The Problem With Treating Terrorism As A Law Enforcement Issue–UPDATED

To understand the limitations of law enforcement when it comes to terrorism, it’s instructive to look at this issue on a small scale.

Did you see the video of the girl getting her head kicked in my malicious teenagers in the Seattle, WA bus station? That’s distressing enough–seeing security guards watch the assault happen and do nothing. One guard even walked away.

What’s worse? The girl went to police in the mall and begged for help before the crime took place.

You know, like the crotch-bombers dad contacted the consulate in Nigeria. Like that.

What Dick Cheney was banging away at again on This Week, yesterday, is the mentality of the Obama administration. It’s dangerous.

Someone who has knowledge about an act yet to happen, even someone credible (like the girl who is being followed by a gang of other kids), will not get much attention because there is no “proof” or as the Seattle police said:

“Seattle police have said they did everything they could to separate the girl from another group, but did not witness unlawful behavior before the attack.”

Kind of like the roving bands of young men in my neighborhood recently–the guys scoping out homes to rob. They aren’t precisely doing anything wrong because they’re just “taking a walk”, which isn’t illegal.

This mentality informs Janet Napolitano and President Obama and Eric Holder and everyone within the administration.

It makes the country ripe for attacks. It is dangerous.

And so, it’s not really shocking when the bully makes it through the system and then kicks the innocent’s butt in full view of everyone. That will happen more, not less, with the administration’s decisions on terrorism.

The American people have clarified how they want these events handled. After the press railed on and on about civil liberties this and that, Americans thought a law-enforcement approach might be better.

Now, having seen it action, people have are soundly against the civilian trials, closing Guantanamo and the political correctness that get’s us the Ft. Hood killer.

The American people may not like Cheney all that much, but having a badass like that making decisions about evil terrorists is a lot more comforting than a guy like Obama watching as the innocent victim gets kicked in the head because procedure needs to be followed.

UPDATED: And what do you do if you’re afraid of interrogation and capture at places like Guantanamo? You kill suspects instead.

Ed at HotAir has more:

In other words, rendition remains an option, but not Gitmo or CIA detention. For a while, we took them to Bagram, but the US has pledged to turn Bagram back to the Afghanis at the end of next year. We have almost 800 detainees in Bagram, some of whom were captured elsewhere. Karzai no longer allows us to do that, though, which means that anyone captured will have to get sent to a regular military prison, transferred to our criminal-justice system, given to another country with some interest in the detainee, or released altogether. Since capturing a prisoner entails a lot of risk to the personnel that attempt the mission, the US has increasing opted to shoot from a distance and eliminate all of the other headaches.

What do we lose in this transaction? With a network leader like Nabhan, we lose the ability to get information on a wide range of important issues, like funding, network nodes, communications techniques, and of course plots in the pipeline. Killing Nabhan makes it difficult for AQ to operate, but capturing and interrogating Nabhan would have put us in AQ’s OODA loop for a short but critical period of time, which would have led us to more terrorists and a better picture of AQ’s operations.

Posted in Terrorism | No Comments »

New 9/11 Pictures

Distressing, but wanted to share them with you. Link here.

Via Dan Riehl who has more.

Posted in Terrorism | 1 Comment »

This Is Rich: The Obama Administration Says Some Critics “Serving The Goals Of Al Qaeda”

From the USA Today, an op-ed by John Brennan where he concludes:

Cries to try terrorists only in military courts lack foundation. There have been three convictions of terrorists in the military tribunal system since 9/11, and hundreds in the criminal justice system — including high-profile terrorists such as Reid and 9/11 plotter Zacarius Moussaoui.

This administration’s efforts have disrupted dozens of terrorist plots against the homeland and been responsible for killing and capturing hundreds of hard-core terrorists, including senior leaders in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond — far more than in 2008. We need no lectures about the fact that this nation is at war.

Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda. Terrorists are not 100-feet tall. Nor do they deserve the abject fear they seek to instill. They will, however, be dismantled and destroyed, by our military, our intelligence services and our law enforcement community. And the notion that America’s counterterrorism professionals and America’s system of justice are unable to handle these murderous miscreants is absurd.

I actually agree: Politics have no place in national security.

But this admonishment is nigh unto guffaw-worthy coming from an administration that got elected on the politically charged platform of closing Guantanemo, stopping “torture” (the military does not and never has tortured), and “gaining respect” in the world again–implying that President Bush diminished respect.

In fact, President Obama cannot stop blaming President Bush, who managed to keep America safe after 9/11.

A year ago, when President Obama gave his Egypt speech and then softened his stance to terrorism and used the language of appeasement, I wrote that he would pay an inordinately high political price should America get attacked.

Well, America has been attacked…and not just one time. And when America has been attacked, the administration has bumbled around both rhetorically and policy-wise. They don’t know what they’re doing. It’s obvious.

And the administration has used political theater to try to win points with the public and their greater audience the world, by bringing the Khalid Sheik Mohammed trial to New York City. The only problem is that no one wants the trial there, including the very liberal New Yorkers who voted for Obama. Oops! Wrong use of politics!

So, while the Obama administration is coming around to Bush-style terrorism approaches, they don’t want politics used against them. Well, the American people aren’t interested in fighting fair. They’re interested in their commander-in-chief having a spine.

When President Obama is perceived as weak, it doesn’t matter if every single policy is the same as the Bush administration–it’s not, but for the sake of argument. The American people won’t forgive harm in the face of weakness.

I submit that President Bush would have gotten more of a pass had another attack happened because people perceived that he was doing everything within his power to fight terrorism. And he didn’t wince when he talked about evil jihadists.

Jake Tapper has more.

Posted in Barack Obama, Terrorism | No Comments »

Pro-Life Groups In Wisconsin Illegally Investigated By Government And Police

Remember when Janet Napolitano included Pro-Life groups in her terrorist lists? Yeah, well, looks like her talk resulted in illegal government action. From Lifenews:

In response to an open records request by the Alliance Defense Fund and Pro-Life Wisconsin, the Middleton Police Department and the Wisconsin Department of Justice, along with the Department of Homeland Security all refused on February 4 to release copies of the threat assessment.

Pro-Life Wisconsin officials told LifeNews.com that the assessment was “inappropriately shared” and should never have targeted pro-life groups.

“The majority of Americans identify themselves as pro-life, and the Middleton Police Department has shown they are out of touch with this peaceful majority,” said Peggy Hamill, state director of the pro-life group. “Pro-lifers are not a minority of the population, nor are they second-class citizens. We refuse to let our First Amendment rights be silenced.”

A few months later in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights concluded the investigation was an improper use of department resources.

The conclusion said the department inappropriately directed against activities protected by the First Amendment, in which law enforcement inappropriately engaged in “the collection, retention and dissemination of U.S. person information regarding protest groups which posed no threat to homeland security and… violated [DHS] Guidelines.”

Hamill said DHS destroyed its copies of the report, but the Middleton Police Department retained its copy.

In January 2010 the Alliance Defense Fund, on behalf of Wisconsin pro-life advocates, asked the Middleton Police Department for a copy of the report pursuant to Wisconsin’s open records laws.

The Middleton Police Department refused to disclose the report and further said that the DOJ similarly refused to authorize disclosure of the report, despite the fact that DHS had already determined that the report was an improper investigation of freedom of speech activities.

“This move by DHS illustrates the Obama administration’s goal of silencing pro-lifers. It is disturbing that a local police department has apparently tapped into the security apparatus of the federal government to potentially obstruct free speech,” Hamill concluded.

“Last year, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano unjustly included pro-lifers in a report on domestic terrorism, and here we see her words in action,” she said.

It’s almost like an enemies list, isn’t it?

Posted in America, Corrupted Culture, Crime, Terrorism | 2 Comments »

Christiane Amanpour Gets Tortured With Enhanced Truth From Marc Theissen

One of the more interesting parts of the Scott Brown campaign was his defense of enhanced interrogation techniques. The Massachusetts voters approve of them, and him. Says Andy McCarthy:

It was health care that nationalized the special election for what we now know is the people’s Senate seat. But it was national security that put real distance between Scott Brown and Martha Coakley. “People talk about the potency of the health-care issue,” Brown’s top strategist, Eric Fehrnstrom, told National Review’s Robert Costa, “but from our own internal polling, the more potent issue here in Massachusetts was terrorism and the treatment of enemy combatants.” There is a powerful lesson here for Republicans, and here’s hoping they learn it.

One of the great frustrations of the Bush years was the fact that the administration had strong national-defense and counterterrorism policies that it shied away from defending. On enhanced-interrogation tactics, for example, President Bush’s position resonates with most Americans: When the nation is under siege, nothing is more important than getting life-saving intelligence. And, particularly when we are dealing with terrorists who are trained to resist interrogation and exploit our legal system, we must aggressively interrogate them and keep them out of our legal system. The opposing position, espoused most prominently by Sen. John McCain, was counterfactual and incoherent. Senator McCain pronounced both that enhanced interrogation (which he called “torture”) never works (which is patently untrue) and that an interrogator might at most use it in a ticking-bomb situation (the last situation in which you’d want to use it if, in fact, it never works).

It seems that the American people are getting an opportunity to compare and contrast the “keep America safe” techniques of President Bush and President Obama. President Obama is found wanting. And hypocritical. And ineffectual.

The press, though, continue to pound this “torture” meme. For once, Christiane Amanpour is stopped by Marc Theissen, author of the book Courting Disaster: How The CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting The Next Attack. Here’s the clip:

The American people are very sensible. They don’t want people randomly waterboarded. They also know that the government has water boarded precisely three (3) terrorists and none have been water boarded at Guantanemo Bay.

It is atrocious that the Crotchbomber in Michigan never got questioned. I watched the testimony on the hill from America’s leading defenders–Janet Napolitano, and the DHS and the rest of the defense guys and was appalled. I thought Jeff Sessions was going to have a heart attack, he was so angry. And rightly so.

The American people don’t need a news anchor telling them that the Khemer Rouge is the same as the CIA with three confirmed terrorists. The moral equivalence is appalling.

Posted in Bias, Military, Terrorism | 2 Comments »

Americans Are In For A Shock, ‘Eh?

According to Obama administration officials and USA Today, Americans will be shocked when they see the results of some internal reports regarding the Crotchbomber:

WASHINGTON — White House national security adviser James Jones says Americans will feel “a certain shock” when they read an account being released Thursday of the missed clues that could have prevented the alleged Christmas Day bomber from ever boarding the plane.

President Obama “is legitimately and correctly alarmed that things that were available, bits of information that were available, patterns of behavior that were available, were not acted on,” Jones said in an interview Wednesday with USA TODAY.

Oh yes, because Americans have been horribly naive about threats we face while President Obama and his lackeys are informed and had just the right perspective on this “man-made disasters” thingy. No, I think it’s the administration who is shocked. Why wouldn’t they be? They campaigned on softening the stance against man-made disasters and their approach was anything but realistic. From A.J. Strata:

This dialing back on the sensitivity of our responses was openly discussed by John Brennan during the campaign (a Bush era reject from the intel community who couldn’t follow orders and thought he knew better than everyone else). He was slated to be the head of the CIA until the looney left torpedoed his nomination bid. But he is a central advisor to then candidate and now President Obama. We see again the White House vetted its people to the rigor of a White House dinner guest list.

Brennan is probably at the center of the latest National Intelligence Strategy – the guiding bible for the dot-connectors at DNI and the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). A strategy replete with distractions that are supposed to be handled by other government organizations:

Recall, we are supposed to be monitoring threats and defending ourselves. … There is violent extremists (a.k.a terrorists), insurgents and transnational criminals – all good targets.

But then things get weird. We find challenges such as ‘global economic crisis‘, ‘failed states and ungoverned spaces‘, ‘climate change and energy competition‘, ‘rapid technology change’ and ‘Pandemic Disease (H1N1)‘.

There are no terrorists at the North Pole plotting as the ice melts and refreeze. While providing scientists with detailed polar images we snap automatically every day is not much of a drain on our resources, the fact someone is checking those images to make sure they are not accidentally revealing national secrets means they are not sifting data for possible real threats. Each meeting on H1N1 at DNI was a meeting not watching for threats.

But in Obama’s world, a warm day is more of a threat than a bomb that can halt travel, disrupt the world’s precarious economy and escalate a war.

The American people will be shocked? I don’t think so anymore. The American people so the President lounge his way through the attack so as not disrupt his Christmas vacation. They have heard the inane babblings of Janet Napolitano on behalf of the President. They suffer through the new, civil liberties killing TSA rules while terrorists will skate through due to political correctness.

Insisting that America doesn’t have enemies. Insisting that President Bush was evil and made things up to scare people. Insisting that Guantanamo created terrorists. All these foolish notions created the foundation of President Obama’s stance on man-made disasters. He can’t even say the word terrorism without sounding tremulous and weak. All that good vibe he accumulated could be lost! Oh no! The world loves Barack Obama! Heaven forbid they actually hear him utter a true word.

Americans aren’t shocked. They’re dismayed. They actually believed President Obama was smart enough to know what he was doing as Commander-In-Chief. It’s clear that he doesn’t. It’s not shocking. It’s just more than a little scary.

Americans knew we still fought an enemy. They figured the President knew that, too. They figured wrong.

Posted in Barack Obama, Liberals, Terrorism | 1 Comment »

Kurt Westergaard, Mohammed Cartoons, And Liberals Ignoring The Obvious

Liberal bloggers are so very, very brave. They can quote out of context and everything! They can also question the bravery of others while not being brave themselves. They can accuse other of hypocrisy and can’t see their own. It’s awesome. Ummmm:

I’m more than a little troubled/confused by the story of Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist who survived an attack this Friday from an axe-wielding critic by hiding in a semi-fortified panic room. (Westergaard drew one of the controversial Muhammad cartoons in 2005). I mean, there are any number of complexities about the story, but here’s the one that I’m most perplexed by.

At the time, Westergaard was looking after his five-year-old granddaughter, Stephanie. He was confronted with a terrible choice: risk being killed in front of his granddaughter, or trust that the PET, Denmark’s security and intelligence service, knew what they were talking about when they had told him terrorists usually don’t harm family members but stick to their target.

Westergaard chose to escape into his bathroom, which had been specially fortified as a “panic room”, while Stephanie was left sitting in the living room. From the bathroom he alerted the police as his assailant reportedly battered the reinforced door with the axe, shouting, “We will get our revenge!”

Both survived unscathed, although God knows how a 5-year-old processes something like that, and you’ve got to imagine her folks aren’t going to be letting Grandpa babysit again anytime soon. Still, how does one even make that choice? Was it really a rational process, as implied above? I could not even begin to say. Or judge.

Well, actually, I think that this author is judging…as am I. If there was a way to get the kid to the safe room, I’m guessing he would have, right? If he callously left her…what the hell? But of course, there’s more to the story.

From the Guardian article:

“Those minutes were horrible,” Westergaard recalled yesterday. “But I think I have got through this fairly well – and so, it seems, did my grandchild. That, of course, is the main thing. I would not have been able to live with myself if something had happened to her.”

From the outside, Westergaard’s house in Aarhus, Denmark’s second-biggest city, looks like your average suburban home. But according to the cartoonist, it is a “fortress without a moat”, equipped with security cameras and armoured windows. Living under the constant threat of revenge, he has always had to take precautions when leaving his home – visits to the gym, for example, could not be at predictable hours, so he would change his schedule every week. He carries a personal alarm and tracking device everywhere, and every day a police car would escort him to and from his work at Denmark’s biggest-selling daily newspaper.

Makes me think the above blogger wants to note the cartoonist’s hypocrisy…he’s not all that brave. While she also omits that this guy is being hounded by radical Muslims every day because of a cartoon.

Can we focus on the closed-mindedness here? Imagine, say, that the cartoon was about Jesus and years later the cartoonist had to have a police escort and a tracking device and a safe room.

It’s called perspective liberals. While you kvetch about his cowardice leaving his grand-daughter in the living room–something, I too, question–you also ignore the constant, relentless threat he lives under for being an artist who dared poke fun of the Religion of Peace. The real story is that a couple years later, psychotic Muslims aren’t enlightened enough to endure criticism of their religion and then reinforce all stereotypes of a barbaric religion by being barbaric. (Ya gotta admit, an axe is pretty barbaric, no?)

It’s also getting more difficult to ignore the Religion of Peace when their extremist adherents are trying to blow up planes on Christmas. Oh yes, they respect other religions as much as they endure insults to their own.

So, until Islam goes through a reformation, focus your ire where it belongs: On the psychotic people unwilling to embrace enlightened values like tolerance and love and peace. You know, all those things John Lennon liked to imagine. It’s not the Christians conducting a jihad, here. They’re making difficult choices like whether they have time to pull their five year old granddaughter into the safe room without getting them both killed by an ax-wielding Muslim or trying to not get blown up on their plane home on Christmas.

Posted in Islam, Islamofascism, Liberals, Not America, Terrorism | 1 Comment »

Jon Stewart On The Crotchbomber

Jokes are obvious, because well, the whole freaking attack was OBVIOUS:

Posted in Entertain Me, Terrorism | No Comments »

Podcast: The Take That! Wrap-Up Of Chrysler, The Crotchbomber And Poor Ben Nelson

The “crotchbomber”, Chrysler, Blackwater, Healthcare, and the fact that Ben Nelson is in serious trouble are the topics of this week’s show.

Download

You can also subscribe to this podcast via iTunes by clicking here.

Posted in Military, Podcast, Terrorism | No Comments »

The Crotch Bomber Smoking Gun: People And Policy Let This Guy Through AND There’s A Second Bomber On Board?

This story just gets worse and more distressing. First, the government failed miserably as A.J. Strata demonstrates in a must-read piece. Here’s his conclusion:

The NCTC has computer connections to State, CIA, FBI etc. They see their reports almost as they are being entered. Their databases are being updated constantly.

The other detail is devastating. Now we add to all the connections I noted above that would have easily been caught by 1990’s computer (Abdulmutallab, Yemen, Nigeria, al-Aulaqi) one more data item that clearly makes it impossible that the dots were never connected:

The U.S. also had intelligence that between August and October of this year, extremists in Yemen were talking about operations. Someone known as “the Nigerian” was mentioned, and they had a partial name — Umar Farouk.

As in Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. No computer is going to miss that one. These dots had to be ignored by a human generated policy that overrides the output of the computer. Someone had to actively dismiss the evidence – no way that it was never connected. The computers could not miss connecting this data – unless they have been faulty for nearly 10 years now and never connected a single dot in all their years of operation and testing.

Second, a lawyer and witness on this flight insists that there is a co-conspirator involved and the government is covering it up. [Once again, MSM collusion. You'd think this would be a big scoop if any of them cared to investigate.] From MLive and the passenger and lawyer Kurt Haskell [another must-read post]:

Seriously Mr. Ron Smith, how stupid do you think the American public is?

Mr. Ron Smith’s third version of the story is an absolute inplausible joke. I encourage you, Mr. Ron Smith, to debate me anytime, anywhere, and anyplace in public to let the American people see who is credible and who is not.

I ask, isn’t this the more plausible story:

1. Customs/FBI realized that they screwed up and don’t want to admit that they left flight 253 passengers on a flight with a live bomb on the runway for 20 minutes.
2. Customs/FBI realized that they screwed up and don’t want to admit that they left flight 253 passengers in customs for 1 hour with a live bomb in a carry on bag.
3. Customs/FBI realize that the man in orange points to a greater involvement then the lone wolf theory that they have been promoting.

Mr. Ron Smith I encourage you to come out of your cubicle and come up with a more plausible version number 4 of your story.”

Go read the whole thing.

Taken together, not only did the government egregiously screw up (yoo hoo? where is Hilary Clinton?), but the government is now covering up what appears to be a more extensive plot. This was not, it seems, a case of a lone bomber.

Posted in America, Terrorism | No Comments »