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Many of you know that Laurie Mylroie is a Middle East expert and regularly testifies before Congressional committees on terrorism matters. She is an adjunct scholar at The American Enterprise Institute and author of Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack & Saddam Hussein's War against America. I sent an email to her this past Sunday, 7-13-03 after having seen her on Fox's John Gibson's program on Friday, 7-11-03 during the 5 PM hour. Something she said really caught my attention, so here is what I wrote to her: Greetings Laurie, I found the link to your email...

Not for commercial use. Solely to be fairly used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion. HEARING OF THE NATIONAL COMMISSION ON TERRORIST ATTACKS UPON THE UNITED STATESCHAIRED BY: THOMAS KEAN WITNESSES: LAURIE MYLROIE, AUTHOR; JUDITH YAPHE, NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY; MURHAF JOUEJATI, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY; MARK GASIOROWSKI, LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY 253 RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C. July 9, 2003 MR. KEAN: Okay, if we could call the hearing back to order. Yeah, I've got a gavel. I'll use the gavel. (Gavels.) "A senior administration official told me in specific that the question of the identities of the...

Saddam's Fingerprints on N.Y. Bombings The Wall Street Journal By Laurie Mylroie June 28, 1993 Military retaliation from Baghdad was the main administration concern following Saturday's strike on Iraq. Yet U.S. officials should start thinking seriously about the question of retaliation through terror. It is quite possible, for example, that there was a connection between Saddam and recent attempts to blow up Manhattan. It is quite possible that New York's terror is Saddam's revenge. Speculation about the responsibility for last week's bombing plot and the earlier World Trade Center bombing has focused on Iran, Sudan, and the fundamentalist Sheik Omar ...

With this comeback, Ronald Reagan famously ridiculed the foolish statements made by Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election campaign. For the past several days I’ve been pointing out how the inexplicable and contradictory policies of President Obama can be explained, once you understand that his main purpose in life is to transfer our wealth and power to peoples in the third world because of his anti-colonialist obsession. This explains his stubborn commitment to Cap & Trade even though manmade global warming has been disproved. This explains his loan of $2 billion to help Brazil develop its oil while shutting down...

Show me where in the Constitution it says the government — created by the people in order to serve the people — is empowered to mandate that those selfsame people buy health insurance as a condition of living and breathing in the United States. That was the pointed demand put to Democrats during the Obamacare debate. You remember those months: threats and bribes for every wavering moderate on their side of the aisle, while Republican opposition was steamrolled with accounting voodoo and parliamentary tricks that would have made Saul Alinksy blush. And what was their answer on the Constitution? Why,...

I found this video, and the three listed in my first comment, at David Horowitz TV. I learned allot watching this video about how trying terrorist in civilian courts neuters our intelligence agencies and how woefully inadequate our civilian courts are in trying them. That's the reason why a terrorist recently was acquitted of almost 250 charges of murder and only a peripheral charge stuck. You'll learn what harm the Obama administration is really causing our country. It's almost as if he does not want us to win the so called war on terrorism.

If only the fantasy were true: If only there actually were a dominant, pro-American, echt moderate Islam, an ideology so dedicated to human rights, so sternly set against savagery, that acts of terrorism were, by definition, “un-Islamic activity.” Imagine an Islam that, far from a liability, proved an asset (indeed, an indispensable asset) in combating the threat against us. Imagine that we could accurately call the threat mere “extremism” — no “Islamic” (or even “Islamist”) modifier being necessary because the “extremists” truly were a tiny, aberrant band, fraudulently “hijacking” a great religion. If the fantasy were true, who among us...

"Secularism can never enjoy a general acceptance in an Islamic society." The writer was not one of those sulfurous Islamophobes decried by CAIR and the professional Left. Quite the opposite: It was Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual guide and a favorite of the Saudi royal family. He made this assertion in his book, How the Imported Solutions Disastrously Affected Our Ummah, an excerpt of which was published by the Saudi Gazette just a couple of months ago. This was Qaradawi the “progressive” Muslim intellectual, much loved by Georgetown University’s burgeoning Islamic-studies programs. Like Harvard, Georgetown has been purchased...

Wednesday, July 28, 2010 Arizona Immigration Decision   [Andy McCarthy] On a quick read, the federal court's issuance of a temporary injunction against enforcement of the major provisions of the Arizona immigration law appears specious.In essence, Judge Susan Bolton bought the Justice Department's preemption argument — i.e., the claim that the federal government has broad and exclusive authority to regulate immigration, and therefore that any state measure that is inconsistent with federal law is invalid. The Arizona law is completely consistent with federal law. The judge, however, twisted to concept of federal law into federal enforcement practices (or, as it...

The decision to ‘look forward, not back’ on Iraq was a profound mistake. In Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove offered a candid confession. His biggest mistake as a top White House adviser, he wrote, was to endorse the decision not to mount a vigorous defense when Democrats accused President Bush of lying the nation into the invasion of Iraq. After amply demonstrating that those who leveled this shameful charge had themselves previously insisted that Saddam was a WMD menace, Rove explains: At the time, we in the Bush White House discussed responding but decided not to relitigate the past....

I haven’t been keeping score, but my sense has been that National Review stays out of Republican congressional primary races, at least most of the time. This is a good thing. It reflects an ethos focused on the strategic direction of the conservative movement rather than tactical politics. It underscores that issues are more critical to us than personalities. As a practical matter, moreover, it avoids diminishing the magazine’s prestige. A candidate who wins despite NR’s endorsement of his opponent could become hostile — and less open to our ideas — especially because he knows NR’s endorsement of the other...

We at Family Security Matters are delighted and proud to have some of our questions answered by Andrew McCarthy, author of the best-selling THE GRAND JIHAD: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America (Encounter Books May 2010) RK: Since the publication of your book, the Ground Zero Mosque seems inevitable. Can you comment? McCarthy: I don't think the mosque is inevitable, but it is the eleventh hour. We were told that the KSM trial in lower Manhattan was inevitable, too, but people got motivated, got active, and stopped it. The thing to bear in mind is that they hurl this...

Last week AIM’s Roger Aronoff, host of the weekly BlogTalkRadio show, Take AIM, conducted an in-depth interview with Andy McCARTHY, the man who led the terrorism prosecution against Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh,” responsible for the first World Trade Center bombing.  He wrote about that case in Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad, and is now out with a powerful new book, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, which debuted last week on the New York Times bestseller list. The primary focus of the interview is the new book, and it’s detailed analysis of...

If what Andrew C. McCarthy calls "the freedom culture" somehow prevails in the West, it will be in great part due to such books as his excellent, ground-breaking new work, "The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America." Islam and the left? Since this notion will raise some eyebrows, I asked McCarthy himself to elaborate on this and some other related questions. Q: Why are Islam and the left, as you demonstrate in "The Grand Jihad," not such strange bedfellows? A: "For all their disagreements on matters like women's rights, gay rights, and abortion, Islam and the left...

A Primer on Jihad Spencer Irvine, June 8, 2010 In the May 27 book event at the Heritage Foundation, author Andrew McCarthy explained the purpose in writing his book, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. As a former federal prosecutor after the failed 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Andrew McCarthy’s experience in dealing with (what he terms) “Islamist” terrorists shaped the viewpoint he presented in his book. McCarthy maintained that the Islamist thinking of jihad is “a perfect reflection of a ground-up civilizational movement,” where the Islamist society is built from the person, then the community,...

During an address on Thursday May 27, 2010 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, John Brennan, the Obama administration’s lead counterterrorism adviser, provided a transparently bowdlerized perspective on jihad. Brennan’s statements were breathtaking in their profound cognitive dissonance regarding this uniquely Islamic institution, which continues to wreak daily havoc in our era. Despite over 15,350 jihad terror attacks by Muslims worldwide, since the cataclysmic acts of jihad terrorism committed against the United States itself, on September 11, 2001, Brennan insisted, Nor do we describe our enemy as ‘jihadists’ or ‘Islamists’ because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate...

Instead of seeking victory in a war against radical Islamic terrorism, the Obama administration has framed our efforts as law enforcement. Whether in Mirandizing the would-be Christmas bomber, initially seeking to try Khalid Sheikh Muhammed in a New York City civilian courtroom, or engaging in a headlong rush to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, the president's Justice Department has politicized justice and imperiled national security. These misguided efforts, as Andrew McCarthy argues, are confusing, but even more, mark a security and constitutional crisis. Charting a different path, this talk will offer a preview of the speaker's forthcoming book, The Grand...

he prosecution team I led in 1995 convicted the notorious Blind Sheikh and 11 others for conspiring to wage a terrorist war that included the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and attempting (unsuccessfully) to attack New York City landmarks. Consequently, some observers seem puzzled that I'm a vocal critic of civilian trials for our terrorist enemies. But they are confusing litigation success with national-security success. So is the Obama administration in deciding to transfer Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 plotters to federal court in Manhattan. We certainly can convict terrorists in civilian court. We've done it too many...

C-SPAN 2 is covering Accuracy in Media's 40th anniversary conference live today.Congratulations to our friends at AIM!

I can’t have any more bills. I’m out of checks.” It is a joke we used to hear all the time, back in the days before credit cards made it even easier to run up bills we can’t or won’t pay. Like all good jokes, it has a kernel of truth: a truth about the human mind’s capacity for self-delusion. In his important new book, Accomplice to Evil: Iran and the War Against the West, Michael Ledeen describes this capacity as “that part of the spirit that shelters active thought from unpleasant truths.” Rarely has the talent for self-delusion been...