Catastrophe (17 page)

“Localism,” as Brian C. Anderson noted in a
Los Angeles Times
op-ed piece, would “impose greater ‘local accountability’ on broadcasters—that is, it would force stations to carry more local programming.”
²⁰³

Since the most popular conservative talk-show hosts—like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Neal Boortz—are nationally syndicated, requiring stations to book local programming would mean cutting into these radio giants’ airtime.

Anderson warns that “localism…also could require stations to set up permanent community advisory boards (including ‘underserved community segments’) that would have to be regularly consulted on ‘community needs and issues.’”
²⁰⁴

The FCC proposal, first made in January 2009, required that the “permanent advisory boards” be

Anderson calls localism “wildly impractical” and asks, “Would liberals sit on the board of a conservative station broadcasting in an urban area? Or would, say, an Islamic community leader sit on the board of a Christian station that broadcast in an area with a large Muslim population?”
²⁰⁶

These community advisory boards would likely have enormous power. Stations would be obliged to listen to their input, since their very broadcast licenses could be imperiled if they don’t. Indeed, Obama has urged that radio stations be required to renew their licenses every two years as opposed to every eight under current law, giving them an even shorter leash. Because radio stations operate on the public airwaves, they cannot broadcast without an FCC license to do so.

Of course, if people in a given community wanted more local programming, they could vote with their fingers and turn their radio dials to stations that offer it. The very popularity of the nationally syndicated shows indicates that they don’t.

The
Public Interest
requirement would give the new community advisory boards the role of judging how well a station met the criterion, further reinforcing their power during the all-important licensing process.

To muzzle conservative talk radio, Obama has appointed Julius Genachowski as the new chairman of the FCC. Media reform groups, the ones that are trying to destroy conservative talk radio, are reportedly “joyous” over his appointment.
²⁰⁷

Genachowski crafted Obama’s blueprint for destroying talk radio—his Technology and Innovation Plan—during the campaign. As the plan noted, “Barack Obama believes that the nation’s rules ensuring diversity of media ownership are critical to the public interest. Unfortunately, over the past several years, the Federal Communications Commission has promoted the concept of consolidation over diversity.”
²⁰⁸

Josh Silver, the director of the media reform group Free Press, said that under Genachowski’s “leadership, the FCC’s compass would point toward the ‘public interest.’”
²⁰⁹
As Genachowski defines it, that is.

Congressional Democrats are lining up behind these changes. Not only did Durbin’s amendment pass the Senate, but House speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke all the code words recently when she said that we need to “take actions to encourage and promote diversity in communication media ownership and to ensure that broadcast station licenses are used in the public interest.”
²¹⁰

So, while conservatives have been directing their fire at the possibility of a restoration of the Fairness Doctrine (which required equal time for opposing points of view), the Obama administration has been aiming at even more fundamental changes in station policy, management—and even ownership.

The new effort to gut conservative talk radio stems from a report by the Center for American Progress, headed by former Clinton chief of staff and Obama transition leader John Podesta, entitled “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio.”

The report said that “any effort to encourage more responsive and balanced radio programming will first require steps to increase localism and diversify radio station ownership to better meet local and community needs.”
²¹¹
He suggested three ways to restore “balance” to the airwaves:

Defending himself from conservative criticism, Senator Durbin noted that the requirement for “diversity in [station] ownership…is not a new rule. It’s been around for sixty years. The other part of the Durbin amendment said that broadcast licensees had to operate in the public interest. That’s also been on the books for almost fifty years.”
²¹³

But Durbin’s amendment requires the FCC to take “‘affirmative actions’ to ensure that radio station ownership is diverse and that broadcasting licenses are issued strictly in the public interest.”
²¹⁴

Senator Inhofe explains where the Durbin amendment might lead:

ACTION AGENDA

The new liberal approach to muzzling talk radio is dangerous—especially because if it is enacted, it could become permanent. By taking away radio
frequencies from their current owners and reassigning them to minority owners or liberals, the administration may be able to change decisively what we hear over the airwaves.

At the very least, the regulations could prompt stations to turn to music—no controversy there. But it’s more likely that the Obama administration, through FCC fiat, would force radio stations to change owners, managers, and ideological orientation.

Imagine if comparable changes were forced on the print media. Any such move would be recognized as a gross violation of the First Amendment, sending up howls of justifiable protest. What if a Republican president ousted the owner and editorial staff of the
New York Times
and insisted on putting in conservatives (who represent the business community in New York) instead?

But the justification that radio uses “public airwaves” shields this action from First Amendment scrutiny—and permits the administration to gut talk radio behind closed doors.

We must fight this change with everything we have. Once the stations change ownership, it will be almost impossible to change them back!

It should be enough for us to demonstrate our loyalty to certain stations and their programming by listening to them every day. But in the strange world of Barack Obama, this demonstration of fealty may not be enough to assure the FCC that the community supports its station. Instead, a group of left-wing advisers could sabotage a radio station’s ownership and mount a coup to topple it. They might even find a way to profit from the change in ownership!

We must work with our talk-show hosts to demonstrate our commitment to our radio stations and the programming they offer. We are sure that Sean and Rush will tell us when the stations that carry their programs have license renewal procedures pending. We should hold demonstrations in the streets to show our support for continuing the current ownership and format. We need to deluge the FCC with letters, e-mails, and petitions in support of the local programming and station ownership.

Otherwise, we could wake up one day and find that our talk radio has been replaced by dead air.

The War on Terror Is Over

In his first few months in office, President Obama has sent a clear message to both Americans and our enemies: the war on terror is over. On a host of fronts, he has pulled back and is pulling out. It’s as if 9/11 never happened.

But terrorists
did
attack the United States that day. And they still have us in their sights. The fact that a president of the United States is disarming us—unilaterally—in the war on terror is a catastrophe in the making!

If Obama’s policies are wrong, the people he has appointed to top jobs at the departments of Justice and Homeland Security are worse! They have won fame and celebrity by criticizing aggressive actions to stop terrorism. They specialize not in making
us
safer but making
the terrorists
safer.

On his first day in office, Obama reversed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) policy of the Bush Justice Department and pledged “an unprecedented level of openness in government.”
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He ordered the new FOIA guidelines to be written with a “presumption in favor of disclosure,”
²¹⁸
even though such disclosure would give important information to terrorists.

Nothing better exemplifies how Obama has turned things upside down than the administration’s decision to drop the charges against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, whom the Pentagon had charged with “organizing and directing”
²¹⁹
the bombing of the USS
Cole
, an attack in which seventeen sailors were killed and thirty-nine injured. On February 5, 2009, Susan J. Crawford, the top authority over the parajudicial commissions Bush had created to try Guantánamo prisoners, dropped the charges against al-Nashiri in order to comply with Obama’s executive order requiring a review of all detention policies and procedures at Guantánamo.
²²⁰
The United States had sought a delay in the Guantánamo trial, scheduled for February 7, 2009, but the judge had refused to grant it.
²²¹
So, rather than proceed to try him, the Obama administration decided it was more important to complete the review than to proceed with the trial.

According to U.S. intelligence, al-Nashiri was the leader of the al-Qaeda network’s operations in the Persian Gulf and was involved in plots against Western targets in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, the Strait of Gibraltar, Morocco, and Qatar. He also fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan and in Chechnya.
²²²

News media reports of the dropping of al-Nashiri’s charges focused not on the mayhem he had committed in killing the sailors and damaging the
Cole
but rather on the fact that he was one of three prisoners the Bush administration has admitted it waterboarded to get information. The other two are Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and Abu Zubaydah, an al-Qaeda operative tied to 9/11.

What inverted priorities! Waterboarding may have been essential in learning, from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, of al-Qaeda’s plans to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and of its efforts to explode a dirty bomb in the United States. And waterboarding of al-Nashiri was likely important in rounding up all the
Cole
terrorists. (Waterboarding, by the way, is not the inhuman nightmare many have portrayed it as being. Among other things, it was a long-established hazing ritual at the Virginia Military Institute. General George C. Marshall, the World War II chief of staff and Harry S Truman’s secretary of state, was waterboarded when he entered V.M.I.) To drop charges against a terrorist who killed seventeen service people simply because he was waterboarded is incomprehensible.

Obama has, of course, prohibited the use of waterboarding regardless of the circumstances. Asked at a press conference on April 29, 2009, about interrogations of terrorists, he said that waterboarding was a “shortcut” and that there were other ways to get the information. But what if there aren’t? And what if the terror attack is just around the corner and there is no time for another way to learn the details? Would Obama literally consign hundreds or thousands of Americans to death so as to avoid waterboarding a terrorist who is neither a U.S. citizen or even a legal resident?

Yes he would!

Also outrageous is Obama’s silence on the February 16, 2009, decision of the Pakistani government to let the Taliban govern the Swat valley and neighboring areas in northwest Pakistan using Shariah law. The decision, which effectively concedes to the Taliban exactly the kind of protected zone it had in Afghanistan—the zone where the 9/11 plot was hatched—is a giveaway to the terrorists.

As Reuters has noted, “critics are…saying the deal will encourage Taliban militants fighting elsewhere in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
²²³

The British newspaper
The Guardian
quotes Khadim Hussain of the Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy, a think tank in Islamabad, as describing the deal as “a surrender to the Taliban.”
²²⁴
The paper also quotes Javed Iqbal, a retired Pakistani judge, as saying that “it means that there is not one law in the country. It will disintegrate this way. If you concede to this, you will go on conceding.”
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The
Times of India
says that Pakistan was trying to find a “good” Taliban. “According to certain strategists, in Pakistan as well as in the US,”
the newspaper explained, “the Taliban can be broadly drawn into two categories—one, the socially ultra-conservative Islamists, who demand the rule of Shariah in areas where they dominate, and, two, the global jihadis. It’s being suggested that the world can do business with the former, if only to isolate and eliminate the latter, the bad ones.”
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But the newspaper points out that many experts say that “any kind of Talibanism is dangerous.”
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When the hard-line cleric Sufi Muhammad, who negotiated the deal for the Taliban, returned to the Swat valley, the Associated Press reports, he “received a hero’s welcome there by crowds shouting ‘Long live Islam!’”
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Of course he did.

NATO, which has 55,000 troops fighting in Afghanistan, was less than pleased with the decision. The truce “is certainly reason for concern,” noted NATO spokesman James Appathurai. “We should all be concerned by a situation in which extremists would have a safe haven…it is clear that the [Swat valley] region is suffering very badly from extremists and we would not want it to get worse.”
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Yet President Obama said and did nothing to change the situation. All Secretary of State Clinton would say was that “the agreement still needed to be ‘thoroughly understood.’”
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The Obama administration seems unwilling even to criticize the Taliban in public. Apparently surrender is just fine with it.

Now, exploiting its gains, the Taliban is increasingly posing a serious military threat to the Pakistani government. That it would do so was, of course, predictable. Once the Pakistani government gave them, in effect, a
safe haven near the Afghan border, their further military advance was inevitable.

Yet even more disturbing than President Obama’s policies are the people he has appointed to administer them.

Let’s begin with Eric Holder, Jr., the new U.S. attorney general. Holder was instrumental in persuading President Clinton to pardon a group of FALN terrorists in 2000. The
Los Angeles Times
reports that Holder “repeatedly pushed some of his subordinates at the Clinton Justice Department to drop their opposition to a controversial 1999 grant of clemency to 16 members of two violent Puerto Rican nationalist organizations.”
²³²
The paper notes that “angry lawmakers demanded to know why the Justice Department had not sided with the FBI, federal prosecutors, and other law enforcement officials who were vehemently opposed to the grants [of clemency].”
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The
Times
reported that Holder “instructed his staff…to effectively replace the [Justice] Department’s original report recommending against any commutations…with one that favored clemency for at least half of the prisoners.”
²³⁴

Later, the pardon attorney at the Clinton Justice Department, Roger Adams, commented on the incident. “I remember this [episode] well,” he said, “because it was such a big deal to consider clemency for a group of people convicted of such heinous crimes.”
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Adams said he told Holder of his “strong opposition to any clemency in several internal memos and a draft report recommending denial.”
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But Holder would not take no for an answer. What makes the whole episode even more reprehensible is that the terrorists had not even applied for pardons. Clinton and Holder simply decided to respond to pressure from outside groups that were advocating their release.

The sixteen FALN members pardoned at Holder’s urging had been convicted of bank robbery, possession of explosives, and participating in a seditious conspiracy. As the
Times
reports, “Overall, the two groups had been linked by the FBI to more than 130 bombings, several armed robberies, six slayings, and hundreds of injuries.”
²³⁷

Joseph Connor—the son of Frank Connor, who was murdered at the age of thirty-three in the FALN bombing of Fraunces Tavern in 1975—testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee to protest Holder’s nomi
nation as attorney general. In his testimony he noted that the FALN pardons had been condemned at the time by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 95–2!

Connor’s eloquent testimony also brings us face-to-face with the aftermath of terrorism:

And Connor poses some questions for Holder.