti-terrorism skills into powerful positions in the very government department that’s supposed to enforce all the laws they’ve crowned their careers trying to vitiate.

The comparison with Joe McCarthy is meant to recall that dark myth of the Hollywood blacklist. You all remember, (or don’t you watch PBS?), how ridiculous it was, even un-American, when Hollywood actors, writers, and directors were prevented from working just because of their prior dabbling in Communism. I mean, just because Paul Robeson was a committed Red, (and Robeson was a very committed Red), was no reason why he shouldn’t be allowed to keep on singing “Old Man River.”

Except this current business with the Gitmo 9 isn’t comparable. With the Gitmo 9, it’s more like saying that, even if Paul Robeson was a committed Red, that’s no reason he shouldn’t have been allowed to manage the prosecution of the Rosenbergs.

“Hey now!,” I hear you shouting, “Are you saying that just because these lawyers represented terrorists, that they’re terrorists themselves?”

To which I reply: I don’t care if they’re terrorists themselves, I only care that they want the terrorists to win. They may not want them to blow up LAX, but they do want them to win habeas corpus rights, civil trials where their chances of acquittal are increased, stress-free interrogations, Miranda warnings, and transfer to the United States, a sector marked on their jihad field maps as Primary Target. And, I may add, when they were representing these guys, these lawyers didn’t just want their clients to win—they also wanted the United States to lose.

Now it’s one thing to want the government to lose when you’re a criminal defense attorney. We recognize punishing the innocent as a greater evil than letting the guilty go free--and that police and prosecutors are wrong a lot--so our legal system is designed to err on the side of defendants. We tell criminal suspects they have the right to not say anything so they’ll have a fighting chance against a government police power with vastly more resources than they have. We’ve learned that justice is better served by putting the government at a disadvantage: that way they have to work harder for every conviction. That’s our civil legal system.

This is war. It’s a whole other kettle of fish to want the government to lose in wartime. We don’t handicap our soldiers and place obstructions in the path of the Commander in Chief so the enemy won’t suffer a disadvantage. (At least, we never used to). In war, justice is not better served by giving your enemy a fighting chance. We don't tolerate defeat for the sake of our most bloodthirsty attackers being guaranteed a trial by jury. Doing that in war is madness, when it isn’t treason.

It’s good etiquette right now to say that the patriotism of these lawyers shouldn’t be in question. But I say, the hell it shouldn’t! Of course their patriotism’s in question!

And I think even Eric Holder agrees with me. He’s so certain the resumes of the al Qaeda 7 aren’t going to recommend them as patriots that he’s gone to no end of trouble to cover up who they are, and what they’ve been up to, for as long as he possibly can.

I would have no objection if these lawyers had “taken jobs at the Justice Department” doing something else--fighting fraud, catching drug dealers, coercing the Detroit Police Department out of its third-world culture--just so long as their jobs don’t involve terrorism or detainee issues.

I truly don’t want these attorneys criminally prosecuted, disbarred, or mocked by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show because of who they've represented in the past. Stated another way, I don’t believe they should be treated as bad as John Yoo and Jay Bybee have been treated for zealously representing their client, the United States of America. I wouldn’t even object if they staged their own production of Showboat.

I just don’t want them anywhere near my country’s national security decisions.

'Censusphobia', Or, 'All Those Empty Neighborhoods'

I do believe “fearing backlash” will never go out of style, like the crooked ball cap, which I remember as far back as 1980.

According to the Washington Post,

The millions of blue forms being mailed this month in the first census count since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, do not ask about religion. But the idea of answering any questions posed by the government makes some Muslims uneasy, and community leaders are worried that many may avoid the 2010 Census altogether. (“Some Muslims, fearing backlash, worry about intent of census”).

The real gem in this story is this paragraph quoting CAIR/Muslim Brotherhood’s Ibrahim Hooper, whose kufi has no bill, which makes it hard to tell when he’s wearing it crooked.

Still, community leaders say they understand why people might be cautious. Many remember the trepidation that arose after Sept. 11, when men from some Muslim countries were required to register with the then-Immigration and Naturalization Service. The requirement led to deportations for visa violations or minor infractions unrelated to terrorism, Hooper said, adding that "whole neighborhoods were emptied."

Whole neightborhoods were emptied??

Do any of you Dearborn folks remember whole neighborhoods being emptied after September 11? Did this have a positive effect on the overcrowding in the Dearborn schools? Real estate prices in 2001 and 2002?

Anyone? Anyone?

Another Dry Run, and Yet Another Malik Shabazz

Here’s another one documenting the years-long jihadist dry-run campaign. And another Malik Shabazz, which brings us to three. This kid is looking at five years in prison for this, so I'm not inclined to believe he's just a prankster.

This may be useful in those family arguments with people who don’t believe there is any terrorist threat.

Man charged with impersonating FBI agent

GREAT FALLS (AP)
Published: Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

A 19-year-old Washington, D.C. man has appeared in federal court on a complaint alleging he told officials at Great Falls International Airport that he had a firearm in his carry-on bag and was an employee of the FBI. Malik Hannabal Shabazz made an initial appearance Monday before U.S. Magistrate Robert Holter on a complaint alleging false impersonation of an officer and making false statements. He is detained.

FBI Agent Francis J. Donato II said Shabazz told him he pretended to be an FBI agent and claimed he had a gun to observe the response of airport personnel.

Shabazz was arrested Friday after trying to board a United Airlines flight. According to court documents, he was dressed in a short-sleeved, collared shirt with an FBI seal and another s e a l t h a t r e a d "Washington Field Office, FBI Junior Academy." Court records also say the man produced an ID card that he insisted allowed him to carry a firearm onto the plane. Shabazz was allowed onto the jet bridge, but he was prevented from boarding. It was later learned that he did not check a bag and did not have a gun.

Oh, and here's hoping the FBI's fabled skill at gleaning intelligence from criminal suspects better than the CIA might actually find out who this kid was working for.

Terrorists Got Friends in High Places

WASHINGTON — U.S. Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales has so politicized the Justice Department that he should step down for the sake of the nation, the Senate's third-ranking Democrat said Sunday.
--March 12, 2007 Los Angeles Times article, referring to statements by Senator Charles Schumer.

Last week, from the Editors at NRO:

Terrorists’ Lawyers at the DOJ

The Obama administration promised Americans an era of unprecedented transparency in the operations of government. At his confirmation hearing and in subsequent testimony, Attorney General Eric Holder professed a desire to work openly and cooperatively with Congress. Given all that, why is Holder stonewalling Senate Republicans on their demand that he identify the political appointees in his Justice Department who have represented or advocated on behalf of the terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay?

After months of delay, Holder finally deigned last week to provide a response that was more like a rebuke. He conceded that “at least nine” Justice Department officials had formerly represented the detainees. But even Holder admitted he was low-balling. He hadn’t, he said, made a complete survey of DOJ political appointees (i.e., the thing he was asked to do). Even if he had made the rounds, moreover, the number nine would have been an understatement. It counts only lawyers who directly represented the terrorists, not lawyers — like Holder himself — whose former firms volunteered their services to the detainees even if they did not personally do the work.

Holder was a senior partner at a Washington firm (Covington & Burling) that proudly boasts of having represented 18 enemy combatants. Working for America’s enemies was its most heavily resourced “pro bono” (no-fee) project, to which it donated thousands of hours of work (3,022 hours in 2007 alone). Holder did not directly handle the cases. Yet, while his firm banged away on them, he made public statements accusing the United States of having “denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the use of procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution.”

Holder has chosen to staff his Justice Department with lawyers who not only voluntarily represented the detainees but tirelessly advocated for them. To help shape detainee policy, for example, he brought in Jennifer Daskal, a lawyer with no prosecutorial experience. Daskal’s apparent qualification for the job was her work on behalf of the detainees as the “senior counterterrorism counsel” at the leftist Human Rights Watch. There, when not citing the United States to the U.N. for our nation’s purportedly inhumane operation of supermax prisons and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, Daskal spoke on behalf of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other terrorists, insisting they’d been tortured (an allegation Holder echoed in his public statements), that their confessions had been coerced, and that their rights to due process had been grossly violated.

The Republican senators had asked Holder to identify: the DOJ lawyers who had represented detainees, the names of those detainees, and the duties those lawyers currently have at DOJ — including any responsibility for terrorism and detainee policy. Holder coughed up only two names: Daskal, who is already notorious, and Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal, whose work was already well known because it involved representing Osama bin Laden’s personal driver and bodyguard, Salim Hamdan, in one of the Supreme Court’s most important terrorism cases.

Holder refused to give any more names or details. He gave no explanation for the refusal to disclose this information. Indeed, he was glibly dismissive, telling the lawmakers not to be concerned because “all department appointees understand that their client is the United States.”

We’re sure they do, but they’re not serving their client well by returning our country to the September 10 approach to counterterrorism, meaning prosecution in the civilian courts. In such an approach, the Justice Department is the most significant agency. With the United States still at war and our enemies still plotting to carry out more 9/11s, the American people are entitled to know what attorneys at the Justice Department worked for the enemy combatants detained at Gitmo.

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Murder in Cuba

From Townhall.com:

Castro Regime Murders Black Human Rights Activist

Humberto Fontova
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
On Feb 23rd, black human rights activist Orlando Zapata-Tamayo died after an 83-day hunger strike and a series of savage beatings by his Castroite jailer/torturers.

Some background: Shortly after Jimmy Carter (famous for his “Human Rights”-flavored foreign policy as president) visited Castro in 2002, played baseball with him and returned home proclaiming Castro, “a committed egalitarian who despises any system in which one class or group of people lives much better than another,” Zapata-Tamayo was beaten and arrested by Castro’s police for the crime of “disobedience.”

Castro’s KGB/STASI -trained secret police had a point. Tamayo, a humble rural plumber and bricklayer, had studied the (smuggled) works of Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi and had attempted some “civil disobedience” to protest the Stalinism imposed on Cuba by the Castro brothers, Che Guevara and their Soviet puppeteers.

“This nigra’s sure getting uppity!” decided Cuba’s lily white Stalinist rulers--and they pounced. Samizdats smuggled out of Cuba by eye-witnesses’ report that while gleefully kicking and bludgeoning Tamayo, his Communist jailers yelled: “Worthless Ni**er!--Worthless Peasant”

Tamayo’s “disobedience” (against a regime hailed by “free spirits” from Johnny Depp to Bonnie Raitt) continued in proportion to his beatings and tortures. Tamayo remained –literally– “bloodied but unbowed.” Even Amnesty International recognized his plight and designated him an official “Prisoner of Conscience. His exasperating defiance simply prompted the regime hailed by Jesse Jackson, Charles Rangel and Danny Glover to more merciless beatings and to bump-up his sentence to 36 years in Castro’s dungeons.

A little perspective: After conviction for planting bombs in public places (by a judiciary process declared scrupulously fair by the attending international press and human rights organizations) Nelson Mandela got a lighter sentence than did Tamayo for a peaceful protest. Needless to add, the regime that jailed Mandela was universally embargoed and condemned-- and with particular virulence by the precise parties who hail Castro (who forbids any and all international human rights groups/observers/etc. from so much as setting foot in his fiefdom).

"There's one place where Fidel Castro stands out head-and-shoulders above the rest. That is in his love for human rights and liberty!" Thus gushed Nelson Mandela himself (!) in 1991.

Shortly after the Congressional Black Caucus visited with Raul Castro last year and returned hailing him as “one of the most amazing human beings we’ve ever met! Castro is a very engaging, down-to-earth and kind man!” the Black human rights activist and Martin Luther King disciple, Tamayo, was beaten comatose by his Castroite jailers and left with a life-threatening fractured skull and Subdural Hematoma.

On December 3, already injured perhaps beyond recovery (certainly with Cuba’s medical facilities) and hoping his death might alert a nauseatingly two-faced “international community” to the plight of Castro’s subjects, Orlando Zapata-Tamayo declared a hunger strike that lasted 82 days.

“They finally murdered my son,” wept Reina Luisa Tamayo this Feb. 24 upon news of her son’s death. “They finally got what they wanted. They ended the life of a fighter for human rights. My son was tortured. But he didn't die on his knees. He died bravely. My son's death gives me much strength, valor; I want the world to demand the release of all the other prisoners of conscience that this not happen again. And no--I don’t accept Raul Castro’s ‘apology.’ He’s an assassin!"

Her son’s body was delivered to Mrs. Tamayo by Castro’s secret police who demanded he be buried quickly and without fanfare. Castro’s police have also blanketed Tamayo’s rural home town to further “emphasize” this last directive.

All press agencies that have earned a Havana bureau were very slow in reporting Tamayo’s death (though a skinned knee or sprained toe in Guantanamo would have buzzed through all news wires within seconds.)

These agencies were very prompt, however, in reporting “President” Raul Castro’s official reaction. “We are really sorry about his death, a lamentable accident,” said “President” Raul Castro. “In half a century in Cuba there have been no extrajudicial killings. We haven’t killed a single person. Here, there is no torture. Killings and torture only happen in Guantanamo.”

Nary a snark accompanied the reports by these Castro-approved reporters. “But how can anyone actually believe such bald-faced lies by Raul Castro?” might be the reaction from folks with a modicum of education or common sense.

Well, I give you excerpts from an article dated 12/6/06 by one of these Castro-approved “reporters”, Anthony Boadle of Reuters. “There are no credible reports of disappearances, extrajudicial killings and torture in Cuba since the early 1960s, according to human rights groups."

Just what "human rights groups" were consulted by this Castro-sanctioned reporter, he doesn't specify. But his concern with "extrajudicial killings" presents a thoroughly fascinating specimen of logic for a presumably educated gentleman. Applying it to other historical settings we discover that the regimes responsible for the Great Terror and the Nuremberg Laws are preferable to the one responsible for the Kent State killings. The first two were perfectly "judicial," after all. The third was not.

Indeed, Stalin's massacres were usually preceded by "trials" featuring detailed "confessions" from the "criminals" with cameras and reporters on hand lest anyone doubt these proceeding's scrupulously "judicial" nature.

The very trademark of a totalitarian regime is that its mass-murders, mass-jailings and mass-larcenies are all perfectly "judicial," because every judge is a regime apparatchik. Any judge who temporizes over the rubber-stamping of a Communist regime decree disappears, not just from his bench, but from the face of the earth. His former colleagues, or perhaps his successor, then sign the proper documentation making his disappearance properly "judicial."

Furthermore, Castro's murder tally is not difficult to dig up. No need to consult the ravings of some "crackpot" scandal sheet from us “crackpot” Cuban-Americans. Simply open The Black Book of Communism, written by French scholars and published in English by Harvard University Press, neither an outpost of the vast right-wing conspiracy. Here you'll find a tally of 14,000 Castroite murders by firing-squad. "The facts and figures are irrefutable. No one will any longer be able to claim ignorance or uncertainty about the criminal nature of Communism." wrote the New York Times (no less!) about the Black Book of Communism.

The Cuba Archive project headed by scholars Maria Werlau and the late Armando Lago estimates the death toll from Castro's regime, including firing squads, prison beatings and deaths at sea while attempting escape at slightly over 100,000. This project has been lauded by everyone from The Miami Herald to the Boston Globe (again, no right-wing outposts) to the Wall Street Journal.

Castro's chief hangman, Che Guevara, had laid down the rules very succinctly: "Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution. We execute from revolutionary conviction."

Now let’s fast forward to that period Boadle assures us is untainted by any "extra-judicial killings." A 17-year-old named Orlando Travieso was armed with only a homemade paddle when he was machine-gunned to death in March 1991. His “crime,” as spelled out perfectly judicially in Cuba’s legal code, was trying to flee Cuba on a tiny raft. Loamis Gonzalez was 15 when he was machine-gunned to death for the same “crime.” The “criminal” Owen Delgado was 15 when Castro’s police dragged him out of the Ecuadorian Embassy where he sought asylum and clubbed him to death with rifle butts.

Boadle will be pleased that these boys and thousands upon thousands of others who perished in similar fashion well after the early 1960s were all deemed "criminals” by Castro’s judicial system.

Angel Abreu and Jose Nicol were 3, Gisele Borges and Caridad Leyva were 4 and Cindy and Yolindis Rodriguez were 2 on July 17, 1994, when their mothers held them in a tight embrace on the deck of a tugboat. Castro’s coast guard rammed the tugboat and water-cannoned them from their screaming mothers arms and into a turbulent sea to drown. Boadle will be pleased that Castro’s regime ruled this—quite judicially—an "accident," exactly as they rule Tamayo’s death.

May Orlando Zapata-Tamayo rest in peace, may his family accept our condolences and may his murderers eventually face justice.
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More Really Quiet Leadership from the White House

If only Democrats and the press had been so tolerant of Bush-era antiterror policies back then as they are now, we’d be a lot further ahead in the war. The Patriot Act was routinely described during Bush’s term as a “domestic spying program,” and the most glaring example of Bush “shredding the Constitution.” And now that the good angels have taken over what do we see?

From BigGovernment.com:

Obama Signs Patriot Act Extension: MSM and the Left Silent

by SusanAnne Hiller

President Obama signed the renewal of the Patriot Act in the quiet of a slow-news Saturday–the Act was set to expire Sunday, February 28–as reported by The Hill.

The reauthorization did NOT include any reforms to the current Patriot Act–an odd display of agreement and submission to Bush-era policy–even though the Democrats had the numbers to reform the Act. The continuance of the current Patriot Act signals that Democrats are fearful of further controversary in light of American’s distrust and poor approval ratings of the Democrat-controlled Congress. From the Hill:

The House approved the bill 315-97 on Thursday, a day after the extension passed the Senate. The provisions, including roving wiretaps, records access and tracking terror suspects not affiliated with any group, were set to expire on Sunday.

Democrats opposing the extension were unable to add desired civil-liberties protections.

The Patriot Act was first passed by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as a defense mechanism against terrorists.

The House and the Senate, behind the scenes of the healthcare fervor, quietly passed this bill with little oppostion and outrage. Democrats could have modified the Patriot Act, but didn’t.
Apparently without Bush, the Patriot Act is no longer Orwellian as Michael Moore would have it and the ACLU is now quietly voicing its differences. Even Obama criticized the Act’s compromise in 2006, but had no issue, as President, signing the identical Act he wanted reforms on. In 2006, Obama stated on the Senate floor:

So, I will be supporting the Patriot Act compromise. But I urge my colleagues to continue working on ways to improve the civil liberties protections in the Patriot Act after it is reauthorized.

The Democrats had the numbers to make changes, but another civil war would have ensued. In addition, it appears that when these controversial legislative pieces are passed by the Democrats, it makes it all better. No more outrage from the MSM and the far-left, because the rules of war and engagement are clearly different because, you know, the Democrats are in charge.
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'See No Islam'

It’s not just former U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson who believes that a jihadist like al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be seen strictly as a “common criminal.” Pulaski County, Arkansas prosecutor Larry Jegley, responsible for prosecuting Muslim convert Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad for shooting to death Pvt. William Long and wounding Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula at a Little Rock recruiting center last June, characterizes the attack as nothing more than “a straightforward murder case.” (“'See-No-Islam' Strategy Disgraces Fallen Soldier”).

There’s a pattern here. It took President Obama three days before he had something to say about the Arkansas attack. (By comparison, it only took him a few hours to give a press conference about the Chile earthquake yesterday.) What he did say about the Arkansas attack betrayed no awareness of its Islamist motivation, calling it “a senseless act of violence.”

“Senseless?,” asks Diane West:

This was an act of jihad, and both soldiers, along with the fallen and wounded at Fort Hood, should receive the Purple Hearts they deserve. Muhammad himself has made his jihadist intentions against the U.S. military clear, beginning first with his statement to police, and later in collect phone calls to the Associated Press from Pulaski County jail. On June 9, the AP quoted Muhammad calling the attack "a act, for the sake of God, for the sake of Allah, the Lord of all the world, and also a retaliation on U.S. military." He wasn't guilty of murder, he said, "because murder is when a person kills another person without justified reason." Such a definition jibes with Islamic law, which, for example, permits the killing of "non-Muslims at war with Muslims." Muhammad also told the AP he wanted revenge against the U.S. military for its perceived offenses against Muslims and the Koran.

But in spite of knowing all this, Prosecutor Jegley told the New York Times he:

“considers (the attack) a straightforward murder case and that they intend to try it without delving into Mr. Muhammad’s religious conversion, political beliefs or possible ties to terrorists. ‘When you strip away what he says, self-serving or not, it's just an awful killing,’ said Larry Jegley. . . ‘It's like a lot of other killings we have.’”

“It is?” asks Diane West:

Do “a lot” of middle-class murder defendants in Pulaski County convert to Islam in 2004 and worship at an Ohio mosque frequented by convicted terrorists in 2005 and 2006? Do “a lot” of them travel to Yemen in 2007 where, ABC News reported, “it is believed that Muhammad attended the Damaj Institute, an Islamic institute attended by a number of radicalized U.S. converts (including) John Walker Lindh? Do “a lot” get themselves arrested for overstaying their visa in Yemen, and possessing a fake Somali passport? Do "a lot" finally get deported back to the States in 2008? (Bio highlights courtesy the NEFA Foundation.) Do “a lot” fire on U.S. soldiers at a military recruiting center?

I'm not the only one confounded by the prosecutor's inexplicable and highly disturbing decision to follow a see-no-Islam strategy. Muhammad himself recently wrote to the judge claiming he was encountering legal obstacles to changing his plea to guilty. Avowing affiliation with al-Qaida as a member of "Abu Basir's Army," Muhammad further emphasized the fact that the incident was a “a Jihadi Attack ... justified according to Islamic Laws and the Islamic Religion. Jihad -- To fight those who wage war on Islam and Muslims.”

Daris Long, Pvt. Long’s father, said that both his fallen son and Pvt. Ezeagwula were heroes. “They weren't on the battlefield, but apparently, the battlefield’s here.”

He’s right. It is here. Or else we really have forgotten what happened on September 11.

As Diane West tries to remind the Arkansas prosecutor:

This was an act of war against the United States and should be treated as such. Especially for the sake of the fallen, this is no time for the prosecutor to run off the battlefield.

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Is the Man Who Destroyed the World Trade Center a 'Common Criminal'?

Retired U.S. District Judge Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, best known for being the judge who tried to break up Microsoft, called this week for Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s criminal trial to be held in Washington, D.C. (“Bring Sheik Mohammed's trial to D.C.”).

Jackson approved of Attorney General Eric Holder’s original idea to try KSM in Manhattan, but, “[f]or reasons I have some difficulty appreciating,” writes Jackson, the city of New York has rejected the idea.

I submit that’s not all Jackson has some difficulty appreciating. For instance, Jackson simply can’t imagine that KSM is anything more than a “common criminal,” and flatly rejects from consideration that KSM should “be tried by a military commission at Guantanamo Bay or anywhere else.”:

His crimes were civil, not military. Mohammed owed no allegiance to any flag, nor did he wear the uniform of any country. He answered to no code of military honor or of the law of war. His targets and victims were innocent civilians who had never sought to harm him. His weapons were four stolen commercial civilian aircraft. He was not captured on a battlefield; he was hunted down like any common felon, hiding in disguise among civilians in a city far removed from military activity.

Jackson has no appreciation--none--that KSM’s planning and execution of the September 11 attacks were acts of war, in particular, an act of jihad, carried out on behalf of an international terrorist army that numbers in the thousands, and is dedicated to making war on America in the name of Allah.

Nor does he seem aware that Congress and the President had long since determined that America’s response would be a military one. The defeat of al Qaeda has been a military objective for America and her allies for the past 9 ½ years.

In 2001 the United States Congress authorized President George W. Bush to respond to the September 11 attacks using “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.” The authorization is specifically described as a statutory authorizations for purposes of the War Powers Resolution. Military commissions are an essential part of that authorization.

This was an implicit rejection of the pre-9/11 approach to mass terror attacks as a law-enforcement problem--the approach which Jackson seems incapable of looking beyond.

Jackson has the vaguest appreciation that trying KSM as a common criminal in a civilian court runs the risk of something going wrong.

The Justice Department has been rumored to be concerned with an alleged reluctance of D.C. juries to impose the death penalty, but no prosecution should ever be undertaken for the primary purpose of putting the defendant to death. The goal is a fair trial.

Obviously, the goal in the American civil justice system is a fair trial. But what is the goal in America’s war on al Qaeda? (How about victory?).

And there’s more that can go wrong than just that KSM escapes the death penalty. He may be acquitted and freed--unless we aren’t serious about it being a “fair trial.” Jackson, (who writes like someone with that superficial assumption that “everybody’s going to do his best”) has no doubts, based upon what reports of what a “highly competent panel of prosecutors has reportedly told the attorney general,” that “[t]here is virtually no possibility of an acquittal or even a hung jury.”

There’s not? Than how can it be a fair trial? We in the Detroit area just found out, and not for the first time, how fickle a district court criminal jury can be, when a single juror refused to look at barrels of evidence in the Sam Riddle trial because her racial bitterness was more important to her.

Then there’s been the outspokenness of Attorney General Holder, who guaranteed KSM’s fair trial in New York would lead inexorably to conviction and execution, because “failure is not an option.” At the same time, President Obama was promising those offended that KSM was getting the legal rights of Americans “won't find it ‘offensive at all when he's convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him.’”

Only someone self-satisfied enough to believe a conviction is certain because a “highly competent panel of prosecutors” have assured their boss of that would think equally competent attorneys can’t make serious legal hash of the chief law enforcement of the United States and his boss, the President, declaring publicly that your client is guilty in advance of trial. (See the Charlie Manson trial, when Manson flashed the jury a Los Angeles Times headline, “MANSON GUILTY, NIXON DECLARES,” and nearly won a mistrial).

In the inconceivable event that [a terrorist] is acquitted, we’re told not to worry — because he will never be released. The administration has been widely derided for this foolish chest-beating. Clearly, it runs roughshod over the most fundamental of trial rights: the presumption of innocence. The commentary has empowered defense lawyers with a very strong argument that their clients cannot get a fair trial.

The thing is that, on the one hand, fighting for military victory “using all necessary and appropriate force,” and then, on the other hand, civil trials, are two profoundly incompatible tools. In wartime, the statement, “failure is not an option” makes sense. In our civil system, it makes no sense. Failure is always an option, even when a defendant is guilty as sin.

But a different Jackson, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who presided at Nuremburg, said this in 1945:

The ultimate principle is that you must put no man on trial under the forms of judicial proceedings if you are not willing to see him freed if not proven guilty. If you are determined to execute a man in any case, there is no occasion for a trial; the world yields no respect to courts that are merely organized to convict.

No show trials. No trials just to prove a point (terrorists, don’t hate us!).

But Penfield Jackson believes in the system in which he labored for years. He believes in his silly way that the prosecutors are top-notch, that the D.C. jurors he’s encountered were “attentive, carefully followed my instructions on the law and returned verdicts in numerous cases consistent with voluminous and complicated evidence,” and that the D.C. trial judges -- his “former colleagues on the court, . . . have distinguished themselves and their court and are a credit to the image of American justice.”:

A public trial in a civilian federal criminal court would demonstrate to the world, once again, that the United States, applying its well-respected standards for fairness, can convict terrorists as the common criminals they are. There is no more appropriate forum than the D.C. federal district court.

This makes a great Rotary Club speech, but as policy advice on the war against Islamic jihadism, it stinks. Jackson simply has no conception that the country is in a war. KSM isn’t a common criminal. Not because he deserves the honors of a soldier (he doesn’t), but because the threat he represents requires a military response. And all the laws and privileges of war that go with it.
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Ft. Hood Report: Diversity Outranks Defense

It was General George Casey who responded to the self-evidently Islam-motivated murder of the Ft. Hood soldiers by saying, “Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

It’s turning out that, as horrific as the massacre of the 13 soldiers was, it was the result of the pre-Ft. Hood Army living up to the Casey standard. The Army risked making casualties of American soldiers precisely in favor of protecting diversity from becoming a casualty.

Reports recently disclosed reveal how Hasan’s superiors overlooked his extremism because they were afraid getting rid of him would cost them the “diversity” of their only Muslim psychiatrist. (“Ft. Hood suspect was Army dilemma”) .

In spite of numerous specific warnings over years that Major Nidal Malik Hasan was a Muslim extremist, including statements defending suicide bombings, advocating the precedence of Shariah law over the U.S. Constitution, and public declarations that Muslim G.I.s can’t make war on Muslims from other nations, superior officers refused to take action.

In searching for explanations for why superiors did not move to revoke Hasan’s security clearances or expel him from the Army, the report portrays colleagues and superiors as possibly reluctant to lose one of the Army’s few Muslim mental health specialists.

The report concludes that because the Army had attracted only one Muslim psychiatrist in addition to Hasan since 2001, “it is possible some were afraid’’ of losing such diversity “and thus were willing to overlook Hasan’s deficiencies as an officer.’’

“Several of his supervisors explicitly mentioned Hasan’s potential to inform our understanding of Islamic culture and how it relates to the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan,’’ the investigators found.

I wonder if the Army has figured out there are easier, and safer, ways of getting informed about Islamic culture.

Baghdad Jim Rides Again

This might be categorized as one more example that there is indeed a difference between the two parties.

Do you remember “Baghdad Jim McDermott”? He was the Democratic Congressman who, along with fellow Democrat Reps Jim Thompson and David Bonior, took a trip to Baghdad on the eve of the Iraq War to do a public-service ad for Saddam’s regime on international TV.

Said McDermott on ABC’s “This Week” from Baghdad: "The president of the United States will lie to the American people in order to get us into this war." Moments later, despite 12 years of evidence that the Iraqi regime had lied about its weapons program, McDermott said, "I think you have to take the Iraqis on their face value."

A month later McDermott accepted a $5,000 payment from an Iraqi businessman tied to Saddam.

McDermott is still doing his best to make sure America loses in the struggle against Islamic terrorism. This past Thursday House Republicans, led by Michigan’s Rep. Pete Hoekstra, forced House Democrats to withdraw an amendment drafted by McDermott, and slipped into an intelligence budget measure at the last second while everyone was focused on the President’s health-care summit.

The bill was withdrawn by House Democrats in the face of Republican opposition, and when it became apparent “some moderate Democrats indicated they would not vote for the bill.”

The McDermott amendment is called the Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Interrogation Prohibition Act of 2010. (Here.)

According to Andy McCarthy:

The provision is impossibly vague — who knows what “degrading” means?. . . . any interrogation tactic that a prosecutor subjectively believes is “degrading” (e.g., subjecting a Muslim detainee to interrogation by a female CIA officer) could be the basis for indicting a CIA interrogator. (While You Are Distracted by the Summit, Obama Democrats Are Targeting the CIA”).

Hoekstra told Democrat supporters of the amendment:

"In the intelligence community today, these folks already believe they are under attack by this administration, and this just reinforces this," Mr. Hoekstra said. "This is outrageous. There has not been one minute of hearings or debates on this amendment, and you are putting something in an [intelligence] bill that could put officers in jail for life. What are you thinking?"

Of course, the act specifies waterboarding, the gravest mortal sin recognized by the Left, (now that we’ve all stopped smoking) as a prohibited technique. One would expect those on that side of the argument to regard the law, (had it survived passage) as a moral triumph, accompanied by blaring trumpets and huzzahs, for the way reduces to statute years of enlightened Democratic indignation about the alleged lawless conduct of the Bush-era torture regime.

Then why sneak it in, as McCarthy points out, while America was distracted by the summit? Why? Because the fact of the amendment itself proves the opposite, that the Bush era wasn’t lawless at all in the way it conducted interrogations:

Waterboarding, as it was practiced by the CIA, is not torture and was never illegal under U.S. law. The reason the Democrats are reduced to doing this is: what they’ve been saying is not true — waterboarding was not a crime and it was fully supported by congressional leaders of both parties, who were told about it while it was being done. On that score, it is interesting to note that while Democrats secretly tucked this provision into an important bill, hoping no one would notice until it was too late, they failed to include in the bill a proposed Republican amendment that would have required full and complete disclosure of records describing the briefings members of Congress received about the Bush CIA’s enhanced interrogation program. Those briefings, of course, would establish that Speaker Pelosi and others knew all about the program and lodged no objections. Naturally, members of Congress are not targeted by this criminal statute — only the CIA.

McCarthy writes in addition that the amendment:

shows how politicized law-enforcement has become under the Obama Democrats. They could have criminalized waterboarding at any time since Jan. 20, 2009. But they waited until now. Why? Because if they had tried to do it before now, it would have been a tacit admission that waterboarding was not illegal when the Bush CIA was using it. That would have harmed the politicized witch-hunt against John Yoo and Jay Bybee, a key component of which was the assumption that waterboarding and the other tactics they authorized were illegal. Only now, when that witch-hunt has collapsed, have the Democrats moved to criminalize these tactics. It is transparently partisan.

Baghdad Jim had help on this one. According to Politico, it was “House Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter [who] attached the provision to the bill Wednesday over the objections of other House leaders.”

Rep. Slaughter attracted notice for something else on Wednesday while attending the health summit, when she told the story about her poor constituent clacketing around the district wearing her dead sister’s dentures. (“And, of course, it's uncomfortable, they don't fit.”)

DU has been unable to confirm a later statement related to this attributed to Rep. Slaughter. We're told she said that, had she heard this unbelievable story sooner, she would have added to the McDermott amendment a prohibition against forcing any unlawful combatant to wear anyone’s false teeth but his own.

Bush Lawyers Vindicated, Very Quietly

It’s receiving very little coverage on cable news, but the two Bush administration lawyers who’ve been persecuted for years for providing legal analysis on interrogation methods permissible to the CIA finally have been vindicated. More specifically, John Yoo and Jay Bybee were the authors of two legal memoranda (routinely slandered by the self-righteous left as the “torture memos”), requested by top intelligence officials and the White House to clarify the state of the law regarding interrogation of unlawful combatants (e.g., Khalid Sheikh Mohammed). The memos were expressly intended to clarify for interrogators of captured al Qaeda killers what techniques complied with any applicable statutes forbidding torture, while still enabling them to compel cooperation from some tough, knowledgeable, and uncooperative sons of bitches. Marc Thiessen has done some noble work in his book, Courting Disaster, detailing the success of these techniques, including examples of thwarted al Qaeda plots and saved American lives.

Because Yoo included waterboarding as a technique that was allowable under American law, he has earned the undying enmity of the Left, who rank him with such bloodthirsty villains as Hitler, Torquemada, and Sarah Palin.

Characteristically, the Holder Justice Department released the report absolving the two lawyers of any professional misconduct just before the weekend, where it would receive as little media notice as possible.

The Wall Street Journal took notice anyway:

So after five years of investigation, partisan accusations and unethical media leaks, the Justice Department's senior ethicist has concluded that Bush Administration lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee committed no professional misconduct. The issue now is whether the protégés of Attorney General Eric Holder who led this exercise at Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) should themselves be in the dock.

That's our reading of the analysis by Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis, a career official who reviewed both the Bush-era legal memos on interrogating terror suspects and their review by the lawyers at OPR. Remarkably, his report is far more scathing about OPR than it is about Messrs. Yoo and Bybee, who he says made legal errors but did so in good faith, out of honest legal analysis, and in the ethical service of their clients in the executive branch at a time of war.

Mr. Margolis's review overrules both a draft OPR report whose contents were leaked to the media last year and a final OPR report that was released along with the Margolis review late Friday. Those OPR reports recommended disciplinary action and potential disbarment for Messrs. Bybee and Yoo for their advice while working in the Office of Legal Counsel in the frantic months after September 11. The leaks were themselves an unethical attempt to smear the reputations of the lawyers while they were under a gag order and unable to reply.

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers nonetheless leapt to praise Friday's release of earlier drafts, touting them as evidence that the OLC memos were "legally flawed and fundamentally unsound." Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy promptly called for Judge Bybee to resign from the federal bench. Both Democrats have scheduled more grandstanding, er, hearings, for the coming days.

Justice is defending its pre-weekend document dump by saying that it had to release the entire record. But notably, Justice failed to release a 14-page January 19, 2009 letter from then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Deputy AG Mark Filip that eviscerated the first OPR draft. The Mukasey-Filip memo has since appeared on media Web sites, and its withering analysis clearly made an impression on Mr. Margolis. The selective disclosure by Mr. Holder suggests the political nature of this entire exercise. (“Vindicating John Yoo”).

Also, Hans A. von Spakovsky, himself former counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights, describes the OPR investigation as a “malicious, partisan witch hunt.” (“SPAKOVSKY: A vindication of interrogation”).

According to the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee were guilty of "professional misconduct" for supposedly not providing "thorough, candid, and objective" advice. David Margolis, the department's most senior career official, flatly overruled the OPR.

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Deputy Attorney General Mark R. Filip blasted OPR in a devastating letter not released by the department for attempting to deny basic due process to the targets of the investigation by denying them the opportunity to review the report. This injustice was corrected only after Mr. Mukasey and Mr. Filip personally intervened to demand that OPR follow its own well-established procedures. OPR successfully used the same ambush tactic in its investigations of the U.S. attorney firings and the faux "politicized" hiring probe of the Civil Rights Division.

John Yoo marked his victory by calling it his “gift” to the Obama presidency:

Barack Obama may not realize it, but I may have just helped save his presidency. How? By winning a drawn-out fight to protect his powers as commander in chief to wage war and keep Americans safe.

He sure didn't make it easy. When Mr. Obama took office a year ago, receiving help from one of the lawyers involved in the development of George W. Bush's counterterrorism policies was the furthest thing from his mind. Having won a great electoral victory, the new president promised a quick about-face. He rejected "as false the choice between our safety and our ideals" and moved to restore the law-enforcement system as the first line of defense against a hardened enemy devoted to killing Americans.

In office only one day, Mr. Obama ordered the shuttering of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, followed later by the announcement that he would bring terrorists to an Illinois prison. He terminated the Central Intelligence Agency's ability to use "enhanced interrogations techniques" to question al Qaeda operatives. He stayed the military trial, approved by Congress, of al Qaeda leaders. He ultimately decided to transfer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of the 9/11 attacks, to a civilian court in New York City, and automatically treated Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, as a criminal suspect (not an illegal enemy combatant). Nothing better could have symbolized the new president's determination to take us back to a Sept. 10, 2001, approach to terrorism. (“My Gift to the Obama Presidency”).

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Abdullah Shot K-9 with a 'Stolen Handgun'

A WDIV News report earlier this week should put an end to one the fables about the Imam Abdullah shootout being spread around by CAIR’s Dawud Walid. Walid has been demanding autopsy reports for the dog Freddy, the K-9 killed that day, in support of an unsupported theory that the animal, instead of being shot by Abdullah, was actually shot by the FBI.

Now, according to a Local 4 Defenders report on the bullet that killed Freddy, sources have confirmed the fatal “bullet coming from a stolen handgun fired by the Muslim cleric, Luqman Ameen Abdullah.”

This is the second time in a couple weeks that Walid, and his co-rabblerousers, Ron Scott and Abayomi Azikiwe, have been rolled in the dirt by details about the Abdullah shooting coming to light. On February 15th, a veteran SWAT member said that his review of the available reports and evidence led him to conclude the FBI agents had done the right thing. Retired FBI agent Gregory Stejskal explained why the task force used the dog, why they used overwhelmimg force when they were fired upon, and why Abdullah’s corpse was found handcuffed.

In response, Walid backpedaled by saying, “The reality is that none of us were at the scene. We re­ally don’t know what happened.”

Endangered Species

From the Associated Press:

Controversial Ga. billboards link abortion, race

By ERRIN HAINES, Associated Press ATLANTA – The message on dozens of billboards across the city is provocative: Black children are an "endangered species."

The eyebrow-raising ads featuring a young black child are an effort by the anti-abortion movement to use race to rally support within the black community.

The reaction from black leaders has been mixed, but the "Too Many Aborted" campaign, which so far is unique to only Georgia, is drawing support from other anti-abortion groups across the country.

"It's ingenious," said the Rev. Johnny Hunter, national director of the Life Education and Resource Network, a North Carolina-based anti-abortion group aimed at African-Americans that operates in 27 states. "This campaign is in your face, and nobody can ignore it."

The billboards went up last week in Atlanta and urge black women to "get outraged."

The effort is sponsored by Georgia Right to Life, which also is pushing legislation that aims to ban abortions based on race.

Black women accounted for the majority of abortions in Georgia in 2006, even though blacks make up just a third of state population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nationally, black women were more than three times as likely to get an abortion in 2006 compared with white women, according to the CDC.

"I think it's necessary," Cheryl Sullenger, senior policy adviser for Operation Rescue, said of the billboard campaign. "Abortion in the black community is at epidemic proportions. They're not really aware of what's actually going on. If it shocks people ... it should be shocking."



Anti-abortion advocates say the procedure has always been linked to race. They claim Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger wanted to eradicate minorities by putting birth control clinics in their neighborhoods, a charge Planned Parenthood denies.

"The language in the billboard is using messages of fear and shame to target women of color," said Leola Reis, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of Georgia. "If we want to reduce the number of abortions and unintended pregnancies, we need to work as a community to make sure we get quality affordable health care services to as many women and men as possible."

In 2008, Issues4Life, a California-based group working to end abortion in the black community, lobbied Congress to stop funding Planned Parenthood, calling black abortions "the Darfur of America."

Pro-Life Action League Executive Director Eric Scheidler said a race-based strategy for anti-abortion activists has gotten a fresh zeal, especially in the wake of the historic election of the country's first black president, Barack Obama, who supports abortion rights.

"He's really out of step with the rest of black America," Scheidler said. "That might be part of what may be shifting here and why a campaign like this is appropriate, to kind of wake up that disconnect."

Abortion rights advocates are disturbed. Spelman College professor Beverly Guy-Sheftall called the strategy a gimmick.

"To use racist arguments to try to bait black people to get them to be anti-abortion is just disgusting," said Guy-Sheftall, who teaches women's history and feminist thought at the historically black women's college.

"These one-issue approaches that are not about saving the black family or black children, it's just a big distraction," she said. "Many black people don't know who Margaret Sanger is and could care less."
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I notice that Guy-Sheftall didn’t identify in the billboard message exactly what “racist arguments” she believes she sees. Her admission that “Many black people don't know who Margaret Sanger is and could care less,” makes the case for the billboard campaign perfectly. Can you imagine her saying “Many black people don't know about high blood pressure and could care less,” as an argument against bringing it to their attention?

Veteran SWAT Members Says FBI Did Abdullah Takedown Right

At least one well qualified expert believes local agents did the right thing in the operation in which Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah was shot, according to an article in today’s Detroit News. (“FBI correct in shooting, ex-agent says”).

The retired FBI agent, Gregory Stejskal, isn’t part of an official investigation, and his opinion is just that--only an opinion. But he provides an expert point of view that’s been needed to balance the irresponsible accusations being made by CAIR’s Dawud Walid, and professional rabble-rousers like Abayomi Azikiwe of the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War and Injustice--accusations being lent faux legitimacy by the likes of John Conyers.

Stejskal’s opinion that “the bureau acted properly and that its agents will be exonerated,” is based on his own review of the available reports and talking with FBI agents about what happened, in addition to his own long years of experience as a team leader on the SWAT team.

It is FBI policy to use over­whelming force when arresting a suspect believed to be armed and dangerous, Stejskal said. A dog is sometimes used to help subdue a suspect who has refused to sur­render, he said. Agents would have been justi­fied in firing if Abdullah had reac­hed for a weapon, let alone hav­ing brandished a weapon and fired three shots, as Stejskal said he understands Abdullah did and as a person familiar with the in­vestigation told The Detroit News.

In a space of three to four sec­onds, four agents fired an average of five shots each, striking Abdul­lah 20 times, with one shot creat­ing two wounds for a total of 21 entry wounds, according to the medical examiner’s report and a person familiar with the investi­gation.“Once you’ve made the deci­sion to use deadly force, you fire until the threat is eliminated,” Stejskal said.

It sounds reasonable. Walid and his pals have been figuratively waving Abdullah’s bloody shirt as proof that the task force used excessive force in taking him down. Otherwise, their rhetorical argument goes, why was he shot so many times? Walid and his cohort have never denied that Abdullah opened fire after being commanded to surrender by task force agents. Their hugely unreasonable assumption has been that a shootout, once it’s begun, ought to be a highly controlled event carefully choreographed by lawmen to achieve minimum damage to the bad guy.

Stejskal also explains why Abdullah’s corpse was wearing handcuffs.

FBI procedures called for Ab­dullah to be immediately hand­cuffed when the agents ap­proached, he said. Agents would have then checked for vital signs, found that he was already dead, and would have not disturbed the shooting scene by removing the handcuffs, he said.

Now that he’s running out of theories, Walid is saying “The reality is that none of us were at the scene. We re­ally don’t know what happened.”

Now he says he doesn’t know what happened. Not really knowing what happened hasn't kept him and his Black Panther buddies for 3½ months from telling the black and Muslim communities that Abdullah’s death was an assassination, and the subsequent investigations a cover-up.

Shit. Shinola. Notice Any Difference?

Something I noticed in The Detroit News over the weekend:

An unenthralled Steve Chapman decides that, "if (Palin's) speech made anything clear, it's that the shallow, ill-informed, truth-twisting demagogue seen in the 2008 presidential campaign is all she is and all she wants to be.

"When it comes to economic affairs," the Chicago Tribune columnist writes, "the tea partiers agree that -- as Palin put it -- 'the government that governs least, governs best.' When it comes to war and national security, however, her audience apparently thinks there is no such thing as too much government." (“Palin's quips keep pundits polarized”).

I believe actually it was Thoreau who said something about “that government is best which governs least,” though it’s also attributed to Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine.

But I don’t see where Chapman gets off saying the tea partiers “apparently” think there’s no such thing as too much government in any area.

I’ve never heard Sarah Palin, (or her hero, Ronlad Reagan), calling for an unlimited increase in war and national security-related government. Just because she supports the military, doesn’t mean she believes there should be an unlimited increase in defense-related government. When has she ever said that? And just because she believes that, when we’re at war, the government should conduct that war like a war and not a like a 911 call, isn’t the same as saying that, when it comes to national security, there can’t be too much government.

Besides, when it comes to the touchstone of Palin’s speech, which is adherence to the Constitution, war and national security are prominently enumerated responsibilities for the national government. “Economic affairs,” strictly speaking, are not.

Like most liberals, Chapman merely resents funds going to national security that, (apparently), he would rather see diverted to social programs and growing the government. Scoffing as he does at Palin’s “governs least” ideal may be his way of saying, implicitly, that he thinks government governs best where it govern most, a presumption he shares with the White House and the majority of Congress.

Now Chapman, after calling Palin “a shallow, ill-informed, truth-twisting demagogue,” thinks he spies in her speech an obvious contradiction, which naturally he intends to exploit. But there is no contradiction. National security and government blundering around with “economic affairs” are two completely different things. This is why it’s perfectly legitimate to support a good, strong defense, while at the same time calling for limited government.

By the way, it doesn't show up in The Jerk clip, but a moment later Steve Martin proves what he's learned by promptly walking oblivious right through the pile of shit.

It's Not 'Hate-Hate' When Liberals Do It

“...the total mindless, morally bankrupt, knee-jerk, fascistic hatred — without which Michelle Malkin would just be a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it.”

--Keith Olbermann, who later revised his meltdown against Scott Brown to include “sexist.”

“She came across to me as a merchant of hate with an oh gosh smile...”

--Democratic operative Bob Shrum, responding to Sarah Palin’s address to the Tea Party convention

From The American Thinker:

Liberal Hate Speech

By John Dietrich

When Sarah Palin made Rahm Emanuel's expletive-enhanced use of the word "retarded" an embarrassment for him and the president, she forced the left to live up to its own P.C. standards. Saul Alinsky would be proud.

Normally, according to the media elites' rulebook, when liberals rant, it's called free speech; when conservatives rant, it is hate speech.

Members of the media elite appear to sincerely believe that liberals are less vitriolic than conservatives, and through repetition they have convinced a large part of the public that this is true. The reason liberals can "rant" without fear of being labeled terrorists is that their "rants" are justified in the eyes of the media elite. Liberals believe that their beliefs are based on the rational analysis of scientific data. Their opponents' beliefs are based on superstition and prejudice.

This perspective was exemplified by comedian Bill Maher, who explained that "half this country wants to guide our ship of state by a compass. A compass, something that works by science and rationality, and empirical wisdom. And half this country wants to kill a chicken and read the entrails like they used to do in the old Roman Empire." Opponents of the liberal agenda are frequently described as "racist," "unpatriotic," and "ignorant." Conservative "rants" are not only incorrect; they are evil. It is therefore not "hateful" to describe opponents for what they are: "ignorant, unpatriotic racists."

Criticism of liberal administrations is seen as destroying public faith in our institutions, and in some cases, it is called dangerous. In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, Washington Post columnist David Broder opined, "The bombing shows how dangerous it really is to inflame twisted minds with statements that suggest political opponents are enemies." During the Clinton administration, columnist Anthony Lewis criticized Rush Limbaugh, saying Limbaugh's "game" was "to throw dirt on government and anyone who believes that society needs government. In his hateful talk about President and Mrs. Clinton and others in office, he is really trying to destroy public faith in our institutions."

Recent criticisms of President Obama and his policies have been characterized as un-American. Suggestions that his policies should fail are equated with a suggestion that America should fail. This concern for American institutions may be something new, because it apparently was not a factor in the past. In 1986, Washington Post columnist William Raspberry commented on his view of the Reagan administration: "Ronald Reagan is in trouble, and [we might as well own up that] some of us are tempted to take a certain fiendish pleasure in the fact." Later, Michael Kinsley of the New Republic wrote in the Washington Post, "The fall of Reagan is a laughable matter. The only irritating aspect of the otherwise delightful collapse of the Reagan administration is the widespread insistence that we must all be poker-faced about it."

Liberals can demonize entire classes of people. One of the favorite targets of the liberal elite is the Christian right. According to Michael Weisskopf of the Washington Post, the followers of people like the late Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson "are largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command." These people are not only ignorant, but they are also a definite threat. Chris Matthews has declared, "The group in this country that most resembles the Taliban, ironically, is the religious right." Rosie O'Donnell asserted, "radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America." This demonization makes it permissible to say some pretty outlandish things. NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu on his "All Things Considered" segment stated, "The evaporation of four million [people] who believe in this [Christian] crap would leave this world a better place." Actress Megan Fox, admittedly not a representative of the elite intelligentsia, said that if given the chance, she'd urge the fictional character Megatron to murder only the "white trash, hillbilly, anti-gay, super Bible-beating people in Middle America."

Of course, Republicans and conservatives are the prime target of liberal spleen. Sen. Ted Kennedy gave this description of Republicans: "The Republican Party is basically anti-civil rights, anti-immigration, anti-women, and anti-worker." Howard Dean, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, stated, "I hate Republicans and everything they stand for." Jesse Jackson after the 1994 GOP victory claimed that "[h]ate and hurt are on a roll in America. If what was happening here was happening in South Africa, it'd be called racist apartheid. If it was happening in Germany, we'd call it Nazism. And in Italy, we'd call it fascism. Here we call it conservatism."

Liberals appear to get a pass when they attack conservative individuals. USA Today columnist and Pacifica Radio talk show host Julianne Malveaux expressed her opinion of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on PBS: "The man is on the Court. You know, I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early, like many black men do, of heart disease. Well, that's how I feel. He is an absolutely reprehensible person." Nina Totenberg, National Public Radio and ABC News reporter, commenting on Senator Jesse Helms, said, "I think he ought to be worried about what's going on in the Good Lord's mind, because if there is retributive justice, he'll get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it." Former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill had a less than flattering opinion of Ronald Reagan: "The evil is in the White House at the present time. And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and future generations of America and who likes to ride a horse. He's cold. He's mean. He's got icewater for blood." New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis claimed that President Reagan "spews out rage and hate, fear and falsehood." It would take volumes to chronicle the outrageous attacks on George Bush or Sarah Palin.

On "Late Night with David Letterman," Sam Donaldson said, "I think he's [Reagan] going to have to pass three tests. The first is, will he get there, stand in front of the podium, and not drool?" After the audience showed its disapproval, Donaldson responded, "Wait a minute, I don't mean that disrespectfully." Letterman replied, "Well, I think we all took that as flattery, Sam, we did." When Whoopi Goldberg drew a distinction between "rape" and "rape-rape," she possible provided an explanation for liberal "rants." They are not "hate-hate" -- simply "hate."

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