By not rushing to judgment, Obama could sweep the issue under the carpet.
MAKING AMERICANS LESS SAFE
Meanwhile, Barack Hussein Obama was making Americans less safe than we were before he was president.
In August 2009 his administration made it official, banning government spokesmen and analysts from using the terms “war on terrorism,” “jihadists,” and “global war.”28 The war on terror was over, and as far as official Washington was concerned, the jihad never was on in the first place.
The only people who didn’t get the memo were the Islamic jihadists themselves. Or maybe they did get it, and they understood it all too clearly: they realized that the Obama administration was weak and anxious to accommodate the Islamic world, and surmised that it would do little or nothing to resist Islamic jihad activity in the United States. Like Osama bin Laden observing Bill Clinton’s withdrawal of American troops from Somalia in the 1990s after the Black Hawk incident, they sensed that the Americans were a weak horse, and that it was time for their strong opponents to step up operations.
And step them up they did. In a three-month period in the late summer and early fall of 2009, there was an extraordinary proliferation of jihad attacks, attempted attacks, and exposed plots in the United States or involving American nationals abroad. In December 2009, a Pakistani Muslim living in Chicago, David Headley (whose original name was Daood Gilani, but who changed it so as to avoid suspicion in the United States), was arrested and charged with aiding in the planning of the jihad massacre in Mumbai in November 2008. Headley visited all the sites of the massacre beforehand, reporting back to his fellow jihadists about logistics of the attack.29 The same week five American citizens were arrested in Pakistan for their involvement with violent jihadist groups.30
Also that same week, a Muslim graduate student from Saudi Arabia stabbed to death a seventy-seven-year-old professor, Richard Antoun. One of the student’s roommates had gone to authorities to report him: “I said he was acting oddly, like a terrorist. When I informed them, it was for them to understand that the guy was violent or he may be violent.”31 But as in the case of Maj. Nidal Hasan, warnings went unheeded. Perhaps officials in Barack Obama’s America were more afraid of being charged with “bigotry” and “Islamophobia” and so quietly sat on the roommate’s warning, hoping that it wouldn’t blow up in their faces.
But it did.
In August 2009, seven Muslims in North Carolina were charged with aiding terrorists; a month later, it came to light that they had planned a jihad attack against the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia.32 In September, a New York–based Muslim, Najibullah Zazi, was arrested as he plotted to set off a weapon of mass destruction in a sporting event or some other crowded area.33 Another Islamic jihadist, Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, was arrested after placing an inert car bomb at a sixty-story office tower in downtown Dallas.34 Yet another jihadist, an American convert calling himself Talib Islam, was arrested for plotting to blow up the Paul Findley Federal Building in Springfield, Illinois.35 In October, Luqman Ameen Abdullah, a Detroit imam who taught his followers that they should wage jihad warfare against the United States, was killed in a shootout with the FBI.36 Also in October, a Muslim in Boston, Tarek Mehanna, was arrested for plotting to massacre American civilians in a shopping mall, as well as to murder “members of the executive branch” whom law enforcement officials declined to identify.37
The reason there was no major Islamic jihad attack in America after 9/11 was because of President George W. Bush, his team, and his policies. Now Obama is dismantling those very same policies, emasculating the CIA, trying to close Gitmo, and creating walls between agencies—restoring many of the same terrible policies of Bill Clinton that made 9/11 possible.
Obama seemed all too willing to abet the imposition of a soft Sharia in America. Refusing to call Hasan’s attack on Fort Hood what it really was, a jihad attack, was to accept the laws of dhimmitude, which forbid the dhimmis from speaking ill of Islam, Allah, or Muhammad. And so, an avowed Islamic jihadist shot over fifty people at Fort Hood, and Obama seemed intent most of all on making sure that no one got the idea that the shootings had anything to do with Islam. This was Sharia. This was dhimmitude.
The crowning capitulation came in February 2010, when the Obama Defense Department released its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), a report on security threats to the United States that it is required to issue every four years. In 128 pages, Obama’s QDR doesn’t mention the threat of Islamic jihad at all—not even with the popular weasel words such as “radical,” “Islamist,” or “extremist.” However, the report devotes eight pages to an exhaustive discussion of the security threat posed by… climate change.38
How long do you think you will remain safe while Obama ignores the jihad threat, and meanwhile triples the number of “diversity” visas and “religious” visas from the fiercest jihad hotspots in the world: Somalia, Gaza, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and more?39
One thing is certain: Obama’s appeasement of the Islamic jihad both internationally and inside America will bear fruit. Bitter fruit.
NINE
Destroying the Prestige of America
IN DUE COURSE, THE POST-AMERICAN PRESIDENT TURNED AGAINST HIS OWN PEOPLE (ALTHOUGH IT SEEMS INCREASINGLY UNLIKELY THAT HE ever really considered them his people): those who had dedicated their lives to protecting this nation after the September 11 terror attacks. He announced his intention to close down the Guantánamo Bay detention camp during his presidential campaign and reiterated this goal many times after becoming president, despite the embarrassing fact that many former Gitmo detainees returned to jihad after being released from the camp.
Obama accepted at face value the leftist claim that Guantánamo was a torture camp. Even as late as his December 1, 2009, speech announcing his troop escalation in Afghanistan, he reiterated this: “And finally, we must draw on the strength of our values—for the challenges that we face may have changed, but the things that we believe in must not. That’s why we must promote our values by living them at home—which is why I have prohibited torture and will close the prison at Guantánamo Bay. And we must make it clear to every man, woman and child around the world who lives under the dark cloud of tyranny that America will speak out on behalf of their human rights, and tend to the light of freedom and justice and opportunity and respect for the dignity of all peoples. That is who we are. That is the source, the moral source, of America’s authority.”1
But Obama’s pledge to speak out on behalf of human rights everywhere rang hollow almost immediately. It was bitterly ironic that just over a week later, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies found in a survey of twelve Arab countries—Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen—that the human-rights situation in virtually all of them had deteriorated markedly in the preceding year. “Arab governments remained wedded to a broad array of repressive laws that undermine basic liberties,” said the report—and it accused the Obama administration of abetting the repression. American policies toward these nations, it said, were “wholly inimical to reform and human rights in the region.” Obama had abandoned reform initiatives: “The last spark of life in the initiatives was quashed once and for all with the arrival of a new US administration.”2
Why was Obama mum about the deteriorating human-rights situation in these Muslim countries? Did he harbor hopes that he would be able to induce them to change by heaping praise and concessions upon them? Or was he simply indifferent to the human-rights situation in those nations, for while the alleged torture at Gitmo served his political purposes in numerous ways, human-rights abuses in Syria or Yemen could not either do him damage or afford any significant political gain?
Obama tried to maximize public outrage over the “torture” at Guantánamo. In April 2009, the Obama administration announced that it intended to release a series of photos that supposedly depicted this torture.3 This would, of course, have handed America’
s enemies a huge propaganda opportunity and eroded the nation’s moral authority to act in the world perhaps for generations. But the ensuing public outcry was so great that ultimately the post-American president, choosing his battles, quietly let the issue drop.4
Nevertheless, the damage had been done: the president of the United States was spreading the notion that American officials had engaged in torture at Guantánamo Bay. Even without actually releasing the photos, he had provided ample grist for Islamic jihadist propaganda mills.
Why did Obama indulge moral outrage over the alleged torture at Gitmo, while ignoring much worse actual torture that was going on in countries he was approaching with outstretched hand?
PROSECUTING AMERICA’S DEFENDERS
On August 24, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder appointed John Durham as a federal prosecutor to investigate CIA officers who might have abused suspected terrorists. With a fine grasp of understatement, Holder conceded: “I fully realize that my decision to commence this preliminary review will be controversial.” But that wasn’t going to stop him: “As attorney general, my duty is to examine the facts and to follow the law. In this case, given all of the information currently available, it is clear to me that this review is the only responsible course of action for me to take.”5
Why?
The Washington Post reported that in appointing this prosecutor, Holder “shook off warnings from President Obama to avoid becoming mired in past controversies.” The article went on to note the “respect that Obama says he maintains for the role of an independent attorney general.”6
But insiders and those close to the administration knew that Holder was executing a policy Obama had long wanted.
Nonetheless, this decision was so politically charged—and so radical in the specter it provided of the U.S. government potentially accusing itself of and confessing to war crimes—that it was hard to believe that Obama left it to Holder, much less dissented from it. Obama would not take the heat for his egregious and enormously hostile policy toward America. Holder was the fall guy for Obama.
Alarmed by how this move cast enemies of the United States in the role of victims and demonized law enforcement, handing a potentially overwhelming propaganda victory to Islamic jihadists worldwide, seven former CIA directors tried to stop the Obama administration from opening investigations on CIA agents who tried to get information out of jihad terrorists. The former CIA chiefs said that “further investigations would demoralize current CIA officers and might also lead allied intelligence services to suspend or scale back cooperation with the United States because the judicial probes could disclose joint operations and activities.”7
No doubt.
And as foreign governments moved also to prosecute Bush administration officials, Obama did nothing—leading John Bolton to point out that while Obama’s prosecution plan may have been “smart politics within the Democratic Party,” it risked “grave long-term damage to the United States. Ironically, it could also come back to bite future Obama administration alumni, including the president, for their current policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.”
Bolton also noted that “morale at the CIA is at record lows.” No surprise there. Holder even opened the door for Obama administration cooperation with a foreign trial of Bush officials: “Obviously, we would look at any request that would come from a court in any country and see how and whether we should comply with it.” Remarked Bolton: “This is deeply troubling. Obama appears to be following the John Ehrlichman approach, letting the U.S. lawyers ‘twist slowly, slowly in the wind.’”
The people twisting in the wind to whom Bolton was referring were the Bush administration lawyers who wrote legal opinion memos to the effect that waterboarding and similar interrogation procedures did not constitute “torture” as defined by international law. The Obama administration initiated prosecutions of John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who wrote the “torture memos,” as trial balloons in a cynically calculated effort to intimidate the entire cadre of ex-Bush administration people into silence on a host of issues—by threatening the low men on the totem pole of Bush officials who were linked to Guantánamo. This effort didn’t get far: Yoo and Bybee were cleared by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) in January 2010.8 But the fact that the attempt to prosecute them was made was disquieting enough.
When the Obama camp began this initiative, former vice president Dick Cheney had had enough, and went public with his fight. “One of the things I find disturbing about this recent disclosure,” he explained when Obama released so-called “torture memos” in April 2009, “is they put out the legal memos but they didn’t put out the memos that show the success of the effort. There are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity.… I have now formally asked that they be declassified now.… They are not telling the whole story.… If you’re going to have this debate, let’s have an honest debate.”9
But Obama wasn’t interested in honest debate. That was never his goal. Bolton explained the point of all such prosecutions: “The real aim is to intimidate U.S. officials into refraining from making hard but necessary decisions to protect our national security.”10
GOING AFTER THE SEALS
But the post-American president wasn’t chastened. In November 2009 three Navy SEALs captured Ahmed Hashim Abed, the mastermind of the killing and horrible mutilation of Americans in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004. But instead of being hailed as heroes, the SEALs faced court-martial—because Abed emerged, according to Rowan Scarborough of Fox News, with a bloody lip.11
A high-placed military source said that the SEALs were so angry about these court-martial proceedings, they were talking about not taking any more prisoners. And who could blame them? So the internationalist Obama managed in one fell swoop not only to demoralize the SEALs, but to make Americans that much less safe.
Even worse, the military source said that the prosecution of the SEALs was a cause dear to the White House, which pursued it relentlessly as payback for an earlier action taken by the SEALs: killing the Somali jihadist pirates who held hostage Capt. Richard Phillips of the Maersk Alabama in April 2009. Obama, ever the internationalist, had set the rules of engagement in such a way as to preclude killing the pirates: a shot could be fired only if Phillips seemed to be in imminent danger of death. The SEALs were on site for thirty-eight hours and had several chances to take out the pirates, but were held back. Finally, the on-site commander determined that Phillips was indeed in danger of death, and ordered the SEALs to fire.
According to a retired military intelligence officer who called in to Rush Limbaugh with the information, Obama was privately furious, although publicly he claimed that he ordered the shot in order to gain public support. But he did not forget the incident, and the prosecution of the SEALs was payback.12 There was no way to verify this information, but there was also no doubt that it was plausible, particularly given Obama’s other actions and habits of mind.
And as we have seen, in August 2009 Secretary of State Clinton said that it was a matter of “great regret” that the United States did not accept the authority of the International Criminal Court (ICC)—which dearly wanted to try American soldiers for war crimes.13
It could happen.
Obama seemed preoccupied with—and angry about—the treatment of jihadi terrorists, and was going after those who put protecting Americans first. The hypocrisy of the administration was devastating.
KSM TO NEW YORK
Not long after that, Holder and Obama found a way both to discredit and weaken America at the same time.
In a stunning act of sedition and capitulation to Islamic jihad, the Obama administration announced in November 2009 that it intended to bring the masterminds of the shocking invasion of America on September 11, 2001, into a New York courtroom. Obama was going to try in a U.S. court the Muslim masterminds of the most brutal attack on American soil in modern history—joining what historian Bat Ye’or has termed “over a millenn
ium of jihad wars, land expropriations, enslavements, and humiliations of the conquered non-Muslim populations on three continents.”
Obama was determined to prosecute the September 11 act of war as a law enforcement issue. And so our wartime enemy would face a civilian trial in New York City. Congressman Peter King (R-NY) said “it may be the worst decision by a U.S. president in history.” Conservative activist David Horowitz agreed with King: “It sends a signal to terrorists everywhere to attack civilians.”
There is a United States Supreme Court holding from 1942 regarding six German Nazi saboteurs who had been apprehended on the eastern seaboard during World War II. As they were not military personnel, they asked to be given civilian trials, rather than trials before military panels. The Supreme Court ruled against them, noting that as spies and saboteurs they were enemy combatants, and would thus go before military tribunals under that system.
End of discussion.
That should be ample authority to establish a jurisdictional basis to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his fellow jihadis in a military tribunal. The holding in the Nazi saboteur case noted that Congress had declared war on Germany, but other statutory and historical references would apply very easily to a finding that Mohammed and his henchmen were “unlawful combatants,” and therefore subject to trial by military tribunals if so directed by the president.14
The precedent is clear. But Holder and Obama, of course, had other priorities.
Consider that the greatest act of war, the most devastating attack on American soil in U.S. history, would be turned over to civilian courts with the enemy mastermind given the constitutional rights of an American citizen.
In a civilian court in New York, the mass-murdering jihadis would not have been put on trial; Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the military would have been the real defendants in what would certainly have turned out to have been a show trial. It would have been a veritable jihad circus, in which Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could have propagandized the whole world in a courtroom in the shadows of the once towering, majestic symbol of American fiscal greatness and superiority, the World Trade Center.
Post-American Presidency Page 23