Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 59

Obama Gives Islamists a Walk

When the first line of defense is “Bush did it, too,” you can rest assured that there is no second line of defense. And on allegations that the Justice Department intervened to prevent the indictment of various Islamist figures and organizations, the Obama administration’s response appears to be: Bush did it, too.

According to reporting at Pajamas Media by Patrick Poole, who has tracked the Muslim Brotherhood for years, the DOJ intervention came in connection with the Holy Land Foundation case, in which federal prosecutors in Dallas proved that the Brotherhood bankrolled its Palestinian branch, the terrorist organization Hamas, during the deadly intifada against Israel. The linchpin of the Brotherhood scheme was the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), an ostensible Islamic charity through which tens of millions of dollars were funneled to jihadists overseas.

#ad#Implicated in this enterprise were various Islamist organizations in the United States that the Brotherhood identified as its partners. Several of these, including CAIR (the Council on American Islamic Relations), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), were designated by prosecutors as “unindicted coconspirators.” When the organizations predictably protested this description, federal courts rebuffed them, finding that there was ample evidence of their complicity.

The five indicted HLF defendants were convicted in 2008. According to Poole, the U.S. attorney in Dallas hoped to do a second round of prosecutions targeting the unindicted coconspirators. They were thwarted, however, by Obama political appointees at Main Justice. According to an unidentified Justice Department official who is one of Poole’s sources, this decision to quash indictments (including one against a top CAIR official) was made not for lack of evidence but due to political considerations: specifically, to promote “outreach” to Muslims (an Obama-administration priority) and to avoid embarrassing the government -- which stood to be vilified if those with whom they had cultivated relationships were shown to have supported terrorists.

The story has begun to attract attention on Capitol Hill. Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, has already fired off a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, demanding an explanation. Not surprisingly, the Obama administration is fighting back. Its tack, however, does not appear to be denial of the allegations (it has, in fact, been stonewalling efforts by Poole and Pajamas to discover the paper trail). Instead, the response is: Bush did it, too.

Sure enough, in Politico on Tuesday, Josh Gerstein reported that in 2004 -- on the front end of the HLF case, years before it was tried -- the Dallas prosecutors wanted to include CAIR and some of the relevant Islamist organizations and their members in the indictment. Bush Justice Department officials, however, are said by Gerstein’s source (who is unidentified but described as “knowledgeable”) to have put the kibosh on the plan. From this fact, Obama apologists claim that there was precedent to guide Mr. Holder’s minions in declining prosecution six years later, and that criticism of them for having done so is a partisan political attack.

That’s not going to cut it.

To begin with, there is nothing partisan about the claim that the Obama Justice Department made a political decision in declining to prosecute. “Political” in this context simply means that the Justice Department made a decision based on considerations extraneous to the law and facts of the case -- such as service to an agenda of cultivating Islamist organizations.

Administrations of both parties, going back to the Clinton era, have been guilty at times of elevating Islamic outreach over prudent national security. Critics of the Obama administration’s practice in this regard were also among the loudest critics of the Bush administration’s outreach efforts. That includes me. Though generally supportive of Bush counterterrorism policies, Gerstein fairly describes my National Review columns and my books (Willful Blindness and The Grand Jihad) as “withering” when it comes to Muslim outreach, regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats were reaching out.

But partisanship aside, there are several reasons the Obama administration’s solicitude toward Islamists is even more alarming than prior episodes, inexcusable though they were.

1. In his 2009 Cairo speech, President Obama falsely claimed that the ability of Muslims to contribute to charity had been impeded by U.S. legal restrictions. There are no legal impediments to charitable giving that single out Muslims. Instead, there are laws that prohibit material support to terrorism. These laws, which apply to terrorism committed by any group, are applied most often to Muslims -- because most anti-American terrorism is carried out by Islamists. And the device most often used to route support to terrorist organizations is the charitable front: outfits such as HLF that are ostensibly charities but actually serve as piggy banks for jihadists.

#page#Consequently, the only way to ease the purported restrictions on Islamic charitable giving, as the president pledged to do in Cairo, is to stop enforcing the material-support laws in cases involving Muslim charities. If that were being done, it would severely compromise national security, as attested by the fact that material-support charges have become a staple of terrorism prosecutions since 9/11. Say what you will about Bush-era Muslim outreach, the Bush Justice Department did authorize the HLF case. The pressing question is whether the Obama administration has put guidelines in place -- formally or informally -- that prevent cases like HLF from being pursued at all. On that score, not only have the HLF unindicted coconspirators been spared, there has been a noticeable drop-off in enforcement action against Islamic charities overall. Does anyone really think they all stopped supporting Hamas, al-Qaeda, and the rest once Obama was inaugurated?

#ad#2. Whatever may have been the state of play in 2004 when the Bush Justice Department reportedly refused to indict CAIR and other coconspirators, a great deal has changed since then. To begin with, the Muslim Brotherhood’s American enterprise -- which involved not only the support of Hamas but also a plot to destroy America from within with the assistance of its Islamist partner organizations -- is no longer just an allegation. It has been proved in court. Defendants were convicted and given severe sentences, and the Justice Department duly decorated the prosecutors with its highest honors for their valuable contribution to our national security. Thus, common sense says any person or organization provably complicit in the conspiracy -- a conspiracy to undermine our national security -- warrants prosecution.

Moreover, since 2004, federal courts have ruled that the government had ample basis for describing groups like CAIR, ISNA, and NAIT as unindicted coconspirators. And that conclusion was based just on the evidence presented during the HLF litigation. The world has not stood still since then. The investigation has continued and, as Josh Gerstein notes, a federal grand jury acquired a trove of internal CAIR records in 2009 from David Gaubatz, a former military-intelligence officer who, along with investigative journalist Paul Sperry, wrote Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America, a book about how Gaubatz’s son, Chris, infiltrated CAIR. This may explain why, according to Poole’s source, the Justice Department still has “boxes and boxes of stuff [i.e., evidence] that has never even been translated” and retains “a mountain of evidence against all these groups [i.e., the unindicted coconspirators] that was never used during the Holy Land trial, and it’s damning. We’ve got them on wiretaps.”

If the Bush Justice Department made a bad decision in 2004, that’s no reason to repeat it, especially given that Obama ran as the anti-Bush. But whatever decision the Bush Justice Department may have made seven years ago, it cannot be a precedent for a situation that now involves significantly different facts.

3. Holder has made a great show of championing the effectiveness of the civilian courts as a counterterrorism tool. In reality, as I’ve argued before, he has misrepresented his critics. No serious person has ever suggested that the civilian prosecution of terrorism cases is not vital to our national security. The contention, instead, is that alien enemy combatants should not be given the advantages of civilian due process during wartime. As for all other types of terrorism cases, national-security conservatives and most Americans would like to see more civilian terrorism cases, not fewer.

In particular, we want to see more material-support cases. The material-support statutes enable investigators to disrupt terror cells in their infancy, before their atrocious schemes can gather resources and momentum. They are vital to any counterterrorism strategy that seeks to prevent terrorist attacks from happening -- in contrast to the pre-9/11 approach, which supposed it sufficient deterrence to prosecute terrorists after they had struck and people had been killed.

#page#Rather than dithering for two years over whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should get a military commission or civilian trial, wouldn’t it be preferable for the Justice Department to prove the seriousness of the attorney general’s claim that civilian prosecutions improve our security? Holder could do that by redoubling the department’s efforts on the cases everyone (except perhaps President Obama) agrees DOJ should be doing: provable material-support cases against Islamist organizations that have used charitable fronts to underwrite terrorists.

#ad#4. Finally: There is willful blindness, and then there is embracing the enemy. It was wrong for the Bush administration, and the Clinton administration before it, to coddle Islamists under the harebrained theory that this outreach somehow improves our security. In fact, the coddling empowers Islamists to infiltrate our agencies, and the prestige it gives organizations such as CAIR and ISNA makes the work of true Muslim moderates all the more difficult. But however wayward those Bush and Clinton policies may have been, Obama’s policies create a greater peril.

Obama-administration officials have airbrushed the Muslim Brotherhood, portraying fundamentalist radicals who seek to vanquish the West as “largely secular” “moderates” with whom our government should be working cooperatively. The president invited the Brotherhood to his Cairo speech, even though it was at the time a banned organization in Egypt -- and even though only a few months earlier the HLF trial proved the existence of a Brotherhood plot to sabotage our country while promoting Hamas’s mission to destroy Israel.

That sabotage saliently involved Islamist organizations in the United States, such as ISNA. In 2008, the Justice Department under the Bush administration was portraying ISNA as a coconspirator in a terror-support plot and demonstrating that it had helped set up the HLF. In 2009, the Obama administration was dispatching Valerie Jarrett, one of the president’s closest advisers, to give the keynote address at ISNA’s annual convention.

There’s no “Bush did it, too” defense to that one.

—  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.

A 'Political' Agenda Isn't Necessarily a 'Partisan' Agenda

At Politico this morning, Josh Gerstein picks up on the story I've been talking about for a few days here -- based on Patrick Poole's reporting -- that political appointees in the Obama administration intervened to prevent prosecution of Islamist organizations and some of their members (like CAIR's Omar Ahmad) after those organizations/members had been shown to be coconspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Josh reports that the Bush Justice Department similarly intervened in 2004, when at least some of the prosecutors (in Dallas) wanted to include some of these organizations in the HLF indictment. He says the disclosure of the Bush DOJ's decision is 

noteworthy because some conservatives have alleged in recent days that a Justice Department decision last year to decline prosecution of CAIR, co-founder Omar Ahmad, and others was motivated by politics and a desire to preserve outreach efforts to U.S. Muslim groups. [Emphasis added.]

I was interviewed at some length for the Politico report, and I think it is well done. But here, I think, Josh is being redundant and, consequently, confusing the meaning of "politics" in this context.

Coddling Islamists is not a political issue in the sense of Republican administrations having one position on it and Democratic administrations another. What makes a decision not to prosecute someone "political" is that it is done for reasons extraneous to the evidence and the law. The political goal in this instance was precisely "to preserve outreach efforts to U.S. Muslim groups." Both parties are guilty of it, and I never said otherwise -- in fact, as Gerstein notes, I have been a "withering" critic of the Bush and Clinton administrations when it comes to coddling Islamists.

 In any event, more on this in tomorrow's column.

A "political" agenda isn't necessarily a "partisan" agenda

At Politico this morning, Josh Gerstein picks up on the story I've been talking about for a few days here -- based on Patrick Poole's reporting -- that political appointees in the Obama administration intervened to prevent prosecution of Islamist organizations and some of their members (like CAIR's Omar Ahmad) after those organizations/members had been shown to be coconspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Josh reports that the Bush Justice Department similarly intervened in 2004, when at least some of the prosecutors (in Dallas) wanted to include some of these organizations in the HLF indictment. He says the disclosure of the Bush DOJ's decision is 

noteworthy because some conservatives have alleged in recent days that a Justice Department decision last year to decline prosecution of CAIR, co-founder Omar Ahmad, and others was motivated by politics and a desire to preserve outreach efforts to U.S. Muslim groups. [Emphasis added.]

I was interviewed at some length for the Politico report, and I think it is well done. But here, I think, Josh is being redundant and, consequently, confusing the meaning of "politics" in this context.

Coddling Islamists is not a political issue in the sense of Republican administrations having one position on it and Democratic administrations another. What makes a decision not to prosecute someone "political" is that it is done for reasons extraneous to the evidence and the law. The political goal in this instance was precisely "to preserve outreach efforts to U.S. Muslim groups." Both parties are guilty of it, and I never said otherwise -- in fact, as Gerstein notes, I have been a "withering" critic of the Bush and Clinton administrations when it comes to coddling Islamists.

 In any event, more on this in tomorrow's column.

Sanity Prevails in Uighurs Case

The Supreme Court has refused to consider an appeal by the Uighurs -- five of the Chinese Muslims held at Gitmo who were determined by the military not to be enemy combatants despite having trained in al-Qaeda camps. The men were claiming a right to be resettled in the United States. A federal district judge in Washington had ruled in their favor, but his decision was reversed by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in a well-reasoned decision written by Judge Raymond Randolph (which I previously discussed, here). The Supreme Court's refusal to hear the case lets stand Judge Randolph's decision.

This is certainly the right result. The framers did not intend a national-security role for the courts -- they believed the most important decisions made by the body politic, those that affect the security of the nation, ought to be made by public officials who are politically accountable to the people whose lives are at stake. In its wisdom, Congress -- prodded by the Supreme Court -- has given the courts power to review the military's wartime determination that captured detainees are properly held as "enemy combatants." That grant of authority must be construed narrowly: The power to decide who is a combatant does not imply the power to decide what happens to detainees found not to be combatants.

It is up to Congress to determine who qualifies for admission into the U.S. Congress has wisely barred admission to aliens who have either been members of terrorist organizations or trained in terrorist camps. That means our government ends up holding some aliens who have (strangely) been found not to be combatants but who do not qualify for entry into the U.S.

With respect for detainees in that limbo, it is up to the executive branch -- through the conduct of diplomacy -- to repatriate alien detainees (or find countries willing to take them if, like the Uighurs, they can't be returned to their native country due to treaty restrictions). There is no reason to believe the executive branch is not trying in good faith to find countries willing to take the detainees -- as it is, we are transferring too many dangerous detainees who should remain in custody, and new homes in Bermuda, Palau, and elsewhere were in fact found for a number of the Uighurs.

Under these circumstances, the courts should be content to do only what Congress has tasked them to do -- viz., review the validity of the aliens' "enemy combatant" status. The delicate political work of relocating the prisoners ought to be left to the political branches.

Re: re: Okay, I'll Ask

I appreciate the input from Dan and Steve.

Steve, I'm afraid either I wasn't clear enough or you misread me. I was raising a question about the timing of the downgrade warning, and about who is trying to shape the narrative. I agree with you and Des Lachman that the downgrade warning is a good thing in the long run. It was also inevitable. The cliff we're going off has to be addressed, and anything that can nudge us in that direction before it's too late is a positive.

Moreover, you describe "the Republican argument that something has to change right now." That argument is surely right, but it sidesteps the issue I raised. One can certainly agree that something has to change right now and disagree about whether that something has to include raising the debt ceiling.

I keep hearing Republican leaders and conservative pundits say both that the debt ceiling has to be raised and that this step must be accompanied by real spending reforms. I'm convinced that the latter is true, but not the former. (FWIW, I'm not beyond convincing on the debt ceiling, but I have not found the arguments made so far very compelling.) But for purposes of our present discussion, the point is that the S&P move could be helpful to both Democrats who want the debt ceiling raised and Republicans who want real changes in spending right now. Indeed, that's clear from the remarks of Majority Leader Eric Cantor, excerpted in Dan's post. Cantor is essentially saying that the GOP will increase the debt limit, but will demand a steep price for doing so.

This, I'd suggest, duplicates the tactical error Pete Kirsanow highlighted in the budget battle, wherein Republicans took their main weapon -- a government shutdown -- off the table. Here, too, by signaling that they've already accepted the need to raise the debt limit, Republicans are ensuring that the price Rep. Cantor & Co. hope to exact will not be as steep.

Rep. Peter King Seeks Answers on DOJ Decision Not to Prosecute Islamists

House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King has fired off a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, demanding answers about why political appointees in the Obama Justice Department stopped efforts to prosecute Islamist groups shown by the evidence at the Holy Land Foundation case to have been complicit in the Muslim Brotherhood-driven conspiracy to support Hamas during the Intifada.

In the letter, which has now been posted on the Committee's website, Rep. King says he has learned

that the decision not to seek indictments of the Council on American Islamic Relations (“CAIR”) and its co-founder Omar Ahmad, the Islamic Society of North America (“ISNA”), and the North American Islamic Trust (“NAIT”), was usurped by high-ranking officials at Department of Justice headquarters over the vehement and stated objections of special agents and supervisors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as the prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Dallas, who had investigated and successfully prosecuted the Holy Land Foundation case. Their opposition to this decision raises serious doubt  that the decision not to prosecute was a valid exercise of prosecutorial discretion. 

As Patrick Poole has noted, the Justice Department has stonewalled him and Pajamas Media in their attempts to uncover details of DOJ's decision to decline prosecution. Chairman King, however, observes that the public record tells us there is considerable proof already known about these groups. As he reminds AG Holder, 

in a previously sealed Memorandum Opinion Order of July 1, 2009, United States District Judge Jorge A. Solis declined CAIR, ISNA and NAIT’s August 14, 2007 and June 18, 2008 requests to strike their names from the United States Attorney’s list of unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation case.  Judge Solis found that the “Government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA and NAIT with [the Holy Land Foundation, “HLF”], the Islamic Association for Palestine (“IAP” [ACM -- IAP was another Muslim Brotherhood tentacle]), and with Hamas.” The Court found that the evidence was “sufficient to show the association of these entities with HLF, IAP, and Hamas. Thus, maintaining the names of the entities on the List is appropriate in light of the evidence proffered by the Government” (citation omitted). At minimum, FBI testimony established that Mr. Ahmad [i.e., Omar Ahmad, the top CAIR official whose indictment DOJ is reported to have prevented] attended a meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in which participants discussed how they could support Hamas, including by raising funds for this terrorist group. NAIT was similarly unsuccessful in its subsequent request to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to have its name removed from the list of co-conspirators. 

Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the Department of State since October 9, 1997, and its status was reconfirmed by the most recent annual report of the National Counterterrorism Center, issued April 30, 2010[.] Hamas shamefully conducts cowardly suicide bombings against civilian targets inside Israel. Hamas also, between 2008 and 2009, conducted 2,614 indiscriminate rocket and mortar attacks upon residential areas in that country, an ally of the United States.  According to the State Department, Hamas finances its terrorist activities “through state sponsors of terrorism Iran and Syria, and fundraising networks in the Arabian Peninsula, Europe, the Middle East, [and] the United States” (emphasis added). It raises the most serious question for the Justice Department to decline to even attempt to prosecute individuals and organizations, accused by a US Attorney and found by a federal judge, to have a nexus with fundraising for an organization which conducts terror attacks upon civilians.

King specifically asks why DOJ declined to prosecute the unindicted coconspirators, who made the final decision not to prosecute, and whether the White House had input in that decision. These are important questions, for sure, but King's Committee should also be pressing the Justice Department on what communications it has had with Islamic organizations regarding decisions about terrorism support prosecutions. Moreover, apropos what I discussed in my weekend column, the Committee should ascertain what policies DOJ and the Obama administration have put in place to ease what President Obama claimed were restrictions on Muslim charitable giving. (As I argue in the column, since there are no restrictions on Muslim charitable giving in U.S. law, the only thing the president could have been talking about is cutting back on the enforcement of federal laws that prohibit material support to terrorist organizations -- which are well known to use Islamic charities as fronts for the transfer of money to terrorists.) 

It's a welcome development that Congress is taking an interest in this. It is also no surprise that, again, it's Pete King leading the charge -- knowing that he will be vilified for doing so by the Justice Department's favorite Islamists.

Okay, I'll Ask

Question for our economic gurus from the resident conspiracy theorist (or, at least, former prosecutor who doesn't believe in coincidences). What is the chance that the timing of S&P's foreshadowing of a downgrading of the U.S. triple-A rating is intended to prejudice the outcome of the debate on raising the debt limit? That is, is someone trying to put Democrats in a position to argue, "See, even the mere suggestion that our credit rating might be downgraded roiled the markets. How can you possibly suggest that we don't raise the debt ceiling? It's the only way to assure the market and our creditors that the U.S. will always honor its debts."

Mind you, I do not believe raising the debt ceiling is the only way to make those assurances. I personally think not raising the debt ceiling, and arranging our payments to ensure that our creditors get paid in full while we reduce other spending, would be the best way to show we understand the importance of being financially responsible, which in turn would ease the anxiety of the market. But I am just wondering whether today's S&P news is something that would have happened today irrespective of the debt ceiling controversy or whether we are seeing an effort to shape the outcome of that controversy.

Obama & the Muslim Brotherhood, continued ...

My column this weekend was about the Obama administration's infatuation with the Muslim Brotherhood -- an infatuation that flies under the lunatic banner of "Islamic Outreach." I've often wondered what would have happened if, when I was a young prosecutor, I had gone into Rudy Giuliani's office and said, "Y'know boss, I really think we ought to bring Carlo Gambino in here for a meeting and see if we can't work this thing out -- maybe get his views on what our agents could be doing better, try to understand his grievances." I don't need to wonder long -- I'd have been looking for a new job the next day. But that was then. Now, alas, the "outreach" crowd is running the asylum -- and we're reaching out not to mobsters and their apologists but to the agents of organizations that want to destroy the West.

In the column, I rehearse Patrick Poole's revelations from last week that  political appointees in the Obama Justice Department quashed plans to indict a top official of CAIR (the Council on American Islamic Relations) and other Islamist groups and activists who had been designated by the U.S. attorney's office in Dallas as unindicted coconspirators in the Muslim Brotherhood's Hamas financing scheme -- an enterprise that sent tens of millions of dollars to Palestinian jihadists during the Intifada.

Pat's reporting (at Pajamas) relies on a high-ranking DOJ official. He interviewed that official, on condition of anonymity, for six hours. Today, Pat reports additional revelations, focusing on how the Obama administration's commitment to outreach -- particularly by the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security -- continues to jeopardize active terrorism investigations. The DOJ official points out that the delusion that our security jihadist violence is improved by reaching out to Islamists did not start with the Obama administration, but it has picked up steam:

[W]e’re having countless meetings from the Cabinet level on down with groups and individuals that we know are bad guys and who we’ve repeatedly said in court are actively working to support terrorist groups overseas. We even had [FBI General Counsel] Valerie Caproni meeting regularly with these Hamas guys to get their guidance. What advice do you think they were giving her? And she knew exactly who she was dealing with. It was the FBI who went into federal court and said that CAIR is Hamas. . . .

We say publicly that we don’t have an official relationship, but CAIR still has most of the staff in [Attorney General Eric] Holder and [FBI Director Robert] Mueller’s offices on speed dial. Don’t think for a minute that we stopped dealing with them. . . .

Now think for a minute about what we’re doing in any other context. Thirty years ago we didn’t have government liaisons to the IRA. The FBI doesn’t have an interfaith outreach to the Mafia. Janet Napolitano doesn’t sit down and have lunch meetings with the Mexican drug cartels. And we don’t appoint members of the Crips and Bloods to our advisory boards on gangs. Well, not yet, at least [laughs]. . . . [B]ut we have been allowing the bad guys to dictate our national policy on terrorism since the World Trade Center bombing [in 1993].

Let’s not forget that during the Clinton administration we had one of al-Qaeda’s top operatives in America — Abdurahman Alamoudi — organizing iftar dinners at the White House! The same guy who stood beside President Bush right after 9/11. Two years later he’s in prison, but his people are still popping up all over Washington. Then we had [CAIR Executive Director] Nihad Awad advising Al Gore’s aviation security commission back in the late 90s. We said absolutely nothing even though we had him on our wiretaps five years before at a major Hamas meeting in Philadelphia. Nobody from DOJ or the FBI said a goddamn word because CAIR was advising every single federal agency dealing with terrorism at the time. We wouldn’t have these problems if we had cut them off then and there.

As a concrete recent example of how outreach programs undermine investigations, the DOJ official pointed to the Minnesota probe involving young Somali men who went missing because . . . they were recruited by imams at various mosques to join al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-linked terror organization that seeks to establish a sharia state on the east coast of Africa. The DOJ official points out that the imams doing the recruiting included the government's "outreach partners" -- and, as Pat observes, testimony at Rep. Peter King's hearing on radicalization confirmed that community Muslim leaders and CAIR were intimidating the families of missing Somali men to prevent them from cooperating with the FBI.

The DOJ official expressed great frustration that the ensuing investigations produced charges only against low-level players, leaving "the imams who recruited these kids and sent them to fight and die" untouched. But worse, the source says, the government is "still working with these guys" . . .  and playing DHS for idiots:

About two months after all these kids disappear, the Al-Shabaab imams from all over the country get together at a meeting in Ohio, including the Minneapolis imams we’re looking at. Do we wiretap the meeting? Of course not. Instead, a representative for the imams convinces some dimwit attorney from Homeland Security Civil Rights division to come talk at their meeting about outreach. And so they let this guy talk for about ten minutes, then he’s quickly ushered out of the building so they can get down to business. This gives them perfect cover. “Well we can’t be having a terrorist meeting because we had Homeland Security here!”

And can you guess what happened to the imam’s lackey who arranged for Homeland Security to be at that meeting? He’s now one of [Homeland Security Secretary] Napolitano’s senior advisors and running all of their Somali outreach! They gave this guy a security clearance! I’m not f***ing kidding you! If anyone wants to understand how utterly insane our outreach policy is they should start right there.

Finally, on the depth and danger of Islamist penetration of our national-security apparatus:

Look, I have to admit that these guys are evil, but they’re absolutely brilliant. They are so inside our decision-making process they will always be twenty steps ahead of us. . . . [F]or or us to return to some semblance of sanity we have got to stop relying on the bad guys to make our counterterrorism policy. And we damn well have to stop hiring these people and putting them in charge of outreach.

We also need to get rid of all these supposed outside experts. Four years ago a bunch of these academic idiots were telling us that Al-Shabaab was a nationalist organization that was only concerned with liberating Somalia from U.S.-backed foreign occupation and there was nothing to worry about. Does anyone still believe that? I mean we just had that Somali kid from Portland [Mohamed Osman Mohamud] try to set off a bomb in the middle of a Christmas celebration that would have killed hundreds of people. The [FBI] ran a solid operation on that one, but they aren’t going to be able to catch them all.

And when the day comes that we have dead Americans lying in our streets, you know what we’re going to hear from these experts? We need more outreach! I guarantee it! And they’ll get huge grants from DOJ, FBI, and DHS to tell us that.

Yup.

The Grand Jihad in Beantown

... or, at least, in nearby Stoughton. Last week, my friend, Rabbi Jon Hausman, hosted me for a speech about The Grand Jihad at Temple Ahavath Torah. The Rabbi has creataed a real oasis in the desert of politically correct gas-baggery, which he calls a "Fremont Forum for Free Thinkers," and I was honored to join the roster of his guest speakers, who have included Mark Steyn, Dick Morris, Frank Gaffney, Geert Wilders, Bat Ye'or, David Littman, Andrew Bostom, and several others.

At his site, "Canary in the Coal Mine," Rabbi Jon has posted video from the speech. It's here. 

The Grand Jihad in Beantown

... or, at least, in nearby Stoughton. Last week, my friend, Rabbi Jon Hausman, hosted me for a speech about The Grand Jihad at Temple Ahavath Torah. The Rabbi has creataed a real oasis in the desert of politically correct gas-baggery, which he calls a "Fremont Forum for Free Thinkers," and I was honored to join the roster of his guest speakers, who have included Mark Steyn, Dick Morris, Frank Gaffney, Geert Wilders, Bat Ye'or, David Littman, Andrew Bostom, and several others.

At his site, "Canary in the Coal Mine," Rabbi Jon has posted video from the speech. It's here.