Law and Order OCO ("Overseas Contingency Operations")

Andrew McCarthy, the former federal prosecutor, knows what he's talking about when it comes to prosecuting terrorists. He's the guy who put the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman (the Blind Sheikh), in jail.

McCarthy thinks that the Obama administration's decision to have the Department of Justice and FBI edge "the CIA out of the business of fighting international terrorism" means that "[s]lowly but surely, it’s September 10 again, a retreat into Clinton-era counterterrorism, when radical Islam prosecuted a war while we tried to prosecute radical Islam in court, playing cops-and-robbers while jihadists played for keeps." ("Wrong Then, Wrong Now").

As prosecutor McCarthy played a critical role in the government's handling of the 1993 attack as a law-enforcement matter. It was hardly enough when Radical Islam planned to follow up that attack with still more.

[B]y 1994, plans were under way to murder the pope, murder the president, and blow up U.S. jumbo jets in flight over the Pacific. By 1996, Osama bin Laden was publicly calling for the global slaughter of Americans while Hezbollah and Iran were killing 19 members of the U.S. Air Force at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

The government’s response? Its obsession at the time was the fear that federal judges might think the FBI was abusing its national-security wiretapping power — using it as a pretext for conducting ordinary criminal investigations. So in 1995, the Justice Department raised a regulatory “wall.” The effect was to bar intelligence agents and criminal investigators from “connecting the dots.” More significant, the wall fostered an ethos of risk-aversion. The message to career-minded agents was: “Take heed: The mere hypothetical (and highly unlikely) possibility of civil-liberties violations is of greater concern to us than the potential of jihadist mass-murder attacks.”

And what good is risk-aversion if you can’t export it? In 1995, President Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 39, making the FBI, with its matrix of law-enforcement procedures, the government’s lead counterterrorism agency — even overseas, which had been the preserve of the CIA and the military, agencies operating under the quaint notion that where you have enemies and exigencies, rather than criminals and crime-scenes, you need a different, less onerous set of rules.

The difference between recognizing this struggle as a war, or thinking of it as a crime problem, isn't just in the choice of words we use. As McCarthy said, while we're playing cops-and-robbers the jihadists are at war, playing for keeps.

Is the War Over?

It’s official now. There’s no longer a war against terrorists. No, we didn’t win it, we’re just changing tactics. Instead of making war on them, we’re going to throw the book at them. Probably “The Audacity of Hope.”

According to an article in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune, the FBI and Justice Department will be taking a bigger role in global terror investigations, replacing, as reporter Josh Meyers puts it, “a system based primarily on clandestine detentions and interrogations “ with “one emphasizing transparent investigations and prosecutions of terrorism suspects.”

The approach effectively reverses a mainstay of the Bush administration's war on terrorism, in which global counter-terrorism was treated primarily as an intelligence and military problem, not a law enforcement one. That policy led to the establishment of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; harsh interrogations; and detentions without trials.

The "global justice" initiative starts out with the premise that virtually all suspects will end up in a U.S. or foreign court of law. (“New FBI system brings terror operations out of the dark”),

Or, stated another way, the new program starts out with the premise that virtually all jihadists fighters will be granted the protections and advantages of criminal defendants.

Meyers quotes Richard Clarke putting it this way: “’We have to return to the practice that we had before of arresting terrorists and putting them on trial, said Clarke, who added that the country's ability to do that ‘has atrophied.’”

Yes, our terrorist-killing muscles got stronger and stronger these past few years at the expense our terrorist-prosecuting muscles . What a shame! Instead of killing all those al Qaeda fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan, we should have brought them here and charged them as criminals, and now maybe they’d be in the fifth year of their criminal appeals, or even out on bond!

If treating al Qaeda and their kind as enemy combatants resulted in the atrophy of America’s terror-prosecution skills, then what should we expect to atrophy now?

I got a particular kick out of this:

The initiative would mean even broader incorporation of the FBI and Justice Department into global counter-terrorism operations. Many national security officials said it is a vindication of the FBI, which before Sept. 11 had played a leading role in international terrorism investigations.

FBI agents for years had used non-coercive interrogations to thwart attacks, win convictions of Al Qaeda operatives and gain an encyclopedic knowledge of how the terrorist network operates. But they withdrew from questioning important suspects after the bureau opposed the tactics being used by the CIA and military -- often by inexperienced civilian contractors.

Obama changes strategies and somehow that vindicates the FBI? I’m sure the FBI was doing a fantastic job of thwarting attacks and leading in international terrorism investigations right up until they failed to discover or thwart the 9/11 attacks.

Even Josh Meyer noted how:

The FBI itself has been criticized, as has the CIA, for failing to connect the dots before the Sept. 11 attacks. In hindsight, the evidence pointed to a clear and intensive Al Qaeda effort to launch attacks on U.S. soil.

I don’t pretend to have a hot line into the FBI. But I do know that until only a few months ago the FBI’s “terror encyclopedia” had a blank page in the CAI-CAN volume where a lengthy article on “CAIR” was supposed to be.

And I’m beginning to notice that when unidentified government sources complain in the press about other agencies, especially when I see phrases like “inexperienced civilian contractors,” it’s got more to do with institutional jealousy (and arrogance), than it does with making sure the mission gets carried out.

Simply changing our footing from war-fighting to crime-fighting won’t cure America’s delusion that we can wish our way back to 9/10 the easy way. It'll make it worse.

For years the left has been putting the word “war” in sneer quotes, and complaining that enemy combatants should be handled as criminal defendants with full due-process rights. Under this new regime they’ll next be putting the word “crime” in sneer quotes, and complaining that criminal prosecutions of “political prisoners” and “freedom fighters” is a blight on our values and the reason the whole world hates us. Hollywood starlets will go on The View demanding the release of KSM, and Springsteen will write a dreary song about waterboarding with a phrase that repetitively rhymes “down” with “drown.”

If you think I’m exaggerating about those sneers, witness how already one AP reporter did both in the same paragraph today when reporting on the sentencing of the Holy Land Foundation defendants in Dallas.

The sentencing re-energized Holy Land's supporters, who believe the prosecution was a politically motivated product of former President George W. Bush's "war on terror" and a prime example of post-Sept. 11 anti-Islam fervor.

Across the street from the courthouse, a handful of people held a banner that read "Feeding Children Is Not A Crime."

Cheney Unbound

I’ve been happy to see Dick Cheney taking the lead in contradicting the presidential/media libels about torture and the enhanced interrogations of the al Qaeda terrorists. For years I wished the Bush administration would put Cheney out there as a spokesman to explain Iraq and what we were doing to stop domestic terrorism, but it never happened.

For all the partisan emotion he draws from the left, Cheney is an outstanding speaker. Better, forensically, than President Obama, who speaks in airy generalities and is allergic to facts. For example, Obama said about Gitmo, “We are cleaning up something that is quite simply - a mess - a misguided experiment that has left in its wake a flood of legal challenges.”

Which really is just so much bullshit. The mess was created when Obama paid off an I.O.U. to Daily Kos by ordering Gitmo closed within a year. Even Senator Jim Webb, who hates Bush’s guts, said Gitmo was an “appropriate facility” that should stay open to try these cases.

When Cheney speaks, in contrast, he puts out the facts, always quite specifically, then he links them together with airtight logic. That's why they want him to shut up.

Here’s a sample of what Cheney said during his AEI speech last week:

Yet for all these exacting efforts to do a hard and necessary job and to do it right, we hear from some quarters nothing but feigned outrage based on a false narrative. In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists.

I might add that people who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about “values.” Intelligence officers of the United States were not trying to rough up some terrorists simply to avenge the dead of 9/11. We know the difference in this country between justice and vengeance. Intelligence officers were not trying to get terrorists to confess to past killings; they were trying to prevent future killings. From the beginning of the program, there was only one focused and all-important purpose. We sought, and we in fact obtained, specific information on terrorist plans.

Ever since President Obama released the interrogation memos, the media has gleefully been embroidering its tapestry of legends drawn from the “torture memos,”or more accurately, from the idea of the “torture memos,” which the media can be confident hardly any one will actually read. The legends tell of how the Bush administration commanded its minions in the Department of Justice, the CIA, and the Pentagon to abandon law and institutional morality in favor of a torture regime limited only by the imaginations of its cruellest practitioners.

One idiotic example of, literally, hundreds I have seen in the past few weeks, is Brian Dickerson in the Detroit Free Press this weekend, declaring that “It's true that Cheney. . . has been defending the unbridled use of torture since 2001.”

Think about that for a moment. What would torture look like, what has it looked like, where it’s been “unbridled”?

Apparently, for one of Dickerson’s rose-petal soft conscience, the unbridled use of torture runs the range between being yelled at by interrogators at the easier extreme to being waterboarded at the harsher extreme: waterboarded, by the way, after being medically cleared for fitness by a physician and then having it explained to you in advance that the interrogators have no intention of killing you. No wonder Zubaydah could take 83 doses.

You want unbridled torture? I ran across this passage from Solzhenitsyn describing only some of the techniques practiced by the Stalinists in Russia:

In the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed with iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (“the secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to the insane asylum.

In our American drama, it’s not the detainees but the media who’ve gone off to the insane asylum, whence they submit their turgid editorials about how America lost her values at Guantanomo but might regain them if we accept queer marriages.

That's when I have to keep reminding myself, these are the people who’ve had forty years to define when human life begins and still haven’t gotten started, or who bled barrels of ink about a “Duke rape case” where there was no rape, and about the lynching victims know as the “Jena Six” who not only weren’t lynched, but committed attempted murder against a kid they didn’t know because he was white.

I’m not one of those guys trying to suggest that the enhanced interrogation techniques aren’t horrible, even brutal. I don’t care for Hannity trying to minimize waterboarding by offering to submit to it for charity. There’s no question these techniques are tough examples of the use of force against known enemies. Still, considering that other examples of the use of force include being shot dead by a Marine rifle squad or getting a cruise missile down your chimney, I have to say KSM and his fellow waterboarding alumni got off pretty easy.

The only question is whether or not the enhanced techniques are unlawful torture. And as usual the media has left that question in the dust in their stampede for the higher ground from which they’ll sermonize the rest of us. And answering that question for a concerned CIA was the whole purpose behind drafting the interrogation memos. The hell of it is the only guys in the country who actually made the effort to answer the critical question whether or not these techniques were torture or not--I’m talking about the Office of Legal Counsel attorneys--now have the cloud of prosecution hanging over them.

Meanwhile, moral paraplegics like Dickerson and Maureen Dowd and hundreds of others get to throw around expressions like “torture” and “broke the law” as if they’ve actually defined those terms--which they haven’t, and dare not.

Which is why they want Dick Cheney to shut up.

Fortunately, he's got eight years of shutting up to make up for.

Free Press Cartoonist Tortures the Truth

Detroit Free Press editorial cartoonist Mike Thompson gives us a two-fer this Sunday by both blogging and illustrating his feelings about what he terms “CIA torture.”

Maybe we can call this treatment of readers, "inkboarding." I know I often have the feeling I'm drowning in deliberately misleading journalism.

On his Freep blog he writes:

This country thought it important enough to investigate and prosecute a president for leaving his DNA all over some intern's dress, but will take a pass when it comes to investigating and prosecuting illegal acts of torture and potential war crimes?

What is wrong with us?

I don't know about "us," but as for Thompson, what is wrong with him--if his cartoon is any indicator--is he lacks a serious enough grasp of the most basic facts to be trusted with "investigating and prosecuting" anybody.

Sure, artistic license is okay when you draw political cartoons. Sometimes you have to exaggerate the truth to make it easier for some people not to miss it. But when you track back that exaggeration, it has to go back to an actual truth. Especially when the cartoon is intended not so much to poke fun or ridicule, but to accuse actual persons of "war crimes."

Spattered blood, burning coals, tongs, chains, rotting skeletons? (OK, maybe Conyers does dress up that way, but I wouldn't know).

Now you may happen to hold the high moral view that waterboarding is the pinnacle of human cruelty, the descent to which, regardless of the urgency of circumstances, earns the United States automatic excommunication from that greater community of decent nations that includes Cuba, the Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, France, and China. But your high moral view doesn't give you the right to simply make up facts because they match the emotional shock you claim to feel.

That Thompson believes he can simply insert any image he wants to illustrate the term "torture"--no matter how barbaric an image and outside the wildest charges ever concocted by critics of the war against jihad--is exactly why the Left can never be trusted to fairly go at "investigating and prosecuting." They aren't interested in investigating, only prosecuting.

The truth is that the Left has been shouting, and reporting, and especially misreporting, about U.S. "torture" of terrorist detainees since 2003. The Democratic Congress has been threatening war-crimes trials since 2006. Almost every pertinent detail about the handling of these few al-Qaeda terrorists has been disclosed, reported, decribed, analyzed, and digested. I know because I've been following it every step of the way. As have some exceptionally smart people like Andrew McCarthy. There is really nothing left to investigate.

But when the Democrats don't get the result they want, they just keep repeating demands for more investigations. Believe me, if Ford hadn't pardoned Nixon, there'd still be a sitting Watergate Committee.

And it isn't only the "CIA torture" that Thompson's misnformed about. He still thinks repeating that "Clinton was impeached for having sex" is a going argument. (What am I saying? It is still a going argument! A poll of C-SPAN callers found this the second most likely thing to be said by Democratics, closely following "Bush lied us into this war.")

As should be obvious by now, the release of no amount of information will actually change the minds of any of the stooges, like Mike Thompson, who actually believe there is evidence of medieval-era torture dungeons with bloody walls, racks, and breaking wheels. To minds so willing to believe only the worst, and so incapable of processing what actually happened, investigations are a waste of time, and an invitation to criminalizing political opinions that vary from those on the Left.

Year of the Double Standard

OK. Not that declarations by this blog count for much, but since it will make me feel better, DU is officially declaring 2009 the Year of the Double Standard. We’ve had them before, obviously; they’re the world we live in. But they're taking it up to a whole new league now.

The LA Times is reporting today that “President Barack Obama has left intact a program that gives the CIA authority to carry out so-called secret renditions — abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.” (“Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool”).

The justification given by the White House to the LA Times:

"Obviously you need to preserve some tools -- you still have to go after the bad guys," said an Obama administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing the legal reasoning. "The legal advisors working on this looked at rendition. It is controversial in some circles and kicked up a big storm in Europe. But if done within certain parameters, it is an acceptable practice."

Makes sense to me. It made sense to me back when Dana Priest revealed classified information about it in her mission to bring down the Bush administration.

We all remember secret renditions as one of the critical Bush-Cheney war-crimes accusations that we’ve all had to listen to for five years. Here’s the award-winning double standard:

The decision to preserve the program did not draw major protests, even among human rights groups. Leaders of such organizations attribute that to a sense that nations need certain tools to combat terrorism. “Under limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place" for renditions, said Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.”

Limited circumstances, presumably, that didn’t exist from 9/11 until January 20, 2009?

This was how Human Rights Watch felt about secret renditions in 2007:

Human Rights Watch expressed grave concern about President Bush’s stated view that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 permits the government to restart the CIA’s secret prison program. Human Rights Watch called upon the Bush administration
to reject the use of secret detention and coercive interrogation as tactics in fighting terrorism, and announce that the CIA’s detention and interrogation program has been permanently discontinued.

“The CIA program – and the civilian leaders who created it – have inflicted tremendous harm on the reputation, moral standing, and integrity of the United States,” Mariner said. “It’s time for President Bush to repudiate this program,and to take steps to repair the damage it has done.” ("US Secret CIA Prisoners Still Missing").

This was Amnesty International eight months ago on secret renditions under the Bush administration:

European states have been implicated in the US-led rendition and secret detention programme, in which people have been unlawfully detained and transferred from one country to another outside of any judicial process. Some have been transferred from US custody to countries where torture and other ill-treatment is known to accompany interrogation; others have been transferred into US custody and subsequently held in detention centres in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

A number of individuals have been subjected to enforced disappearance, including in secret CIA detention, and the whereabouts of some three dozen people remain unknown. Every one of the victims of rendition interviewed by Amnesty International has said they were tortured or otherwise ill-treated in ustody.

Investigations by the Council of Europe and the European Parliament have recommended that Member States take measures to prevent such human rights violations occurring in the future and to ensure redress, including reparation, to the victims. (“End rendition and secret detention: Europe’s duty”).

So today there’s a “legitimate place” for what was a “human rights violation” only in June.

Conyers Still Determined To Prove a Bad Day Fishing Is Better than a Good Day at Work

Conyers invites McClellan to testify on Valerie Plame-CIA leak

June 9, 2008

WASHINGTON -- Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan had mouths dropping open all over the nation's capital with his tell-all book about his feelings regarding the Bush administration.

Now he's getting the chance to say it in person -- to the House Judiciary Committee.

John Conyers, the Detroit Democrat who chairs the committee, sent McClellan a letter today inviting him to the committee room June 20 to testify, specifically on the Valerie Plame-CIA leak of a couple years back.

“In his book, Mr. McClellan suggests that senior White House officials may have obstructed justice and engaged in a cover-up regarding the Valerie Plame leak," says Conyers. "This alleged activity could well extend beyond the scope of the offenses for which Scooter Libby has been convicted and deserves further attention.”

Or not.

'Al Qaeda on the Run'

From Saturday’s Wall Street Journal:

Al Qaeda on the Run

May 31, 2008

A year ago in July, a National Intelligence Estimate warned that al Qaeda had "protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability," meaning it could be poised to strike America again. The political reaction was instantaneous and damning. "This clearly says al Qaeda is not beaten," said Michael Scheuer, the former CIA spook turned antiterror scold.
What a difference 10 months – and a surge – make.

CIA Director Michael Hayden painted a far more optimistic picture in an interview yesterday in the Washington Post. "On balance, we are doing pretty well," he said. "Near strategic defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al Qaeda globally – and here I'm going to use the word 'ideologically' – as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their form of Islam."

What happened? To certain sophisticates, this is all al Qaeda's doing: By launching suicide attacks on Shiite and even Sunni targets, and ruling barbarically wherever they took control, the group has worn out its welcome in the Muslim world.

There's some truth in this. The Sunni Awakening in Iraq was in part a reaction by local clan leaders against al Qaeda's efforts to subjugate and brutalize them. The Arab world took note when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ordered the November 2005 bombing of three hotels in Amman, Jordan, in which nearly all of the victims were Sunni Arabs. Extremist Islamic parties took an electoral drubbing in Pakistan's elections earlier this year following a wave of suicide bombings, one of which murdered Benazir Bhutto.

It's also true that al Qaeda finds itself on the ideological backfoot, even in radical circles. As our Bret Stephens reported in March, Sayyed Imam, a founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and once a mentor to Ayman al Zawahiri, has written an influential manifesto sternly denouncing his former comrades for their methods and theology. This was enough to prompt a 215-page rebuttal from Zawahiri, who seems to have time on his hands. Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker and Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in the New Republic have recently written about similar jihadist defections.

But the U.S. offensives in Afghanistan and especially Iraq deserve most of the credit. The destruction of the Taliban denied al Qaeda one sanctuary, and the U.S. seems to have picked up the pace of Predator strikes in Pakistan – or at least their success rate. This has damaged al Qaeda's freedom of movement and command-and-control.

As for Iraq, Zawahiri himself last month repeated his claim that the country "is now the most important arena in which our Muslim nation is waging the battle against the forces of the Crusader-Zionist campaign." So it's all the more significant that on this crucial battleground, al Qaeda has been decimated by the surge of U.S. forces into Baghdad. The surge, in turn, gave confidence to the Sunni tribes that this was a fight they could win. For Zawahiri, losing the battles you say you need to win is not a way to collect new recruits.

General Hayden was careful to say the threat continues, and he warned specifically about those in Congress and the media who "[focus] less on the threat and more on the tactics the nation has chosen to deal with the threat." This refers to the political campaign to restrict wiretapping and aggressive interrogation, both of which the CIA director says have been crucial to gathering intelligence that has blocked further terrorist spectaculars that would have burnished al Qaeda's prestige.

One irony here is that Barack Obama is promising a rapid withdrawal from Iraq on grounds that we can't defeat al Qaeda unless we focus on Afghanistan. He opposed the Iraq surge on similar grounds. Yet it is the surge, and the destruction of al Qaeda in Iraq, that has helped to demoralize al Qaeda around the world. Nothing would more embolden Zawahiri now than a U.S. retreat from Iraq, which al Qaeda would see as the U.S. version of the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.

It is far too soon to declare victory over al Qaeda. Still, Mr. Hayden's upbeat assessment is encouraging, and it suggests that President Bush's strategy of taking the battle to the terrorists is making America safer.

Wright May Be Gone, But His Message Still Scares Me

It looks as though Obama went farther than expected t distance himself from his longtime pastor and spiritual adviser, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, in his statements yesterday. ("Obama denounces pastor's inflammatory remarks Obama denounces pastor's inflammatory remarks").

According to the AP,

Obama called the pastor's statements widely aired on television and the Internet "completely unacceptable and inexcusable" in a Fox News television interview Friday night and said they did not reflect the kinds of sermons he had heard from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright while attending services at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ.

And he said in his blog statement:

"I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country or serves to divide us from our allies," Obama said in his blog posting. "I also believe that words that degrade individuals have no place in our public dialogue, whether it's on the campaign stump or in the pulpit. In sum, I reject outright the statements by Reverend Wright that are at issue."

All things considered, in my opinion that's about as far as anyone can expect Obama to go in repudiating, denouncing, renouncing, etc.

(And I am so grateful that ABC and Brian Ross put this stuff out there where it badly needed to be).

So why am I still so disturbed by Wright and his hateful preaching? I'm not disturbed because I really think Obama's views are identical with Wright's, or that he's going to place Wright in a position of prominence in his administration. Obama is a lot smarter than that.

Wright's preaching bothers me on its own account. Because he represents what a lot of people--a whole lot of people--think about their own country. When I hear the audio of Wright goddamning America, or crowing about the 9/11 attack, or ranting about Nagasaki, it isn't his raspy, ugly voice that makes me want to turn it off. It's the deafening roar of the unnamed, unknown thousands in his congregation who are beside themselves with enthusiasm for what he is saying.

We already know that Michelle Obama--who has lived a much more privileged life than me or most of my family--would not list pride of country as one of her attributes. This episode with Wright is also the first time, really, that Obama has spoken of his love for country, and it should be borne in mind that he is only saying it in reaction to the firestorm over Wright.

The menace of Jeremiah Wright is not that he controls Obama, but that Obama, when he had a free choice wher to worship, and under what kind of leader, and in what kind of spiritual community, chose to be in a church that cheers when its pastor does a victory dance after 9/11, and tells his flock that it's "in the Bible" to say "god damn America."

It's human nature that we seek out those who think like us. It's even more the case that leaders and executives seek out those who think like them. Wright may be safely under the Obama bus, but there are thousands--millions--more out there who see America the way he does. How many of them will find their way into a President Obama administration?

C. Edmund Wright, no relation, wrote this yesterday for American Thinker.

Pastor Wright and Barack Obama: The media finally notices

C. Edmund Wright

Dr. Jeremiah Wright Jr. has been saying things like "God damn America" for a couple of decades to a congregation that has grown to the thousands, and his sermons only go out via webcast, podcast, telecast, broadcast, cable cast. And for the technologically challenged, audio cassettes and books. I mean, just how deep should we expect our intrepid media mavens to dig? It's hard to find that haystack in the needle, ain't it?

[Editor's note: American Thinker has been covering Pastor Wright's radicalism for a year now.]

But under the Biblical principle of being grateful for what you have, I am thankful that millions more are aware of this now than were just 48 hours ago. You know, back in the good ole days before "client number 9" was a household word.

(I must wonder, however, how this got past Clinton, Inc, for so long. Maybe it's just me, but since we've been told that white Iowans and so on loved the non-threatening post racial nature of Obama....I can't help but think that a little Jerry Wright sprinkled in early and often might have nipped this hoax in the bud. Just a thought.)

It is critical now, however, that more understanding of this dynamic be circulated. People need to understand the unique nature of a large independent church pastor and his congregation. It is very different from the relationship that exists in more traditional denominational churches.

Jeremiah Wright is not simply a pastor who was assigned to Trinity United Church of Christ by a synod or diocese as the latest in a long line of such assignments. Jeremiah Wright is the TUCC. Or, more accurately, the TUCC is simply one of "Jeremiah Wright's ministries." This is how it works with these independent churches.

These churches exist for the sole purpose of spreading the pastor's specific ministry. If there is a market for such a ministry (and in Chicago there has been one), then the church will grow. Most of these churches, in fact, are founded by (and for) the pastor.

TUCC was not founded by Wright. But almost. He has pastored it from a membership of 87 to one now of over 6000. It is his doctrine, direction, interpretation and emphasis that is TUCC. Wright is TUCC and TUCC is Wright. Period.

And with this dynamic, being an active member and significant benefactor of such a church for 20 years is by natural extension an endorsement of the pastor's message. With one of these churches, if you do not buy into the pastor's specific direction, you go to another church. It is not at all like going to your family's 3rd generation Methodist Church and having varying degrees of agreements with the numerous pastors as they flowed through the pulpit.

Barack Obama sought out the message of Jeremiah Wright, joined and remained in and supported TUCC because of that message, and in fact named his book after a sermon of that message. He even used that message so that black voters in Chicago would not focus on the half of Obama that is white, and on his privileged Hawaiian education. To paraphrase the good pastor, he "was riding dirty" on that message.

In other words, he embraced Wright and TUCC's agenda to get his black street cred and to escape his "white half." Now, he's trying to divert attention away from his black street cred. And a little sober reminder here... he is doing this so he can occupy the Oval Office.

The media will of course try to tie any conservative candidate to any outlandish statement made at any time by any pastor who endorses such a candidate. Last night, MSNCB was trying to change the subject by linking John McCain to one of John Hagee's statements about Catholics years ago. As far as I know, McCain and Hagee have never even met and the Catholic statement is not the founding principal of Hagee's ministry.

But if that's the standard, then it portends disaster for the Obama campaign. As long as the message can get out. Because Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright have met. Often. For decades. And hating America always has and always will be the driving principal of Jeremiah Wright and his followers.

God help us if the message does not get out and one of those followers ends up in the Oval Office.
C. Edmund Wright is not related to Pastor Wright.

CIA Mole, or Destroyed Videotape: Tough Call on News Interest

This isn't what I'd call rigorously scientific, but I did a little Google search this morning after getting this update for America’s Truth Forum: “More details on ex-agent's security breach.”

On Wednesday, prosecutors said Prouty illegally accessed the FBI's Hezbollah investigative files in 2002 and 2003, at a time when she was a Washington, D.C.-based FBI field agent who was not working Hezbollah cases. Prouty accessed them electronically, "without authorization and in excess of her authorized access," the prosecutors said in a court filing.

At the time, her sister's husband, Talal Khalil Chahine, 51, was under investigation by the FBI in Detroit for his suspected ties to Hezbollah. The Lebanon-based group was designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization in 1997….

One senior federal law enforcement official said an ongoing damage assessment focused on what information Prouty -- who started working for the FBI in 1999 and the CIA in 2003 -- passed onto Chahine and perhaps others with connections to Hezbollah here. Officials also are trying to determine whether the information undermined any of the FBI's long-running investigations into the organization.

So why isn’t this a bigger story?

I put in these search terms for the CIA videotape story: “CIA videotape investigation,” and got 318 hits.

I Googled “Prouty FBI spy Hezbollah” and got 41 hits.

(As a reality check, I Googled “Michael Vick sentencing”, 3,392 hits, but we’re just coming off a weekend.)

So Hezbollah has apparently managed to get a mole into not one, but two of our highest-echelon intelligence agencies, and used their mole to steal secrets of direct benefit to Hezbollah, and it’s a smaller story than the CIA destroying a videotape after going to the Congress and saying, “Hey, we’re going to get rid of this videotape, all right?”

I wonder how many Congressional investigations Carl Levin is going to demand about this one. After all, it happened in Michigan, the State he represents, I'm told.

Dearborn Hosts Premiere of 'Sister Act 3'

Well, some of us got it and some of us don't. And Talal Chahine, that old lady killer, most clearly has got it.

How else to explain how yet one more female accomplice of Chahine, La Shish restaurateur and Hezbollah financier, gets to face federal charges, while Chahine gets to do his wudu five times a day in the congenial environs of Bint Jbeil, Lebanon?

This time, the defendant is Nada Nadim Prouty, the elder sister of Elfat El Aouar and Rula Al-Aouar, both of whom preceded their big sister into federal custody. If I were in charge of the investigation, I’d find out how many El Aouar sisters are left, and go right on down the line.

First was Elfat El Aouar, who was married to Chahine. She was indicted along with him in May 2006 but, unfortunately for her, was not smart enough to be charged in absentia the way her wily husband was. and is now doing 18 months for tax evasion.

Then there is Rula Al-Aouar, 36, a Detroit-area physician, charged this past September with citizenship fraud. More specifically, she paid a dishwasher to marry her in order to obtain US citizenship by fraud.

She also worked for Chahine's restaurant. Along with tax evasion and Hezbollah money-laundering, Chahine used his La Shish restaurant to arrange lots of fraudulent marriages between immigrants and La Shish employees who were US citizens.

He even worked out a scheme to pay (now former) ICE official, Roy Bailey, to accept bribes in exchange for helping with these kinds of marriage frauds, or releasing illegal immigrants facing deportation. Chahine and Bailey also conspired to use Bailey’s ICE position to then extort money from some of La Shish’s former employees with precarious immigration problems they don’t want reported. Chahine was charged along with Bailey for that in October, but, as the DOJ’s press release notes, “CHAHINE has failed to return to the United States and is believed to be living as a fugitive in the country of Lebanon.”

And now there is big sister Nada Nadim Prouty, who overstayed her student visa, and in 1990 paid some out-of-work guy to marry her so she could become a citizen. Then, after a few years of internship as waitress and hostess at La Shish, then managed to get hired consecutively by both the FBI and the CIA.

As is now being reported all over, (even in the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press!!), Ms. Prouty used her positions as an FBI special agent, and then as CIA operations officer, to access classified information to see if she or other family members, including Chahine, were being investigated for terrorist activities. To aid in her search, she concentrated on an investigation file targeting Hezbollah. She also took classified FBI documents home. As the Free Press headline states it quite literally: "Fake U.S. citizen got FBI secrets from files".

All of which has now led to her agreement to plead guilty to federal charges of “conspiring to fraudulently obtain U.S. citizenship; illegally accessing the FBI computer system, and naturalization fraud.” For this she faces six-12 months in prison, loss of citizenship, and deportation. Her plea deal also stipulates that the government will allow her little sister, Rula Al-Aouar, to be referred to a pre-trial diversion program so she can avoid her own charges for naturalization fraud.

David Ashenfelter at the Free Press gives a decent chronology of this in his article today. In it, he describes how Ms. Prouty, while still at the FBI, and before she joined the CIA, was using her position there to assist her brother-in-law, Chahine, as he continued to provide material assistance to Hezbollah. As things unfolded once Ms. Prouty joined the FBI in 1999, as Ashenfelter recounts:

In August 2000, Chahine married Prouty's sister.


The next month, Prouty accessed an FBI computer system without authorization to find out whether she, El Aouar or Chahine was being investigated.

In 2002, Prouty's sister and Chahine attended a fund-raiser in Lebanon that featured speeches by Chahine and Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of Hizballah, which the U.S. State Department says is a terrorist organization.


In June 2003, a few weeks before joining the CIA as an operations officer, Prouty again accessed the FBI computer system to learn about a Detroit-based national security investigation involving Hizballah.

In other words, she was spying. But she is notably not being charged with spying, nor anything remotely so grave.

I hope that the lenient charges (the heaviest charge she faces is for naturalization fraud), and the favor to her younger sister, are being exchanged for something of substantial value in return from Ms. Prouty--something that could finally get authorities to lower the boom on Hezbollah in Dearborn.