Guest Opinion/Commentary*
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Obama Wake Up Call
Terrorism piece by
Guest:
David Coughlin
Someone needs to wake up President Obama that the Global War on Terror (GWOT) is still very active around the world and the United States remains the number one target of opportunity. The war is hot and deadly around the world: decreasing in Iraq, increasing in Afghanistan, occasional drone strikes in Pakistan and Somalia, and currently quiet in Malaysia and the Philippines. Yemen has put itself on the GWOT radar training future combatants.
In 2009 the United States has been attacked twice on American soil: first at Fort Hood and now at the Detroit airport, and five other plots were thwarted before execution. “Connecting the dots” on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab , the Christmas bomber, should not have been that tough since intelligence about terror threats rarely comes on such a silver platter:
· His Nigerian banker father went to the U.S. Embassy in Lagos to warn that his son had fallen under “the influence of religious extremists based in Yemen” and was a security risk.
· This came after months of U.S. intelligence intercepts about al Qaeda plans for an attack using a Nigerian man.
· He paid for his ticket with cash, didn’t check any luggage, and didn’t leave any contact information.
We were spared the horrible consequences of our incompetence, only because of his technical incompetence. Abdulmutallab’s name went onto the list of 400,000 people who might have links to terror, but not the list of 14,000 subject to multiple screenings before boarding an airplane nor the list of 3,400 people who are not permitted to fly. The FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center’s “reasonable suspicion” standard reads: “Reasonable suspicion requires ‘articulable’ facts which, taken together with rational inferences, reasonably warrant a determination that an individual is known or suspected to be or has been engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of, or related to, terrorism and terrorist activities, and is based on the totality of the circumstances. Mere guesses or inarticulate ‘hunches’ are not enough to constitute reasonable suspicion.” This “political correctness” to not tag him as a person of interest raises questions not only about airline security, but about how we are fighting the real war we are in. Unlike the war on crime, or the war on drugs, this is not a metaphorical war, and there is no presumption of innocence, rather a presumption that he is a terrorist and did not act alone. The immediate imperative was not to read him his Miranda rights, but to subject him to intense and hostile interrogation so that U.S. forces can quickly find, fix, attack and kill his comrades and camp followers. The first 100% truthful thing that President Obama said was that “U.S. intelligence had enough information to uncover the terrorist plot to bomb a Northwest Airlines flight but failed to piece it all together before the suspect boarded a plane for Detroit armed with explosives.” Look for Obama to throw Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and/or Counter-Terrorism Czar John Brennan under the bus for incompetence to cover his own cluelessness! Bush’s premise that Islam would negotiate with the West was false, but Bush loved America, and he protected America, even if he refused to see the enemy for who and what it was. It was no accident that America was safe for eight years post-9/11, but our security is now being unraveled by a weak and pro-Islamic president. I fear the jihadi attacks on America in 2009 were staggering, and it has only just begun. Maybe now Homeland Security will finally begin profiling for actual terrorists like El Al Airlines has done successfully for years, and stop focusing on such dreaded implements of terrorism as nail files and shampoo bottles!
David Coughlin
Hawthorne, NY
http://www.ReturnToCommonSensesite.com/
(“The Real War” by Pat Buchanan dated January 2, 2010 published by Real Clear Politics at http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/01/02/the_real_war_99743.html
“The Jihad Decade Cometh” by Pamela Geller dated January 3, 2010 published by American Thinker at http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/the_jihad_decade_cometh.html
“Intelligence Is a Terrible Thing to Waste” by L. Gordon Crovitz dated January 3, 2010 published by The Wall Street Journal at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704065404574636130361837754.html )
Posted by Guest: David Coughlin on 1/6/10 at 09:06 AM
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