Crimes Against Liberty (56 page)

The administration continues to promote their dangerous fable that America is safer under their retreat-and-surrender approach to the war. Meanwhile, Americans are beginning to notice, despite the White House’s best efforts to deny it, that incidents of terrorism are rising on U.S. soil. In addition to the Christmas Day and Times Square bombing attempts, there was the fatal shooting at an Army recruiting station in Arkansas; an attempted jihadist car bombing in Dallas; an attempted bombing of a federal building in Spring-field, Illinois, by an American convert to Islam; the Fort Hood massacre; the arrest of five Virginians in Pakistan for terrorist activities; the arrest of Pennsylvania’s Jihad Jane and Colorado’s Jamie Paulin-Ramirez; the arrest of a Brooklyn-born man along with twelve others for supporting an al Qaeda-affiliated group and for plotting several attacks in New York; another New York plot to blow up a synagogue; a planned suicide attack at Grand Central Station; and others.
³²
Nor does Obama’s Muslim outreach seem to be impressing Pakistan jihadist leader Hakimullah Mehsud who, according to the Middle East Media Research Center, recently released a YouTube video declaring, “From now on, the main targets of our Fidaeen [armed fighters] are American cities.”
³³

ADMINISTRATION ROADBLOCKS

As part of his pandering to the Muslim world, Obama has increasingly refused to identify obvious acts of terrorism by Islamist extremists for what they are. After radical Muslim U.S. Army major Hadal Malik Hasan gunned down twelve U.S. soldiers and a security guard and wounded thirty-one others while shouting “Allahu Akbar,” Obama could not bring himself to call the Fort Hood massacre “terrorism,” much less Islamist terrorism. This, despite his awareness of these important facts about Hasan:

• He had business cards marked “SoA,” or “Soldier of Allah.”

• He had e-mail communications with Anwar al-Awlaki, an al Qaeda recruiter who inspired at least two other North American terror plots and was a fugitive from U.S. justice. He had been Hasan’s “spiritual leader at two mosques,” and later praised Hasan for the massacre.

• Hasan had routinely signed his e-mails with “Praise Be to Allah,” and reportedly said that infidels should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats.

• Key psychiatric authorities at Walter Reed reportedly met to discuss whether Hasan was psychotic because his Islamist proclivities were so undeniable that one such official reportedly feared “that if Hasan deployed to Iraq or Aghanistan, he might leak secret military information to Islamic extremists.”

• He had contacted jihadist websites through various email addresses and screen names.

Obama simply would not declare the obvious, claiming, “We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing.”
³⁴
On this point the administration is pathetically consistent. Eric Holder outdid himself in his congressional testimony following the attempted terrorist car bombing in Times Square. Despite leading questions, he repeatedly refused to acknowledge that radical Islam had inspired the attack. Agents, he said, were trying to understand Faisal Shahzad’s motivation. “There are a variety of reasons why I think people have taken these actions,” he stammered. “I think you have to look at each individual case.... I don’t want to say anything negative about a religion.”
³⁵

Throughout the investigations of both the Christmas bomber and the Fort Hood massacre, the administration was particularly secretive, not so much to protect national security, it seemed, but to cover up the Islamist role at play in both. Congressman Pete Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, released a statement on January 7 welcoming the release of the administration’s report on the Christmas bomber, but criticizing it for refusing to release its reports on Guantanamo Bay terrorist detainee recidivism or the Fort Hood attack. “Congress needs the analysis of both attacks,” said Hoekstra, “to help prevent the next attack.” But the administration, he said, “continues to put up roadblocks and hurdles to prevent us from getting information or answers to even basic questions.”

He laid these roadblocks squarely at the feet of the White House, pointing to its “absolute refusal ... to meet the requirement that Congress be kept fully and currently informed.” Instead, the administration was employing a “go-it-alone approach after the Fort Hood attack” that “did not work before and it will not work now.” He said that our national security depends on the executive and legislative branches working together, “but the president and congressional Democrats have to be willing to reach out and accept our repeated offers of help.”
³⁶
Hoekstra added, “The White House review on the attacks was completed on November 30
^th
. Despite our requests, the administration has yet to brief us on the findings of that report. This is inexcusable and contradicts the many promises from you and the Intelligence Community to brief us in a timely manner.”
³⁷

REFUSING TO CONNECT THE DOTS

It wasn’t until January 15, 2010, that the administration finally released its report on the Fort Hood attack and an Obama administration official called the murders “an act of terrorism.” But even then, it was a diluted description focusing on the tactic that was used. As for the theological or ideological motivation, the report professed ignorance, claiming, “We are still acquiring knowledge about different people involved, and whether or not there was any type of direction, control, inspiration that led to the events of the day.”
³⁸

Tellingly, the 86-page report did not once mention the shooter, Major Nidal Hasan, by name, or make any reference to his strong Islamic faith. As
Time
magazine asked, “The Fort Hood Report: Why No Mention of Islam?”
Time
’s Mark Thompson wrote, “The apparent lack of curiosity into what allegedly drove Hasan to kill isn’t in keeping with the military’s ethos; it’s a remarkable omission for the U.S. armed forces, whose young officers are often ordered to read Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War
with its command to know your enemy.” Yet the heads of the review, former Army Secretary Togo West and the Navy’s former top admiral, Vernon Clark, simply refused responsibility for investigating Hasan’s motives, claiming, “Our concern is with actions and effects, not necessarily with motivations. . . . We certainly do not cite a particular group.”

Whether it was a matter of the politically correct culture or of a top-down edict from the White House to whitewash Islam lest Obama’s theories of appeasement be compromised, one thing is for certain: this type of willful denial is suicidal to our homeland security and represents a mindset toward Islamist terrorism that is perhaps even more reckless than our pre-9/11 orientation.

The administration’s report, according to Thompson, lumped in radical Islam with other fundamentalist religious beliefs and, contrary to all evidence, even asserted that “religious fundamentalism alone is not a risk factor,” and that “religious-based violence is not confined to members of fundamentalist groups.” These people may be fooling themselves, but they’re not fooling the American people, or even less, adequately protecting us. Thompson noted that many believe this attitude means that the lessons of 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq, “where jihadist extremism has driven deadly violence against Americans, are being not merely overlooked but studiously ignored.”
³⁹

As a further striking example of the administration’s mentality, Eric Holder compared Osama bin Laden to mass murderer Charles Manson
⁴⁰
—as if the al Qaeda leader is just another maniac, with no particular affiliation or motivation worth discussing. Another example was the government’s acceptance of a UN decision to send some 6,000 Somali refugees from Uganda to the United States in 2010, despite our recession, the ever growing national debt, and the even grimmer reality that these refugees are reportedly turning into jihadist fighters throughout many cities in the world. The reason they are being moved is even more ominous: their failure to integrate with other refugee groups.
⁴¹

The administration goes to great pains to narrowly describe our enemy—when it will even concede having an enemy—as only “al Qaeda and its affiliates,” thus ignoring the inconvenient fact that many branches of Islamist terrorists beyond the al Qaeda network are warring against us. The administration also refuses to acknowledge that jihadists can operate independently, without direct orders from some hierarchical authority and without affiliation with al Qaeda or any other outside group. The
Washington Times
cited the example of Lloyd R. Woodson, who was arrested on January 25 in rural New Jersey with “a cache of weapons, body armor, a map of a military installation and jihadist personal effects.” Most Americans, argued the
Times
, “assume the situation is terrorist-related. The Obama administration said otherwise.”
⁴²

Does anyone remember all the Democratic posturing and handwringing following the 9/11 attacks over the Bush administration’s failure “to connect the dots?” Here we have not just a failure, but an adamant refusal.

Still, there are a few individuals in the administration who do suspect jihadists can become self-radicalized. Defense secretary Robert Gates, in announcing the Defense Department report on the Fort Hood shooting, admitted, “Military supervisors are not properly focused on the threat posed by self-radicalization and need to better understand the behavioral warning signs.”

Walid Phares, author and terrorism expert, warned it is ideology that is behind the radicalization. But our government is reluctant to recognize that for fear of “theological entanglement.” Phares wrote, “Washington disarmed its own analysts when bureaucrats of the last two years banned references to the very ideological indicators that would enable our analysts to detect the radicalization threat.” Ironically, he said, the very fact that Hasan “fully displayed the narrative of Jihadism” is why he “was not spotted as a jihadist.”
⁴³

In April, Congressman Hoekstra voiced his concern that the administration was withholding information on the Fort Hood attack. But Defense secretary Gates denied it, claiming, “What [is] most important is the prosecution, and we will cooperate with the committee in every way with that single caveat—that whatever we provide does not impact the prosecution. That is the only thing in which we have an interest.”
⁴⁴
Considering this massacre was an act of war by a jihadist, one would think the administration would be interested in the factors behind Hasan’s radicalization, his contacts with Anwar al-Awlaki and any other Islamists, and other relevant information. It takes a stunning willful blindness to believe the government’s only interest should be in criminal prosecution.

THE NO-NUKE COMMITMENT

On the campaign trail, our appeasement-oriented president, in addition to vowing not to weaponize space and to cut investments in “unproven” missile defense systems, said he would “slow our development in future combat systems,” and in pursuing his goal of a world without nuclear weapons he “will not develop new nuclear weapons.”
⁴⁵

For once Obama has been true to his word, as he has been hell-bent on unilaterally disarming the United States of its nuclear arsenal. He doesn’t present it as unilateral, but given the absence of verification measures with the Russians in his recently signed START agreement, it might as well be. In early April, Obama announced he was reformulating our nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons. The
New York Times
reported that “for the first time, the United States is committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack.” His strategy, of a piece with his naïve fantasy that being kind to terrorists will tame them, was to make nuclear weapons obsolete by incentivizing nations not to develop them. Apparently, our scaling back of our own nuclear deterrent would encourage them not to do so.

Amidst charges that the policy was recklessly destructive to our national security, the administration claimed it has carved out exceptions for certain rogue states like Iran and North Korea, and reserved the option of reconsidering the use of nuclear retaliation against a biological attack. Obama announced this “Nuclear Posture Review” just over a week before he signed the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia in Prague.
⁴⁶
In that treaty, Obama agreed with Russia to reduce our nuclear arsenal by historic amounts: nuclear warheads would be reduced by one-third and the missiles and other delivery vehicles would be cut in half. Senators from both parties called the agreement troublesome .
⁴⁷
Obama also disclosed details about the size and scope of our atomic stockpile—5,113 nuclear warheads—as part of his campaign to get other nuclear nations to be more forthcoming, which he believed would improve his bargaining position against Iran’s pursuit of nuclear capabilities. Once again, Obama’s recklessly childlike naïveté was on full display.