Seven years after the attacks of 9/11, which succeeded in part because our intelligence agencies were deliberately hobbled by Carter-era regulations made worse by Clintonite Jamie Gorelick in 1995, the updated Guidelines are long, long overdue.
But welcome as they should be to all Americans, the defenders of jihad in Dearborn are denouncing them as an invitation to “profiling.” (Surprise! I'll bet you never saw that coming!)
According to Detroit Free Press Jihad Affairs Correspondent Niraj Warikoo,
critics say the plan will allow for abuses by agents, including more racial and religious profiling and intrusive investigations into political and religious groups. . . .Some say they worry there will be more undercover agents and informants infiltrating mosques, attending events like Palestinian conferences, and snooping into the private lives of ordinary residents. (“FBI power in terror cases grows/Metro Detroiters worry it'll open door to profiling”).
Aside from that gratuitous crack about snooping into private lives, what’s not to like about undercover agents infiltrating mosques and attending Palestinian conferences?
"Well," someone may object, "how would you like it if government agents targeted your church?"
And I would answer: If my church and co-religionists were being featured, day in and day out for years, in headlines and breaking news stories mounting into the thousands, for perpetrating deliberate murders on every continent, I’d not only understand why government agents were dogging my church, but I’d have to ask myself why I still attend this church.
But as this is not the case, I say this: If I spotted that telltale trenchcoat on an individual muttering into his collar at Mass on Sunday, I personally wouldn’t feel threatened. The worst he’ll be able to report is that the old priest is an unrepentant pro-Sandinista and that Catholics sing as if we’ve been given these hymns as a penance. The only evidence he’ll ever uncover of support for terrorism is that some of our mission contributions are leached to ACORN without our knowledge.
Shine all the light you want; you'll soon grow bored. The Muslim community, unfortunately, shuns the light, which makes the rest of us wonder, what's so interesting?
The truth is, the Arab-American complaints about profiling are getting stale. There’s nothing in the new guidelines that makes profiling any more likely than before. And as we have noted numerous times, the charges of profiling are vastly exaggerated; in fact, they're pure fiction. The usual suspects trot out the term every time they want to scare the Feds into backing off.
As Attorney General Mukasey explains in his memo about the Guidelines, these changes reflect that the FBI is “a full-fledged intelligence agency,” and needs “more comprehensive and adequate treatment of the FBI’s intelligence collection and analysis functions.” That means gathering more information proactively, rather than just waiting until a bomb goes off and then offering your fingerprint lab to identify victims.
This is national security, folks, not an excuse to burn up federal resources just to hassle people with Middle Eastern names.
I think what has some of these guys worried, especially the people who cater all those Hezbollah fundraisers at the Bint Jubail Cultural Center, is the “Enterprise Investigations” section of the Guidelines, which allows full investigations of groups or organizations if there is “an articulable factual basis” that reasonably indicates the group may be involved in things like racketeering, or international or domestic terrorism.
The kind of investigation the FBI can conduct under that section includes “a general examination of the structure, scope, and nature of the group or organization including: its relationship, if any, to a foreign power; the identity and relationship of its members. . . . its finances and resources; its geographical dimensions; and its past and future activities and goals.”
This paragraph alone must send shivers down the spines of Imams Hassan al-Qazwini and Mohammed Ali Elahi, or any other Islamic leader whose group has been allowed to masquerade as a charity while actually pipelining cash to foreign groups or nations, such as Hezbollah and Iran, at the same time those foreign groups are fostering terrorism and attacks on Americans. Charity contributions, I might add that go on openly in Dearborn, and are illegal. (See U.S. vs. Holy Land Foundation).
Why should the only undercover work that gets done in Dearborn be handled by Debbie Schlussel?
I would love it if local FBI looked into the Imams Qazwini’s and Elahi’s “relationship. . .to a foreign power” [Iran], who finances their mosques, or the Saudi-funded Sunni mosques, or the Hamas-front, CAIR, or the glaring relationship between the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and the MSA. Why not examine these groups’ “past and future goals” based on their actual documented charters (Hamas’s past and future goal is to destroy Israel, the Muslim Brotherhood’s past and future goal is to destroy western civilization), rather than on the bullshit spoon-fed to the press by the likes of Walid, Hamad, and Elahi? What if undercover agents sat in on and recorded some of the Bint Jubail Hezbollah fundraisers?
(And will they now? It would sure help, too, if the government put an end to its cozy relationship with Dearborn’s most outspoken radicals).
Then there is that unmistakeable connection between criminal activity and money sent to Hezbollah to kill Jews. Whether it’s Talal Chahine’s tax cheating, Kalil Khalil's mortgage fraud, or Imad Majed Hamadeh's cigarette smuggling, the most prolific crooks in town always manage to find it in their criminal hearts to donate lots of their illegal proceeds to Sheikh Nasrallah. The government has had some success busting these guys criminally, but the dots remain unconnected when it comes to their contributions to international terrorism.
For too long after 2001 the FBI seal has been marred by a new motto, ‘THERE IS NO CONNECTION WITH TERRORISM.”
They need to go back to the old one, “FIDELITY BRAVERY INTEGRITY.”
