9-11 Its Aftermath, Eleven Years On

On September 11, 2001 al Qaeda, a group of Wahhabi Islamists led by Osama bin Laden, managed the worst foreign attack ever on American soil ever. Using passenger jets as weapons of mass slaughter, they killied nearly 3,000 innocent men, women and children. The attack was a surprise to most Americans. Few realized, just the day before, on September 10, 2001, the nature of the threat against us rising in the Middle East, nor, for that matter, that such a threat existed.

Since 9-11, we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and lost the lives of thousands of American fighting men and women in what was once known as the "war on terror," a term Obama later sanitized to "overseas contingency operations." Between September 11, 2001 and today, we drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan, though they have since mounted a partial comeback. We drove the Ba'athits from power in Iraq as part of a war of choice to try to bring democracy and moderation to the Middle East. We rid the world of many an evil man, either by capture of death, such as Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Abu Musab al Zarqawi and Saddam Hussein. We have kept America safe from any large scale terror attacks. And, in an act of great symbolic importance, we brought justice to Osama bin Laden. He sleeps with the fishes.

So are we safer today, eleven years on from 9-11? We as a nation certainly seem to feel so. Washington today will be "business as usual," according to Dana Milbank. There will be a smattering of memorial services in Washington, but, Milbank tells us, that "the day that changed the nation is becoming more and more ordinary . . . Sept. 11, 2001 is on its way to joining Dec. 7, 1941 — more historical, less raw." But it is very much a false sense of security for no, we are not safer today. For the past eleven years, our soldiers and intelligence services have performed brilliantly. They have done all that we have asked of them. And yet, the future in the Middle East and, more particularly, as regards the radical Islamists, looks far more threatening today than it did on September 10, 2001.

On September 10, 2001, no Islamic radicals had access to nuclear weapons. Today, Iran, the world's most ardent supporter of terrorism, a regime every bit as bloody minded, radical, expansionist and Jew-hating as was Nazi Germany, is on the brink of creating nuclear weapons.

On September 10, 2001, Pakistan, the only Islamic nuclear nation, was under the control of a nominally secular military dictator. Today, Pakistan is a hot bed of radical Islam, a failed state, and evermore our enemy.

On September 10, 2001, Turkey was a secular nation, an ally of the U.S. and a friend to Israel. Today, Turkey is well down the path to being Islamicized by PM Erdogan, who, not long ago, conducted a coup against secularists in control of the Turkish military. Erdogan dreams of reestablishing Turkey as the head of a new Caliphate and has warmed to Iran.

On September 10, 2001, Egypt was a dictatorship friendly to the U.S. and cooperative with Israel. Today, after the "Arab Spring," Egypt is under the control of the radical Muslim Brotherhood - the organization that spawned al Qaeda and shares every one of al-Qaeda's goals. The secularists who led the revolution that deposed the Mubarak dictatorship are already under brutal assault from their new regime and its Islamist supporters. The Muslim Brotherhood government has already led a coup against the military, which many in the West hoped to be a restraining influence in Egypt. Indeed, Egypt seems to be following the same pattern that took Iran from revolution in 1979 to a radical theocracy but two years later.

On September 10, 2001, the PLO nominally controlled the Gaza strip, subject to Israeli oversight. Today, Hamas, a bloody terrorist organization, fully controls the Gaza strip, the PLO has joined with them, and the Obama regime is funding them, at least indirectly, to the tune of almost a billion dollars..

On September 10, 2001, Lebanon was divided between Syrian occupation in the north and Israeli occupation to the south. Today, Lebanon is virtually a puppet regime of Iran, ruled only with the continuing approval of Hezbollah. It is armed to the teeth with Iranian supplied rockets pointed at Israel.

On September 10, 2001, Syria was a secular dictatorship under the Assad / Alawite clan and an ally of Iran. Today, Syria is involved in a brutal "civil war;" but . . . a large number, perhaps a majority, of the people fighting Assad for control are not beleagured Syrian citizens, but foreign Islamists bent on deposing Assad in order to put in place their own Sunni theocracy. Indeed, as one Syrian General recently opined,

"Of Western, and particularly European, attitudes to the battles, he voiced disbelief. "Don't they understand that we are the last dam that is holding back the flood of Islamists in Europe," he asked. "What blindness."

Just as Egypt's former dictator Mubarak rightly warned us that he was the bulwark against the Islamists in Egypt, I think that the Syrian general might well be right as regards Syria, not to mention what it will mean for Europe if Assad falls to the Islamists. And we seem to be doing nothing to influence the situation.

On September 10, 2001, Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussein. We got rid of him and installed what was to be a democracy. But desperate to mark Iraq as a failure, our perfidious left demanded that all U.S. troops be pulled from Iraq, Bush blinked, and Obama made sure all U.S. troops were removed. Moreover, when Iraq held its free election in 2010, Obama acquiesced to what amounted to a coup by Maliki. Today, we have little influence over Iraq and its illegitimate government is moving ever closer to the Iranian sphere. Unique in today's Middle East, Iraq today is better off than it was ten years ago and it is, at least not a direct enemy of the U.S. That said, Iraq's trajectory looks poor indeed.

On September 10, 2001, Saudi Arabia was nominally a close ally of the U.S. They still are a close ally of our government types, even as they spend billions of dollars annually pushing their bloody, toxic brand of Wahhabi Islam throughout the world. And it is that - Wahhabi Islam and its influences - that caused 9-11, and that undergird the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah, among many others. Iran's own highly radicalized version of Shia Islam, the Ayatollah Khomeini's veleyat-e-faqi, is virtually a clone of Wahhabi Islam in terms of its triumphalism, expansionism and bloodiness.

So what has gone wrong over the past eleven years? Short answer - Bush's failure to identify our enemy as Wahhabi Islam, a mistake exponentially compounded by Obama's policies towards Wahhabi Islam and the Middle East.

Obama has pointed to the execution of bin Laden as well as his, Obama's, increased use of drone strikes as the ipso facto proof of his foreign policy bona fides. But especially as regards the Middle East and radical Islam, his policies have been an utter catastrophe: from the failure to fan the Green Revolution in Iran to fanning the flames of revolution in Egypt; from pressuring Israel to make unreasonable concessions to the Palestinians to excusing the radicalism and terrorism of the Palestinians; from failing to halt Iran's march towards a nuclear arsenal to allowing Pakistan to play a double game against the U.S. Obama has allowed a bad situation to become exponentially worse.

I have been saying for years now on this blog that our policy towards the Islamists - those who would happily slaughter us in a heart beat and impose Sharia law on the world - has no chance of working unless and until we finally identify the enemy. The enemy is not "terrorism." Terrorism is a tactic. The enemy is the toxic ideology of Wahhabi Islam and the Veleyat-e-Faqi of Iran.

Columnist Caroline Glick, several months ago, hit on much this same point, as well as pointing out how Obama has made the situation much worse. Her assessment is well worth a read:

How is it possible that the US finds itself today with so few good options in the Arab world after all the blood and treasure it has sacrificed? The answer to this question is found to a large degree in an article by Prof. Angelo Codevilla in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books titled "The Lost Decade."

Codevilla argues that the reason the US finds itself in the position it is in today owes to a significant degree to its refusal after September 11, 2001, to properly identify its enemy. US foreign policy elites of all stripes and sizes refused to consider clearly how the US should best defend its interests because they refused to identify who most endangered those interests.

The Left refused to acknowledge that the US was under attack from the forces of radical Islam enabled by Islamic supremacist regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Iran because the Left didn't want the US to fight. Moreover, because the Left believes that US policies are to blame for the Islamic world's hostility to America, leftists favor foreign policies predicated on US appeasement of its enemies.

For its part, the Right refused to acknowledge the identity and nature of the US's enemy because it feared the Left.

And so, rather than fight radical Islamists, under Bush the US went to war against a tactic - terrorism. And lo and behold, it was unable to defeat a tactic because a tactic isn't an enemy. It's just a tactic.

And as its war aim was unachievable, the declared ends of the war became spectacular. Rather than fight to defend the US, the US went to war to transform the Arab world from one imbued with unmentionable religious extremism to one increasingly ruled by democratically elected unmentionable religious extremism.

The lion's share of responsibility for this dismal state of affairs lies with former president Bush and his administration. While the Left didn't want to fight or defeat the forces of radical Islam after September 11, the majority of Americans did. And by catering to the Left and refusing to identify the enemy, Bush adopted war-fighting tactics that discredited the war effort and demoralized and divided the American public, thus paving the way for Obama to be elected while running on a radical anti-war platform of retreat and appeasement.

Since Obama came into office, he has followed the Left's ideological guidelines of ending the fight against and seeking to appease America's worst enemies. This is why he has supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. This is why he turned a blind eye to the Islamists who dominated the opposition to Gaddafi. This is why he has sought to appease Iran and Syria. This is why he supports the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition. This is why he supports Turkey's Islamist government. And this is why he is hostile to Israel.

And this is why come December 31, the US will withdraw in defeat from Iraq, and pro- American forces in the region and the US itself will reap the whirlwind of Washington's irresponsibility.

There is a price to be paid for calling an enemy an enemy. But there is an even greater price to be paid for failing to do so.

We have already spent tremendous amounts of treasure and blood in response to the 9-11 attacks. But the failure to identify and fight the real enemy, not merely on the battlefield, but in the war of ideas, has been an existential error.

One of the lessons of WWII, according to Nazi generals, was that Hitler could have been stopped with minimal cost in blood and treasure in 1937 had France and England stood up to him. Waiting just two years turned the costs from nominal into the most costly and deadly conflict in our world's history.

We are now repeating that mistake in regards to radical Islam. Bush is at fault; Obama has allowed the situation to become exponentially worse. Given that 9-11 has given us much more warning of the "enemy's" bloodiness, violence and existential motivations than either the British or French had as regards the Nazi's in 1937, our failure to address this is unforgivable. And no, killing bin Laden does not change the fact that, on this most important of issues, Obama's foreign policy is ineffective at best, incompetent and dangerous at worst.

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Glancing about the web, I see that Bookworm Room has a post on 9-11 that you would likely find of interest: September 11, 2001: In Memoriam.

Powerline has a good post on how aggressive CIA policies, now condemned by Obama, are what led to finding and executing Osama bin Laden.

Update: This from Muslim reformer Dr. Zhudi Jasser of AIFD today hits the nail on the head:

The American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) is calling on President Obama and presidential candidate Governor Mitt Romney to use the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks to reengage the national discussion into the root causes of this horrible attack that claimed nearly 3,000 American lives.

With the understandable concerns over the U.S. economy driving the 2012 president race, both the Administration and the Romney campaign seem to be content to not engage on important issues in the global arena. But eleven years since the attacks on our country the U.S. still has done little to address the ideology of political Islam which is the root cause that led Al Qaeda and 19 hijackers to attack our country. In fact with the Islamist political victories in the Middle-East since the “Arab Spring” it is clear that the ideology of political Islam, and the radicalism that is borne within the ideology, are growing in a post 9-11 world. . . .

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"Osama bin Jerk'n"

By now, everyone has heard that, among the many items the SEALS found and confiscated from the bin Laden compound was a rather extensive cache of porn. Since this information was made public, goat jokes - and videos of goat porn - have been appearing all over the net. That said, the New York Post has taken the jokes to the next level, listing the titles of porn found on the compound. They include among their number:

•Talibuns
•Debbie Does Abbotabad
•Oral Qaeda
•No Fatwa Chicks
•9 1/2 Sheiks
•IE-DDD
•Suicide Bombshells 6
•Behind the Green Burqa
•1000 Arabians in One Night
•Weapons of Mass Seduction
•SEAL Team Sex
•Whora Bora

Heh. Other notable attempts to guess the titles came from Doug Ross, who believed "Deep Goat," "The Camel's Toe," and "Two And A Half Goats" might be among their number. Heh.

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Steyn On Handwringing, Heads & The Unchecked March Of Radical Islam

Yes, we got bin Laden. Then we buried him in accordance with Muslim tradition - though I think we should be demanding to know of what that "tradition" consisted, since it appears that a traditional Muslim ceremony includes prayers that Islam triumph completely over Christianity and Judaism.

And as Mark Steyn points out in his latest missive, the death and post-death treatment of bin Laden encapsulates in a nutshell everything that is wrong with our approach to this war against "radical Islam." We are engaging in the physical war, but not the war of ideas. Indeed, in the latter, we lay prostrate, not merely failing to engage, but showing great concern for the sensibilities of those who would slaughter us. Steyn's two points - one, we could use a lot more Kitchner and a lot less Obama; two - the Muslim radicals are winning the war of ideas, here and everywhere. And it is that only that war that ultimately counts.

This from Mr. Steyn:

The belated dispatch of Osama testifies to what the United States does well – elite warriors, superbly trained, equipped to a level of technological sophistication no other nation can match. Everything else surrounding the event (including White House news management so club-footed that one starts to wonder darkly whether its incompetence is somehow intentional) embodies what the United States does badly. Pakistan, our "ally," hides and protects not only Osama but also Mullah Omar and Zawahiri, and does so secure in the knowledge that it will pay no price for its treachery – indeed, confident that its duplicitous military will continue to be funded by U.S. taxpayers. . . .

. . . On Sept. 12, 2001, Gen. Musharraf was in a meeting "when my military secretary told me that the U.S. secretary of state, Gen. Colin Powell, was on the phone. I said I would call back later." The milquetoasts of the State Department were in no mood for Musharraf's I'm-washing-my-hair routine, and, when he'd been dragged to the phone, he was informed that the Bush administration would bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age" if they didn't get everything they wanted. Musharraf concluded that America meant it.

A decade later, we're back to Sept. 10. Were Washington to call Islamabad as it did a decade ago, the Pakistanis would thank them politely and say they'd think it over and get back in six weeks, give or take. They think they've got the superpower all figured out – that America is happy to spend bazillions of dollars on technologically advanced systems that can reach across the planet but it doesn't really have the stomach for changing the facts of the ground. That means that once in a while your big-time jihadist will be having a quiet night in watching "Dancing With The Stars" when all of a sudden Robocop descends from the heavens, kicks the door open, and it's time to get ready for your virgins. But other than that, in the bigger picture, day by day, all but unnoticed, things will go their way.

In the fall of 2001, discussing the collapse of the Taliban, Thomas Friedman, the in-house thinker at The New York Times, offered this bit of cartoon analysis:

"For all the talk about the vaunted Afghan fighters, this was a war between the Jetsons and the Flintstones – and the Jetsons won and the Flintstones know it."

But they didn't, did they? The Flintstones retreated to their caves, bided their time, and a decade later the Jetsons are desperate to negotiate their way out.

When it comes to instructive analogies, I prefer Khartoum to cartoons. If it took America a decade to avenge the dead of 9/11, it took Britain 13 years to avenge their defeat in Sudan in 1884. But, after Kitchener slaughtered the jihadists of the day at the Battle of Omdurman in 1897, he made a point of digging up their leader the Mahdi, chopping off his head and keeping it as a souvenir. The Sudanese got the message. The British had nary a peep out of the joint until they gave it independence six decades later – and, indeed, the locals fought for King and (distant imperial) country as brave British troops during World War Two. Even more amazingly, generations of English schoolchildren were taught about the Mahdi's skull winding up as Lord Kitchener's novelty paperweight as an inspiring tale of national greatness.

Not a lot of that today. It's hard to imagine Osama's noggin as an attractive centerpiece at next year's White House Community Organizer of the Year banquet, and entirely impossible to imagine America's "educators" teaching the tale approvingly. So instead, even as we explain that our difficulties with this bin Laden fellow are nothing to do with Islam, no sir, perish the thought, we simultaneously rush to assure the Muslim world that, not to worry, we accorded him a 45-minute Islamic funeral as befits an observant Muslim.

That's why Pakistani big shots harbored America's mortal enemy and knew they could do so with impunity. Bin Laden was a Saudi with money, and there are a lot of those about funding this and that from South Asia to the Balkans to Dearborn, Mich. They've walked their petrodollars round the Western world buying up everything they need to, from minor mosques to major university "Middle Eastern Studies" departments. By comparison with his compatriots, Osama squandered his dough. In that long-ago Spectator piece, I wrote, "Junior's just a peculiarly advanced model of the useless idiot son – a criticism routinely made of Bush but actually far more applicable to Osama, who took his dad's fortune and literally threw it down a hole in the ground."

A lot of American policy followed it. A decade on, our troops are running around Afghanistan "winning hearts and minds" and getting gunned down by the very policemen and soldiers they've spent years training. Back on the home front, every small-town airport has at least a dozen crack TSA operatives sniffing round the panties of grade-schoolers. Meanwhile, at the UN, the EU, at the Organization of the Islamic Conference, in the "Facebook revolutions" of "the Arab spring," the Islamization of the world proceeds: Millions of Muslims support bin Laden's goal – the submission of the Western world to Islam – but, unlike him, understand that flying planes into buildings is entirely unnecessary to achieving it. Will being high-flying Jetsons with state-of-the-art gizmos prove sufficient in a Flintstonizing world? The Pakistanis are pretty sure they know the answer to that.

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Dick Cheney On the CIA, Enhanced Interrogation, Obama & Osama

Obama has gutted the CIA's Enhanced Interrogation program that ultimately gave us bin Laden. He has taken the CIA completely out of the business of interrogating high level detainees. And on top of that, outrageously, Obama continues to investigate those CIA employees who in fact applied enhanced interrogation, despite all of them having been cleared in a prior investigation by a career Justice Dept. employee. Dick Cheney discusses each of these points while explaining why we need the CIA's program reconstituted on Fox News Sunday.



Obama did not capture bin Laden, I am convinced, because he did not want to have to deal with bin Laden within the gutted, ridiculous framework for high level detainees that he is responsible for since coming to office. Nonetheless, the fact is that our soldiers did walk away from the bin Laden compound with a treasure trove of intelligence that will likely lead us to the identities of many new people in the war on terror. The irony is that our ability to to exploit that information is, thanks to Obama, seriously constrained. As Michael Mukasey put it in his recent WSJ article:

But policies put in place by the very administration that presided over this splendid success promise fewer such successes in the future. Those policies make it unlikely that we'll be able to get information from those whose identities are disclosed by the material seized from bin Laden.

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Time To Spike The Ball?

That about sums it up.

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Cry Havoc And Let Slip The Cats Dogs Of War

Among the highly trained soldiers sent to dispatch bin Laden to meet his 72 sturgeons, one had 4 legs, canine teeth - and it wasn't a cat. According to reports, it was a Belgian Malinois named Cairo, though his precise mission in the bin Laden raid is not known.

So why was Cairo there and not Felix the cat? Rob Long, writing at Ricochet, states the obvious - you "don't bring a cat to kill a terrorist," explaining:

[I]n the debate of Dog v. Cat, case closed. Dogs are fierce warriors, loyal friends, hard chargers, face lickers, snack lovers, and, clearly, patriots.

True. All true. And as one commenter to Rob's post cogently adds, "if we depended on cats to protect us we would all be in burqas by now."

Today's military canines perform a wide variety of tasks, from security and capture to sniffing out IED's. But dogs have been used in warfare since antiquity. Indeed, prior to the invention of gunpowder, and for several centuries thereafter, war dogs have been used to fight as part of armies. This from Wiki gives a good overview:

War dogs were used by the Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, Sarmatians, Alans, Slavs, Britons, and the Romans. The Molossian 'Canis Molossus' dog of Epirus was the strongest known to the Romans, and was specifically trained for battle. However, when fought against the broad-mouthed, powerful mastiff of Britannia, they were outmatched. The Romans exported many of this breed of mastiff to Rome and then disseminated them over the known world. Often war dogs would be sent into battle with large protective spiked metal collars and coats of mail armor. The Romans had attack formations made entirely of dogs. Native Americans also used dogs, though not on this scale.

During the Late Antiquity, Attila the Hun used giant Molosser dogs in his campaigns. Gifts of war dog breeding stock between European royalty were seen as suitable tokens for exchange throughout the Middle Ages. Other civilizations used armored dogs to defend caravans or attack enemies. The Spanish conquistadors used armoured dogs that had been trained to kill and disembowel when they invaded the land controlled by South American natives. The British used dogs when they attacked the Irish and the Irish in turn used Irish Wolfhounds to attack invading Norman knights on horseback. Two wolfhounds, or even a single one were often capable of taking a mounted man in armour off his horse, where the lightly armed handler would finish him off if necessary.

Later on, Frederick the Great used dogs as messengers during the Seven Years' War with Russia. Napoleon would also used dogs during his campaigns. Dogs were used up until 1770 to guard naval installations in France . . .

Bottom line, I agree with Rob, if I have to go to war, its going to be with my hounds by my side - no cats need apply.

Shhhhhhhh . . . . warrior sleeping.

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Intelligence, Interrogation, Obama & Osama

I explained in the post here how enhanced interrogation was directly tied to our finding bin Laden, and how Obama, with his warped sense of morality, has gutted our ability to gain such intelligence in the future. Former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey has penned an article in the WSJ making precisely the same points as he argues that the enhanced interrogation program put in place by President Bush should be reconstituted. This from Mr. Mukasey:

Osama bin Laden was killed by Americans, based on intelligence developed by Americans. . . .

But policies put in place by the very administration that presided over this splendid success promise fewer such successes in the future. Those policies make it unlikely that we'll be able to get information from those whose identities are disclosed by the material seized from bin Laden. The administration also hounds our intelligence gatherers in ways that can only demoralize them.

Consider how the intelligence that led to bin Laden came to hand. It began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information—including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden. . . .

Abu Zubaydeh was coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of 9/11. Bin al Shibh disclosed information that, when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydeh, helped lead to the capture of KSM and other senior terrorists and the disruption of follow-on plots aimed at both Europe and the United States.

Another of those gathered up later in this harvest, Abu Faraj al-Libi, also was subjected to certain of these harsh techniques and disclosed further details about bin Laden's couriers that helped in last weekend's achievement.

The harsh techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of these techniques.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations. The Bush administration put these techniques in place only after rigorous analysis by the Justice Department, which concluded that they were lawful. Regrettably, that same administration gave them a name—"enhanced interrogation techniques"—so absurdly antiseptic as to imply that it must conceal something unlawful.

The current president ran for election on the promise to do away with them even before he became aware, if he ever did, of what they were. Days after taking office he directed that the CIA interrogation program be done away with entirely, and that interrogation be limited to the techniques set forth in the Army Field Manual, a document designed for use by even the least experienced troops. It's available on the Internet and used by terrorists as a training manual for resisting interrogation.

In April 2009, the administration made public the previously classified Justice Department memoranda analyzing the harsh techniques, thereby disclosing them to our enemies and assuring that they could never be used effectively again. Meanwhile, the administration announced its intentions to replace the CIA interrogation program with one administered by the FBI. In December 2009, Omar Faruq Abdulmutallab was caught in an airplane over Detroit trying to detonate a bomb concealed in his underwear. He was warned after apprehension of his Miranda rights, and it was later disclosed that no one had yet gotten around to implementing the new program.

Yet the Justice Department, revealing its priorities, had gotten around to reopening investigations into the conduct of a half-dozen CIA employees alleged to have used undue force against suspected terrorists. I say "reopening" advisedly because those investigations had all been formally closed by the end of 2007, with detailed memoranda prepared by career Justice Department prosecutors explaining why no charges were warranted. Attorney General Eric Holder conceded that he had ordered the investigations reopened in September 2009 without reading those memoranda. The investigations have now dragged on for years with prosecutors chasing allegations down rabbit holes, with the CIA along with the rest of the intelligence community left demoralized.

Immediately following the killing of bin Laden, the issue of interrogation techniques became in some quarters the "dirty little secret" of the event. But as disclosed in the declassified memos in 2009, the techniques are neither dirty nor, as noted by Director Hayden and others, were their results little. As the memoranda concluded—and as I concluded reading them at the beginning of my tenure as attorney general in 2007—the techniques were entirely lawful as the law stood at the time the memos were written, and the disclosures they elicited were enormously important. That they are no longer secret is deeply regrettable.

It is debatable whether the same techniques would be lawful under statutes passed in 2005 and 2006—phrased in highly abstract terms such as "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment—that some claimed were intended to ban waterboarding even though the Senate twice voted down proposals to ban the technique specifically. It is, however, certain that intelligence-gathering rather than prosecution must be the first priority, and that we need a classified interrogation program administered by the agency best equipped to administer it: the CIA.

We also need to put an end to the ongoing investigations of CIA operatives that continue to undermine intelligence community morale.

Acknowledging and meeting the need for an effective and lawful interrogation program, which we once had, and freeing CIA operatives and others to administer it under congressional oversight, would be a fitting way to mark the demise of Osama bin Laden. . . .

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Enhanced Interrogation & The Death Of Bin Laden

The fact that we found bin Laden has had an unfortunate consequence for the left - it has shined a spotlight on the fact that Obama has virtually gutted our most important tool in the war on terror - the ability to gain intelligence by interrogating high level terrorists. The unassailable fact is that the seeds that allowed us to finally locate bin Laden arose out of interrogations of high level detainees who had been subject to the CIA's Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. Probably no one does a better job of laying this out than Ace at Ace of Spades:

1. 2003: Enhanced Interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad Results in the Nom De Guerre of bin Ladin's Courier. . . .

2. 2004: Enhanced Interrogation of al-Qahtani Confirms the Nom De Geure of bin Ladin's Courier. . . .

3. 2006 (?): Enhanced Interrogation of an Al Qaeda Captured in Iraq, Ghul, Produces the Real Name of the Courier. . . .

4. 2006-2009: NSA Begins Furiously Intercepting Any And All Communications Made By Anyone "al-Kuwaiti" Has Ever Known. . . .

5. Late 2010 (?): al-Kuwaiti Places a Very Ill-Advised Phone Call [that gives away his location]. . . .

6. 2011: Surveying Abbottabad, We Grow Confident We've Found Bin Ladin's Hideout. . . .

Do read the whole post as it both goes into detail while responding to the NYT and others who are busy indeed trying to pretend that enhanced interrogation played no or minimal role in finding bin Laden. (Likewise is this post from Ace on the same topic.)

Honestly, watching the left trying to spin this is like watching small children with their fingers in their ears stamping their feet in a tantrum while they scream: "Enhanced Interrogation is TORTURE, it is EVIL, and it had NO BEARING on our ability to find bin Laden." It would be merely pathetic were it not that our national security is very much at issue.

As a threshold matter, it bears repeating ad infinitum that, despite the labeling by the left, none of the CIA enhanced interrogation techniques - including waterboarding - rose to the level of "torture" as defined by the UN Convention Against Torture and U.S. law. It is also worth a reminder just how Obama and the left have gone about completely gutting our ability to interrogate high level al Qaeda detainees. As I wrote in a post last year:

Obama superimposed his warped morality on the mosaic of our national security. Obama baldly – and wrongly - slapped a label of “torture” on waterboarding and all the techniques of enhanced interrogation. In his effort to demonize the right and establish himself as the nation's Arbiter of Morality In Chief, he began to war on the CIA.

He allowed a witch hunt to go forward against the Office of Legal Council (OLC) attorneys who authored legal opinions responsive to questions asked by the CIA. The subject of those opinions was the legality of certain interrogation techniques. Obama thus ensured that, perhaps for decades to come, we will have risk averse intelligence agencies and that no OLC attorney in their right mind will ever again give legal approval to anything remotely controversial, regardless of what the law and precedent may be.

Obama's next step, in April [2010], was his decision to declassify those portions of the OLC opinions that suited his purpose of attacking the Bush regime. But Obama withheld – and does so even to this day – fully unredacted copies of memos showing that the enhanced interrogation techniques were at the heart of our success in the war against terror during the Bush years.

Assuming that a recent Rasmussen poll regarding U.S. attitudes towards waterboarding and interrogation of the undiebomber is accurate, Obama has clearly failed to convince the nation that his morality should trump his duty to use all legal means to see to the safety of Americans. Yet Obama, ever the ideologue, in his most recent speech, chastised his critics for their moral failings in disagreeing with him.

Obama further damaged the standing and morale of the CIA when, after Nancy Pelosi called the CIA liars over the substance of her briefings on waterboarding, Obama remained silent and allowed the charges to stand. By all accounts, morale at the CIA is at its nadir.

Not satisfied with merely ending the “waterboarding,” Obama went far beyond that. Almost as soon as he took office, Obama not only tossed out all of the techniques of “enhanced interrogation used by the CIA, he limited future interrogations to those 19 techniques used in the Army Field Manual. But the reason enhanced interrogation techniques were developed in the first place was because those techniques set out in the field manual, while they had historically yielded results in over 90% of interrogations since the WWII, proved near worthless when it came to interrogating the religiously motivated fighters of al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Ultimately, Obama took the step of taking the CIA out of the interrogation business. As of August, 2009, all high level interrogations were solely to be carried out by a team controlled by the FBI and under direct White House oversight.

The death of bin Laden should in fact bring the issue of interrogation and enhanced interrogation front and center. Since Obama took office, we have not interrogated a single high level al Qaeda operative. Obama would much rather kill them than have to deal with interrogating them. Nothing proves that more than raid on the bin Laden compound, where only one of the four men, all al Qaeda operatives, was armed and fired on the SEALS. Nonetheless, all four men on the compound were killed. Why were none, including bin Laden and his wife, captured? They could have been captured easily we now know. Unfortunately, by doing otherwise, we cost the U.S. the single greatest intelligence find we could possibly ever have grasped. It is a travesty.

We can either have the argument about enhanced interrogation now, or we can have it later, following the next major successful terrorist attack from al Qaeda or its clones. To date, the two major attacks, the Times Square Bomber and the Undiebomber, were thwarted not by the Obama administration acting on intelligence, but rather by some combination of the grace of God or terrorist incompetence. The only thing of which we can be sure is that more similar attempts will be made. Nonetheless, Obama and the left hope to put the argument off until after the 2012 election, irrespective of what that means for our national security.

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In The Absence Of Pictures, Multiple Choice Question

Obama told us today that he will not authorize the release of any of the death photos of bin Laden, including, apparently, even those taken of his burial at sea. With that in mind, let's play multiple choice. Which of the following statements are false:

A. Having authorized a ground raid against Osama bin Laden in order to insure that we had evidence that he was killed, it makes no sense whatsoever to now hide thst evidence.

B. By witholding pictures of bin Laden's death because it might inflame some Muslims, the Obama administration is prioritizing concern for Muslims, and in particular radical Muslims, over concern for what is best for Americans generally.

C. Those Muslims who would be inflamed by pictures of bin Laden's death are the same Muslims who are already inflamed and ready to do violence because of the Crusades, the Reconquista, Napoleon's forays into Egypt, and a million other reasons, of which the fact that we killed bin Laden is simply one more.

D. A gruesome photo of Osama bin Linden in the ultimate position of weakness, having had the will of America imposed upon him, is how we want everyone, including the Muslim world, to remember him when they ponder whether to follow his example.

E. None of the above.

If you answered "E," congratulations, you are more intelligent than our moralizer in chief.

I would only add that I am so tired of Obama positing that those who disagree with him are operating from illegitimate, base motives. He did so today when he said that anyone who wanted the photos of bin Laden published did so out of a desire to "spike the ball in the endzone." Not only is Obama's judgment fatally flawed, the man is an intellectually dishonest ass.

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Obama the Dragonslayer?

In the 1981 movie, the "Dragonslayer," a dragon terrorizes a kingdom. Three people take it upon themselves to kill the dragon and, in the end, they succeed. Yet as the dragon lays dead in the field, the King rides to the carcass, places his sword in the beast and then has himself proclaimed "Dragonslayer." Is Obama a real life "Dragonslayer?" If one very detailed, anonymous report is true, then that answer is yes. But the issue goes far beyond mere hypocrisy on a royal scale. It shows Obama as criminally indecisive as regards the decision to order the raid on bin Laden. Obama repeatedly refused to authorize the attack and, in the end, it only occurred because CIA Director Leon Panetta and General Petreaus didn't just force the issue, but actually planned and initiated the attack without the foreknowledge of Obama. In the end, they pulled him off of the golf course Sunday only after the mission was already underway. McQ at Q&O accurately opines on the ramifications of the report:

If this is true, it is a bombshell and will kill the luster on Obama’s new found Commander-in-Chief bona fides.

Read the entire, riveting report here If it is true, we all need to be holding our collective breaths over the next two years as Obama is even more incompetent and weak than we possibly feared. Here is hoping this gets thoroughly investigated and either proven or disproven.

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Osama bin Shark Bait Part II

A few other issues have arisen in regards to the successful operation to introduce Obama to his Maker - and 72 sturgeons. One is the inexplicable lack of security at Obama's compound. Two is the decision whether to release a photo of bin Laden with his brains decorating the walls of his compound. Three is the reaction to the raid from many of the euro-lefties. Four is the reaction from the radical Muslim wing.

According to reports to date, two blackhawk helicopters were able to hover over bin Laden's compound while 24 soldiers rappelled into the compound, probably from a height of about 50 to 60 feet, perhaps higher. Once on the ground, they made their way into the building housing bin Laden and made it all the way up to the third floor before taking any fire. In the end, it appears only four men were on the compound, three of whom were bin Laden and two of his sons. In other words, there was no security presence. There were no people manning machine guns in the courtyard. There were no RPG positions on the roof. There was zip, zero, nada - not even a BEWARE OF DOG sign apparently.

For one of the most hunted men in the world, I find that complete lack of security mind boggling. From this, we can safely infer that bin Laden had no clue whatsoever as to our operational capability. Given that we have probably performed literally thousands of night air assault raids over the past decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, this suggests a level of ignorance on the part of bin Laden that is inexplicable. Obviously bin Laden felt completely secure in his compound. The only way that makes any sense at all is if bin Laden felt that that his security was guaranteed by a third party - and that can only mean that Pakistan's security services were involved at some level. We will see what the documents and computers captured from the compound show about this, if it is ever revealed.

The second issue is the hand-wringing going on in the Obama administration over whether to release photos of the recently departed bin Laden. It is ridiculous. According to the Obama administration, the concern is whether the death photos might be "inflammatory" to Muslims. Let's get this right. Bin Laden's existence on this earth was inflammatory to Americans. Americans, as well as every person who has been attacked by this most evil of men (the majority of whom are Muslims), is entitled to photographic proof of bin Laden's demise. That should be the alpha and omega of the Obama administrations consideration on that issue. But to add, I don't care if it inflames some Muslims. To the contrary, I want seared into their memory the last image of bin Laden being with half of his skull missing and his brains decorating the walls. Bin Laden claimed in the mid-90's that the massive growth of al Qaeda was because people want to back the "strong horse." Well, bin Laden today is not merely a weak horse, he is an executed one. Muslims who will be inflamed by his execution will be inflamed irrespective of graphic photos. It seems more likely that the photos may dissuade some from following bin Laden. Further, Muslims in the Middle East need proof of bin Laden's death, particularly given their propensity for utterly insane conspiracy theories. In short, whether to release bin Laden's death pictures really should be a "no brainer" for the Obama administration.

The third issue is the international response to the raid on bin Laden's compound. As a threshold matter, bin Laden was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people. If there was ever a man who deserved death at the end of a gun, it was him. Yet the euro-left, as discussed at length in Der Spiegel, is engaging in a lot of hand wringing, speculating that our assassination mission violated some provision of "international law:"

Claus Kress, an international law professor at the University of Cologne, argues that achieving retributive justice for crimes, difficult as that may be, is "not achieved through summary executions, but through a punishment that is meted out at the end of a trial." Kress says the normal way of handling a man who is sought globally for commissioning murder would be to arrest him, put him on trial and ultimately convict him. In the context of international law, military force can be used in the arrest of a suspect, and this may entail gun fire or situations of self-defense that, in the end, leave no other possibility than to kill a highly dangerous and highly suspicious person . . . .

It is unfortunate. And it is certainly no reason for the indescribable jubilation that broke out on Sunday night across America -- and especially not for applause inside the CIA's operations center.

This from the folks who gave us Hitler and the final solution. Really guys, if you want a say over our foreign policy and how we conduct our national security, or to condemn us for celebrating the execution of this most evil of men, let me just say, with all sincerity . . .



Lastly, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, the Taliban and many others of their ilk are condemning the assassination of bin Laden. On of the most bucolic of these responses came from an Imam in Jerusalem:

An imam from the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem vowed to take revenge over "the western dogs" for killing Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on Sunday.

In a Youtube video uploaded by the imam he said: "The western dogs are rejoicing after killing one of our Islamic lions. From Al-Aqsa Mosque, where the future caliphate will originate with the help of God, we say to them – the dogs will not rejoice too much for killing the lions. The dogs will remain dogs and the lion, even if he is dead, will remain a lion."

The imam then verbally attacked US President Barack Obama saying: "You personally instructed to kill Muslims. You should know that soon you'll hang together with Bush Junior."

"We are a nation of billions, a good nation. We'll teach you about politics and military ways very soon, with god's help," he vowed.

This is the response I would respect from radicalized Muslims. As Instapundit notes:

what’s this about how dogs should not rejoice after killing a lion? If I were a dog, and I killed a lion, I’d damn sure rejoice.

But Osama was more of a jackal, you know? And if this dumbass keeps talking, people might get the idea that we’re at war with Islam or something. And trust me, your Imam-ness, you don’t want Americans to decide that.

True enough. Indeed, most Americans believe in live and let live. That said, the reality of radical Islam is an unknown to most Americans still to this day - a fact for which I blame both Bush and Obama. Under a best case scenario, Americans become educated about the realities of radical Islam and public opinion in the free world is harnessed to bring pressure for change and moderation. Under a worst case scenario, Americans remain blissfully ignorant and the radicals in fact do pull off another 9-11, perhaps one with nuclear or biological weapons. And when that happens, live and let live will be out the window - as will be any attempt to seperate the good from the radicals in the Muslim world. God help the radical Muslims - and indeed, all Muslims - should that happen.

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The World's Funiest Vanlentine's Day Joke

A young Jewish girl decides to honor Saint Valentine's Day in a very special way.

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Ex-CIA Agent Michael Scheuer Flays Obama

I made the argument in a Words Have Meaning that the OLC attorneys did colorable legal work in assessing that waterboarding is not torture under the legal definitions of that term. Further, Congress was briefed on the program. Given those two facts, and particularly in light of the latter, no criminal investigation aimed at the OLC attorneys could possibly be justified. Rather, this is being done wholly out of a desire to criminalize political disagreements. Further, the day Obama decided to open the fence to a criminal investigation of the OLC attorneys, he did incalculable harm to our ability to gather intelligence for years to come, if not decades. I can foresee no attorney in the OLC giving the CIA a legal opinion green lighting a politically sensitive operation in the foreseeable future, irrespective of what the law allows.

Outside of the legal context, in Torture, Persecution and Morality, I argued that the moral high ground Obama claimed in labeling enhanced interrogation torture and putting it off limits was sheer preening for his own personal aggrandizement. It was an act of political theatre, moral cowardice, and suicidal naivete. I had planned to enlarge on these arguments in a future post, but former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer (of all people) has done a phenomenal job of flushing out these precise arguments in a brutal WaPo opinion piece. I would add that Scheuer also identifies a gaping and unforgivable weakness that I have been blogging on for two years. That is, as I said most recently in the post What You Don't Know About Salafism Could Kill You, that our government has utterly failed in its affirmative duty to educate the public as regards to militant Islam.

At any rate, Scheuer begins by setting up a scenario where we have captured bin Laden. Over tea with the CIA interrogator, bin Laden tells us that he knows when and where nuclear strikes will occur on American cities, but then refuses to say any more. In fact, he does so despite some very stern looks from his CIA interrogator. Picking up from there . . .:

. . . the CIA director can only shrug when the president asks: "What can we do to make Osama bin Laden talk?"

Americans should keep this worst-case scenario in mind as they watch the tragicomic spectacle taking place in the wake of the publication of the Justice Department's interrogation memos. It will help them recognize this episode of political theater as another major step in the bipartisan dismantling of America's defenses based on the requirements of presidential ideology. George W. Bush's democracy-spreading philosophy yielded the invasion of Iraq and set the United States at war with much of the Muslim world. Bush's worldview thereby produced an enemy that quickly outpaced the limited but proven threat-containing capacities of the major U.S. counterterrorism programs -- rendition, interrogation and unmanned aerial vehicle attacks.

Now, in a single week, President Obama has eliminated two-thirds of that successful-but-not-sufficient national defense troika because his personal ideology -- a fair gist of which is "If the world likes us more we are more secure" -- cannot tolerate harsh interrogation techniques, torture or coercive interviews, call them what you will. Surprisingly, Obama now stands alongside Bush as a genuine American Jacobin, both of them seeing the world as they want it to be, not as it is. Whereas Bush saw a world of Muslims yearning to betray their God for Western secularism, Obama gazes upon a globe that he regards as largely carnivore-free and believes that remaining threats can be defused by semantic warfare; just stop saying "War on Terror" and give talks in Turkey and on al-Arabiyah television, for example.

Americans should be clear on what Obama has done. In a breathtaking display of self-righteousness and intellectual arrogance, the president told Americans that his personal beliefs are more important than protecting their country, their homes and their families (emphasis added). The interrogation techniques in question, the president asserted, are a sign that Americans have lost their "moral compass," a compliment similar to Attorney General Eric Holder's identifying them as "moral cowards." Mulling Obama's claim, one can wonder what could be more moral for a president than doing all that is needed to defend America and its citizens? Or, asked another way, is it moral for the president of the United States to abandon intelligence tools that have saved the lives and property of Americans and their allies in favor of his own ideological beliefs?

Before enthroning Obama's personal morality as U.S. defense policy, of course, some dirty work had to be done. Last Sunday, Obama's hit man and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel led the charge by telling the American people that the interrogation techniques are a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and its Islamist partners. Well, no, Mr. Emanuel, that is not at all the case. The techniques surely are not popular with our foes and their supporters -- should that be a concern in any event? -- but they do not even make the Islamists' hit parade of anti-U.S. recruiting tools. . . . Still, Emanuel's statement surely sounded plausible to Americans who have received no education about our Islamist enemy's true motivation from Obama, George W. Bush, Clinton or George H.W. Bush.

Next, the president used his personal popularity and the stature of his office to implicitly identify as liars those former senior U.S. officials who know -- not "argue" or "contend" or "assert" but know -- that the interrogation techniques have yielded intelligence essential to the nation's defense. The integrity, intellect and reputations of Judge Michael Mukasey, Gen. Michael V. Hayden and others have now been besmirched by Obama because their realistic worldview and firsthand experience do not mesh with the president's desire to install his personal "moral compass" as the core of U.S. foreign and defense policy. And after visiting CIA headquarters last week, the president made it clear that he rejected statements surely made by CIA officers who risked their careers to tell him how many successful covert operations against al-Qaeda have flowed from interrogation information. As with all Jacobins, Obama cannot allow a hard and often brutal reality -- call it an inconvenient truth -- to impinge on his view of how the world should and must be made to work.

And so as the Justice Department memos farce plays out over the coming weeks, Americans can be confident that both parties will play politics to the hilt while letting the nation's safety take the hindmost. . . .

Americans and their country's security will be the losers. The Republicans do not have the votes to stop Obama, and the world will not be safer for America because the president abandons interrogations to please his party's left wing and the European pacifists it so admires. Both are incorrigibly anti-American, oppose the use of force in America's defense and -- like Obama -- naively believe that the West's Islamist foes can be sweet-talked into a future alive with the sound of kumbaya.

So if the above worst-case scenario ever comes to pass, Americans will have at least two things from which to take solace, even after the loss of major cities and tens of thousands of countrymen. First, they will know that their president believes that those losses are a small price to pay for stopping interrogations and making foreign peoples like us more. And second, they will see Osama bin Laden's shy smile turn into a calm and beautiful God-is-Great grin.

Very well said Mr. Scheuer. Do read the entire article.

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Never Forget . . . Never Forgive

Video compliments of KG at Crusader Rabbit

It has been seven years since a terrorist attack on our soil that took the lives of 2,998 civilians. Osama bin Laden justified this cowardly attack on the dogma of Salafi Islam. Bin Laden believed, based on his understanding of the history of the United States from days of Vietnam though the Clinton years, that any U.S. response to these attacks would be ineffectual. He expected the U.S. to exact retribution against Muslim Americans, inflaming Muslim sentiments world-wide. He could not have been more wrong on both points.

Seven years later, bin Laden and his second in command, Zawahiri, preside over a greatly weakened movement from their foxholes dug in the backwaters of Pakistan. They were driven from Afghanistan before 2001 drew to a close. They tried to ignite civil war in Iraq and drive America from that country. They would have won had those in our country who placed partisan interests over national security had their way. They did not - but we should not forget who these people were, nor forgive their perfidy.

Thanks to George Bush, American soldiers were given a new mission. Well led, they executed with a precision that should make all Americans proud and all of our enemies shudder. Al Qaeda's dreams of a caliphate suffered fatal blows in Iraq when they were decimated by our soldiers in the "surge" and rejected by the very Sunni Muslims they hoped to rule. The ramifications of the performance of our soldiers, the failure of Allah to grant al Qaeda victory over the infidel, and the rejection of al Qaeda by the Sunnis in Iraq have been and will continue to be far reaching.

Al Qaeda is down but not dead. They still hold on in the hinterlands of Pakistan and are weaved into the incredibly troubled politics of that country. They still seek to carry out attacks on the west and they still seek WMD. Should we act foolishly in the Middle East, al Qaeda can arise again. They must not be allowed that opportunity.

We must never forget al Qaeda's cowardly attack upon defenseless civilians. We must never forget that their goal is the destruction of our society. We must never forget that their goal is to impose their 7th Century version of Islam upon each and every person on this earth. We must never forget that they have no moral restraints. We must never forgive them for their brutal attacks and the massive death and mayhem they have wrought. We must not rest until the scourge of radical Islam is destroyed in all its facets.

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Why Did We Ever Put Hamdan To A Trial?

I am still scratching my head wondering why we put bin Laden's driver, Hamdan, to a trial? This was a foolish move by our government.

Salim Hamdan was tried before a military tribunal on charges that he, one, conspired with al Qaeda to attack civilians, destroy property, and commit murder in violation of the laws of war. Two, he was charged with providing material support to terrorists. He was acquited of the former, convicted of the latter. The former carried a maximum sentence of life in prison, the latter a maximum of thirty years. He was given a five year sentence.

There are basically two types of prisoners in war time - those enemy combatants whom you want to keep in captivity until the end of hostilities for self protection and those that you want to punish on the gallows for war crimes. We have long known that Hamdan provided limo service for the bearded One. That itself does not make Hamdan a war criminal.

Even though the military charged Hamdan with being a war criminal, the government did not seek the death penalty - which should be an immediate clue that their case was hardly air tight and that whatever support Hamdan provided, it was not central to the crimes. That the case was weak was not surprising. We were charging a driver, not an operational officer for al Qaeda.

Besides being bin Laden's driver, Hamdan was caught at a border crossing carrying two RPG's. Given all this, clearly Hamdan is an enemy combatant and a threat to America. Thus, we are entitled to hold onto him until the end of hostilities - and there is no end in sight for that. That's too bad for Mr. Hamdan, but you makes your choices and you takes your chances. I'm not going to lose any sleep over the harshness that he might reasonably be looking at spending the rest of his natural life at Club Gitmo.

So why even hold a trial for this guy? It does several things, none of which in the balance seem like a positive for the U.S. One, giving Hamdan a sentence to a time certain now sets up the expectation in the court of public opinion that he will be released when his time is served. This is a self-inflicted public relations nightmare for our government.

Two, it sets a precedent that we will try our detainees, even for non-capital offenses. This just took us one step closer to turning the war on terror into the police investigation of terror.

Three, we have opened up a hornet's nest with this military tribunal for every socialist and communist in politics and the ABA to claim that this was an unfair tribunal. Tribunal's should be reserved for Khalid Sheik Mohammed and people of his ilk who will be given a propoer hearing before hanging. Let the far left complain about military tribunals in those instances and their shrill shreiks will gain no traction.

The only reason I can see to have sent Hamdan before a tribunal was to test the system itself. But this was a very poor decision on the part of our government. Nothing positive came out of this trial with the exception that it seems justice in terms of the verdicts was likely served. For anyone with a lot of prior military experience, that was hardly a surprise. Fairness, objectivity and personal honesty are the finest marks of our officer corps. But all that is meaningless to the far left for whom the military is evil and the tribunal system fatally flawed regardless of outcome. They expected a kangaroo court. The fact that it wasn't has made no impression on them.

Hamdan should never have been tried. He should have been left in his cell at Gitmo with the door securely fastened until he dies or hostilities clearly end. Save the tribunals for those deserving of being hanged. This was an unenforced error by the Bush Administration.

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The UK & The Anti-War On Terror

The photo above represents what is apparently the latest and sole weaponry authorized by the British judicial system to combat Islamic radicalism and those foreign terrorists who take up residence in Britain. Not shown is the welfare check that is delivered seperately by the Labour Government through the mail.

Within the past two weeks, British Courts have been asked to deport Abu Qatada, bin Laden's "right hand man" in Europe, and yesterday, Europe's most dangerous terrorist, identified only as "U" in British papers. "U" is actually known throughout the rest of the world as Amar Makhlouf, alias Abu Doha, alias Rachid, alias, Dr. Haider, alias The Doctor. He is one of the most violent and dangerous terrorists in Europe. And what do the socialist left holding the reigns of power in Britain do with the most violent and dangerous terrorists - why, they release them into British society and put them on welfare benefits. Oh, and in this case, since "U" is particularly dangerous, they withold his name and the town into which he was released. No need for the public to know that information apparently. It really seems as if the inmates are in charge in the mental facility that is modern Britain.

(If you are the U.S. and feeling left out of all the insane fun, just give it a little time - the activisit wing of our Supreme Court is rapidly catching up to their British counterparts)
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To go over the particulars of Mr. Makhlouf, he is a native of Algeria and a senior member of both al-Qaeda and the GSPC terrorist networks. Makhlouf has close and direct ties to Osama bin Laden and he was recently described by the CounterTerrorism Blog as one of the world's most dangerous terrorists:

He is widely known to have been a senior leader within the GSPC and a founder member of one of al-Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan subsequently becoming one, if not the most senior member of al-Qaeda operating in Europe. Prior to his arrest in February 2001 by a Special Branch officer, while he was attempting to flee to Saudi Arabia during operation ODIN he was responsible for: plotting an attempted attack on Los Angeles airport, a plot to bomb the US embassy in Rome, an attempt to bomb unspecified targets in Strasbourg as well as having a hand in organizing al-Qaeda cells for operations against United States targets within Germany. This is on top of the large number of recruits he managed to bring into the movement.

Read the entire post. Having captured Makhlouf in London several years ago, Britain is now trying to deport him to his native Algeria. But given that it is not likely to succeed - British courts interpreting EU law have a perfect record of refusing to approve any deportation to a country where an individual might be tortured - he has been released on bail and onto the public dole. This incredible story from the Telegraph:

. . . Although his name has been widely used in the past he can only be referred to as "U" under a court order which also bans any reference to the date he was released or the town where he was bailed to.

The order was put in place by Mr Justice Mitting, chairman of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission which has granted his release pending a House of Lords case in October.

The judge has also banned the release of the man's bail conditions, which are likely to involve a strict curfew similar to that of the preacher abu Qatada, released last month.

. . . The Home Office claim he was a "leading organiser and facilitator of terrorist activity."

A Foreign office note sent to U's native Algeria in 2006 said: "Senior position in Mujahedin training camp in Afghanistan. Direct links to UBL (Usama Bin Laden) and other senior AQ (Al Qaeda) figures. Involved in supporting terrorists including those involved in the planned attack on the Strasbourg Christmas Market in 2000, and an earlier plan to attack Los Angeles Airport.

"US sought his extradition but withdrew request August 2005 … DETAINED".

The Special Immigration and Appeals Commission (SIAC) said last year there were "credible grounds for believing each of these assertions."

. . . The Home Office said today: "It is our position that individuals who are not British nationals who pose a threat to the national security of the UK should be deported.

Read the entire article. Those Home Office types obviously have a real sense of humor. Even the NYT, that paragon of leftie values who celebrated the insane Boumediene decision that threatens to make our own court treatment of terrorists into a mirror of Britain's, is sputtering at what happens when insane laws passed by socialists get interpreted by insane activist judges:

. . . The release of the [Abu Qatada, bin Laden's right hand man, last week and Makhlouf this week] has highlighted the problems the British authorities face as they try to curb what they have acknowledged as a large and growing Islamist terrorist underground in Britain. Despite volumes of intelligence information implicating the Algerian and Abu Qatada amassed by British and American investigators, and by the authorities in their own countries, British officials say that attempts to build indictments against them have been frustrated by a lack of detailed evidence that would stand up in court.

The other option, seeking to deport the two men to their homelands, has been blocked by British judges on the grounds that the men may be subjected to torture at home, or to prosecution based on evidence obtained by torture, in violation of Europe’s human rights charter.

In both cases, appeal court judges also ruled that their rights were being violated by indefinite detention, and ordered their release.

In a ruling last year, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission in Britain described the Algerian suspect as having had “direct links” with Mr. bin Laden and of having held a “senior position” at a Qaeda camp for Islamic extremists in Afghanistan in the late 1990s. In their bid to deport the Algerian, the British authorities described him as the leader of an abortive plot to attack a Christmas market in the French city of Strasbourg in 2000, in addition to the role he is alleged to have played in the planned Los Angeles attack.

The protections afforded the Algerian and Abu Qatada, including the decision to release them while lawyers battle the government over their deportation, have caused growing dismay on both sides of the Atlantic. Bush administration officials have pressed Britain to adopt tighter antiterrorism laws that reduce the courts’ discretion in terrorism cases, and opinion polls have shown increasing concern among British voters about the scope of the terrorism threat.

The frustration was mirrored in a commentary published after Abu Qatada’s release in The Sun, the hell-raising tabloid that is Britain’s most widely sold newspaper.

“Poor old Osama bin Laden, scuttling around the war-torn Afghan mountains to avoid death or capture,” the newspaper said. “But hope is on the horizon for the world’s most wanted terrorist. There’s one place on Earth where he would be perfectly safe. Britain. Here, we throw nobody out. Bin Laden has every chance of ending his days among peace and plenty.” . . .

Read the entire article.

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Al Qaeda Failing In Iraq

Our ambassador in Iraq, Ryan Crocker, is a man not given to overstatement. Thus, things must indeed be looking bad for al Qaeda in Iraq indeed for Ambassador Crocker to chacracterize thier situation as near defeat.

This from the AP:

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq said Saturday that al-Qaida's network in the country has never been closer to defeat, and he praised Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for his moves to rein in Shiite and Sunni militant groups.

Iraqi forces have been conducting crackdowns on al-Qaida militants in the northern city of Mosul and on Shiite militiamen in the southern city of Basra. Thousands of Iraqi forces also moved into the Shiite militia stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad last week imposing control for the first time in years.

. . . U.S Ambassador Crocker spoke as he visited reconstruction projects in the southern city of Najaf.

"There is important progress for the Iraqi forces in confronting the Sunni and Shiite militias," he said, speaking Arabic to reporters. "The government, the prime minister are showing a clear determination to take on extremist armed elements that challenge the government's authority ... no matter who these elements are."

"You are not going to hear me say that al-Qaida is defeated, but they've never been closer to defeat than they are now," Crocker said.

The U.S. military says attacks have dropped dramatically — down to an average of 41 a day across the country, the lowest rate since 2004 — amid the crackdowns and truces. The U.S. military, backed by Sunni Arab tribal fighters, have scored successes in battling al-Qaida in Iraq and other Sunni insurgents in western parts of the country.

The Mosul sweep aims to dislodge the terror network from its most prominent remaining urban stronghold. . . .

Read the entire article. This coming from Ambassador Crocker is indeed good news. It also fits with bin Laden's November comments that Iraq was, in so many words, lost to al Qaeda, and now, in his most recent tape, not even mentioning Iraq. This also coincides with a significant weakening of the al Qaeda brand world-wide, as discussed in the TNR article about which I blogged here.

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The Decline Of The Al Qaeda Brand

The New Republic (TNR) has published an article, "The Unraveling," on the decline of jihadism and the pushback within the jihadi community against the type of indiscriminate and extreme violence regularly practiced by al Qaeda. The decline is well documented, as well as the changing attitudes towards al Qaeda in the Muslim world. The TNR authors do a good job of documenting the tactical differences within the jihadi community. Unfortunately, the authors misdiagnose both the cause of radical Islam and the reason for the pushback against the violence. The TNR article is also of note for the facts it raises about al Qaeda’s pre-9/11 belief in America’s weakness and how that played into the decision to attack the U.S.

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You can find the TNR article here. It traces the growth of resistance to al Qaeda from within the jihadi community and is well worth the read.

Unfortunately, the resistance the author’s document to al Qaeda and its brand of indiscriminate violent jihad comes not from the type of rethinking of values that might lead to a true revolution within Islam. Rather, it is largely rooted in abhorrence of the indiscriminate violence that seems most directed at innocent Muslims. This is important, but it is at best a small step towards lessening the fundamental problems presented by radical Islam. For every radical who turns away from al Qaeda today, there are tens of thousands of children around the world being trained in a Saudi Salafi / Wahhabi curricula that has among its explicitly stated goals "to prepare students physically and mentally for jihad for the sake of Allah." Another stated goal of the curricula is "to arouse the spirit of Islamic jihad in order to fight our enemies, to restore our rights and our glory, and to fulfill the mission of Islam." In other words, the wheels of the jihadi factory are turning on a daily basis around the world in Saudi funded schools and mosques. The TNR authors completely miss this.

The authors don't seem to fully grasp that there are two prerequisites to ending Islamic radicalism. One is that Wahhabi / Salafi Islam must be engaged and either moved into a process of moderation through ijtihad or be de-legitimized. Wahhabi / Salafi Islam is a brutally repressive strain of Islam originating out of Arabia. It presents a very rigid, utopian view of Islam based on the millenium old teachings of Ibn Taymiyyah as embraced and interpreted by Ibn Wahhab in the 18th century. It is a strain of Islam that has only gained ascendancy in the Muslim world in the past 50 years on the back of the Saudi oil wealth.

Rather than identify terrorism with the dogma of Wahhabi / Salafi Islam, the TNR authors blame a particular doctrine as being at the heart of radical Islam’s problems:

Why have clerics and militants once considered allies by Al Qaeda's leaders turned against them? To a large extent, it is because Al Qaeda and its affiliates have increasingly adopted the doctrine of takfir, by which they claim the right to decide who is a "true" Muslim. Al Qaeda's Muslim critics know what results from this takfiri view: First, the radicals deem some Muslims apostates; after that, the radicals start killing them. . . .

The authors completely misperceive this. The doctrine of takfir has always been at the very heart of Wahhabi / Salafi Islam. It was the religious justification the Saud clan used to massacre their way to power within the past century. It is not innovation by al Qaeda. To the contrary:

The radical medieval Islamic scholar . . . Ibn Taymiyyah established a precedent for the declaration of takfir . . . The 18th Century Islamic Revivalist Muhammad Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab referred back to Ibn Taymiyyah in constructing an interpretation of Islam that allowed him to fight his fellow Muslims. He condemned many mainstream Muslim traditions (such as Sufism) as bid'a (innovation of the religion) and his followers slew many Muslims for allegedly kufr practises. . . .

Read the entire article. The problem is the sect of Wahhabi Salafi Islam – and as several insightful commentors have noted before, it is not that bin Laden has bastardized Wahhabi Salafi Islam, it is that bin Laden has fully effectuated its teachings. Winston Churchill, who spent many years in Middle East, described Salafi / Wahhabi Islam as "a form of Mohammedanism which bears, roughly speaking, the same relationship to orthodox Islam as the most militant form of Calvinism would have borne to Rome in the fiercest times of [Europe's] religious wars." You can find a list of some of the more radical aspects of Wahhabi / Salafi Islam here, and you can read former Salafi terrorist Tawfiq Hamid’s missive about the incredible dangers posed by Salafi / Wahhabi Islam here.

So long as Wahhabi / Salafi Islam remains in its current form and the practitioners of that sect continue to be supported by vast oil wealth of the Middle East, we will not see an end to radical Islam. And indeed, Islamic terrorism, while it may recede in the interim, will always be a threat. It is one that will increase exponentially should the Middle Eastern countries – and in particular Saudi Arabia – join the club of nuclear armed nations. That is a distinct possibility as Saudi Arabia, along with most countries in the Middle East, are looking to develop nuclear capability in response to Iran.

Which brings us to the second prerequisite if we are to see the end of radical Islam. There must be a moderating or de-legitimization of the Khomeinist Shia variant of radical Islam practiced in Iran. It is every bit as radical, expansionist and triumphalist as Wahhabi / Salafi Islam and, indeed, Khomeini appears to have been directly effect by Wahhabism in the development of his own philosophy, the velyat e faqi. It is a philosophy that broke with over a millenium of Shia apolitical tradition to require theocratic rule and that seeks the expansion of its revolution throughout the Middle East and the larger world.

Another aspect of the TNR article is quite troubling. At one point, the authors describe the severe problem that Britain has as the West’s home with radical Islamists:

. . . It is in Britain that many leaders of the jihadist movement have settled as political refugees, and "Londonistan" has long been a key barometer of future Islamist trends. There are probably more supporters of Al Qaeda in Britain than any other Western country, and, because most British Muslims are of Pakistani origin, British militants easily can obtain terrorist training in the tribal areas of Pakistan, Al Qaeda's main operational hub since September 11. And now, because it is difficult for Al Qaeda to send Middle Eastern passport holders to the United States, the organization has particularly targeted radicalized Muslims in Britain for recruitment. . . .

The authors go on to note that the British government has allied with organizations that are off-shoots of the Muslim Brotherhood to combat violent jihadism in Britain. The authors portray the Brotherhood as a type of moderate organization. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, relying on the Brotherhood to stop radical Islam is akin to making a deal with the devil to fight evil. The difference between the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda is purely one of tactics.

The Muslim Brotherhood eschews the indiscriminate violence of al Qaeda, but it seeks to subvert the freedoms of the West and to achieve precisely the same goals of Islamic dominance – and it too is founded in the Wahhabi / Salafi ideology. It is neither non-violent nor non-radical. Indeed, yesterday, the head of the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood was on television praising bin Laden. The motto of the organization should be a hint: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope." Fjordman has done an extensive essay on the Muslim Brotherhood and the dangers it poses to the West that I posted here. If Britain is looking to the Brotherhood as its ally against radical Islam, it is in even deeper trouble than I have articulated in previous posts, such as here.

Lastly, the article brings up a fact well worth remembering, particularly by those on the left who are wedded to declaring Iraq a defeat and withdrawing from that country while simultaneously undertaking direct talks with Iran. The TNR article opens with discussion of a meeting held by al Qaeda in 2000 as bin Laden sought to enlist other terror organizations under his banner:

Within a few minutes of Noman Benotman's arrival at the Kandahar guest house, Osama bin Laden came to welcome him. . . . It was the summer of 2000, and Benotman, then a leader of a group trying to overthrow the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, had been invited by bin Laden to a conference of jihadists from around the Arab world, . . .

. . . Benotman also told bin Laden that the Al Qaeda leader's decision to target the United States would only sabotage attempts by groups like Benotman's to overthrow the secular dictatorships in the Arab world. "We made a clear-cut request for him to stop his campaign against the United States because it was going to lead to nowhere," Benotman recalls, "but they laughed when I told them that America would attack the whole region if they launched another attack against it." . . .

The important point here is that we were attacked in large part because bin Laden and his associates did not fear us. They believed the West was weak and would not respond forcefully. The starting point for that belief was our legislated defeat in Vietnam – a point repeatedly raised over the years by Ayman al Zawahiri in his speeches. It was a view further strengthened when al Qaeda attacked the West and America at the margins throughout the 1990's. The U.S. response to each provocation was seen by the jihadis as weak and ineffectual. Remember the Khobar Towers bombing, the bombing of our embassies in Africa, Blackhawk Down and the bombing of the USS Cole. The 9-11 attacks were simply the natural evolution of the jihadi paradigm. That should be an abject lesson in why pulling out of Iraq at this point would be suicidal folly. It would only reinforce the same beliefs that led to the 9-11 attacks.

This is an important point as to Iran also. A motto of the leader of Iran’s revolution in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini, was that the "U.S. can’t do a damned thing." He was utterly convinced of the impotence of the West, and it is a central theme within the Iranian theocracy to this day. The theocrats in Iran do not believe the West has the stomach to challenge them, and they are acting accordingly. They have regularly attacked U.S. interests in the Middle East and are doing so now in a proxy war in Iraq. They do not believe the West will do anything to stop them as they move forwards towards a nuclear arsenal, dominate Lebanon, attack Israel through Hamas, and wreak bloodshed and havoc throughout the Middle East. We have no chance of engaging Iran and making them alter their murderous ways until they come to believe that we are not impotent and we are quite willing to pull the trigger. It is why Obama’s utopian strategy to eschew the stick and engage Iran in presidential talks is the height of folly.

While this is an informative article by TNR, to the extent that it gives the impression that our problems with radical Islam are ameliorating within the Jihadi community, it is only partly correct - and only a small part at that.

(H/T The Belmont Club)

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