Tag Archives: Homeland Security

News

Has political correctness made the FBI impotent against real terrorist threats?

1 Comment

I am a huge fan of FBI, or at least I was, until I read this story from the Weekly Standard. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

On Monday, ABC News first reported that Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had reached out to al Qaeda associates prior to his attack. There were good reasons to speculate that one of these al Qaeda figures is Anwar al Awlaki — an al Qaeda recruiter who acted as a “spiritual advisor” to two of the 9/11 hijackers. Awlaki preached at a mosque Hasan attended in 2001 and praised Hasan’s attack on his web site Monday morning.

It turns out that informed speculation was correct, according to the Associated Press and the New York Times. Beginning in December of last year, authorities found that Hasan communicated with Awlaki “10 to 20 times.” But no formal investigation was ever launched. Why?

Well, because the FBI thought that talking to an Al-Quaeda recruiter isn’t really such a big deal.

The WS article notes that the FBI investigated Awlaki TWICE:

…Awlaki and his mosques had substantive ties to three of the 9/11 hijackers and the terrorist who was responsible for coordinating their activities.

[…]The FBI investigated Awlaki again after the September 11 attacks and found there was a lot of “smoke,” but told the 9/11 Commission and the Congressional Joint Inquiry that they did not have enough evidence to detain him.

[…]Now we have a third failure. Despite the fact that Hasan had reached out to Awlaki, who had been investigated twice before because of his ties to al Qaeda, “no formal investigation” into the Hasan-Awlaki connection was ever launched.

Remember the DHS report about the threat of terrorism from conservatives? If you favored immigration law enforcement, small government, personal responsibility, responsible firearm ownership, and right to life, then the DHS report said that you were a potential terrorist. Refresh your memory here. But what does DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano do when actual terrorism occurs?

According to the Associated Press: (H/T Dinocrat via ECM)

The U.S. Homeland Security secretary says she is working to prevent a possible wave of anti-Muslim sentiment after the shootings at Fort Hood in Texas. Janet Napolitano says her agency is working with groups across the United States to try to deflect any backlash against American Muslims following Thursday’s rampage by Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim who reportedly expressed growing dismay over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The shootings left 13 people dead and 29 wounded.

Actually, if you count the unborn child that one woman who died was carrying, it’s FOURTEEN dead.

Is it any wonder that Michele Bachmann has called on Napolitano to resign?

Can Democrats be trusted to keep America safe from threats? They seem to think that actual terrorists are victims, and that conservatives are the real terrorists.

News

Waterboarding saved American lives, so Obama opposes it

5 Comments

According to Gateway Pundit, waterboarding does work after all:

According to a former intelligence agent, waterboarding of terrorist Abu Zubaydah got him to talk in less than 35 seconds. The technique, which critics say is torture, probably disrupted “dozens” of planned al-Qaida attacks and saved hundreds and thousands of lives. The CIA also confirmed that waterboarding 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed led to information that prevented a similar attack on Los Angeles.

…The CIA confirmed that waterboarding of 9/11 mastermind Led to Info that aborted 9/11-style attack on Los Angeles.

The details on the prevention of that Los Angeles attack are provided by CNS News. (H/T Hot Air)

The Central Intelligence Agency told CNSNews.com today that it stands by the assertion made in a May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that the use of “enhanced techniques” of interrogation on al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) — including the use of waterboarding — caused KSM to reveal information that allowed the U.S. government to thwart a planned attack on Los Angeles.

Before he was waterboarded, when KSM was asked about planned attacks on the United States, he ominously told his CIA interrogators, “Soon, you will know.”

According to the previously classified May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that was released by President Barack Obama last week, the thwarted attack — which KSM called the “Second Wave”– planned “ ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles.”

Hot Air fills in some more of the details:

…the [CIA] remains tenacious in insisting that waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, and Abu Zubaydah saved American lives.  CNS News reports that the CIA stands by its 2005 memo describing how those interrogations stopped another 9/11-scale attack:

KSM initially resisted all other interrogation procedures, right up to the waterboard.  He insisted that Americans did not have the necessary resolve to get information out of him, and that we would only know about the next plot when it killed hundreds, if not thousands again.  Only after the waterboard did KSM cough up the information on the “second wave” attacks, and the CIA and other national-security agencies stopped it.

But nevermind the good results of counter-terrorism programs and policies. Obama needs to appease the special interest groups who elected him! How will he do that?

The left-wing BBC reports that Obama may prosecute the authors of the counter-terrorism policies: (H/T Gateway Pundit)

US President Barack Obama has left open the possibility of prosecuting officials who wrote CIA memos allowing harsh interrogation methods.

It would be up to the attorney general whether to prosecute, Mr Obama said.

The memos detailed the range of techniques the CIA could use for questioning terror suspects.

Mr Obama had said he would not use anti-torture laws to prosecute CIA personnel who relied in good faith on legal opinions issued after 9/11.

The BBC’s James Coomarasamy in Washington says the president’s comments marked a change of tone amid growing pressure from the Democratic Party not to rule out potential prosecutions.

Well, prosecuting counter-terrorism experts is one thing, but that may not be enough to appease Michael Moore and the rest of the high school dropouts in Hollywood.

Gateway Pundit reports that Obama won’t rule out prosecuting George W. Bush either, because protected America too much:

Video here:

Gateway Pundit reported a few days ago that Dick Cheney, a serious statesman, has asked the Obama regime to declassify the details of the attacks that were stopped by waterboarding, but so far Obama has declined to do so. I guess he doesn’t want the American people to know the realities of national security decision-making in the 21st century.

Should we really have elected an ACORN lawyer who is tougher on counter-terrorists than on actual terrorists? Remember these things when the 2010 elections come around.

UPDATE: More about Obama’s defense spending cuts, including cuts of missile defense programs, is here. This post also talks about his appeasement of aggressors such as North Korea and Iran as they go nuclear.

UPDATE: A total of THREE terrorists were waterboarded during the time the policy was in place.

News

Democrats are weak on military policy and counter-terrorism

Leave a comment

I was browsing over at The Anchoress and I came across this post which describes how Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein has inadvertently leaked that the USA launches Predator missions from Pakistan. This may cause the government to lessen their cooperation with American military efforts in the region because a significant amount of the population of Pakistan will not react well to this news.

This sort of error is not the exception but the rule with Democrats. Democrats have a reputation for not taking defense and counter-terrorism seriously. According to this post over at the American Thinker, the 9/11 tragedy was mostly due to a failure in intelligence caused by a “wall” between different intelligence-gathering organizations.

Gorelick, an appointee of Bill Clinton, is the one who constructed the wall of separation that kept the CIA and the FBI from comparing notes and therefore invading the privacy of nice young men like, say, Muhammed Atta and Zacarius Moussaoui. While countless problems were uncovered in our intelligence operations in the wake of 9-11, no single factor comes close to in importance to Jamie Gorelick’s wall.

In fact, it was Gorelick’s wall, perhaps more than any other single factor, that induces some people to blame Clinton himself for 9-11 since he appointed her and she acted  consistent with his philosophy of “crime fighting.” She put the wall into place as Deputy Attorney General in 1995.

George W. Bush’s bold action abroad gave us 7 years free from terrorist attacks on American assets. If there is one thing that deters future attacks, it is military invasions of countries that support and/or harbor terrorists. They understand military force. For Bush, one terrorist attack was enough to get us to respond with force.

As a result of the Bush doctrine of invading states suspected of developing and/or proliferating WMDs, Libya discontinued its weapons program and invited inspectors to come in and cart away all of its research equipment. That was the Bush doctrine – which Libya believed only because they saw that we were willing to back up our demands with force. We can have peace if our enemies believe that we have the will to go to war, and that our enemies fear that they will lose that contest.

Contrast George W. Bush’s immediate response to terrorism with Democrat Bill Clinton. According to Byron York, we had four terrorist attacks during Clinton’s presidency.

So Clinton talked tough. But he did not act tough. Indeed, a review of his years in office shows that each time the president was confronted with a major terrorist attack — the February 26, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center, the Khobar Towers attack, the August 7, 1998, bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the October 12, 2000, attack on the USS Cole — Clinton was preoccupied with his own political fortunes to an extent that precluded his giving serious and sustained attention to fighting terrorism.

How did Clinton respond to these four attacks? According to this interview with Richard Miniter, President Clinton was much less aggressive than Bush was, during his two terms. Bush’s administration did not fear public opinion, but Clinton’s administration did. Miniter lists sixteen of the Clinton administration’s failures to treat terrorism as a serious threat. Below, I cite my favorites. Read the whole list!

Lopez: In sum, how many times did Bill Clinton lose bin Laden?

Miniter: Here’s a rundown. The Clinton administration:

…

4. Did not militarily react to the al Qaeda bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

…

7. Objected to Northern Alliance efforts to assassinate bin Laden in Afghanistan.

8. Decided against using special forces to take down bin Laden in Afghanistan.

…

11. Clumsily tipped off Pakistani officials sympathetic to bin Laden before a planned missile strike against bin Laden on August 20, 1998. Bin Laden left the camp with only minutes to spare.

12-14. Three times, Clinton hesitated or deferred in ordering missile strikes against bin Laden in 1999 and 2000.

15. When they finally launched and armed the Predator spy drone plane, which captured amazing live video images of bin Laden, the Clinton administration no longer had military assets in place to strike the archterrorist.
16. Did not order a retaliatory strike on bin Laden for the murderous attack on the USS Cole.

When you look at the facts, we begin to understand why Democrats perform so poorly on national security issues. Remember John Kerry’s global test? Kerry thought that our national security should be partly based on world opinion. (Ironically, Kerry voted against the first war in Iraq, when the whole world supported us in the liberation of Kuwait).

Republicans, on the other hand, believe in peace through strength.

In foreign policy, Reagan sought to achieve “peace through strength.” During his two terms he increased defense spending 35 percent, but sought to improve relations with the Soviet Union. In dramatic meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, he negotiated a treaty that would eliminate intermediate-range nuclear missiles. Reagan declared war against international terrorism, sending American bombers against Libya after evidence came out that Libya was involved in an attack on American soldiers in a West Berlin nightclub.

The differences between the two parties could not be more clear. Weakness provokes war. Wars start when our enemies believe that they can strike us with impunity. Military strength, and the will to use it, deter aggression.