Radical Islamists around the world have been reacting online to the bomb attacks that struck the Boston Marathon last month.
Since America intensified its counterterrorism efforts against al-Qaeda over the last several years, the terrorist group’s leaders have called on their followers in the United States to carry out smaller-scale attacks while at the same time providing online education and teach them how to carry them out.
According to Shiraz Maher of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization, the bombings at the Boston Marathon not only caught U.S. intelligence services by surprise, but debate raged onjihadist websites over the motivations and its implications.
“In the most generic and broadest sense, there was a sense of celebration on the jihadi forums. These guys are committed jihadists. They hate the United States and the West,” Maher said.
Terror analyst Raffaello Pantucci of the Royal United Services Institute says al-Qaeda cells are encouraging radicalized individuals in the West through the internet. Al-Qaeda has developed a new tactic which essentially teaches that even if it cannot take lives directly, it wants to inflict economic and financial losses on the United States and the West generally.
This is “Open-source jihad as they call it, in which individuals are very much empowered or the emphasis is on them to launch attacks where they can on targets that they specifically identify using materials on hand,” Pantucci said.
Here’s the thing: America must not allow Benghazi or Boston or the next Jihadi obscenity to be about “getting” Hillary Clinton or Obama or any other American. Such self-defeating rot is a goal right out of the Islamists’ playbook. Benghazi showcases, more than anything else, the inefficacy of our present national security effort.
by CAPT. GARY HARRINGTON, US NAVY (RET.)
President Obama, at a May 13, 2013 press conference, explained there’s no “there” there in defending his administration regarding the events surrounding four American deaths in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Without a “there” there, that would signal to Congress that their criticism is groundless. But the evidence shows…not so fast, President Obama. Not only was there a “there” there, I propose the “there” was born of an unholy Immaculate Conception.
“You’d better not go into the woods” has been the administration’s refrain in the Benghazi narrative. This theme, from a popular child’s song, is apt since, “If you do, you’re sure of a big surprise because that’s where Teddy Bears have their picnics.” The Benghazi Jihadi terrorists, not stuffed animals, have long planned “beneath the trees where nobody sees.” In fact, their plans have influenced our government immensely, having caused this administration to fall for the Jihadi strategy. This is best seen in our recent purge of Islamist words – amazingly – from our own government’s military training materials. This prevailing correctness about language fosters deception, and this lies at the core of the Benghazi story. “They hide and seek as long as they please…”
Toxic ideological picnics began with medieval Wahhabi and Salafi ideas that aren’t well studied, known or discussed in polite society or in press conferences, which makes them easy to obfuscate. So to avoid a “big surprise” on the ideological origins of Benghazi, high government officials conceived a not-so-Immaculate Conception: the You Tube video cover story. The sperm was Salafi jihad. The egg was a transnational progressive idea gone bad on the eve of a national election: the “normalization” of Benghazi. A politically inconvenient truth about a Jihadi attack was deliberately blurred to protect a setback to a State Department pet project.
A forest and tree cliché is helpful to better conceive the Immaculate Conception. Benghazi is but one tree in the mature, mutating Jihadi forest. We noticed the Bomb-the-U.S.-Homeland tree at the Boston marathon finish line, as we did earlier the other U.S. Homeland trees of Ft. Hood and Times Square. In the heart of the forest lie the remains of older trees, some U.S Homeland and some international: the 9/11 tree, the original World Trade Towers tree, the USS Cole, the Marine Barracks and so on. The ghosts of Danny Pearl, Theo Van Gogh, Boston’s little Martin Richard, Ambassador Stevens, Colonel Higgins, Navy Diver Stethem, and so many others, wander “there.” Aisha’s missing nose is buried “there.” “There” is a transnational Jihadi forest that makes it hard for some political leaders to see – or even want to see – the trees that comprise it.
Weeds flourish on untended ground and they distract from the clear picture of the forest. They include the variegated flora of parsed talking points (such as “sideshows”), jailed patsy blasphemers, denied State Department Forward Emergency Support Teams (FEST), fired and demoted officials (some innocent of any wrongdoing), FBI, ICE and State Foot Draggers, AP definitions reset, and other troublesome mutants. The lexicon of the forest does not take rocket science to fathom. We must explore and study it precisely because “tired little teddy bears” in high office have refused to define Islamist strategies and their undergrowth of motivating medieval ideas for decades. We need to do it for ourselves.
Once the forest clears, you begin to recognize the patterns of the trees in daily headlines, and “catch them unaware” on Oped pages. Author Dr. Walid Phares has defined these patterns as six distinct Jihadi strategies: Economic, Ideological, Political, Intelligence, Subversive, and Diplomatic.
Three days after the tenth anniversary of September 11, left-wing activist Spencer Ackerman struck a blow for Muslim terrorism by denouncing FBI training materials as Islamophobic.
The training materials dealt with such topics as the doctrinal basis for Jihad and the origins of terrorism in Islamic law. The story spread into the mainstream media, and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, whose leaders had endorsed terrorist groups and helped raise money for terrorists, began pressuring the FBI to recant the threat of Islamic terrorism.
In February of 2012, Amine El Khalifi was arrested for plotting to carry out a suicide bombing in the US Capitol building. Before he began his mission, he visited the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center, whose former Imam was Al Qaeda leader Anwar Al Awlaki and whose parishioners included Fort Hood terrorist Nidal Hasan. At his sentencing, El Khalifi said, “I just want to say that I love Allah.”
But that did not stop the FBI from announcing a few days later that it had completed purging references to Islamic terrorism from its training materials. A month earlier, Tamerlan Tsarnaev had begun his trip to Russia and by the time he returned, the training materials meant to prepare agents for the reality of the terrorist plot that he and his brother would carry out had been buried out of sight.
Where El Khalifi had failed in Washington, the Tsarnaev brothers would succeed in Boston.
The counterterrorism information purge had been completed by the time the lead Boston bomber returned to America, but it had begun earlier under Obama.
The 9/11 Commission Report had freely used terms like “Jihad,” “Takfir” and “Islam” to define the nature and motivations of the enemy. But the 2009 National Intelligence Strategy did not mention them. Neither did the FBI counterterrorism lexicon. They had been replaced by “violent extremism.”
Violent extremism is generic. Predicting an attack requires specifics. Investigators cannot stop undefined crimes or arrest undefined suspects. The less information they have to work with, the more likely the terrorists are to succeed.
Islam is the crucial link between disparate terrorist groups from Dagestan to Thailand, from Mali to Afghanistan, from Israel to Nigeria and from the United States to Chechnya. Without the Islam factor, there was no reason to suspect that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a threat to anyone except the Russians.
The old FBI training materials had explained what Chechen, Pakistani, Egyptian and Nigerian terrorists had in common. In the new ones there was a great empty space in which facts died and lives were lost.
Dr. Sebastian Gorka, Military Affairs Fellow and Director, National Security Fellows Program, Foundation for Defense of Democracies discusses the Obama administration’s persistent denial of the threats from Jihad:
Dr. Sebastian Gorka is an internationally recognized authority on issues of national security, terrorism, and democratization, having worked in government and the private and NGO sectors in Europe and the United States. He was born in the U.K. to parents who escaped Communism during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. A graduate of the University of London and Corvinus University, Budapest, he was a Kokkalis Fellow at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and holds a Ph.D. in political science. He is an associate fellow at the Joint Special Operations University (USSOCOM) and an assistant professor at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. -
Islamism is a growing and powerful ideology that tolerates no dissent or rivalry. Yet in recent decades the United States has responded only to the violence that Islamism has generated, not to the beliefs and ideas that drive it. As a result of this failure, Islamist numbers and confidence have grown, and Islamist regimes have taken power in the Middle East and North Africa. So the United States is less safe than it was before 9/11, as is everyone else outside the Islamist fold.
Until the United States understands and confronts Islamist ideology, it will not be able to slow the Islamist revolution and its destructive effects. This collection of essays proposes an effective strategy for countering and defeating the beliefs that motivate Islamists. It examines those beliefs in detail, considers their strengths and weaknesses, and draws on the lessons of past ideological conflicts. Thus it provides invaluable equipment for the war of ideas in which we must now engage.
Of 125 Videos Of Al-Qaeda Commander Al-Zawahiri Flagged On YouTube By MEMRI, YouTube Keeps 57 Active
MEMRI:
Jihadi Videos On YouTube
Over the past three years, and based on research by the MEMRI Jihad and Terrorism Threat Monitor (JTTM) project, we have determined that YouTube has emerged as the leading website for online jihad. It has replaced – and surpassed – websites administered by jihadis themselves, which were previously the leaders in online jihadi efforts. During this time, we have offered our assistance to YouTube in identifying videos that incite violence and terrorist acts for possible removal.
The most recent example of this is a video of Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri, released on multiple YouTube pages on April 6, 2013, and also released simultaneously on jihadi websites. In the video, Al-Zawahiri calls upon viewers to “exert every effort to make [Syria] a jihad-fighting Islamic state” that will be a step towards “restoring the rightly-guided caliphate.” Addressing the Muslims in these countries, he urged them to support the mujahideen, and expressed his particular hope that the French forces in Mali would face the same difficulties as the U.S. faced in Iraq and Afghanistan. The video, as posted by user “arslan ifriki,” had almost 17,000 views on the first day; viewers were also given links to other users’ postings of the same video.
As documented by previous MEMRI reports, MEMRI met with Google Inc. and YouTube representatives to discuss the issue of jihadi videos. YouTube then committed to introducing a flagging system whereby users could flag videos to alert YouTube that they included content that “promotes terrorism.” Following the introduction of this system, MEMRI flagged jihadi YouTube videos of Osama bin Laden and 9/11-glorification videos, as well as videos by and of the late Yemeni-American Sheikh Anwar Al-Awlaki, the influential jihadi cleric and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) leader. Of the former, 58 of 100 remained active even after MEMRI’s flagging; of the latter, 111 out of 127 remained active.
Not only has MEMRI identified YouTube as one of the main jihadi vehicles, but this subject is of great concern to counterterrorism experts worldwide. In the U.K., jihadi and terrorist videos on YouTube is so great a problem that it was the focus of a recent inquiry by the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee.
Dr. Sebastian Gorka (Military Affairs Fellow and Director, National Security Fellows Program, Foundation for Defense of Democracies) addressed the Canter for Security Policy’s Stanton Group on Capitol Hill. The topic of his briefing was “Counterterrorism and Counterintelligence in the Second Obama Administration: Persistence of Threat Denial?”
Note to the reader:This is the first article in a three-part survey of “Denying Islam’s Role in Terror.” The other two parts, by Teri Blumenfeld and David Rusin, look at the specific phenomenon of denial in the FBI and the U.S. military, respectively.
Cover of “Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood”.
Over three years after Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s massacre at Ft. Hood, Texas, in November 2009, the classification of his crime remains in dispute. In its wisdom, the Department of Defense, supported by law enforcement, politicians, journalists, and academics, deems the killing of thirteen and wounding of forty-three to be “workplace violence.” For example, the 86-page study on preventing a repeat episode, Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood, mentions “workplace violence” sixteen times.[1]
In contrast, members of congress ridiculed the “workplace violence” characterization and a coalition of 160 victims and family members recently released a video, “The Truth About Fort Hood,” criticizing the administration. On the third anniversary of the massacre, 148 victims and family members sued the U.S. government for avoiding legal and financial responsibility by not acknowledging the incident as terrorism.[3] Indeed, were the subject not morbid, one could be amused by the disagreement over what exactly caused the major to erupt. Speculations included “racism” against him, “harassment he had received as a Muslim,” his “sense of not belonging,” “mental problems,” “emotional problems,” “an inordinate amount of stress,” the “worst nightmare” of his being deployed to Afghanistan, or something fancifully called “pre-traumatic stress disorder.” One newspaper headline, “Mindset of Rogue Major a Mystery,” sums up this bogus state of confusion.[2]
The military leadership willfully ignores what stares them in the face, namely Hasan’s clear and evident Islamist inspiration; Protecting the Force mentions “Muslim” and “jihad” not a single time, and “Islam” only once, in a footnote.[4] The massacre officially still remains unconnected to terrorism or Islam.
This example fits in a larger pattern: The establishment denies that Islamism—a form of Islam that seeks to make Muslims dominant through an extreme, totalistic, and rigid application of Islamic law, the Shari’a—represents the leading global cause of terrorism when it so clearly does. Islamism reverts to medieval norms in its aspiration to create a caliphate that rules humanity. “Islam is the solution” summarizes its doctrine. Islam’s public law can be summarized as elevating Muslim over non-Muslim, male over female, and endorsing the use of force to spread Muslim rule. In recent decades, Islamists (the adherents of this vision of Islam) have established an unparalleled record of terrorism. To cite one tabulation: TheReligionOfPeace.com counts 20,000 assaults in the name of Islam since 9/11,[5] or about five a day. In the West, terrorist acts inspired by motives other than Islam hardly register.
It is important to document and explain this denial and explore its implications. The examples come predominantly from the United States, though they could come from virtually any Western country—except Israel.
Documenting Denial
The government, press, and academy routinely deny that Islamist motives play a role in two ways, specific and general. Specific acts of violence perpetrated by Muslims lead the authorities publicly, willfully, and defiantly to close their eyes to Islamist motivations and goals. Instead, they point to a range of trivial, one-time, and individualistic motives, often casting the perpetrator as victim. Examples from the years before and after 9/11 include:
1990 assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York: “A prescription drug for … depression.”[6]
1991 murder of Makin Morcos in Sydney: “A robbery gone wrong.”
1993 murder of Reverend Doug Good in Western Australia: An “unintentional killing.”
1993 attack on foreigners at a hotel in Cairo, killing ten: Insanity.[7]
This pattern of denial is all the more striking because it concerns distinctly Islamic forms of violence such as suicide operations, beheadings, honor killings and the disfiguring of women’s faces. For example, when it comes to honor killings, Phyllis Chesler has established that this phenomenon differs from domestic violence and, in Western countries, is almost always perpetrated by Muslims.[19] Such proofs, however, do not convince the establishment, which tends to filter Islam out of the equation.
The generalized threat inspires more denial. Politicians and others avoid mention of Islam, Islamism, Muslims, Islamists, mujahideen, or jihadists. Instead, they blame evildoers, militants, radical extremists, terrorists, and al-Qaeda. Just one day after 9/11, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell set the tone by asserting that the just-committed atrocities “should not be seen as something done by Arabs or Islamics; it is something that was done by terrorists.”[20]
Another tactic is to obscure Islamist realities under the fog of verbiage. George W. Bush referred once to “the great struggle against extremism that is now playing out across the broader Middle East”[21] and another time to “the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies and who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world.”[22] He went so far as to dismiss any Islamic element by asserting that “Islam is a great religion that preaches peace.”[23]
In like spirit, Barack Obamaobserved that “it is very important for us to recognize that we have a battle or a war against some terrorist organizations, but that those organizations aren’t representative of a broader Arab community, Muslim community.”[24] Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, engaged in the following exchange with Lamar Smith (Rep., Texas) during congressional testimony in May 2010, repeatedly resisting a connection between Islamist motives and a spate of terrorist attacks:
Smith: In the case of all three [terrorist] attempts in the last year, … one of which was successful, those individuals have had ties to radical Islam. Do you feel that these individuals might have been incited to take the actions that they did because of radical Islam?
Holder: Because of?
Smith: Radical Islam.
Holder: There are a variety of reasons why I think people have taken these actions. It’s one, I think you have to look at each individual case. I mean, we are in the process now of talking to Mr. [Feisal] Shahzad to try to understand what it is that drove him to take the action.
Smith: Yes, but radical Islam could have been one of the reasons?
Holder: There are a variety of reasons why people…
Smith: But was radical Islam one of them?
Holder: There are a variety of reasons why people do things. Some of them are potentially religious…[25]
And on and on Holder persisted, until Smith eventually gave up. And this was not exceptional: An almost identical denial took place in December 2011 by a senior official from the Department of Defense.[26]
Or one can simply ignore the Islamist element; a study issued by the Department of Homeland Security,Evolution of the Terrorist Threat to the United States, mentions Islam just one time. In September 2010, Obama spoke at the United Nations and, using a passive construction, avoided all mention of Islam in reference to 9/11: “Nine years ago, the destruction of the World Trade Center signaled a threat that respected no boundary of dignity or decency.”[27] About the same time, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, stated that the profiles of Americans engaged in terrorism indicate that “there is no ‘typical’ profile of a homegrown terrorist.”[28]
Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, rightly condemns this mentality as “two plus two must equal something other than four.”[29]
Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org), president of the Middle East Forum, initially delivered this paper at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel.
Washington, D.C.: With the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence scheduled to vote tomorrow on John Brennan’s nomination to become the next Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, it has become clear that Senators simply do not have all the information necessary for an informed decision on so sensitive an appointment. In an effort to illuminate the nominee’s shortcomings that demand – but have yet to receive – close scrutiny, the Center for Security Policy convened avirtual press conference featuring video-taped comments by six of the country’s preeminent experts on, among other things, the threat of Islamism and Brennan’s blindness to it.
The video includes powerful statements by Steve Emerson, Executive Director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism; Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy;Chris Farrell, Vice President for Investigations and Research for Judicial Watch; Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin, USA Ret., former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; Andrew C. McCarthy, former federal prosecutor and author of The Grand Jihad and Spring Fever; andStephen Coughlin, Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Policy and author of the forthcoming book, Catastrophic Failure.
The video, National Security Experts Warn: Reject Brennan, compliments the Center’s other effortsto educate the public, media and policymakers about the dangers of a possible Brennan tenure at the CIA, including a collection of Brennan-related resources and several investigative pieces.
Andrew McCarthy–who successfully prosecuted the Blind Sheikh who, twenty years ago yesterday, conspired to blow up the World Trade Center–said:
Making John Brennan the director of the Central Intelligence Agency is the most monumental mismatch of man and mission that I can imagine. The point of having our intelligence agencies is to make sure that we have a coherent, accurate idea of the threats that confront the United States. Unfortunately, Mr. Brennan’s career, and certainly the signature that he has put on the national security component of the Obama administration has been to blind the United States to the threats against us.
Steve Emerson, one of the country’s preeminent counter-terrorism experts added:
John Brennan, CIA director nominee, is uniquely unqualified to be the CIA director as evidenced by him being the architect of the outreach program to the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States as well as in the Middle East. In the course of the investigation conducted by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, we discovered that there were at least four hundred visits in the three years between 2009 and 2012 to the White House of radical Islamic groups, some of whom were unindicted co-conspirators in terrorism trials, but all of whom had been involved in establishing radical Islamic rhetoric, including support for Hamas, Hezbollah, denigrating the US, calling this a war against Islam by the United States.
Zuhdi Jasser, a leader of anti-Islamist Muslims in America, warned that:
…The reports put out from [John Brennan's] counter-terrorism office at the White House…did not recognize the [Islamist] ideology. They noted a “radical ideology,” but didn’t name what it was — even though the word ‘ideology’ was mentioned twenty times. Our American-Islamic Leadership Coalition, that includes over 20 different reform-based organizations that are anti-Islamist, were not consulted. And, you can see from the report, that it seems to be very similar to things put out by groups like the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Islamic Society of North America. Unfortunately, John Brennan has had a very cozy relationship to these groups and has often used their talking points when speaking out about Islam, Islamism, jihad, and the threat…. In every position Brennan has been it, he has been more a facilitator of Islamist groups rather than a counterweight to them, in order to oppose them and confront them.
The Center today also released a letter signed by fifteen conservative leaders – many of whom have extensive experience with national security policymaking and practice – calling on congressional leaders to launch a bicameral select committee to investigate the Benghazigate scandal. John Brennan’s involvement in the run-up to the murderous attack on September 11, 2012, his conduct during that seven-hour engagement and his role in the subsequent cover-up must be addressed before he is allowed, as Rep. Trent Franks recently put it “anywhere near the CIA, let alone running it.”
“History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid” – Gen. Eisenhower.
The Iranians and their terrorist proxy Hezbollah has been building forward operating bases in the Tri-Border area of South America and Mexico for the last three decades. Venezuela’s uranium deposits have been an important and rarely reported on component fueling Iran’s efforts to win the hearts and minds of the people in Latin America and Mexico.
Iranian Press Expose the Hispanic Insurgency
Sending young Iranian clerics to Latin American countries to spread Iranian-style radical Shi’ite Islam: To prepare for such missions, clerics train for three years, and study a variety of subjects to help them in their activity in Latin America: Spanish, religions and cultures of Latin America, and skills for converting Spanish speakers to Islam. In February 2012 Hojjat-ol-Eslam Ruhollah Maheri, the deputy director of the institute, announced that registration was open for the eighth course. Those interested were asked to call the institute or send an application form by email (AmuzehSpanish@gmail.com). (Rasa News Agency, 2/15/2012)(ITIC)
Of growing concern are Hezbollah, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Quds Force, partnering with Mexican and South American drug syndicates, joining in lucrative drug, gun running, counterfeiting, and human trafficking operations. Out of these associations, Islamic terrorist groups are making hundreds of millions of dollars while exploiting our Mexican border and entering the United States at any time of their choosing, often cloaked as illegal immigrants.
Wikileaks Exposes U.S. Brazilian Counterterrorism Recommendations (2011)
CONFIDENTIAL SÃO PAULO 000653
SIPDIS
DEPARTMENT FOR SR FARAH PANDITH, KAREN CHANDLER AMEMBASSY BRASILIA PASS TO AMCONSUL RECIFE
SUBJECT: Scenesetter for SR Farah Pandith’s Visit to Brazil: São Paulo’s Muslims
REF: São PAULO 433 São PAULO 421 BRASILIA 709 2008 São PAULO 542
Classified By: David C. Brooks, State POL; Reason: 1.4 (d)
The U.S. government also wishes to develop relations between U.S. Muslim community leaders and the Muslim communities in Brazil. They hope that by fostering a connection they will “bolster mainstream Islam in Brazil, highlight the importance of freedom of religion in America, the diversity of Islam in America, and debunk the myths that exist about Islam in America.” Additionally it would further the Sao Paulo Muslim community’s effort to spread its “interfaith relations… with other Muslim communities around the World.”
“Post, Karen Chandler, has suggested several possible programs, including a campaign to provide consular information to Muslim contacts, a series of outreach presentations on President Obama, and, most important, our desire to bring down a visiting U.S. Sheik who can explain how Islam is now a vital part of American society and build ties with local religious leaders. Given its size, diversity and traditions of cultural tolerance, Brazil could be an excellent testing ground for programs that might be useful to other WHA posts with similar Muslim minority populations.”
Obama and State Department Arrogance and Idiocy Towards Political Islam
The United States is an Infidel nation, following man made laws, in direct violation of Islamic Law. For President Obama’s Foreign Policy team to think we can “influence Hezbollah Islam in Brazil by promoting the diversity of Islam in America” as a force multiplier across the South America region to counter the Hezbollah power base in the tri-border area, is patently absurd and quite dangerous.
Our State Department articulates they will achieve this naive objective above by doing a “series of outreach presentations on President Obama and bringing down a U.S. Sheik to say how important Islam is to American Society.”
The WikiLeaks memo above focuses a neon light on how utterly ignorant our State Department officials are about the Islamic Threat Doctrine, Hezbollah, Al-Queda, and the Muslim Brotherhood. American policy makers believe this mythical form of Infidel U.S. friendly Islam will out Islam the truer Islam of Iran is like the Keystone Cops giving tactical training to the Navy SEAL’s.
Hezbollah is currently sending Jihadis through the porous Mexican / U.S. Border creating a national security risk which The Obama Administration refuses to name, much less address and counter.
It is not possible to wage an effective war against an international terror network while simultaneously foreclosing the possibility that American traitors will be killed in military operations.
By Andrew C. McCarthy:
If a plane full of 200 American citizens is hijacked by foreign jihadists, the law does not tell us whether the president should shoot down the plane or let it be plowed into a skyscraper and kill 3,000 American citizens. It is the kind of excruciating decision that war makes necessary. Legal niceties do not tell us how to resolve it.
That is the problem with our debate over the treatment of U.S. nationals who join the enemy’s forces in wartime — most urgently, over the targeted killing of our fellow citizens. We want the legal answer. But the legal answer is not going to help us. Under the Constitution, Americans who join the enemy may lawfully be treated like the enemy, which includes being attacked with lethal force. That, however, tells us only the outer limits of what is permissible. It does not tell us what we need to know: What should we do?
The government’s war powers must be boundless, at least in theory. We must be able to marshal all our might to repel any conceivable existential threat. Yet the Constitution, the sole legitimate source of the government’s power to levy war, is, quintessentially, the citizen’s protection against aggression by that same government. Thus, the tension between government’s war powers and the citizen’s fundamental rights is a conundrum. It simply cannot be resolved with finality.
Neither side of our debate is satisfied with that. We want fixed rules. But fixed rules work only if they answer every conceivable hypothetical. So the debate lurches inexorably to worst-case scenarios.
