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Home Front: WoT
Pensacola Jihad Massacre Proves We've Learned Nothing Since the Fort Hood Attack
2019-12-08
[PJ] Second Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, an aviation officer in the Saudi Air Force, opened fire at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla., on Friday, killing four people and wounding many others. In doing so, he showed yet again that the prevailing politically correct obfuscation and denial regarding the jihad threat is not only wrong, it’s dangerous. If we had a realistic approach to the jihad threat, Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani’s victims would be alive today.

Before he embarked upon his killing spree, someone who appeared to be Alshamrani ranted on Twitter about the evils of America. First, he rejected the George W. Bush explanation for jihad terrorism, "They hate us because of our freedom": "O American people ‐ I’m not against you for being American, I don’t hate you because your freedoms, I hate you because every day you [sic] supporting, funding and committing crimes not only against Muslims but against humanity."

Alshamrani went on to elucidate exactly what those crimes were: "What I see from America is the supporting of Israel which is invasion of Muslim countrie [sic], I see invasion of many countries by it’s [sic] troops, I see Guantanamo Bay. I see cruise missiles, cluster bombs and UAV." He added: "I’m against evil, and America as a whole has turned into a nation of evil."

This statement, if it did indeed come from Alshamrani, as appears likely, makes clear that he was a jihad terrorist. He was killing because of America’s supposed crimes against Muslims; that rules out the alternative explanation for his acts, that he was lashing out after some negative incident or mistreatment at the Naval Air Station.

Many credulous Americans, meanwhile, will believe his list of grievances, and think that if we just stop committing these supposed "crimes," that the jihad will disappear. Actually, grievance lists such as Alshamrani’s are common from jihadis, who have to couch their jihads as defensive in the absence of a caliphate. In Sunni law, only the caliph can declare offensive jihad. So when there is no caliph, all jihad must be defensive. The enumerated grievances are pretexts that enable a jihadi lawfully to kill in accordance with Islamic law.

Alshamrani was in the country to get aviation training. No one flagged him as a potential jihadi. No one would even have dared to question him to try to ascertain his thoughts about the United States and the global jihad. Any effort to have done so would have been denounced as "Islamophobic," and would have been career suicide for whoever did the questioning.

We saw this with the Fort Hood jihad mass murderer, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who was praised and promoted despite alarming his colleagues with his talk of violent jihad. None of his superiors dared do anything except promote him; they knew that if they questioned him about his loyalties, they would be the subject of a CNN feature story the next week on "Islamophobia in the Military," and they would be looking at a dishonorable discharge.
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Home Front: WoT
The Backlash Industry
2015-12-21
[DAILYCALLER] The history of the looming anti-Muslim backlash that never arrives is instructive. Logically, the original post-9/11 anti-Muslim backlash should have been the largest and most ferocious of the various backlashes, and indeed George W. Bush, members of his administration and members of Congress frequently warned Americans not to blame all Muslims for the acts committed by Al-Qaeda.

Even an anti-Israel leftist like Rachel Corrie
...aka Saint Pancake. A member of the lefty International Solidarity Movement, she attempted to stare down an Israeli bulldozer in 2003...
 Award recipient Delinda C. Hanley recognizes that there was no post-9/11 backlash. Writing in the Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs, Hanley gushed: "As a result of the effective campaign undertaken by America's leaders, non-governmental organizations and the media, a backlash that, in many nations, might have turned into a bloodbath was averted and, indeed, transformed into a celebration of diversity."

The group known as Human Rights Watch
... During the fiscal year ended June 30, 2011, HRW received a pledge from the Foundation to Promote Open Society, of which George Soros is Chairman, for general support totaling $100,000,000. The grant is being paid in installments of $10,000,000 over ten years.Through June 30, 2013, HRW had received $30,000,000 towards the fulfillment of the pledge....
 however tells a different tale. It documents in the same era a series of attacks amounting to "a nationwide wave of hate crimes against persons and institutions believed to be Arab or Muslim." The numbers are notable either for the "ferocity and extent" as HRW puts it, or for the remarkable calm they convey compared to the predicted carnage. For instance the 17-fold increase in anti-Muslim incidents sounds more alarming than the fact that there were 28 such events in 2000 compared with 481 in 2001.

It gets more interesting when one reads that these numbers include behavior ranging from "verbal taunts to employment discrimination to airport profiling to hate crimes." Since no actual numbers are listed for specific "crimes" one might suspect that there are far more verbal taunts than hate crimes among the 481.

One rarely-cited statistic that deflates HRW's story is the number two: only two people committed murder attributed to the post-9/11 backlash: Frank Roque and Mark Stroman. Roque is the Arizona man who killed Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas station owner, and Stroman is the Texas man who killed Vasudev Patel, a non-Muslim Indian gas station attendant, and Waqar Hasan. In a nation of over 300 million people, only two became murderers after 9/11 as a result of their anti-Muslim rage.

After Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, M.D. went on a shooting spree at Fort Hood, US Army General George Casey told CNN that he was "concerned that this increased speculation could cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers." Worse yet, on NBC after having acknowledged Hasan's attack as a "tragedy" Casey added "if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's worse."

After the ISIS attacks in Gay Paree on November 13, the media was awash with breathless prognostications about the imminent anti-Muslims backlash: The Atlantic,NPR, The New York Times
...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize...
, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, The Huffington Post, and many more.

Most Muslim advocacy groups (like CAIR
...designated a terrorist group by the UAE...
 and MPAC) are the prime movers of the backlash myth. In fact, the Attorney General's cautionary speech was given to a group called Muslim Advocates, which describes itself as a "national legal advocacy and educational organization." Her comforting words (to the Muslim audience) and admonition (to everyone else) might have been drawn from the Muslim Advocate's "study" titled "Anti-Muslim Bigotry Rises Alongside Hateful Rhetoric" which, as of this writing, lists 32 events comprising the post-San Bernardino backlash. Many of these purported backlash events are anecdotal. Most of the "assaults" are verbal. Four involve violence against Muslims or people perceived to be Muslims.

So while the left continues with its infantilizing condescension towards the American public, it ignores the FBI's own hate crime statistics which tell a different tale: 60.3 percent of all hate crimes in the U.S. are perpetrated against Jews while 13.7 percent are committed against Muslims. The anti-Muslim backlash is a chimera. If the Department of Justice gets its way, the real backlash will befall anyone questioning the received wisdom of the B.O. regime and its media supporters.
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Europe
Pete Heck: The problem is within Islam itself
2015-01-11
[INDYSTAR] In the editorial offices of a French magazine this week, Moslem butchers put an emphatic and bloody exclamation point on President B.O.s 2012 declaration before the United Nations
...the Oyster Bay money pit...
 that, The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.

And even before the broken bodies of the French cartoonists had been removed from the scene, apologists on the American political left were taking to cameras and keyboards to make sure the apparent greater crime of political incorrectness was not perpetrated.

CNN pundit Sally Kohn sent out a barrage of politically correct tweets that repackaged the foolish charge made years ago by fellow left-winger Rosie O'Donnell that, radical Christianity is just as dangerous as radical Islam. You can be forgiven for struggling to remember the last time monks with suicide belts stormed a mall food court or a group of knife-wielding nuns beheaded an infidel before mass.

Can you find nutjobs claiming to be Christian who have committed violent acts? Of course. But in every example, the offender was not acting in accordance with the teaching of any mainstream Christian denomination, nor are there large groups of Christians dedicated to implementing such a strategy.

Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean
Former Dem governor of Vermont or Rhode Island or one of those dinky states. Howard lost his bid to be president by shrieking and screaming and acting like a loon. Then they made him chairman of the Dem national committee, where he continued doing the same things only nobody paid any attention....
 appeared on MSNBC attempting to say the same about Islam. I stopped calling these people Moslem terrorists, he proclaimed as though he or anyone on the left has used that phrase with regularity. I think ISIS is a cult. Not an Islamic cult. I think its a cult, he said.
Despite the turbans and the automatic weapons.
This is the same nonsense weve been hearing from American liberals for years. After the horrific attack at Fort Hood, where Moslem terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan jumped onto a table, shouted Allahu Akbar and massacred Americans in cold blood, the B.O. regime labeled the event workplace violence. Go online and watch Attorney General Eric Inaction Jackson Holder
... aka Mister Fast and Furious...
 refuse to act like he understands the phrase radical Islam. When you do, it should become apparent why events like this continue to happen. We are paralyzed with fear at the thought of honestly acknowledging that the problem we face is within Islam itself.

Every time Islamic jihadists strike, our society searches for some reason to explain what provoked them: American foreign policy, the invasion of Iraq, a preacher in Florida who threatened to burn a Koran, the establishment of Israel after World War II, the events at Abu Ghraib, offensive cartoons, and on and on.
It's always something, ain't it? Don't forget the loss of al-Andaluz in 1492. That was a biggie.
But lost in the sideshow is the truth that many within Islam have been imitating their warrior prophet and fighting the world since the 7th century.

Yes, thankfully there are large numbers of Moslems who interpret their holy book in a manner that allows them to live at peace with others.

But we cant deny the reality that Islam is the only religion where there is a discussion within the faith about whether its acceptable to saw off journalists heads, burn children alive who don't renounce their faith in Christ, massacre thousands by using jetliners as missiles, or slaughter cartoonists at a satirical magazine. Those acts of terror arent the product of some modern movement of Islamists who misunderstand and pervert their scriptures. It has been this way since Muhammad was perpetrating the violence himself.

The stark difference between Kohn and O'Donnell's radical Christian violence and Islamic terror is the difference between despicable acts and despicable teachings. Theres a reason that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote over a century ago, I studied the Koran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad.

Multiculturalist blather prevents us from acknowledging that simple reality. Pretending there is moral and ethical equivalency between all faiths is cultural suicide. Muhammad proclaimed, I have been ordered (by Allah) to fight against the people until they testify that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.

Three Moslems in La Belle France followed that example this week. Thats the real problem we continue to ignore.
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Home Front: WoT
The Great ‘Workplace Violence’ Epidemic
2014-10-23
As if Ebola were not serious enough, a new, and perhaps more lethal, epidemic appears to be spreading throughout the world from the Middle East to North America. It goes under the rubric “workplace violence.”

The possibility of such an epidemic first came to our attention in November 2009 when Major Nidal Malik Hasan – an Army psychiatrist who corresponded with the late Yemen-based imam Anwar Al-Awlaki and who lectured his fellow doctors on jihad — shouted “Allah Akbhar” and fatally shot 13 people, injuring 30 others, at Ft. Hood, near Killeen, Texas. The U.S. Department of Defense and federal law enforcement agencies classified the shootings as acts of “workplace violence.”

(Some scholars, however, say the first true instance of “workplace violence” was the September 11, 2001 aviation incident at the World Trade Center, since the vast majority of the people in those structures were at work. Calling this a terror attack was a misnomer instigated by Islamophobes.)

For a few years, the potential epidemic seemed to be in abeyance but of late there have been disturbing signs of a resurgence.
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Terror Networks
Call the Islamic State What It Is: Evil
2014-08-28
By Jonah Goldberg
[NATIONALREVIEW] I never liked it when George W. Bush used the term "evildoers" to describe al-Qaeda and other terrorists.
I never had the least problem with the description. I thought it accurate.
A lot of other people objected as well, but for different reasons. I didn't like the term because it always sounded to me like he was saying "evil Dewar's," as in the blended Scotch. (This always made some of Bush's statements chuckle-worthy -- "We will not rest until we find the evil Dewar's!") I prefer single malts, but "evil" always seemed unduly harsh.
I'm not a scotch drinker and -- never having heard the brand name spoken -- I'd have pronounced it "Di Wars." Just goes to show what I know. Taking exception to the term doesn't lessen the actual evil.
The more common objection to "evildoers" was that it was, variously, simplistic, Manichean, imperialistic, cartoonish, etc.
"Evildoers" has a Dudley Dooright air to it. That still never changed the fact that evil was being done.
"Perhaps without even realizing it," Peter Roff, then with UPI, wrote in October 2001, "the president is using language that recalls a simpler time when good and evil seemed more easy to identify -- a time when issues, television programs and movies were more black and white, not colored by subtle hues of meaning."
Peter sounds like a subtle sort of fellow, who could see 3000 dead Americans in other than a Manichean light. Yasss, yasss, the world is actually made up of shades of gray. It still remains that some shades are considerably darker than others. Those of us who see the world in Technicolor don't have that much trouble distinguishing among them.
A few years later, as the memory of 9/11 faded and the animosity toward Bush grew, the criticism became more biting. But the substance was basically the same. Sophisticated people don't talk about "evil," save perhaps when it comes to America's legacy of racism, homophobia, capitalistic greed, and the other usual targets of American self-loathing.
Us Technicolored folks don't have any trouble distinguishing among "bad," "evil," "Evil," and "EVIL!"
For most of the Obama years, talk of evil was largely banished from mainstream discourse.
Diversity is good for you. I've never understood the way that statement has always been met with unthinking acceptance. Perhaps diversity can be overdone just like anything else. Wearing shoes with pom-poms on them and dancing in a circle with the guys down at the Greek center is a bit of diverting diversity. Refusing to speak anything but Greek is stupidly diverse. But you can't get too far into diversity without running into evil and sometimes into EVIL! Diverse human cultures sometimes slice the genitalia off young girls. I, personally, would characterize that as Evil (capital E). If your courtship doesn't work out in Pakistain you might douse the light of your life who's just rejected you with acid. I, personally, would call that EVIL. Just adding the exclamation point when thinking about the things the Islamic State and its cousin Boko Haram are doing seems inadequate. There should be some sort of word to describe "beyond evil."
An attitude of "goodbye to all that" prevailed, as the War on Terror was rhetorically and legally disassembled and the spare parts put toward building a law-enforcement operation.
Well, you know. (That's a sentence in progressivespeak). Proper progressives are against war, even in the face of existential threats. They keep assuring each other that Violence Never Solves Anything, which any Gepid can tell you is bunk. A hyperarmed police force, on the other hand, is necessary to defeat domestic "terrorism" by those who would attempt to limit the government's writ.
War was euphemized into "overseas contingency operations" and "kinetic military action."
There's always been something kinetic about the falling of a bomb from a B52.
There was still bloodshed, but the language was often bloodless. Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a protege of al-Qaeda guru Anwar al-Awlaki, shouted "Allahu Akbar!" as he killed his colleagues at Fort Hood. The military called the incident "workplace violence."
He was in his workplace, sort of, and he was certainly violent. The fact that he's a religious lunatic was thought to be beside the point, though it did cheat the victims of their Purple Hearts. The language Shakespeare and Walter Raleigh and Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe spoke has been soaking for the past fifty years in warm milk. It has become cheesy.
But soaking sanitizing the language only works so long as people aren't paying too much attention.
"Whoa! Over there! Isn't that Kim Kardashian!"
That's why the Islamic State is so inconvenient to those who hate the word "evil." Last week, after the group released a video showing American journalist James Foley getting his head cut off, the administration's rhetoric changed dramatically. The president called the Islamic State a "cancer" that had to be eradicated. Secretary of State John Kerry referred to it as the "face of . . . evil."
That was after referring to it as the "Junior Varsity of Terrorism." But if you were paying attention back during the Bush years you realize this is nothing new. One poor guy (I think his name was Johnson but I'm too lazy to look it up) was murdered in Saudi Arabia and the murderer had his head in his refrigerator when he was nabbed. But that was years ago, maybe six or seven, and we were all so much younger then...
Although most people across the ideological spectrum see no problem with calling the Islamic State evil, the change in rhetoric elicited a predictable knee-jerk response.
There's always room for tut-tuttery, also known as rhetorical Jell-o.
Political scientist Michael Boyle hears an "eerie echo" of Bush's "evildoers" talk. "Indeed," he wrote in the New York Times, "condemning the black-clad, masked militants as purely 'evil' is seductive, for it conveys a moral clarity and separates ourselves and our tactics from the enemy and theirs."
Or perhaps it merely illustrates the separation? No. No. That couldn't be it.
James Dawes, the director of the Program in Human Rights and Humanitarianism at Macalester College, agreed in a piece for CNN.com. Using the word "evil," he wrote, "stops us from thinking."
'Tis my opinion that being able to recognize it requires you start thinking...
No, it doesn't. But perhaps a reflexive and dogmatic fear of the word "evil" hinders thinking?
Y'gotta be started to be hindered.
For instance, Boyle suggests that because the Islamic State controls lots of territory and is "administering social services," it "operates less like a revolutionary terrorist movement that wants to overturn the entire political order in the Middle East than a successful insurgent group that wants a seat at that table."
Tut tut, sir. It's just another approach to governance. Different cultures have different ways. Theirs includes chopping people's heads off and summarily executing prisoners and crucifying people. Who are we, who have our own faults, to judge? We used to have slavery in this country too. Diversity is good for you. Shuddup.
Behold the clarity of thought that comes with jettisoning moralistic language! Never mind that the Islamic State says it seeks a global caliphate with its flag over the White House. Who cares that it is administering social services? Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot did, too. That's what revolutionary groups do when they grab enough territory.
Mussolini made the trains run on time or else.
There's a more fundamental question: Is it true? Is the Islamic State evil?
I'd characterize anyone who actually has to ask that question as not too firmly good him-, her-, or itself.
As a matter of objective moral fact, the answer seems obvious.
"Doh!" I shouted, whacking myself on the forehead...
But also under any more subjective version of multiculturalism, pluralism, or moral relativism shy of nihilism, "evil" seems a pretty accurate description for an organization that is not only intolerant toward gays, Christians, atheists, moderate Muslims, Jews, women, et al. but also stones, beheads, and enslaves them.
Tut tut, sir. You're not being at all multicultural.
Who are you saving the word for if "evil" is too harsh for the Islamic State?
If Lucifer himself stalked down the middle of Main Street there would a pretty big crowd following him. Dissent, y'understand, is the highest form of patriotism.
More to the point, since when is telling the truth evidence you've stopped thinking?
Well, yeah. So they crucify people. Isn't it up to us to try and understand their culture?
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Home Front: Culture Wars
When failure carries no cost
2013-08-10
h/t Gates of Vienna
This week, after a three-and-a-half-year delay, US Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was finally placed on trial for massacring 13 and wounding 32 at Ft. Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009.

Hasan was a self-identified jihadist. His paper and electronic trail provided mountains of evidence that he committed the massacre to advance the cause of Islamic supremacy. Islamic supremacists like Hasan, and his early mentor al-Qaida operations chief Anwar al-Awlaki, view as enemies all people who oppose totalitarian Islam's quest for global domination.

Before, during and following his assault, Hasan made his jihadist motives obvious to the point of caricature in his statements about the US, the US military and the duties of pious Muslims. But rather than believe Hasan, and so do justice to his victims, the Obama administration, with the active collusion of senior US military commanders went to great lengths to cover up Hasan's ideological motivations and hence the nature of his crime.

On the day of the attack, Lt.-Gen. Robert Cone, then commander of III Corps at Ft. Hood, said preliminary evidence didn't suggest that the shooting was terrorism. Cone said this even though it was immediately known that before he began shooting Hasan called out "Allahu akhbar." He called himself a "Soldier of Allah" on his business cards.

In an interview with CNN three days after the attack, US Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said, "Our diversity, not only in our army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's worse."
I wonder what a man who gave us "A reverence for life does not require one to respect nature's obvious mistakes." would've made of this?
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Home Front: WoT
HIV positive soldier accused of military base plot wears surgical mask in trial
2012-05-23
An HIV positive US soldier accused of plotting an attack on a military base after fleeing his post as a Moslem conscientious objector has gone on trial wearing a surgical mask and manacled to the floor.

Courtroom security agents behind him wore protective goggles, an apparent reaction to an incident in which the soldier, Naser Jason Abdo, who claims to be HIV positive, bit his lip and spat blood at police.

Prosecutors called the first of 43 witnesses to the stand in a bid to show that Abdo, who fled his post in Kentucky, was gathering bomb-making materials and weapons to attack soldiers and their families at the Fort Hood base in Texas, the scene of a deadly shooting rampage in 2009.

One witness said Abdo told him that the assault was intended to show support for Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Moslem psychiatrist accused of killing 12 soldiers and a civilian in the 2009 shooting, which also maimed 32 others.

The FBI alleges Hasan had contacts with the charismatic US-born holy man Anwar al-Awlaqi, a leading member of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who was killed in a September 2011 drone strike.

FBI agent Charles Owens said that Abdo told him in an interrogation session that "he wanted to do it for the sake of the men and women of Afghanistan, that they had been wronged."

Abdo was tossed in the slammer
Yez got nuttin' on me, coppers! Nuttin'!
 July 27 in the nearby Texas town of Killeen. Police and federal agents have previously testified that they found a handgun and enough gunpowder to make at least one bomb.

They also discovered directions from an al-Qaeda magazine on how to build an bomb.

Prosecutors mounted a detailed case, mixing a trail of receipts and time-stamped videos of Abdo with testimony from a number of workers who encountered him.

They said he planned to detonate a bomb in a crowded Chinese restaurant not far from Fort Hood, and then gun down soldiers, their families and civilians as they fled.

"He referred to civilians as collateral damage," Mr Owens said.

Defence attorney Zachary Boyd countered that prosecutors could not prove that his client intended to kill anyone, and that no bomb was ever built.

"I want the jury to focus not just on the evidence, but the law," Boyd said in his opening statement.

Prosecutor Gregg Sofer told jurors that Abdo had intended to kidnap a soldier and execute him on video when he was still in Kentucky.

"He had already acquired a body bag, a stun gun, a cattle prong," Sofer told the jury.
But the plan fell apart and Abdo fled, leaving his Cadillac, body bags, a green body bag carrier and bleach to clean up the scene of the crime.

A hood, three handcuff boxes, batteries for the prong, his car keys and identification papers were also found.

"My heart was racing," Oak Grove Police Sergeant Victor Lynch told the court. "I was thinking somebody was in danger."

Abdo bought a .40-calibre handgun and two extended round clips from a man in Nashville and paid $315.05 in cash at a Dallas-area department store for items that prosecutors said could be used to make a bomb, including electrical wiring, clocks and a pressure cooker.

He then took a four-hour taxi ride from North Texas to Killeen, where he bought smokeless gunpowder in a local gun store.

A federal forensic analyst testified that the powder, typically used in fireworks, burns slowly but could be used to detonate a bomb.

Prosecutors displayed receipts for the goods and showed videos of Abdo at the department store, his Killeen hotel and at the gun store a few miles down the road.
Along the way, he aroused suspicion that twice prompted police investigations and ultimately led to his arrest.

One employee recalled telling Abdo to have a nice day after he paid $256.44 cash for a number of items that included the smokeless gunpowder.

Bothered after the exchange, those at the store later called police.
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Home Front: WoT
Purple Hearts for Fort Hood Victims Listed as Reason for Obama Veto Threat
2012-05-21
Why? To honor the victims in this way would acknowledge that the radical Islamist perpetrators were domestic terrorists.

“The Administration objects to section 552, which would grant Purple Hearts to the victims of the shooting incidents in Fort Hood, Texas, and Little Rock, Arkansas,” the veto threat states. “The criminal acts that occurred in Little Rock were tried by the State of Arkansas as violations of the State criminal code rather than as acts of terrorism; as a result, this provision could create appellate issues.”

On June 1, 2009, Muslim convert Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, who had spent time in Yemen and was an avowed jihadist, killed one soldier and wounded another in a drive-by shooting on a military recruiting office in Little Rock. He pleaded guilty to murder, avoiding trial and the death penalty, and was sentenced to life in prison.

Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army major who had email communications with senior al-Qaeda recruiter and Yemen-based cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, awaits military trial for the Nov. 5, 2009, massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, in which 13 were killed and 29 wounded.
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Home Front: WoT
Obama: Warrior Or Assassin?
2011-10-03
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
Good news from the Voldemort Affair (the unpleasantness formerly known as the Global War on Terror, these days it appears to be some kind of contretemps with Those Who Must Not Be Named).
I am so-o-o-o-o stealing that. It's not plagiarism when you announce you're going to steal it up front, is it?
President Obama's order to kill or capture Anwar al-Awlaki, one of Al Qaeda's chief propagandists, has finally been carried out.
Deader than a rock, from what we hear.
Over at Salon.com,
Good Gawd! They're still around? Who reads them?
Glenn Greenwald greeted this news by calling President B.O. an assassin.
President Sparafucile? Somehow it doesn't work for me...
After all, Mr. Al-Awlaki was a US citizen and was never convicted in a court of law of those offenses for which the alleged terrorist was allegedly killed. According to a story in the Los Angeles Times, also joining Mr. Greenwald in the assassin-identification business was Texas Congressman Ron Paul.
That's a pretty fastidious approach, alright. It avoids getting blood on your hands by drooling pablum down the chin. Pontius Pilate approves.
Part of me is glad to see Mssrs. Greenwald and Paul engaging so cordially in this rare moment of bipartisan harmony.
They should spend more time together. They make a cute couple. I'm looking forward to buying them a toaster.
And it is always good to see ideas in Special Providence confirmed in real life; in that book on the American foreign policy tradition I wrote that Jeffersonians on the right and the left often unite in their condemnation of what they see as executive excess. I used Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan in the book as I recall; now I can update those examples.
People kinda backed off doing that when Buchanan decided he wasn't a Republican anymore. Nader, in the meantime, has become such a joke that even lefties giggle.
But I fear I am one of the mindless hordes Mr. Greenwald invokes when he, like Paul, mourns that so many Americans will think the death of Al-Awlaki is good news.
My throat's still raw from all the ululation.
What's most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government's new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government. Many will celebrate the strong, decisive, Tough President's ability to eradicate the life of Anwar al-Awlaki
... Born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, al-Awlaki is a dual citizen of the U.S. and Yemen. He is an Islamic holy man who is a trainer for al-Qaeda and its franchises. His sermons were attended by three of the 9/11 hijackers, by Fort Hood murderer Nidal Malik Hussein, and Undieboomer Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He is the first U.S. citizen ever placed on a CIA target list...
 -- including many who just so righteously condemned those Republican audience members as so terribly barbaric and crass for cheering Governor Perry's execution of scores of serial murderers and rapists -- criminals who were at least given a trial and appeals and the other trappings of due process before being killed.
Again I note with praise and thanks Mr. Greenwald's sense of fair play as he steps in to make a favorable contrast between GOP debate audiences and the liberal editorialists who praised President B.O.'s drone campaign -- and reminds us that whatever faults it may have Texas does have a judicial system in which accused criminals have rights. Much more of this from the often acerbic Mr. Greenwald and historians will begin to describe our times as an "era of good feelings" in which bipartisan civility reigned supreme.
... rather than as an era in which theory regularly triumphed over practice...
But having said all this, and wanting to emphasize that both in Special Providence and elsewhere I argue that the Jeffersonian critiques from Ron Paul, Glenn Greenwald and others of executive excess in foreign affairs stand in a long and completely legitimate tradition of American foreign policy, it nevertheless seems to me that they are wrong in this case.
It nevertheless seems to me that the sun continues to rise in the east and that the woods are foul with bear poop. Somebody should call the EPA.
Perhaps this is just further proof of how mindless I am, but it does seem to me that Al-Awlaki and his buds are at war with the people of the United States and that in war, people not only die: it is sometimes your duty to kill them.
"Duty" is the key word there. It's at the end of a very long stick of social change. In 1941 my Dad had a duty to get drafted and shipped off the fight Nazis. Our cultural pantheon included Mom, the Boy Scouts, Apple Pie, Truth, Justice, and the American Way. After 70 years of battering Dissent is the Highest Form of Patriotism. Mom has become a role model for both girls and boys, has taken a lesbian lover, and has a life outside the home. The Boy Scouts are ucky because they refuse to allow homosexual predators to swarm around boys just as they're trying to figure what the hell puberty's doing to them. Truth has become relative. Justice has crumbled in the face of rehabilitation and counterintuitive compassion. Practices that would have tripped a gag reflex at Buchenwald now have their own validity, which makes any "American" way just one approach among many and who's to say which is better? It's an age of sympathetic vampires and evil clowns, where duty is a tenuous concept that applies only to what's best (or even what feels best) for you.
That the Al-Qaeda groupies are levying war against the United States without benefit of a government does not make them less legitimate targets for missiles, bullets and any other instruments of execution we may have lying around: the irresponsibility, the contempt for all legal norms, the chaotic and anarchic nature of the danger they pose and the sheer wickedness of waging private war make them even more legitimate targets with even fewer rights than combatants fighting under legal governments that observe the laws of war.
To my knowledge, no American "captured" by either al-Qaeda or the Taliban has escaped alive. Geneva Conventions apply only to the civilized, while today's Vandals, Avars and Huns get to do things the 622 A.D. way.
Mr. Al-Awlaki chose to make himself what used to be called an outlaw; a person at war with society who is no longer protected by the laws he seeks to destroy. He was not a criminal who has broken some particular set of laws; he was an enemy seeking to destroy all the laws and the institutions that create them. His fiery sermons inspired numerous jihadists, like Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan, to attack Americans. He was personally involved with planning the attempted Christmas Day bombing in 2009 and he mentored several of the 9/11 bombers. That he was at war with the United States may not have been proved in a criminal court but is not really up for debate.
Once you join the enemy army you're cut off from the rules governing your own people. You get to live by theirs, and your old side, the one you were born and bred to, gets to shoot out out of hand if they catch you.
By waging private war against the United States, he placed himself in jeopardy, and our Chief Magistrate, obedient to the commitments he made when he took his oath of office, fulfilled his solemn duty by returning Mr. Al-Awlaki to his maker by the most effective means at hand.
Once you're outside your own country and living in the enemy camp you get what the enemy gets. What's complicated about that?It's because you've become an enemy, whether you've submitted a letter of resignation from civilization or not.
Abraham Lincoln did not order the Kearsarge to arrest the Confederate sailors on the Alabama and return them to the US for a civil trial; he ordered the Navy to sink Confederate ships without serving them arrest warrants, without getting grand jury indictments, without reading them their rights and without giving them the opportunity to send their lawyers into court to get injunctions against the attack.
Far from President B.O. launching an unprecedented assault on the civil rights of all Americans, he was acting as presidents must -- and do.
Being forced into the cattle chute and groped when I want to fly somewhere is a much greater infringement of my civil rights than Anwar al-Awlaki swallowing a Hellfire in another country.
Every President of the United States, including Thomas Jefferson and probable Ron Paul hero John Tyler (the only ex-president who stood with the Confederacy in the Civil War) would have taken a similar step in similar conditions, and I have no doubt that every Congress ever elected would have backed them up. Abraham Lincoln did not order the Kearsarge to arrest the Confederate sailors on the Alabama and return them to the US for a civil trial; he ordered the Navy to sink Confederate ships without serving them arrest warrants, without getting grand jury indictments, without reading them their rights and without giving them the opportunity to send their lawyers into court to get injunctions against the attack.
... and Lincoln took the same sort of heat (only worse) from the same sort of people who're bitching and moaning today...
I am neither a lawyer nor a judge, but it does not take much special knowledge to understand that Mr. Awlaki had placed himself well beyond the protections of criminal law.
Starting with being outside the boundaries of the U.S...
Had he been captured, and dragged as it were unwillingly back under the umbrella of American law, it might have been different, and he could have been tried for treason or other crimes. But Mr. Obama was under no obligation to risk the lives of American soldiers to save Mr. Awlaki from himself and restore to him the protection of the laws he despised, nor was he under any obligation to forbear and allow Mr. Awlaki to continue his activities until such time as Interpol or some other recognized law enforcement agency could serve him a warrant and take him into custody.
How many terrorists has Interpol arrested? Actually, Interpol doesn't really arrest people -- there is no Man from U.N.C.L.E. They issue paper, which makes its way to police agencies at the national level, which then disseminates the paper to other agencies at provincial levels, which further disseminate paper to local levels. All of the dissemination at each level is subject to local law and politix, and overriding all is the question of whether the police bureaucracy happens to feel like rounding up the miscreant or even disseminating the paper. Dawood Ibrahim continues existing quite openly in Pakistain, despite multiple Interpol warrants and despite the fact that Indian intel agencies are able to discover his addresses, phone numbers, the names of his closest associates and their addresses and phone numbers, and the addresses and phone numbers of their mistresses and "special" dancing boys, all of which is beyond the power of Pak intel agencies to discover...
Both Congressman Paul and Mr. Greenwald do, I think, have a legitimate beef with the President. The President is clearly acting like a man who is fighting a war. He is bringing down fiery death from the skies against any foe he can locate. This is not the normal behavior of a Chief Magistrate faithfully executing the laws. It is the behavior of a president locked in a bitter struggle against a dangerous foe. President B.O. cannot have it both ways. If he is our chief law enforcement officer leading the investigation of a global criminal network known as Al-Qaeda, then his actions are subject to one set of restrictions and one kind of review. Perhaps an Al-Awlaki can be killed resisting arrest, but the Greenwald-Paul questions about assassinations make some sense if we are in the middle of a complex law enforcement operation against an organized crime entity comparable to the mafia or perhaps to a narco mob.
Being Chief Magistrate implies you've actually got a country to be in charge of. There won't be any luxury vacations for Michelle and the girlies with the black flag of Islam flying over the White House. Probably if you live there you notice the flagpole every day. It changes the outlook.
But if the President is acting as Commander in Chief in a Congressionally authorized quasi-war (quasi because Al Qaeda is not a state), then his actions fall under another set of guidelines altogether.
I don't think the war's "quasi" at all. The Visigoths weren't a "state," either, which meant squat to the Romans in 410 A.D.For that matter, Islam was not a "state" in 622 A.D. Unlike the Visigoths and unlike Mohammed himself, al-Qaeda did declare war on us "crusaders and Jews."
The President has created some of the confusion in our debate.
Make no mistake...
Frequently during the campaign, sometimes even in office, he has spoken as if he is the head of a criminal investigation team. When it comes to actual decisions, however, he acts like a military leader at war.
He gets a daily intel brief and he meets with military staff regularly. In the movies these are often two different meetings, in practice I believe they're usually concurrent. (I can't say for sure; I only ever addressed one morning intel brief, by video...) It's not a matter of the generals showing up to be given orders by the commander-in-chief. The usual procedure is for the generals to bring options to the CinC. These are "sold," sometimes by spiffy-looking staff officers chosen for their presentation skills, other times by the actual smart guys. In most cases I believe an "executive decision" consists of "Let's go with Major Whatsisname's approach and see if it works. If it does, then we'll put some more emphasis on it. For backup we'll keep LTC Hoodat's plan."

At some point in the Bush administration the use of drones went beyond the "put a missile up a camel's ass" point when Major Brilliant put an extra coat of spit shine on his shoes and wore his best uniform for his big appearance. He made the point that battles are often won by skirmishers degrading the enemy command structure. We can't get snipers into position to pot al-Qaeda's command structure, but we have the technology -- continuously being improved -- to put rockets over the target area inhabited by the big turbans. Big shots as intel sources are overrated. The most important intel associated with them is their location. The geolocation and the collection and dissemination process -- both also being continuously improved -- mean that a fix can go from the collector to the targeter within seconds, a process that used to take an hour or better back in Vietnam days. Bush at some point told Major Brilliant to "go for it," at the same time keeping two or three plans just about as good in reserve.

The rest is history. Major (Now LTC(P), assuming his career hasn't been assassinated by jealous pretty boyz) Brilliant's approach started showing good results almost from the first -- remember how they thought they'd gotten Zawahiri on what in my memory is the first use of drones in FATA? Since then the intel's been improving, the technology's been improving, the skill of the operators has been improving, there's been a long string of sudden job openings among the turbans, and suddenly B.O.'s a military genius. Go figure.
Greenwald and Paul appear to believe that he is a policeman and needs to start acting more like one; I believe he is a war leader and needs to start talking more like one.
Politically he's constrained to wimpery. With the economy such a shambles his lefty constituency's all he's got, and they hate the idea of U.S. military success.
Via Meadia applauds President B.O. for killing America's enemies as fast as he can -- and I have no fear that a future US President will use that precedent to send a Hellfire missile through the windows of the stately Mead manor in Queens. I don't even think American stock market swindlers and tax evaders lounging on the Riviera need to worry about a Predator strike bringing their peaceful retirements to a premature close. Roman Polanski does not need to move to an undisclosed bunker underground. This isn't a slippery slope; it is war.
Not until Polanksi decides that Jihad is the Only Way...
Two years ago, the idea that America was in a war might have seemed like one of those anachronistic Bushisms which could be swept underfoot by the New Age of Light and Reason--Guantanamo and military tribunals would have to go as well. With Anwar al-Awlaki dead, the Obama Administration has again demonstrated that it can fight the Lord Voldemort War pretty well; it just can't quite bring itself to make the case for what it must do.
It's difficult to Restore Our Reputation with pablum dripping from your chin, isn't it?
The President can speak forcefully about force;
I've said time and again...
his Nobel Peace Prize address on the continuing importance of war is a case in point.
Make no mistake!
He needs to do more of this at home;
It'd be a game changer...
if a war is important enough to fight it is important enough to defend and explain.
You can keep your present plan.
Link


Home Front: WoT
Obama: Warrior Or Assassin?
2011-10-03
Fred's inlines are so much more interesting than my unmarked extract that I moved the whole thing here rather than informing you that it had been snipped and sending you to the other article. Enjoy!

-- trailing wife at 12:30 ET
By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
Good news from the Voldemort Affair (the unpleasantness formerly known as the Global War on Terror, these days it appears to be some kind of contretemps with Those Who Must Not Be Named).
I am so-o-o-o-o stealing that. It's not plagiarism when you announce you're going to steal it up front, is it?
Especially not if you preface it with, "As Walter Russell Mead said," at least for the first few weeks. You cannot add, "of blessed memory," the appellation of the more famous rabbis, because the gentleman is most clearly still alive.
President Obama's order to kill or capture Anwar al-Awlaki, one of Al Qaeda's chief propagandists, has finally been carried out.
Deader than a rock, from what we hear.
Over at Salon.com,
Good Gawd! They're still around? Who reads them?
All the right-minded folks who read Newsweek, of course...
Glenn Greenwald greeted this news by calling President B.O. an assassin.
President Sparafucile? Somehow it doesn't work for me...
After all, Mr. Al-Awlaki was a US citizen and was never convicted in a court of law of those offenses for which the alleged terrorist was allegedly killed. According to a story in the Los Angeles Times, also joining Mr. Greenwald in the assassin-identification business was Texas Congressman Ron Paul.
That's a pretty fastidious approach, alright. It avoids getting blood on your hands by drooling pablum down the chin. Pontius Pilate approves.
Part of me is glad to see Mssrs. Greenwald and Paul engaging so cordially in this rare moment of bipartisan harmony.
They should spend more time together. They make a cute couple. I'm looking forward to buying them a toaster.
And it is always good to see ideas in Special Providence confirmed in real life; in that book on the American foreign policy tradition I wrote that Jeffersonians on the right and the left often unite in their condemnation of what they see as executive excess. I used Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan in the book as I recall; now I can update those examples.
People kinda backed off doing that when Buchanan decided he wasn't a Republican anymore. Nader, in the meantime, has become such a joke that even lefties giggle.
But I fear I am one of the mindless hordes Mr. Greenwald invokes when he, like Paul, mourns that so many Americans will think the death of Al-Awlaki is good news.
My throat's still raw from all the ululation.
What's most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government's new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government. Many will celebrate the strong, decisive, Tough President's ability to eradicate the life of Anwar al-Awlaki
... Born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, al-Awlaki is was a dual citizen of the U.S. and Yemen. He is was an Islamic holy man who is was a trainer for al-Qaeda and its franchises. His sermons were attended by three of the 9/11 hijackers, by Fort Hood murderer Nidal Malik Hussein, and Undieboomer Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He is was the first U.S. citizen ever placed on a CIA target list...
 -- including many who just so righteously condemned those Republican audience members as so terribly barbaric and crass for cheering Governor Perry's execution of scores of serial murderers and rapists -- criminals who were at least given a trial and appeals and the other trappings of due process before being killed.
Again I note with praise and thanks Mr. Greenwald's sense of fair play as he steps in to make a favorable contrast between GOP debate audiences and the liberal editorialists who praised President B.O.'s drone campaign -- and reminds us that whatever faults it may have Texas does have a judicial system in which accused criminals have rights. Much more of this from the often acerbic Mr. Greenwald and historians will begin to describe our times as an "era of good feelings" in which bipartisan civility reigned supreme.
... rather than as an era in which theory regularly triumphed over practice...
But having said all this, and wanting to emphasize that both in Special Providence and elsewhere I argue that the Jeffersonian critiques from Ron Paul, Glenn Greenwald and others of executive excess in foreign affairs stand in a long and completely legitimate tradition of American foreign policy, it nevertheless seems to me that they are wrong in this case.
It nevertheless seems to me that the sun continues to rise in the east and that the woods are foul with bear poop. Somebody should call the EPA.
Perhaps this is just further proof of how mindless I am, but it does seem to me that Al-Awlaki and his buds are at war with the people of the United States and that in war, people not only die: it is sometimes your duty to kill them.
"Duty" is the key word there. It's at the end of a very long stick of social change. In 1941 my Dad had a duty to get drafted and shipped off the fight Nazis. Our cultural pantheon included Mom, the Boy Scouts, Apple Pie, Truth, Justice, and the American Way. After 70 years of battering Dissent is the Highest Form of Patriotism. Mom has become a role model for both girls and boys, has taken a lesbian lover, and has a life outside the home as a pole dancer. The Boy Scouts are ucky because they refuse to allow homosexual predators to swarm around boys just as they're trying to figure what the hell puberty's doing to them. Truth has become relative. Justice has crumbled in the face of rehabilitation and counterintuitive compassion. Practices that would have tripped a gag reflex at Buchenwald now have their own validity, which makes any "American" way just one approach among many and who's to say which is better? It's an age of sympathetic vampires and evil clowns, where duty is a tenuous concept that applies only to what's best (or even what feels best) for you.
That the Al-Qaeda groupies are levying war against the United States without benefit of a government does not make them less legitimate targets for missiles, bullets and any other instruments of execution we may have lying around: the irresponsibility, the contempt for all legal norms, the chaotic and anarchic nature of the danger they pose and the sheer wickedness of waging private war make them even more legitimate targets with even fewer rights than combatants fighting under legal governments that observe the laws of war.
To my knowledge, no American "captured" by either al-Qaeda or the Taliban has escaped alive. Geneva Conventions apply only to the civilized, while today's Vandals, Avars and Huns get to do things the 622 A.D. way.
Mr. Al-Awlaki chose to make himself what used to be called an outlaw; a person at war with society who is no longer protected by the laws he seeks to destroy. He was not a criminal who has broken some particular set of laws;
He means not just a criminal who broke a particular set of laws...
he was an enemy seeking to destroy all the laws and the institutions that create them. His fiery sermons inspired numerous jihadists, like Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan, to attack Americans. He was personally involved with planning the attempted Christmas Day bombing in 2009 and he mentored several of the 9/11 bombers. That he was at war with the United States may not have been proved in a criminal court but is not really up for debate.
Once you join the enemy army you're cut off from the rules governing your own people. You get to live by theirs, and your old side, the one you were born and bred to, gets to shoot you out of hand if they catch you.
By waging private war against the United States, he placed himself in jeopardy, and our Chief Magistrate, obedient to the commitments he made when he took his oath of office, fulfilled his solemn duty by returning Mr. Al-Awlaki to his maker by the most effective means at hand.
Once you're outside your own country and living in the enemy camp you get what the enemy gets. What's complicated about that?It's because you've become an enemy, whether you've submitted a letter of resignation from civilization or not.
Abraham Lincoln did not order the Kearsarge to arrest the Confederate sailors on the Alabama and return them to the US for a civil trial; he ordered the Navy to sink Confederate ships without serving them arrest warrants, without getting grand jury indictments, without reading them their rights and without giving them the opportunity to send their lawyers into court to get injunctions against the attack.
Far from President B.O. launching an unprecedented assault on the civil rights of all Americans, he was acting as presidents must -- and do.
Being forced into the cattle chute and groped when I want to fly somewhere is a much greater infringement of my civil rights than Anwar al-Awlaki swallowing a Hellfire in another country.
Every President of the United States, including Thomas Jefferson and probable Ron Paul hero John Tyler (the only ex-president who stood with the Confederacy in the Civil War) would have taken a similar step in similar conditions, and I have no doubt that every Congress ever elected would have backed them up. Abraham Lincoln did not order the Kearsarge to arrest the Confederate sailors on the Alabama and return them to the US for a civil trial; he ordered the Navy to sink Confederate ships without serving them arrest warrants, without getting grand jury indictments, without reading them their rights and without giving them the opportunity to send their lawyers into court to get injunctions against the attack.
... and Lincoln took the same sort of heat (only worse) from the same sort of people who're bitching and moaning today...
I am neither a lawyer nor a judge, but it does not take much special knowledge to understand that Mr. Awlaki had placed himself well beyond the protections of criminal law.
Starting with being outside the boundaries of the U.S...
Had he been captured, and dragged as it were unwillingly back under the umbrella of American law, it might have been different, and he could have been tried for treason or other crimes. But Mr. Obama was under no obligation to risk the lives of American soldiers to save Mr. Awlaki from himself and restore to him the protection of the laws he despised, nor was he under any obligation to forbear and allow Mr. Awlaki to continue his activities until such time as Interpol or some other recognized law enforcement agency could serve him a warrant and take him into custody.
How many terrorists has Interpol arrested? Actually, Interpol doesn't really arrest people -- there is no Man from U.N.C.L.E. They issue paper, which makes its way to police agencies at the national level, which then disseminates the paper to other agencies at provincial levels, which further disseminate paper to local levels. All of the dissemination at each level is subject to local law and politix, and overriding all is the question of whether the police bureaucracy happens to feel like rounding up the miscreant or even disseminating the paper. Dawood Ibrahim continues existing quite openly in Pakistain, despite multiple Interpol warrants and despite the fact that Indian intel agencies are able to discover his addresses, phone numbers, the names of his closest associates and their addresses and phone numbers, and the addresses and phone numbers of their mistresses and "special" dancing boys, all of which is beyond the power of Pak intel agencies to discover...
Both Congressman Paul and Mr. Greenwald do, I think, have a legitimate beef with the President. The President is clearly acting like a man who is fighting a war. He is bringing down fiery death from the skies against any foe he can locate. This is not the normal behavior of a Chief Magistrate faithfully executing the laws. It is the behavior of a president locked in a bitter struggle against a dangerous foe. President B.O. cannot have it both ways. If he is our chief law enforcement officer leading the investigation of a global criminal network known as Al-Qaeda, then his actions are subject to one set of restrictions and one kind of review. Perhaps an Al-Awlaki can be killed resisting arrest, but the Greenwald-Paul questions about assassinations make some sense if we are in the middle of a complex law enforcement operation against an organized crime entity comparable to the mafia or perhaps to a narco mob.
Being Chief Magistrate implies you've actually got a country to be in charge of. There won't be any luxury vacations for Michelle and the girlies with the black flag of Islam flying over the White House. Probably if you live there you notice the flagpole every day. It changes the outlook.
But if the President is acting as Commander in Chief in a Congressionally authorized quasi-war (quasi because Al Qaeda is not a state), then his actions fall under another set of guidelines altogether.
I don't think the war's "quasi" at all. The Visigoths weren't a "state," either, which meant squat to the Romans in 410 A.D.For that matter, Islam was not a "state" in 622 A.D. Unlike the Visigoths and unlike Mohammed himself, al-Qaeda did declare war on us "crusaders and Jews."
The President has created some of the confusion in our debate.
Make no mistake...
Frequently during the campaign, sometimes even in office, he has spoken as if he is the head of a criminal investigation team. When it comes to actual decisions, however, he acts like a military leader at war.
He gets a daily intel brief and he meets with military staff regularly. In the movies these are often two different meetings, in practice I believe they're usually concurrent. (I can't say for sure; I only ever addressed one morning intel brief, by video...) It's not a matter of the generals showing up to be given orders by the commander-in-chief. The usual procedure is for the generals to bring options to the CinC. These are "sold," sometimes by spiffy-looking staff officers chosen for their presentation skills, other times by the actual smart guys. In most cases I believe an "executive decision" consists of "Let's go with Major Whatsisname's approach and see if it works. If it does, then we'll put some more emphasis on it. For backup we'll keep LTC Hoodat's plan."

At some point in the Bush administration the use of drones went beyond the "put a missile up a camel's ass" point when Major Brilliant put an extra coat of spit shine on his shoes and wore his best uniform for his big appearance. He made the point that battles are often won by skirmishers degrading the enemy command structure. We can't get snipers into position to pot al-Qaeda's command structure, but we have the technology -- continuously being improved -- to put rockets over the target area inhabited by the big turbans. Big shots as intel sources are overrated. The most important intel associated with them is their location. The geolocation and the collection and dissemination process -- both also being continuously improved -- mean that a fix can go from the collector to the targeter within seconds, a process that used to take an hour or better back in Vietnam days. Bush at some point told Major Brilliant to "go for it," at the same time keeping two or three plans just about as good in reserve.

The rest is history. Major (Now LTC(P), assuming his career hasn't been assassinated by jealous pretty boyz) Brilliant's approach started showing good results almost from the first -- remember how they thought they'd gotten Zawahiri on what in my memory is the first use of drones in FATA? Since then the intel's been improving, the technology's been improving, the skill of the operators has been improving, there's been a long string of sudden job openings among the turbans, and suddenly B.O.'s a military genius. Go figure.
Greenwald and Paul appear to believe that he is a policeman and needs to start acting more like one; I believe he is a war leader and needs to start talking more like one.
Politically he's constrained to wimpery. With the economy such a shambles his lefty constituency's all he's got, and they hate the idea of U.S. military success.
Via Meadia applauds President B.O. for killing America's enemies as fast as he can -- and I have no fear that a future US President will use that precedent to send a Hellfire missile through the windows of the stately Mead manor in Queens. I don't even think American stock market swindlers and tax evaders lounging on the Riviera need to worry about a Predator strike bringing their peaceful retirements to a premature close. Roman Polanski does not need to move to an undisclosed bunker underground. This isn't a slippery slope; it is war.
Not until Polanksi decides that Jihad is the Only Way...
Two years ago, the idea that America was in a war might have seemed like one of those anachronistic Bushisms which could be swept underfoot by the New Age of Light and Reason--Guantanamo and military tribunals would have to go as well. With Anwar al-Awlaki dead, the Obama Administration has again demonstrated that it can fight the Lord Voldemort War pretty well; it just can't quite bring itself to make the case for what it must do.
It's difficult to Restore Our Reputation with pablum dripping from your chin, isn't it?
The President can speak forcefully about force;
I've said time and again...
his Nobel Peace Prize address on the continuing importance of war is a case in point.
Make no mistake!
He needs to do more of this at home;
It'd be a game changer...
if a war is important enough to fight it is important enough to defend and explain.
You can keep your present plan.
Link


Home Front: WoT
Arkansas Jihad
2011-07-13
An admitted jihadist who killed an American soldier on U.S. soil will be tried next week in Arkansas on a state charge of capital murder - not terrorism. This is odd, considering that the Obama administration recently went out of its way to bring a Somali-born jihadist into U.S. federal court to face terrorism charges for what he may have done overseas. Perhaps the White House thinks that if it turns a blind eye toward domestic Islamic terrorism, it won't really exist.

Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad is a textbook case of homegrown terrorism. He was born Carlos Bledsoe in Memphis, Tenn., and converted to Islam at age 20. He was active in radical circles, traveled to the Middle East and married a Yemeni woman. In 2008, he was arrested in Yemen for a visa violation and was found to have counterfeit Somali identification documents. He was held in jail and interviewed by FBI agents but was allowed to return to the United States in 2009. He was interviewed once by the bureau upon his return but reportedly was not placed under surveillance.

On June 1, 2009, Mr. Muhammad allegedly opened fire on an Army recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark., killing Pvt. William Long and wounding Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula, who were outside taking a break. Mr. Muhammad was picked up by police later that day; in his vehicle they found an SKS assault rifle, a scope, a laser sight, a silencer, two pistols and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. He said he was angry at the U.S. treatment of Muslims and involvement in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He wanted to kill as many service members as he could.

The Little Rock shooting did not get the attention given to higher-profile jihadist incidents such as the Fort Hood massacre in November 2009 or the botched Christmas Day 2009 underwear bombing attempt. In all three cases, the bureaucracy ignored clear warning signs of potential terrorist activity. In all three cases, there was a known link to Yemen and American-born al Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki. Like Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, Mr. Muhammad is a homegrown jihadist.

The Justice Department's lack of interest in the Arkansas shooting case is consistent with the administration's attempts to delink radical Islam from terrorism. This also was the case with the Fort Hood shooting, where the administration doggedly ignored all aspects of Maj. Hasan's jihadist motives for the attack and initially refused to classify it as terrorism. This was a neat trick considering Maj. Hasan yelled the jihadist war cry "Allahu akbar!" before opening fire.

It's not as though the administration is afraid of bringing terrorists to federal courts. Mr. Obama ordered the Justice Department to do an end run around Congress to charge accused Somali terrorist Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame with federal crimes and grant him full due-process rights even though he is not an American citizen and had not conducted an attack inside the United States.

Mr. Obama seems desperate to have foreign jihadists face federal judges and equally driven to deny that jihadism has sprouted on American soil. Perhaps Mr. Obama believes that the president on whose watch Osama bin Laden was killed cannot be called soft on terrorism, but the case of Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad may prove otherwise.
Link


Home Front: WoT
FBI & DOD Could Have Prevented Ft. Hood Shooting
2011-02-04
A new Senate report on the 2009 Fort Hood shooting blames the FBI and Department of Defense for failing to recognize or act on alleged shooter Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan's extremist views.
But being PC feels sooooo good. The handwringing brings orgasms. And the denial is divine.

So perhaps PC doesn't have much of a place in the military, but I'm sure it will continue to work wonders for our politics.
Link



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