America Calls Retreat

Steven Emerson gave a chilling interview to Bill Bennett this past week about the unraveling of eight years of the American war against radical Islamic jihad.

You can listen to it here.

'Revenge of the Shoe Bomber'

From the Thursday Wall Street Journal:

Revenge of the ‘Shoe Bomber’
The terrorist sues to resume his jihad from prison. The Obama administration caves in.

By DEBRA BURLINGAME

Last May at the National Archives, President Barack Obama warned that “more mistakes would occur” if Congress continued to politicize terrorist detention policy and the closure of Guantanamo Bay. “[I]f we refuse to deal with those issues today,” he predicted, “then I guarantee you, they will be an albatross around our efforts to combat terrorism in the future.”

On June 17, at the Administrative Maximum (ADX) penitentiary in Florence, Colo., one of those albatrosses, inmate number 24079-038, began his day with a whole new range of possibilities. Eight days earlier, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Denver filed notice in federal court that the Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) which applied to that prisoner—Richard C. Reid, a.k.a. the “Shoe Bomber”—were being allowed to expire. SAMs are security directives, renewable yearly, issued by the attorney general when “there is a substantial risk that a prisoner’s communications, correspondence or contacts with persons could result in death or serious bodily injury” to others.

Reid was arrested in 2001 for attempting to blow up American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami with 197 passengers and crew on board. Why had Attorney General Eric Holder decided not to renew his security measures, kept in place since 2002?

According to court documents filed in a 2007 civil lawsuit against the government, Reid claimed that SAMs violated his First Amendment right of free speech and free exercise of religion. In a hand-written complaint, he asserted that he was being illegally prevented from performing daily “group prayers in a manner prescribed by my religion.” Yet the list of Reid’s potential fellow congregants at ADX Florence reads like a Who’s Who of al Qaeda’s most dangerous members: Ramzi Yousef and his three co-conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui; “Millennium bomber” Ahmed Ressam; “Dirty bomber” Jose Padilla; Wadih el-Hage, Osama Bin Laden’s personal secretary, convicted in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombing that killed 247 people.

In December 2008, the Department of Justice filed a motion to dismiss Reid’s lawsuit. It cited the example of ADX inmate Ahmed Ajaj as an illustration of “the dangers inherent in permitting a group of inmates, of like mind in their opposition to the United States, to congregate for a prayer service conducted in a language not understood by most correctional officers.”

While imprisoned for passport fraud in 1992, Ajaj assisted in the plans to destroy the World Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993, making phone calls to Ramzi Yousef and speaking in code to elude law enforcement monitoring. Ajaj tried to get his “training kit” to Yousef, which included videotapes and notes he had taken on bomb-making while attending a terrorist camp on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Reid’s own SAMs on correspondence had been tightened in 2006 after the shocking discovery that three of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers at ADX, not subject to security directives, had sent 90 letters to overseas terrorist networks, including those associated with the Madrid train bombing. The letters, exhorting jihad and praising Osama bin Laden as “my hero of this generation,” were printed in Arabic newspapers and brandished like trophies to recruit new members.

When setting restrictions on inmate religious practice, the Bureau of Prisons need only meet a reasonableness standard, a very low bar in the case of Muslim terrorists. Justice would easily have prevailed against Reid’s lawsuit; nevertheless it dropped the security measures on Reid after he missed 58 meals in a hunger strike that required medical intervention and forced feeding in April.

On July 6, Justice Department lawyers informed the court that Reid will be given a “new placement” in a “post-SAMs setting.” Whether that entails stepped down security in a different unit or transfer to a less secure facility, the Bureau of Prisons won’t say, and Justice refuses to comment.

Mr. Obama likes to observe that “no one has escaped from supermax,” but if Reid is moved from ADX Florence, he will be the first convicted terrorist to use the First Amendment to sue his way out.

What drove the Obama administration’s decision to cave in to Reid’s demands? The president after all has repeatedly pitched supermax and the federal prison system as a secure alternative to Guantanamo, citing the fact that it handles “all manner of violent and dangerous criminals.” Yet the last thing he needs, as his administration engages in its hasty effort to shut Gitmo down by a fast-approaching deadline, is for lawyers and human-rights activists to use a hunger-striking, near-death prisoner to launch a propaganda campaign fashioned right out of the Gitmo detainees’ playbook. Lawyers who shamelessly compared Gitmo to Nazi concentration camps would think nothing of casting supermax as the next “symbol of America’s shame” and a “rallying cry for our enemies.”

From the outset of his administration, Mr. Obama has been trying to thread the needle between national security policy and his ideological affinity with civil liberties lawyers and human-rights activists, meeting with and consulting them prior to making detainee-related decisions. Though his executive order shutting Guantanamo closely followed the blueprint provided by Human Rights First, leaders of key organizations were stunned when he revealed in an awkward, off-the-record meeting the day before his public announcement at the National Archives that he planned to continue President George W. Bush’s policy of preventive detention.

Michael Ratner, whose human rights organization, the Center for Constitutional Rights, filed the first successful detainee lawsuit in 2002, called Mr. Obama’s proposed U.S. detention scheme a “road to perdition” and nothing more than a plan to “repackage Guantanamo.” Leaders of the so-called Gitmo bar appear poised to launch a flurry of legal challenges the moment the last departing detainee’s feet touch U.S. soil.

In January, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Colorado issued a statement saying that conditions at supermax are “simply another form of torture” worse than Gitmo which “make a mockery of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’” Last month, the ACLU filed a civil lawsuit mirroring Reid’s religious rights claim on behalf of two terrorism inmates held at the Communications Management Unit inside a medium security prison in Terre Haute, Ind.

One of those inmates is Enaam Arnaout, a Syrian-born U.S. citizen serving a 10-year sentence for diverting Muslim charity money to militant Islamic groups in Bosnia and Chechnya. The other, Randall Royer, is serving 20 years for his role recruiting young Muslims in the “Virginia Jihad Network,” a group that used paintball games in 2000-2001 to train for holy war.

Mr. Obama has repeatedly suggested that the security challenge of bringing more than 100 trained and dangerous terrorists onto U.S. soil can be solved by simply installing them in an impenetrable fortress. This view is either disingenuous or naïve. The militant Islamists at Guantanamo too dangerous to release believe that their resistance behind the wire is a continuation of holy war. There is every reason to believe they will continue their jihad once they have been transported to U.S. soil where certain federal judges have signaled a willingness to confer upon them even more rights.

The position of civil rights activists with regard to these prisoners is plain. “If they cannot be convicted,” says ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer, “then you release them.”

Meanwhile, in order to appease political constituencies both here and abroad, the Obama administration is moving full steam ahead, operating on the false premise that giving more civil liberties to religious fanatics bent on destroying Western civilization will make a difference in the Muslim world. In a letter sent to his father as he began his hunger strike, Reid provided a preview of how he will exercise his newly enlarged free speech rights, calling Mr. Obama a “hypocrite” who is “no better than George Bush.” His lawsuit remains active while the Department of Justice works out a settlement that satisfies the man who declared, “I am at war with America.”

Ms. Burlingame, a former attorney and a director of the National September 11 Memorial Foundation, is the sister of Charles F. “Chic” Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

Who Can You Count on When the Chimps Are Down?

The New York Post has apologised to those offended by an editorial cartoon that critics said was racist because it likened President Barack Obama to a chimpanzee.

The New York Post cartoon drew immediate criticism from Al Sharpton, the black activist and community leader. . . .

The country's first African-American president had the previous day signed the $787 billion economic recovery bill after a heated debate in Washington. Mr Sharpton immediately accused the newspaper, which takes a strong conservative editorial tone, of deploying a crude racist stereotype of blacks as monkeys.

Col Allan, the Post's editor-in-chief, had vigorously defended the cartoon as a parody of Washington politics, saying it "broadly mocks Washington's efforts to revive the economy". ("New York Post apologises over 'racist' Barack Obama cartoon")

* * *

Needless to say, I’m sad to see the New York Post fall on its sword this way. Free speech has died a little more.

The NYP cartoonist clearly meant to skewer Congressional Democrats. Indeed, Republicans have criticized Obama for letting Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have control of this bill instead of having more input himself.

You remember Nancy Pelosi, she’s America's Speaker of the House, and was last seen crouching on the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, happily peeling a banana.

Then America’s new Attorney General, Eric Holder, just finished a speech insulting the whole country as a “nation of cowards” because we don’t talk about race more candidly.

Next to cleaning a handgun without unloading it first, I can’t think of a higher-risk activity in this country than talking about race without the express prior approval of the NAACP, Al Sharpton, and the Congressional Black Caucus.

The problem is that the folks who most want to talk about race, (the NAACP, Al Sharpton, and the Congressional Black Caucus), are the most reactionary when it comes to boycotting, calling for resignations and firings of people who make the stupid mistake of saying something about race. For example, this is how the NAACP is handling the chimp cartoon controversy, which isn't even about race:

Benjamin Todd Jealous, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, called on the tabloid to remove editor-in-chief Col Allan, as well as longtime cartoonist Sean Delonas.

Then we’re called cowards because we refuse to step on things clearly marked “LAND MINE.”

The reason these candid conversations fail is because they always follow this pattern:

African-American spokesperson: This country needs to have a serious conversation about race.

Non-African-American respondent: Okay. I feel I treat everybody fairly, and I don’t see why I should get passed over for a promotion to make way for a less-qualified guy just because he’s a minority.

African-American spokesperson: Shut up. You have no right to discuss what our people have gone through.

Race hucksters not only control the subject matter of race, but also claim control of any subject matter that can possibly be connected to race, even if only as an arbitrary emblem or symbol of race.

Hurrican Katrina, for example, was a hurricane, not a Klan attack. As many white people were killed, injured, and suffered property damage as blacks, (more whites died, proportionally). But once the story of New Orleans was adopted by Jesse Jackson and the rest as an example of racial injustice, then white Americans were no longer allowed to discuss Katrina without facing 100-1 odds of offending blacks. (Unless, that is, they used it as shorthand for the racism of the Bush administration. But candid talk about Katrina is forbidden).

Just Friday some state governors said they intended to refuse the “stimulus” money because they don’t want their states saddled with escalating entitlement bills after the federal money runs out. They were rational, economic/political decisions. But U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., said he was insulted by opposition to the bill because it was a "a slap in the face of African-Americans."

There simply isn't any having a candid conversation under these conditions.

It’s perfectly obvious this New York Post cartoon isn’t about Obama. I don’t even believe that Sharpton and Julian Bond believe it’s about Obama. They just see an opportunity and they’re going to take it. Good race-hustling jobs are hard to come by in post-racial America.

But where were these guys when Leftist racists were drawing cartoons explicitly mocking Condoleeza Rice as a race stereotype, or Palestinian racists drawing her pregnant with a chimpanzee?

And didn’t Lincoln’s enemies call him a baboon and caricature him as a monkey? Doesn't Obama imagine himself to be the New Lincoln?

If Obama doesn’t unsay his AG’s foolish talk, then he’s the coward.

Obama's AG Embodies BELIEFS WE CAN CHANGE

When he introduced his new national security team the other day, the team that includes prospective Attorney General Eric Holder, President-elect Obama said he values the different opinions from team members. It turns out he’d still get different opinions even if he were introducing Holder by himself.

As we noted the other day, Holder blasted the current administration in June in a speech to the American Constitution Society. The AP provides some more details on what he said:

"We must close our detention center in Guantanamo Bay," Holder told the American Constitution Society this summer. "A great nation should not detain people, military or civilian, in dark places beyond the reach of law. Guantanamo Bay is an international embarrassment."

Holder added that he never thought he'd see the day where the "Supreme Court would have to order the President of the United States to treat detainees in accordance with the Geneva Convention." (“Obama AG pick defended Guantanamo policy”).

But in January 2002 he said this in a CNN interview when asked

whether terrorism suspects could be held forever, Holder
responded: "It seems to me you can think of these people as combatants and we are in the middle of a war," Holder said in a CNN interview in January 2002. "And it seems to me that you could probably say, looking at precedent, that you are going to detain these people until war is over, if that is ultimately what
we wanted to do."

Just weeks later, Holder told CNN he didn't believe al-Qaida suspects qualified as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

"One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located," said Holder, the former deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration. "Under the Geneva Convention, you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people."

Holder said it was important to treat detainees humanely. But he said they "are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war." He also downplayed criticism that prisoners were being mistreated.

How to explain the difference? Probably by noting that Holder had no partisan advantage at stake in January 2002, and was giving his honest opinion, informed by common sense, his sound legal judgment, and his knowledge of history. The anti-Bush, lose-your-mind, "Close Gitmo!" bandwagon hadn’t gotten rolling yet. Once it did, the people piling on were soon ditching unneeed baggage like common sense, history, and, in the case of anti-Bush lawyers, their legal judgment.

Last June, after years of the Left brainwashing themselves about the war-crime status of detaining some of the the world's most dangerous human beings, Holder simply told the ACS what he thought they wanted to hear. He never imagined, back then, that he might face nomination as AG in an Obama administration, where he then would have to explain his two opposing points of view. (This hardly says much for his ability to hold principled positions).

Now, I expect Holder will swing back closer to the Bush position, with which his 2002 views are identical.

Craven pandering to friendly audiences during speeches at the high tide of Bush Derangement Syndrome is one thing. But when you’re boss is the President and you know he’ll be blamed for any boneheaded stunts you pull, stunts like recommending setting bloodthirsty jihadists loose on U.S. soil, you might be more likely to try getting your feet back on the ground.

This is like that joke that goes, "the older I get, the smarter my parents seem." Faced with the gravity of a struggle they minimized and ridiculed—and made worse--when they were in the opposition (disloyal opposition), the Democrats now realize their political success—even their survival—depends on not being the party that expeditiously loses the terror war on every front. What formerly they ridiculed as patently stupid because Bush wanted to do it, and he’s patently stupid, is now obvious and sensible to Democrats. That's because they’re the ones now who have to make the hard choices.

The strange thing is that common sense may actually be returning to Washington, whence it’s been banished throughout the long, universal Democrat tantrum that erupted in 2002-2003 in response to Bush’s early successes. Bush never lost his cool, but his sensible policies were sabotaged and damaged—as they were meant to be—by having to be implemented and defended in the teeth of a howling gale of insults, spittle, and treason. That’s the best idea the Dems had for beating him—the political equivalent of staving off defeat in checkers by flipping over the board and all the pieces.

Obama's Attorney General Pick

I wasn’t sure at first what to think about President-elect Obama’s selection of Eric Holder as nominee for Attorney General of the United States. Frankly, I don’t remember him from the Clinton administration. But then I read Andrew McCarthy’s take on him at The Corner, (“Opposed to Holder without apology”), ripping Holder for his role in the Clinton PardonFest. I have tremendous admiration for McCarthy, and since he speaks as a former Justice Department insider (he prosecuted the Blind Sheikh and, atypically of DOJ terror prosecutions, won), I give his opinions that much more weight.

Now I see that the Arab American News likes Holder, and for all the wrong reasons. Speaking for Osama Siblani’s newspaper is up-and-coming jihadist mouthpiece, Tarek Baydoun, whom we’ve notice before calling for, among other things, the "national unity" of the Muslim nation. Baydoun sings Holder’s praises, cementing my negative view of Holder in the process. (“Obama's Attorney General pick encouraging to Arabs, Muslims and all Americans”).

Baydoun is an example of the heights that can be reached in opinion-writing when a writer is unfettered by either fact-checking or moderation. As an Osama Siblani disciple, Baydoun subscribes, or pretends to subscribe (sorry, I instinctively credit all law students with crass ambition), to the Muslim Gulag narrative, whereby, (goes the narrative), each morning every Arabic resident of East Dearborn wakes--on a good day--to face daily checkpoints, body searches, and harsh interrogation, and--on a bad day--a simple trip to the bakery is as likely as not to end in summary arrest, deportation, waterboarding, transport to Gitmo, or disappearance without a trace.

As I believe I may have mentioned before, as a West Dearborner who has to drive through East Dearborn to get to work, I have to allow myself extra time to plod through the countless black marias blocking traffic as they round up hapless Muslims innocently on their way to wire money to their freedom-loving relatives abroad.

As Baydoun tells it, this systematic destruction of the civil liberties of Arab Americans will be the worst stigma of all of the Bush administration, above and beyond, as he so temperately describes it, “the failures on all fronts of the Bush administration.”

Baydoun is heartened that Obama picked Holder who, in June, long before he knew he was going to have to have to face Senate confirmation for Attorney General, made a speech to the American Constitution Society, “a progressive organization of lawyers and law students,” where:

Holder blasted the Bush administration's policies as "immora[l]." Holder said the policies weakened the government's position at home and abroad in its fight against terrorism. Holder described the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II and the Supreme Court decision upholding it as "one of the darkest moments in American constitutional history." He said that although the government did not do the same to American Muslims after 9/11, much of the action it did take was "excessive and unlawful." Holder said "Our government authorized the use of torture, approved secret electronic surveillance of American citizens without due process of law, and denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of enemy combatants. I do not question the motives and patriotism of those responsible in implementing these policies. But this does nothing to mitigate the fact that these steps were wrong when they were initiated, and they are wrong now… We owe the American people a reckoning."

When you write like Baydoun, who actually was allowed to publish to readers
of the Arab American News that “hundreds of citizens” have been “arbitrarily and illegally detained without trial in prisons inside and outside of the United States” [and] “transferred abroad for torture” [!], you’re not going to be able to resist the boundless nonsense of Holder’s seamless non sequitur from the Japanese internment of WWII to the current domestic war on terror: “although the government did not do the same to American Muslims after 9/11, much of the action it did take was ‘excessive and unlawful.’”

I don’t expect a Democrat President to nominate an Attorney General of my exact liking. But at least he should know the law, (especially the Constitution, e.g., the legal history of habeas corpus being extended to enemy combatants), and have a decent measure of coolness in his thinking. Based on the excerpts of the speech he gave the ACS, Holder appears to lack all of these.

Personally, in view of the incoming Obama administration's sudden discovery of the lethal intentions of our jihadist enemies, I look forward to watching Holder try to explain to the Senate Judiciary Committee how he intends to keep Americans safe from domestic terrorist plots while intending to "reverse course" on effective methods, perfectly legal methods, that have been successful these last few years to thwart terrorism. Sure, it's fun to make gratuitious swipes at the Bush administration when you don't imagine you might be part of the next administration. Now Holder can try being the AG who suggests to President Obama, whose re-election campaign started November 6th, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed deserves release under habeas corpus.