Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 42

The Solyndra Fraud

The Solyndra debacle is not just Obama-style crony socialism as usual. It is a criminal fraud. That is the theory that would be guiding any competent prosecutor’s office in the investigation of a scheme that cost victims -- in this case, American taxpayers -- a fortune.

Fraud against the United States is one of the most serious felony offenses in the federal penal law. It is even more serious than another apparent Solyndra violation that has captured congressional attention: the Obama administration’s flouting of a statute designed to protect taxpayers.

#ad#Homing in on one of the several shocking aspects of the Solyndra scandal, lawmakers noted that, a few months before the “clean energy” enterprise went belly-up last week, the Obama Energy Department signed off on a sweetheart deal. In the event of bankruptcy -- the destination to which it was screamingly obvious Solyndra was headed despite the president’s injection of $535 million in federal loans -- the cozily connected private investors would be given priority over American taxpayers. In other words, when the busted company’s assets were sold off, Obama pals would recoup some of their losses, while you would be left holding the half-billion-dollar bag.

As Andrew Stiles reported here at NRO, Republicans on the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee say this arrangement ran afoul of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This law -- compassionate conservatism in green bunting -- is a monstrosity, under which Leviathan, which can’t run a post office, uses your money to pick winners and losers in the economy’s energy sector. The idea is cockamamie, but Congress did at least write in a mandate that taxpayers who fund these “investments” must be prioritized over other stakeholders. The idea is to prevent cronies from pushing ahead of the public if things go awry -- as they are wont to do when pols fancy themselves venture capitalists.

On the Energy Policy Act, the administration’s malfeasance is significant, but secondary. That’s because the act is not a penal statute. It tells the cabinet officials how to structure these “innovative technology” loans, but it provides no remedy if Congress’s directives are ignored.

The criminal law, by contrast, is not content to assume the good faith of government officials. It targets anyone -- from low-level swindlers to top elective officeholders -- who attempts to influence the issuance of government loans by making false statements; who engages in schemes to defraud the United States; or who conspires “to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof, in any manner or for any purpose.” The penalties are steep: Fraud in connection with government loans, for example, can be punished by up to 30 years in the slammer.

Although Solyndra was a private company, moreover, it was using its government loans as a springboard to go public. When the sale of securities is involved, federal law criminalizes fraudulent schemes, false statements of material fact, and statements that omit any “material fact necessary in order to make the statements made#...#not misleading.” And we’re not just talking about statements made in required SEC filings. Any statement made to deceive the market can be actionable. In 2003, for example, the Justice Department famously charged Martha Stewart with securities fraud. Among other allegations, prosecutors cited public statements she had made in press releases and at a conference for securities analysts -- statements in which she withheld damaging information in an effort to inflate the value of her corporation and its stock.

That’s exactly what President Obama did on May 26, 2010, with his Solyndra friends about to launch their initial public offering of stock. The solar-panel company’s California factory was selected as the fitting site for a presidential speech on the virtues of confiscating taxpayer billions to prop up pie-in-the-sky clean-energy businesses.

By then, the con game was already well under way. Solyndra had first tried to get Energy Act funding during the Bush administration, but had been rebuffed shortly before President Bush left office. Small wonder: Solyndra, as former hedge-fund manager Bruce Krasting concluded, was “an absolute complete disaster.” Its operating expenses, including supply costs, nearly doubled its revenue in 2009 -- and that’s without factoring in capital expenditures and other costs in what, Krasting observes, is a “low margin” industry. The chance that Solyndra would ever become profitable was essentially nonexistent, particularly given that solar-panel competitors backed by China produce energy at drastically lower prices.

Yet, as Stiles reports, within six days of Obama’s taking office, an Energy Department official acknowledged that the Solyndra “approval process” was suddenly being considered anew. Eventually, the administration made Solyndra the very first recipient of a public loan guarantee when the Energy Act program was beefed up in 2009 -- just part of nearly a trillion dollars burned through under the Obama stimulus.

#page#For a while after Solyndra tanked, the administration stonewalled the House subcommittee’s investigation, but we now know that minions in the Energy Department and the Office of Management and Budget had enormous qualms about the Solyndra loan. They realized that the company was hemorrhaging money and, even with the loan, would lack the necessary working capital to turn that equation around. Yet they caved under White House pressure to sign off in time for Vice President Joe Biden to make a ballyhooed announcement of the loan in September 2009. An OMB e-mail laments that the timing of the loan approval was driven by the politics of the announcement “rather than the other way around.”

Why so much pressure to give half a billion dollars to a doomed venture? The administration insists it had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that Solyndra’s big backers include the George Kaiser Family Foundation. No, of course not. George Kaiser, an Oklahoma oil magnate, just happens to be a major Obama fundraiser who bundled oodles in contributions for the president’s 2008 campaign. Solyndra officers and investors are said to have visited the White House no fewer than 20 times while the loan guarantee was being considered and, later, revised. Kaiser, too, made several visits -- but not to worry: Both he and administration officials deny any impropriety. You’re to believe that the White House was just turning up the heat on OMB and DOE because Solyndra seemed like such a swell investment.

#ad#Except it didn’t seem so swell to people who knew how to add and subtract, and those people weren’t all at OMB and DOE. Flush with confidence that their mega-loan from Uncle Sam would make the company attractive to private investors, Solyndra’s backers prepared to take the company public. Unfortunately, SEC rules for an initial public offering of stock require the disclosure of more than Obama speeches glowing with solar power. Companies that want access to the market have to reveal their financial condition.

In Solyndra’s case, outside auditors from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) found that condition to be dire. “The company has suffered recurring losses from operations, negative cash flows since inception, and has a net stockholders’ deficit,” the PWC accountants concluded. Even with the gigantic Obama loan, Solyndra was such a basket case that PWC found “substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”

The “going concern” language is not boilerplate. As Townhall finance maven John Ransom explains, it is a term of art to which auditors resort when there is an extraordinary need to protect themselves and the company from legal liability. Angry investors who’ve lost their shirts tend to scapegoat the loser company’s accountants. In truth, even if the accountants affixed a neon “going concern” sign to the company’s financial statements, investors would have no one but themselves to blame. But it is unusual: The language is absent from the statements of many companies that actually end up going bankrupt. Auditors reserve it for the hopeless causes -- like Solyndra.

With no alternative if they wanted to make a play for market financing, Solyndra’s backers disclosed the auditors’ bleak diagnosis in March 2010. The government had thus been aware of it for two months when President Obama made his May 26 Solyndra speech -- the speech Solyndra backers were clearly hoping would mitigate the damage.

As president, Obama had a fiduciary responsibility to be forthright about Solyndra’s grim prospects -- in speaking to the American taxpayers whose money he had redistributed, and to the American investors who were about to be solicited for even more funding. Instead, he pulled a Martha Stewart.

The president looked us in the eye and averred that, when it came to channeling public funds into private hands, “We can see the positive impacts right here at Solyndra.” He bragged that the $535 billion loan had enabled the company to build the state-of-the-art factory in which he was then speaking. He said nothing about how Solyndra was continuing to lose money -- public money -- at a catastrophic pace. Instead, he painted the brightest of pictures: 3,000 construction workers to build the thriving plant; manufacturers in 22 states building an endless stream of supplies; technicians in a dozen states constructing the advanced equipment that would make the factory hum; and Solyndra fully “expect[ing] to hire a thousand workers to manufacture solar panels and sell them across America and around the world.”

#page#Not content with that rosy portrait, the president further predicted a “ripple effect”: Solyndra would “generate business for companies throughout our country who will create jobs supplying this factory with parts and materials.” Sure it would. The auditors had scrutinized Solyndra and found it to have, from its inception, a fatally flawed business model that was hurtling toward collapse. Obama touted it as a redistribution success story that would be rippling jobs, growth, and spectacular success for the foreseeable future.

It was a breathtaking misrepresentation. Happily, it proved insufficient to dupe investors who, unlike taxpayers, get to choose where their money goes. They stacked what the administration was saying against what the PWC auditors were saying and wisely went with PWC. Solyndra had to pull its initial public offering due to lack of interest.

#ad#But fraud doesn’t have to be fully successful to be a fraud, and this one still had another chapter to go. As the IPO failed and the company inevitably sank in a sea of red ink, Solyndra’s panicked backers pleaded with the administration to restructure the loan terms -- to insulate them from their poor business judgment, allowing them to recoup some of their investment while the public took the fall.

It should go without saying that the duty of soi-disant public servants is to serve the public. In this instance, the proper course was clear. As structured, the loan gave the public first dibs on Solyndra’s assets if it collapsed, and, as we’ve seen, the law requires it. There was no good reason to contemplate a change.

In addition, as Andrew Stiles relates, OMB had figured out that there was no economic sense in restructuring: Solyndra was heading for bankruptcy anyway, and an immediate liquidation would net the government a better deal -- about $170 million better. The case for leaving things where they stood was so palpable that OMB openly feared “questions will be asked” if DOE proceeded with an unjustifiable restructuring. So, with numbing predictability, the Obama administration proceeded with an unjustifiable restructuring. In exchange for lending some of their own money and thus buying more time, Solyndra officials were given priority over taxpayers with respect to the first $75 million in the event of a bankruptcy -- the event all the insiders and government officials could see coming from the start, and that hit the rest of us like a $535 billion thunderbolt last week.

The administration’s rationalization is priceless. According to DOE officials, the restructuring was necessary “to create a situation whereby investors felt there was a value in their investment.” Of course, the value in an investment is the value created by the business in which the investment is made. Here, Solyndra had no value. Investors could be enticed only by an invalid arrangement to recoup some of their losses -- by a scheme to make the public an even bigger sap.

The word for such schemes is fraud.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Re: Gardasil and the GOP

Let me preface this by saying I think Rep. Michele Bachmann, after making a couple of worthy points, went over the top in her critique of Gov. Rick Perry on the Gardasil executive order he issued in 2007. Her language is too strident ("innocent children," "government injection," "very dangerous consequences," the "damage" caused in the body, etc.); the intimation of corruption in Perry's decision process was unwise; and I sure hope she's ready to deal with questions -- because there are certain to be lots of them -- about her allegation that, according to a mother she did not identify but was quick to quote, the vaccine caused mental retardation in one young girl. But all that said, and with due respect, I find much of Dr. Miller's post unpersuasive.

Dr. Miller does a very good job of refuting the suggestion that the vaccine is unsafe. The fact that there were no serious side effects in such extensive clinical studies is highly significant, especially in light of Rep. Bachmann's aforementioned allegation. And I am sensitive to the concerns raised by Yuval and Adam Keiper about fear-mongering on vaccines. But Dr. Miller misses the main point of the complaints lodged against Perry, and the rebuttal he offers to Bachmann's argument about infection prevention is a nonsequitur.

To take the second point first, Miller notes that Bachmann "tried to distinguish Gardasil from other required pediatric vaccines that prevent infectious diseases" (my italics). From there, he snarks that Bachmann should take note that Gardasil "prevents [most strains of HPV] infection" (his italics). But Bachmann never made any claim to the contrary.

Put aside what appear to be her overblown claims about the risks attendant to the vaccine. Bachmann is not saying Gardasil is ineffective against HPV. She is saying that people tolerate government vaccination mandates because school attendance is compulsory and diseases like mumps and Measles are infectious in the sense of being easily communicated -- one child can pass them on to the next through routine classroom interaction. It is that sort of infectiousness, not the kind Dr. Miller refers to, that is the rationale for permitting state vaccination mandates. That is, we permit what is otherwise the primacy of parents when it comes to a child's medical treatment to be overridden in this narrow area, not because the state knows best what is good for the child but because the state has a heightened interest in protecting the broader community. (See, e.g., Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website regarding immunizations: "Parents who choose not to vaccinate their own children increase the risk of disease not only for their children, but also for other children and adults throughout the entire community.") HPV, to the contrary, is a sexually transmitted condition -- I know the schools are pretty wild, but I don't think we've yet reached the point where sex is routine classroom interaction.

And it is on this point where Dr. Miller is way off base. He declares, "I am as opposed to [sic -- I think he means "as"] anyone ... to non-essential government intrusion into our lives." But it turns out he's really not. The Gardasil mandate was an unnecessary government intrusion. As Robert explains, it was not cost-effective, requiring vaccinations for every child at $360 a pop to prevent an infection that (a) may cause a usually non-fatal form of cancer in less than half a percent of women and girls, and (b) can be avoided by abstaining from sex (or, at least, unprotected sex).

Moreover, the lack of a government mandate would not mean Gardasil was unavailable. It would simply mean that parents, rather than the state, would decide whether the child should be immunized. That is, it would be up to parents to consult their doctors and buy the vaccine for their children if they chose to do so -- i.e., to borrow Robert's point, we would not be encouraging sexual promiscuity by socializing its cost. And while there's plenty of room for disagreement, a parent might well decide against the vaccine out of a conviction that it would undermine the parent's encouragement of abstinence from sex. (Personally, I would not consider that a convincing reason to refrain from having my child vaccinated, but I certainly wouldn't condemn as unreasonable a parent who came out the other way, particularly given the very low probability of infection.) 

I often joke that my mom only sent me to law school to learn how the enemy thinks. But the point of the joke is serious: the conventional wisdom that society needs to defer to legal experts whenever there is some public policy question that touches on the law is wrong and degrades our freedom. The same applies to public policy questions that involve medicine. Dr. Miller's expert opinion on the safety of Gardasil is clarifying and welcome. But his medical degree doesn't make him any more of an authoritative voice on the question of parental rights and the proper role of government than my law degree makes me.

I emphatically agree with Kevin's argument that we shouldn't much care about the views of politicians on scientific matters about which they lack competence. But, just as emphatically, I think Dr. Miller is all wet when he suggests that politicians should "keep quiet" whenever science intrudes on some public issue. A great deal of litigation involves issues of science, technology and medicine. We don't farm the cases out to expert panels. We have the experts come testify and subject themselves to cross-examination. This provides the necessary instruction for lay people on the jury to grasp the matters that are outside their ken. But it's the jurors -- the representatives of the community -- who decide the case. The same thing is true of legislation: the experts come testify, and they are liberally consulted by lawmakers, but it is Congress that writes and votes on the laws. (That is why Rep. John Conyers became a laughing stock when he mocked the suggestion that a congressman should actually read the bills rather than delegate that basic task to staff lawyers.)

Gov. Perry's Gardasil order is not trivial. Voters are entitled to weigh what it says about his small-government credentials, whether he really was chastened when the legislature overrode him, whether he grasps that this is not just a process issue, and what motivated him to do what he did. But neither is this as enormous a matter as Rep. Bachmann is making it out to be. There was, after all, an opt-out. To be sure, this was an upside-down way of doing business: It should have been an opt-in, to reflect that it is parents, not politicians, who are primarily responsible for their children's healthcare. But an opt-out is not nothing -- it's a little much to argue that parents must be trusted to make important decisions about their children's healthcare but then imply that they can't be trusted to inform themselves about an opt-out provision in a public healthcare program.

However one comes out on all this, though, most of the issues that make this episode relevant to an election do not require specialized knowledge to sort out. Rep. Bachmann will obviously be accountable for the assertions she has made, but she shouldn't have felt the need to "keep quiet" just because she lacks a medical license.

Incoherent on Afghanistan

Rich is right that Perry's answer on the Afghanistan question was incoherent, his worst moment of the night (with the possible exception of his chuckle upon being called "treasonous" by the ineffable Huntsman). And I inferred the same thing Rich did: Perry seemed to be saying it is time to pull out, carefully and responsibly. I'd cut some slack for any candidate who faltered on this question, though, because it is the Afghanistan mission that incoherent -- very hard to sound sensible about it.

We've been told the primary reason for having over 90,000 troops in Afghanistan is to prevent the terror-sponsoring Taliban from returning to power, whereupon they would give safe-haven to al Qaeda -- the situation that gave rise to 9/11. Yet, we have been ambivalent about the Taliban from the start. As I've previously recounted, the Bush administration was initially content to leave the Taliban in power -- the barbaric practices of the regime, which were frequently cited as a reason for fighting the Taliban post-invasion, were not a rationale for launching the invasion. We invaded and toppled the Taliban solely because, despite several demands, Mullah Omar refused to turn bin Laden & Co. over to us. Still, despite the Bush Doctrine decree that terror abetting regimes would be treated as the equivalent of terrorists, the Bush administration never designated the Taliban as a terrorist organization -- even though our military deemed captured Taliban fighters to be enemy combatants allied with al Qaeda terrorists. 

Moreover, when he was in command there, General Stanley McChrystal (undoubtedly with the support of his then-boss, General David Patraeus) took the position that Afghanistan was not even our war. Instead, he wrote, we were there to secure, encourage, and train the Afghan population while they built their country ("Our strategy cannot be focused on seizing terrain or destroying insurgent forces; our objective must be the population").

Lest my military friends get the wrong idea, my purpose here is not to argue the wisdom of counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy in the context of the War on Terror, or to claim that we are only nation-building in Afghanistan. As I've acknowledged before, in executing COIN, our military has continued to capture and kill a lot of jihadists. One need not be a huge fan of the McChrystal and Petraeus approach in order to appreciate the fact that it has been instrumental in preventing a reprise of 9/11.

No, my point is that the government's lack of clarity about the Taliban makes it difficult to understand the Afghan mission, and thus for people like Gov. Perry to propose next steps. Sure, beating back the resurgent Taliban was the stated rationale for President Obama's troop surge (the first 30,000-troop escalation ever to be announced in conjunction with a withdrawal date). But like the Bush administration before it, the Obama administration refuses to designate the Taliban as a terrorist organization. If we actually believe the Taliban does not promote terror, and we actually believe (as administration officials proclaim) that al Qaeda is greatly diminished from what it was in 2001, it's hard to fathom why we need to be in Afghanistan any longer. 

I have been ranting about the failure to designate the Taliban for a few years now (see, e.g.,  and ). I don't think there is any reason to believe the Taliban is any less jihadist than it has ever been -- it still supports al Qaeda affiliates and it still orchestrates mass-murder attacks. Thus I've offered the theory that the administration has refrained from applying the "terrorist" label simply because the president is anxious to negotiate an end to the war but wants to avoid being accused of negotiating with terrorists. Last year, the late Richard Holbrooke, President Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan, told CNN that the administration had concluded, in consultation with our commanders on the ground, that the war could not be won "militarily." "The Taliban is part of the fabric of recent Afghan political life," Ambassador Holbrooke elaborated, indicating that its leaders needed to be engaged politically -- not fought, much less defeated.

And so today there is this report from the Australian: The Obama administration "has given its blessing for the Taliban to be brought in from the cold with a critical step towards reconciliation." The report relates that President Obama "has endorsed  plans for the Islamist network to open political headquarters in the gulf state of Qatar by the end of the year ... so the West can begin formal peace talks with the Taliban."

Of course, it was done quietly, even as our nation marked the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and as the Taliban stepped up bombings in Afghanistan -- killing two U.S. soldiers and wounding over a hundred others in what the paper describes as "one of the bloodiest days for American forces since the US invasion 10 years ago." Qatar was picked to keep the office outside "Pakistan's sphere of influence" -- Pakistan, the Taliban's creators, having undermined previous negotiation efforts. The establishment of the office is globally significant: it marks the first international recognition of the Taliban (which refers to itself and its designs as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan) since it was ousted in 2001. That is something of an improvement in the Taliban's lot: ten years ago, when it ruled Afghanistan, it was formally recognized only by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

According to the Australian, "Western officials said the opening of the office would serve as a confidence-building measure in the lead-up to what they hope will become formal talks towards ending the war." The idea is to regard the Taliban as "a political party," just as many in the administration (and the Islamist organizations that have their ear) would like the U.S. to regard Hamas and Hezbollah -- as if putting a friendly label on jihadists will somehow change their nature. The Taliban will be represented by Tayyab Agha, who is said to be "negotiating with the personal authority of the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar." To repeat, he's the guy who wouldn't turn bin Laden over to us in 2001. We've come full circle, haven't we?

So we have 90,000 troops in Afghanistan squaring off against what the Obama administration portrays as a non-terrorist, non-enemy, political party with whom we are actively negotiating because we've already concluded that a military approach is futile ... notwithstanding that the said non-terrorist, non-enemy, political party is still using car bombs and IEDs against our forces. If Rick Perry seems incoherent on this one, he's got a lot of company.

Bachmann & Bernie

I'm disappointed to read the comments of Michele Bachmann's adviser, which Katrina posted on yesterday and Mike mentioned earlier today. I don't mind a good debate over Social Security. As Mark suggests, we need it, and the GOP should be making such a debate easier to have, not demagoguing anyone who tries to address Social Security and other entitlements. What bothers me is vapid commentary. I like Rep. Bachmann a lot, and I hate seeing an adviser make incoherent arguments on her behalf. After all, not having something thoughtful to say implies an intention to do nothing more than pander to senior citizens in Florida and South Carolina (the states the adviser took pains to mention ... and that just happen to be crucial primary states). 

In trying to differentiate Rep. Bachmann from Gov. Perry, the adviser makes the following absurd comparison: "Bernie Madoff deals with Ponzi schemes, not the grandparents of America." But in a correct analogy, Bernie Madoff would be in the role of the government, not the beneficiaries. Does the adviser seriously believe that "the grandparents of America" were not among those who depended on returns from Madoff's fraud scheme? Does the adviser think that "the grandparents of America" are not among those who were swindled in Madoff's fraud? Madoff’s victims, many of whom were ruined, are no less sympathetic because they were defrauded by a convicted fraudster instead of by elected officials who hold themselves above the fraud laws they apply to everybody else.

Perry's point was that, much like Madoff’s scheme, Social Security was designed in such a way, and has been managed in such a way, as to defraud those currently paying in, and to imperil the payment streams current and future senior citizens have been promised. I'd be interested to know with what part of that Bachmann disagrees.

There is another problem for us Bachmann admirers. A big part of her appeal involves her commitment to being, as she puts it, a "constitutional conservative" -- with great respect for states' rights and for the Framers' conception of a limited federal government. Given her emphatic support for Social Security, I'd certainly be interested in her views on its constitutionality. In fact, I’d be interested in hearing all the candidates on that point. I don't see, for example, how you could say that Social Security is a proper exercise of Congress's tax-and-spend power under the General Welfare Clause and not concede that Obamacare would also be constitutional if its individual mandate were pitched as a tax instead of a compulsory insurance contribution (a la Social Security). (As I'll try to flesh out soon, I'm a Madisonian on the General Welfare Clause -- and, up until now, I'd have bet that a Tea Partier like Michele Bachmann was one, too.)

If, in the alternative, Rep. Bachmann believes Social Security is constitutional simply because the Supreme Court has so ruled, as opposed to because the original meaning of the General Welfare Clause supports that interpretation, then there is rather less appeal to constitutional conservatism, isn't there? 

Romney: Social Security Is Like a Criminal Fraud

Mitt Romney's demagoguing of Rick Perry for calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme is just mind-boggling. Let's put aside for a moment Stanley's invaluable column on the home-page today, demonstrating that, for nearly half a century, reputable commentators across the ideological spectrum have referred to Social Security as a Ponzi scheme due to the undeniable fact that its structure is -- and has always been -- unsustainable. The fact is that, just last year, Romney himself compared social security to a fraudulent criminal enterprise.

As John McCormack recounts at TWS:

[I]n his book “No Apology: The Case For American Greatness”, which was published just last year, Romney compared those managing Social Security to criminals, saying:



“Let’s look at what would happen if someone in the private sector did a similar thing. Suppose two grandparents created a trust fund, appointed a bank as trustee, and instructed the bank to invest the proceeds of the trust fund so as to provide for their grandchildren’s education. Suppose further that the bank used the proceeds for its own purposes, so that when the grandchildren turned eighteen, there was no money for them to go to college. What would happen to the bankers responsible for misusing the money? They would go to jail. But what has happened to the people responsible for the looming bankruptcy of Social Security? They keep returning to Congress every two years.” [Emphasis in McCormack's post.] 

Social Security is a Ponzi scheme -- only worse, because Ponzi schemes are voluntary and Social Security is compulsory. Moreover, the Washington politicians who have promoted and maintained Social Security well knowing that it is a swindle -- and well knowing that there is no "trust fund" because they have raided it -- are the same Washington politicians who have prescribed federal sentencing guidelines that (a) impose life sentences on swindlers like Bernie Madoff for comparatively modest frauds, and (b) enhance the jail term of every fraud convict if his conduct -- e.g., the raiding of a trust fund by a trustee -- has violated a fiduciary duty he owed to his victims.

Under Social Security as designed, younger Americans are being forced to pay into a system based on assurances that the government fully knows to be false: they are told their compulsory payments guarantee a stream of benefits from retirement until death (in fact, it is known that there is not enough money to pay promised benefits to prospective retirees); and they are told their compulsory payments are going into a trust fund (in fact, government spends the money on other things and writes itself IOUs that Americans are on the hook to pay off).

Until five minutes ago, Romney used this system would be deemed criminal if someone in the private sector tried to pull it off. Now, he calls Perry "reckless" for saying it is criminal. I hope someone asks him what changed his mind.

9/11 In the Here and Now

The original idea for my column this weekend was a retrospective on 9/11 -- along the lines of what we've been doing at NRO for the past few days, and what other publications have similarly been doing in connection with the 10th anniversary. (I still find it hard to refer to the annual remembrance of a history-altering atrocity as an "anniversary" -- maybe Jay will give me something more suitable.)

I abandoned that idea not because it was a bad one. Many of the retrospectives have been great -- Rich's on 9/11 heroes and Michael Ledeen's on his heroic family were especially moving, and Mark's column this morning is a brilliant reflection on how we've allowed suicidal self-loathing to hijack righteous resolve. As for lessons learned, VDH admirably covered how they are so convincing that even President Obama had to adopt most of them ... after campaigning against President Bush's application of them.

So I decided, instead, that it would be better to address a clear and present danger: the ongoing effort to undermine pro-active, intelligence-based counterterrorism -- the kind of counterterrorism pioneered by the NYPD under Commissioner Ray Kelly.

A decade hence, I'd like to think we'll be commemorating the 20th anniversary of 9/11, not the 8th or 9th anniversary of something just as horrific, or worse. The only way that happens is if we persevere with what works -- if we not only learn the lessons of 9/11 but keep applying them, as NYPD does but as the Obama administration would like to stop it (and other police forces) from doing. One of those lessons, I try to explain, is that Islamist ideology is a political program, not a religion. We must stop being paralyzed by false accusations of religious bigotry.

For more, my friend Judy Miller has a terrific op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today on how the NYPD has exploited intelligence to foil some 13 plots since September 11, 2001. And while you're at the WSJ, check out James Taranto's splendid weekend interview with former attorney general Michael Mukasey, who looks back on 20 years of American responses to jihadist terror -- including presiding as a judge over some little trial back in the mid-nineties ...

Of Mafiosi and Mullahs

This was supposed to be a reflection on 9/11 and what we’ve learned in the decade since -- what we’ve done right, what we’ve done wrong. It would be foolish, though, to waste time retracing our steps when the lesson is simple and the threat that we will unlearn it is immediate and concrete. What we’ve learned is that the only protection from jihadist terror lies in good intelligence. And what we’re seeing is an attempt to re-establish pre-9/11 roadblocks to intelligence-gathering in the very place where, as 9/11 painfully proved, the threat to us is most profound.

Commissioner Ray Kelly’s police department has pioneered a counterterrorism strategy that has safeguarded New York City, the jihad’s No. 1 target, since jihadists destroyed the twin towers ten years ago tomorrow. Yet, as my column last weekend related, Kelly and the NYPD continue to be targets of an Associated Press smear campaign, bringing down the same hidebound indictment Islamist organizations and the Lawyer Left trot out against any counterterrorism strategy worth having: that it means profiling, domestic spying, and Islamophobia.

#ad#This week, that campaign continued with AP’s latest installment, wherein correspondent Adam Goldman bewails the special attention the NYPD has paid to mosques and what he preciously describes as “Muslim student groups.”

Not surprisingly, I caught some flak for contending that the AP is dutifully carrying water for the Obama administration, which has urged a strategy for combatting terrorism that is very different from the NYPD’s -- a strategy that resists even using the word “terrorism.” So I am grateful to Mr. Goldman for removing any doubt. Right on cue, he now frets that internal NYPD memoranda “appear at times at odds with the White House’s newly released policy on combatting violent extremism.” NRO readers will recognize this Obama policy as “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States,” which I outlined in both the aforementioned column and in “Losing Malmo,” another recent column on what the European forerunner of Obama’s strategy has wrought.

As Goldman puts it, Obama’s policy “discourages authorities from casting suspicion on communities or conflating strong religious views with violent extremism.” That’s an accurate reflection of how Obama fans view the president’s policy. It also brings into sharp relief two of the policy’s several flawed premises -- misconceptions that Goldman clearly shares.

First, if a threat is coming from a particular community, the police must investigate that community. At the very least, that means monitoring the enclaves that are the source of the peril. In suggesting that the threat to America is not Islamic militancy but rather police investigations that cause Muslims to feel aggrieved, President Obama has it exactly backwards. Not coincidentally, this is the domestic iteration of the administration’s wayward foreign policy, in which past American action, rather than Islamist ideology, is portrayed as the root cause of Muslim aggression.

It is not, as the administration claims and the AP parrots, a matter of the police “casting suspicion on communities.” In New York City, police have reacted as police must react to a threat of unprecedented deadliness. Of course, if one is content to wait until “violent extremism” erupts before responding, one presumably has no problem with the police remaining passive until after innocent people have been killed. But having experienced jihadist terror in a way other American cities have not, New Yorkers prefer to see their police prevent attacks. If that’s where you’re coming from, there simply is no alternative to proactive policing: gathering intelligence and interrupting terror cells before plots mature.

This is not a radical concept. It is why legislatures elected by citizens enact laws against conspiring to commit offenses and providing material support to terrorists. The point is to get police to thwart attacks, not prosecute them post facto (assuming that there are any survivors left to prosecute).

#page#What is radical is the administration’s premise: As framed by the president and attorney general Eric Holder, it is a “false choice” to posit that we must either encourage more proactive policing or be prepared to suffer more attacks. Instead, the administration insists, there’s a third option: Have the police “empower local partners” -- which is to say, have the police delegate their intelligence-gathering duties to Muslim community leaders.

The second flawed premise shared by the administration and the AP is their insistence that “strong religious views” are being unfairly equated with the promotion of “violent extremism.” In point of fact, what promotes terrorism is Islamist ideology. In the strict sense, Islamist ideology is not a religion. It is a political program. Yes, it has some spiritual elements, but its main goal is to consume our secular space: to supplant Western culture with Islamic culture and American constitutional principles with sharia, Islam’s legal and political framework.

#ad#To be sure, there is an apolitical interpretation of Islam -- a Westernized adaptation. Regrettably, it is a work in progress, no matter how many times we tell ourselves it is really mainstream and popular and comfortably consonant with Islamic scripture. In this reformist construction of Islam, adherents honor Islam’s spiritual principles but resist the insinuation of sharia tenets in civil society. That Islam is not a political program. It is a creed more consistent with religion as we understand it in the West, and no one is conflating it with “violent extremism.” What is conflated with violent extremism is Islamist ideology, for the simple reason that the latter endorses the former.

With this as background, let’s consider the AP’s sleight-of-hand. Mr. Goldman contends that the NYPD is using covert operatives “to canvas the Islamic population of America’s largest city.” This, he claims, has “put huge numbers of innocent people under scrutiny as they went about their daily lives in mosques, businesses and social groups.” This is nonsense, betraying either willful deception or a woeful grasp on how law enforcement works.

It is simply a fact that crime, particularly concerted criminal activity, tends to have cultural or ethnic commonality. Let’s put Islam aside. When the mafia was more of a force in New York City than it is today, the police and the FBI dispatched informants and undercover agents into parts of the Italian community. They were not canvassing the city’s Italian population; they were pursuing leads and collecting intelligence in what were notorious hotbeds of Cosa Nostra activity and support.

Relative to the comparatively small number of people who were eventually prosecuted, one might well say that “huge numbers of innocent people were placed under scrutiny.” “Scrutiny,” however, is a misleading term. Very few of those people were what prosecutors call “targets” of the investigation -- people virtually certain to be charged. Some were what’s known as “subjects” -- people whose activities were being investigated to determine whether they were criminally culpable. The vast majority were innocent people, neither subjects nor targets but ordinary citizens (the bank teller, the pizza-delivery guy, the witness who happened to be in the parking lot when the heroin was delivered) whom investigators necessarily came across in trying to get to the bottom of what the crooks were up to.

In the investigations on which I worked over the years, it was not unusual to have hundreds of these innocent people cross into our investigative lens. In the 1984 Pizza Connection case, which we investigated for years before finally indicting three dozen Mafiosi, it was no doubt well over a thousand. A high percentage of those people, naturally, were Italian. But in no sense were we canvassing the Italian population. We were conducting an investigation of a secret criminal organization in which Italian heritage was a membership requirement, and we were going where the evidence took us.

Islamist terrorists and the Islamist firebrands who inspire them are Muslims. They contend that they are compelled to act aggressively, and at times violently, by their ideology. (Again, I don’t think it’s accurate to call it a religion just because they say so.) They are anchored in Muslim neighborhoods, they have sympathizers in those neighborhoods, and they use mosques, Islamic community centers, and Muslim-controlled businesses to plot, recruit, raise funds, and draw other material support. You can’t investigate them or gather intelligence about their machinations without crossing paths with many innocent people, as well as not-so-innocent people, who are Muslims. That is not canvassing, profiling, or Islamophobia. It is competent police work, if the mission of the police is to prevent attacks.

#page#Goldman’s next bombshell is to report that police identified 250 mosques in the metropolitan area and whittled them down to 53 “mosques of concern.” Evidently, you are to be alarmed by the one-in-five breakdown, the suggestion that fully 20 percent of mosques are problematic.

You should be alarmed, but for the opposite reason. If Goldman is right, the police are probably low-balling. As I mentioned over the weekend, the recently published Mapping Sharia study found that four out of five American mosques -- 80 percent -- disseminate literature that endorses violent jihad. The imams in mosques that feature these materials tend to promote them. Further, over half these mosques feature guest speakers known to preach approvingly of violence.

#ad#The true number of “mosques of concern” is surely higher than the number to which the police have apparently whittled it down, perhaps by a factor of four. The only sensible conclusion is that the NYPD is bending over backwards not to target Muslims for investigation. And sure enough, Goldman concedes that most of the 53 “mosques of concern” have been “flagged for allegations of criminal activity, such as alien smuggling, financing Hamas, or money laundering.” It is precisely not a matter of NYPD’s “conflating strong religious views with violent extremism.”

In a dark tone, Goldman adds that other mosques have been scrutinized due to their “ties to Salafism” or to what is vaguely described as mere “rhetoric.” But his implication that this runs afoul of the First Amendment is meritless. To take “rhetoric” first, the direct nexus between the exhortations of Islamist imams and the commission of violence by Muslims is too well documented to call for much additional comment. There is no constitutional protection for rhetoric that incites lawlessness or that evidences seditious designs.

Regarding Salafists, Goldman naturally fails to alert the reader that they are infamous for promoting violent jihad (see my column earlier this year on the savage attacks by Salafists against Coptic Christians in Egypt). Amusingly, Goldman’s lame effort to camouflage the Salafists as extremely devout rather than extremely violent succeeds only in highlighting the dangers of sharia. He describes Salafism as “a hardline movement preaching a strict version of Islamic law.” Well, yeah#...#but what makes this “hardline” is the uncongenial fact that “strict” sharia is inextricably linked to -- all together now -- violent extremism.

Equally disingenuous is Goldman’s concern that the NYPD focused on two mosques “for having ties to Al-Azhar, the 1,000-year-old Egyptian mosque that is the pre-eminent institute of Islamic learning in the Sunni Muslim world.” Let’s assume for argument’s sake that the AP is correct and that the police had no reason other than some hazy connection to al-Azhar for giving a mosque special attention. Goldman’s rendering of al-Azhar is ludicrously incomplete.

Yes, it is the ancient seat of Sunni learning. That happens to make it the cradle and sustenance of Islamist ideology -- and, given its weighty influence in the Muslim ummah, that also makes it the chief obstacle for Islamic reformers we are supposed to be trying to help. Al-Azhar has produced such jurisprudents as the Blind Sheikh (Omar Abdel Rahman), whose authority to issue fatwas for assassinations and mass-murder plots (including the 9/11 attacks) owes solely to his status as a renowned al-Azhar scholar. Ditto Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood scholar whose fatwas have called for killing Americans in Iraq and for suicide attacks in Israel.

That some of al-Azhar’s faculty condemned the 9/11 attacks, and that the university won praise from top Bush adviser Karen Hughes, as Goldman takes pains to point out, doesn’t tell half the story. Sheikh Qaradawi condemned 9/11, too. It’s not that he and al-Azhar oppose terrorism in principle. They don’t. Indeed, al-Azhar scholars rallied to Qaradawi’s defense over the fatwa authorizing terrorist attacks against U.S. personnel in Iraq. No, al-Azhar and Qaradawi were against 9/11 for tactical reasons. The U.S. is not an Islamic country, so there was no sharia mandate to attack Americans here as there is to attack Westerners if they occupy a Muslim territory such as Iraq. When there is no mandate, Islamists decide whether violent jihad should be launched against non-Muslims based on a cost-benefit analysis, not on any conviction that killing non-Muslims is immoral. This is a close question when it comes to America -- we might call it a question on which unreasonable minds can differ.

#page#To al-Qaeda, America is the root of all evil and must be attacked whenever and wherever possible, period. The Brotherhood and al-Azhar agree with al-Qaeda’s condemnation of America’s nature, but, being more sophisticated, they also recognize that the U.S. has an unparalleled capacity to inflict damage if provoked, and is a country where Islamists (the Muslim Brotherhood’s affiliates, in particular) have been fabulously successful both at raising money for terrorists and pursuing the sharia agenda by cultivating naive politicians such as Ms. Hughes, who was hardly singular in the Bush administration in her eagerness to pander to Islamic authorities.

#ad#Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 strikes prompted the U.S. to attack and occupy Muslim countries, as well as to scrutinize and prosecute the Islamist fundraising network on which Hamas (a Muslim Brotherhood terror wing championed by al-Azhar) is dependent. To Qaradawi and al-Azhar, this made 9/11 counterproductive: a miscalculation, not a blasphemy against Islam.

On that score, it is worth bearing in mind that al-Azhar has certified Reliance of the Traveller, the classic manual of sharia. Among other gems, Reliance defines jihad as “to war against non-Muslims,” and collects Koranic verses to corroborate this interpretation (e.g., Suras 2:216 and 4:89, respectively, “Fighting is prescribed for you,” and “Slay them wherever you find them.”) The al-Azhar certification appears at the beginning of the manual, right after a similar certification from the International Institute of Islamic Thought, a Muslim Brotherhood think-tank, whose founders and leading members have been intimately connected to the Brotherhood’s promotion of Hamas, as well as to Sami al-Arian and Abdurrahman Alamoudi -- both convicted promoters of terrorism.

Finally, the AP grouses that “police also kept tabs on seven of the area’s Muslim student associations.” This attempt to suggest sinister NYPD spying on youngsters for no better reason than that they happen to be Muslims is laughable. What Goldman doesn’t tell you (but what I do recount in The Grand Jihad) is that the Muslim Students Association is the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s American infrastructure.

The MSA began in the Midwest in 1963, and there are now about 600 chapters in colleges and universities across the U.S. and Canada. Its raison d’etre is to steep students in Islamist ideology, providing a rich recruiting pool for the Brotherhood (many of whose alumni, it is worth noting, move seamlessly along to terrorist organizations). The MSA encourages mastery of the writings of Brotherhood theorists Hassan al-Banna (the Brotherhood’s founder) and Sayyid Qutb (the thinker most admired by al-Qaeda and the Blind Sheikh for demanding holy war against regimes that fail to govern in accordance with sharia). Eventually, the MSA was officially subsumed into the Brotherhood’s most important American satellite, the Islamic Society of North America. ISNA was cited as an unindicted coconspirator by the Justice Department in the 2007–08 Holy Land Foundation case because of its well-documented fund-raising activities on behalf of Hamas.

Goldman doesn’t tell you any of this. He just says the police “define” the MSA as “a university-based student group, with an Islamic focus, involved with religious and political activities.” Well, sure, if you consider Islamist ideology to be religion and the replacement of American law with sharia law to be politics. But once they are aware of its program, most people recognize the MSA as a gateway to radicalization and thus, potentially, to “violent extremism.” The problem would be if police were ignoring the MSA.

But that, of course, is not the Obama way. As I’ve noted in recent columns, the Islamist apologists on whom the Obama administration relied in crafting its strategy maintain that there is not enough evidence to figure out what radicalizes Muslim youth. This is a thinly veiled jab at the NYPD, which responsibly undertook to study radicalization in 2007. The Obama strategy is to “delink” law-enforcement efforts to prevent violence from such studies -- i.e., to pretend Islamist ideology is not a problem and to avoid offending the Muslim community leaders with whom the administration is anxious to “partner.”

Both the AP and the Obama strategy would have New York City abandon the intelligence-based counterterrorism that has worked remarkably well. Police would instead delegate their information-gathering functions to their “partners,” Muslim community leaders, many of whom harbor Islamist sympathies. Of course, these community leaders frown on traditional police investigative techniques such as the use of informants and the interrogation of arrested suspects. That is, the police would forfeit their ability to reach out beyond Islamist organizations and imams to rank-and-file Muslims -- patriotic Americans who would like to help police identify potential problems, but who need to do it quietly for fear of being ostracized as traitors. And because the Obama program anticipates that the community “partners” would train the police to be culturally sensitive, what little the cops will be allowed to observe would be seen through the prism of the community leaders’ worldview -- which is to say, sloughed off as innocuous religious and political activity.

Over time, police would learn almost nothing about what happens in communities with a history of supporting Islamists and rationalizing terrorism. Concurrently, the community leaders with whom they “partner” would become more powerful, strengthening their hand to pursue a strategy of Islamizing their enclaves without interference from the state. As Europeans will tell you, that’s how a country sprouts no-go zones, where police no longer enforce the civil law and where the society loses its sovereignty. That’s how a city gets to be Malmo.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

The New Criterion at 30

I was honored to be asked to contribute to The New Criterion's fantastic 30th anniversary edition. My essay, "The Ruler of Law" (I'll let you guess whom it's about), is posted here. But do yourselves a gigantic favor and get your hands on the whole thing. You'll be treated not only to the always sage reflections of our friend and TNC's editor, Roger Kimball, but also to stellar contributions from Jay, Derb, Kevin, DP-J, and a host of top-notch writers. Congratulations to Roger, co-editor Hilton Kramer, and TNC's staff on both their tremendous accomplishment in longevity and their ongoing elevation of our culture and politics.

How the NYPD Gets Jihad Right

‘Every conspiracy against Islam and scheming against Islam and the Muslims -- its source is America.”

“Jihad is Jihad. There is no such thing as commerce, industry, and science in jihad. This is calling things other than by its [sic] own name. If Allah says, ‘Do jihad,’ it means do jihad with the sword, with the cannon, with the grenades, and with the missile. This is Jihad. Jihad against Allah’s enemies for Allah’s cause and his word.”

“Why do we fear the word ‘terrorist’? If the terrorist is the person who defends his right, so we are terrorists.#...#The Koran mentions the words ‘to strike terror,’ therefore we don’t fear to be described with ‘terrorism.’#...#We are ordered to prepare whatever we can of power to terrorize the enemies of Islam.”

#ad#This rhetoric was not at all unusual. It was the sort of thing you’d hear on any given Friday at mosques in Brooklyn or Jersey City. Nor is there anything ostensibly criminal about it, at least according to the hash the Supreme Court has made of the First Amendment.

That wasn’t the case in the speaker’s native Egypt. There, Omar Abdel Rahman had been notorious for such fiery Friday sermons. There, the imam known as “the Blind Sheikh,” a renowned scholar of Islamic jurisprudence, had been jailed several times for inciting Muslims -- urging that they kill regime officials for allying with America and for failing to implement sharia, Islam’s legal system.

But not here, not in the land of free expression: In the United States, the authorities regarded Abdel Rahman as a respected community leader. The federal government put out its welcome mat despite his appearance on its terrorist watch lists. Federal authorities never consulted the police force responsible for protecting the New Yorkers he would attack; they just issued him a green card to work as a “religious teacher” and sent him on his way.

It was Ray Kelly, one of the great police commissioners in American history, who finally arranged to place the blind sheikh in handcuffs. This was during the summer of 1993, when Kelly was in his first go-round as NYPD commissioner.

The sheikh was holed up in a favorite New York City mosque, surrounded by his followers -- at least those of them who were not already in prison or on the lam for multiple bombing plots. As I recounted in Willful Blindness, when Attorney General Janet Reno green-lighted the arrest that we prosecutors had been seeking for weeks, it was Kelly and his savvy city cops who defused the potentially explosive situation. The NYPD spoke to people in the community, the sheikh was coaxed out of the mosque, and federal immigration agents took him into custody without incident. This was no small thing: In the two decades since, dozens of innocent people have been killed by zealots demanding his release.

What I most remember about that day is Kelly’s quiet confidence, instilling calm in a room full of NYPD cops, FBI agents, and immigration officers -- not to mention a thirtysomething government lawyer who happened to be on hand. A panicky supervisor from INS (called ICE now) groused that the sheikh’s arrest -- initially on immigration charges -- would have to wait until he could get clearance from his office. I was speechless. After all, the attorney general had already made her decision -- why would we now have to wait on a midlevel bureaucrat? Because, it turned out, INS had sent the wrong bureaucrat to the meeting, the New York supervisor instead of the guy from across the river who was in charge of the INS end of the investigation. “You don’t understand,” the supervisor muttered as he reached for a phone, “the case belongs to New Jersey.”

“Yeah,” countered Commissioner Kelly, “but the streets belong to me.”

Kelly is now in his second tour of duty as commish, and New Yorkers are extraordinarily fortunate that their streets have belonged to him for most of the decade since September 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 of our fellow citizens were murdered. You mightn’t think so, however, if all you had to go on was the hatchet-job published by the Associated Press last week.

By the AP’s lights, Kelly is running a rogue domestic-spying operation. To the contrary, the commissioner has crafted an unparalleled counterterrorism strategy. Ever mindful of civil rights and respectful of Islamic culture -- just as the police must be respectful of the variegated cultures in the Big Apple’s ethnic goulash -- Kelly has kept the world’s No. 1 terrorist target safe from mass-casualty attacks. He has managed this despite 13 known attempts -- and who knows how many others that cannot be spoken of without compromising intelligence sources.

#page#The AP hit was compiled with scads of cooperation from federal-government sources, Islamist organizations, and the Lawyer Left (fancying itself the “civil-rights community”). Its timing is no coincidence. We are approaching the tenth anniversary of 9/11, which our community-organizer-in-chief is feverishly recasting as a “community service” exhibition rather than a day of national remembrance. The AP dropped its purported bombshell hard on the heels of “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States,” Obama’s recently published strategy for countering terrorism without referring to it as “terrorism” -- a term that, as the Blind Sheikh inconveniently points out, has roots in the Koran (e.g., Sura 8:12, in which Allah instructs Muslims, “I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them”).

#ad#Make no mistake: There is a battle under way over how we should pursue national security. It is not enough to say the Left wants to move us back to a September 10 mindset -- unless you mean September 10 sometime in the mid-1970s. That was when “intelligence” became a dirty word upon revelation that the CIA and various law-enforcement agencies had gathered it against such left-wing radicals as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the Weather Underground terrorists who would later become the friends, ideological allies, and activist partners of a certain upstart Chicago pol.

The winners write the history. Thus, “domestic spying” has become That Seventies Show: the revisionist narrative the Left uses to erase the fact that it wasn’t all about cracking down on peaceful, patriotic dissent. In truth, there really were evil people who built bombs and tried to kill hundreds of Americans in an effort to foment revolution -- people like Ayers, who tartly concedes that he was “guilty as sin,” even though he ended up “free as a bird.”

The difference is that today’s threat comes from a mostly alien force inspired by a known (albeit consciously ignored) ideology rooted in fundamentalist Islam -- which, in much of the world, is mainstream Islam. Because that is so, service to the cause is convincingly sold to young Muslims as a religious duty. This not only makes jihadist recruitment easier, it also ensures that many of those disinclined to participate in violence will be open to lesser degrees of aggression: a posture of hostility toward America, hatred of Israel and of Jews, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s scheme of voluntary apartheid -- life in a closed community of believers in a Muslim enclave that is functionally independent from the state, its laws, and their enforcement by police.

Today’s threat has also systematized jihadist training. That means its terror cells are more competent by orders of magnitude than the 1960s variety. Moreover, weaponry has evolved in the last half century. It takes fewer terrorists to project more lethal force. The horrific price of missing the signals of an oncoming attack, we learned ten years ago, cannot be calculated in dollars, cents, or lives destroyed.

That is what we are up against, and that is why Ray Kelly is a godsend. A decorated veteran who led Marines in combat, Kelly gets the difference between a crime racket and a national-security challenge. He was on the front lines when the jihad first came to these shores: when the World Trade Center was bombed in February 1993 and when, within a few months, jihadists were thwarted as they conspired to carry out a string of simultaneous attacks on New York City landmarks. He realized that the terrorists had been guided by Abdel Rahman’s sermons, had successfully drawn recruits from local Islamic centers, and had been influential fixtures in the metropolitan area’s Muslim community.

After Kelly’s first stint as commissioner, President Clinton had the good sense to make him a top Treasury Department official, with a portfolio covering counterterrorism and financial intelligence. He brought that experience to a three-year tenure as the nation’s customs commissioner. The newly elected mayor Michael Bloomberg brought Kelly back as NYPD commissioner in January 2002, while the city was still in shock over 9/11 and the War on Terror overseas increased the need for vigilance at home.

Kelly knows his city a lot better than Washington does. He appreciates that not every Muslim is a suspect -- that most American Muslims are cold to the fundamentalist call and thus natural allies of law enforcement. But Kelly also grasps that Islamism is not a fringe movement, which is why cooperation with the police is fraught with risk for pro-American Muslims. It is simply a fact that our enemies have strong pockets of support in the Islamic communities.

Naturally, the AP report did not see fit to mention the findings of the Mapping Sharia project, which determined that roughly 80 percent of American mosques disseminate Islamist literature that endorses violence. The imams in these mosques tend to promote that literature. Over half of these mosques host guest lecturers known for promoting violent jihad.

#page#The Mapping Sharia study, as its authors observe, may not accurately reflect the whole of Islam in America. Many Muslims do not attend mosques, and those who do are not necessarily receptive to the interpretation of Islam the imams are pushing. The study, however, is a stark depiction of the leadership in Muslim communities. It becomes easier to understand how Islamist ideology takes root in the young. It becomes easier to see how figures the authorities portray as respected community elders -- just as the Blind Sheikh was once portrayed -- are positioned to inspire anti-Americanism and worse.

#ad#Those responsible for protecting millions of lives cannot afford to be willfully blind to this sort of information. It indicates -- just as common sense indicates, just as Ray Kelly’s experience indicates -- that you cannot have safety without intelligence. Police need to be a visible presence in neighborhoods. They also need to be an invisible presence. When there are signs of trouble, they have to have informants willing to be their eyes and ears -- meaning our eyes and ears. In Islamist hotbeds, they have to cultivate ties with pro-Western Muslims. They need to reach out not just to community leaders but to ordinary Muslims who do not want sharia enclaves, Muslims who are disposed to help police provide security but fear being ostracized as traitors if their cooperation becomes known.

Proactive, energetic, intelligence-based security is what Ray Kelly has forged. It is not an entirely new concept. It builds on Compstat, the crime-analysis and accountability system pioneered in the 1990s by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton -- a system of intelligence-based policing driven by intensive analysis of crime data. The system drove city crime down by a remarkable 77 percent, and Heather Mac Donald sagely describes it as “the most revolutionary public-sector achievement of the last quarter-century.”

In our post-9/11 reality, the imperative of crime prevention has been magnified into mass-murder prevention. Kelly has thus incorporated the tactics that have worked nationally: recruiting aides schooled in CIA intelligence operations to make police better at collecting and analyzing information, and establishing liaisons overseas with foreign police and intelligence services, recognizing that attacks inside the city are often triggered from outside that city and outside the country. But, as Kelly often emphasizes, the system operates within the rigors of law-enforcement protocols.

This is not martial law, and it is not “domestic spying.” Investigations are triggered by reasonable, articulable suspicions of criminal activity -- people are not targeted just because they are Muslims. The police are trained to be culturally sensitive and to avoid giving gratuitous offense. But, at the same time, culture is not treated as immunity from investigation. Police are duly deferential to community leaders, but they do not delegate their intelligence-gathering duties to them.

This is not the way the Obama administration wants things done. The president’s strategy warns against singling out any particular brand of “violent extremism” for special attention -- jihadist terror is not to be regarded as any more a threat to America than other sources of violence. Obama miniaturizes the threat as “al-Qa’ida’s hateful ideology” -- as if the Islamist challenge to the West were a fringe movement. He waves off concerns about Muslims’ support for Islamists with the peremptory declaration that “Muslim American communities have categorically condemned terrorism” -- as if that were an incontestable proposition or one that told the whole story.

The real threat to our security, so the theory goes, is not Muslim terrorist plots against us but our provocation of Muslims by conveying the misimpression that America is at war with Islam. Therefore, the key to security is “partnering” with the leadership in Muslim communities: Let them train the police, let them be our eyes and ears, and surely they’ll let us know if there is any cause for concern.

In fact, in 2010, a working group of Obama’s Homeland Security Advisory Council, whose recommendations form the foundation of the administration’s new strategy, took a thinly veiled shot at the NYPD’s 2007 effort to study the phenomenon of Muslim radicalization. Current understanding of the “sociology of ‘radicalization’ and ‘extremism’ is still immature,” the president’s advisers pronounced. Therefore, they decreed, we must “delink” crime-reduction efforts from studies of radicalization -- we must, that is, ignore the nexus between Islamist ideology and aggression by Muslims.

As we look across the Atlantic, we can see what happens when multi-culti governments convince themselves that security lies in abdicating sovereign responsibilities to a movement whose very goal is to split off from the sovereign. That this is done under the sweet-sounding guise of “partnering” with communities does not change the outcome. Good policing requires that hostile movements be understood as such. To be sure, keeping the peace counsels against antagonizing the movement’s adherents absent good cause. But it doesn’t mean “partnering” with them, and it cannot entail transferring law-enforcement chores to them. The police are a society’s manifestation of the determination to govern itself in accordance with its rule of law. They are there to protect and to serve, not to be passive observers of the society’s surrender.

The Blind Sheikh preached from his incendiary pulpit. His followers used their mosques to convene, to plot attacks, and to store and transfer weapons. They exploited Islamic community centers to recruit for the jihad and to advertise paramilitary training sessions. They found sympathizers in the community who would not join in forcible conduct but who were supportive -- morally, and sometimes materially. They were able to carry out attacks that required months of planning because people who might have helped the police stop them were afraid to speak up.

This menace has not gone away. What do you suppose gives us a fighting chance to protect ourselves: Ray Kelly’s NYPD or the Obama administration’s “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism”? Do we really want to mess with ten years of success?

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Re: Ruth Marcus's Phantom Fear

Beyond Ramesh's point, and to borrow from Ms. Marcus: "Imagine what would have happened in the aftermath of Dred Scott v. Sanford if the Perry rule were in place." I suppose we could play this game all day. In any event, the Supreme Court has become at least as much a political institution as a legal one -- if it were a strictly legal institution, our confirmation process would not be as heated and politicized, and there would be no demonstrations by interested partisans outside the Supreme Court building. That being the case, why shouldn't the Court be subject to a political check? My only qualm is Perry's two-thirds super-majority idea. With the practical reality of a 60-vote requirement in the Senate, I don't see why it should take two-thirds of Congress to reverse the Court when it only takes a margin of one unelected justice to reverse the Congress and the president.