If GOP candidates are looking for a way to talk about this in terms voters will get, put it this way: You look at the Obama team's views on terrorism and the law, from the top down, and then ask yourself, Are they going to protect us 24/7 . . . or not? That's one question you never had to ask about John Yoo.(emphasis added)
Listening to President Obama's speech, I could not help wondering how different this night would have been had Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's bomb not malfunctioned. Four weeks ago our country was the target of a catastrophic terrorist attack. But for the grace of God, Northwest Flight 253 would have crashed into downtown Detroit, killing thousands. Yet just a month later, it is an afterthought for this president. His only mention of the failed attack was a passing reference that he was responding with "better airline security."I'm also bothered that Iraq & Afghanistan get such short shrift from this President. I read a lot of military blogs and try and keep on top of what's happening in those places. One of the things that comes across a lot is how frustrated members of the military are with the fact that many Americans both don't know and don't seem to care about what's happening to them wherever they are.
Worse, the president's brief discussion of terrorism focused not on what he was doing to defend the country but was, rather, a vigorous defense of himself. His first words on the subject were a chastisement of those who would dare criticize his handling of terrorism, declaring that "all of us love this country" and warning his Republican critics to "put aside the schoolyard taunts about who is tough." It's all about him. No acknowledgement of how close we came to disaster or praise for the brave passengers who subdued the terrorist. No, only this message for his critics: If you question the wisdom of telling a captured terrorist "you have the right to remain silent," you are really questioning the president's patriotism and engaging in childish taunts.
The fact is, the American people have real concerns about Obama's approach to terrorism. They do question the wisdom of eliminating CIA interrogations, closing Guantanamo Bay, bringing the terrorists held there to this country, putting Khalid Shiekh Mohammed and his cohorts on trial in civilian courts, and giving captured terrorists Miranda rights after 50 minutes of questioning. Instead of acknowledging these concerns, Obama dismissed them. It was strange, defensive, arrogant -- and un-presidential.
Everyone has seen the pictures of inconsolable grief amid the coffins of Fort Hood. Only one person can resolve the confusion that let this happen: the president.
This is the president who told his attorney general to decide if the CIA officers who water-boarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be held criminally liable.
But two weeks ago, Mr. Obama met 18 coffins returned from Afghanistan. Whatever he decides about the Afghan troop deployment, what won't change is that over there or here at home, they will keep trying to kill us.
To give us better odds of protection than we had last week, President Obama should do two things: Call off the CIA investigation. Then call in the guys who didn't make the right call on Hasan and ask why not. Then, whatever set the bar too high, lower it. His "base" won't like it. So what? What he saw in Texas was worse.
in February 2008, Imad Mughniyeh, the organization's military commander and Nasrallah's close associate, was killed in a car bomb in Damascus. The assassination of the man who topped the FBI's most-wanted list prior to Osama bin Laden was a severe blow to morale, as well as to Hezbollah's strategic capabilities. Nasrallah was convinced that the Mossad was responsible, and vowed to take revenge "outside of the Israel-Lebanon arena."Read it all.
The Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency, which is also responsible for protecting the country's legations abroad, has been on high alert ever since. But as of today, Hezbollah has not exacted its revenge. This fact was a topic of discussions at a high-level secret forum of Israel's intelligence services that took place from late July to early September.
Israeli officials raised four possible reasons for Hezbollah's failure to act, all of which reflect its current weakness.
First, no replacement has been found for Mughniyeh, whose strategic brilliance, originality and powers of execution are sorely missed by Hezbollah.
Second, Israel's intelligence coverage of Iran and Hezbollah is far superior today to what it was in the past. Planned attacks, including one targeting the Israeli Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, have all been foiled. The Israeli security services have warned Israeli businessmen abroad of possible abduction attempts by Hezbollah. They also shared information with Egyptian authorities that led to the arrest of members of a Hezbollah network who intended to kill Israeli tourists in Sinai. The arrest of these operatives resulted in sharp public exchanges between Egypt, Hezbollah and its Iranian masters, when Nasrallah admitted that these, in fact, were his men.
Third, Nasrallah cannot afford to be viewed domestically as the cause of yet another retaliation against Lebanon. Any act of revenge that he contemplates needs to be carefully calibrated. On the one hand, it needs to hurt the enemy and be spectacular enough to stoke Hezbollah pride. On the other hand, it cannot be so murderous as to cause Israel to respond with force. To complicate matters further, Israel has made it clear that because Hezbollah is part of the Lebanese government, despite the fact that the party that it backed lost in the recent election, any Hezbollah action against Israel would be viewed as an action taken by the Lebanese government. Thus Israel would regard Lebanese infrastructure as a legitimate target for a military response.
Finally, there are the Iranians. Their primary focus is on proceeding with their nuclear program without unnecessary distractions. Tehran's main concern is that a terror attack that can be linked to Iran would result in the arrest of its agents overseas, who are currently procuring equipment for its uranium-enrichment centrifuges.
The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda's Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order that President Barack Obama signed that the detention center be shut down within a year.The lesson, as always: These guys aren't plain old criminals.The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Yemen's capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.
Two men released from the US "war on terror" prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba have appeared in a video posted on a jihadist website, the SITE monitoring service reported.Honestly, I don't think Obama really intends to close Gitmo--that is to say, shut down the Bush administration's "enemy combatants" designation and treat these guys as regular criminals.One of the two former inmates, a Saudi man identified as Abu Sufyan al-Azdi al-Shahri, or prisoner number 372, has been elevated to the senior ranks of Al-Qaeda in Yemen, a US counter-terrorism official told AFP.
Three other men appear in the video, including Abu al-Hareth Muhammad al-Oufi, identified as an Al-Qaeda field commander. SITE later said he was prisoner No. 333.
It didn’t take long before the apologist industry was cranked up to explain the latest terrorist outrage in Bombay. Joshua Kurlantzick at the New Republic suggested that “After years of moderation, India’s Muslims—including even some middle-class Muslims—finally may be striking back at the discrimination stacked against them.” A piece in Time chimed in by noting that “the roots of Muslim rage run deep in India, nourished by a long-held sense of injustice....” So falls into place the usual response of Western liberals to any acts of intolerant savagery committed by Muslim “militants” —that it is somehow in some way caused by those they attacked, that “Muslim rage” over their mistreatment leads Muslims to slaughter Hindus, Jews, Christians, Orthodox Russians and even thoroughly secular Europeans.(h/t Ace)...
Some intrepid, politically incorrect soul might even have the temerity to draw attention to the fact the Islamic terrorists seemed to have grievances against just about everybody, every ethnic or religious group that isn’t Muslim along with all those Muslims who refuse to fall in line with the Islamist project. Muslim terrorists have, after all, killed far more Muslims than non-Muslims in the past decade.
The sheer diversity of it all is part of the problem. There are so many rag-tag Muslim terrorist groups launching so many attacks based on such a bewildering array of grievances—infidels in the land of Mecca and Medina, the existence of Israel, disputes over Kashmir, Russian colonialism in Chechnya, etc. —that we bend ourselves into pretzels trying to define them all as understandable responses to mistreatment.
We are left to wonder why Muslims here, there and everywhere seem to be so badly mistreated and respond to such mistreatment in such drearily predictable fashion, which is to blow other people (and sometimes themselves ) up.
COUNTER-TERRORISM POLICE today rounded up hundreds of Britons suspected of membership in organizations described as “irritating” to Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The exact number was not released, but police officials said that many more are expected, “depending on the Prime Minister’s mood this morning.”For a more serious take on the very serious erosion of democracy in the UK evidenced by Brown's arrest of Damian Green, Shadow Minister for Immigration, read Roger Kimball.“Our sole purpose is to keep citizens safe from the threat of international terrorism,” said Thomas Ayckroyd, a spokesman for the Home Office. “While these detainees may all be British citizens, they were clearly engaged in treasonous acts designed to destabilize Her Majesty’s government by embarrassing, irritating, or otherwise inconveniencing the Prime Minister.”
Consider first an op-ed article in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times by Martha Nussbaum, a well-known professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago. The article was headlined “Terrorism in India has many faces.” But one face that Nussbaum fails to mention specifically is that of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Islamic terror group originating in Pakistan that seems to have been centrally involved in the attack on Mumbai.(emphasis added)This is because Nussbaum’s main concern is not explaining or curbing Islamic terror. Rather, she writes that “if, as now seems likely, last week’s terrible events in Mumbai were the work of Islamic terrorists, that’s more bad news for India’s minority Muslim population.” She deplores past acts of Hindu terror against India’s Muslims. She worries about Muslim youths being rounded up on suspicion of terrorism with little or no evidence. And she notes that this is “an analogue to the current ugly phenomenon of racial profiling in the United States.”
So jihadists kill innocents in Mumbai — and Nussbaum ends up decrying racial profiling here. Is it just that liberal academics are required to include some alleged ugly American phenomenon in everything they write?
