The Surrender to the Jihad Continues (0 appeases "Shoe Bomber" Richard Reid)

National Review Online ^ | 7/30/2009 | Andrew McCarthy

[mojito]

Better have something to bite on before you start reading the intrepid Debra Burlingame's Wall Street Journal op-ed this morning — your teeth are going to be gnashing big-time.

Unbelievably, the Obama Justice Department has withdrawn the "special administrative measures" (SAMs) imposed at the federal supermax prison in Colorado against "Shoe Bomber" Richard Reid (the jihadist who tried to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight with nearly 200 people on board). As Debra explains, the "SAMs are security directives, renewable yearly, issued by the attorney general when 'there is a substantial risk that a prisoner’s communications, correspondence or contacts with persons could result in death or serious bodily injury' to others."

Why abandon the SAMs? Because they were a violation of Reid's First Amendment rights to free speech and free exercise of his religion, of course. So the would-be suicide bomber went on a hungar strike and got results: a cave-in from the Obama Justice Department — which works closely with the "human rights" Left (some Obama DOJ lawyers are recruited from this faction; other top Obama DOJ lawyers aligned with it while they were in private practice, volunteering their services to enemy combatants held at Gitmo).

Exactly what was the First Amendment problem here? Debra explains:

"In a hand-written complaint, [Reid] asserted that he was being illegally prevented from performing daily “group prayers in a manner prescribed by my religion.” Yet the list of Reid’s potential fellow congregants at ADX Florence [i.e., the supermax prison] reads like a Who’s Who of al Qaeda’s most dangerous members: Ramzi Yousef and his three co-conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui; “Millennium bomber” Ahmed Ressam; “Dirty bomber” Jose Padilla; Wadih el-Hage, Osama Bin Laden’s personal secretary, convicted in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombing that killed 247 people."

The human-rights Left is already incorporating their fabulously successful smear-Gitmo strategy in their attack on our civilian prisons. Even Reid's hungar-strike is page one in the Gitmo playbook. Here's Debra again:

"In January, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Colorado issued a statement saying that conditions at supermax are “simply another form of torture” worse than Gitmo which “make a mockery of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’” Last month, the ACLU filed a civil lawsuit mirroring Reid’s religious rights claim on behalf of two terrorism inmates held at the Communications Management Unit inside a medium security prison in Terre Haute, Ind. One of those inmates is Enaam Arnaout, a Syrian-born U.S. citizen serving a 10-year sentence for diverting Muslim charity money to militant Islamic groups in Bosnia and Chechnya. The other, Randall Royer, is serving 20 years for his role recruiting young Muslims in the “Virginia Jihad Network,” a group that used paintball games in 2000-2001 to train for holy war."

Sure it's nuts, but as I detailed a couple of weeks ago, detainee policy in the Obama/Holder Justice Department is now being shaped by former Human Rights Watch lawyer Jennifer Daskal, who thinks incarceration is tantamount to torture (recall her complaint that one jihadist, "a self-styled poet," was being subjected to severe mental trauma: He "found it was nearly impossible to write poetry anymore because the prison guards would only allow him to keep a pen or pencil in his cell for short periods of time").

In my last column, I related the story of Mamdouh Salim, the al-Qaeda chieftain who maimed a prison guard and used the constitutional rights we gave him to try to kidnap his court-appointed lawyers in an escape attempt. The incident sits uneasily with Holder's bold claim that "the Justice Department has a “history of securely detaining and successfully prosecuting terror suspects through the criminal-justice system.” What I didn't point out — but Debra shows in spades — is that to have any chance of securely detaining terrorists in civilian prisons, the SAMs need to be imposed and aggressively enforced.

Yet, even as Holder is making the "securely detaining" argument out of one side of his mouth, he's abandoning the SAMs out of the other. And all the while, Obama is pushing to close Gitmo and bring scores of these trained terrorists into the civilian prison system. It's madness.

[mojito]

Worst.

T0TUS.

Ever.

[mojito]

A FReeper link to the WSJ Debra Burlingame article:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2304077/posts

[bareford101]

in the obamanation’s early days, he could have well been a part of this. Read the following on him:

One of Obama’s early mentors in the Alinsky method was Mike Kruglik, who had this to say to an interviewer of The New Republic, about Obama:

“He was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation, who could engage a room full of recruiting targets in a rapid-fire Socratic dialogue, nudging them to admit that they were not living up to their own standards. As with the panhandler, he could be aggressive and confrontational. With probing, sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing down their egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better.”

Watch Obama work a crowd at a town hall meeting. He comes out, says a few words in greeting and then begins his laundry list of all the stuff that’s wrong with America, getting the audience all revved up. When the crowd is engaged and sufficiently “pissed off,” Obama presents a solution to the all the things that are “pissing them off” — the chosen one, the anointed one, the Obama — as president.

Alinsky’s goal was to slowly turn the United States into a Communist dictatorship; to this end he tried to convince various groups of poor people and labor unions to push for legislation in that direction; he did this by appealing to their self-interest — whether valid or not — instead of using charismatic leadership — but now we have Obama, who is skilled in the Alinsky method and charismatic.

[ScottinVA]

Watch Obama work a crowd at a town hall meeting. He comes out, says a few words in greeting and then begins his laundry list of all the stuff that’s wrong with America, getting the audience all revved up. When the crowd is engaged and sufficiently “pissed off,” Obama presents a solution to the all the things that are “pissing them off” — the chosen one, the anointed one, the Obama — as president.

Which I find amazing that there are so many misguided, naive souls out there. From the time I first heard him and saw him... all I've seen is a poseur -- a silver-tongued shyster who can read prepared text. Unfortunately, 62 million people elevated him as He Who Will Cure All. It's tragic Americans have lost their ability to be skeptic toward wild claims by politicians.

[ScottinVA]

skeptic =skeptical

[Diogenesis]

THEN:

"We are not afraid of any of your terrorist co-conspirators, Mr. Reid ...
"You’re a big fellow. But you’re not that big. You’re no warrior. I know warriors....
You are a terrorist, a species of criminal guilty of multiple attempted murders."
To call you a soldier gives you far too much stature.
You are a terrorist, and we do not negotiate with terrorists.
We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice. ...
"See that flag, Mr. Reid?
That is the flag of the United States of America
That flag will fly there long after this is long forgotten."
[Federal Chief Judge William Young, First Circuit to Terrorist Shoebomber Reid]

NOW:

[bareford101]

amen.... the discernment level in this country has just about disappeared through the educational process.

[Marysecretary]

That’s for sure. Maybe Richard will escape and take a trip to the white house with his shoe...

[Rome2000]

Well, its a good thing NRO is exposing this, God knows the RNC and those idiot country clubbers whose incompetence allowed the marxist takeover to begin with will do completely nothing with this issue.