al-Qaeda

Clueless National Intelligence Director Clapper Should Be Fired

February 13, 2011

Now that Egypt’s people and military have overthrown the government of Hosni Mubarak, the biggest threat to the future of Egypt is a takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has repeatedly demonstrated its inability to understand the threat from radical Islam.

Last week, National Intelligence Director James Clapper reached a new level of incompetence when he called the Muslim Brotherhood a “heterogeneous” and “secular” organization:

It is truly frightening that the guy in charge of national intelligence is a complete idiot and has not been fired. Watch Mark Steyn and Megyn Kelly discuss Clapper’s bizarre statement:

Even on NBC, Clapper’s comments caused surprise. NBC Correspondent Richard Engel called the comments a “head-snapping moment” and “terrifying”:

What else does Clapper need to do to get fired?

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A Sane Voice on Airport Security: Muslim Woman Says “Profile Me!”

November 30, 2010

asra nomani 150x150 A Sane Voice on Airport Security: Muslim Woman Says Profile Me!Asra Nomani, a Muslim woman and author, has written in The Daily Beast (via Hot Air) that we should profile Muslims as part of airport screening for potential terrorists.

Nomani is a refreshingly rational voice in the debate on how to catch terrorists:

As an American Muslim, I’ve come to recognize, sadly, that there is one common denominator defining those who’ve got their eyes trained on U.S. targets: MANY of them are Muslim—like the Somali-born teenager arrested Friday night for a reported plot to detonate a car bomb at a packed Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in downtown Portland, Oregon.

Nomani doesn’t advocate using race and religion as the only factors to consider, but they should be part of the overall strategy to catch terrorists:

I realize that in recent years, profiling has become a dirty word, synonymous with prejudice, racism, and bigotry. But while I believe our risk assessment should not end with religion, race and ethnicity, I believe that it should include these important elements, as part of a “triage” strategy that my debate partner, former CIA case officer Robert Baer, says airports and airliners already do.

Profiling doesn’t have to be about discrimination, persecution, or harassment. As my debating partner, conservative columnist Deroy Murdock put it: “We are not arguing that the TSA should send anyone named Mohammad to be waterboarded somewhere between the first-class lounge and the Pizza Hut.”

Nomani points out that in the 1970s other religious and ethnic groups would have been targets for profiling and today Colombians receive extra scrutiny because of Colombia’s FARC, a terrorist and drug-running organization. She concludes:

As attorney R. Spencer MacDonald put it in an article in the Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law, we can have “rational profiling.”

I know this is an issue of great distress to many people. But I believe that we cannot bury our heads in the sand anymore. We have to choose pragmatism over political correctness, and allow U.S. airports and airlines to do religious and racial profiling.

Read Nomani’s complete column here.

Watch Nomani’s thoughtful approach on how to conduct terrorist threat assessments at airports in the following interview on CNN:

Nomani has previously been a rational Muslim voice in the debate about radical Islam. See Bizarre Double Standard: Condemning Book Burning without Condemning Murderous Islamic Reaction.

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Obama Incompetence: al-Qaeda Terrorist Acquitted of 280 Charges in Civilian Trial

November 18, 2010

eric holder barack obama 150x150 Obama Incompetence: al Qaeda Terrorist Acquitted of 280 Charges in Civilian TrialPresident Obama’s policy of putting terrorists on trial in civilian courts rather than military tribunals has spectacularly failed this week when Ahmed Ghailani was acquitted of the murder of 224 innocent people including Americans at the 1996 American embassy bombings in Kenya. He was found guilty of just one of more than 280 charges.

The problem with this trial was not the jury, but the fact that the jury was not allowed to see key evidence in part due to rulings by the judge in charge of the trial, in part because providing all the evidence in a civilian trial would expose our field operatives in the intelligence agencies and endanger American security by giving our enemies valuable intelligence on our operations against them. You cannot try an enemy combatant in an American civilian court while the fight against the enemy goes on. We have military tribunals for cases like this.

This failure of a policy that Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, were warned about repeatedly (see Obama’s Show Trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), should result in Eric Holder immediately resigning, Obama reversing his policy and putting terrorist on trial in military tribunals and Obama apologizing to the American people for his foolish behavior.

Watch Senator Lindsey Graham grill Eric Holder on this issue earlier this year:

A man who cannot bring himself to say that Radical Islam caused recent terrorist attacks is unfit to be Attorney General or hold any other position responsible for America’s security:

See Eric Holder: Another Obama Cabinet Member Who Should Be Fired for Incompetence in the War on Islamic Terrorism for more of the context surrounding this video.

Radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt has passionately attacked the failure of Obama’s policy both on his show and on his blog. He quotes Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia:

But even when the military has evidence that it can bring forward, it is often foolhardy to release that evidence to the attorneys representing our enemies. And one escalation of procedures that the Court is clear about is affording the detainees increased access to witnesses (perhaps troops serving in Afghanistan?) and to classified information. See ante, at 54–55. During the 1995 prosecution of Omar Abdel Rahman, federal prosecutors gave the names of 200 unindicted co-conspirators to the “Blind Sheik’s” defense lawyers; that information was in the hands of Osama Bin Laden within two weeks. See Minority Report 14–15. In another case, trial testimony revealed to the enemy that the United States had been monitoring their cellular network, whereupon they promptly stopped using it, enabling more of them to evade capture and continue their atrocities. See id., at 15.

Hewitt, who is also a lawyer and teaches Constitutional Law, concludes:

Hopefully all but the most ideologically blinded of the cheerleaders of this manifestly unworkable and unnecessary process will now recognize their own folly and all future proceedings for unlawful combatants who are not American citizens will take place in military tribunals conducted at Gitmo. Hopefully at least one more Supreme Court Justice will blink in sudden recognition of the awful injustice their “reasoning” has produced and appropriately defer to the combined judgments of the Article I and Article II authorities on a matter of national security.

Hopefully at least some on the the academic left will shut up about that which they nothing about –the difficulty of trying unlawful combatants with civilians in the jury box and prosecutors unable to use evidence both because of evidentiary standards that ought not to be applicable to terrorists captured abroad and because of the the fear of compromising the methods and sources of intelligence gathering.

If these are the results of this case, perhaps the families of the victims of the massacre perpetrated by Ahmed Ghailani will receive some comfort that while the killer was acquitted of these murders, the manifest and shocking injustice of that result has curbed at least for a while the insanity of the American legal left, and especially its most prominent and powerful members, Barack Obama and Eric Holder.

Read Hugh Hewitt’s coverage of this important issues of national security here and here.

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Have the Terrorists Won? – TSA Subjecting Travelers to Groping, Poking and Nudity

November 14, 2010

Protests are increasing against the new invasive methods of the TSA screening travelers at airports. Red State summarizes the choices you have under Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s new rules:

Door #1: Have nude pictures of yourself beamed to some video monitor to be viewed by a total stranger where it may or may not be stored; or,

kim kardashian pat down 300x200 Have the Terrorists Won? TSA Subjecting Travelers to Groping, Poking and NudityDoor #2: Allow yourself to be groped, poked, patted down, felt up, frisked, and squeezed at the hands of some police academy reject in a Smurf-blue uniform [Photo: Kim Kardashian at LAX]; or…

Door #3: Don’t travel.

Worse is the fact that, if you have children, you have the same choices to make on their behalf:

* Have nude images of your kids viewed (and stored?) by strangers,
* Subject your kids to physical molestation, or
* Cancel your trip.

Pilots and flight attendants have complained about the invasive new searches and the potential risk from repeated exposure to radiation from the new machines.

Even three-year-olds are not safe from TSA groping:

When the threat of terrorism causes the government to perform indiscriminate searches in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, have the terrorists won? After all, the goal of terrorism is to unleash fear and destroy our society. The TSA’s new procedures allow them to score on both counts.

Ironically, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is recommending presumably effective strategies for avoiding these searches to Muslim travelers:

* If you opt out of the full-image body scanner, you have the right to request that the manual search be conducted in private.
* It is your right to be screened by an officer of the same gender. The TSA states in its Head-to-Toe Screening Policies: “It is TSA’s policy that passengers should be screened by an officer of the same gender in a professional, respectful manner.”
* If you experience any disturbing incidents with the new pat down procedure, particularly if you feel you have been subjected to religious or racial profiling, harassment or unfair treatment, immediately file a complaint with the TSA and report the incident to your local CAIR chapter.

Special recommendations for Muslim women who wear hijab:

* If you are selected for secondary screening after you go through the metal detector and it does not go off, and “sss” is not written on your boarding pass, ask the TSA officer if the reason you are being selected is because of your head scarf.
* In this situation, you may be asked to submit to a pat-down or to go through a full body scanner. If you are selected for the scanner, you may ask to go through a pat-down instead.
* Before you are patted down, you should remind the TSA officer that they are only supposed to pat down the area in question, in this scenario, your head and neck. They SHOULD NOT subject you to a full-body or partial-body pat-down.
* You may ask to be taken to a private room for the pat-down procedure.
* Instead of the pat-down, you can always request to pat down your own scarf, including head and neck area, and have the officers perform a chemical swipe of your hands.
* If you encounter any issues, ask to speak to a supervisor immediately. They are there to assist you.

These strategies work in America, but they do not work in other places where real security trumps political correctness. This summer, when returning from a vacation in Europe via Düsseldorf, a Muslim woman wearing traditional dress stood in line for boarding the airplane in front of me. Out of the hundred or so passengers who boarded the airplane before me, she was the only one pulled aside for extra screening. Oh, and I never even had to take off my shoes and was allowed to keep my bottle of water when going through security checks in Europe.

Hot Air reports on a better way to protect air travel. It has a proven track record. It has been practiced by Israel’s airline El Al for more thirty years with a 100 percent success rate. There have been no hijackings, no bombings, no failed attempts on the airline that has more enemies among Islamic fanatics than any other airline in the world. It does require smarter techniques, constantly anticipating of what terrorists might try next and, yes, – the horror of American political correctness – ethnic profiling.

Don’t expect the TSA to adopt the Israeli model anytime soon. It would require hiring highly skilled people rather than blue smurfs that were rejected for police jobs. And, more importantly, it would require our government to overcome its fear of offending protected groups and to recognize that a passenger’s characteristics matter. A three-year-old traveling with American parents or a nun do not pose the same risk as a young man from the Middle East.

So here is what we will continue to have to deal with from Janet Napolitano’s smurfs to the tune of The Who’s “See Me, Feel Me:”

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Radical Muslim Cleric Defends Bin Laden & Encourages Terrorism in America

November 10, 2010

This is a couple of weeks old, but it is well worth watching to remind ourselves of the threat of radical Islam. In an interview on CNN’s Parker Spitzer, Anjem Choudary, a radical Muslim cleric, defends the terrorist threats made by Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders. He then admits that radical Islam wants to impose Sharia law on everyone.

This is not the first time Choudary, who was born and lives in England, has expressed a desire to impose radical Islam on America. See Radical Islamist: “The Flag of Islam Will One Day Fly Over the White House”

Choudary tries to claim that his message is peaceful, but supporting “warnings” from Osama bin Laden is hardly a peaceful message.

Spitzer then asks: “are you communicating with individuals in the United States and encouraging them to participate in attacks of this sort?” and Choudary replies: “Of course I am.”

Watch the video for Spitzer’s appropriate conclusion:

Here is part of the transcript of the interview:

I think that we can have a decent relationship. You withdraw your troops, stop supporting the pirate state of Israel, and then perhaps we can have a dialogue and discussion. These warnings are there, in the statements of Sheikh Osama bin Laden, Sheikh Ayman al- Zawahiri, you know, Adam Gadahn. You know, why is the American establishment not taking heed? I think that is the real question.

PARKER: But you also want to impose Sharia law where you live. Does that mean that – does the work of a Muslim mean imposing Sharia law on everyone who is not a Muslim, including Americans?

CHOUDARY: Look, the Sharia law is the divine law sent by God to the final messenger, Mohammed (speaking Arabic). It is justice for mankind. It will take mankind out of the shackles of man-made law, into the perfection and beauty of divine law. So of course I want that – I want that everywhere. I want to share that with you. Surely it’s a very noble thing to invite someone to a superior way of life. You know, if I believe the people are being oppressed, why should I not invite them to come out of their oppression?

I believe that the Americans, the British and indeed most of the world had been living in the darkness of the hegemony and the exploitation of man-made law for many, many decades. But you know, when we open the door, when we shine the light, people don’t like the light. But you know, I think you will find that when people actually have a look at Islam, when they look at the Sharia, they will see that it in fact has a solution for every single problem that’s facing America and Britain nowadays. You know, from the inflation to the credit crunch to the exploitation…

SPITZER: Mr. Choudary, are you communicating with individuals in the United States and encouraging them to participate in attacks of this sort?

CHOUDARY: Of course I am. You know, I am participating in communication with people all around the world. As you know, the Internet makes the world a very small place. You know, we have a lot of support, in fact, (inaudible) from people as far afield as Indonesia, from India…

SPITZER: Mr. Choudary, Mr. Choudary, based upon your answer, I believe – and I’m sure many prosecutors will listen to your answer – you have violated U.S. law. You deserve to be arrested, prosecuted, jailed for the rest of your life. That is what you, sir, deserve. You are a violent and heinous terrorist.

CHOUDARY: I – I say to you – I will say to you…

(CROSSTALK)

SPITZER: You can speak it from behind prison bars as far we’re concerned, sir.

CHOUDARY: … you can use as much pejorative – you can use as much…

(CROSSTALK)

CHOUDARY: … my invitation – my invitation is a peaceful one to people to embrace Islam and to warn them obviously of the consequences of occupying Muslim land. I think that’s a very decent thing. If we said to you, look, there’s not going to be any consequence by people attacking Muslims, then I think that would be…

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Radical Islamist: “The Flag of Islam Will One Day Fly Over the White House”

October 6, 2010 Read the full article →

September 11, 2001: Never Forget!

September 10, 2010 Read the full article →

Bizarre Double Standard: Condemning Book Burning without Condemning Murderous Islamic Reaction

September 9, 2010 Read the full article →

Islam’s Unacceptable Reaction to One Man’s Dumb Stunt

September 6, 2010 Read the full article →

How the Media Distorts News: AP Tells Reporters to Stop Referring to “Ground Zero Mosque”

August 20, 2010 Read the full article →

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