Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 6

Pope Benedict's Statement on Resigning

As reported by the Telegraph:

Dear Brothers,

I have convoked you to this Consistory, not only for the three canonisations, but also to communicate to you a decision of great importance for the life of the Church. After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry. I am well aware that this ministry, due to its essential spiritual nature, must be carried out not only with words and deeds, but no less with prayer and suffering. However, in today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the bark of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognise my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me. For this reason, and well aware of the seriousness of this act, with full freedom I declare that I renounce the ministry of Bishop of Rome, Successor of Saint Peter, entrusted to me by the Cardinals on 19 April 2005, in such a way, that as from 28 February 2013, at 20:00 hours, the See of Rome, the See of Saint Peter, will be vacant and a Conclave to elect the new Supreme Pontiff will have to be convoked by those whose competence it is.

Dear Brothers, I thank you most sincerely for all the love and work with which you have supported me in my ministry and I ask pardon for all my defects. And now, let us entrust the Holy Church to the care of Our Supreme Pastor, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and implore his holy Mother Mary, so that she may assist the Cardinal Fathers with her maternal solicitude, in electing a new Supreme Pontiff. With regard to myself, I wish to also devotedly serve the Holy Church of God in the future through a life dedicated to prayer.

From the Vatican, 10 February 2013

BENEDICTUS PP XVI

Pope Benedict XVI Resigns, Effective February 28

The pontiff is citing health reasons: "I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me." It is the first time a pope has stepped down in 600 years.

Other than that, not much happening . . .

The Sequester and What We're Up Against

Just read Eliana's superb post on the GOP's resort to, of all people, Bob Woodward (he of Bill Casey told me everything fame) as their secret weapon to prove that the sequester that Obama Dems are whining about was actually Obama's own proposal. It put me in of a question that is relevant to my own column this weekend, which discusses the hypocrisy entailed in Obama's embrace as president of Bush/Cheney counterterrorism policies he condemned as a candidate.

The question is this: Does the typical voter who reelected Obama -- the "low information voter," as Rush puts it -- even know what the sequester is, much less whether it matters whose idea it was?

I doubt it. 

We're seeing the same cynicism in national security policy. Obama runs around condemning Bush/Cheney/GOP with claptrap like, "We don't have to make a false choice between our security and our values"; yet, all the while, he has actually adopted an aggressive executive unilateralism that would have made President Bush and Vice President Cheney blush.

From what I see, the typical Obama voter hears and is enthralled by the former, and doesn't have a clue about the latter.

Seems like in the Beltway, Republicans still fight (at least on some things) as if the key is to be right on policy; yet, out in the culture, the millions who elect this administration, having made up their mind up after watching The View or Jon Stewart or Pimp with the Limp, either don't give a hoot about policy or are under a complete misimpression about policy because they gobble up Obama demagoguery and are indifferent to Obama action. 

I wish I knew what to do about that in the short term.

The Problems of the White Paper

My, how the worm has turned.

Seems like only yesterday that Eric Holder was inveighing against sweeping executive war powers. These were the Bush years, when Holder could readily be found caviling about such odious practices as “secret electronic surveillance against American citizens” and “detain[ing] American citizens without due process of law.” Back then, Holder declared these Bush war crimes so “needlessly abusive and unlawful” that the American people (translation: the Bush-deranged Left) were owed “a reckoning” against the officials who conjured them up.

But once he became attorney general in a Democratic administration, the ever-malleable Mr. Holder decided there was actually no problem killing American citizens without due process of law, based on intelligence gleaned from secret surveillance.

The breathtaking hypocrisy of the Obama Democrats is what screams off the pages of the “white paper” Holder’s Justice Department has served up to support the president’s use of lethal force against U.S. nationals who align with our foreign terrorist enemies. It bears remembering that Holder, like his Gitmo Bar soul mates, once volunteered his services to the enemy. At the time, he was a senior partner at a firm that was among the Lawyer Left’s most eager to provide free legal help to al-Qaeda enemy combatants in their lawsuits against the American people. Holder filed an amicus brief on behalf of Jose Padilla, an American citizen turned al-Qaeda operative who was sent to the United States by Khalid Sheikh Mohamed in 2002 to attempt a post-9/11 “second wave” of mass-murder attacks.

#ad#Just so you get the gist of where Holder was coming from, an amicus (or “friend of the court”) brief is not something a lawyer has to file on behalf of a client. Padilla already had other counsel. Holder was a party crasher, gratuitously intervening -- exploiting his status as a former Clinton deputy attorney general -- to steer the court toward his desired policy.

And that desired policy? Holder wanted terrorism relegated to the criminal-justice system, as it had been before Bush pivoted to a law-of-war paradigm. According to the pre-2009 Holder, if an enemy-combatant terrorist, particularly an American citizen, is encountered away from a traditional battlefield, the Constitution demands that he be given the rights of a criminal defendant. Executive action against him may be taken only under judicial supervision. Yes, Holder conceded, this might mean that the government will be barred from detaining and interrogating many a “dangerous terrorist.” And yes, it risks the reprise of 9/11’s slaughter of nearly 3,000 Americans. “But,” he blithely concluded, “our Nation has always been prepared to accept some risk as the price of guaranteeing that the Executive does not have arbitrary power to imprison citizens.”

Ah, but arbitrary power to kill citizens -- now, that’s a different story.

We could go on all day about chutzpah. Holder and Obama used to sneer that Bush/Cheney counterterrorism posed a “false choice” between our security and “our values.” Now, they’ve decided not only that the commander-in-chief’s war powers extend beyond “hot battlefields” to anyplace on the planet the president chooses, but also that the last thing we need is judicial oversight. After all, the white paper declaims, “matters intimately related to foreign policy and national security are rarely proper subjects for judicial intervention” and “turn on standards that defy judicial application.”

#page#Who knew? Indeed, who knew that Clarence Thomas -- Clarence Thomas -- had become Obama’s favorite Supreme Court justice? The Left used to point out gleefully that, in the critical 2004 Hamdi case, which reaffirmed that American-citizen enemy combatants may be detained without civilian due process, none of the other eight justices agreed with Thomas’s embrace of the Bush administration’s expansive take on executive war power. Now, Obama and Holder extensively quote Justice Thomas -- as if the Left hadn’t spent eight years smearing him and Bush and every national-security conservative as a Constitution-shredding monster.

#ad#It is tempting to dwell on Obama’s political posturing, on the fraud that runs through everything from Left’s condemnation of waterboarding to its precious fretting over Bush’s Gitmo “gulag” -- as opposed to the Obama graveyard. To linger on the hypocrisy, however, is to miss the big picture. That requires us to look at three things.

The first is that, on the central question, the administration is right: The commander-in-chief does have the power in wartime to use lethal force against American citizens who join with the enemy, and there is no judicial recourse. The Obama/Holder blather about “false choices” was absurd, because no choice is involved at all: “Our values” are reflected in the Constitution, which calls for due process under the prevailing circumstances, not judicial process under all circumstances. When hostilities rage, “our values” include the laws of war. Under them, enemy combatants may lawfully be killed, captured, and detained without trial, or tried by military commission.

That goes for American enemy combatants, too -- continued foot-stamping to the contrary from progressives and libertarians notwithstanding. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that American citizens who fight for the enemy may be treated like the enemy. Ever notice that the people forever insisting on judicial interventions are the first to ignore the courts when the rulings go against them?

The second big-picture issue is the substance of the Obama guidelines. Despite proceeding from a sound premise, the Justice Department white paper is dangerously misguided. Ironically, this is mostly because the administration is guilty of exactly the error the Left accused President Bush of, often unfairly: an executive imperialism that fails to respect Congress’s war powers and to seek legislative buy-in.

No credible person questions the following two propositions: (1) The president has not only the authority but the obligation to use any force necessary to repel attacks or prevent truly imminent attacks; and (2) when combat operations are authorized by Congress, which is endowed with the constitutional power to declare war, the president may use any force he judges necessary within the parameters of Congress’s authorization. In those two situations, if American citizens are killed while fighting for the enemy, there is no constitutional violation.

Nevertheless, outside these two situations, presidents can veer into lawlessness. Executive war-making is on thin ice, at best, if it exceeds Congress’s combat authorization (or if Congress has not given authorization), and if the United States is not otherwise under either attack or the imminent threat of attack. The Obama guidelines are heedless of these limitations.

The white paper suggests that, independent of congressional authorization, the president has some amorphous reservoir of authority -- created by a combination of his general Article II powers and international law (particularly the latter’s recognition of a self-defense right) -- to instigate military operations on his own. The administration would comfort us regarding this imperious claim by purporting to limit it to “imminent” attack situations, and stipulating that lethal force should be used against Americans only when capture is “infeasible.” But the guidelines provide Orwellian definitions of imminence and feasibility -- such that these are not really limitations at all.

#page#What emerges instead, at least in theory, is an unbound, unreviewable license to kill any American the commander-in-chief, acting through some unspecified subordinate, decides is dangerous.

Let’s try to be more concrete about it by considering a hypothetical based on the Libya war. Obama launched that war unilaterally: There was no congressional authorization, no threat of attack against the United States, and no vital American interest imperiled. Let’s say the president or, even worse, some unidentified subordinate decided some American mercenary in, say, northern Chad (a non-battlefield) was training non-uniformed forces to conduct covert operations in support of Qaddafi. The administration appears to take the position that the president or his mysterious subordinate could legitimately dispatch a drone to kill that American citizen.

This is plain wrong. That the Constitution, as construed by the Supreme Court, abides the wartime killing of American enemy combatants is not a bright green light. It is a reluctant allowance, a grudging resolution of a very close question. The Constitution remains, primarily, every American citizen’s protection against federal-government abuse. Foreign enemies threaten all Americans, and thus wide latitude must be granted to the governmental forces charged with defeating them. If this ends up meaning a citizen’s right to life must be denied because he threatens other American lives, the killing must be done consistent with the Constitution’s requirements. In the absence of an attack or imminent attack, that means there must be a congressional authorization. Consulting with the Security Council or the Arab League will not do.

#ad#The ongoing war against al-Qaeda and its affiliates is legitimate under the Authorization of the Use of Military Force passed by Congress in the aftermath of 9/11. But the 2001 AUMF is not the showstopper it is portrayed to be by the white paper, by administration supporters, and by the national-security Right. As I’ve argued before (see, e.g., here), it is badly in need of updating.

To be sure, the AUMF is sweeping in terms of allowing the president to target “nations, organizations or persons” without any geographical limitations -- Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen and Jose Padilla in Chicago were no less eligible for enemy-combatant treatment than Yasser Hamdi in Afghanistan. Yet the AUMF is narrower than commonly thought, and surely narrower than the Obama white paper intimates. That is because, to qualify as enemy combatants, the AUMF requires that these nations, organizations, or persons must either have been complicit in the 9/11 attacks or have harbored those who were complicit.

September 11, 2001, was a dozen years ago. Many jihadists who now threaten us did not join al-Qaeda and its affiliates until years after the attacks. In fact, some affiliates, such as the Pakistani Taliban, did not even exist on 9/11. To be sure, the AUMF went on to say that the reason Congress was authorizing combat operations was “to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” But that clause did not unmoor what is otherwise the AUMF’s literal grounding in 9/11. Certainly, the fuzzy “future attacks” language is a thin reed on which to rest the use of lethal force against Americans -- or anyone else -- who had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, even if they are jihadist savages. I doubt many Republicans would have much use for judges who construed the Constitution with the same organic grandeur that colors the standard Republican reading of the AUMF.

This brings us, finally, to the last big-picture point: There is abundant opportunity in Obama’s hypocrisy. For a dozen years, we have engaged in heated debates about Bush counterterrorism practices. After four years of watching Obama enthusiastically adopt what he once condemned, we now know Bush detractors were animated by politics, not conviction. We now know that, across a broad spectrum of Obama progressives and national-security conservatives, there is consensus about an aggressive counterterrorism model.

Though neither the civilian nor the military justice system is a comfortable fit for modern international terrorism, we have wasted years slamming the square peg into these round holes. Instead, we should have been designing a new, hybrid legal framework for the modern realities of international terrorism: the need to detain jihadists who cannot be tried under civilian due-process standards; the need effectively to interrogate jihadist prisoners to whom Geneva Convention protections for honorable combatants do not apply; the need to conduct searching, rapid-fire cross-border surveillance; the need to capture and sometimes kill enemy operatives who lurk in the shadows, far from traditional battlefields -- some of whom will inevitably be American citizens; the need to revise the AUMF to reflect the current state of the war and remove uncertainty -- or illegitimacy -- in the determination of who qualifies as an enemy combatant.

For many years, I have argued that we need a new national-security court to deal with the unique legal challenges of a war against transnational terrorists. If anything, the need is more urgent now than ever. No matter what the future of counterterrorism is, though, there needs to be congressional buy-in. President Bush could never deliver that: Democrats were too determined to smear for political purposes the strategies they abruptly embraced once they were accountable for the nation’s security. But President Obama could do it -- he could deliver plenty of Democrats. Together with the strong Republican support that is guaranteed, we could very quickly have an enduring, constitutionally sound counterterrorism framework. We could craft legislation that provides broad executive discretion but avoids the dangerous excesses of the Justice Department white paper.

All President Obama has to do is lead. All he has to have, in dealing publicly with his anti-war, anti-anti-terrorist base, is the courage of the convictions he and his attorney general manage to summon up for secret white papers.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which is published by Encounter Books.

Is Hagel Toast?

Powerline's John Hinderaker thinks former senator Chuck Hagel's nomination to be Obama's defense secretary is already dead. He may be right.

Andrew's post from last evening homes in on why. As Senator Ted Cruz pointed out in his superb questioning at the confirmation hearing (which irritated all the right people), Hagel has stonewalled the Senate regarding transcripts of his prior speeches. Hagel's propensity to say stupid things is already notorious (see, e.g., the Let Freedom Ring USA video I mentioned yesterday). It's thus hard to imagine that the substance of the speeches is the problem. No, the issue must be that Hagel has been giving speeches to, taking speaking fees from, and otherwise canoodling with what Andrew refers to as "unsavory" organizations. Two such groups might provide the coup de grace.

As John notes, Ben Shapiro has reported at the Breitbart site Big Peace that one of Hagel's funding sources is a group purportedly called "Friends of Hamas." That might make someone a good fit for president of Egypt, prime minister of Turkey, or any number of advisory posts on the White House staff. But given that being a "friend of Hamas" -- at least the kind of friend who provides material support to that terrorist organization -- is a crime in the United States, it may not be quite what the Senate is looking for in a secretary of defense.

Then there is Iran. My friend Sam Nunberg of The Legal Project alerts me that Hagel sits on the board of the Soros-supported Ploughshares Fund, a left-wing group that allegedly funds various organizations sympathetic to the mullahs' regime and, as night follows day, hostile to Israel. One such group is the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which is basically the Iranian regime's lobbyist in the U.S.

A few years back, the NIAC -- channeling its inner Lance Armstrong -- filed a bogus defamation suit against Seid Hassan Daioleslam, editor of an anti-regime group, for having the audacity to expose NIAC's coziness with the mullahs. This was a bonehead move because it gave Mr. Daioleslam's lawyers (including the Legal Project) the opportunity to exploit the searching civil discovery procedures available under federal law. Consequently, NIAC began to channel its inner Chuck Hagel by stonewalling the defendants and the court.

That evidently did not sit well with Judge John Bates of the district court in Washington, who threw out the defamation suit against NIAC and ordered sanctions for its failure to comply with discovery orders. The case was especially embarrassing for the Obama administration since, in e-mails that actually were disclosed, it became clear not only that NIAC had deep ties to the Iranian regime but that it is also an Obama fave -- one whose top official, Trita Parsi, visits the White House, consults with Valerie Jarrett, briefs Secretary of State Clinton, lectures the CIA, and so on. (See Eli Lake's report for the Washington Times.) 

Besides sitting on the board of a foundation that funds the NIAC, Hagel has had an ongoing relationship with the NIAC (and its precursor organization, the American-Iranian Council). As Ken Timmerman notes in the Washington Times, this has included giving speeches that rail against sanctions imposed to pressure Iran on its nuclear program, call for unconditional negotiations with the mullahs, etc. The NIAC, in kind, avidly supports Hagel's nomination.

Hagel's friends of the mullahs, especially if they turn out to be coupled with Friends of Hamas, may be too much for even Senate Democrats to bear. Obviously, if there were not grave concerns about Hagel's nomination, Senate Armed Services chairman Carl Levin would not have postponed the committee's vote. If he can't get Hagel approved by the committee now, it doesn't look like things are going to get better for the nominee as new information emerges in the coming days. Looks like the president better have a Plan B.

Re: Blown-up Terrorists and Dead American Nazis in Uniform

Much as I hesitate to do this, I will take slight issue with Victor on the matter of killing Americans who fight for the enemy in wartime. Let me preface this by saying I concur completely with Victor's contention that the procedures adopted by the Obama administration are lacking -- something I'll have more to say about in my weekend column. But I respectfully suggest that there is more to the context of this debate than Victor suggests. 

It is true, of course, that our jihadist enemies do not present as uniformed soldiers. There may be less to this distinction than meets the eye, though. In the debate over this subject, the most ubiquitous of the examples of Americans killed fighting for the Nazis comes from the famous Supreme Court case of Ex Parte Quirin (1942). He is Hans Haupt, one of several Nazi saboteurs who infiltrated the U.S. in 1942 by secretly landing on Long Island and Ponte Verde Beach.

The interesting thing about that for present purposes is that, once ashore, they shed their uniforms. (By the way, Judge Mukasey had a very interesting explanation of why they did this in his district court opinion in the 2002 case of another American enemy combatant, Jose Padilla. See Padilla v. Bush (SDNY 2002), Op. p. 62 & n. 12 -- link here.) When the Nazis were captured days later -- by the FBI, not the military -- they were wearing civilian clothes and not in the act of carrying out any of the terrorism they had plotted. Despite the fact that Haupt was an American and that the U.S. courts were open and functioning, FDR had them designated as enemy combatants, tried by military commission, and put to death (i.e., Haupt and five others, all German nationals, were executed; others who had cooperated were given lengthy sentences).

I agree with Victor that most of the considerations pertinent to handling a uniformed (lawful) combatant are significantly different from those involved in handling non-uniformed terrorists (unlawful combatants). There is, however, a preliminary consideration that is common and highly relevant to both. It is this: Is it permissible under our Constitution knowingly and intentionally to kill an American citizen under circumstances where Congress has not suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and where there has been no judicial determination of guilt?

That is an extremely close question. Indeed, Justice Scalia, in a forceful dissent joined by Justice Stevens in the 2004 Hamdi case, said the answer should be no and strongly suggested that Quirin (which he called "not this Court's finest hour") was wrongly decided. Nevertheless, Quirin remains the law, reaffirmed by the Hamdi majority (a plurality opinion by Justice O'Connor, with the fifth vote provided by the opinion of Justice Thomas, which is somewhat oddly recorded as a "dissent").

I take Victor as essentially addressing the practical reasons why we should have different guidelines for American unlawful enemy combatants versus American lawful enemy combatants. Still, the Nazi saboteur example will always be an apt one because the first question has to be the Constitutional question.

Let's put aside battlefield situations, where, naturally, we don't find out until after attacking that an enemy combatant killed by our forces was an American. In the situation we're concerned with here, there would be no cause to make guidelines for American enemy combatants, uniformed or terrorist, if the Constitution were construed to forbid the knowing and intentional killing of an American citizen in wartime, under circumstances where habeas corpus has not been suspended and there has been no judicial determination of guilt. 

The problem with the debate we've been having for a number of years, and the reason the Nazis keep coming up despite their obvious differences from al Qaeda, is that people on the Left and the libertarian Right make their arguments as if Quirin were not the law. But Quirin is the law.

Hagel a disaster? Let me count the ways ...

Better yet, let my friends at Let Freedom Ring USA count the ways, here.

Will the Senate Confirm a CIA Director Who Denies the Existence of What the Secretary of State Called "the Global Jihadist Threat"?

In observations conveniently made on the way out the door, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged that the United States faces "a spreading jihadist threat," led by al Qaeda. [For those who may have forgotten, that would be the jihadist network the Obama administration heretofore told us had been crushed thanks to the president's steely resolve.] Again and again, Madame Secretary told a senate committee that the administration was now gravely concerned about this growing "jihadist threat" -- worried that Syrian chemical and biological weapons could "fall into the wrong hands, jihadist hands"; worried about migrant al Qaeda operatives "who are in effect affiliates, part of the jihadist syndicate"; and worried about the "complicated set of allegiances between jihadist groups." 

Sounds like a huge national security challenge, no? Only problem is that President Obama's nominee to head the nation's premier intelligence agency denies that there is a jihadist threat.

Our enemies, John Brennan insists, "are not jihadists, for jihad is a holy struggle, an effort to purify for a legitimate purpose, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing holy or pure or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children." In fact, Brennan, the White House counterterrorism czar through the first Obama term, maintains that the president agrees with him on this point: 

President Obama [does not] see this challenge as a fight against jihadists. Describing terrorists in this way, using the legitimate term 'jihad,' which means to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal, risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve.

Brennan's confirmation hearing is today. As Steve Emerson recounts in a comprehensive post on the dreadful nomination, Brennan has repeated the trope that there is no violent jihad numerous times. In shaping Obama's national security policy, his top agenda item has been to deny the palpable nexus between Islamic doctrine and Islamist brutality, and thus to blind our intelligence community to the ideological underpinnings of the threat against our nation, the West and Israel. Say what you will about Obama's other nominations, including the hapless Chuck Hagel. Never has there been a more monumental mismatch between man and mission than Brennan and CIA director.

As I have explained here and elsewhere, Brennan's meanderings about jihad are frivolous. On their face they are silly because Islam and the West do not have a single, consensus value system. In fundamental ways, we don't agree on what a "legitimate purpose" is.

Even those who buy into the revisionist attempt to evolve the concept of jihad into a personal struggle to "purify oneself" or attain "a moral good" must, if they are being honest, concede that Muslims mean "purity" and "morality" as determined by sharia, Islam's societal framework. To sharia-compliant Muslims, "purifying" oneself or one's community might include demanding the killing of apostates and homosexuals, or demanding the suppression of speech that exposes some of the other draconian and iniquitous elements of Islamic doctrine. We in the West would regard these as morally monstrous ... but that they are sharia desiderata cannot be credibly denied. A "personal struggle" to achieve them would thus be a legitimate "jihad," even under Brennan's interpretation. 

But Brennan is also wrong. Reliance of the Traveller, the classic sharia manual endorsed by the hugely influential scholars of al-Azhar University and the  Muslim Brotherhood's American think-tank, the International Institute of Islamic Thought, flatly instructs: "Jihad means to war against non-Muslims." As Emerson's report points out, this is completely consistent with the teachings of Brotherhood icons Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. I elaborated on this theme in The Grand Jihad:

Bernard Lewis, the West’s preeminent scholar of Islam, points out that “the overwhelming majority of early authorities, . . . citing relevant passages in the Koran and in the tradition, discuss jihad in military terms.” The encyclopedic Dictionary of Islam, first published by the British missionary Thomas Patrick Hughes in 1886, defines jihad as “a religious war with those who are unbelievers in the mission of Muhammad.” So entrenched is jihad’s nexus with violence that forthright Islamophiles concede it. In The Age of Sacred Terror, for example, the former Clinton officials Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon claim that a “domestication of jihad” has transformed it into an “internal battle” for personal betterment waged through “acts of charity, good works in society, and education.”  Still, they ruefully attest that jihad grew up as “exclusively actual, physical warfare,” and that the “domestication” they perceive is a “modern-day” contrivance.

Jihad is the tenet that drives Islam's aggressive supremacism. An accurate understanding of it explains not only al Qaeda's global terrorist rampage. It gives one a firm grasp of why Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan -- not just movement jihadists but rank-and-file Muslims -- are rabid about driving Western forces out of their countries and adamant in rejecting Western institutions. It tells you why the Muslim Brotherhood government of Egypt was hellbent on imposing a sharia constitution despite both significant opposition from minorities and behind-the-scenes discouragement by Western governments from which Cairo desperately needs financial aid. Understanding jihad, understanding the ideological underpinning of the threat against the West, understanding the fact that this ideology has an unbreakable grip on the Middle East precisely because it is inextricably tied to Islam's religious elements -- this is what we need from our intelligence community. This is what enables the CIA to predict what those hostile to us will do. This is what enables us to defend ourselves and navigate a complex, dangerous world.

It is exactly what we will not get from Brennan. Not only does he deny the undeniable. He has invited Muslim supremacists to dictate counterterrorism policy, relying on Islamist experts -- whom the administration still refuses to identify -- to help the administration purge the manuals and courses used to train our national security agents of information Islamists consider offensive. Emerson's important post includes the letter Brennan wrote to Islamist activists, acceding to their demands.

Will the senate committee considering Brennan's nomination finally force the "most transparent administration in history" to disclose its Islamist advisors?

Will the senate committee confirm a man who denies the existence of what Secretary Clinton described as a growing jihadist threat?

Will the senators allow the CIA to be steered by the very incarnation of willful blindness?

Senate Republicans Arm the Brotherhood

I’m done grumbling about how President Obama is empowering America’s enemies. After all, it is not just Obama. When it comes to abetting the Muslim Brotherhood, Republicans are right there with him.

Not all of them, of course. This week, for example, Senator Rand Paul proposed an amendment that would have prohibited our government from transferring F-16 aircraft and Abrams tanks to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood–dominated government. This lunatic plan is not just an Obama initiative. It is also a GOP brainstorm -- of a piece with 2011’s Libya debacle, in which Republican leaders cheered as Obama, upon consulting with the Arab League, ignored Congress and levied war on behalf of the very jihadists who, quite predictably, have since raided Qaddafi’s arsenal, besieged northern Africa, and massacred Americans in Benghazi.

A few weeks back, the John McCain & Lindsey Graham roadshow made its way to Brotherhood Central in Cairo, with newcomer Kelly Ayotte in tow. Senator Ayotte appears to have filled the void created by Joe Lieberman’s retirement -- after all, when you have Republicans, who needs another Democrat? The former trio is best remembered for its Tripoli triumph of late 2009, when the three kicked back in the Qaddafi compound and toasted our newly cozy relations with the dictator. The bipartisan solons then winged their way home in time to second the Obama State Department’s increase in funding for the Libyan dictator’s regime. After all, they reasoned, Qaddafi was our hedge against Libya’s jihadists. As is their wont, though, the solons soon dazzled us with a 180, suddenly deciding that what we really needed to do was back Libya’s jihadists in their war against Qaddafi. The rest, as they say in Mali, is history.

#ad#So the GOP brain trust now brings this Midas touch to Egypt, rallying behind Obama’s cozy relations with the new “Islamic democracy.” That would be the Brotherhood’s rapidly unraveling sharia basket case, into which our own bankrupt government has so far sunk nearly 3 billion U.S.-taxpayer dollars, with more billions soon to come through U.S.-backed IMF loans and, yes, sophisticated U.S. weaponry. Any moment now, as it was in turbulent Libya, the ground in Egypt is certain to shift, or crater. When it does, who knows whose side the senators will have us on#...#and who knows what American enemies may be wielding that U.S. weaponry?

Senator Paul, by contrast, has three ideas that seem positively batty to the McCain gang. First, he thinks that American foreign policy ought to be premised on American national interests, not on the shifting notions of “global stability” popular at the Wilson School and the Council on Foreign Relations. Second, he suggests that when we give aid and arms to anti-American Islamists, bad things tend to happen to America. Finally, Paul believes the foundation of American foreign policy is, of all quaint things, the United States Constitution. The Framers gave Congress not merely the authority but the duty to thwart executive excess. On the international stage, that primarily means the power of the purse, which enables the people’s representatives to defund such madness as the arming of Islamic supremacists.

So Senator Paul tried to stop weapons transfer. His amendment, however, was defeated 79–19, because 23 Republican senators opted to follow the lead of McCain, Graham, and Ayotte. They joined all Senate Democrats (and a couple of nominal “independents” who are, in effect, Democrats) in voting to “table” the Paul Amendment. “Tabling” is a bit of procedural chicanery, allowing senators to defeat Paul’s amendment yet pretend to the folks back home that they didn’t actually vote “against” it.

#page#Don’t be fooled. The choice here was simple: Stand with the Muslim Brotherhood or stand with the American people. Nearly two-thirds of Senate Republicans went with the Brothers.

Let’s be clear about whom Republicans have voted to arm. In late 2010, as I detail in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, Mohammed Badi, head of the Muslim Brotherhood, called for violent jihad against the United States and Israel. The “Supreme Guide” gleefully added, “The United States is now experiencing the beginning of its end, and is heading towards its demise.” The Brotherhood took pains to post this speech on its Arabic-language website, reflecting its official position.

#ad#Badi’s sentiments would have been no surprise to anyone who had been paying attention. It had not been long, after all, since the Holy Land Foundation trial, in which the Justice Department proved that the Brotherhood regards the core mission of its U.S.-based affiliates (such organizations as CAIR, the Muslim Students Association, and the Islamic Society of North America) to be, as the Brothers themselves put it, “a grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within” by “sabotage.” Prosecutors further demonstrated that the Brotherhood’s principal activity in the U.S. since the late 1980s has been the financing and promotion of Hamas, a formally designated terrorist organization to which it is a serious federal felony to provide material support. Lo and behold, since the moment the Brotherhood took power in Egypt, promoting and legitimizing the leadership of Hamas has been at the top of its agenda.

Mohamed Morsi, a leading Brotherhood official, became Egypt’s president last summer -- just as his close associate, the aforementioned Supreme Guide, was railing that all Muslims, including rulers, must “wage jihad in Allah’s way” in order to reverse the “usurpation” of Palestine by the “murdering Zionist criminals.” In his very first public pronouncement after winning the presidency, Morsi called for the United States to release Omar Abdel Rahman. That would be the “Blind Sheikh,” who is serving a life sentence for terrorism convictions, and who has been credited by Osama bin Laden with issuing the fatwa that approved the 9/11 attacks. Al-Qaeda quite sensibly gleaned that fatwa from this statement about Americans that Abdel Rahman made following his conviction:

Muslims everywhere#...#dismember their nation, tear them apart, ruin their economy, provoke their corporations, destroy their embassies, attack their interests, sink their ships,#...#shoot down their planes, [and] kill them on land, at sea, and in the air. Kill them wherever you find them.

In addition to calling for the Blind Sheikh’s return to Egypt, where such sentiments are common, Morsi has directed the release of many terrorists who had been incarcerated during President Hosni Mubarak’s tenure -- Mubarak having had a close counterterrorism partnership with the United States. Morsi further failed to protect the American embassy from being overrun by Islamist rioters. When, after several calls from an embarrassed White House, Morsi finally dispersed the rabble-rousers, he left intact the longstanding encampment where Egyptians continue to agitate for the Blind Sheikh’s release.

Prior to his election, Morsi promised that his top imperative would be the imposition of sharia, Islam’s totalitarian legal code and societal framework. He has been true to his word, recently orchestrating the imposition of a new sharia constitution -- the heavy-handed gambit that has horrified minorities and sent Egypt reeling into its latest chaos. Sharia constitutions are apparently fine with Senator McCain these days, but as we saw in his vertiginous positions on Qaddafi, the GOP’s guru of choice is not exactly a model of consistency on this point.

In a 2011 interview with Der Spiegel, the senator declared, quite correctly, that “sharia law#...#in itself is anti-democratic -- at least as far as women are concerned.” Thus McCain then insisted that the sharia-driven Brotherhood -- which he accurately described as “a radical group” that “has been involved with other terrorist organizations” -- “should be specifically excluded from any transition government” in Egypt. Yet, now that the Brothers are the government, McCain would have us to arm them.

Meanwhile, under Morsi’s leadership, Egypt is seeing the widespread persecution of Christians and other religious minorities. In many areas, police and Islamist vigilantes now enforce sharia standards on the streets, just as they do in Saudi Arabia and Iran. And recordings recently surfaced of Morsi calling Jews the “descendants of apes and pigs” -- “blood-suckers” for whom Muslims “must not forget to nurse our children and grandchildren on hatred,” including “hatred#...#for all those who support them.” [Memo to Republicans: “Those who support them” refers to#...#the American people.]

I could go on, but as Beltway supporters of America-hating Islamists like to say, “What difference does it make?” Still, just in case it makes any difference to you, here are the Republican senators who shamefully voted to provide Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government with F-16s and Abrams tanks: Alexander, Ayotte, Barasso, Blunt, Burr, Chambliss, Coburn, Cochran, Collins, Corker, Enzi, Flake, Graham, Hatch, Hoeven, Inhofe, Isakson, Johanns, Johnson, Kirk, McCain, McConnell, Murkowski, Portman, Toomey, and Wicker.

Kudos to the 18 Republicans who joined Senator Paul in trying to stop the arming of America’s enemies: Boozman, Coats, Cornyn, Crapo, Cruz, Fischer, Grassley, Heller, Lee, Moran, Risch, Roberts, Rubio, Scott, Sessions, Shelby, Thune, and Vitter. Common sense is on their side. Sadly, history is sure to follow, and probably soon.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which is published by Encounter Books.

'First and Foremost, the SEC Is a Law-Enforcement Agency'

. . . as its website explains. That's why Mary Jo White will be an excellent fit, as my former colleague Rich Alpert explains in this post at Forbes.