Fire John Brennan

[Warrior-Mentor]

Fire John Brennan
by Jed Babbin
HUMAN EVENTS
02/11/2010

Even before he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama proclaimed he wanted to appoint a Lincolnesque cabinet, a “team of rivals.”

Lincoln, as ABC’s Jake Tapper reminded us way back in May 2008, appointed three of his rivals for the GOP presidential nomination to his cabinet, people who disagreed with him and at least one -- Edward Stanton, who became Secretary of War -- who had hurled personal insults at Lincoln, calling him a “long-armed ape.”

But Obama’s cabinet is no team of rivals, and his national security team is a concatenation of radical liberals like himself, a curious admixture of fools, miscreants and worse.

Consider their consistent record of bad decisions only one year into Obama’s presidency:
- to close the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba;
- to move Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other al Qaeda varsity out of the military commissions system and try them in civilian criminal court;
- to war against the intelligence community;
- to put the White House in charge of interrogations of captured terrorists; and, most recently,
- the hasty decision to put the Christmas Day underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, in civilian custody thus preventing professional intelligence interrogators from having access to him.

At the center of all these decisions is a White House staffer with a fancy title: John O. Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. Mr. Brennan is a special case: his arrogance and flat-out fibs about the Abdulmutallab case have created a roadblock of antagonism between the White House and congressional Republicans.

If Team Obama’s handling of Abdulmutallab weren’t so serious, it would be something only Mel Brooks could have scripted. It was only by luck and the bravery of passengers on Northwest Flight 253 that the youthful terrorist didn’t succeed in blowing the aircraft out of the sky. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano then proclaimed “the system worked.”

Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) told me in a Wednesday telephone interview that these actions bespeak what he called an “ACLU mentality” in the Obama administration. It stems, he says, from a core mistake: putting the Attorney General in charge of the war on terror.

Taken into custody by the FBI, Abdulmutallab was questioned for about fifty minutes before being read the Miranda warnings and clamming up. In a subsequent press session, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told Fox News’ Chris Wallace that the FBI got all the information that could be obtained from Abdulmutallab in those few minutes, which is entirely absurd. Intelligence interrogators can milk good information out of terrorists over days, weeks and months as they have proved repeatedly at Gitmo.

Then came the carefully-crafted release to media friends that Abdulmutallab was -- despite the Miranda warnings -- cooperating. Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo), ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence committee told me last week that publication of Abdulmutallab’s supposed cooperation came within a day of Bond’s being told by FBI Director Bob Mueller that keeping the terrorist’s cooperation secret was essential to other counter-terrorist actions.

Now comes John Brennan in a USA Today op-ed earlier this week which is a string of fibs and misleading statements so easily disproved it leaves observers wondering about Brennan’s sanity.

In the op-ed, Brennan makes several astounding assertions: that immediately after Abdulmutallab was captured he was “…thoroughly interrogated and provided important information,” implying that there was nothing else to get from the man who was trained, armed and sent to attack us by an al-Qaeda cell.

Brennan further asserts that, “It's naive to think that transferring Abdulmutallab to military custody would have caused an outpouring of information. There is little difference between military and civilian custody, other than an interrogator with a uniform. The suspect gets access to a lawyer, and interrogation rules are nearly identical.” Which is false.

Gitmo detainees aren’t entitled to counsel, and don’t get access to lawyers until they are charged with war crimes by a military commission or are seeking release in a habeas corpus proceeding.

Brennan also says, “Cries to try terrorists only in military courts lack foundation.” Apparently Brennan is willfully ignorant of the exclusive use of military courts to try people who commit acts of war against the United States since the Revolutionary War era, the Constitutional basis for military courts, their affirmation by the Supreme Court over fifty years ago in Ex Parte Quirin and the statutory basis in the post-9-11 Military Commissions Act.

And, most outrageously, Brennan writes “We need no lectures about the fact that this nation is at war…Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda.”

John Brennan told “Meet the Press” host David Gregory that the top congressional Republicans were briefed when Abdulmutallab was captured and none objected to the plan to put the terrorist into the civilian justice system.

But those top Republicans -- Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky), his House counterpart Rep. John Boehner (R-Oh), Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo), ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee and his House counterpart, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mi) -- have very different recollections. Both Bond and Hoekstra said that Brennan told them of Abdulmutallab’s arrest and custody but not of any decision to Mirandize him or place him into the civilian justice system.

Responding to Brennan’s op-ed in a joint statement with Minority Leader John Boehner, Hoekstra said on Tuesday that, “Mr. Brennan’s cheap, irresponsible political smear doesn’t help keep the American people safe. We would like to think -- given the public testimony given by Intelligence Community officials of the possibility of a terrorist attack within the next six months -- that the Administration would become serious about closing such painfully obvious and public gaps in our security.”

Brennan can’t be trusted. As Pete Hoekstra told me in a telephone conversation on Tuesday night, “Why would I even take a call from this guy unless I could record it?”

If Obama can (or even wants to) learn how dangerous his actions are, he would fire his national security team and repopulate it with people who are capable of dealing with terrorism as it must be dealt with, and are equipped by experience and temperament to do so. First to go should be John O. Brennan.

Mitch McConnell isn’t one to venture into the dangerous business of making predictions. But he risked one Wednesday. Noting that he opposed the closure of Gitmo even when President Bush wanted to do it -- and the sudden about-face by Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa), who has been consumed with the “rights” of terrorists until yesterday -- McConnell told me, “I predict that over the course of the year, increasing bipartisan majorities in Congress will insist that terrorists be kept at Gitmo and not be brought into the United States.”

“The administration,” said McConnell, is going to learn that they will have to retreat on the issue of bringing these people into the United States.”


Mr. Babbin is the editor of Human Events and HumanEvents.com. He served as a deputy undersecretary of defense in President George H.W. Bush's administration. He is the author of "In the Words of our Enemies"(Regnery,2007) and (with Edward Timperlake) of "Showdown: Why China Wants War with the United States" (Regnery, 2006) and "Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe are Worse than You Think" (Regnery, 2004). E-mail him at jbabbin@eaglepub.com.


SOURCE:
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=35582

[Ret10Echo]

And to further muddy the waters:

Administration may abandon civilian 9/11 trial
February 12, 2010 - 12:58pm

WASHINGTON (AP) - Attorney General Eric Holder is leaving open the possibility of trying professed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before a military commission instead of the civilian trial originally planned for New York City.

"At the end of the day, wherever this case is tried, in whatever forum, what we have to ensure is that it's done as transparently as possible and with adherence to all the rules," Holder told The Washington Post in an interview published in Friday's editions. "If we do that, I'm not sure the location or even the forum is as important as what the world sees in that proceeding."

Opposition from New York officials has forced the Obama administration to reconsider plans to put Mohammed on trial in federal court in lower Manhattan, near where the World Trade Center was felled.

City and state officials and many congressional Republicans argue that the high-security trial would put New Yorkers at risk of further attacks, cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in security expenses and take a staggering toll on nearby businesses.

Holder still maintains that a civilian trial would be the best option for the case and "best for our overall fight against al-Qaida."

President Barack Obama said in a CBS interview that he hasn't ruled out holding the trial in New York federal court but was taking into account the objections of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the city's police.

[Warrior-Mentor]

Dhimmi "Counter-Terrorism" Advisor to President Obama, John Brennan:

"They are not jihadists, for jihad is a holy struggle, an effort to purify for a legitimate purpose, and there is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- holy or pure or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children," Brennan said.

"We are not waging a war against terrorism because terrorism is but a tactic that will never be defeated, any more than a tactics of war will. Rather, such thinking is a recipe for endless conflict. ... We are at war with Al Qaeda and its extremist allies, and any comment to the contrary is just inaccurate. We will destroy that organization."

COMMENT: As if the destruction of Al Qaeda would end the global jihad currently underway. Unbelievable.

This is either professional incompetence, an offense punishable by firing - or - it is something more vile, intentional deception bordering on treason during a time of war, an offense, if convicted, punishable by death.

I couldn't agree more with those who are calling for Mr. Brennan to step down.

LINK:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/02/ob...-struggle.html

[Bordercop]

The link: http://michellemalkin.com/2010/02/17...s-flying-imam/


The other stupid things John Brennan said
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010

It’s bad enough that John Brennan, President Obama’s national security deputy, thinks Gitmo jihadi recidivism is “not that bad.” But in his talk last week with Islamic law students at New York University, Brennan made even more reckless comments about our counterterrorism programs while pandering to one of the worst Muslim grievance-mongers and sharia peddlers in America.

During the question-and-answer session, Brennan welcomed a question from Omar Shahin. He identified himself as the head of the “North American Imams Federation.” What he didn’t mention was his role as the chief ringleader of the infamous flying imams. You remember them: They were the six Muslim clerics whose suspicious behavior – provocatively shouting “Allahu Akbar!” before boarding the plane, fanning out in the cabin before take-off, refusing to sit in their assigned seats, requesting seat-belt extenders, which they placed on the floor – led to their removal by a U.S. Airways crew in 2006.

In coordination with the unindicted terror co-conspirators of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Shahin and his radical delegation attempted to shake down the airline with a discrimination lawsuit and bully the citizen “John Does” who flagged the imams’ security-undermining behavior. CAIR’s then-mouthpiece Ibrahim Hooper blasted “anti-Muslim hysteria” by those who saw something and said something about the imams’ in-flight shenanigans. Shahin ranted in a teleconference strategy session in 2007 that indeed, he and his cohorts were spoiling for the incident and planning to engineer “many, many cases” to sabotage airline security efforts.

As head of the Tucson Islamic Center in Arizona (home to past jihadi dry-run plotters), Shahin preached that his followers must put Islamic sharia law above Western laws. He told the Arizona Republic that he doubted Muslims were behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, concluding: “All of these, they make it up.” Brennan didn’t appear to know who Shahin was. Somebody around him should have briefed him: Shahin’s involvement in Hamas-linked charities and radical Wahhabi “youth groups” has earned the Jordanian-born naturalized citizen increased FBI scrutiny over the years.

Instead, Brennan treated him as just another innocent Muslim with “reasonable” concerns about the government. “We came to this country to enjoy freedom,” Shahin began with faux, flag-waving emotion. “We feel that since September 11, we aren’t enjoying these values anymore…Also, we feel that there’s a big lack of trust between Muslims’ community and our government…My question: Is there anything being done by our government to rebuild this trust?”

Instead of countering the narrative, exposing Shahin’s true intentions, and vigorously defending America’s homeland security apparatus, Brennan dutifully genuflected to the gods of political correctness. President Obama, he told the militant 9/11 inside-jobber and jihad white-washer, is “determined to put America on a strong course.”

No, not a “strong course” that includes national security profiling of Islamic radicals pretending they care about our country’s best interests. By “strong course,” Brennan assured Shahin, he meant a course towards assuaging the civil rights groups who have objected to every security program at airports, borders, train stations, and visa offices for the past nine years.

Brennan told Shahin that the post-9/11 response of the Bush administration was a “reaction some people might say was over the top in some areas” (insert indignant grievance-monger nodding and mmm-hmm-ing here) and that “in an overabundance of caution [we] implemented a number of security measures and activities that upon reflection now we look back after the heat of the battle has died down a bit we say they were excessive, okay.”

It gets worse: Brennan then went on to decry the “ignorant feelings” of Americans outraged at the jihadi attacks on American soil. And then he told Shahin and the audience of Muslim students that he “was very concerned after the attack in Fort Hood as well as the December 25 attack that all of sudden there were people who went back into this fearful position that lashed out not thinking through what was reasonable and appropriate.”

The Fort Hood jihadist slaughtered 14 innocent soldiers and an unborn baby after an Army career openly threatening the lives of our soldiers and Brennan is wringing his hands about the rest of us “lashing out” over government incompetence. He believes our true sin is not in the systemic underreacting by the military, homeland security, intel, and White House officials in charge, but in the “overreacting” of the American public.

With clueless capitulationists like Brennan in charge of our safety, who needs enemies?

[T-Rock]

"They are not jihadists, for jihad is a holy struggle…”

The Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law


o9.0 JIHAD

(O: Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word mujahada, signifying warfare to establish the religion.
(pgs 599-609)

o4:17 There is no indemnity for killing a non-Muslim...
(pgs 588-595)

What an idiot…IMHO, Lt. Colonel Allen West put it best when he said:

“Until you get principled leadership in the United States of America that is willing to say that, we will continue to chase our tail, because we will never clearly define who this enemy is, and then understand their goals and objectives—which (are) on any jihadist website—and then come up with the right (and) proper objectives to not only secure our Republic but secure Western civilization.”

[T-Rock]

One of the most theologically ignorant and irresponsible speeches delivered by a public figure:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNZjTuevDfU

[Warrior-Mentor]

Originally Posted by T-Rock

One of the most theologically ignorant and irresponsible speeches delivered by a public figure:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNZjTuevDfU

Not just theologically, but LEGALLY ignorant as well.

[T-Rock]

Obama's Top Counterterror Adviser's Inability to Think Outside the Box Bodes Disaster

by Raymond Ibrahim
May 29, 2010

"The greatest hurdle Americans need to get over in order to properly respond to the growing threat of radical Islam is purely intellectual in nature; specifically, it is epistemological, and revolves around the abstract realm of 'knowledge.' Before attempting to formulate a long-term strategy to counter radical Islam, Americans must first and foremost understand Islam, particularly its laws and doctrines, the same way Muslims understand it—without giving it undue Western (liberal) interpretations. This is apparently not as simple as expected: all peoples of whatever civilizations and religions tend to assume that other peoples more or less share in their worldview, which they assume is objective, including notions of right and wrong, good and bad. ….

[T]he secular, Western experience has been such that people respond with violence primarily when they feel they are politically, economically, or socially oppressed. While true that many non-Western peoples may fit into this paradigm, the fact is, the ideologies of radical Islam have the intrinsic capacity to prompt Muslims to violence and intolerance vis-à-vis the 'other,' irrespective of grievances…. Being able to understand all this, being able to appreciate it without any conceptual or intellectual constraints is paramount for Americans to truly understand the nature of the enemy and his ultimate goals."

Such were the words that opened my testimony to Congress. One year later, none other than President Obama's top counter-terror adviser, John Brennan, has come to to personify the approach I warned against, that is, the misguided phenomenon of westernizing Islamic concepts.
A Fox New's report, titled "Counterterror Adviser Defends Jihad as 'Legitimate Tenet of Islam,'" has the details:

During a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, John Brennan described violent extremists as victims of "political, economic and social forces," but said that those plotting attacks on the United States should not be described in "religious terms."

In other words, despite the fact that Islamists describe all their goals in "religious terms," Brennan sees them—you know, people like Osama bin Laden who murdered 3,000 Americans—as naught more than victims of the system. And why is that? Because Brennan believes that "political, economic and social forces"—the three I specifically stressed in my excerpt above—are the only precipitators to violence. So jihadists can openly articulate their violent bloodlust through religious terms all they want, it matters not: Brennan and his ilk have their intellectual blinders shut tight and refuse to venture outside the box.

Next, our counter-terror adviser evokes the perverse logic behind the administration's recent decision to censor words offensive to Muslims (which I closely explored here):

Nor do we describe our enemy as "jihadists" or "Islamists" because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one's community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children.

Inasmuch as he is correct in the first clause of that sentence—"jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one's community"—he greatly errs in the latter clause, by projecting his own notions of what constitutes "holy," "legitimate," and "innocent" onto Islam. In Islam, such terms are often antithetical to the Judeo-Christian/Western understanding. Indeed, the institution of jihad, according to every authoritative Muslim book on Islamic jurisprudence, is nothing less than offensive warfare to spread Sharia law, a cause seen as both "legitimate" and "holy" in Islam. As for "innocence," by simply being a non-Muslim infidel, one is already guilty in Islam. Brennan understands the definition of jihad; he just has no clue of its application. So he is left fumbling about with a square peg that simply refuses to pass through a round hole.
Fox News continues:

Brennan defined the enemy as members of bin Laden's Al Qaeda network and "its terrorist affiliates." But Brennan argued that it would be "counterproductive" for the United States to use the term, as it would "play into the false perception" that the "murderers" leading war against the West are doing so in the name of a "holy cause."

Fine, do define the enemy as members of bin Laden's Al Qaeda network and "its terrorist affiliates," but do also define the cause that binds these "terrorist affiliates" together in the first place. Of course, one need only read their writings to know that they adhere to one and the same cause: the establishment of a hegemonic caliphate that governs the world according to Sharia. As for Brennan calling the terrorist affiliates "murderers," would he also be willing to apply that epithet to their prophet Muhammad, who was wont to send assassins to, well, murder his critics, including poets and one old woman whose body was dismembered by her Muslim assailants—assailants who were no less convinced that they were involved in a "holy cause" than were the 9/11 hijackers?


It should be further noted that this tendency to project one's own cultural norms and priorities onto others is the height of arrogance and ethnocentrism—precisely what liberals constantly warn against. Yet the irony is that "open-minded" proponents of cultural relativism are also the ones most prone to westernizing Islam. When Brennan insists that jihadists are really not motivated by religion but rather are products of "political, economic and social forces," is this total dismissal of the "other" and his peculiar motivations (in favor of Western paradigms) not arrogant?

In the end, Brennan is not all to blame. After all, though he and I were both born and raised in North Bergen, New Jersey, perhaps my dual Middle-East/Western background gives me the advantage to understand both the Islamicate and American mindsets equally. No, seems the greater blame lies with the president whose campaign denounced ignorance and arrogance as leading us astray—only to hire a counter-terror adviser who epitomizes both.

Source> http://www.raymondibrahim.com/7544/o...s-inability-to