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| Home Front: WoT |
| Willful Blindness |
| 2009-12-30 |
| FP: Andrew C. McCarthy, welcome to Frontpage Interview. Your thoughts on how the Obama administration is handling Abdul Mutallab in comparison to how it handled Hasan? The embarrassing and leaving-us-open-to-terror saga continues? Napolitano, as we know, emerged with some moronic statements. Your thoughts? McCarthy: Jamie, thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure. It would be nice if the government spent half as much energy focusing on what actually catalyzes jihadist terror as it does denying that there is terrorism. This problem is not unique to Obama officials, but this administration is raising willful blindness to a new level. Basically, unless they catch a guy wearing an al Qaeda t-shirt, their default position is that everyone is a lone-wolf with no connection to any larger enterprise — and God forbid that we should ask exactly what it is that somehow inspires all these lone-wolves to attack Americans. In my book, I describe how, right after Sayyid Nosair murdered Meir Kahane in 1990, the first impulse of the NYPD’s chief of detectives was to portray him as a lone, crazed lunatic who was certainly not part of a broader conspiracy and whose religious beliefs were irrelevant — and, as their public statements at the time demonstrate, the FBI went right along publicly with that theory. Of course it was idiotic for Napolitano to say Hasan’s was not an act of terrorism and that there are no indications Mutallab is part of a larger terrorist conspiracy. Already, evidence to the contrary is overwhelming, on both scores. But this is the same error we’ve been making for 20 years. We don’t want to come to grips with the fact that something we can’t control — something we can only fight or surrender to — is causing Muslims to terrorize us. So we pretend the something and the terrorism don’t exist. FP: It appears that former Gitmo detainees released in 2007 may be behind this latest terror effort. The significance? McCarthy: Well, we plainly should not have been releasing jihadist detainees all along, and this obsession to shutter Gitmo is sheer madness. Common sense says that, if even the Obama administration realizes it would be problematic to release the last 200 of them, these remnants must be a very serious national security threat. And yet, less than two weeks ago, we shipped another half-dozen back to Yemen — as a harbinger for what the administration hoped would be the return of dozens more (Yemenis account for about 90 of the remaining 198 or so detainees). That’s nuts. The Yemeni government, while it periodically feigns friendship with the U.S., makes common cause with Qaeda jihadists — using them to help fight Shiite insurgents. The government has a history of releasing and allowing the escape from custody of anti-American terrorists. Sending them to Yemen — as well as to Afghanistan and Somaliland, as we’ve taken to doing — is like sending them right back to bin Laden. The only thing possibly more absurd is the delusion that we can move them away from jihadism by sending them to a Wahhabist re-education course run by the Saudis, who have spent billions of dollars and half a century propagating the ideology that fuels Sunni terrorism. Rest at link |
| Posted by:ed |