By Daniel Greenfield Tuesday, December 15, 2009
The thirteen US soldiers murdered at Fort Hood were killed by the bullets fired by Malik Nidal Hassan, but there were those who helped Nassan fire his bullets, who did everything but hold his gun and pull the trigger for him. The initial FBI review has found that the Justice Department guidelines for opening a criminal investigation were too high, in turn investigators have said that it now requires a very high standard of evidence in order to convict a terrorist plotter.
Pursuing charges before all the evidence is in hand can backfire – suspects have sued authorities before, claiming they were falsely imprisoned victims of witch hunts… Five Muslim immigrants were convicted last year of conspiring to kill U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey, but they were acquitted of attempted murder after prosecutors acknowledged they were probably months away from acting.
...In January 2006, agents watched as a young man suspected of links to terrorists walked out of an Atlanta Home Depot with materials that could be used to make a bomb.
They knew Syed Haris Ahmed had researched bombmaking techniques online and shaved his head, as some jihadis have done before an attack.
However, they decided to wait to arrest him and keep building a stronger case – and risk a potential terror attack.
Not being able to stop a terrorist before he strikes. Not being able to remove Muslims who are engaging in threatening behavior on a plane. Not able to take action against a terrorist plot for fear that the terrorists will be allowed to walk free. That is what the domestic version of the War on Terror looks like today.
Those are the wages of Lawfare, the legal campaign on behalf of terrorists waged by well known liberal legal advocacy groups such as the ACLU, and the much wider base of liberal organizations and newspapers who lobbied on behalf of captured terrorists and republished every single one of their claims of torture… to the extent that the Al Queda manual made it a default for captured terrorists to cry abuse once on trial.
Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard and driver, who was captured together with Al Queda operatives, became a cause celebre for liberals and liberal groups from Amnesty International to People for the American Way to the American Jewish Committee to George Clooney who was interested in making a movie about him and starring as his lawyer. They turned Salim Hamdan into a martyr and breathlessly repeated every single one of his statements. And they won. They won with Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld. And they won again at trial. Hamdan was freed a few months after sentencing to return to Yemen.
The liberal establishment had fought its hardest for Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard… and they won. America lost. That wasn’t the only time they won. From day one every terrorist in Gitmo, every terrorist plotter seized on American soil plotting to murder Americans had the liberal establishment in their corner and fighting on their behalf. From trial lawyers queuing up to defend them to the editorial pages of every liberal newspaper in America clamoring that they had been victimized, that the charges against them were worthless and that America had besmirched itself by not bowing to the wishes of the aforementioned trial lawyers. And they won.
From Abu Ghraib to Gitmo, from Hamdan to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, they won. They successfully smeared US soldiers and interrogators and CIA agents as monsters, torturers and kidnappers. They successfully portrayed Al Queda terrorists as sensitive victims and martyrs of a latter day Gulag. The same press that wouldn’t report on any of Castro’s atrocities a few miles south of Guantanamo Bay if you put a gun to their heads, put on their novelist hats and transformed butchers into loving fathers, and dedicated fanatics into misunderstood patriots. And they won.
From the first when the United States decided to try captured terrorists before military tribunals, passed the Patriot Act and asked public employees to send in tips if they suspected someone of terrorist activity, American liberals rose up with a storm of indignation as if Washington D.C. had been reborn as the capital of Nazi Germany. And they kept it up for eight years, fighting their hardest to see that America lost and the terrorists won. And they got their wish. Any policy taken to stop terrorism, instantly earned their contempt. Any surrender to terrorism, instantly earned their support.
And today they’re still at it again, suing civilian companies who transported captured terrorists and inciting Muslims to act out on flights and sue airlines if any action is taken against them. And their aggressive lawfare unsurprisingly comes at a high cost in American lives. The 13 dead at Fort Hood were murdered as much by the liberal lawfare of the ACLU and the New York Times, as by Nidal Malik Hassan, the Jihadist Major whose career of abusing soldiers and preaching terrorism, they helped spawn.
And the full and complete toll of those killed is only coming, as FBI agents are handcuffed when it comes to investigating Muslim terrorists, forced to hold back and then hold back some more before bringing the case to Federal court, knowing that liberal trial lawyers and Clinton and Carter appointed judges are just champing at the bit to put another terrorist back on the streets.
Sometimes the FBI can stop a terrorist in that golden moment when he has all he needs to carry out his attack and is ready to go—and just before he kills. And if they can’t, then blood splashes and bodies pile up, courtesy of the liberal lawfare being waged against America by terrorism’s Madison Avenue accomplices.
And once law enforcement has folded in the face of terror, targeting private companies ensures that the path of the next wave of terrorists will be clear. Suing airlines helped insure that airline companies would turn the other cheek no matter what Muslim passengers do, as the better choice than having to pay out on discrimination lawsuits accompanied by the negative publicity that comes with being charged with Islamophobia. From the airline’s perspective, if the Muslims turn out to actually be terrorists, their insurance and government bailouts will cover it, and no one will be hurt but the passengers. If they don’t turn out to be terrorists, then again no one will be traumatized but the passengers.
Again liberal lawfare wins and Americans lose, both their liberty and their lives, as the implacable logic of political correctness demands universal measures that deny freedom in general, without being selective enough to actually stop Islamic terrorists. And this fits the agenda of turning the War on Terror against ordinary Americans, while immunizing Muslims as much as possible, thereby turning ordinary Americans against the War on Terror, and handing the terrorists yet another victory.
By planting a stick in the wheels of American national defense at every turn, it becomes an increasingly impossible task to protect America against terrorism, whether by toughening the Rules of Engagement on the battlefield, leaving US troops naked in the field, or by insuring that fear of lawsuits and tough standards will turn the arrest of a terrorist into a race against time, no matter how much advance warning there may be.
If the liberal organizations responsible for this do not actually want terrorists to win, then they have done a perfect facsimile of every course of action that would have been taken anyway by those who actually want the terrorists to win. The distinction then is only one of motivation, between deliberate treason and ideological blindness so thick that its practical consequences are indistinguishable from treason.
When prominent terrorist lawyer Lynn Stewart passed along covert messages to Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, ringleader of the original World Trade Center bombers, from his terrorist followers in Egypt regarding their Egyptian campaign; did she cross a line? If she did, most of the usual suspect organizations who appealed for clemency on her behalf did not seem to think so. And in truth the only difference between what Lynn Stewart did and what her colleagues do day in and day out, is that she broke the letter of the law by helping a terrorist kingpin, while her colleagues help terrorists day in and day out without breaking the letter of the law.
The letter of the law is where liberal lawfare lives, the thick legal line that blindfolds law enforcement and binds the hands of those who would stop the terrorists… for the benefit of the terrorists themselves. The thirteen dead at Ft. Hood are only the latest casualties of liberal lawfare, and they will not be the last.
