by Daniel GreenfieldThe thirteen US soldiers murdered at Fort Hood were killed by the bullets fired by Malik Nidal Hassan, but there were those who helped Nassan fire his bullets, who did everything but hold his gun and pull the trigger for him.
The initial FBI review has found that the Justice Department guidelines for opening a criminal investigation were too high, in turn investigators have said that it now requires a very high standard of evidence in order to convict a terrorist plotter.
Pursuing charges before all the evidence is in hand can backfire – suspects have sued authorities before, claiming they were falsely imprisoned victims of witch hunts… Five Muslim immigrants were convicted last year of conspiring to kill U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey, but they were acquitted of attempted murder after prosecutors acknowledged they were probably months away from acting.
...In January 2006, agents watched as a young man suspected of links to terrorists walked out of an Atlanta Home Depot with materials that could be used to make a bomb.
They knew Syed Haris Ahmed had researched bombmaking techniques online and shaved his head, as some jihadis have done before an attack.
However, they decided to wait to arrest him and keep building a stronger case – and risk a potential terror attack.
Not being able to stop a terrorist before he strikes. Not being able to remove Muslims who are engaging in threatening behavior on a plane. Not able to take action against a terrorist plot for fear that the terrorists will be allowed to walk free. That is what the domestic version of the War on Terror looks like today.
Those are the wages of Lawfare, the legal campaign on behalf of terrorists waged by well known liberal legal advocacy groups such as the ACLU, and the much wider base of liberal organizations and newspapers who lobbied on behalf of captured terrorists and republished every single one of their claims of torture… to the extent that the Al Queda manual made it a default for captured terrorists to cry abuse once on trial.
Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard and driver, who was captured together with Al Queda operatives, became a cause celebre for liberals and liberal groups from Amnesty International to People for the American Way to the American Jewish Committee to George Clooney who was interested in making a movie about him and starring as his lawyer.
They turned Salim Hamdan into a martyr and breathlessly repeated every single one of his statements. And they won. They won with Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld. And they won again at trial. Hamdan was freed a few months after sentencing to return to Yemen.
The liberal establishment had fought its hardest for Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard… and they won. America lost. That wasn’t the only time they won.
From day one every terrorist in Gitmo, every terrorist plotter seized on American soil plotting to murder Americans had the liberal establishment in their corner and fighting on their behalf.
From trial lawyers queuing up to defend them to the editorial pages of every liberal newspaper in America clamoring that they had been victimized, that the charges against them were worthless and that America had besmirched itself by not bowing to the wishes of the aforementioned trial lawyers. And they won.
From Abu Ghraib to Gitmo, from Hamdan to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, they won. They successfully smeared US soldiers and interrogators and CIA agents as monsters, torturers and kidnappers.
They successfully portrayed Al Queda terrorists as sensitive victims and martyrs of a latter day Gulag.
The same press that wouldn’t report on any of Castro’s atrocities a few miles south of Guantanamo Bay if you put a gun to their heads, put on their novelist hats and transformed butchers into loving fathers, and dedicated fanatics into misunderstood patriots. And they won.
Posts
