Obama appeases terrorist state Iran
An influential Republican senator has unleashed acrushing attack on the Obama administration and Secretary of State John Kerry's policy on the Iranian nuclear program, comparing it to Britain's appeasement of Nazi Germany in 1938.
"This administration," said Senator Mark Kirk, a top Republican leader, on Thursday, "like Neville Chamberlain, is yielding a large and bloody conflict in the Middle East involving Iranian nuclear weapons, which will now be part of our children’s future."
Kirk blasted both the administration's opposition to new sanctions on Iran and Kerry's testimony on Wednesday to Congressional leaders. He called Kerry's testimony "unconvincing" and "anti-Israeli."
The Netanyahu government has often hinted that the current approach to Iran constitutes appeasement, raising comparisons to British prime minister Neville Chamberlain's unilateral decision at the 1938 Munich conference to hand large sections of Czechoslovakia over to Hitler. In exchange, Hitler pledged to give up the rest of his territorial claims in exchange for peace.
Hitler promptly broke his pledge and occupied the country, setting the stage for the invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II. Munich is widely considered one of the most craven and disastrous foreign policy decisions in modern history, to the extent that Chamberlain's name has become a byword for appeasement and incompetence.
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Obama appeases terrorist state Iran
Obama Supports Syrian Rebel Groups That Pledged Allegiance To Al-Qaeda
DECEMBER 13, 2012 BY 8 COMMENTS
and the MB
IPT News
November 29, 2012
November 29, 2012
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The elected head of a nation made threatening statements toward Israel. His organization called for jihad and celebrated a bus bombing in Tel Aviv.
The United States then hailed Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi as a statesman and a moderate last week.
True, he did help bring about a cessation of Hamas rocket fire from Gaza. But in doing so, he wasn't trying to advance American objectives or the cause of peace.
Morsi knew avoiding a war in Gaza would help secure $1 billion in debt relief from the United States and an International Monetary Fund loan approaching $5 billion.
All of that makes the high praise Morsi received from the Obama administration unnecessary and counterproductive. And the administration's tepid response to Morsi's subsequent power grab – neutering his country's judiciary – fails to make clear whether there will be consequences if he maintains dictatorial power.
"Mr. Obama told aides he was impressed with the Egyptian leader's pragmatic confidence," The New York Times reported after the Gaza ceasefire Nov. 21. "He sensed an engineer's precision with surprisingly little ideology."
The president and his aides must not have been paying attention. Days earlier, Morsi stood in Cairo's al-Azhar mosque and offered unwavering support to Hamas and threatened Israel with violent retribution.
"Let everyone know that the size of Egypt and the capabilities of Egypt, and the people of Egypt have rage, and the leaders of Egypt are enraged at what is hitting Gaza," Morsi said. "The leaders of Egypt are enraged and are moving to prevent the aggression on the people of Palestine in Gaza."
"We in Egypt stand with Gaza," he said. "[W]e are with them in one trench, that he who hits them, hits us; that this blood which flows from their children, it, it is like the blood flowing from the bodies of our children and our sons, may this never happen."
During a Nov. 19 visit to Shifa Hospital in Gaza, Saad Katatni, chairman of Morsi's Freedom and Justice Party and speaker of Egypt's dissolved parliament, continued issuing violent threats of jihad against Israel, saying:
"We are with you in your jihad. We have come here to send a message from here to the Zionist entity, to the Zionist enemy. And we say to them, Egypt is no longer. Egypt is no longer after the revolution a strategic treasure for you. Egypt was and still is a strategic treasury for our brothers in Palestine; a strategic treasure for Gaza; a strategic treasure for all the oppressed."
The Obama administration has yet to criticize the pro-Hamas, pro-jihad rhetoric from Morsi, Katatni and their Brotherhood associates.
Throughout the conflict, the Muslim Brotherhood – where Morsi had been a senior member before seeking office earlier this year – issued a series of pro-Hamas statements and celebrations of attacks on Israel, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reports.
During a protest organized by the Brotherhood and its political arm in Al-Qalyubi, preacher Muhammad Ragab called on Muslims "to raise the banner of jihad against the tyrannical, invading and wicked sons of apes and pigs [i.e., the Jews], and to unite against the enemies of Allah."
"The MB thanked Allah for the death of Israelis killed by rockets, and called for jihad against Israel," the MEMRI report says. "The official MB Facebook page reported joyously on the deaths of Israelis. On November 15, 2012, the official MB Facebook page celebrated the death of three Israeli civilians killed by a rocket that hit a house in Kiryat Malakhi: 'Allah akbar and praise to god, three Zionists were killed and five others were injured in a blast at a three-story building in Kiryat Malakhi from resistance rockets.'"
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland ducked the issue of violent rhetoric from Morsi and the Brotherhood when a reporter raised it in a Nov. 16 press briefing.
"Well, I'm obviously not, from this podium, going to characterize the Egyptian view, nor am I going to speak for them and characterize our private diplomatic conversations,"Nuland said. "We all agree on the need to de-escalate this conflict, and the question is for everybody to use their influence that they have to try to get there."
The Muslim Brotherhood's hostile rhetoric against Israel continued on Nov. 22 after the cease-fire was reached. Supreme Guide Dr. Mohamed Badie—considered by Middle East intelligence sources to be the real power broker behind Morsi— issued a statement describing jihad against the Jewish state as "a personal obligation for all Muslims."
"The cause of Palestine is of considerable importance. It is not a cause of power, nor of Palestinians, nor of the Arabs, but is the basic cause of life of every Muslim," Badie said."For the sake of its return, every Muslim must wage jihad, sacrifice; and expend his money for the sake of restoring it.
"Palestine and Jerusalem is a holy Muslim land, part of the faith of the Muslim ummah," Badie continued. "To forsake any part of it is to forsake the ummah's civilization and faith. This is a great sin."
The Muslim Brotherhood leader continued, saying that the Jews should not "establish a state for themselves" and should be content living as a minority in other nations.
"The enemy knows nothing but the language of force," Badie said. "Be aware of the game of grand deception with which they depict peace accords."
Morsi Grabs Dictatorial Powers
Cairo's streets filled with angry protesters after Morsi turned around and issued an edict making his decisions immune from judicial review just a day after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised him as a peacemaker.
"I want to thank President Morsi for his personal leadership to de-escalate the situation in Gaza and end the violence. This is a critical moment for the region," Clinton said during a Nov. 21 joint press conference in Cairo with Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr. "Egypt's new government is assuming the responsibility and leadership that has long made this country a cornerstone of regional stability and peace."
Morsi's grab for dictatorial power trampled Egypt's judiciary and gave him unchecked rule over Egypt at least until a new constitution is drafted.
At least 40 people were wounded and a teenager was killed Sunday in the Nile Delta city of Damanhoor when a group of anti-Morsi protesters tried storming the Brotherhood's local offices, the Associated Press reported.
Washington's response has been tepid at best, calling for calm but never criticizing Morsi directly. White House Spokesman Jay Carney was asked directly Monday if the administration "condemned" Morsi's unprecedented power grab.
"We are concerned about it and have raised those concerns," Carney said.
During a press briefing also held Monday, the State Department's Nuland tread lightly. Clinton spoke with Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr that morning, Nuland said, taking "that opportunity to reiterate some of the points that you saw in our statement, that we want to see the constitutional process move forward in a way that does not overly concentrate power in one set of hands, that ensures that rule of law, checks and balances, protection of the rights of all groups in Egypt are upheld, et cetera."
She repeatedly referred back to a statement issued Friday calling for calm in Egypt as a result of Morsi's decree.
U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called on the United States to condemn these actions and demand they be reversed. "Stop. Stop. Renounce the statement, and the move that he just made. Allow the judiciary to function," McCain said. "If the judiciary is flawed in some way, then, that's an illness that can be cured over time. But, absolutely, to assume this kind of power is unacceptable to the United States of America and, then, we can outline what actions might be taken. But, first, condemn it."
Egypt's pro-democracy groups also have called on President Obama to condemn Morsi's decree, but their pleas fell on deaf ears.
"I am waiting to see, I hope soon, a very strong statement of condemnation by the U.S., by Europe and by everybody who really cares about human dignity," said prominent opposition figure Mohamed Elbaradei.
The opposition forces have formed a National Salvation Front in response to Morsi's power grab in attempt to circumvent an impending Islamist takeover of the Egyptian government, referring to the move as a "coup" and Morsi as a "pharaoh."
"I'm against the constitution and the dictatorship of Mr. Morsi," anti-Morsi protester Horeya Naguib told the Associated Press Tuesday amid protests in Tahrir Square. "He is selling his own country and looks out for the interests of his group, not the people of Egypt."
Morsi's decree is his second attempt at consolidating power in five months, first ousting military leaders and invalidating a constitutional declaration that limited his control over Egypt's army.
Egyptian opposition politician Hamdeen Sabahy said that protests would continue until Morsi's decree was reversed, stating that Egypt "will not accept a new dictator because it brought down the old one."
Morsi's Long Support For Hamas
It is worth remembering that the administration has tried to cast the Muslim Brotherhood in a false light of moderation since the early days of the Arab Spring. In February 2011, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared before a House committee and described the group as "a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried Al Qaeda as a perversion of Islam."
That comment was widely derided and Clapper walked it back somewhat. But a series ofArabic translations from the Muslim Brotherhood's official website made by the Investigative Project on Terrorism shows that Morsi worked for years alongside Hamas, which began as a splinter group from Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s.
As a leading Muslim Brotherhood member of Egypt's parliament, Morsi wrote a Sept. 23, 2003 letter to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh thanking God for his survival and declaring his solidarity with Hamas' goal of destroying Israel.
"We thank all of you for your courageous positions in support of our cause, the cause of Palestine – the first Qibla of the Muslims, and your continued support of your brothers on the land of encampment," Morsi wrote, according to Ikhwanonline.com. "We send through you greetings to all our faithful brothers throughout the world, and we assure you that we are we are pledged to God, and we promise you we will continue to the path of jihad and resistance until victory or martyrdom."
In April 2004, Morsi actually led efforts in the Egyptian parliament to scrap the peace treaty with Israel.
The Brotherhood's own website reported that "Dr. Morsi" proposed "a timetable for the disposal of the alleged peace agreement signed with the Zionist entity."
Later that year, Morsi invoked anti-Semitic themes found in the Qur'an and Shariah law, saying the Jews are "the most hostile of men to Muslims" and that "Zionists are traitors to every covenant."
In 2007, he said that he and the Muslim Brotherhood actively supported Palestinian jihadism to annihilate Israel through violent jihad: "[T]he Palestinian issue for the Brotherhood is pivotal and essential, and that the Brotherhood offered and still offers full support for the Palestinian resistance to liberate the Holy Land."
A month later, Morsi participated in a teleconference with Haniyeh, saying "resistance is the right and only way to liberate the land from the defilement of the Jews."
The list goes on and on. Morsi delivered a brief respite in the rocket fire from Gaza toward Israeli civilians. That's a good thing. But pretending this one act somehow transforms him into a statesman, or a reliable international mediator is not. It's reckless.
Articles by IPT
Dems Tap Radical Islamists for Cash
by STEVEN EMERSON AND JOHN ROSSOMANDO • November 1, 2012 • IPT News
by STEVEN EMERSON AND JOHN ROSSOMANDO • November 1, 2012 • IPT News
The Investigative Project on Terrorism has learned that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi headlined a Democratic Party fundraiser with leaders of Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood front groups in May of this year.
The invitation-only fundraiser was sponsored by Reps. Keith Ellison, D-Minn.; Andre Carson, D-Ind.; and Steve Israel, D-N.Y., chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and took place on the evening of May 16, 2012, at the W Hotel in Washington D.C.
An Islamist activist honored by the White House last December as a "Champion of Change" called Zionism "racism" this week and said "nothing is creepier" than the belief in a Jewish homeland.
Linda Sarsour also posted two links on her Twitter feed to a rabidly anti-Israel video by a New York poet that accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing and mocks interfaith dialogue as selling out.
A year-long investigation by the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) has found that scores of known radical Islamists made hundreds of visits to the Obama White House, meeting with top administration officials.
A Red Carpet for Radicals at the White House
by Steve Emerson and John Rossomando
IPT News
October 21, 2012
IPT News
October 21, 2012
A year-long investigation by the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) has found that scores of known radical Islamists made hundreds of visits to the Obama White House, meeting with top administration officials.
Court documents and other records have identified many of these visitors as belonging to groups serving as fronts for the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and other Islamic militant organizations.
The IPT made the discovery combing through millions of White House visitor log entries. IPT compared the visitors' names with lists of known radical Islamists. Among the visitors were officials representing groups which have:
- Been designated by the Department of Justice as unindicted co-conspirators in terrorist trials; Extolled Islamic terrorist groups including Hamas and Hizballah;
- Obstructed terrorist investigations by instructing their followers not to cooperate with law enforcement;
- Promoted the incendiary conspiratorial allegation that the United States is engaged in a "war against Islam"— a leading tool in recruiting Muslims to carry out acts of terror;
- Repeatedly claimed that many of the Islamic terrorists convicted since 9-11 were framed by the U.S government as part of an anti-Muslim profiling campaign.
Individuals from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) visited the White House at least 20 times starting in 2009. In 2008, CAIR was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorist money laundering case in U.S. history – the trial of the Holy Land Foundation in which five HLF officials were convicted of funneling money to Hamas.
U.S. District Court Judge Jorge Solis later ruled that, "The Government has produced ample evidence to establish the association" of CAIR to Hamas, upholding their designations as unindicted co-conspirators. In 2008, the FBI formally ended all contact with CAIR because of its ties to Hamas.
In January 2004, Hussam Ayloush, executive director of CAIR's Los Angeles office, publicly defended Palestinian terror attacks in comments before Muslim students at the University of California – Los Angeles, saying that terrorists were exercising their "legitimate right" to defend themselves against Israeli occupation.
Ayloush, who was a delegate to the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., casts the United States as controlled by Israeli interests. At a 2008 CAIR banquet in San Diego, he imagined "an America that respects and humanizes religion. It's an America that is free to act on its values and not on the interests of any foreign lobby." In 2004, he said that the war on terror had become a "war on Muslims." Ayloush attended at least two White House meetings.
The logs show Ayloush met with Paul Monteiro, associate director of the White House Office of Public Engagement on July 8, 2011 and Amanda Brown, assistant to the White House director of political affairs Patrick Gaspard, on June 6, 2009.
According to reliable sources, Monteiro was White House liaison for secret contacts with CAIR, especially with Ayloush. IPT has learned that the White House logs curiously have omitted Ayloush's three meetings with two other senior White House officials.
Louay Safi, formerly executive director of the Islamic Society of North America, visited the White House twice – meeting in intimate settings with Paul Monteiro on June 29, 2011 and July 8, 2011.
Law enforcement first noticed Safi in 1995 when his voice was captured in an FBI wiretap of now-convicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami Al-Arian. At the time of his conversation with Al-Arian, Safi served as executive director of the International Institute of Islamic Thought, an organization listed in law-enforcement and in internalMuslim Brotherhood documents as one of the movement's top front groups in North America.
Safi also wrote for the Middle East Affairs Journal, produced by the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR). That group was established by Hamas deputy political leader Mousa Abu Marzook and part of the Hamas-support network called the "Palestine Committee."
Safi has repeatedly expressed understanding for the underlying causes that provoke terrorism: "Terrorism cannot be fought by…ignoring its root causes. The first step…is to examine the conditions that give rise to the anger, frustration, and desperation that fuel all terrorist acts." He also called Palestinian terrorists "freedom" fighters.
Esam Omeish, former head of the Muslim Brotherhood-created Muslim American Society, visited the White House three times.
In 2000, Omeish personally hired the late terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki to be the imam of Falls Church, VA, Dar al-Hijrah mosque. According to IPT analysis, more terrorists have been linked to Dar al-Hijrah since 9/11 than to any other mosque in America.
Omeish publicly mourned the Israeli airstrike that killed Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin at an April 10, 2004, MAS conference.
According to video captured by IPT, Omeish went a step further at the December 22, 2000, Jerusalem Day rally in Washington's Lafayette Park, praising Palestinian terror groups, saying they had learned "the jihad way" to "liberate" Palestine.
In a sermon at Dar al-Hijrah in 2009, Omeish called for "an American Islamic movement that transforms our status, that impacts our society, and that brings forth the change that we want to see."
Last month, Omeish attended a reception for Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi during Morsi's United Nations visit. Morsi is a longtime Egyptian Brotherhood leader. Omeish posted a picture of the event on his Facebook page and noted: "His Excellency provided great insights and we share important perspectives."
Mohamed Elibiary, appointed to the Homeland Security Advisory Council in October 2010, spoke at a December 2004 seminar in honor of Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, titled: "A Tribute to the Great Islamic Visionary."
Elibiary condemned the convictions of the defendants in the Hamas money-laundering trial as a "loss for America" and dismissed the prosecution as "a political trial trying to achieve a government policy." He also opposed the targeting of American-born al-Qaida cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, saying it wouldn't be "worth the ramifications of having to chase his ghost as a martyr for the next half century."
Interestingly, the Obama administration's enthusiastic support for gay rights did not prevent it from inviting Islamists who support laws overseas giving gays the death penalty.
In a June 21, 2001 article in The San Francisco Chronicle, Muzammil Siddiqi, the former head of Islamic Society of North America, said he "supported laws in countries where homosexuality is punishable by death." Siddiqi met with Monteiro on June 8, 2010.
Despite the President's public proclamations that he is standing strong against terrorism, the White House logs demonstrate that he has legitimized the very same groups that espouse radical Islamic terrorism.
MPAC's Influence on Policy
The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) has secured the closest working relationship with the Obama White House despite a record of anti-Semitism,whitewashing the terrorist threat and hostility toward law enforcement. Fifteen MPAC officials have been welcomed by the White House. Executive Director Salam al-Marayati enjoyed at least six White House visits between September 2009 and July 2011, mostly involving meetings with Monteiro. Alejandro Beutel, who was MPAC's government liaison until July 2012, had 10 White House visits between July 2010 and May 2012.
MPAC's Washington director Haris Tarin made 24 trips to the White House between December 2009 and March 2012. Those meetings often were intimate in nature, involving a handful of people at most.
Edina Lekovic, an MPAC spokeswoman, visited the White House twice in July 2010. As a UCLA student, Lekovic served as an editor of a Muslim magazine called Al-Talib, which in 1999 ran an editorial calling Osama bin Laden "a great mujahid" and saying when bin Laden is called a terrorist, "we should defend our brother and refer to him as a freedom fighter, someone who has forsaken wealth and power to fight in Allah's cause and speak out against oppressors. We take these stances only to please Allah." That issue identified Lekovic as a managing editor.
Like CAIR, MPAC also has pushed that "war on Islam" message. MPAC defendedHizballah's 1983 attack on a U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon which killed 241 Americans and questioned U.S.-terror designations for Palestinian terrorist groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
But the White House turned to MPAC officials as it prepared two papers on combatting what it calls violent extremism in America.
On July 18, 2011, White House Senior Director for Global Engagement QuintanWiktorowicz hosted four MPAC officials for a private meeting. Two weeks later, the White House issued "Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States," a counter-terrorism initiative which made no mention of radical Islam or jihad waged by its followers. Rather, it named only al-Qaida as the enemy and included a vow to counter al-Qaida's narrative that America is at war with Islam.
That focus fits neatly with MPAC's agenda. It has lobbied for years to strip references to Islam from national security dialogue, even though terrorists from al-Qaida to Hamas use Quranic doctrine to justify their bloody campaigns.
And it marks the culmination of a dream described by MPAC founder Salam al-Marayati in a 2005 speech: "Counter-terrorism and counter-violence should be defined by us," he said. "We should define how an effective counter-terrorism policy should be pursued in this country. So, number one, we reject any effort, notion, suggestion that Muslims should start spying on one another … That is why we are saying have them [law enforcement] come in community forums, in open-dialogues, so they come through the front door and you prevent them having to come from the back door."
Wiktorowicz, a member of President Obama's National Security Council who authoreda 2005 ebook on radical Islam, was a receptive host for MPAC government and policy analyst Alejandro Beutel, Washington, D.C. office director Haris Tarin, policy analyst Hoda Elshishtawy and Shammas Malik, an MPAC intern, White House logs show.
MPAC didn't tout the July 18 meeting publicly but quickly praised the White House initiative. It "echoes MPAC's long-standing position of emphasizing community-based solutions in addressing violent extremism," the organization said in an August 3, 2011news release.
Days before the meeting, President Obama called Tarin personally to commend his work with the Muslim American community and the nation.
MPAC repaid the courtesy a month later by issuing a paper blasting the American opposition to a Palestinian scheme to get United Nations recognition of statehood without pursuing it through peace talks.
The MPAC report questions the Obama administration's integrity by suggesting that the "U.S. is so out of step with global public opinion" on this issue because it is unduly influenced by "domestic political consequences" and campaign concerns, an allusion to the perceived political power of the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., which MPAC often invokes.
Despite MPAC's strident public opposition to U.S. policy, Wiktorowicz again hosted Beutel, Tarin, and Elshishtawy on November 4, 2011 – just a month before a follow-upcounter-terrorism document was released.
Access Didn't Moderate MPAC
In March 2011, Beutel took to Press TV, an English-language broadcast outlet controlled by the Iranian government, to criticize congressional hearings on radicalization within the Muslim American community:
It spoke to a lot of the feelings that I think many Muslim Americans have with respect to their position here in America post-9/11. We are loyal citizens to this nation and we are trying to do everything we can to keep it safe and secure. And yet even when we're doing the right things and in many cases, laying our lives down on the line for our nation, we still get stigmatized sometimes.
Most recently, Beutel co-authored an op-ed with Tarin, in which the two MPAC officials criticized NYPD surveillance of Muslim student groups across the Northeast: "The NYPD's surveillance of an entire community based on their faith -- with no evidence of criminal activity -- is a blow [to] democracy and an ineffective and counterproductive offense to its mandate to 'protect and serve.'"
In September 2010, Beutel criticized FBI raids in Chicago and Minneapolis targeting supporters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), both U.S.-designated terrorist organizations. Beutel argued that "[t]he FBI cannot continue to tell the American people that harassing anti-war activists falls under the rubric of counterterrorism and a fight against al-Qaeda … They have absolutely nothing to do with each other. The FBI is undermining the trust that has been built between communities and law enforcement."
Other Islamists Who Enjoyed Access
White House logs show Islamists visiting the White House who may have lower profiles, but who also defended terrorists and terrorist groups, and repeatedly castigated law enforcement, especially in counter-terror sting operations. Among them:
- Farhana Khera– executive director of Muslim Advocates and the National Association of Muslim Lawyers (NAML). She casts FBI counter-terror stings as "entrapment." Following arrests in late 2010, she told USA Today, "But for the government's role in these cases the suspects may have been left with their own bravado. Law enforcement resources need to be focused on actual threats." Khera also has compromised FBI operations and coached mosque personnel on how to evade FBI surveillance. "In one case, the FBI even wanted to build a gym to attract young Muslims to work out and 'discuss jihad," Khera once wrote. In July 2010 Khera told delegates at an Islamic Society of North American convention: "Sometimes [Muslim] community members don't even think of themselves as a[n] [FBI] source. They might just think [to] themselves, 'Well, I have a good relationship with the head of the FBI office. He comes by my office from time to time and we have tea, or we go to lunch, and he just talks to me about the community.' But what may seem like an innocuous set of conversations in the FBI's mind they may be thinking of you as an informant, as a source. And the repercussions and the harm that that can cause can be pretty serious." Khera shows up three times in the White House visitor logs, most recently in August 2011.
- Hisham al-Talib–A founder and current VP of Finance for Herndon, VA-based, International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), an organization the FBI believes has housed key Muslim Brotherhood leaders in the United States since the late 1980s. Al-Talib was among seven people to meet March 30, 2012 with Joshua DuBois, White House executive director of the Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. A 1987 FBI investigative report, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, cited a source whose name was redacted but who has private communication with IIIT leaders. Their conversations show the IIIT leaders "…are implementing Phase I of the overall six phase IKWAN [Brotherhood] plan to institute the Islamic Revolution in the United States." The source said that IIIT leaders were working "to peacefully get inside the United States Government and also American universities" ultimately to help overthrow non-Islamic governments. Just four years later, the IIIT acknowledged funding WISE, a Tampa think-tank that housed four members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad's governing board (Sami al-Arian, Ramadan Shallah, Basheer Nafi and Mazen al-Najjar). WISE had a cooperative agreement to work with University of South Florida faculty. In a November 1992 letterto al-Arian, IIIT President Taha Jaber al-Awani explained the intimate relationship between the Tampa and Virginia operations. "And I would like to affirm these feelings to you directly on my behalf and on the behalf of all my brothers [naming IIIT officials including al-Talib] … "that when we make a commitment to you or try to offer, we do it for you as a group, regardless of the party or façade you use the donation for … [W]e consider you as a group … a part of us and an extension of us. Also, we are part of you and an extension of you," al-Awani wrote. "[O]ur relationship, in addition to being a brotherhood of faith and Islam, is an ideological and cultural concordance with mutual objectives." The letter named the IIIT officials who shared this view, including al-Talib.
- Imam Talib El-Hajj Abdur Rashid–religious and spiritual leader of Harlem's Mosque of the Islamic Brotherhood. Rashid rationalized Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's stance on destroying Israel, saying it merely is a "sentiment born of the legitimate anger, frustration, and bitterness that is felt in many [parts of the Muslim World" because of Israel's "ongoing injustice toward the Palestinian people." He also serves on the National Committee to Free Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin. Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rapp Brown, was convicted of killing a Georgia police officer in 2002.White House logs place Rashid in two meetings during 2010 including a July 13 event with President Obama.
- Hatem Abudayyeh – executive director of the Chicago-based Arab American Action Network, founded by Rashid Khalidi, a friend of President Obama. Abudayyeh has been under criminal investigation at least since September 2010, when FBI agents raided his home and office in connection with a terror-support probe. In a 2006 interview, Abudayyeh blasted Israel's "military killing machine" after Israel retaliated for a cross-border Hizballah attack that killed five people and led to the kidnapping of two soldiers. "The U.S. and Israel will continue to describe Hamas, Hezbollah and the other Palestinian and Lebanese resistance organizations as 'terrorists,'" he said,"but the real terrorists are the governments and military forces of the U.S. and Israel." He visited the White House in April 2010.
Outreach to minority communities can foster a feeling of inclusiveness. However, President Obama opening the White House to radical Islamists compromises American security in at least two ways. First, it legitimizes groups and individuals whose track records beg skepticism and scrutiny. Second, White House visitor logs show that top U.S. policy-makers are soliciting and receiving advice from people who, at best, view the war on terrorism as an unchecked war on Muslims. These persons' perspectives and preferred policies handcuff law enforcement and weaken our resolve when it comes to confronting terrorism.
Related Topics: Muslim American Society (MAS), Muzammil Siddiqi, Salam al-Marayati, Sami Al-Arian, The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) | Steve Emerson | John Rossomando
Read More: White House, Visitor Logs, Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR, Hussam Ayloush,Paul Monteiro, Patrick Gaspard, Louay Safi, UASR, Omeish, MAS, Dar al-Hijrah,Elibiary, Muzammil Siddiqi, al-Marayati, Beutel, Tarin, Lekovic, Khera, Al-Talib,Abudayyeh, Muslim American Society (MAS), Salam al-Marayati, Sami Al-Arian, The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC)
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Reader comments on this item
Your Vote Counts
Submitted by Ron, Nov 2, 2012 17:53
I am tired of commenting, it is a waste of time. I will just VOTE come next Tuesday, November 6, 2012 and get this President impersonater out of ,with GOD's help, amen.
I have some questions about Allah...
Submitted by Wisdomspeak1, Oct 31, 2012 20:19
I have some questions about Allah...
God forbid I say, "God is Great!" at the destruction of people as the Muslims do! Why would Allah be happy at the destruction of his creation if he's the Creator of it unless Allah is not truly the Creator God, but an imposter?! Expressions of joy, delight and happiness at destruction and death is more inline with a character of an impostor who had no involvement whatsoever in the creation of the world at all in the first place!
Why are Muslims so intent upon conquering the world for Allah? Is not Allah the Sovereign Creator God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and the Christians? If he is, then why re-conquer something that's already his for he's the Creator of all things? Won't that be redundant?
Why do muslims believe that people need to be control through sharia law? Does your Allah not dwell in the hearts of his people as the Creator God of the Christians do? If not, then he's an imposter who is unable to conduct his affairs as a Sovereign God for he's NOT that Sovereign God!
Why can't Muslims attract new converts to their faith without resorting to force, coercion and violence? Is not Allah that Glorious God that can mesmerize us with his awesomeness majesty, glory, beauty and righteousness and truth? If not, then Allah is AN IMPOSTOR!
Why do Allah followers have no respect for human life? Christ says he came so that we may have life more abundantly? Why is Allah here? So that we may obtain death more violently? God states that he delights in us! Just how does Allah view humanity? Why are Muslims directed by Allah to hate everyone who's not a Muslim? Just how does Allah view us?
I do believe that Allah is a very real spirit entity that had a created beginning, but he's NOT that Sovereign Creator God, but the imposter who has declared in his heart...
...I will exalt my throne above the stars of God:... Isaiah 14:13
Jarrett’s Secret Iran Talks Raise Questions About Obama’s Intentions
Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary
11.05.2012 - 2:05 PM
11.05.2012 - 2:05 PM
During the presidential debate on foreign policy, President Obama denied that his administration was preparing to conduct secret talks with Iran after the presidential election, as a New York Times story alleged. But according to a report published today in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot and on its English-language website Ynet.com, such talks are not only planned but have been going on for months and are being led by presidential advisor Valerie Jarrett. This raises questions not only about whether the president will stand by his pledge in the debate that any deal with Iran must require them to give up their “nuclear program,” but also whether she is negotiating a compromise along the lines sought by the Europeans in the P5+1 talks. In that compromise, Tehran would be allowed considerable leeway in terms of its nuclear future. It also places in context the administration’s absolute refusal to agree to “red lines,” in response to Israel’s request that the U.S. promise diplomacy would not be allowed to drag on until it would be too late to take action to forestall Iran’s nuclear goal.
That secret talks are going on with Iran is, in itself, hardly surprising since Tehran has been holding off-and-on talks with the West about the nuclear issue for years. But Jarrett’s involvement signals the importance the issue has for Obama because of her standing as a senior advisor and her close personal connection with the Obama family. But by putting someone with no background on security issues in charge of this track, Obama may be signaling that the president’s goal here is not an Iranian surrender of nuclear capability, but rather a political compromise that may not eliminate the threat of an Islamist bomb sometime down the road.
Jarrett was born in Shiraz, Iran (her father ran a hospital there) but left when she was 5, though she is said to have spoken Persian as a child. But that’s the extent of her expertise on the country. Her main qualification is that she is a close confidante of both the president and his wife. She is also widely given credit for helping to jump-start the president’s career by introducing him into the corrupt world of Chicago politics, where she was a significant player. That gives her credibility with the Iranians since she has a direct line to the White House. But if a re-elected Obama is rightly suspected of wanting to show more “flexibility” with America’s foes, then the Jarrett caper seems to be evidence that he is more interested in making this sore issue go away rather than pushing Iran hard to give up the possibility of attaining a weapon.
Though Jarrett and Obama may think their Chicago background makes them tough, the Iranians have made fools of every Western negotiator they’ve dealt with in the past decade, because of their tenacity and willingness to use the charade of talks as a way to run out the clock while their scientists get closer to achieving the country’s nuclear ambition. While the sanctions that the administration reluctantly put in place against Iran have caused the country economic pain, the American conviction that this gives them leverage over the ayatollahs may be mistaken. So long as the Iranian regime believes they can outlast and out-talk the West on this issue, it’s doubtful they can be compelled to sign a deal that would eliminate the nuclear threat–or to observe it even if they did.
While the president has been talking tough about Iran during the election year, it remains to be seen how tough his envoy has been with the Iranians in their secret talks. If Ms. Jarrett emerges with a deal sometime after the election, the suspicion is that her goal is more to get the president off the hook for his promises than to actually stop the Iranians.
Obama and Terror: A Four-Year Scandal
From the outset, the Obama administration’s handling of the most sensitive secrets of the war on terror has been worrisome. In April 2009, the Justice Department released previously classified memoranda that described the standards of the CIA’s interrogation program, thereby making known to our enemies the limits of what they might face if captured. The release also demoralized those within the intelligence agency who were told they could no longer rely on the memoranda—and would, therefore, be judged by a standard different from the one in place when they acted.
Two years later, following the killing of Osama bin Laden, revelations about the intelligence recovered in the raid on his Pakistan compound rendered much of that intelligence useless, because terrorists found out what we had learned. A few months after that, administration officials confirmed to the media that the United States had been involved along with Israel in implanting a computer virus in Iranian nuclear-enrichment centrifuges that caused physical damage, thereby justifying by our own professed standards any retaliation Iran might undertake. And, most recently, newspaper reports have disclosed planning for retaliatory operations against the terrorists who murdered our ambassador to Libya and military and other personnel present in our consulate in Benghazi.
The recklessness with which the Obama administration has allowed these precious and deadly secrets to be revealed in the light of day—and in all cases for political reasons, to buff the president’s image—is a little-covered national scandal. And it is on display throughout the text of Daniel Klaidman’s Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 304 pages). There are several details in this book that Klaidman, a veteran Newsweek correspondent, could only have uncovered from leaks of classified information at the highest levels. At least two revelations have the potential to do real damage. Some of the details Klaidman reveals about the nature of the evidence gathered at Guantanamo Bay—gleaned from what was, until this book was published, secret surveillance of detainees—are bound to complicate prosecution of suspected terrorists who were held there, including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who also personally beheaded (“with my sacred right hand”) the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002.
The other revelation involves foreign policy. We are told that a plan to release Yemeni prisoners from Guantanamo to the Saudis so that they could be put into the intermittently effective Saudi deprogramming regimen for al-Qaeda associates came undone when the Yemeni president affronted the Saudi king by suggesting Yemen was doing the monarch a favor in allowing the kingdom to take those Yemenis. This mildly titillating story may well make it more difficult for the United States to conduct diplomacy in a part of the world where it is not helpful to be the source of gossip that embarrasses those in power.
But leaving aside the sloppy handling of such sensitive information, the public has reason to be disturbed by Klaidman’s account of the way the administration made its decisions in the war on terror. For example, Klaidman reports that President Obama is unwilling to use conventional law-of-war detention, which could take terrorist combatants off the battlefield for the duration of the conflict. Because this is not a conventional war, we can’t predict when or how it will end and therefore detention could be indefinite—indeed, even perpetual. The possibility that a system of ongoing review might be put in place to assure at least that no prisoner is held beyond a time when he presents any realistic danger seems either not to have occurred to anyone, or to have been rejected as too similar to what was in place under George W. Bush.
Harsh political reality thus far has prevented Obama from releasing prisoners at Guantanamo, notwithstanding his pledge to close that facility, indeed his order that it be closed—because they are simply too dangerous to release. He has determined that henceforth no new prisoners will be brought to Guantanamo and the only prisoners who remain there will be the legacy of his predecessor. Klaidman portrays the president as far more concerned with the imagined excesses of the war on terror than with the consequences of another attack. And he fears his possible successors as well. Discussing the possible use of detention power, Obama has supposedly said: “You never know who is going to be president four years from now. I have to think about how Mitt Romney would use that power.”
The options now in place for dealing with terrorists who obey no laws of war is that they will be either killed by remotely piloted drones or captured and tried and thereby treated better than lawful combatants who obey the laws of war. So the administration that wears its concern for human rights on the sleeve of its military has defaulted to kill rather than capture. The introduction of drone technology was the achievement of then Defense Secretary Robert Gates, initially motivated in part by budgetary constraints; however, the technology was not as developed nor its use as widespread during the Bush administration as it has become during Obama’s tenure. Thus, drones do not bear the dreaded Bush trademark. An administration that seeks at all costs to avoid being identified with its predecessor—even to the point of substituting the terms “unlawful enemy combatant,” used in legal literature for about a century, for “unprivileged enemy belligerent” and “foreign contingency operation” for “war”—feels comfortable, unlike its predecessor, having lethal force as its default enforcement method.
The president’s take on Islamism emerges as a fabric of platitudes: Obama’s “cosmopolitan background…gave him a more visceral feel [than his predecessor had] for how much of the world lived—and how they viewed America.” He had traveled abroad to visit his relatives and spent three weeks in Karachi, “a sprawling, congested city throbbing with sectarian strife.” “These experiences helped shape Obama’s belief that what most people around the world desired was adequate food, shelter, and security—lives of dignity, free of the daily humiliations of poverty and ignorance. They were the basis for a coherent set of views about the roots of Islamic rage and the underlying conditions that breed Islamic extremism—the economic despair, the social and political dysfunction that lead young men to become terrorists.” As portrayed here, the president does not seem to have factored into his “coherent set of views” that Osama bin Laden was a millionaire many times over; or that Mohammed Atta, the lead operative in the September 11 attacks, was an upper-middle-class university student, as were other participants in that atrocity; or that those who plotted in 2007 to blow up the Glasgow airport were physicians, as is Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri; or that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to detonate himself and his fellow passengers aboard an airplane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, was the son of a Nigerian cabinet minister; or that those implicated in plots in the UK are principally those born there who had no connection to a city “throbbing with sectarian strife.”
Nor does the book contain any hint that the president may have considered the possibility that “Islamic rage” and “Islamic extremism” may have some connection to Islam.
President Obama is not the only actor in Klaidman’s book. There was, it seems, a struggle for the soul of his presidency between what Klaidman calls the “Tammany Hall” element, led principally by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and representing the forces of political expediency, and “the Aspen Institute” element, led by State Department legal adviser and former Yale Law School dean Harold Koh, representing the forces of high-minded idealism.
Koh is shown wielding influence that far outstrips his rank because President Obama values his academic heft in pushing the debate leftward. He is described as having “an enormous intellect” and a background congenial to the president, a “former constitutional law professor himself.”
Koh’s lofty disdain, moreover, for settled notions of process—he tried to get the deputy attorney general to take away from Solicitor General Elena Kagan the authority inherent in her office to determine the government’s litigation position in certain detainee cases because he disagreed with her views—appears to resonate with the president’s own approach to governance. Thus, in the summer of 2009, the president convened a meeting at the White House in which Koh was invited to brief him and certain others in the administration on issues relating to detention. This was a meeting to which others with a stake in that issue, including the CIA and the Defense Department, were not invited, apparently so that Koh could try to influence the president without the inconvenience of contrary views.
Koh’s presentation as described here was less an intellectually disciplined briefing than a locker room pep talk, ending with, “Don’t let the past control the future.” Klaidman summons the characteristic eloquence of Vice President Joe Biden, in memorable prose uttered after the president left the room, to establish that the pep talk seemed to have worked: “‘You f—king did it,’ the vice president said, jabbing Koh in the chest. ‘You f—king connected with him, and that’s not easy.’”
Although Klaidman blandly describes this episode as “a departure from protocol that ruffled some feathers,” it was actually a fundamental departure from basic rules of the road that normally define how decisions are taken on matters of national concern. Such rules—prosaically referred to as the “inter-agency process”—are designed to assure that those with a stake in any such decision participate in a way that assures both that the president will get the benefit of their advice, and that they will be able to go forward at least with an understanding of how and why a result they may oppose was reached. Disdain for that process results in not only sloppy execution, but also bad decisions, and it raises serious questions about the competence of those who are supposed to be in charge.
Such disdain, and such results, are on gaudy display here. A case in point is the decision made in November 2009 to abort the military-commission trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and transfer him to a civilian Article III court in Manhattan—this, when KSM already had announced his intention to plead guilty and proceed to sentencing and, presumably, martyrdom. Attorney General Eric Holder sought and received the authority to decide where the Guantanamo detainees would be tried once the prison was closed. This was true even in those cases in which military-commission proceedings had already commenced—notwithstanding that all detainees were in the formal legal custody of the Department of Defense, not the Department of Justice. Holder first made his leaning toward a civilian court known to Obama while the two were watching the fireworks on July 4, 2009, from a terrace at the White House. “It’s your call, you’re the attorney general,” the president responded.
That result was in full accord with the preference of Harold Koh, expressed in terms not of rigorous jurisprudence, but of pop psychology. To try KSM in Manhattan, according to Koh, would “‘show confidence in our system,’ it would be a ‘redemptive act’ precisely because it is what the terrorists don’t want us to do.” Yet, whatever Koh’s “enormous intellect” may have revealed about what terrorists might want, actual events demonstrate that real terrorists often show a decided preference for making a hash out of legal processes by turning them into political theater. That was what we learned from the year-long circus that was the sentencing proceeding in a civilian court of Zacarias Moussaoui following his guilty plea as the so-called 20th hijacker. Tossing terrorists into the civilian legal system because they are purportedly afraid of it is rather like tossing Brer Rabbit into the briar patch because he purportedly was afraid of it—and it’s likely to yield the same success.
By the time Holder announced that KSM would be tried in New York, he had not discussed the decision with anyone who would face its consequences, notably local authorities in New York, who turned against it when they came to realize the chaos such a proceeding would bring to lower Manhattan. Klaidman describes some of the episodes that marked the course from the announcement of that decision in November 2009 to the announcement in April 2011 that it had been reversed. Along the way, Holder provided the curious assurance to the Senate that, the niceties of due process notwithstanding, a conviction in the KSM trial was assured. There was also the near acquittal of a defendant brought to New York from Guantanamo and charged in the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, a proceeding that was supposed to illustrate the near certainty of convictions in civilian terrorism trials but wound up so rattling Congress that it passed a statute barring the use of any funds to bring defendants from Guantanamo to trial in the United States. That is what necessitated Holder’s retreat.
These episodes included a squabble among Holder, Koh, and Emanuel at a White House meeting that ended with what Klaidman describes as the president’s attempt “to lead his team to higher ground,” but winds up in the telling as a descent into bathos. The president read aloud from the oration of the judge who sentenced would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid; the judge told Reid he was “not a soldier” and “no big deal” and then reached through fractured paraphrase for the eloquence of John F. Kennedy (“we will bear any burden, pay any price, to preserve our freedoms”) and Abraham Lincoln (“the world is not going to long remember what you or I say here”), only to achieve principally the grandiloquence of Douglas MacArthur (“See that flag, Mr. Reid?…That flag will fly there long after this is all forgotten”). As Klaidman describes it:
Obama put down the speech and looked around the room. He didn’t fix his gaze on anyone in particular; he just stared for several moments. Then he spoke. “Why can’t I give that speech?” Without another word, he rose and walked out of the room.
No less disconcerting is Klaidman’s account of how the attorney general decided to open—or reopen—an investigation into whether CIA agents had committed crimes when they questioned some high-value detainees using “enhanced interrogation techniques.” That dreadfully inartistic term falsely suggested the concealment of unspeakable criminality, but in fact, the techniques were analyzed in detailed legal memos by Justice Department lawyers that, although revised at least once, concluded uniformly that they violated no standards applicable when the memos were written. Even more notably, these techniques had not been used since 2003. Holder, over the objection of every living former CIA director and the then incumbent director, Leon Panetta, released those memos.
When the public outrage Holder expected failed to materialize, he pressed on with investigations of the intelligence officers who carried out the interrogations. Career prosecutors in the eastern district of Virginia had investigated each instance of claimed unlawfulness and had concluded that none merited prosecution, drafting detailed memoranda describing their conclusions and the reasons for closing each of the investigations. Holder, by his own account in testimony, and by the account in this book, never read those memoranda. Moreover, he was well aware that such an investigation could damage morale within the agency, not to mention the damage it could cause to the careers of those under investigation regardless of the outcome—which came years later when the reopened investigations were closed again for lack of evidence of illegality.
What motivated him to press the issue? By Klaidman’s account, Holder was influenced strongly by an article in Vanity Fair by Christopher Hitchens, who had volunteered to be waterboarded and videotaped his experience of the procedure. Waterboarding was the most celebrated and severe of the CIA techniques and had been imposed on precisely three senior al-Qaeda terrorists. After his own experiment, Hitchens wrote an article pronouncing the technique torture.
The word torture, in addition to being a handy epithet, is defined in the applicable statute that criminalizes torture as acting under color of law with the specific intent to cause “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” “Severe mental pain or suffering” is defined as “prolonged mental harm” resulting from any of several causes, including “severe physical pain or suffering” or the threat thereof, or the threat of imminent death; “severe physical pain or suffering” is not defined. Hitchens, a talented journalist and critic whose renown as a drinker matched his renown as an atheist, never claimed to have consulted the applicable law or to have experienced any prolonged effects from his ordeal; he simply announced that what he had experienced was torture. According to Klaidman, Holder watched the video of Hitchens’s experience, which showed that Hitchens had “lasted for fewer than 10 seconds before asking for mercy” and was “both mesmerized and repulsed.”
Klaidman says Holder was so dogged because he carried a lingering sense of guilt from the time of his service as deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration when he had helped bring about the pardon of Marc Rich, a financier charged with tax evasion whose wife had contributed huge sums to the Clinton campaign and library. (Notably, although unmentioned in this book, Holder failed on that occasion as well to consult with prosecutors in his own department who had brought the Rich prosecution.)
So there you have it. The chief law-enforcement officer of the United States knowingly damaged morale in the nation’s principal intelligence agency by reopening investigations previously closed by career prosecutors within his own department without bothering to read why they did so. Holder acted on the strength of a fewer-than-10-second simulation of waterboarding performed on a writer devoid of any acquaintance with the law, and on his own guilty conscience over a previous lifting of tax-evasion charges in a case in which he also did not bother to determine why career prosecutors in his own department had acted. In so doing, he moved with exquisite efficiency to undermine faith simultaneously in law enforcement and national security.
Klaidman does not disclose his sources for the account he presents, although the book is preceded by two pages entitled “A Note on Sources,” in which he outlines the steps he took to assure accuracy. The only source he appears to deny using directly, and it is a fairly casual denial, is the president himself:
Occasionally I write about the emotional state and interior thoughts of President Obama and his top aides. In doing so, I am not taking literary license. Those accounts are based on reporting—either from specific comments the president has made that directly express his state of mind, or from reasonable inferences from sources I have interviewed who have observed and spoken to him.
The president is portrayed often as maddeningly detached and above the fray, but it is impossible to believe that the accounts of private conversations between him and members of his administration were not cleared with him.
One obvious source is Holder. This emerges not only from such apparent accounts as his one-on-one discussion with Obama about bringing KSM to trial in the United States—a story that could have had only two authoritative sources—but also from less obvious data points. For example, the account of Holder’s friction with Rahm Emanuel consistently portrays Emanuel as unprincipled and narrowly political and Holder as idealistic and thoughtful—always a telling indicator in a behind-the-scenes account.
Consider as well how Klaidman accounts for Holder’s absence from the famous photo of the president, an open-mouthed Hillary Clinton, and others gathered in the White House Situation Room watching in real time the operation that killed Bin Laden:
The operational planning surrounding Bin Laden was known to only a tiny circle of national security officials, on a need-to-know basis. One person who was not brought into the loop was the attorney general. He was Obama’s closest friend on the cabinet and the proposed raid raised important legal questions. But Obama determined that the mission would be a “Title 50 operation,” conducted under the auspices of the CIA. As a covert action, there had already been a legal finding prepared, so additional Justice Department approval was not required.
This excuse makes no sense. Title 50 is that part of the U.S. Code that sets forth, among other things, the authorities of the CIA. It authorizes the agency to enlist the military in the conduct of covert actions when finding that such an action is appropriate has been signed by the president. In this case, that put Leon Panetta, director of the CIA, in command, directing the operation carried out by Navy SEALs overseen by Admiral William McRaven.
But the Bin Laden operation bristled with legal questions, or at least questions that lent themselves to the kind of analysis that lawyers bring to bear, beyond those answered simply by finding that such an operation could be authorized. These included questions relating to mounting such an operation in a country that was a nominal ally of the United States, and ones related to risks, if any, of collateral damage.
Indeed, a memorandum from Panetta that surfaced after the operation disclosed that McRaven’s forces were authorized to do only what had been briefed to the president—without specifying what that was—and that if anything not included in that briefing was encountered, they were required to seek further guidance. The possible need for additional guidance that could have engaged legal questions was and is apparent. That the naked finding necessary to authorize the operation had been made simply does not suffice to explain the attorney general’s absence.
Here’s what does make sense, even though Klaidman does not connect these dots. Holder, he tells us, was regarded by many in the White House as a loose cannon. And his legal pursuit of intelligence officers made certain that his fellow cabinet members at the State Department and the CIA would have every reason to distrust him. That is a far more plausible explanation for Holder’s absence than the suggestion he was kept out of the loop because the he did not have a need to know. That notion simply does not hold water.
In the end, like all insider accounts written with the cooperation of insiders, what we have in Kill or Capture is a portrait the Obama administration wants available as he seeks reelection. This is how Obama and his men wish to be perceived. So beyond the question of whether everything really happened as Klaidman describes lies the key question: Does this portrait of the people close to Obama and the process by which they managed the war on terror recommend four more years of stewardship?
The Obama Administration's PR Campaign for Morsi and the MB
IPT News
November 29, 2012
November 29, 2012
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Be the first of your friends to like this.The elected head of a nation made threatening statements toward Israel. His organization called for jihad and celebrated a bus bombing in Tel Aviv.
The United States then hailed Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi as a statesman and a moderate last week.
True, he did help bring about a cessation of Hamas rocket fire from Gaza. But in doing so, he wasn't trying to advance American objectives or the cause of peace.
Morsi knew avoiding a war in Gaza would help secure $1 billion in debt relief from the United States and an International Monetary Fund loan approaching $5 billion.
All of that makes the high praise Morsi received from the Obama administration unnecessary and counterproductive. And the administration's tepid response to Morsi's subsequent power grab – neutering his country's judiciary – fails to make clear whether there will be consequences if he maintains dictatorial power.
"Mr. Obama told aides he was impressed with the Egyptian leader's pragmatic confidence," The New York Times reported after the Gaza ceasefire Nov. 21. "He sensed an engineer's precision with surprisingly little ideology."
The president and his aides must not have been paying attention. Days earlier, Morsi stood in Cairo's al-Azhar mosque and offered unwavering support to Hamas and threatened Israel with violent retribution.
"Let everyone know that the size of Egypt and the capabilities of Egypt, and the people of Egypt have rage, and the leaders of Egypt are enraged at what is hitting Gaza," Morsi said. "The leaders of Egypt are enraged and are moving to prevent the aggression on the people of Palestine in Gaza."
"We in Egypt stand with Gaza," he said. "[W]e are with them in one trench, that he who hits them, hits us; that this blood which flows from their children, it, it is like the blood flowing from the bodies of our children and our sons, may this never happen."
During a Nov. 19 visit to Shifa Hospital in Gaza, Saad Katatni, chairman of Morsi's Freedom and Justice Party and speaker of Egypt's dissolved parliament, continued issuing violent threats of jihad against Israel, saying:
"We are with you in your jihad. We have come here to send a message from here to the Zionist entity, to the Zionist enemy. And we say to them, Egypt is no longer. Egypt is no longer after the revolution a strategic treasure for you. Egypt was and still is a strategic treasury for our brothers in Palestine; a strategic treasure for Gaza; a strategic treasure for all the oppressed."
The Obama administration has yet to criticize the pro-Hamas, pro-jihad rhetoric from Morsi, Katatni and their Brotherhood associates.
Throughout the conflict, the Muslim Brotherhood – where Morsi had been a senior member before seeking office earlier this year – issued a series of pro-Hamas statements and celebrations of attacks on Israel, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reports.
During a protest organized by the Brotherhood and its political arm in Al-Qalyubi, preacher Muhammad Ragab called on Muslims "to raise the banner of jihad against the tyrannical, invading and wicked sons of apes and pigs [i.e., the Jews], and to unite against the enemies of Allah."
"The MB thanked Allah for the death of Israelis killed by rockets, and called for jihad against Israel," the MEMRI report says. "The official MB Facebook page reported joyously on the deaths of Israelis. On November 15, 2012, the official MB Facebook page celebrated the death of three Israeli civilians killed by a rocket that hit a house in Kiryat Malakhi: 'Allah akbar and praise to god, three Zionists were killed and five others were injured in a blast at a three-story building in Kiryat Malakhi from resistance rockets.'"
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland ducked the issue of violent rhetoric from Morsi and the Brotherhood when a reporter raised it in a Nov. 16 press briefing.
"Well, I'm obviously not, from this podium, going to characterize the Egyptian view, nor am I going to speak for them and characterize our private diplomatic conversations,"Nuland said. "We all agree on the need to de-escalate this conflict, and the question is for everybody to use their influence that they have to try to get there."
The Muslim Brotherhood's hostile rhetoric against Israel continued on Nov. 22 after the cease-fire was reached. Supreme Guide Dr. Mohamed Badie—considered by Middle East intelligence sources to be the real power broker behind Morsi— issued a statement describing jihad against the Jewish state as "a personal obligation for all Muslims."
"The cause of Palestine is of considerable importance. It is not a cause of power, nor of Palestinians, nor of the Arabs, but is the basic cause of life of every Muslim," Badie said."For the sake of its return, every Muslim must wage jihad, sacrifice; and expend his money for the sake of restoring it.
"Palestine and Jerusalem is a holy Muslim land, part of the faith of the Muslim ummah," Badie continued. "To forsake any part of it is to forsake the ummah's civilization and faith. This is a great sin."
The Muslim Brotherhood leader continued, saying that the Jews should not "establish a state for themselves" and should be content living as a minority in other nations.
"The enemy knows nothing but the language of force," Badie said. "Be aware of the game of grand deception with which they depict peace accords."
Morsi Grabs Dictatorial Powers
Cairo's streets filled with angry protesters after Morsi turned around and issued an edict making his decisions immune from judicial review just a day after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised him as a peacemaker.
"I want to thank President Morsi for his personal leadership to de-escalate the situation in Gaza and end the violence. This is a critical moment for the region," Clinton said during a Nov. 21 joint press conference in Cairo with Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr. "Egypt's new government is assuming the responsibility and leadership that has long made this country a cornerstone of regional stability and peace."
Morsi's grab for dictatorial power trampled Egypt's judiciary and gave him unchecked rule over Egypt at least until a new constitution is drafted.
At least 40 people were wounded and a teenager was killed Sunday in the Nile Delta city of Damanhoor when a group of anti-Morsi protesters tried storming the Brotherhood's local offices, the Associated Press reported.
Washington's response has been tepid at best, calling for calm but never criticizing Morsi directly. White House Spokesman Jay Carney was asked directly Monday if the administration "condemned" Morsi's unprecedented power grab.
"We are concerned about it and have raised those concerns," Carney said.
During a press briefing also held Monday, the State Department's Nuland tread lightly. Clinton spoke with Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr that morning, Nuland said, taking "that opportunity to reiterate some of the points that you saw in our statement, that we want to see the constitutional process move forward in a way that does not overly concentrate power in one set of hands, that ensures that rule of law, checks and balances, protection of the rights of all groups in Egypt are upheld, et cetera."
She repeatedly referred back to a statement issued Friday calling for calm in Egypt as a result of Morsi's decree.
U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called on the United States to condemn these actions and demand they be reversed. "Stop. Stop. Renounce the statement, and the move that he just made. Allow the judiciary to function," McCain said. "If the judiciary is flawed in some way, then, that's an illness that can be cured over time. But, absolutely, to assume this kind of power is unacceptable to the United States of America and, then, we can outline what actions might be taken. But, first, condemn it."
Egypt's pro-democracy groups also have called on President Obama to condemn Morsi's decree, but their pleas fell on deaf ears.
"I am waiting to see, I hope soon, a very strong statement of condemnation by the U.S., by Europe and by everybody who really cares about human dignity," said prominent opposition figure Mohamed Elbaradei.
The opposition forces have formed a National Salvation Front in response to Morsi's power grab in attempt to circumvent an impending Islamist takeover of the Egyptian government, referring to the move as a "coup" and Morsi as a "pharaoh."
"I'm against the constitution and the dictatorship of Mr. Morsi," anti-Morsi protester Horeya Naguib told the Associated Press Tuesday amid protests in Tahrir Square. "He is selling his own country and looks out for the interests of his group, not the people of Egypt."
Morsi's decree is his second attempt at consolidating power in five months, first ousting military leaders and invalidating a constitutional declaration that limited his control over Egypt's army.
Egyptian opposition politician Hamdeen Sabahy said that protests would continue until Morsi's decree was reversed, stating that Egypt "will not accept a new dictator because it brought down the old one."
Morsi's Long Support For Hamas
It is worth remembering that the administration has tried to cast the Muslim Brotherhood in a false light of moderation since the early days of the Arab Spring. In February 2011, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared before a House committee and described the group as "a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried Al Qaeda as a perversion of Islam."
That comment was widely derided and Clapper walked it back somewhat. But a series ofArabic translations from the Muslim Brotherhood's official website made by the Investigative Project on Terrorism shows that Morsi worked for years alongside Hamas, which began as a splinter group from Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s.
As a leading Muslim Brotherhood member of Egypt's parliament, Morsi wrote a Sept. 23, 2003 letter to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh thanking God for his survival and declaring his solidarity with Hamas' goal of destroying Israel.
"We thank all of you for your courageous positions in support of our cause, the cause of Palestine – the first Qibla of the Muslims, and your continued support of your brothers on the land of encampment," Morsi wrote, according to Ikhwanonline.com. "We send through you greetings to all our faithful brothers throughout the world, and we assure you that we are we are pledged to God, and we promise you we will continue to the path of jihad and resistance until victory or martyrdom."
In April 2004, Morsi actually led efforts in the Egyptian parliament to scrap the peace treaty with Israel.
The Brotherhood's own website reported that "Dr. Morsi" proposed "a timetable for the disposal of the alleged peace agreement signed with the Zionist entity."
Later that year, Morsi invoked anti-Semitic themes found in the Qur'an and Shariah law, saying the Jews are "the most hostile of men to Muslims" and that "Zionists are traitors to every covenant."
In 2007, he said that he and the Muslim Brotherhood actively supported Palestinian jihadism to annihilate Israel through violent jihad: "[T]he Palestinian issue for the Brotherhood is pivotal and essential, and that the Brotherhood offered and still offers full support for the Palestinian resistance to liberate the Holy Land."
A month later, Morsi participated in a teleconference with Haniyeh, saying "resistance is the right and only way to liberate the land from the defilement of the Jews."
The list goes on and on. Morsi delivered a brief respite in the rocket fire from Gaza toward Israeli civilians. That's a good thing. But pretending this one act somehow transforms him into a statesman, or a reliable international mediator is not. It's reckless.
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