Remember when executive branch abuses of power provoked such outrageous outrage..?

... we do.



If the following is to be believed, it will only confirm what we've been saying for years on this blog with respect to the President's approach to the war on terror.

From The Guardian:

The lawyer who first drew up White House policy on lethal drone strikes has accused the Obama administration of overusing them because of its reluctance to capture prisoners that would otherwise have to be sent to Guantánamo Bay.

John Bellinger, who was responsible for drafting the legal framework for targeted drone killings while working for George W Bush after 9/11, said he believed their use had increased since because President Obama was unwilling to deal with the consequences of jailing suspected al-Qaida members.

"This government has decided that instead of detaining members of al-Qaida [at Guantánamo] they are going to kill them," he told a conference at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Translation: he's lazy. Expending resources to capture, detain and interrogate bad guys is messy business when it's so much easier to hit the war on terror's easy button and send in the drones, instead.


So, the man who has wanted to close Gitmo since he started campaigning for President prior to his first term as he felt it a moral stain on this country's conscience and want's civilian trials for terror masterminds like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, has no problem with killing them instead, including Americans even suspected of untoward activities buttressed by the most tenuous of evidence.


From a civil rights/liberties standpoint, why then, is he getting a pass on this?

1) The press won't make this an issue. Doing so would implicitly acknowledge that perhaps Obama is even more egregious than ol' you know who with respect to the abuse of executive power so we know that ain't happening.

2) His fan boys and girls and other assorted low information voters that voted for him in '08 and 2012 are abject hypocrites in whistling past the graveyard. Of course, many of them are unaware of the drone killings because of No. 1 but...

3) those that are aware play the "I (heart) Barack" card saying they simply trust this President more than they would, say, President Bush. This, of course, is nonsense as it displays a stunning lack of grasping a functional constitutional republic with its checks and balances, oversight, due process and transparency of which Obama's drone program lacks altogether.

We are a nation of laws not of men and putting life and death choices into the hands of one man in the Commander-in-Chief sets a horribly dangerous precedent moving forward for what happens when the Oval Office once again becomes saddled with a mere mortal individual not nearly possessing of Obama's infinite wisdom, benevolence and moral rectitude?

The silence of the establishment-left in this country with respect to this has been craven, convenient and ultimately abjectly hypocritical.

The framework has now been laid for egregious abuses of executive power moving forward if those abuses of power have not occurred already.

How the left stopped worrying and learned to love the drone

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During the first term of this current administration, we ran a series alternately titled “O > W” and “Constitutional Republics Are, Like, Hard” to illustrate just how closely President Obama’s domestic and foreign policies had mirrored that of his predecessor and to illustrate how often those policies represented an extension of executive power beyond that of Bush. (If you decided to go to the link, you will see there was no shortage of material)

Since the killing of Anwar-alAwlaki back in September of 2011 via a drone strike in Yemen, the practice of killing Americans overseas has been public knowledge… well at least as public as a compliant 4th estate would make it public.

Just last week, however, against the backdrop of the CIA Director confirmation hearings for John Brennan, a leaked white paper from the Department of Justice gave legal justification for the administration to kill Americans oversees with what we will feel free to describe as virtually zero oversight, due process and transparency. This, at last, put this long-overdue debate on the front burner and certainly, Peter Baker’s conveniently-timed Saturday commentary in the New York Times has finally given Paper-of-Record voice to our O > W contention.

The lede from the article:

Four years into his tenure, the onetime critic of President George W. Bush finds himself cast as a present-day Mr. Bush, justifying the muscular application of force in the defense of the nation while detractors complain that he has sacrificed the country’s core values in the name of security.

Oh, that he were as we have seen the establishment left in this country both in the press, government and celebrity, rush to the president’s defense with the lame defense that the president knows best.


And Baker makes the point of Obama’s use of drones as essentially being lazy; a point we have made for years:

By emphasizing drone strikes, Mr. Obama need not bother with the tricky issues of detention and interrogation because terrorists tracked down on his watch are generally incinerated from the sky, not captured and questioned. By dispensing with concerns about due process, he avoids a more traditional war that he fears could lead to American boots on the ground.

Glenn Greenwald penned an excellent column exposing the hackery of the left and the fact that progressive fans of the Obama drone killing program need to apologize and thank McBushChimpHitler, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the gang… because you can’t get to assassinating Americans from above without first going through warrantless wiretaps and enhanced interrogations. It’s all about process, you see, to achieve lack of due process.


But back to the “I (heart) Barack” defense…

Here’s MSNBC host Krystal Ball best exemplifying this line of reasoning:

Look, I voted for President Obama because I trust his values and his judgment. And I believe that he's a fundamentally responsible actor. Without gratuitously slamming ex-President Bush, I think he displayed extraordinary lapses in judgement in executing his primary responsibility as commander in chief, and put troops in harms way imprudently. President Obama would have exercised better judgment and he has exercised better judgment. The way it stands now, the drone program is exclusively in the domain of the executive. Their protocol, their judgment. So yeah, I feel a whole lot better about the program when the decider, so to speak, is President Obama.

That’s charming… it really is. And it also demonstrates an embarrassing lack of understanding as to what is required of a constitutional republic with its checks and balances, oversights and separation of powers.

What is wrong with the “I trust Obama (more)” line of reasoning is that precedent has now been set for all other future presidents. This logic locks in a very short term perspective based largely on a cult of personality that completely ignores the long-term ramifications of a single person having the go/no-go on terminating U.S. citizens without any oversight, process, review or transparency.

Hell… we just wrote “.. long-term ramifications…” for something that has happened 3 times already.


Saying you trust Barack Obama more than you trust George W. Bush or Mitt Romney is fine for matters such as the economy or tax policy but for matters of life and death and given the flimsy pretexts and controls that Justice Department legal document lay out for justification, you are effectively gutting the 4th amendment. The truism that (ideally) we are nation of laws and not of men seems to be lost on many of these folks.

Besides, Obama has only 4 more years left. We can’t wait to see what happens when someone as obviously less-saintly than he possesses these extraordinary powers and what he will do with them.

And we can’t wait to see what hacks like Kristal Ball will say about it then, as well.


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Constitutional republics are, like, hard

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It must've been Cindy Sheehan and Code Pink camping out in that ditch in Texas all those years that kept G.W. Bush from assassinating 16 yr. old U.S. citizens.



In the aftermath of 9-11, B-Daddy of The Liberator Today warned of the amassing of executive power as justified by the necessity to protect this country in our newly-minted War on Terror. Paraphrasing:

The Commander-in-Chief's intentions may be entirely honorable and he may not abuse the powers Congress has granted him but the framework for these powers to be abused are now codified into law and we may not always be blessed with a Commander-in-Chief with the best of intentions. What if Hillary Clinton becomes the next President? Would you trust her with these powers?

Here's Glenn Greenwald, a reliable lefty, writing for the Guardian UK in a column titled "Obama Moves to Make the War on Terror Permanent" :

The primary reason for opposing the acquisition of abusive powers and civil liberties erosions is that they virtually always become permanent, vested not only in current leaders one may love and trust but also future officials who seem more menacing and less benign.

The Washington Post has a crucial and disturbing story this morning by Greg Miller about the concerted efforts by the Obama administration to fully institutionalize – to make officially permanent – the most extremist powers it has exercised in the name of the war on terror.

Based on interviews with "current and former officials from the White House and the Pentagon, as well as intelligence and counterterrorism agencies", Miller reports that as "the United States' conventional wars are winding down", the Obama administration "expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years" (the "capture" part of that list is little more than symbolic, as the US focus is overwhelmingly on the "kill" part). Specifically, "among senior Obama administration officials, there is broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade." As Miller puts it: "That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism."

(italics, ours)


As we have written in these pages before, the administration is simply to lazy to be bothered with the nettlesome "capture and question" aspect of anti-terrorism and have opted to go heavy on the "kill" aspect. It is indeed, just too hard.


With respect to creating an infrastructure capable of sustaining a seemingly permanent war:

The Post article cites numerous recent developments reflecting this Obama effort, including the fact that "CIA Director David H Petraeus is pushing for an expansion of the agency's fleet of armed drones", which "reflects the agency's transformation into a paramilitary force, and makes clear that it does not intend to dismantle its drone program and return to its pre-September 11 focus on gathering intelligence." The article also describes rapid expansion of commando operations by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and, perhaps most disturbingly, the creation of a permanent bureaucratic infrastructure to allow the president to assassinate at will.

The creepiest aspect of this development is the christening of a new Orwellian euphemism for due-process-free presidential assassinations: "disposition matrix". Writes Miller:

"Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the 'disposition matrix'.

"The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. US officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the 'disposition' of suspects beyond the reach of American drones."

Again, the reasoning behind this disposition matrix appears to be a result of the incoherency of a anti-terrorism policy that wants to give Gitmo detainees civilian trials, while reaching out, touching and killing others overseas.

This was all motivated by Obama's refusal to arrest or detain terrorist suspects, and his resulting commitment simply to killing them at will (his will). Miller quotes "a former US counterterrorism official involved in developing the matrix" as explaining the impetus behind the program this way: "We had a disposition problem."

The central role played by the NCTC in determining who should be killed – "It is the keeper of the criteria," says one official to the Post – is, by itself, rather odious. As Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts noted in response to this story, the ACLU has long warned that the real purpose of the NCTC – despite its nominal focus on terrorism - is the "massive, secretive data collection and mining of trillions of points of data about most people in the United States".

In particular, the NCTC operates a gigantic data-mining operation, in which all sorts of information about innocent Americans is systematically monitored, stored, and analyzed. This includes "records from law enforcement investigations, health information, employment history, travel and student records" – "literally anything the government collects would be fair game". In other words, the NCTC - now vested with the power to determine the proper "disposition" of terrorist suspects - is the same agency that is at the center of the ubiquitous, unaccountable surveillance state aimed at American citizens.

Greenwald writes of this new nearly unaccountable, supra-legal bureaucracy that, most likely, would have been rejected out of hand as recently as 10 years ago:

What has been created here - permanently institutionalized - is a highly secretive executive branch agency that simultaneously engages in two functions: (1) it collects and analyzes massive amounts of surveillance data about all Americans without any judicial review let alone search warrants, and (2) creates and implements a "matrix" that determines the "disposition" of suspects, up to and including execution, without a whiff of due process or oversight. It is simultaneously a surveillance state and a secretive, unaccountable judicial body that analyzes who you are and then decrees what should be done with you, how you should be "disposed" of, beyond the reach of any minimal accountability or transparency.

The Post's Miller recognizes the watershed moment this represents: "The creation of the matrix and the institutionalization of kill/capture lists reflect a shift that is as psychological as it is strategic." As he explains, extra-judicial assassination was once deemed so extremist that very extensive deliberations were required before Bill Clinton could target even Osama bin Laden for death by lobbing cruise missiles in East Africa. But:

Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it.

To understand the Obama legacy, please re-read that sentence. As Murtaza Hussain put it when reacting to the Post story: "The US agonized over the targeted killing Bin Laden at Tarnak Farms in 1998; now it kills people it barely suspects of anything on a regular basis."

Consider the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born person who later renounced his citizenship when he turned radical cleric and who was considered by our intelligence community to be a top recruiter and strategist for Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He wound up on the President's "kill list" and on September 30, 2011 he, along with Samir Khan were killed by U.S. deployed Hellfire missiles. al-Awlaki, who was said to be in regular contact with the Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Hasan, was most likely a bad actor, a very bad actor. However, throughout this nation's history, "most likely" didn't cut legal muster for the ostensible purposes of a targeted assassination.

It gets better: Two weeks after that, his 16 year old son, himself a U.S. citizen, Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi, was cut down in a separate drone strike. To give you an idea of how far this program has already progressed and how far gone is the psychology and mentality that is guiding it, consider what former White House Press Secretary and current Obama campaign contributor, Robert Gibbs had to say with respect to the justification: (he) "should have [had] a far more responsible father." It was thought that Gibbs was unaware that the son was killed in a different strike but that is nearly a distinction without a difference as far as Gibbs is concerned; an unaccountable star chamber can afford to make flippant and callous remarks like this.

What is most disturbing to us is not only the lack of outrage but even the lack of any national conversation on this topic. It was a truly bipartisan effort by a Democratic-controlled Senate and a Republican-controlled House that gave the President the powers he now wields via the American Defense Authorization Act that was signed into law at the end of 2011.

And consider the New York Times expose' of a couple months back that described the kill list in physical terms, as a deck of baseball cards... Now batting clean-up for Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki who's 2010-2011 disposition is "dead man walking"... That article was not intended in any way to blow the lid off the existence of the kill list or to paint the President as a blood-thirsty assassin who called his decision to assassinate al-Awlaki's son a "no-brainer" rather quite the opposite. The image of the President casually flipping through that deck of cards and giving the thumbs up or thumbs down was absolutely intended to burnish his credentials as a defender of the republic and not some effeminate, milque-toasty community organizer-type.

And it all happened just like that. No protests. No lawsuits. No screams of outrage from the left. And because of their inaction in this matter, it has proven them to be as morally and intellectually bankrupt as we always figured them to be. Nothing exists for the left except politics. No principles, no bearings, no convictions, only politics and winning elections.

Whereas 3 people get waterboarded and the Abu-Ghraib prison scandal created a virtual lefty Woodstock out there in that ditch outside of Crawford Texas for a few years, the existence and application of a kill list which led to the unlawful assassination of a 16 year old U.S. citizen has been met with deafening silence.

As the saying goes, "Only Nixon could go to China". Now it's "Only a leftist ideologue posturing as a pragmatic centrist could get a kill list" 'cause it sure as hell wasn't going to happen for a President from Texas.



Greenwald concludes with this:

At Wired, Spencer Ackerman reacts to the Post article with an analysis entitled "President Romney Can Thank Obama for His Permanent Robotic Death List". Here is his concluding paragraph:

"Obama did not run for president to preside over the codification of a global war fought in secret. But that's his legacy. . . . Micah Zenko at the Council on Foreign Relations writes that Obama's predecessors in the Bush administration 'were actually much more conscious and thoughtful about the long-term implications of targeted killings', because they feared the political consequences that might come when the U.S. embraces something at least superficially similar to assassination. Whoever follows Obama in the Oval Office can thank him for proving those consequences don't meaningfully exist — as he or she reviews the backlog of names on the Disposition Matrix."

We guarantee you this will be an issue if Romney wins the election when we all welcome back the anti-war left on November 7th.

Video clip of the day

. A couple of entrance observations/questions:

1) Wasn't this the sort of "spiking the ball" they said they were going to avoid when bin Laden was killed? 2) Isn't a guy who lobbed missiles somewhere in bin Laden's general direction merely to serve as a distraction from him receiving oral sex from chubby white interns the last guy you want fronting your anti-terrorism chops?

. Here's the new Obama campaign ad which is pretty much, four years on, the equivalent of Hilary Clinton's "3 A.M." ad for which Team O took such umbrage. Frankly, can you blame Team O for doing this? They certainly don't have a record of accomplishment on which to run. You think he's going to campaign on the economy, jobs or doing something about our unsustainable entitlements to which he added yet another in ObamaCare? What Obama has been most effective at is wacking people be they terrorists, foreign strongmen (Gaddafi) or U.S. citizens (Anwar al-Awlaki). Barack Hussein Obama 2012: stone-cold killa. .

Slouching towards a 4th term (cont.)

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Last week, the National Review's Rich Lowry had a column titled "Holder's Identity Problem" which took a look at Holder's considerable issues with individual state's voter identification laws.

Clever but not nearly as appropriate or relevant for the miserable hack that runs the Justice Department's identity problem with respect to indefinite detention of suspected terrorists and the killing of alleged terrorists even if they are American citizens.



Let's jump in the way-back machine and catch up with Holder in 2004 during the dark tyranny of the Bush regime:

(Via Patterico's Pontifications):

And yet a disturbing pattern has emerged. Lawyers for this administration have attempted to sanction the wholesale roundup and extended detention of Middle Eastern men on routine immigration violations, and the indefinite detention of American citizens with minimal judicial supervision, and without access to legal counsel.

We must be aggressive in the conduct of the war, and in the interrogation of prisoners taken in that war. But this Administration’s view, that the President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief can almost always overcome what it views as burdensome laws, restrictive International treaties, and tired old customs is extremely dangerous.

Now let me be clear. This is not to equate American al-Qaeda sympathizers with law abiding Japanese-American citizens. But citizenship must mean something. The guarantees that come with it must be respected.

Now, let's see how Holder grows in office. Back to the present: Eff, it.. let's kill'em instead:

President Obama, who came to office promising transparency and adherence to the rule of law, has become the first president to claim the legal authority to order an American citizen killed without judicial involvement, real oversight or public accountability.

That, regrettably, was the most lasting impression from a major address on national security delivered last week by Attorney General Eric Holder Jr.

Eric Holder, in a speech just last week, did indeed claim that the Executive branch had the authority to kill American citizens suspected of being terrorists without due process.

Quite a turnaround, now isn't it? Imagine the rioting in the streets in Berkeley, Madison and Eugene if Bush had claimed this authority. And let's be clear, Team O did indeed carry through with this threat when they wacked Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen in a drone strike last September.

So, what is the real reason behind this new-found extra-constitutional executive power? A realization of the threat posed by terrorists to this country? A convenient opportunity to accrue even more authority? Maybe. But we think it's a little more simple than that: Obama's lazy. That's it. He doesn't want to have to mess around with the sticky business of capturing, interrogating and, mostly, detaining suspected terrorists. Afterall, this is the administration that made a campaign goal of closing down Gitmo and which still maintains a public position of desiring to see suspected terrorists in civilian courts. It's much, much easier to just wack them... it's a hell of lot cleaner that way.

Let that sink in for a moment: An administration that desires to see Gitmo residents tried in civilian courts doesn't let suspected terrorists see the light of the Cuban day.



Here's Andew Napolitano with Shep Smith talking about the subject matter just prior to Holder's speech (Via Dueling Barstools):

"Due process is not something the government gives, due process is a natural right that every human being has and the Constitution requires that the government respect that in the 5th amendment."

1:45 : Wait, al-Awlaki's son and a family friend, both U.S. citizens were killed also? We've been following this story pretty closely and this is the first time we've heard this.

"On the basis of that summary, the President can be judge, jury and executioner for any American anywhere."

2:40 : That's right - we'd almost forgot. al-Awlaki was the guy the Ft. Hood shooter was reaching out to. Fancy that, it's considered impolite to suggest that the Ft. Hood shooter was a radical Islamist terrorist yet al-Awlaki receives death by drone for being a radical Islamist terrorist... allegedly.

"If what the attorney general is about to say is accepted uncritically by Americans then we are doomed, our freedoms are gone - the President is no longer our President he is a King, he can decide who lives and who dies on his own without any evidence, without any trial."

It's being received uncritically by Americans because the 4th estate has again failed in reporting out on this travesty. One of the very types of things they despised Bush for, they will provide cover when one of their own not only matches the outrage but far exceeds it. It would only be fair then to say then that the media does not suffer any longer from "liberal bias", rather "despotic bias".

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Smack of the day and the Friday evening dump

First, da schmack:

When historians sit down decades from now to address the events of the early 21st century, they will have no trouble explaining why Americans elected Barack Obama president. They elected him out of a firm conviction that the United States was not involved in enough wars.

Steve Chapman at Reason.com expands upon 1) Libya, 2) Yemen, 3) Iraq and 4) Afghanistan at the link above but neglects this administration's war on jobs. A glaring omission as far as we're concerned.


Libya, you say? In a bit of a news dump this past Friday, and who could be blamed for not catching it with the Big Media-Governor Palin dumpster-diving extravaganza kicking-off, we via NATO are finally stating what our kinetic military actions have declared all along: we are pursuing regime-change there.

A U.N. resolution justifies the targeting of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, a senior NATO military official with operational knowledge of the Libya mission told CNN Thursday.

Asked by CNN whether Gadhafi was being targeted, the NATO official declined to give a direct answer. The resolution applies to Gadhafi because, as head of the military, he is part of the control and command structure and therefore a legitimate target, the official said.

But to be completely fair to the Commander-in-Chief, we have far less of a problem with what's going on in Yemen where just last week, we took out a top al Qaeda commander, Abu Ali al-Harithi, in an American air strike, than we do in Libya where we have not been granted any congressional approval to take out a sitting head of state.

In Yemen, the President has cover as granted by the Authorization for Use of Military Force of September 18, 2001.

(a) IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

Yemen, yes. Libya, no.

Hey, you may disagree with the AUMF and/or its application with respect to our actions in Yemen but, as opposed to what we are pursuing in Libya, there is, at least, a thread of legal logic to it.

And, again, with respect to the engagement level of the President: he never seems as focused or locked-in on the job as he does when he's wacking people.

Smack of the day

Alternate headline: We're all flag-waving unauthorized and semi-unilateral kinetic military action assassins now, brother

As much as I am now embarrassed to admit it, if you had asked me 48 hours ago whether Osama Bin Laden would ever be brought to justice I would have probably answered "no." Like many Americans I had all but abandoned hope that we would ever capture or kill the 9/11 mastermind, and had resigned myself to the idea he would die an old man thumbing his nose at us from some comfortable cave in Waziristan. Well, I can happily report that I completely underestimated the skill, courage, and perseverence of America's military. And, almost as happily, I can report that I also completely underestimated the capacity of America's erstwhile "peace community" for turning on a dime and embracing the kind of all-American xenophobic flag-waving bloodlust they only recently decried. So today I stand proudly with my new friends of the formerly antiwar left in a mindlessly jingoistic salute to President Obama for an extralegal military assassination well done.

And...

Little did I know that this untested young Commander-in-Chief would muster the courage to read his weekly Gallup numbers and, in one daring unilateral extra-judicial targeted hit job, toss aside every single idiotic foreign policy principle of his election campaign.

No one out there we are aware of runs it quite like P.J. O'Rourke and Iowahawk.

Check out the rest, here.

Blog link of the day

Our blog buddy, Harrison at Capitol Commentary, thinks the reaction to the recent developments with respect to TSA screenings is "overblown" and provides a nice summation of the whole debate, here.

We think what galls people is that they are subjected to what they see as humiliating treatment while we still get near misses (the Christmas/crotch bomber, for example) that should've been taken down before they boarded the plane.

One-way destinations, paying in cash, learning to fly but not how to take-off or land, no luggage, suspicious behavior at the gate, no-fly lists… all the above were huge flashing red light indicators of terrorist plots from 9/11 onward that were not picked up on or that we failed to act upon and which did not require racial profiling, strip searches or body scans.

Instead of employing common sense and competent vigilance, we are combating terror at the check-in counter in the most ham-fisted and intrusive manner possible. It makes no sense.

And not to go into full-blown conspiracy mode but as commenter (at Harrison's post) Sharon S. mentions:

I’m under the impression that TSA (Thousands Standing Around) employees don’t get any situational awareness training. Why should they? Fear is profitable. Security is a lucrative business. Body scanners run 150K a piece. It’s a billion dollar industry! Sure, this technology has now also become a moral dilemma. “The war on terrorism” has taken over “the war on drugs”. Back in the day, there were agents to pull aside suspicious looking individuals, such as drug mules. What ever happened to human intelligence? Can’t we train DEA agents to sniff out bomb mules? Oh right, that’s not PC. That’s profiling! But I guess it is PC to strip search people with scanners or grope those of us who opt out. As for children, leave them alone.

Incidentally, ProVision is making a fat buck selling scanners, compliments of the tax payer. The irony, we are paying to get strip searched. Maybe TSA would enjoy a little dance when I go through security next time, a la pole

Tall order all around, for we don't see a vast bureaucracy like the TSA suddenly transforming into the nimble, learning and smart agency they need to be in order to combat today's (and tomorrow's) terrorist threat.

Please leave any and all suggestions in the box provided before heading out.

Question of the day

We now have a new question to add to the lineup that measures, on an individual basis, America's cultural zeitgeist.



Ford or Chevy?


Beatles or Rolling Stones?


John or Paul?


Snickers or Milky Way?


Ginger or Mary Ann?


Digital or vinyl?


Episodes IV-VI or Episodes I-III?


Ice cream or frozen yougurt?


Rare, medium or well-done?


Dale Jr. or Jeff Gordon?


Shaken or stirred?


And now, ladies and gentlemen.....


.... full body scan or crotch pat?

= Pt. II

President Barack Obama's advisers plan to remove terms such as "Islamic radicalism" from a document outlining national security strategy and will use the new version to emphasize that the U.S. does not view Muslim nations through the lens of terrorism, counterterrorism officials say.

The change would be a significant shift in the National Security Strategy, a document that previously outlined the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. It currently states, "The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century."

The officials described the changes on condition of anonymity because the document is still being written and is unlikely to be released for weeks, and the White House would not discuss it. But rewriting the strategy document is the latest example of Obama putting his stamp on U.S. foreign policy, as with his promises to dismantle nuclear weapons and limit the situations in which they can be used.

The revisions are part of a larger effort about which the White House talks openly, one that seeks to change not just how the U.S. talks to Muslim nations, but also what it talks to them about, from health care and science to business startups and education.

If by healthcare, it is meant somehow convincing Muslim nations to quit funding... Muslim terrorist groups from building roadside bombs and training suicide bombers to kill Americans which really does nothing to bend the cost curve downward then we're for it.

Look, we're down with getting outside the box and other management bullshit-speak if it means effectively countering terrorism generating from Muslim countries but in reading this article, we couldn't help but think it was just another effort by the Obama administration to rhetorically distance themselves from the Bush administration while doing nothing substantively different.

Check this out:

That shift away from terrorism has been building for a year, since Obama went to Cairo and promised a "new beginning" in the relationship between the U.S. and the Muslim world. The White House believes the previous administration based that relationship entirely on fighting terrorism and winning the war of ideas.

"You take a country where the overwhelming majority are not going to become terrorists, and you go in and say, 'We're building you a hospital so you don't become terrorists.' That doesn't make much sense," National Security Council staffer Pradeep Ramamurthy said.

With respect to the shift away from winning the war of ideas: and Bush was the anti-intellectual?

And no sooner than the idea of humanitarian aid is derided, the Obama administration intends on winning over Muslim nations with.... humanitarian aid.

Like Reagan in China, Obama in Cairo made only passing references to terrorism. Instead he focused on cooperation. He announced the U.S. would team up to fight polio with the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, a multinational body based in Saudi Arabia. The U.S. and OIC had worked together before, but never with that focus.

"President Obama saw it as an opportunity to say, 'We work on things far beyond the war on terrorism,'" World Health Organization spokeswoman Sona Bari said.

"We're probably entering into a whole new level of engagement between the OIC and the polio program because of the stimulus coming from the U.S. government," said Michael Galway, who works on polio eradication for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also began working more closely with local Islamic leaders in northern Nigeria, a network that had been overlooked for years, said John Fitzsimmons, the deputy director of the CDC's immunization division.

Though health officials are reluctant to assign credit to any one action, new polio cases in Nigeria fell from 83 during the first quarter of last year to just one so far this year, Fitzsimmons said.

... and blah, blah, blah.

Maybe we should look at the bright side of things and cheefully grant the President these rhetorical departures as bone-throws to his Left knowing that he, as his track record thus far has indicated, has not done anything of substance to dismantle the Bush anti-terrorism regime.

So, how are we coming along with that war on terror thingy?

Let’s look at some recent developments with respect to the war on terror and see if we can gage by some degree or another if we really are serious about fighting terror.

Back in December, Homeland Secretary, Janet Napolitano said that the Christmas crotch bomber was not part of a larger terrorist plot to which we replied:

Oh, really?

Every single jihadist on the face of this planet be they trained and funded by or affiliated with Hamas, AQ, Hezbollah, the Taliban… even if they are “lone wolves”… whoever, is part of “a larger terrorist plot.”

That larger terrorist plot is called Islamic extremism and every single one of its minions is unified in its hatred for the West and its institutions and belief systems and are fatally committed to its destruction including all who live within it who are not found to be in sufficient compliance to Sharia law.

But if Napolitano and the other powers that be can’t quite grasp that concept, other detained terrorists who have since been able to lawyer-up are making the distinction a little bit easier.

A Tennessee man accused of killing a soldier outside a Little Rock, Ark., military recruiting station last year has asked a judge to change his plea to guilty, claiming for the first time that he is affiliated with a Yemen-based affiliate of Al Qaeda.

In a letter to the judge presiding over his case, the accused killer, Abdulhakim Muhammad, calls himself a soldier in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and calls the shooting “a Jihadi Attack” in retribution for the killing of Muslims by American troops.

If your memory is a little hazy on the above, don’t be alarmed because this incident which involved the assassination of one Private William Long and the injury of one of Long’s colleagues at the hands of an obvious Islamic jihadist back in June of last year has been effectively swept under the carpet as the Commander-in-Chief who couldn’t get out of his way fast enough to condemn the murder of abortionist, Dr. George Tiller, has still failed to make a single comment regarding the murder of an idividual in his chain of command.

And for some news from a more recent event; from Time Magazine:

The U.S. military's just-released report into the Fort Hood shootings spends 86 pages detailing various slipups by Army officers but not once mentions Major Nidal Hasan by name or even discusses whether the killings may have had anything to do with the suspect's view of his Muslim faith. And as Congress opens two days of hearings on Wednesday into the Pentagon probe of the Nov. 5 attack that left 13 dead, lawmakers want explanations for that omission.

(John Lehman, a member of the 9/11 commission and Navy Secretary during the Reagan Administration, says a reluctance to cause offense by citing Hasan's view of his Muslim faith and the U.S. military's activities in Muslim countries as a possible trigger for his alleged rampage reflects a problem that has gotten worse in the 40 years that Lehman has spent in and around the U.S. military. The Pentagon report's silence on Islamic extremism "shows you how deeply entrenched the values of political correctness have become," he told TIME on Tuesday. "It's definitely getting worse, and is now so ingrained that people no longer smirk when it happens."

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. In midcareer, they study the contrast between capabilities and intentions, which is why they aren't afraid of a British nuclear weapon but do fear the prospect of Iran getting one.

(italics, ours)

And this from USA Today:

In the wake of a mass shooting allegedly by a military psychiatrist, the Army's top doctor acknowledged his service needs to improve how it manages medical officers, including using more candor in reviewing their officers' performance.

But Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker, the Army surgeon general, told USA TODAY there's no evidence his staff "could have predicted" that Maj. Nidal Hasan, the man accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood in Texas, "could have become a mass murderer."

(italics, ours)

Because nothing says inactionable intelligence like having a business card that says, “servant of Allah”, a shoddy record of medical performance and inappropriate discussion of his Muslim faith at work, email exchanges with a radical Yemeni cleric and reportedly shouting “Allah Akbar” while he was shooting up Ft. Hood.

Missing all that is one thing. To perpetuate that incompetence once you’ve been caught with your pants down, though, is entirely another and because of that this jack-ass Schoomaker ought to be relieved of his command immediately.

OK. So there you have it. Looks like we’re pretty much on our own and dependent upon the likes of citizen-heros like Todd Beamer and the Flying Dutchman in our fight against Islamic jihad.

We're in the best of hands.

Third party? We don't need no stinking third party

Hey, do you remember when they told us that if we voted for McCain it would just be a continuation of conflicting interests and lack of transparency of the Bush years? Well, they were right.



The White House is jumping on the how it is the system failed in wake of the thwarted Christmas bomber attack and doing it in a manner that is entirely consistent with what we expect now from this administration.

President Obama's top counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, will lead the White House review of intelligence community information practices and aviation security, even though he was CEO of the private company the government used to help manage a key terrorism database before he joined the administration.

In response to questions about Brennan's potential conflict of interest, White House ethics counsel Norm Eisen has issued a waiver for Brennan, official said.

No doubt, this guy may know this system like the back of his hand but how is he going to be able to objectively critique it and point out any flaws?

Eisen, you may recall, was the President’s hatchet man in the firing of Gerald Walpin, the Inspector General who was investigating Sacramento mayor and Obama supporter, Kevin Johnson and his charity organization so you know he’s got tons of credibility in the ethics department.

Yep, we’re in the very best of hands.

A 2nd bomber? (UPDATED)

Kurt Haskell, an attorney from Detroit was in the airport in Amsterdam with his wife returning to the states from a safari in Uganda and claims the Christmas bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had an accomplice help him board the plane there.

Long story short: Well-dressed Indian or Pakistani man was able to convince airline officials that Abdulmutallab was from the Sudan and thus as some sort of refugee-fleeing-war-torn-country did not have/require a passport for international travel.

Linked story does not provide an additional claim made by Haskell which we heard during a radio interview with Haskell this morning on KOGO AM 600 – that being there was a second bomber onboard who was hauled off the plane after an explosive device was discovered by a bomb-sniffing dog that was brought onboard the plane in Detroit and was witnessed by many of the passengers including Haskell.

Haskell has been questioned on multiple occasions by federal authorities since that time. At one of these sessions they showed him a series of photos and asked him if he recognized any of the people in the photos. Haskell picked out Abdulmutallab as well as the 2nd bomber while adding, “That’s the 2nd bomber you’re not telling anyone about.” The feds were not pleased with this commentary. To our knowledge, we have not seen any official word confirming or denying the existence of this second set of explosives or an alleged 2nd bomber.

Stay tuned

(UPDATE #1): There was indeed a 2nd man taken into custody according U.S. Customs but they are insisting this person came to Detroit on a separate flight from Flight 253 and the F.B.I. is maintaining that Abdulmutallab was the only person arrested in relation to Christmas’ foiled attacks.

Several eye-witnesses including Haskell maintain they saw a man being taken away after a carry-on baggage search.

The most intriguing part of this whole thing remains Haskell’s contention that he positively ID’d this person from a series of photos presented to Haskell in one of his questioning sessions with authorities – photos which we will assume were not from Haskell’s high school year book.

We’re just baffled that it's nearly a week gone by before this has generated any hard news stories. Guess our Homeland security apparatus sure runs a tight ship.

Question of the day

A senior Obama administration official pushed back against critics of the White House’s plans to transfer some detainees at Guantanamo Bay to Yemen as it moves toward closing the facility, saying the process for transfers are “consistent with our national security interests.”

The fresh criticism, including a letter from Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) calling on President Obama to halt the transfer of detainees to Yemen, comes after reports of links between that country and the attempted Christmas Day terrorist attack.

“I am aware of a lot of people pointing back at the way the transfers were handled under the Bush administration that apparently they have some concerns about that,” said the official, who had not seen the senators’ letter. “I didn’t hear many of those concerns at the time, but there were obviously hundreds and hundreds of detainees that were transferred under the old regime.”

So, what’s more shocking? That an administration official would actually acknowledge publicly that they are mimicing a Bush-era policy (a man and administration they have been concurrently blaming and campaigning against since they took office over 11 months ago) or the fact that they are behaving in such a thick-headed manner (remember the sin of “moral certitude”?) as to continue to deport Gitmo detainees to a terrorism training hot spot in the face of such overwhelming countering common sense? Common sense shared by heavyweight Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein who is urging the administration to halt the transfer of detainees to Yemen.

P.S. The nutroots-inspired regime reference did not escape our notice. When dealing with the absolute whiniest administration ever, sometimes further commenting to the same becomes redundant.

Then again, what would one expect from the curator of the “man-made disaster” paradigm?

Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, is taking quite a bit of grief for a quote she made regarding the Christmas bomber, that being “the system worked”. She later walked that back saying she was being taken out of context and that indeed the system did not work.

But here’s what she said that really puzzled us.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says there is no indication that the man who attempted to destroy an airliner in Detroit on Christmas Day is part of a larger terrorist plot.

Oh, really?

Every single jihadist on the face of this planet be they trained and funded by or affiliated with Hamas, AQ, Hezbollah, the Taliban… even if they are “lone wolves”… whoever, is part of “a larger terrorist plot.”

That larger terrorist plot is called Islamic extremism and every single one of its minions is unified in its hatred for the West and its institutions and belief systems and are fatally committed to its destruction including all who live within it who are not found to be in sufficient compliance to Sharia law.

That Napolitano apparently fails to grasp this concept is, unfortunately, not shocking nor shocking enough combined with the frightening ease by which Abdulmutallab boarded the plane does not give us the warm fuzzies regarding our commitment to stopping airborne terror plots.

Imagining the previously unimaginable?

Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida is under heavy pressure in its strongholds in Pakistan's remote tribal areas and is finding it difficult to attract recruits or carry out spectacular operations in western countries, according to government and independent experts monitoring the organisation.

Speaking to the Guardian in advance of tomorrow's eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, western counter-terrorism officials and specialists in the Muslim world said the organisation faced a crisis that was severely affecting its ability to find, inspire and train willing fighters.

Its activity is increasingly dispersed to "affiliates" or "franchises" in Yemen and North Africa, but the links of local or regional jihadi groups to the centre are tenuous; they enjoy little popular support and successes have been limited.

Lethal strikes by CIA drones – including two this week alone – have combined with the monitoring and disruption of electronic communications, suspicion and low morale to take their toll on al-Qaida's Pakistani "core", in the jargon of western intelligence agencies.

Dogged, relentless and unmerciful pursuit of this scum will be the only thing that works.

Airborne U.S. Special Operations forces attacked a car in southern Somalia on Monday and killed one of east Africa's most wanted al Qaeda militants, a U.S. official said.

The commandos, among the most elite and secretive of all U.S. military forces, had spent days tracking Kenyan-born Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, who is suspected of building the truck bomb that killed 15 people at a Kenyan hotel in 2002, as well as involvement in a simultaneous, botched missile launch at an Israeli airliner, the official said.

The strike represented an unusually high-profile assault by the covert American forces, whose activities are highly classified and whose operations -- whether successes or failures -- rarely take place in public view.

Publicizing high-profile hits like this every once in a while certainly can't help morale and which even the promise of 72 virgins doesn't appear to hold the same allure it once did for Islamo-terrorist recruits.

Kudos to President Obama for signing off on this hit. We kind of liked writing that so we are going to write it again. Kudos to President Obama for signing off on this hit.

We'll keep our fingers crossed that the President is realizing that the best way to fight this fight is by leaving it in the hands of our "rough men" who have been trained to "visit violence on those who would do us harm" and not in the hands of that hack who runs the Justice Department.

B-Daddy has more here on the "W"-word.

If it's July, it must be the silly season

Breathless panting all around regarding this secret plan hatched by former Vice President Dick Cheney and the CIA to “deal” with the terrorists. With Congressional investigations pending, Nancy Pelosi thinks she will be getting her proverbial day in court with regard to her running feud with the CIA.

We predict, as with the torture kerkuffle a couple of months back, America will give a collective shrug or worse be thankful that someone had the foresight to confront the bad guys on their own terms, thus keeping America safe.

But if the term “secret” seems a little far-fetched to you, it should.

Here’s President Bush from his 2003 State of the Union address:

All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries.
And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.

(italics, ours)

And here’s President Bush from a radio address back in January of 2005:

In the years since I first swore to preserve, protect and defend our Constitution, our nation has been tested. Our enemies have found America more than equal to the task. In response to attacks on our home soil, we have captured or killed terrorists across the Earth. We have taken unprecedented steps to secure our homeland from future attacks, and our troops have liberated millions from oppression.

(italics, ours)

Yep, definitely sounds like Cheney’s work to us.

B-Daddy has more on this “scandal” and what the President plans on doing about it, here.

And with respect to the above, Big Media is already hard at work providing cover for the precarious prospects of cap and trade and health care reform. CNN.com headline: Bush-era distractions may weigh down Obama’s agenda. Good grief.

H/T: The Corner

The City of San Diego plays politics with National Security

Blackwater Worldwide, a private security firm has asked a federal judge to order the city of San Diego to issue the final certificate needed for that firm to open up their training facility in Otay Mesa. If they are unable to do so by this Monday then Blackwater will be in violation of their contract with the Navy. Story here.

The training facility, including the firing range is entirely indoors and will be used to train sailors and Marines in marksmanship, assembly and disassembly of weapons, new weapons systems and in arrest and apprehension techniques. Ostensibly, these sailors and Marines would mostly benefit the physical security forces of U.S. Navy and Military Sealift Command (civilian operated Navy supply ships and notoriously bad aims) vessels against terrorist and small-scale attacks on the same. Think USS Cole.

But with elections coming up, its obvious that Mayor Jerry Sanders and City Attorney Mike Aguirre are caving to the same pressure that denied Blackwater a proposed training facility in East County near Potrero. Unmentioned in article is the city councilman for the district in which the facility resides, Ben Hueso. Hueso has been a vocal critic of Bush the War in Iraq and not coincidentally, Blackwater.

This is a local issue with over-the-horizon implications. Point being, Blackwater is employed almost exclusively by veterans and former members of the military and the instructors who will be doing the training all live in the San Diego area. The sailors and Marines they will be training and the assets and men and women at sea and abroad they will be protecting are all San Diego-based.

For these agitators and obstructionists who wish to portray Blackwater as a shadowy para-military arm of the Bush junta and who will allow their distaste for this Administration and our presence in Iraq to trump the safety of their own neighbors is unconscionable.

Up to this point, Blackwater has jumped through every administrative, bureaucratic and environmental hoop for the city so when they cry foul and claim they are being held hostage by petty, agenda-driven politics, they are exactly right.

But Blackwater Worldwide is not entirely blameless. Let’s face it, were this any other security firm than Blackwater or perhaps Blackwater did not have as ominous a name, this would be a non-issue. So in the spirit of free advice, may we make a suggestion that instead of their current name, it becomes something more non-threatening, fuzzy and in keeping with spirit of peaceful dialog and conflict resolution with the bad guys….

We propose…….





…… Barney Worldwide