Dangerous Accommodations

Scott Brown can't get to Washington soon enough. In his victory speech on Tuesday night, the newly elected Senator from Massachusetts underscored a central plank in his campaign platform: "Let me say this: with respect to the people who wish to harm us, I believe – and I know all of you believe – that our Constitution and laws exist to protect this nation. They do not grant rights and privileges to enemies in wartime. And the message we need to send in dealing with terrorists: Our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, and not lawyers to defend them."

This commonsensical approach to dealing with our enemies clearly found resonance with the voters of one of the most liberal states in the nation. Polls suggest on related questions about closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay and bringing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to trial in New York City, Americans across this country are of a similar mind. Yet, with each passing day it is evident that the Obama administration is committed to a very different course, one that is likely to get more of us killed.

For instance, we discovered this week that neither the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency nor the Secretary of Homeland Security were consulted before the decision was taken to allow Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab to lawyer-up in Detroit. We are told that, for some reason, local FBI agents – who had gotten a wealth of valuable intelligence in the course of a few hours with the alleged Christmas Day pantybomber before they told him he had the right to remain silent – believed they needed to Mirandize the terrorist before he went into surgery.

With that, on advice of counsel, Abdulmutallab clammed up and – despite claims by the President's Homeland Security Advisor, John Brennan, that plea-bargaining will elicit more cooperation from this jihadist – it now seems unlikely that such help will be forthcoming and, if it is, that it will be "actionable."

Then, we learn that the State Department has decided to offer 14,000 of its "diversity visas" to Nigerians wishing to immigrate to this country. Never mind that Abdulmutallab exemplifies a portion of that nation's Muslim population that has embraced the supremacist, totalitarian ideology called "Shariah" by authoritative Islam, the same program that obliges its adherents to engage in jihad (or holy war). Randomly allocating visas to such folks assuredly increases the probability of inviting more of jihadists into our midst.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, the State Department announced that Secretary Hillary Clinton had personally exercised her authority to waive a prohibition on the entry into the United States of two prominent Islamists, Tariq Ramadan (the Swiss Islamist who is the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna, the son of a preeminent Brotherhood propagandist and a professor at Oxford) and Adam Habib, a professor at the University of Johannesburg. As spokesman Darby Holladay put it, "Both the president and the secretary of state have made it clear that the U.S. government is pursuing a new relationship with Muslim communities based on mutual interest and mutual respect."

The chief State Department press flak, P.J. Crowley, added: "As we look at it, we do not think that either one of them represents a threat to the United States. We want to encourage a global debate. We want to have the opportunity potentially to have Islamic scholars come to the United States and have dialogue with other faith communities in our country."

In the case of Ramadan, this action reverses a decision taken as long ago as 2004 by George W. Bush's Department of Homeland Security. At the time, one of America's leading experts on Islamism, Daniel Pipes, reported that a "DHS spokesman, Russ Knocke, explained that this had been done in accord with a law that denies entry to aliens who have used a ‘position of prominence within any country to endorse or espouse terrorist activity.' The revocation, Mr. Knocke added, was based on ‘public safety or national security interests.'"

Interestingly, in his prepared statement, Clinton spokesman Holladay claimed that the two professors "were denied admittance after making statements counter to U.S. foreign policy." For Ramadan, at least, the grounds for exclusion were very different: Daniel Pipes points out that he did not get a visa because the Swiss Islamist had "funded two Hamas-related groups."

In an article in the New York Sun published on August 27, 2004, around the time of Ramadan's exclusion, Dr. Pipes went on to enumerate a number of Ramadan's other, publicly reported ties to terrorism:

• He has praised the brutal Islamist policies of the Sudanese politician Hassan Al-Turabi. Mr. Turabi in turn called Mr. Ramadan the "future of Islam."
• Mr. Ramadan was banned from entering France in 1996 on suspicion of having links with an Algerian Islamist who had recently initiated a terrorist campaign in Paris.
• Ahmed Brahim, an Algerian indicted for al Qaeda activities, had "routine contacts" with Mr. Ramadan, according to a Spanish judge (Baltasar Garzón) in 1999.
• Djamel Beghal, leader of a group accused of planning to attack the American embassy in Paris, stated in his 2001 trial that he had studied with Mr. Ramadan.
• Along with nearly all Islamists, Mr. Ramadan has denied that there is "any certain proof" that bin Laden was behind 9/11.
• He publicly refers to the Islamist atrocities of 9/11, Bali, and Madrid as "interventions," minimizing them to the point of near-endorsement.

While the President and Secretary of State gloss this decision with platitudes about "mutual interest and mutual respect" between Muslim and non-Muslim communities, Americans will get no genuine "respect" from Ramadan – nor will he encourage his co-religionists to give it to others considered "infidels."

In fact, Ramadan is, as Caroline Fourest documented in her marvelous book, Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan, a man gifted at saying one thing to non-Muslims and something altogether different to Muslim ones. If admitted into the United States, he will engage in his sophisticated "double discourse," sounding the quintessential moderate in settings where that will serve his cause, yet espousing Shariah and the Islamic supremacism it demands when speaking to the faithful.

In each of these instances, and too many others to mention in the space available here, the Obama administration is acting in ways that intensify the risk to Americans at the hands of those who adhere to Shariah. It can only be hoped that the more prudent and responsible attitude towards our enemies endorsed by the people of Massachusetts with their election of Scott Brown will translate into a vigorous rejection of Team Obama's priorities and conduct with regard to those who practice Islam pursuant to Shariah and who seek to impose it on the rest of us.

Should Tax Dollars Prosecute Terrorists or Pay for Their Defense Lawyers?

Scott Brown's victory speech Tuesday night in Massachusetts included a sharp criticism of Obama's benevolent treatment of foreign terrorist suspects:

"And let me say this, with respect to those who wish to harm us, I believe that our Constitution and laws exist to protect this nation - they do not grant rights and privileges to enemies in wartime. In dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them."

Many political pundits are attributing Brown's stunning upset yesterday in the Bay State to Obama's unpopular health care agenda, but Brown's ascent in the polls also coincided with the Christmas Day bombing attempt and its aftershocks, of Northwest Flight 253 by a 23-year-old Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and negative publicity stemming from missed warning signs by those in government who have been given a massive infusion of taxpayer resources to fight terrorism and prevent terror attacks since 9/11 (including an entire new federal agency dedicated to the defense of the homeland, the Department of Homeland Security and its subsidiary agency, the TSA (Transportation Security Administration).

To make matters worse, the Obama Administration decided to reward terrorist suspect Abdulmutallab with a civilian trial rather than turning him over to the military to be tried by military commission without consulting, according to Obama's Director of National Intelligence who testified before the Senate today, either the Homeland Security Secretary, the CIA Director or himself. It's been reported that the Nigerian underwear bomber was "singing like a canary" until provided a lawyer and magnanimously granted the special rights and privileges that uniquely accrue to American citizens per our Constitution and Bill of Rights. It is hard to conceive of what information will now not be gleaned from this suspect about the al Qaeda network and the Islamic cleric in Yemen that Abdulmutallab was in touch with (the same who claims helping to encourage Army Maj. Hasan in his lethal attack at Fort Hood on unarmed fellow soldiers) since the Obama Administration granted this illegal enemy combatant Fourth Amendment protections.

The Clinton Administration tried the same failed approach now being revisited by Obama – of treating international terrorism as a law enforcement problem, rather than as a military problem and refused to connect the dots. After the first World Trade Center bombing, other Islamic terrorist attacks followed – the attacks on two U.S. Embassies in Africa, the near sinking of the Aegis cruiser, the U.S.S. Cole, in the port of Yemen – meanwhile Osama bin Laden and his clan recruited jihadis and plotted the devastating attacks on U.S. soil on September 11, 2001.

Former Attorney General Mike Mukasey, speaking last week at a conference in New York criticized DoD Secretary Bob Gates on this point, invoking Gates' comment that we cannot kill our way out of this conflict. Mukasey's rebuttal was that we certainly can't convict ourselves out of it. Jamming U.S. courts with foreign/enemy terrorists and granting them the same rights of U.S. citizens – and treating terrorism like an ordinary domestic crime such as bank robbery or embezzlement – defies common sense and ignores the successful tradition and history of U.S. prosecutions during wartime.

As also pointed out at the New York conference by Andrew McCarthy (who prosecuted the first World Trade Center bombing), Franklin Delano Roosevelt designated the Nazi saboteurs who landed on Long Island and in Florida in 1942 as enemy combatants. These enemy agents met with swift justice, with a trial held just four weeks after their capture. Hearing that the German invaders were seeking habeas corpus to challenge their treatment as enemy combatants, FDR arranged to have word passed by his Attorney General to the Supreme Court Justices that he did not care what the Justices thought.

Within less than eight weeks of their capture, six of eight saboteurs were executed. FDR acted as a President who understood his role as Commander-in-Chief; he was not going to permit enemy operatives to take advantage of the liberal protections afforded American citizens by the protections of the U.S. Constitution. FDR did not want to take chances with a civil trial where secrecy could not be guaranteed and legal technicalities could result in allowing the prisoners to go free. Instead, he established a military tribunal, the first to be convened since Lincoln’s day, and the Supreme Court upheld his authority to do so. Further back in history, Gen. George Washington used military commissions to prosecute the Whiskey Rebellion, and military commissions were also used to prosecute John Wilkes Booth's accomplices.

Ambassador John Bolton has pointed out that the "law enforcement paradigm" simply does not work during war. Moreover, the "war paradigm" does not reject the rule of law as supporters of the "law enforcement paradigm" imply. The United States military has the Uniformed Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) which serves to prosecute perpetrators when violations occur - as happened at the Iraqi prison, Abu Ghraib. The prison at Guantanamo Bay was set up, in conformance with the requirements of the Geneva Convention, to deal with extremely dangerous prisoners. GTMO detainees are permitted Geneva Convention protections despite having violated its fundamental requirements which are to wear a military uniform and to avoid killing innocent civilians. Terrorists deliberately target civilians and refuse to abide by the civilized code of conduct that other nations embraced when they signed the Geneva Convention. Rewarding ruthless terrorists with civilian trials (indeed, with better treatment than our own POWs would be entitled to) simply undermines respect for, and the objective of, the Geneva Convention which is to encourage conformance by adversaries to rules during wartime.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and who took credit for slitting the throat of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, supposedly boasted upon his capture by American forces, "I'll see you in New York with my lawyer." With the prosecution of the 20th hijacker taking four years to work its way through the domestic courts, and no indictment yet of the 9/11 hijackers, it is evident that civilian trials are simply a means to drag out prosecutions and afford a public stage and spotlight to our enemies for propaganda purposes, letting them exploit America's attributes to their own benefit, and to thwart the U.S. war effort. As Scott Brown declared, we need to finance weapons to stop them, not pay for their legal defense.