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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Justice</title>
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		<title>9/11 and Forgiveness</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joeherring/911-and-forgiveness/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=911-and-forgiveness</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joeherring/911-and-forgiveness/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Sep 2014 04:51:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joe Herring]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[9/11]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[betrayal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fight]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[forgiveness]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Global Faith Institute]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Justice]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=240755</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I'm sorry, but on this 13th anniversary I'm not looking for closure.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/fr.jpeg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240759" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/fr-450x314.jpeg" alt="fr" width="320" height="223" /></a>On a certain day in the very recent past, before the sun had melted the morning into afternoon, I had been told three times that forgiveness was the order of the day for this upcoming 13<sup>th </sup>anniversary of 9/11.  Once was by the carnival barker/news anchor on the television.  I heard it for the second time by a teenager in a television commercial, urging his fellow citizens to commit &#8220;acts of service&#8221; as a means of remembrance.  Lastly, a sign on the marquis outside a church I drove past read, &#8220;Remember, but Forgive.&#8221;</p>
<p>It has always been a difficult concept for a hothead like me to grasp, this forgiveness thing. I know Jesus would, but I&#8217;m no Jesus.  To me, forgiveness is something bestowed on those who erred unintentionally, or through a lapse in judgment, not for those who acted out of a malicious intent to harm or kill.  I can&#8217;t fathom forgiving the rapist of a child or the savage murderer of the innocent and helpless.  It is a good thing that I am not all-powerful, because I would make for a terribly vengeful god.</p>
<p>It was a beautiful day on which I wrote this. The sky was crystalline blue; the air was clear, with a whisper of the coolness of approaching fall.  In fact, it was a near-carbon copy of the weather from thirteen years earlier.  I remember watching the warplanes buzzing over my city like angry hornets on that day, to and fro, with armaments hanging menacingly from their wings.  Only later would I discover that they were performing an over-watch operation, guarding the airspace above the military base south of town, where President George W. Bush had just landed in Air Force One.</p>
<p>I come from a military family and am a veteran myself.  I understand the nature of conflict, and the reasons to avoid it, if possible.  I also realize that conflict is often unavoidable, and at times even preferable to maintaining the status quo.</p>
<p>After the brutal assault we suffered on 9/11/01, we could have maintained our usual pattern of treating terrorism as a police matter and launched an international investigation.  Or we could have followed the fetid and worn advice of the appeasers (who tell us everything is our fault) and simply offered money or a new aid program to assuage the perpetrators of this attack.  Instead, we chose war, and properly so.</p>
<p>Now that the 13<sup>th</sup> anniversary is here, I don&#8217;t feel the catharsis the media tells me I should have experienced by now.  I must be a barbaric freak – some war-loving monkey with a cylindrical brain that recycles the same hatred over and over again, tumbling it like compost until it steams.  I&#8217;m supposed to forgive, and even, according to some commentators from the left, forget that 9/11 happened.  To &#8220;get over ourselves,&#8221; as the &#8220;enlightened&#8221; opine.</p>
<p>It finally occurred to me, though, why I couldn&#8217;t get right with this whole &#8220;forgiveness&#8221; theme.  It struck me why I bristled at the suggestion by President Obama that we declare 9/11 a &#8220;day of service,&#8221; casting about for volunteer opportunities as a way of honoring our dead.  The unrest in my heart was not courtesy of 9/11 itself; it was the tainting of the victory America deserved and earned <em>after</em> 9/11 that spawned my ill ease.</p>
<p>In times past, our remembrances have been predicated on victory, whole and entire.  Such victories are the necessary resolutions of violent conflict.  No one celebrates a stalemate, much less a loss.  WWII was solid.  We won.  Polio was solid.  We beat that, too.  In the Civil War, we lamented the terrible price our countrymen paid, but we celebrated the ultimate supremacy of our Union, and built ever higher on that hard-won foundation.</p>
<p>The War on Terror, like Vietnam, has emerged muddled and unclear, seemingly by design. It is precisely this feeling that the left seeks to engender in us: a sense of haplessness – to have us view our defense as a burden of care that we can&#8217;t wait to lay down.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t want to lay down that burden.  I&#8217;m not looking for closure.  I want to fight.  I want to ratchet up the retribution until the very ground our enemy stands upon screams its submission, and the air itself cracks with the blast of our righteous vengeance.  Our blood-earned victory has been stolen &#8212; and I want it back.</p>
<p>I want those who preach the politics of defeat and appeasement to find themselves shunned at every turn by those of us who still believe that America fights when America is right – and that to accept anything short of victory is to dishonor the sacrifice of the dead and wounded.</p>
<p>War is an ugly and repulsive thing, but it is not as ugly and repulsive as the coward who would lick the hand of his master and thank him for beating him less today than the day before.  America has changed the world in unprecedented ways.  We have shown the common souls of this earth that they are possessed of an inherent worth, granted by a force mightier than any government, and not subject to the whims and designs of men.</p>
<p>Despite our successes, or perhaps because of them, the brutish of the world are fighting back.  Never forget: the default position of humanity has always been brutal oppression and savage war.  America and the ideals of its founding have done more to change that than anything else, save Christianity.</p>
<p>The left wishes us to accept less than winning.  We aren&#8217;t any better than all the other nations of the earth, they tell us.  Well, I think that those on the left are right: <em>they</em> aren&#8217;t any better than all the other nations, but the rest of us are, and we intend to raise a standard to which the righteous and patriotic may aspire.  I say fight on, against all enemies, foreign <em>and</em> domestic.</p>
<p>The &#8220;parade marshal&#8221; of the American left, Barack Obama, marches proudly toward an alternative vision of our nation, leading those who fail to recognize that our strength is built upon action, not apology – goodness in the deed, not merely the intention.</p>
<p>We have earned our victory.  We deserve it as a nation and as a people, and I intend to mark the anniversary of 9/11 with martial pride and a hearty thump of the chest.  Let 9/11 be a day of service for those inclined to servitude.  For me, it will always be a reminder that our safety is only as sure as our strength.  To God the glory; to the rest of us, <em>Semper Fidelis!</em></p>
<p><strong>Joe Herring writes from Omaha, Nebraska and welcomes visitors to his website at <a href="http://www.readmorejoe.com/">www.readmorejoe.com</a>. He is the communications director for the <a href="http://globalfaithinstitute.org/">Global Faith Institute</a>. </strong></p>
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		<item>
		<title>The Lie Behind the Lynch Mob</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/john-perazzo/lynch-mob-rage-based-on-a-lie/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=lynch-mob-rage-based-on-a-lie</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 26 Aug 2014 04:45:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Perazzo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crime]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Justice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Police]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[shootings]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[STATISTICS]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239517</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The remarkable statistics on police shootings and race.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/In-Missouri-Police-Officer-Named-Who-Shot-Michael-Brown.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239519" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/In-Missouri-Police-Officer-Named-Who-Shot-Michael-Brown.jpg" alt="In-Missouri-Police-Officer-Named-Who-Shot-Michael-Brown" width="309" height="268" /></a>Sunday in New York City, Al Sharpton led at least 2,500 marchers in a <a href="http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/08/23/thousands-to-call-for-action-over-death-of-eric-garner-at-staten-island-march-and-rally/">rally</a> condemning “<span style="color: #18181a;">a society where police are automatically excused” for wrongdoing. At issue was </span>the recent death of Eric Garner, a black New Yorker who resisted arrest and subsequently died from what a <a href="http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Eric-Garner-Chokehold-Police-Custody-Cause-of-Death-Staten-Island-Medical-Examiner-269396151.html">medical examiner</a> described as an interplay between a white police officer&#8217;s chokehold and Garner&#8217;s multiple chronic infirmities<span style="color: #343434;">. </span><span style="color: #18181a;">A featured speaker at Sunday&#8217;s demonstration was t</span><span style="color: #272727;">he mother of Amadou Diallo, a black man who was killed in a 1999 shooting by four NYPD officers. “Police cannot judge our sons and execute them for no reason,” she declared. </span></p>
<p><span style="color: #272727;">Yesterday, Sharpton <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/michael-brown-supporters-line-funeral-article-1.1915903">spoke</a> at the funeral of Michael Brown, the b</span>lack teenager who was recently shot and killed by a white policeman in Missouri. Claiming that the police had callously treated Brown &#8220;like his life value didn&#8217;t matter,&#8221; Sharpton called on the congregation to help &#8220;change this country.&#8221; Indeed, Sharpton has <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/michael-brown-shooting/michael-brown-rally-we-have-had-enough-rev-al-sharpton-n182701">vowed</a> to turn Brown&#8217;s death into a <span style="color: #272727;">“defining moment on how this country deals with policing.” His contention is that too many African Americans are being unjustifiably killed in the streets by white police. If he&#8217;s correct, then we&#8217;ve got a monumental national scandal on our hands that surely deserves to be addressed. So </span>let&#8217;s examine the facts and see what they tell us.</p>
<p>The most comprehensive information we have on this issue comes from a landmark 51-page <a href="http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/ph98.pdf"><span style="color: #680900;">report</span></a> published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2001. This study examined incidents where police used deadly force to kill criminal suspects during the 23-year period from 1976 through 1998.[1]  The study did not distinguish between whites and Hispanics,[2] but instead categorized all members of those two demographics as “<a href="https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/publications/doj-report-policing-and-homicide-1976-98/">white</a>.” So, for the moment, let&#8217;s refer to this group as “W&amp;H” (Whites &amp; Hispanics) rather than “whites.”</p>
<p>During the course of the entire 23-year period examined in the study, 56% of all suspects killed by police were W&amp;H, and 42% were black.</p>
<p>Over time, W&amp;H constituted an ever-increasing percentage of those who were killed by police: In 1978, they accounted for 50% of all such killings. By 1988 that figure had climbed to 59%, and by 1998 it stood at 62%.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the trend for African Americans was moving in precisely the opposite direction: In 1978, black suspects were 49% of those killed by police. By 1988, that figure had fallen to 39%. And ten years after that, it stood at 35%.</p>
<p>Most cases where police killed suspects during 1976-98 were same-race incidents: When W&amp;H officers were the killers, the suspects were usually W&amp;H (63%). And when black officers were the killers, the suspects were usually black (81%).</p>
<p>In 1998 specifically, 3.2 out of every 10,000 black officers killed a black suspect sometime that year, whereas only 1.4 out of every 10,000 W&amp;H officers killed a black suspect.</p>
<p>Also in 1998, about 2.8 out of every 10,000 W&amp;H officers killed a W&amp;H suspect sometime that year—<i>double</i> the rate at which W&amp;H officers killed black suspects.</p>
<p>To fill in the data from more recent years, we must turn to a 2011 Bureau of Justice Statistics <a href="http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ard0309st.pdf">study</a> which covers the period from 2003 to 2009. Unlike the earlier study, this one <i>does</i> distinguish between whites and Hispanics.[3] Of all suspects who are known to have been killed by police during the 7-year time frame, 41.7% were white, 31.7% were black, and 20.3% were Hispanic.</p>
<p>It is also worth noting that during the 2003-2009 period—when blacks were 31.7% of all suspects killed by an officer—blacks accounted for about 38.5% of all arrests for violent crimes, which are the types of crimes most likely to trigger a confrontation with police that could result in a fatality.[4]  These numbers do not in any way suggest a lack of restraint by police in their dealings with black suspects. On the contrary, they suggest the opposite.</p>
<p>The bottom line is this: Evidence of systemic racism in police shootings simply doesn&#8217;t exist. Anywhere.</p>
<p>But Al Sharpton and his ideological ilk have no use for facts like these. For Sharpton, the corpses of Michael Brown and Eric Garner are merely props to be exploited for the purpose of advancing the singular agenda he has had for more than 30 years, which is <i>to convince as many people as possible that America is, and always has been, an inherently racist wasteland that needs to be fundamentally transformed—economically, politically, and socially</i>. The facts of any specific case are irrelevant to Sharpton. For him, everything is about the larger agenda.</p>
<p>Nor is this anything new for Sharpton. Way back when this utterly pathetic individual was immersed in his equally pathetic Tawana Brawley “rape” hoax, one of his closest aides, Perry McKinnon—a former police officer, private investigator, and hospital security director—revealed the following: “Sharpton acknowledged to me early on that &#8216;the [Brawley] story do sound like bullsh**, but it don&#8217;t matter. We&#8217;re building a movement. This is the perfect issue. Because you&#8217;ve got whites on blacks. That&#8217;s an easy way to stir up all the deprived people … and all [you've] got to do is convince them that all white people are bad. Then you&#8217;ve got a movement.&#8217;”[5]</p>
<p>A quarter-century later, nothing—<i>absolutely nothing</i>—has changed.</p>
<p><b>NOTES:</b></p>
<p>[1] All calendar years from 1976 through 1998 are counted, thus 23 separate calendar years are included in the study. All told, approximately 8,578 suspects were killed by police during those 23 years. The annual totals ranged from a low of 296 to a high of 459. Data for a small handful of states is missing from this study, but the vast majority of police killings nationwide were counted.<br />
[2] “Hispanics” is a broad and nebulous term referring, generally, to people whose heritage can be traced to Spanish-speaking countries. The term was concocted for political purposes in 1970 by the Nixon administration. For an excellent explanation of the term&#8217;s origins and its subsequent ramifications, <a href="http://futureuncertain.blogspot.com/2005/09/how-richard-nixon-invented-hispanics.html"><span style="color: #011480;">click here</span></a>.<br />
[3] The data in this study are not entirely comprehensive, because not every U.S. state reported its overall statistics in every year that was examined. Nevertheless, the ratios uncovered in the report are highly illuminating.<br />
[4] The annual violent-crime arrest statistics for 2003-2009, broken down by race, can be found here: <a href="http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2003/03sec4.pdf">2003</a>, <a href="http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/persons_arrested/table_38-43.html">2004</a>, <a href="http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius/data/table_43.html">2005</a>, <a href="http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/data/table_43.html">2006</a>, <a href="http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2007/data/table_43.html">2007</a>, <a href="http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/data/table_43.html">2008</a>, and <a href="http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_43.html">2009</a>.<b> </b><br />
[5] Richard T. Pienciak, “6 Interviews That Shook Tawana Team,” New York <i>Daily News</i> (June 16, 1988), p.4.</p>
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		<title>Time for a Nuremberg Trial for Hamas and the Pipers of Death</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/giulio-meotti/time-for-a-nuremberg-trial-for-hamas-and-the-pipers-of-death/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=time-for-a-nuremberg-trial-for-hamas-and-the-pipers-of-death</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 06 Dec 2012 04:26:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Giulio Meotti]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[genocide]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=167978</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A war Israel can win -- with help from the West.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/giulio-meotti/time-for-a-nuremberg-trial-for-hamas-and-the-pipers-of-death/hamas11-4/" rel="attachment wp-att-167985"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-167985" title="hamas11" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/hamas11-450x298.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="179" /></a>Back in the 1970s, law expert Yoram Dinstein argued that according to UN definitions, terrorism and incitement against Israelis constituted genocide. That’s why Israel, with the help of a few Western democracies, should set up a Nuremberg-type initiative for Palestinian terror leaders, who must be charged for inciting and committing genocide. In the name of the peremptory principle <em>nullum crimen sine poena</em>, &#8220;No crime without a punishment,” we should prosecute Palestinian terrorists, whether as individuals or entities. They are <em>hostes humani generis</em>, &#8220;common enemies of humankind.&#8221;</p>
<p>The initiative would be a powerful rebuke of the failed International Criminal Court in the Hague, which should have prosecuted these evil leaders and promoters of genocide. The Islamic regimes of the world succeeded in changing the Court’s statute to eliminate terrorism as an offense and, at the same time, to define the Jewish inhabitants of Judea and Samaria as “war criminals.”</p>
<p>If Israel has no right to defend itself from genocidal attacks and the Jews have no right to live in their historic land, then Israel has no right to exist.</p>
<p>The Palestinian Authority tried to submit criminal cases against individual Israeli soldiers and leaders, but the prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said Palestine was not yet a state, and only states could file cases. With the UN General Assembly having upgraded the Palestinians&#8217; status to that of a non-member state, the PA will try to re-file.</p>
<p>The Arab clerics, who describe the Jews as sub-humans with expressions like “pig,” “cancer,” “filth,” “microbes” and “vermin,” should be put on trial for fomenting lethal anti-Jewishness reminiscent of the 1930s. An example of this religious incitement is the fatwa issued by the Muslim Brotherhood’s guru, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, permitting the killing of Jewish fetuses, on the logic that when Jews grow up they might join the Israeli army. Unfortunately, Europe is freeing these clerics, like Abu Qatada, who was recently released by the UK.</p>
<p>The suicide vest costs only $150 for Palestinian terror groups. But it needs &#8220;software&#8221; to operate. This is the role of the clerics who put in motion the robots of death. It&#8217;s like the piper and the rats in the famous Hamelin fairy tale.</p>
<p>The same with the Arab media, which distribute hate material such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or maps without Israel. Western jurisprudence would find these media outlets guilty, like the Nazi war criminal Julius Streicher, who published the anti-Semitic <em>Der Stuermer</em> and was found guilty by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Another example is the trial in which the Rwandan journalists were charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for inciting fellow Hutus to commit genocide against the Tutsis. At the very least, Europe must block the access to these malignant websites and include the journalists on a black list.</p>
<p>The legal basis for the campaign against this hatred is the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, ratified on January 12, 1951.</p>
<p>International tribunals have ruled that hate speech targeting a population based on discriminatory grounds constitutes crimes against humanity per Article 7 of the Rome Statute.</p>
<p>In 2004, three Arab intellectuals, Jawad Hashim, Shakir al-Nabulsi and Lakhdar Lafif, sent a request to the UN Security Council, urging the establishment of an international tribunal for the prosecution of Islamist incitement against Jews, Muslim “apostates” and Christians. Thanks to satellite channels, Hamas’ Al-Aqsa TV can beam its incitement and hatred into European living rooms, radicalizing Muslim immigrants. Israel must ask Europe to turn off this terror offspring, which every evening repeats the same monstrous message: &#8220;The Jewish infidels are less than human, killing them is a meritorious act.&#8221; Words lead to mass murder.</p>
<p>Israel and its Western allies must launch a campaign to charge NGO leaders who commit incitement, enlisting the help of attorneys, journalists and writers to testify on the endless litanies of paranoia and genocidal perversion. Such people risk their careers and lives daily by denouncing the blood libels, and Israel should support them.</p>
<p>Hamas and other incitement leaders should be placed on a “watch list” by Western countries preventing their entrance as “inadmissible persons” (Qaradawi is already banned in the UK and US).</p>
<p>Brave groups, such as UN Watch, can support the battle in global forums. In 2009, a similar campaign prevented Farouk Hosni, the Egyptian minister who said that he “would burn Israeli books himself if found in Egyptian libraries,” from becoming UNESCO&#8217;s head.</p>
<p>Moreover, human rights groups should be flooded with the untold Israeli statistics: the 17,000 people wounded in terror attacks; the 2,000 civilians killed; the 15,000 rockets fired on southern Israeli cities; the fact that some 40% of wounded Israelis will remain with permanent disabilities.</p>
<p>There are wounded Israeli heroes who just want to tell their story. I can provide a list of these maimed fighters who should be invited to speak in the courts because they are the survivors of current-day genocide. In European faculties, there are still brave academicians who can denounce Hamas-supporting speakers among them. We must ask Europe to expel them.</p>
<p>This is an historic battle that Israel can win with the support of Westerners who still care about the fate of their civilization. To the Spanish fascists who were saying, “Viva la muerte!” the Republicans replied: “No pasarán.” We must offer the same response to contemporary death cultists.</p>
<p>No pasarán. They shall not pass.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<slash:comments>44</slash:comments>
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		<title>The Left&#8217;s &#8216;Education Justice&#8217; &#8212; Chicago Teachers on Strike</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/the-lefts-education-justice-chicago-teachers-on-strike/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-lefts-education-justice-chicago-teachers-on-strike</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/the-lefts-education-justice-chicago-teachers-on-strike/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Sep 2012 04:43:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chicago]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Justice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mayor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rahm emanuel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[strike]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[students]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Teachers Union]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=143534</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The real school bullies take to the streets. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/813804_525_380_w.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-143561" title="813804_525_380_w" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/813804_525_380_w.gif" alt="" width="375" height="250" /></a>After a final weekend of fruitless, 11th-hour contract negotiations, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) made good on their long-threatened promise and went <a href="http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/09/13768624-no-school-for-400000-students-as-chicago-teachers-strike?lite">on strike</a> for the first time in 25 years. &#8220;We have failed to reach an agreement that will prevent a labor strike,&#8221; Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Karen Lewis said. “No CTU members will be inside of our schools Monday. We will walk the picket lines, we will talk to parents, we&#8230;will demand a fair contract today, we demand a fair contract now,&#8221; she said, calling the ordeal an &#8220;education justice fight.&#8221; The strike affects 675 schools and more than 400,000 students in the nation&#8217;s third-largest public school system.</p>
<p>After the final Sunday session, Chicago school board President David Vitale <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-chicago-public-schools-chicago-teachers-union-contract-talks-strike,0,2062807.story">spoke</a> with reporters, noting that the district had changed its proposal more than 20 times over the course of negotiations and had little left to offer. The district announced that teachers had been offered a 16 percent pay raise over the course of four years, along with other benefit proposals, including paid maternity leave for the first time. “This is about as much as we can do. There is only so much money in the system,” said Vitale. “This is not a small commitment we&#8217;re handing out at a time when our fiscal situation is really challenged,” he added. Vitale also noted that the latest proposal made by the district would cover four years, at a <a href="http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/09/13768624-no-school-for-400000-students-as-chicago-teachers-strike?lite">cost</a> of $400 million.</p>
<p>Lewis countered that the two sides were not far apart on compensation, a major sticking point exacerbated by the school board&#8217;s unanimous vote last year to rescind the teachers&#8217; 4 percent pay hike in the final year of their contract. Yet she also <a href="http://apnews.myway.com/article/20120910/DA16P42G0.html">said</a> she would not &#8220;prioritize&#8221; the remaining issues. Despite that assertion, the three key issues remaining unresolved appear to be health benefits, the teacher evaluation system, and job security. &#8220;This is a difficult decision and one we hoped we could&#8217;ve avoided,&#8221; Lewis said Sunday. &#8220;Throughout these negotiations, we&#8217;ve remained hopeful but determined. We must do things differently in this city if we are to provide students the education they so rightfully deserve.&#8221;</p>
<p>Lewis and Vitale agreed to meet again Monday and resume talks.</p>
<p>With respect to health benefits the issue is simple: teachers want to maintain the status quo, part of which includes &#8220;banking&#8221; sicks days that cost the system millions of dollars. The teacher evaluation system is a no-go because Lewis claims it would be based too heavily on students&#8217; standardized test scores. This ostensibly makes it unfair to teachers, because it fails to properly consider outside factors that affect student performance, such as poverty, violence and homelessness. “Evaluate us on what we do, not on the lives of our children we do not control,” Lewis said Sunday, <a href="http://www.suntimes.com/15054902-761/chicago-teachers-strike-for-first-time-in-25-years-contingency-sites-ready-charters-remain-open.html">denouncing</a> the online process responsible for training the evaluators. The union also claims such evaluations could cost 6,000 teachers their jobs. The job security issue stems from the fact that the union wants laid off teachers to be <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-08-31/news/ct-edit-strike-20120831_1_cps-teachers-new-teacher-project-school-year">first in line</a> for new jobs. The Chicago Public School system (CPS) wants principals to be able to choose the best teachers.</p>
<p>Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel was <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/10/chicago-teachers-school-b_n_1869477.html">furious.</a> After Lewis addressed the press on Sunday night, it was Emanuel&#8217;s turn. &#8220;This [strike] is totally unnecessary, this is avoidable, and our kids do not deserve this,&#8221; he fumed. &#8220;This is a strike of choice.&#8221; Emanuel contends that only two issues remain unresolved. First, he addressed job security. &#8220;It&#8217;s essential that the local principal who we hold accountable for producing the educational results not be told by the CPS bureaucracy&#8230;and not be told by the union leadership who to hire,&#8221; he said. The second is the aforementioned evaluation system. Emanuel noted that the evaluations would not count in the first year, and the CPS reportedly offered joint implementation of teacher evaluations between itself and the union. &#8220;I&#8217;m telling you, these were the final two issues,&#8221; he said, appearing exasperated.</p>
<p>When he took office last year, Emanuel inherited a school district facing a $700 million budget deficit, which led to the cancellation of the aforementioned 4 percent raises. He then asked the union to reopen its contract and accept 2 percent pay raises in exchange for lengthening the school day, something he had made part of his election campaign. After the union refused, Emanuel attempted to bypass it, taking his case to individual teachers until the union challenged his effort before Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board. The bad blood that arose as a result reportedly prevented the Mayor from being part of the final negotiations that took place on Sunday.</p>
<p>As a result of the impasse, the system&#8217;s 26,000 teachers and support staff began manning picket lines early Monday morning. &#8220;Rahm says cut back, we say fight back,&#8221; said picketers outside CPS headquarters. CPS officials implemented their “Children First” <a href="http://www.suntimes.com/15054902-761/chicago-teachers-strike-for-first-time-in-25-years-contingency-sites-ready-charters-remain-open.html">contingency</a> plan, keeping 144 schools open between 8:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. in order to provide children with lunch and breakfast in a district where many students receive free meals. They also asked community organizations for help, and a number of churches, libraries and other organizations pitched in to provide activities for some of the children. “The response has been extraordinary, truly extraordinary,” Vitale said Sunday night. “Chicagoans should be proud of how their city has responded to the needs of kids.”</p>
<p>But the likelihood is that many of Chicago&#8217;s students will take to the streets, a reality for which Police Chief Garry McCarthy was reportedly prepared. &#8220;We&#8217;re emptying out our offices,&#8221; he <a href="http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/chicago-teachers-union-strike-public-schools-police-response-169131866.html">said</a> at a Sunday night press conference at the Harold Washington Library. &#8220;We&#8217;re taking officers who are on administrative duties&#8211;we&#8217;re shutting down administrative duties&#8211;we&#8217;re putting those officers on the streets to deal with potential protests at various locations throughout the city.&#8221; McCarthy&#8217;s main goals are maintaining security at the Safe Haven Sites throughout the city, dealing with the inevitable picket line protests, and keeping a watchful eye on the thousands of kids likely to hit the streets in a city already wracked by street violence all summer.</p>
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		<title>Major Nidal Hasan’s Beard</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/lloyd-billingsley/major-nidal-hasan%e2%80%99s-beard/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=major-nidal-hasan%25e2%2580%2599s-beard</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/lloyd-billingsley/major-nidal-hasan%e2%80%99s-beard/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 25 Jun 2012 04:15:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fort hood shooter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Justice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Major Nidal Malik Hasan]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=135713</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Justice delayed for “alleged” Fort Hood shooter.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/fh.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-135717" title="fh" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/fh.jpg" alt="" width="336" height="261" /></a>This week military judge Gregory Gross barred Major Nidal Malik Hasan from appearing in court because he has <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-fort-hood-trial-beard-20120619,0,1402646.story">refused to shave a beard he reportedly grew as a badge of his deep Islamic faith</a>. The beard, judge Gross said, was a violation of Army policy. As it happens, so were Hasan’s actions in November of 2009 at Fort Hood, Texas.</p>
<p>As <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125750297355533413.html">one of the early press accounts</a> noted, Major Hassan packed a revolver and an FN Herstal pistol, and stuffed the cargo pockets of his camouflage pants full of 20-round ammunition clips. Then he opened fire on U.S. Army soldiers while shouting “<em>Allahu akbar</em>,” or “Allah is great.” In a matter of minutes Hassan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist trained to help soldiers deal with the horrors of war, had killed thirteen and wounded thirty.</p>
<p>He was methodical, aiming carefully at those seeking cover. Kimberly Munley, a police officer married to a Fort Hood soldier, saw Major Hasan chasing a wounded soldier across a courtyard and opened fire on Hasan. He returned fire and hit her twice, but one of her shots nailed Hasan in the chest and took him down. Munley survived the attack but 13 others did not.</p>
<p>Hasan’s victims included Aaron Nemelka, 19, Francheska Velez, 22 and pregnant with her first child, and Michael Cahill, a 62-year-old reservist. The mass shooting was the worst ever to take place on a U.S. military base. Hasan’s commander, Col. Kimberly Kesling, said it was all “a shock.” It shouldn’t have been.</p>
<p>Hasan’s militant brand of Islam was not exactly a secret. He had defended suicide bombings in an internet posting, and he had been giving away personal items. He prepared carefully for the killing spree – both handguns were not military issue – but despite the cries of “Allah is great” military brass gave him the benefit of the doubt on the role his religion, Islam, played in the attack.</p>
<p>It could have been his upcoming deployment to Afghanistan, they said. It didn’t seem that way to soldiers who knew Hasan. It takes a major act of cognitive dissonance to deny that devotion to Islam was a motive. As for the means and opportunity, those are clear, and to paraphrase Rod Steiger from <em>In the Heat of the Night</em>, we have the bodies which are dead. All thirteen of them.</p>
<p>In a case of this magnitude, political correctness and petty military rules about appearance should not interfere with the judicial process. Judge Gross should let Major Hasan keep the beard, and allow him to be present in the hearings. As Hasan’s August 20 trial date approaches, the nation would do well to ponder the implications of this episode.</p>
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		<title>Bin Laden’s Death Discomfits Religious Left</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/mark-d-tooley/bin-laden%e2%80%99s-death-discomfits-religious-left/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bin-laden%25e2%2580%2599s-death-discomfits-religious-left</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/mark-d-tooley/bin-laden%e2%80%99s-death-discomfits-religious-left/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 09 May 2011 04:05:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark D. Tooley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[act of vengeance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anglican bishop]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[civil rulers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[global publicity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Justice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Laden]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lambeth palace]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Osama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[violence]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=92573</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Secretly pining for Osama.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/RowanWilliams.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-92577" title="RowanWilliams" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/RowanWilliams.jpg" alt="" width="460" height="276" /></a></p>
<p>From  the safety of his London palace, the Church of England’s Archbishop of  Canterbury is questioning whether the U.S. Navy Seals’ killing of Osama  Bin Laden exemplified “justice.”</p>
<p>“The  killing of an unarmed man is always going to leave a very uncomfortable  feeling because it doesn’t look as if justice is seen to be done,” Rowan  Williams told a press conference at Lambeth Palace.  “I don’t know full  details any more than anyone else does. But I do believe that in such  circumstances when we are faced with someone who was manifestly a war  criminal, in terms of the atrocities inflicted, it is important that  justice is seen to be observed.”</p>
<p>Presumably,  the Archbishop discerns “justice” in a decades-long captivity for Bin  Laden, which may or may not have involved a billion dollar show trial,  and endless controversy over the trial’s and the incarceration’s  location, not to mention reams of endless global publicity for Bin  Laden’s genocidal version of Islamism.</p>
<p>Williams’  concerns were echoed by fellow Anglican Bishop of Winchester Michael  Scott-Joynt, who criticized Bin Laden’s killing as “an act of vengeance”  that might provoke reprisals against Christians.  When St. Paul wrote  that that civil “rulers” are the “ministers of God” who “beareth not the  sword in vain” and who are a “revenger to execute wrath upon him that  doeth evil,” was the Apostle advocating “vengeance?”  Of a sorts, yes,  since he declared that rulers, when performing properly, are divine  instruments for God’s legitimate vengeance upon evil doing.  But  religious leftists are uncomfortable about talk of human evil,  preferring to spin their utopians dreams from ecclesial palaces,  seminary campuses, and insulated, endowed pulpits.</p>
<p>In  some contrast to the British bishops, U.S., religious leftists, so far,  mostly have demurred from directly criticizing the U.S. strike against  the terrorist mastermind.  Instead, they have fretted over the  supposedly frightful crowds of young celebrants who rejoiced over bin  Laden’s demise outside the White House, in New York’s Times Square, and  in Harvard Yard.</p>
<p>Himself visiting in Britain when Bin Laden died, Emergent Church guru Brian McLaren tut-tutted over disturbing scenes of “American  college students reveling outside the White House, shouting, chanting  ‘USA’ and spilling beer.”  He shared his embarrassment as an American,  since “this image does not reflect well on my country, especially in  contrast to the images that have been so strong here in recent days &#8230;  revelers celebrating a wedding.”  And he further intoned:  “Joyfully  celebrating the killing of a killer who joyfully celebrated killing  carries an irony that I hope will not be lost on us. Are we learning  anything, or simply spinning harder in the cycle of violence?”</p>
<p>From  the Religious/Evangelical Left’s pacifist perspective, a lawful  government’s execution of a mass murderer who had slain thousands of its  citizens only contributes to the “cycle of violence.”  And presumably  McLaren would have preferred that the college students who waved the  flag for a few hours in the streets on Sunday evening should instead  have penitently withdrawn into prayer closets, to lash themselves for  complicity in American imperialism.</p>
<p>Evangelical Left activist  and Sojourners chief Jim Wallis, who cherishes his ties to the Obama  White House, was more careful in his public angst.  “Pumping our fists  in victory or celebrating in the streets is probably not the best  Christian response to anyone’s death, even the death of a dangerous and  violent enemy,” he wrote for CNN’s religion blog.  “The chants of ‘USA,  USA, USA’ are also not the best mantra for believers who should know  that they are meant to be Christians first and Americans second.”  So is  any exuberant expression of patriotic joy by definition an idolatrous  exaltation of nation over God?  For religious leftists like Wallis, the  answer is likely yes.  Wallis also complained that U.S. Christians have  valued innocent American lives “more than the innocents who were in the  way of our wars in response to the attacks against us.”   Certainly  Christians esteem all human life as sacred to God.  But just as parents  have special responsibility for their own children, even while wishing  well to everyone’s children, do not nations, especially governments,  have a special responsibility for the people over which Providence has  assigned them unique authority?  This point eludes trans-nationalists  like Wallis.</p>
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		<title>Leftist Tears For Bin Laden</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/daniel-flynn/leftist-tears-for-bin-laden/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=leftist-tears-for-bin-laden</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/daniel-flynn/leftist-tears-for-bin-laden/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 05 May 2011 04:45:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[curtis doebbler]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[human rights lawyer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Justice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[killing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mainstream sources]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mental meanderings]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muslim traditions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Osama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[West]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=92310</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The progressive faith's hatred is on full display.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/flanders.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-92311" title="flanders" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/flanders.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="278" /></a></p>
<p>“The West is now celebrating the death of someone who, however misled  and wrong-minded, was a person who was willing to fight for the poorest  and the most vulnerable people in the world to the very end of his  life,” <a href="http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContentP/4/11269/Opinion/The-illegal-killing-of-Osama-Bin-Laden.aspx">writes Curtis Doebbler</a>,  an American-born “human rights” lawyer who teaches at a Palestinian  university. Doebbler cites “anecdotal evidence” that “Osama Bin Laden’s  body was desecrated by over enthusiastic American soldiers” and that  “Muslim traditions of respect for women were flaunted by male American  soldiers who molested Muslim women in the heat of the operation. The US  actions concerning Osama Bin Laden’s body look merely like the work of  criminals trying to dispose of the evidence of their crime.”</p>
<p>Was the crime killing nearly three thousand people at the World Trade  Center, the Pentagon, and in rural Pennsylvania, or was it killing the  killer of nearly three thousand people at the World Trade Center, the  Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania?</p>
<p>Though the lawyer’s scribbles may be dismissed as the mental  meanderings of a lone fanatic, a perusal of more mainstream sources  divulge similarly crankish reactions to the elimination of Osama bin  Laden. One needn’t get muddy in the Internet’s fever swamps to encounter  such lunacy. The bishop’s pulpit, the prime minister’s platform, the  professor’s lectern, the radio host’s microphone, and the newspaper  columnist’s pen yield disturbing evidence that, nearly ten years into  the war on terrorism, the Left still sticks to a script that casts  America as the bad guy.</p>
<p>“Killing Osama bin Laden outright—that’s vengeance or something else,” writes Dan Rodricks, a columnist for the <em>Baltimore Sun</em>.  “It’s not justice, and President Obama knows better.” Rodricks used the  killing of the world’s most successful terrorist as an occasion to  blast the president’s reluctance, campaign promises aside, to close the  Guantanamo Bay detention center and abolish military tribunals for  alleged terrorists. Rodricks reminds that “even the cops have to obey  the law” in an effort to portray the military operation against bin  Laden as illegal. “The idea—and it’s a grand old idea—is to bring  fugitives to justice, not shoot them as they rise from slumber.”</p>
<p>Laura Flanders blogged at <em>The Nation</em>’s website that Sunday’s  raid shows “how changed we are: no arrest, no trial.” Shifting logic  180-degress, Flanders continued that “where we are today feels like  where we were…on 9/11 itself. Americans seeking sense and getting  vengeance. Seeking connection and finding mostly media-fed jingoism.”</p>
<p>Ignoring (among much else) al-Qaeda’s campaign of bombings in Iraq,  left-wing radio host Mike Malloy broadcast that “bin Laden really didn’t  have anything to do—Did he?—with Iraq” and “his only relationship to  Afghanistan was geographical…. So when does Seal Unit Six, or whatever  it is called, drop in on George W. Bush? Bush was responsible for a lot  more death— innocent death—than bin Laden.”</p>
<p>Across the Atlantic, the condemnations of the bin Laden operation  have been predictably louder, and from more prominent personages.</p>
<p>“The reality is we are behaving much more in the sense of revenge  than seeking the kind of dealings that could reasonably be described as  justice,” opines Michael Scott-Joynt, Bishop of Winchester for the  Church of England. On the Christmas following 9/11, the Right Reverend  delivered “This Terror Is a Judgment Upon Us,” a sermon blaming the  First World’s extravagance at the expense of the Third World for that  year’s atrocity.</p>
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		<title>An Unholy Marriage</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/david-solway/an-unholy-marriage/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=an-unholy-marriage</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/david-solway/an-unholy-marriage/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 25 Apr 2011 04:30:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[brain cramp]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cause]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[chief beneficiaries]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[constitutive factors]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islam the religion of peace]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Justice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tyrannical oppression]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=91219</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Sleeping with the enemy is never a good idea.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/vittorio2.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-91228" title="vittorio" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/vittorio2.jpg" alt="" width="391" height="301" /></a></p>
<p>One of the most profound conundrums of our time is the passionate love affair carried on by the young inheritors of the liberal and presumably enlightened West with the totalitarian specimens of the Arab Middle East. They tend to be meltingly soft on Islam—the “religion of peace”—and, obviously, the chief beneficiaries of their misplaced adoration are the Palestinians. Our fellow travelers arrive in the Middle East’s ideological swamp where the terrorists eagerly await them, like crocodiles passing the mustard. Why Western advocates for justice, peace and democracy, as they like to style themselves, believe it could be otherwise almost beggars comprehension.</p>
<p>Is it a case of chronic and pervasive brain cramp among a media-and university-indoctrinated class of adolescent donzels, fueled by the faux idealism of miseducated youth? Today’s youth, as is common knowledge, is mainly oriented toward the dreamscape of the utopian left, which sees reality as a binomial <em>construct</em>: evil here in the world we inhabit, good there in the world to come. And the glorious world to come is already prefigured in Gaza and the West Bank where revolutionary “heroes” fight against tyrannical oppression in the name of freedom and justice. Thus a cohort of our young people, accompanied in many instances by their stunted elders, cluster under the banner of a spurious humanitarianism and sail away or troop off to join their imagined partners in the quest for a better future.</p>
<p>Or does it go deeper than merely arrested development? Is Jamie Glazov right in his <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/how-vittorio-arrigoni-went-to-gaza-hoping-to-die/?singlepage=true">analysis</a> of the constitutive factors of leftist utopian thinking, which he regards as predicated on the loss of a sustaining identity or, essentially the same thing in its effect, the repudiation of an unwanted self? According to Glazov, there arises as a result a compelling need to fill the vacancy by committing to a large and powerful collective that promises to restore a sense of meaning, purpose and value to the empty shell of an absconding or rejected self. “This psychological dynamic,” Glazov writes, “involves <em>negative identification</em> whereby a person who has failed to identify positively with his own environment subjugates his individuality to a powerful, authoritarian entity, through which he vicariously experiences a feeling of power and purpose.” As Erich Fromm points out in his definitive study of the integrals of self-abdication, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Freedom-Erich-Fromm/dp/0805031499/ref=sr_1_1_title_0_main?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1303301174&amp;sr=1-1">Escape From Freedom</a></em>, what we are witnessing is the “craving for power over men and the longing for submission to an overwhelmingly strong outside power.” The paradox is only apparent.</p>
<p>More likely, the various elements we are considering are not mutually exclusive but readily combine in an explosive mixture of immaturity, ignorance, and surrender of the will, leavened by the illusion of noble self-sacrifice to a higher cause. And today that cause is chiefly associated with the blatantly false Palestinian narrative of historical innocence, brutal victimization at the hands of Zionist irredentism, and the justification of terrorism under the name of “resistance.” A potent and ever-serviceable strain of antisemitism, cloaking itself as anti-Zionism, also plays into this malignant amalgam of righteous vindictiveness. The callowness of youth prolonged, the emptiness of the self and the ancestral hostility toward Jews together form the principal ingredients of this devil’s brew.</p>
<p>Take for example the “martyred” 23-year-old Rachel Corrie, a member of the antisemitic International Solidarity Movement, who threw herself in front of an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza where she was protesting the demolition of a terrorist’s house. Corrie, recently the subject of a venomously <a href="http://cifwatch.com/2010/07/29/katharine-viner-nails-her-colors-to-the-mast-head-2/">anti-Israeli play</a> co-written by <em>Guardian</em> editor Katherine Viner, has become the antisemite’s answer to Anne Frank, the new suffering heroine who, as the putative victim of the Jewish state, cancels out the Jewish claim to the world’s sympathy and understanding. The fact that Corrie’s death was self-inflicted in the service of a dubious and ill-considered cause, and under circumstances that have been cleverly manipulated to appeal to the uninstructed “morality” of a gullible public, is of no account to the antisemitic left. In fact, it is its <em>modus operandi</em>.</p>
<p>The left’s response to the fate of Corrie’s successor was equally “correct” and opportunistic. When, on August 10, 2006, 24-year-old Angelo Frammartino was stabbed to death by a Palestinian Arab in East Jerusalem, the NGO he worked for, ARCI (or Active Citizenship Network), issued a statement describing the incident, not as “a terrorist attack, or a manifestation of ethnic hatred” but as “a worrying symptom of the ever-worsening socioeconomic crisis in the marginalized areas of East Jerusalem.” The idiocy of this whitewash was only enhanced by the irony of a letter Frammartino had sent to an Italian newspaper several months earlier in which he regretted, among other things, “the blood of Palestinian youths from the first intifada.”</p>
<p>Similarly, a group going by the name of The Palestinian Civil Society Organizations exonerated the killer by laying the blame on Israel, rehashing the usual boilerplate of “massacres against Palestinian and Lebanese civilians” and “grave human rights violations committed by the Israeli Occupation.” The killer was plainly so upset by the Israelis that he decided to murder an Italian. These muddled equations constitute standard reasoning in the minds of the Palestinians’ besotted suitors.</p>
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		<title>Obama-Style Socialism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-horowitz/obama-style-socialism-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-style-socialism-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 03 May 2010 04:15:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Is the president a "neo-socialist"?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/obamunism.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-59418" title="obamunism" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/obamunism.gif" alt="" width="340" height="272" /></a><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/">Visit NewsRealBlog</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0767917189?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0767917189" target="_blank">Jonah Goldberg</a> has written <a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/what-kind-of-socialist-is-barack-obama--15421?page=all">an important article</a> in <em>Commentary</em> on what he calls the <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1511" target="_blank">“neo-socialism”</a> of the <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1511" target="_blank">Obama administration</a>. I like this label. It is both accurate and more palatable than the term <a href="http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=18423" target="_blank">“neo-communism”</a> which I have applied to the hard left. But given the twenty-year political partnership between <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2169" target="_blank">a neo-Communist</a> like <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2169" target="_blank">Billy Ayers</a> and Obama, and Obama’s coterie of <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2323" target="_blank">Communist Party mentors</a> and allies, it is at bottom a distinction without a difference.</p>
<p>Neo-socialists are fellow travelers of neo-Communists and  vice-versa. The real division in the modern world is between totalitarians and <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=731" target="_blank">libertarians</a>, and pivot of this division is the inherent conflict between liberty and equality. Since people are born unequal (in talent, capability, brain power and physical beauty and prowess) and since they develop unequally through circumstance, the only way to make them equal is <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2042" target="_blank">to take away everyone’s liberty</a>. And of course this will not make them equal because those who get to decide who is made equal and at what pace constitute a new and oppressing ruling class.</p>
<p>This truth is <a title="Read The Politics of Bad Faith for more on this" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684856794?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0684856794" target="_blank">the focus of Federalist Paper #10 and is enshrined in the Constitution</a> which is why every leftist is at war with it and is dedicated to rewriting it. So-called progressives are the 21st Century’s true reactionaries who have failed to learn the lessons of the most horrific social experiment ever inflicted on the human race which murdered 100 million people and destroyed the lives of billions. The term “neo-socialism” attaches them to that awful legacy and serves as a warning to present and future generations of the price that will be paid to achieve <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=160&amp;type=issue" target="_blank">“social justice”</a> and also of the fact that the pursuit “social justice” is an evil fantasy which can never be realized.</p>
<p>I have two quibbles with Jonah’s excellent piece. First, it was Rousseau (in <em>The Social Contract</em>)  not Babeuf who identified private property as the root of all evil. Second, “social justice” is not a milder socialist impulse — it is in fact a code for communism in the hardest sense. Hayek wrote a brilliant book called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226320839?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0226320839" target="_blank"><em>The Mirage of Social Justice</em></a> which argued that 1) there is no such entity as “society” which distributes wealth. Hence the call for social justice is simply a mask — a fake rationale — for distributing wealth politically and thus arrogating to one political faction totalitarian control of everyone else.</p>
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		<title>Terrorism, Witch Hunting the CIA, and National Security</title>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 30 Apr 2010 04:20:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A unique discussion featuring John Yoo, Marc Thiessen and Andrew McCarthy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/mccarthy.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-59288" title="mccarthy" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/mccarthy.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="276" /></a></p>
<p><em>Editors&#8217; note: At the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Santa Barbara Retreat this past weekend, one of the panels featured John Yoo, Marc Thiessen, and Andrew McCarthy in a fascinating and candid conversation about the effort on the part of Left-legal activists and Democratic Party officials to weaken American security by trying to broadly define as “torture” many of the efforts undertaken by the Bush administration to extract information from captured terrorists that would keep the American homeland safe.  Each of the three was crucially involved in major, behind-the- scenes decisions about national security over the last several years.  Each has remained a steadfast witness to the dangers America faced from terrorists and continues to face from those who would try to punish those who kept us safe since 9/11 &#8212; and, by so doing, to make us vulnerable to another attack.</em></p>
<p>David Horowitz Freedom Center<br />
Santa   Barbara, California<br />
April 23<sup>rd</sup> &#8211; 25<sup>th</sup>, 2010<br />
Karen Lugo, John Yoo, Marc Thiessen, Andrew McCarthy<br />
<strong>To watch the video, <a href="http://www.davidhorowitztv.com/retreat/2010/296-courts">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo</strong>: First, I’d like to do a quick little, proud and very shameless plug for Muffin and Paul Vallely’s Soldiers Memorial Fund.  If you have not yet purchased your Swarovski crystal for the ladies, or men’s lapel pin, please see Paul and Muffin Vallely over there.</p>
<p>This panel that is about to present some thoughts and ideas, first on the problem, and then second, hopefully, a little bit about the solution &#8212; we’ve changed our title for today.  Originally, we were going to be addressing something about America or terrorism in the courts.  And so, we’ve expanded the title so that our panelists will be able to address a broader range of issues within the age of Obama.  And the subtopic is &#8212; when foes are treated like friends, when allies are alienated, and when jihad is not a word.</p>
<p>I think that when many of us originally heard that President Reagan had said that democracy, potentially, is always just one generation away from extinction; it was kind of recognized as a profound truth.  But many of us have had an epiphany within the last year, in acknowledging that it will be our generation that will be challenged to respond to this truth.  It will be our generation that must educate our peers &#8212; and, importantly, educate our children &#8212; as to what it is that’s at stake, and how that within one generation, we do stand to lose treasured, fundamental and irreplaceable liberties if we do not act &#8212; and that is, act between now and the next election in November.</p>
<p>We that fight Obama’s statist agenda of domestic entitlement and international appeasement have surely first recognized what Obama and Congress are destroying.  As we are the great resistance, and a rising army of patriots, we have learned of our extraordinary heritage of Judeo-Christian-inspired consensual government and a culture that once inspired initiative and independence.  We know the importance of keeping commitments to our allies and commanding respect &#8212; and, yes, some fear &#8212; in potential enemies.  We will hold our President accountable for the common defense of the nation.</p>
<p>Today, our panelists will discuss where this age of Obama is taking us, both in terms of domestic national security and international foreign policy standing.  You are all undoubtedly very aware of their backgrounds.  You’ve seen many of them on Fox News and read them, probably, almost daily.</p>
<p>So what I’d like to do is especially recognize books that they’ve written and that two of the authors will have for sale here  at the conference this weekend.  These three books &#8212; if that was all one would read between now and the election &#8212; could serve as a blueprint for America’s awakening, if only we read, and share, and educate.</p>
<p>So today, our panelists will share insights as to the challenges we face.  They will also spend a few minutes talking about how they see solutions that may be brought to bear on these challenges.</p>
<p>First of all, I would like to introduce Professor John Yoo.  Professor Yoo joined the Boalt faculty at Berkeley in 1993.  He has clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas of the US Supreme Court and served as General Counsel of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee; also as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the United States Department of Justice, where he worked on issues involving foreign affairs and, yes, also worked on the definition of torture.  His third book, in a trilogy, is called “<em>Crisis in Command</em>.”  It is just out.  And it describes the history of Presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush when faced with national security challenges, and what their Constitutional response was.</p>
<p>I’d also like to say very briefly about John Yoo &#8212; we talk a lot within this organization about education.  And I’ve been privileged to work with John Yoo and his students at Boalt on several projects where we have written amicus briefs to the United States Supreme Court.  He’s worked with students at Boalt, I’ve worked with students at Chapman.  And in fact, this last year, we submitted an important brief on national security issues.  So this is something that is not discussed much.  But to understand that most of these organizations that do such things are on the Left &#8212; and I think we’re one of two or three operations in the United   States that uphold original understanding of the Constitution.  So I’d like to publicly thank John Yoo for that and introduce him now.</p>
<p><strong>John Yoo:</strong> Well, I’d like to thank Karen, and David Horowitz, for the invitation to come spend the morning with you.  I welcome any chance to leave the People’s Republic of Berkeley and venture to more conservative places, like Santa Barbara.</p>
<p>It’s also a great honor to be here.  Because finally, for the first time in my life, I get to be the most liberal person on a panel. This will probably be the first and last time that’s ever going to happen to me.</p>
<p>Before I start, I’d like to address a question that pretty much almost everyone I met during the cocktail hour last night asked me about, which is how did I beat John Stewart on “The Daily Show?”  So for those of you who didn’t see my appearance &#8212; and I also have a lot of thoughts about Marc Thiessen’s appearance, too, which followed a little bit after mine.  But I went on at the beginning of the book tour, back in the first week of January.  I think I so befuddled and confused him &#8212; after 30 minutes of jousting about what the definition of torture was, and when enhanced interrogation methods, as I would call them, can be used on terrorist leaders to reveal information about pending attacks &#8212; that he just kind of gave up.  And then, on the next day’s show, he said that I had beaten him.  And my students told me that was the first and only time he’s ever said that a guest on his show had beaten him.</p>
<p>So I went back and looked at the tape, and I tried to figure out, how did I defeat the great liberal talk show host of our day?  And I thought about it for a little bit.  And I think it has to do with the fact he’s probably never had a law professor on his show before.  Because if you think about what my job is &#8212; and has been for the last 17 years &#8212; it’s I confront an audience of 100 25-, 26-year-old people three times a week who are very smart, very clever &#8212; sometimes, occasionally funny &#8212; but are utterly unprepared for class and have done no reading.</p>
<p>So I think if any of you have the misfortune of being on “The Daily Show,” just treat him like a 21-year-old student, and you’ll be fine.</p>
<p>So my job on the panel today is try to put what we’re going to talk about in a historical context, which is to talk about where Obama sits in the course of the history of the presidency.  And my basic theme is that President Obama has brought to office what I think of as an upside-down or an inverted view of the presidency, where his view was that the presidency should be fairly weak office when it came to foreign affairs and national security, that should defer to the other branches; but that he should be a leader of domestic change, and domestic revolution in terms of the economy and society.  And this is the exact opposite, I think, of not just the framers’ design for the office but what his greatest predecessors have done.</p>
<p>So just to start off, in writing this book and giving some context, it’s important to figure out what we mean by greatest Presidents.  So the views of scholars and regular people are quite different on this question.</p>
<p>So one way to measure what regular Americans think &#8212; and I don’t have access to the sophisticated polling data of the last panel &#8212; but one way I approach such questions is to look at that great barometer of popular opinion, <em>Parade Magazine</em>.  So in January<strong>, </strong><em>Parade Magazine</em> did a poll.  And they asked regular Americans &#8212; which President should be added to Mount Rushmore?</p>
<p>So I’d like to ask you all, who do you think the most Americans gave as the fifth President to be added to Mount Rushmore, after you correct for the fact that many Americans gave the names of Presidents who already were on Mount Rushmore?</p>
<p>Who do you think Americans, regular people, thought ought to be the next President added to Mount  Rushmore?  Most people did not put Reagan.  I heard Obama.  Obama did make the list; he was number five.  I’ve always thought it would be hard for a sculptor to do the Nobel Peace Price on the stone, but yes.  Exactly right.  John F. Kennedy was ranked by Americans the next President who should be added, right?  Glamorous, young President, image of activity.</p>
<p>In 2005, <em>The Wall Street Journal</em> editorial page did a poll of 300 scholars &#8212; I was one of them &#8212; to rank every President in order.  Kennedy was below average.  In fact, if you think about it, the more we learn about Kennedy, the worse his reputation tends to get.</p>
<p>Reagan was on the list, FDR was on the list, Clinton was on the list and, as I said, Obama was on the list.  This is somewhat at odds with whom we think of as the great Presidents, or these scholars do.  There’s wide agreement on who the top three are &#8212; Washington, Lincoln and FDR.  As you know, Washington and Lincoln are already on the monument.  The fourth and fifth greatest Presidents are Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt, who are also on Mount Rushmore.</p>
<p>Reagan made sixth.  And actually, that’s a remarkable change.  Because if those of you who can remember back to 1988, when he left office, and remember what academics and people in the media were saying about Reagan, he was widely considered a mediocre President by the intellectual elites.  And now, it’s stunning that a poll of academics rates Reagan the sixth greatest President in American history.</p>
<p>The seventh is someone I didn’t hear anyone mention &#8212; was Harry Truman.  Right?  He left office with his opinion poll ratings in the low 30s, in the middle of an unpopular war.  He could have run for reelection and chose not to.  But now, we appreciate Truman because he set the basic foundations for our long-term strategy in the war against the Soviets.  I won’t ask any of the smart people here whether that reminds you of anybody.</p>
<p>The eighth greatest President was Dwight Eisenhower &#8212; again, a President who was criticized in many of the same terms that Reagan had been criticized, as sort of out of touch, grandfatherly; we like him, but not his policies.  Eisenhower’s considered now the eighth greatest President in American history.</p>
<p>The ninth greatest President is someone I didn’t hear anyone mention.  But if it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t be enjoying our nice day here on the coast in Santa   Barbara, James Polk, who deliberately triggered a war with the Mexicans in 1848.  He turned a border skirmish on the Texas-Mexican border between about 100 troops into a justification for launching an amphibious invasion of Mexico, capturing Mexico City and engaging in what we call regime change, and then taking away the one third of the best part of the country, and annexing it to the United States.  A guy who was so unpopular that when he ran for office, he had to go around promising he would not run for reelection.</p>
<p>Tenth greatest President &#8212; Andrew Jackson, whose face, of course, is on the $20 bill, who would be horrified at the idea that he would be on the $20 bill, since his great mission was to destroy the Bank of the United   States at the time.</p>
<p>Let me ask you one more question.  In this ranking of great Presidents, who do you think was ranked the worst President in American history? Carter, no.  Carter, actually, is about average these days, among scholars.</p>
<p>Buchanan.  So I just want to be clear &#8212; when I speak in college audiences, and I say Buchanan, the students pause, because they think I’m talking about Pat Buchanan -that he might’ve been President when they were kids, they don’t really know.  But we are, in fact, talking about James Buchanan, who was the President right before Lincoln.  Right.  And that’s the basic message of the book, and the basic context I want to set out, is &#8212; why is Buchanan the worst President, by universal acclaim, among scholars?  And why is Lincoln almost tied with Washington for being our greatest President?  It has everything to do with emergency and the power of the office.</p>
<p>Buchanan and Lincoln were both Presidents during the worst emergency that we have faced &#8212; the Civil War.  And Buchanan responded to it by saying &#8212; many people don’t know this &#8212; Buchanan thought that secession was unconstitutional.  He actually thought that the states could not leave the Union.  But he said, As President, I have no constitutional power to stop it from happening.  The presidency is powerless.  And he actually said, I call on Congress to reach a solution.</p>
<p>Those of you who’ve worked with a legislature can guess what Congress did.  They formed a special commission to study the problem.  Lincoln comes into office a few months later.  The period between election and inauguration was much longer then.  Lincoln says, I agree with President Buchanan &#8212; secession is unconstitutional.  But I have the power as President to protect the country, to protect its security.  And he took extraordinary measures to do that.  He raised an army and a navy, he took money out of the treasury, without congressional permission.  He started offensive operations against the South.  He suspended the writ of habeas corpus through the country, all with the goal of protecting the United   States during period of emergency.  His most famous act, and the one for which we as Republicans remember him the most &#8212; the Emancipation Proclamation &#8212; was what people today would call a unilateral exercise of executive power.</p>
<p>Does anybody remember what the Supreme Court’s opinion about emancipation was in 1863, at the time of President Lincoln’s order?  Supreme Court’s opinion still was Dred Scott vs. Sandford, which said no federal or state government law could eliminate slavery.  Lincoln brushed that aside.  He said, To win the Civil War, we have to free the slaves, which is actually why the Emancipation Proclamation only applied in the South, but not in the peaceful areas of the North.</p>
<p>So in the time I have remaining let me turn to President Obama.  Because the lesson, I think, that comes from the history of our great Presidents and their time during periods of emergency are twofold .  One is that the framers designed the presidency in the weird way they did.  They designed the executive branch with one person in charge, where all the power and responsibility goes to that one person, so that he could act quickly, swiftly, secretly, decisively, as the Federalist Papers talked about.</p>
<p>When it came to domestic policy, however, the framers thought that the presidency would be a modest office.  They were worried about Congress when it came to domestic policy.  Fact, they specifically gave the President the veto power, so that the presidency would moderate the legislative branch.  The framers were extremely worried about the idea that Congress, which had access to the power of the purse, would take money from one group of citizens and transfer it to another group of citizens.  Where would they have gotten that crazy idea from?  The President’s job was to stop Congress from enacting special-interest legislation and to pursue the national interest.</p>
<p>Just let me close by saying &#8212; and now set it up for Marc and Andrew, my good friends &#8212; look at what Obama did when he came into office.  Right?  He saw his job as pushing Congress to go farther.  And because of that, he’s undermining the legitimacy and power of the presidency, by combining it too closely with Congress, as we’ve seen with health care.  His job was to restrain Congress from passing health care, not to prod it to going farther.</p>
<p>At the same time, I’d say in national security matters, he has tried to retract the power of the presidency.  That’s the way to understand his decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the guy who thought up the idea of the 9/11 attacks in civilian court in New York City.  There’s a lot of crazy reasons why this is not a good idea, not the least of which is spending $250 million a year on security in downtown New York, when it only costs, I think &#8212; I checked &#8212; only $108 million to build the Guantanamo Bay base.</p>
<p>But if you think about it, when you transfer the trial of terrorists to civilian courts, you are, as President, giving up the power to set terrorism policy on a lot of matters to another branch of government, something Presidents Washington and Lincoln and FDR never would have done.  Obama doesn’t want the responsibility, he doesn’t want to make the decisions about the war on terrorism.  But at the same time, he’s, I think, damaging the presidency by pulling the powers of the institution back, and hoping someone else will make the hard choices.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, that’s why we have a President.  If these jobs, these decisions, were easy, we wouldn’t need the President to make them.  And I worry that because of his efforts to avoid these hard choices when it comes to the most important function of government, which is protecting the security of its citizens, that President Obama will not use the powers of his office, as his greatest predecessors did, to protect the security of the country.</p>
<p>So thank you very much, and I turn it over to Marc and Andrew.</p>
<p><strong>Marc Thiessen:</strong> Thank you very much.</p>
<p>Actually, the subtitle of my book could have just as easily been “How John Yoo Kept America Safe.”  So I’m proud to be on a panel with John Yoo. And there are two other people who are responsible for my screed, who are here today.  And they are David Horowitz and Peter Collier.  And the reason is that back in the 1980s, when I was an aspiring young leftist at Vassar College, I was purged from the Student Coalition Against Apartheid for having raised a question about necklacing, which was a practice that the African National Congress used to punish &#8212; I won’t go into the details of it, it was horrific.  And I was informed one night that there had been a vote, and I had been purged.  Because that’s what communists do, they purge people.</p>
<p>And so I was a leftist without a home.  And a conservative friend said, You’ve got to read this book, “<em>Destructive Generation</em>,” by Peter Collier and David Horowitz.  And I got it, and I read it overnight.  I’ve been going to the right ever since, and never turned back.  So as a result, here I am, having written a book in defense of the enhanced interrogation program.</p>
<p>You’ve undoubtedly heard the myth that Barack Obama is continuing the national security policies of the Bush Administration.  Because he’s doing Predator strikes, he hasn’t eliminated the Patriot Act or the National Security Agency’s listening program, using the state secrets defense, supporting indefinite detention, keeping a responsible drawdown in Iraq that Bush had set in motion, and he’s launched a surge in Afghanistan.  And so he’s continuing these terrible policies, as the Left says.</p>
<p>Imagine, if you would, that in the midst of World War II, Neville Chamberlain had come to power, and in the middle of World War II.  And he continued to fight the war, and he continued the bombings of Germany, and he continued the battle in North Africa and Italy, and launched the D-Day invasion.  But he eliminated the Ultra program that had broken the German codes.  And he spoke out and said that this &#8212; but listening in to the Germans was against our values, and then released the secrets behind this program to the public, and thus to the Nazi leadership in Berlin.</p>
<p>We wouldn’t say that Neville Chamberlain was continuing the policies of Winston Churchill, would we?  This is essentially what Barack Obama has done, in eliminating the CIA interrogation program, and then releasing all the secrets of how we interrogated terrorists and got them to tell us their plans for new attacks to the enemy.  Today, we are in growing danger of experiencing another 9/11 attack.  Because we are no longer capturing, detaining and interrogating the senior leaders of al-Qaeda.</p>
<p>Think back for a minute to the period after 9/11.  We knew that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks, but we didn’t know who.  We didn’t know that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind of 9/11 or the operational commander of al-Qaeda.  In fact, Mike Hayden, the former CIA director, says that he wasn’t even in our flowchart of senior al-Qaeda leaders at the time.  We didn’t know who his key accomplices were.</p>
<p>And unbeknownst to us, there were two terrorist networks out there, active, that we didn’t know the members of or what their plans were &#8212; the KSM network that had launched the 9/11 attacks, and the network called the Hambali network, which was a Southeast Asian terror network that KSM was working with to develop follow-on attacks against America.</p>
<p>We didn’t know who they were or what their plans were.  And in fact, we later found out that they had in fact set in motion plans for a series of terrorist attacks.  These included a plot to repeat the destruction of 9/11 in Europe by hijacking airplanes in Europe and flying them into Heathrow Airport and buildings in London’s financial district.  They included a plot to blow up our consulate in Western residences in Karachi, Pakistan in an attack that would have replicated the East Africa Embassy bombings in Pakistan.  They had set in motion a plot to blow up our marine camp in Jabuti using explosive-laden water tankers.  They had deployed a cell that was developing anthrax for attacks in the United States.</p>
<p>And most nefariously of all, they were working with Hambali.  KSM knew that after 9/11 we’d be on the lookout for Arab men.  So he developed a cell of Southeast Asians, thinking we wouldn’t be on the lookout for them, working with this terrorist Hambali, to hijack an airplane and fly it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, which is the tallest building on the West Coast, just south of here.</p>
<p>We didn’t know any of this.  None of it.  And then, the CIA began capturing and interrogating senior leaders of al-Qaeda.  We captured Abu Zubaydah, who was a senior al-Qaeda facilitator.  And he gave us information that led us to Ramzi bin al Shibh, who was one of the senior key operatives in the 9/11 attacks.  And together, they gave us the information that led us to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  And then Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the rest of these terrorist gave us information that led to the roundup of dozens of members of these two networks, and put them &#8212; dismantled them both and put them out of business, and stopped the attacks that they had set in motion.</p>
<p>These people were captured.  In fact, it’s ironic &#8212; I know Andy’s going to talk about the trials in New York &#8212; every single one of the people that Barack Obama wants to put on trial in New York City were captured as a direct result of CIA interrogations.  If it had not been for the CIA program, Barack Obama would have no one to put on trial.</p>
<p>So this is one of the most important intelligence programs, probably &#8212; certainly in the war on terror, and possibly in the history of the United States.</p>
<p>Now, fast-forward to beginning of 2009.  Barack Obama becomes President of the United States.  And he, on his second day in office, eliminates this program.  Almost simultaneously, as he is doing this, there is a new terrorist network forming on the Arabian Peninsula, called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is a merger between al-Qaeda in Yemen and al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, which were two local &#8212; small, local terrorist networks that were basically focused on killing &#8212; attacking Western interests there.  And they form a transnational terrorist network, who has the intent and capability of striking the United States of America, here in the American homeland.  And the Obama Administration admits, by its own admission, that we did not know that they were either capable or had the intent to strike us here at home.</p>
<p>But on Christmas Day, one of their operatives got through all of our defenses and was on a plane, circling Detroit, and almost blew that plane up in what would have been the most catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil since the 9/11 attacks.  Why were we caught blind?  Because we were not trying to capture, detain and interrogate the leaders of al-Qaeda, who could’ve told us about this new terror network.  We didn’t know anything about it.</p>
<p>In fact, not only were we not interrogating the senior leaders of al-Qaeda who could’ve warned us about this &#8212; when a high-value terrorist fell into our laps, like manna from heaven, we read him his rights and told him he had the right to remain silent, and gave him a lawyer.  It’s insanity.  It’s absolute insanity.</p>
<p>Christmas Day, we avoided disaster by pure luck.  Pure luck.  This was not a foiled attack.  The bomb malfunctioned.  If it hadn’t, he was planning to blow that plane up over Detroit.  So not only the couple hundred people on that plane but thousands of people on the ground would’ve died as a result of it.  You cannot keep this country safe unless you interrogate senior terrorist leaders.</p>
<p>Now, why is interrogation essential?  The failure to stop the Christmas Day attack was a failure to connect the dots.  You’ve heard that phrase.  In my book, “<em>Courting Disaster</em>,” I interviewed Mike Hayden, the former Director of the CIA.  And he explained it to me this way &#8212; why is interrogation important.  Intelligence, he said, is like putting together a puzzle.  And you got all the pieces laid out on the table in front of you.  And you have to connect the pieces, connect the dots.  But you’re not allowed to look at the cover of the box to see what the picture looks like.  That’s the challenge of intelligence.</p>
<p>There’s only one way to find out what that picture looks like &#8212; capture the people who know what the picture on the cover of the box looks like and get them to tell you.  When you capture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it’s not that he’s giving you pieces of the puzzle that you could get another way.  He’s telling you how the pieces fit together.  He’s giving you the picture on the cover of the box.</p>
<p>And today, this is the capability we have voluntarily given up &#8212; the ability to see the picture on the cover of the box.  And so this is why we’re in danger of another attack.</p>
<p>A few weeks ago, the <em>Washington Post</em> reported, on its front page, that the US had tracked down the leader of al-Qaeda in East Africa, which is a virulent terror al-Qaeda offshoot.  This was a big deal to find this guy.  And they knew where he was, and they were tracking him.  And so they went to the White House.  And they gave the President three options.  They said, We can capture him alive and interrogate him, we can kill him with a Predator strike, or we can send a helicopter in with commandos and kill him, and then repel down and get the DNA to confirm that he’s dead.  And the military said, We want to capture him alive.  The President said kill him.  And so they killed him with the third option, sending a helicopter team.  So we could’ve reached him, because the commandos went in and actually got his DNA to confirm that he was dead.</p>
<p>And think of the intelligence that was lost with that man, vaporized with that man being killed.  The information this guy had.  If President Bush had made that decision when we located Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, there would be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York City.  A dead terrorist can’t tell you his plans for new attacks.  We have to capture these people alive and bring them in.</p>
<p>Now, why did the CIA interrogation program work so well?  All right, I’m winding down.  Former CIA Director Jim Woolsey is here.  He would probably have to report me to the CIA Security Office if I told you this story a year ago.  But now that Barack Obama’s released all the details, I can tell it to you.</p>
<p>The first guy that we captured was a terrorist named Abu Zubaydah, senior al-Qaeda facilitator.  And he was the first one who was waterboarded.  And after he was waterboarded, he said something remarkable to his interrogators.  I got to &#8212; one of the things about my book is it’s the first time you’ll hear from the actual interrogators.   I talked to them, the people who were in the room for these interrogations.  And Zubaydah &#8212; after he was waterboarded &#8212; they actually said to him, after he broke, you know, We don’t want to do this waterboarding.  Is there something else we can do?  He said, No, no, no.  You must do this for all the brothers.</p>
<p>Why would an al-Qaeda terrorist tell &#8212; he thanked us for waterboarding him, and said you must do this for the other brothers, you cannot stop waterboarding.  Why would an al-Qaeda terrorist tell us that?  What he explained was that the jihadi philosophy is that they &#8212; Allah is going to prevail, no matter what happens.  The victory is predestined.  His responsibility to Allah is to resist as far as he can.  And then, once he’s met the limits of resistance, he’s free to spill his guts and tell us everything he knows.</p>
<p>So if you know this, do you give him Snickers bars?  Do you try and develop a rapport with him?  No, you have to give him something to resist.</p>
<p>So what the CIA did was they developed this program, where they would give him &#8212; they gave him something that did not cross the line into torture &#8212; John, you made sure that was the case &#8212; with the least coercive technique first, escalating up to maximum of waterboarding, which is not torture, the way it was done by the CIA.  And they gave him a chance to resist something.  And almost &#8212; of the people who run the CIA program &#8212; there were 100 people brought into CIA interrogations &#8212; only 30 had any enhanced interrogation techniques used on them.  The rest said I’ll talk to you, CIA, I will tell you anything you want to know.  Thirty of them had enhanced interrogation techniques, and three made it to waterboarding.</p>
<p>And they developed techniques that were safe, that would not harm them, but got the information.  And it was the most successful program in &#8212; possibly in the history of the United States, in intelligence.  And Barack Obama has eliminated it.</p>
<p>Just in closing, a quick point -we are in danger because we don’t have this capability anymore.  And we’ve been asked to sort of give you the silver lining in the dark cloud.  It’s a pretty dark cloud, when it comes to the war on terror.  The silver lining is the American people are with us on this issue.  If you look at the polls &#8212; and I cite some of them in the book &#8212; 71 percent of Americans support enhanced interrogation.  Seventy-one percent.  Scott Brown, who they mentioned &#8212; Congressman Royce mentioned him in the early panel &#8212; campaigned as an open supporter of enhanced interrogation, and he won election in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts.  If that does not tell you that Americans are with us on this issue, then I don’t know what does.</p>
<p>But for some reason, Republican legislators and Republican lawmakers are afraid to talk about this.  Because they don’t want to be tagged as supporting torture.  Well, it’s not torture.</p>
<p>In my book &#8212; I explain it in great detail, why &#8212; what the laws are on torture, you can read the Yoo memos &#8212; it’s not torture.  And the Democrats are vulnerable on this, because they’re putting us in grave danger.  And we need to be able to speak out about this.  Christmas Day was a wakeup call.  We almost suffered another 9/11 in our midst.  And it was just four months ago.  It’s been forgotten.  When’s the last time someone mentioned it to you?  This almost happened.</p>
<p>I hope and pray that it does not take al-Qaeda succeeding in a mass-casualty attack on our country for us to wake up.  But hope and prayer are not a sufficient national security policy.</p>
<p>Thank you very much.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo:</strong> Thank you, Marc.</p>
<p>Andrew McCarthy is Senior Fellow at the National Review &#8211;</p>
<p>&#8211; “<strong>Willful Blindness</strong>.”  I highly recommend that.  His new one is coming out &#8212; unfortunately will not be here in time for him to sign this weekend.  But the new one, called “<em>The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America,</em>” I’m sure will be highly instrumental in educating people as far as what’s at stake for this next election.</p>
<p>So again, thank you very much for all of the work that you do, Andy.  And we welcome you to make comments this morning.</p>
<p><strong>Andrew McCarthy:</strong> Thanks so much.  And thanks, Michael, for inviting me here.  Imagine being placed on the extreme right of this panel.</p>
<p>But I think, actually, John’s too kind.  Because I guess we could’ve sat anyone anywhere, on this panel.</p>
<p>What I’d like to talk about is this whole issue of the civilian trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the 9/11 plotters.  And I think it’s important to talk about it.  Because what you’ve heard in the public domain about this is really, in my mind, a significant misrepresentation of what really is at stake, and what the position is of those of us who have opposed having a civilian trial in Manhattan &#8212; or, frankly, anyplace else &#8212; of these particular enemy combatants, or indeed of enemy combatants in general.</p>
<p>I don’t want to be presumptuous.  But I would suggest to you that if you’re being told that Eric Holder is more in favor of prosecuting bad guys than I am, you probably ought to check that, see if that makes a lot of sense.</p>
<p>We’re talking here about a very small category of &#8212; whether you would call it war criminal or defendant.  I hear the Attorney General say, Don’t take this tool away from us, we need this tool, prosecution’s an important tool.  Nobody &#8212; least of all, me &#8212; is saying that we shouldn’t be doing prosecutions in the civilian courts, or that prosecutions in the civilian courts are not part &#8212; and must not &#8212; or, not that they must be part of a total government counterterrorism strategy.  What we’re talking about is an approach to counterterrorism in the post-9/11 era that learns from the mistakes of the pre-9/11 era.</p>
<p>In pre-9/11 times, during the Clinton Administration, the Justice Department wasn’t just the tip of the counterterrorism spear; it was pretty much the entirety of the spear.  I mean, the intelligence community was doing some things.  But for the most part, the government’s national security strategy against terrorism during the 1990s was prosecution in the civilian system.</p>
<p>And what we learned from that experience, I think first and foremost, is that it is a provocatively weak response.  I’m not saying that we can’t prosecute people in the civilian system; we know we can.  We did it repeatedly in the eight years between the time the World Trade Center was bombed and when it was destroyed.</p>
<p>But think about what the bottom line of all that is.  Basically, in about nine trials, we took out 29 people, which is sometimes less than what our military does in a single day, in the post-9/11 era.  Most of the most important terrorists &#8212; bin Laden, Zawahiri, the rest of them &#8212; but for a very small number of those 29, the people that we took out by prosecuting were the lowest of the low-ranking players.  They were the low-hanging fruit, the most easily replaced terrorists in any of the cells or the organization.  I mean, there were a few differences &#8212; my guy, the Blind Sheikh, Ramzi Yousef, two or three others.  But of the 29, most of them were the most easily replaced.</p>
<p>And in fact, I think more than half of them were out of the 1993 Trade Center bombing itself.  There was no prosecution in connection with the Khobar Towers attack which killed 19 members of our air force.  There was no prosecution in connection with the Cole attack which killed 17 members of our navy.</p>
<p>So I think what we learned from that approach is that it is too limited, and it has too many downsides to it, to be a significant response to a national security challenge.  Osama bin Laden, for example, has been under indictment by the Justice Department since June of 1998.  That’s before the embassy bombings, before the Cole, before 9/11.  He’s still at large.  But the point is that obviously, the response of bringing al-Qaeda to court was not something that stopped al-Qaeda from not only continuing to attack but continuing to attack in a way that was much more &#8212; that became more aggressive and more audacious over time.</p>
<p>So how do we change after 9/11?  We don’t say no more prosecutions in the civilian court.  We say instead that the Justice Department has to have an appropriately subordinate role in what is a total government response to what is a national security challenge &#8212; a war, not a crime wave.  So there will be times, as we go forward in this struggle &#8212; and we will go forward for quite a long time, I think &#8212; but there will be times when it will be primarily a military task, an intelligence task.  There will never be a time, I don’t think, when our Treasury resources are unimportant, so that we’re tracking terrorism finances, not just to try to dry up the funding, but actually as a source of intelligence &#8212; to be able to follow the money, see where it goes, and try to figure out who is it who’s attached to the money.</p>
<p>After all, the only defense that we have in this war is really intelligence.  There’s never going to be a moment when we sit on a navy ship and sign a treaty with al-Qaeda.  Our defense in a war of this type, against a transnational enemy that attacks in stealth and that defies the laws and customs of war, is intelligence.  We have to know who they are, where they are, and what their plans are, what they’re next most likely to hit.</p>
<p>In that framework, the Justice Department still plays a crucially important role.  But it’s a subordinate role.  We heard a lot of debate, particularly in the three or four years right after 9/11, about the Patriot Act, and the powers that it gave to the &#8212; particularly the intelligence side of the executive branch, and, you know, whether that was appropriate, whether it was over the line.</p>
<p>Having actually had to deal with these cases, I think that the most important law that has been enacted with respect to counterterrorism is actually the 1996 overhaul of terrorism law, which gave prosecutors tools that were unavailable to me, for example, back in 1993, when the World Trade Center was bombed.  After 1996, they gave us, you know, a terrorism conspiracy statute.  They added some bombing conspiracy provisions.  Most importantly, they put in a new offense called Material Support to Terrorism, which became a staple of counterterrorism prosecutions after that.</p>
<p>After those laws were put in in 1996, you could still have a healthy debate about whether, philosophically, we ought to be approaching this challenge as a war or a crime.  But prosecutors could no longer complain, as we complained back in 1993, that the tools we had were not adequate to the task.</p>
<p>But why are these tools so important?  Because what Material Support to Terrorism allows you to do is to strangle terrorism cells and terrorism plots in the cradle, before they gain momentum and before they’re able to strike.  And that really has to be what the role is for the Justice Department in a post-9/11 era, when we’re trying to move from prosecution to prevention.</p>
<p>The idea is now that we want to stop these things from happening well in advance, rather than try to content ourselves with prosecuting people after Americans and other innocents have already been killed, which was the 1990s model.  We don’t want less prosecutions in the civilian courts.  We want more prosecution in the civilian courts.  But they’re not going to be the same kind of cases as they were before 9/11.</p>
<p>And sometimes, frankly, they’re not going to be very attractive cases.  I think what we’re asking prosecutors to do now is, frankly, a lot harder than I was asked to do back in the early to mid-1990s.  I don’t mean to say that these cases aren’t difficult.  They present challenges that other sorts of cases don’t.  But it’s not the most difficult thing on the planet to prosecute even a bunch of terrorists after there’s been a mass-murder attack against Americans.  Even the <em>New York Times</em> could get behind a prosecution like that.</p>
<p>But what we’re asking prosecutors to do today is something that’s much more difficult.  Can you imagine what the <em>New York Times</em> would’ve said if the Justice Department had tried to bring a case against Mohamed Atta on the information that was known prior to 9/11?  Not only Atta, but any of the 9/11 hijackers?  They would’ve said it was overreach, they would’ve said it was profiling, they would’ve said that it was baseless.</p>
<p>What we’re actually asking prosecutors to do now, along with law enforcement and along with our intelligence community, is to anticipate what these guys will do next and stop them from doing it.  And those cases are going to have some ambiguity to them.  They’re not going to be as solid as the cases that we did in the ‘90s.  They’re not going to have the same kind of public support as the cases that we did in the ‘90s.  But it still is a very important role.  And it’s one that has to be done if we’re actually going to stop things from happening.</p>
<p>So I think that the important thing, from my perspective, that I’d like you to take away about this controversy over the civilian trial, is that what we’re talking about is whether it’s appropriate to bring into court actual war criminals who have either plotted to carry out or have actively carried out war crimes against the United States.  I would suggest to you that it’s not only a provocatively weak response, it not only is inappropriate, given the amount of intelligence that we have to turn over for due process purposes while we’re at war; it’s a betrayal of the very impetus for doing it, which is international humanitarian law.</p>
<p>The whole idea behind humanitarian law and behind the Geneva Conventions is to civilize warfare.  It’s not an automatic system, it’s an opt-in system.  You have to opt in by conduct.  You have to comply with the laws and customs of war.  And what we’re doing when we bring these particular offenders into civilian court is we’re taking the worst of the worst, the people who actually target civilians for mass murder, and carry out those mass-murder attacks.  And rather than handling them as military enemies, we are clothing them in all of the rights of Americans, in all of the rights of the people that they’re sworn to kill.</p>
<p>And let me just close by saying it’s not tripe; I think it’s a truism, to say that when you reward bad behavior, you’re only apt to get more of it.  And when we give this kind of a reward &#8212; the entrance into our own civilian justice system with all of the protections of the Bill of Rights &#8212; to people who are actively trying to make war &#8212; who are actively, actually, making war against the United States &#8212; we are inviting more of what we need to be preventing.</p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo:</strong> Thank you very much, Andy.</p>
<p>Andy mentioned the importance of being able to prosecute terrorist activity under this Material Support statute.  And in fact, the case that I worked on &#8212; the brief that my students and John Yoo’s students helped to draft, and Andy’s Center for Law and Counterterrorism cosigned &#8212; has to do with an attack on the statute under constitutional speech rights, in claiming that an individual who is supporting a charitable effort sponsored by a named terror organization has his speech rights infringed upon if he is not able to &#8212; if there is an ability to prosecute his activities in supporting the terrorist organization, but charitably.</p>
<p>So it’s going to be interesting to see how this one’s resolved.  Because from the line of questioning the day that the arguments were made, it’s hard to tell exactly what the split will be.  But the name of that case is Humanitarian Legal Project.  And there should be a decision on that within the next few weeks.</p>
<p>So I’m going to ask the panelists if they will talk for just a couple of minutes about what their solutions are &#8212; what they would advise that we do as citizens to see that national security is kept to the forefront, as far as on our national agenda.</p>
<p>John?</p>
<p><strong>John Yoo:</strong> Thanks, Karen.</p>
<p>So, three ideas.  One is, even though I think that the presidency has this great power of national security, it’s not to say that it’s without check.  Even in wartime, when the President’s power is at its height, Congress is still in control of funding and the size and shape of the military.  And I think electing members to Congress who are going to take a much more pro-national security stance is one of the most important things we can do.</p>
<p>President Obama wanted to close down Guantanamo Bay.  He gave an order in his first week of office to do that within a year.  Congress prohibited the use of any funds to transfer prisoners into United States and has so far managed to block his efforts to do that.  Perfectly within Constitution.  This is a Congress with huge Democratic majorities.  So I think more of that would be possible.</p>
<p>Second thing is judges, which we don’t think about much when we think about national security.  But the greatest obstacle, I think, to the effective fighting of the war on terrorism, unfortunately, has been our own judges.  If you look at a lot of the policies in the war on terrorism, the presidency and Congress, at least under the Bush Administration, actually agreed on enhanced surveillance.  [Congressmen], actually &#8212; as Marc shows in his book &#8212; did approve of the interrogation programs, although they don’t want anyone to know about it.  The judges are the ones who first started trying to pull down the policies in the war on terrorism.</p>
<p>Just to give you a small anecdote &#8212; I wrote a piece in <em>The Wall Street Journal</em> last weekend about Justice Stevens, who announced his resignation from the Court.  When Justice Stevens was a young intelligence officer in the Pacific during World War II, he was allowed to listen in on the operation to shoot down Admiral Yamamoto, which was made possible by the breaking of the code secret &#8212; the Japanese naval codes.</p>
<p>Justice Stevens thought that it was wrong for the United States to specifically target and shoot down Admiral Yamamoto.  He later gave a speech, many years later, saying that he thought it violated humanitarian norms for the American military to specifically try to kill another member of the enemy.  And in fact, he then said, And that’s why I’m pretty much against the death penalty now, too.</p>
<p>Think about what Justice Stevens would think about the Predator drone program.  Justice Stevens has been the leader on the Court at trying to do what Andy has described would be the wrong answer, which is to give all terrorists the same constitutional rights as you and I would, if we were prosecuted for any garden-variety crime.</p>
<p>Last thing I’ll just say quickly is &#8212; aside from electing members of Congress, aside from pressing the Senate not to confirm judges who are weak on national security &#8212; third thing, I think, is that &#8212; collectively could do outside the arm of the government is to create some kind of [fund] organization to protect officers of the CIA.</p>
<p>Because &#8212; I think we probably would all agree to this, I don’t know &#8212; but there’s going to come a witch hunt against the men and women who are the subject of Marc’s book.  And I don’t think they’re getting a lot of support right now.  These people &#8212; I mean, they make $50,000, $60,000 a year.  And they’re going to come under the worst legal expenses and political harassment you can &#8212; I lived through this for the last year.  And luckily, I survived.  I was lucky to have one of the best attorneys in America volunteer to represent me for free.  Also, I made myself a real pain in the ass in the media.  And I think that actually scared them off a little bit.</p>
<p>But there’s going to be dozens of CIA officers who are currently, and will be, investigated for what they did to protect the country.  And I think that’s one thing we could all do that doesn’t involve the government, you know, would be to help defend those guys.</p>
<p><strong>Marc Thiessen</strong>: I agree with all that.  Couple things &#8212; I would say the most important thing is for us as conservatives to speak out.  When the American people are with us as strongly as they are, speaking out works.  I mean, the fact is, there is no trial going on right now for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York because of public opposition.  And so we have the power, if we speak out, to stop these things from happening.</p>
<p>Andy laid out a number of the reasons why the trial was a bad idea.  Those legal &#8212; I’m the only one who’s not a lawyer here.  I’ll give you a different reason.  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed disappeared from the face of the earth when he was captured in 2003.  He was in a CIA [black site], completely cut off.  Then he’s been Guantanamo ever since.  If he were to be put on trial, and suddenly emerge this heroic leader, with his flowing turbans, and all that, the effect that would have on the jihadi movement, the shot in the arm that would be, that after all &#8212; everything we did to him, that he’s still standing, and would put us on trial, it would make &#8212; that trial would make the O.J. Simpson trial look like a traffic court hearing.  So we know this is a bad idea.  We’ve stopped it so far, we got to keep the pressure on them.</p>
<p>Second thing is &#8212; push for the restoration of the CIA interrogation program &#8212; not the one that John approved, and that was in place in the first years of the Obama Administration; but the program that actually Barack Obama inherited.  There’s a myth out there that Barack Obama eliminated waterboarding.  Waterboarding had already been taken out of the CIA program when he came into office.</p>
<p>Mike Hayden &#8212; I told the story in my book, how Mike Hayden and Admiral McConnell, the head of &#8212; the Director of National Intelligence, scaled back the program, specifically to create a program that could be supported by even a Democratic administration coming in.  When Obama came into office, the techniques that were left were the tummy slap, the facial hold, a diet of liquid Ensure, which &#8212; I’m sure the makers of Ensure would love to know that their product was considered torture &#8211;and mild sleep deprivation, maximum of four days.  No one would consider that torture.  These were the techniques.  The program still worked.  Because the terrorists didn’t know that.</p>
<p>I’ll tell you another story that &#8212; Jim Woolsey’s going to be busy on the phones with the Security Office and the CIA.  When the program was scaled back, a terrorist named Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi was captured.  You probably never heard of him.  He’s one of the most &#8212; he’s a very, very senior al-Qaeda leader.  He was a major in Saddam Hussein’s army who joined al-Qaeda, interestingly enough, and was one of bin &#8212; he was a member of the Shura Council &#8212; very senior guy.  And he was being sent by bin Laden to Iraq to run al-Qaeda operations in Iraq, and he never made it.</p>
<p>And he was brought into a CIA interrogation site.  And they took off his hood, and they said, We’re the CIA.  And he said, I know, I’ll tell you anything you want to know.  And he did.  Why?  Because he didn’t know what he would face.  He didn’t know that all he was going to face was the tummy slap and liquid Ensure.</p>
<p>So the idea that this is torture, and that we can do &#8212; we have to follow the Army Field Manual, which is the manual &#8212; local police &#8212; district attorneys have more authority to interrogate terrorists than the Army Field Manual provides.  A district attorney, on a daily basis, will say to a criminal in an interrogation, I’m going to put a needle in your arm if you don’t give up your accomplices.  You’re going to see the death penalty.  You can’t do that under the Army Field Manual.  We can’t threaten a terrorist in any way.  It’s crazy that we’re following the Army Field Manual for all interrogations.  So we got to push for a restoration of this program that is absolutely &#8212; there’s no reason why Barack Obama and the most liberal Democrat administration in history couldn’t even support using this program.</p>
<p>And then, I agree wholeheartedly with John about standing by these CIA interrogators.  These people are not torturers; they’re heroes.  They don’t deserve subpoenas; they deserve the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  They kept this country safe and stopped the next 9/11.</p>
<p>One last story, just to tell you something about these people.  One of the interrogators who I spoke with &#8212; I tell the story in my book.  I call him Harry.  It’s not his name, but that’s the name I use for him in the book.  And he’s the guy who interrogated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  And one night, he went into KSM’s cell.  And after the interrogation part was over, he actually had a very good relationship with KSM.  KSM called him Emir, which is a title of great respect in jihadi ranks.  They’re seen as respected adversaries in war.</p>
<p>And he came in.  KSM greeted him warmly, said how are you.  And they were talking.  And he said, And then KSM turned to me.  And he said, Just so you know, if I ever get out of this hole, I’m going to kill you, I’m going to kill your wife, I’m going to kill your sisters, I’m going to kill your whole family.  Because that’s what I do.  And he said, You know, this job is hard.  And sometimes I get down about it.  But then I think back to those two people standing on the ledge of the 90<sup>th</sup> floor of the World Trade Center, who held hands and stepped off into space.  I think of them, and I just go back to work.</p>
<p>This is the kind of people we have, who’ve been protecting our country.  And we’re threatening them with prosecution?  It’s insanity.  These people are heroes, and we need to stand up for them.  So I think that’s what [we should do].</p>
<p><strong>Andrew McCarthy:</strong> I want to say one general thing, and then maybe one specific legislative proposal that I think is important.</p>
<p>The general comment is I think that we need to keep doing what we’ve been doing.  What I think has emerged, particularly in the last year, is that the Left badly misread the election not only of 2008 but, I think, also of 2006, in the sense that they took what I think they were entitled to take as a very ambivalent attitude of the American people toward the war in Iraq.  And they read into that a generalized ambivalence, or even opposition, to the war on terror, to the actual threat by al-Qaeda and its affiliates to the American people.</p>
<p>And I think that was a very bad misreading.  I don’t believe there’s ever been a time, particularly after 9/11, that the American people have been anything other than completely supportive of the idea that we need to take aggressive measures &#8212; whether they’re surveillance, prosecution, interrogation, what have you &#8212; to protect the American people from attack.</p>
<p>And because this war still resonates with the American people, look at where we are.  Despite everything that Obama said in the run up to the election, Gitmo is still open.  And it’ll be open for some time.  We’re still using military commissions.  They did a couple of cosmetic tweaks on them, but they haven’t changed them.  And in fact &#8212; think how crazy this is &#8212; actually, they’re using the military commissions to prosecute the bombers of the U.S.S. Cole, even though the Cole was attacked at a time when we didn’t have military commissions and President Bush hadn’t even issued the order yet for military commissions.</p>
<p>So you might ask yourself, you know, rationally, what’s the predicate, what’s the foundation, for trying those guys in a military commission?  You know, the answer to that is 9/11.  But of course, we’re taking the 9/11 guys, and we’re putting them in a civilian trial.  You can’t even wrap your brain around how crazy that is.</p>
<p>But my point is that the military commissions are still up and running.  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not getting a trial in Manhattan.  And if I were a betting man, I’d bet he’s not going to get a trial in a civilian court, either.  I think ultimately, just because of public support and public protest, those trials are ultimately going to take place in a military commission, which is exactly where they should’ve taken place in the first place.</p>
<p>Remember the issue a few months back of the CIA photos, the so-called prisoner abuse photos?  The Justice Department wanted to get those out into the public domain, even though everybody knew that they would be used by the enemy for propaganda and recruitment purposes.  Everybody knew it was a bad idea.  Justice Department wanted to put it out, anyway, in this ceaseless impulse that they have that there has to be a reckoning against the Bush Administration, which is something that Holder and Obama both talked about in the run up to the election.</p>
<p>Well, those photos never made it out.  They never saw the light of day, and they probably never will see the light of day.  And the reason is because there was very strong public protest.  Basically, the Justice Department had to back down.  Obama had to reverse Holder.  And despite the fact that you have very large Democratic margins in both houses of Congress, we managed to get legislation through that enabled the Secretary of Defense to sign a finding that made sure that those photographs wouldn’t see the light of day.</p>
<p>And the point is that even though the legislative numbers are daunting against us, this issue is still an issue that powerfully motivates the American people to make themselves heard, when they become aware that there is something to be heard about.  And we have managed, for that reason, to be able to stop them from doing a lot of things that they otherwise wanted to do.  So I think it’s very important that we continue to stay motivated and continue to do the things that we’ve done, which have stopped them from really acting on their worst impulses.</p>
<p>As far as a concrete legislative proposal is concerned, the worst thing about the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision &#8212; and we could spend hours talking about how bad it was &#8212; is that it dumped all of these habeas corpus cases, these detention cases, onto the district courts with no guidance about the rules or procedures that would govern those proceedings.</p>
<p>And as a result, district judges have actually been releasing people who obviously ought to remain held, and doing it under circumstances where we know at least one in five are going back to the jihad.  And I suspect it’s a much higher number.  I think Congress has to get into the game here and prescribe some strong procedural rules to guide the courts in how these habeas proceedings are going to take place.</p>
<p>In the criminal &#8212; in the regular criminal civilian courts, we don’t let judges make it up as they go along.  They have to follow the federal rules of criminal procedure and the federal rules of evidence, and all sorts of prescriptions that Congress gives them.</p>
<p>This is much more important.  We’re dealing with people who, if liberated, want to mass-murder Americans.  And I think it’s really incumbent on Congress to act to stop the judges from doing what they’re doing, which is releasing a lot of people who want to go back to killing Americans.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo</strong>: We have time for three questions.  So I think I’m going to try to address one to each of the panelists.  And this one would be starting with Andy &#8212; what is the &#8212; what are the appropriate criteria to determine if alleged terrorists should be tried in federal courts or in military commissions?  And do you favor a national security court?</p>
<p><strong>Andrew McCarthy</strong>: I do favor a national security court.  And I could go on at great length about why.  But let me just try to answer the first part of the question, which is &#8212; I think when we’re talking about military commissions, we’re talking about war criminals &#8212; people who have either carried out or been caught in the act of carrying out, or plotting, war crimes against the United States.  Those people need to be tried by military commission.  If I had my druthers, I would stop having the big fight about, you know, should it be civilian or should it be military court, and try to develop a court that was more tailored to the threat that we’re dealing with.</p>
<p>But given that that’s not in the cards right now, those people belong in military commissions.  And I think other people who are &#8212; particularly if they’re captured inside the United States, doing things like Material Support to Terrorism &#8212; presumptively, they belong in the civilian courts.  And those are cases that we not only should do; we should do as many of them as we can.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo</strong>: Thank you.</p>
<p>And to John Yoo, since you’ve already mentioned your brilliant column about Justice Stevens, and what Obama should do next as far as Supreme Court Justice &#8212; what do you think we can do, as far as influencing the decision on approval or confirmation of the next Supreme Court Justice?</p>
<p><strong>John Yoo:</strong> That’s a great question.</p>
<p>You know, I think Obama is going to have to nominate, for his own base, someone who’s pro-abortion and pro-affirmative action.  You know, those are the hot-button issues of the last 20, 30 years in Supreme Court nominations.  I don’t think anything anybody can do is going to change that.  But I think he has a lot of flexibility in who he chooses, in terms of their views on national security.</p>
<p>And so, if Republicans press for that issue, and pick that out as the most important issue to fight about, I think you could push Obama into picking someone much more centrist on those, even though they might not share the views Republicans have on those other two issues.  That’s one.</p>
<p>The second thing is, Democrats, I think, in the last election &#8212; I mean, the last administration declared open season on judges.  I think there’s no longer any deference that the Senate provides to President’s choice of a judge, which used to be, I think, the unbroken practice for many, many decades, where Justice Byron White &#8212; who was appointed to the Court by President Kennedy &#8212; didn’t even have a hearing when he was confirmed  &#8211; he showed up at the Judiciary Committee doors, ready for his hearing.  And they said, You don’t need a hearing.  And then they voted him, and sent him on to the Senate.  Then they confirmed him, all in one day.</p>
<p>That’s all out the window.  And so, I think that if the Democrats have opened up the floodgates on this &#8212; as they first started with Judge Bork, I’m afraid, and then with my old boss, Justice Thomas; but then, even lower court appointees in the last administration &#8212; I think that judges &#8212; for good or ill, but this is the way it is now &#8212; are subject for normal political activity and campaigning, [like] any other issue.</p>
<p>And so I think as part of that, then, what you and I can do is place pressure on our senators.  Right?  We can put up a filibuster now.  And I think that if we thought there was going to be someone who was going to approve the kind of policies we’re worried about in the war on terrorism, I think that would be legitimate grounds for a filibuster.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo</strong>: Marc, I wish you had many more than a couple of minutes to address this &#8212; how do you feel President Obama’s speeches overseas have affected our national security?  In what way has his self-effacing tone of these speeches helped or harmed our national security?</p>
<p><strong>Marc Thiessen</strong>: Depends on the speech.  His speech in Cairo was a debacle.  I don’t know how many people saw it.  But he stood before a Muslim audience, speaking to the Arab world, and said that we had tortured people.  I mean, in one speech, he confirmed all of the al-Qaeda propaganda and lies that have been spread to the Arab world.  The damage that is done in such a speech is irreparable.</p>
<p>So yeah, he’s done a great deal of damage to our national security in confirming this propaganda.  The United States didn’t torture anybody.  We did what was necessary to protect our country.</p>
<p>And on top of that, the other thing that he doesn’t talk about &#8212; the word that almost never passes his lips &#8212; is freedom.  Whether you’re for the Iraq war or against the Iraq war, &#8212; they now have had an election where they’re having debates over &#8212; a big political fight over who’s going to be the next prime minister.  I mean, it’s a messy, functioning, young democracy, in the heart of the Middle East.  And we’ve done great damage to al-Qaeda by helping the Iraqis stand up this young democracy.</p>
<p>The other day, they killed &#8212; the Iraqi military, which is trained by the United States, with the help of the United States &#8212; killed the top two leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq.  Wasn’t on the front page of the <strong>Washington Post</strong>, wasn’t on the front page of the <em>New York Times</em>.  And when the White House went and made a statement about it, the President sent Joe Biden out to make the statement in the press briefing room, announcing it.</p>
<p>I remember very well, when I was working for President Bush, getting the call late one evening that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been killed; not to tell anybody, but that I needed to draft a statement for him to deliver the next morning in the Rose Garden.  It’s considered a huge victory.  It’s a victory &#8212; the Iraqi people hated al-Qaeda.</p>
<p>I mean, think about what happened with the surge in Iraq.  Al-Qaeda came in to drive America out of Iraq and rally the Sunni masses against us.  And the Sunni masses joined with America to drive al-Qaeda out.  That’s a huge defeat.</p>
<p>And so the killing of a senior al-Qaeda leader in Iraq is a great moment.  The President couldn’t be bothered to even say something, or [issue a] paper statement on it.  He doesn’t care about freedom.  He doesn’t care about the war on terror.  He wants to be the Secretary of Health and Human Service. He was elected to be the Commander in Chief.  And being the Commander in Chief requires marshalling words.</p>
<p>President Bush always told us, when we were writing his speeches, that there were three audiences that he was always thinking about when he was speaking.  The first was the American people.  Actually, four audiences.  The first was the American people.  The second were our allies around the world, and what message they took from what he said, when we had troops around the world being contributed from all these countries &#8212; how they were going to take the message.  The third was the American troops &#8212; were they going to get a message of resolve from him.  That’s why he was always criticized for never acknowledging mistakes, or so on, so forth.  He wasn’t going to stand up &#8212; as he used to say, I’m not going to get up there as the Commander in Chief and wring my hands in front of our troops on national television.  And the last one was our enemies.  Our enemies are watching.</p>
<p>And so when the President doesn’t project resolve, when he’s apologizing for America, when he doesn’t talk about victory, or freedom, or the principles of our country, and this war, all of those four audiences are harmed, and are &#8212; their courage is undermined, and [he said] their morale is undermined.</p>
<p>So the President of the United States has the responsibility, as Commander in Chief, not only to run the war on terror but to rally the troops, rally our allies, and rally the American people to support the cause of freedom.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo</strong>: These men would all continue to pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor on behalf of this country in doing what they do.  But let’s thank them for what they’ve done for our nation.</p>
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		<title>Revising the Revisionists</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-forsmark/to-hell-on-a-fast-horse/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=to-hell-on-a-fast-horse</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 19 Apr 2010 04:02:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill Hickok]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Billy]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the epic chase to justice in the Old West.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Gardner.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-58394" title="Gardner" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Gardner.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="526" /></a></p>
<p><em>To Hell on a Fast Horse:<br />
Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West</em><br />
By Mark Lee Gardner<br />
Morrow, $26.99, 336 pp.</p>
<p>Some things never change.  The New York Times, for instance, can always show sympathy for a cop killer with an excuse.</p>
<p>In 1926, a Times book reviewer criticized <em>The Saga of Billy the Kid</em>, one of the first books on the Kid and Pat Garrett that relied on actual reporting, for presenting Garrett as a hero.  The critic, who apparently had watched a few too many Tom Mix movies, thought the lawman with eight kids to feed should have given Billy “a chance to fight for his life.”</p>
<p>I didn’t know liberals were so into dueling. The statement is doubly ironic since the Kid’s most famous killing was the straight-up bushwacking ambush of the (admittedly corrupt) sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico.</p>
<p>Nearly a century later, the Times can still find fault with nearly every police shooting, while it romanticizes cold-blooded cop killers for &#8220;standing up to the Man&#8221;—especially if their politics are radical.</p>
<p>The story of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid often has been used as sort of a pseudo-Marxist fable&#8211; though, unlike Jesse James, John Dillinger and other outlaws who attained such status, the Kid didn’t rob banks.</p>
<p>One of the more infamous accounts of the legend is Sam Peckinpah’s <em>Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, </em>a glum disaster of a movie that basically killed what was left of the drunken director’s career (plus nearly snuffed out the Western genre itself in the early &#8217;70s).  Peckinpah imagined Garrett as a man who is bitter about being used as a capitalist tool to kill off a young rebel threat who sits around grousing about the greedy businessmen who have destroyed the code of the West.</p>
<p>But the truth comes out in Mark Gardner&#8217;s <em>Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West. </em>He reports Garrett was an enthusiastic, if not terribly successful, capitalist himself who had invested in and started several large cattle concerns and other enterprises.</p>
<p>And while Billy may have been on the right side in the famed Lincoln County War, it was the only time in his life that the career horse thief and casual killer had any justification for his actions.</p>
<p><em>To Hell on a Fast Horse</em> may not present a lot of new information, but it is a vividly told, action-packed and thoroughly enjoyable look at the complete lives of two of the Old West’s iconic figures.</p>
<p>Gardner tells the story as parallel biographies. The Kid was not born William Bonney (as usually reported) but probably Henry McCarty, the son of a poor Irish refugee.  A petty thief who gradually drifted West ahead of the law, the Kid graduated to stealing horses and constantly practiced with his pistols.  Personally charming, the Kid attracted a loyal band of cohorts — and women — and his dash and daring earned him admiration among some in the general public.</p>
<p>Garrett, meanwhile, was almost the Kid’s direct opposite.  A tall man of few words, Garrett was born on a prosperous Louisiana plantation but sought his fortune in the West. He worked as a buffalo hunter and cowboy, saving his money until he opened his own saloon in Lincoln County.  Garrett married Juanita Gutierrez, who died within months of the wedding. (The Kid, along with most of the county&#8217;s folks, probably attended the wedding reception, leading to the myth, central to Peckinpah’s film, that Garrett and the Kid had been good friends.) Garrett then married Juanita’s sister, Apolinaria, who bore him nine children.</p>
<p>Two things would forever shape how the American public would view both men.  First, the irony that the Kid worked his first straight job for John Tunstall, the most sympathetic figure in the Lincoln County War, a smaller entrepreneur looking for fair treatment in the cattle market. After Tunstall was shot down in cold blood, many saw the Kid’s subsequent actions — including shooting a corrupt sheriff from ambush — as honorably seeking vengeance and justice for his dead boss. His real motives, however, were far cloudier than that.</p>
<p>Garrett, on the other hand, would never live down the fact that he ultimately shot the Kid from a position of advantage in the dark, even taking into account the number of deputies Garrett had lost in the pursuit of the Kid, and his belief that the Kid was armed and making a move on him.</p>
<p>Garrett never garnered a reputation like Wyatt Earp, Bill Hickok and other legendary lawmen because of how he shot the Kid in the dark. Ironically, Garrett’s detractors generally ignore that the Kid had shot Lincoln County’s Sheriff Brady from ambush&#8211; and that Garrett had captured the Kid alive once, only to have the outlaw murder one of his deputies and escape.</p>
<p><em>To Hell on a Fast Horse</em> at times reads like a Louis L’Amour book, especially when Garrett’s posse pursues the Kid and his band and engages in a series of gun battles and hairbreadth escapes.  While such modern Western movies as <em>Open Range</em> have tried to be more “realistic” about the marksmanship in the Old West (if they couldn’t shoot better than that, many would have starved to death), Gardner relates gun battles in vivid detail that reminds us that these people were <em>very</em> familiar with weapons—and some of them could <em>really</em> shoot.</p>
<p>More importantly, Gardner gives a balanced and complete portrait of Garrett, a flawed and fascinating man whose ambition often exceeded his reach in business. He nonetheless remained an effective law enforcement officer who was constantly called back into service to solve particularly troublesome situations.</p>
<p>The legend surrounding Billy the Kid remains fascinating, as it does not quite fit into the usual template of the outlaw who becomes an American folk hero. He may have been charming and had flair to spare, but he also casually gunned down men who had no chance to fight back.</p>
<p>The Kid also was, by trade, a horse thief.  Unlike most other crooks-turned-icons, he didn&#8217;t rob banks that were regarded as the bad guys for foreclosing on American home and farm owners during hard times. (Though in pre-Federal Reserve times, small investors and farmers could lose their life savings because of such robberies.)  His only virtue was seen as standing up for the little guy against bigger corporate interests in avenging his murdered boss.</p>
<p>Of course, it’s elected officials today who rob the banks blind, call <em>them</em> the bad guys and seem to be hell-bent on killing small businesses …</p>
<p>Maybe moderns shouldn’t feel so superior and sneer so much about the “Wild West.”</p>
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		<title>Should I Stay or Should I Go?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/timothy-radcliffe/should-i-stay-or-should-i-go/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=should-i-stay-or-should-i-go</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 15 Apr 2010 04:03:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Timothy Radcliffe]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[As a former Master of the Dominicans, I've decided the Church
is stuck with me, whatever happens.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/night.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-58190" title="night" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/night.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="250" /></a></p>
<p><strong>This article is reprinted from <a href="http://www.thetablet.co.uk/">The Tablet.</a></strong></p>
<p>Fresh revelations of sexual abuse by priests in Germany and Italy have provoked a tide of anger and disgust. I have received emails from people all around Europe asking how can they possibly remain in the Church? I was even sent a form with which to renounce my membership of the Church. Why stay?</p>
<p>First of all, why go? Some people feel that they can no longer remain associated with an institution that is so corrupt and dangerous for children. The suffering of so many children is indeed horrific. They must be our first concern. Nothing that I will write is intended in any way to lessen our horror at the evil of sexual abuse. But the statistics for the US, from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2004, suggest that Catholic clergy do not offend more than the married clergy of other Churches.</p>
<p>Some surveys even give a lower level of offence for Catholic priests. They are less likely to offend than lay school teachers, and perhaps half as likely as the general population. Celibacy does not push people to abuse children. It is simply untrue to imagine that leaving the Church for another denomination would make one’s children safer.  We must face the terrible fact that the abuse of children is widespread in every part of society. To make the Church the scapegoat would be a cover-up.</p>
<p>But what about the cover-up within the Church? Have not our bishops been shockingly irresponsible in moving offenders around, not reporting them to the police and so perpetuating the abuse? Yes, sometimes. But the great majority of these cases go back to the 1960s and 1970s, when bishops often regarded sexual abuse as a sin rather than also a pathological condition, and when lawyers and psychologists often reassured them that it was safe to reassign priests after treatment. It is unjust to project backwards an awareness of the nature and seriousness of sexual abuse which simply did not exist then. It was only the rise of feminism in the late 1970s which, by shedding light on the violence of some men against women, alerted us to the terrible damage done to vulnerable children.</p>
<p>But what about the Vatican? Pope Benedict has taken a strong line in tackling this issue as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) and since becoming Pope. Now the finger is pointed at him. It appears that some cases reported to the CDF under his watch were not dealt with. Isn’t the Pope’s credibility undermined? There are demonstrators in front of St Peter’s calling for his resignation. I am morally certain that he bears no blame here.</p>
<p>It is generally imagined that the Vatican is a vast and efficient organisation. In fact it is tiny. The CDF only employs 45 people, dealing with doctrinal and disciplinary issues for a Church which has 1.3 billion members, 17 per cent of the world’s population, and some 400,000 priests. When I dealt with the CDF as Master of the Dominican Order, it was obvious that they were struggling to cope. Documents slipped through the cracks. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger lamented to me that the staff was simply too small for the job.</p>
<p>People are furious with the Vatican’s failure to open up its files and offer a clear explanation of what happened. Why is it so secretive? Angry and hurt Catholics feel a right to transparent government. I agree. But we must, in justice, understand why the Vatican is so self-protective. There were more martyrs in the twentieth century than in all the previous centuries combined. Bishops and priests, Religious and laity were assassinated in Western Europe, in Soviet countries, in Africa, Latin America and Asia.</p>
<p>Many Catholics still suffer imprisonment and death for their faith. Of course, the Vatican tends to stress confidentiality; this has been necessary to protect the Church from people who wish to destroy her. So it is understandable that the Vatican reacts aggressively to demands for transparency and will read legitimate requests for openness as a form of persecution. And some people in the media do, without any doubt, wish to damage the credibility of the Church.</p>
<p>But we owe a debt of gratitude to the press for its insistence that the Church face its failures. If it had not been for the media, then this shameful abuse might have remained unaddressed.</p>
<p>Confidentiality is also a consequence of the Church’s insistence on the right of everyone accused to keep their good name until they are proved to be guilty. This is very hard for our society to understand, whose media destroy people’s reputations without a thought.</p>
<p>Why go? If it is to find a safer haven, a less corrupt Church, then I think that you will be disappointed. I too long for more transparent government, more open debate, but the Church’s secrecy is understandable, and sometimes necessary. To understand is not always to condone, but necessary if we are to act justly.</p>
<p>Why stay? I must lay my cards on the table; even if the Church were obviously worse than other Churches, I still would not go. I am not a Catholic because our Church is the best, or even because I like Catholicism. I do love much about my Church but there are aspects of it which I dislike. I am not a Catholic because of a consumer option for an ecclesiastical Waitrose rather than Tesco, but because I believe that it embodies something which is essential to the Christian witness to the Resurrection, visible unity.</p>
<p>When Jesus died, his community fell apart. He had been betrayed, denied, and most of his disciples fled. It was chiefly the women who accompanied him to the end. On Easter Day, he appeared to the disciples. This was more than the physical resuscitation of a dead corpse.</p>
<p>In him God triumphed over all that destroys community: sin, cowardice, lies, misunderstanding, suffering and death. The Resurrection was made visible to the world in the astonishing sight of a community reborn. These cowards and deniers were gathered together again. They were not a reputable bunch, and shamefaced at what they had done, but once again they were one. The unity of the Church is a sign that all the forces that fragment and scatter are defeated in Christ.</p>
<p>All Christians are one in the Body of Christ. I have deepest respect and affection for Christians from other Churches who nurture and inspire me. But this unity in Christ needs some visible embodiment. Christianity is not a vague spirituality but a religion of incarnation, in which the deepest truths take the physical and sometimes institutional form. Historically this unity has found its focus in Peter, the Rock in Matthew, Mark and Luke, and the shepherd of the flock in John’s gospel.</p>
<p>From the beginning and throughout history, Peter has often been a wobbly rock, a source of scandal, corrupt, and yet this is the one – and his successors – whose task is to hold us together so that we may witness to Christ’s defeat on Easter Day of sin’s power to divide. And so the Church is stuck with me whatever happens. We may be embarrassed to admit that we are Catholics, but Jesus kept shameful company from the beginning.</p>
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		<title>Defending Gitmo&#8217;s Lawyers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/defending-gitmos-lawyers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=defending-gitmos-lawyers</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Mar 2010 05:35:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=54490</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Left tries to squelch debate about the “Al-Qaeda Seven.”]]></description>
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<p>Joe McCarthy lives, and his name is Liz Cheney. Such has been the overreaction of the Left, and much of the establishment media, to the now-famous “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIxg7LmlEQg">al-Qaeda seven</a>” internet ad aired by Keep America Safe, the political group which the former vice president’s daughter co-chairs.</p>
<p>Despite being denounced as a McCarthyite smear job, the ad’s content was relatively tame. It called on Attorney General <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2357">Eric Holder</a> to reveal the identities of seven of the nine Justice Department lawyers who represented or advocated for the Guantanamo Bay detainees while in private practice. (Holder already has named two of them.)</p>
<p>Just as notable – yet not nearly as noted – is what the ad did not say. At no point did it call for the DOJ attorneys to be fired for supplying legal counsel to terrorist detainees. In that respect, it was very different from the Left’s campaign to criminally prosecute attorneys in the Bush administration’s Justice Department who wrote memos justifying the use of harsh interrogation on Guantanamo detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6162">National Lawyer’s Guild</a>, the premier left-wing legal group, has even <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2008/04/09/nationals-lawyers-guild-calls-for-yoos-disbarment/">called</a> for one of those attorneys, John Yoo, to be disbarred, fired from his job as a professor at Berkeley law school, and tried as a war criminal. Nothing in the Keep America Safe ad even approaches that level of politically motivated sabotage.</p>
<p>That distinction has not deterred the ad’s left-wing critics from waxing indignant about the injustice supposedly done to the seven anonymous DOJ attorneys. For the Left, the DOJ lawyers who represented Guantanamo detainees follow in the proud American tradition of providing counsel to unpopular clients. Liberal columnist Eugene Robinson recently <a href="http://www.kansascity.com/2010/03/13/1810564/liz-cheneys-group-puts-politics.html#ixzz0iChzYFXO">scolded</a> that the lawyers targeted in the ad</p>
<blockquote><p>“…did what lawyers are supposed to do in this country: Ensure that even the most unpopular defendants have adequate legal representation and that the government obeys the law.”</p></blockquote>
<p>But that analogy is specious. Guantanamo’s al-Qaeda detainees aren’t unpopular criminals. They are enemy combatants and, as such, have no constitutional right to legal counsel – a legal tradition recognized by the Supreme Court since World War II. As Andrew McCarthy <a href="http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2010/03/opposing-view-no-right-to-counsel.html">points out</a>:</p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<blockquote><p>“The al-Qaeda detainees at issue are not accused defendants. They are plaintiffs filing offensive lawsuits (habeas corpus claims) against the American people during wartime. Unpopular American inmates must represent themselves in such suits because there is no right to counsel.”</p></blockquote>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>With the legal precedent decidedly not in their favor, the ad’s foes on the Left have resorted to shrill cries of “McCarthyism.” <em>Nation</em> contributor and long-time anti-Guantanamo activist David Cole recently raged that Liz Cheney “challenged the loyalty and patriotism” of the lawyers who had represented the Guantanamo detainees. Whether or not one agrees with that description, it’s peculiar that Cole should take issue with this approach. After all, left-wing activists have long claimed that Bush attorneys like John Yoo should be tried for “<a href="http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/38067#comment-222161">treason</a>” for supposedly singing off on “torture” – a passion for questioning patriotism that Cole, the author <em>The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable, </em>has done much to fuel.<em> </em></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>Even granting Cole’s premise that the ad questioned the patriotism of the DOJ lawyers, the logical response is: So what? Why should it be off-limits to question the motives of lawyers who volunteered their services to America’s terrorist enemies? Especially when those services could have jeopardized the war on terror – and endangered American soldiers – by securing the release of terrorist combatants?</p>
<p>In fairness, even some on the Right have objected to the ad’s implication that the DOJ lawyers harbored pro-terrorist sympathies. (&#8220;Whose values do they share?&#8221; the narration portentously asks.) That may have overstated the case, but the fact remains that while the Guantanamo lawyers are not themselves jihadists they have aided the jihadists’ cause. Some went further than others: As Debra Burlingame and Thomas Joscelyn detail in the <em><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704131404575117611125872740.html">Wall Street Journal</a></em><strong> </strong>today, lawyers for the detainees occasionally defined zealous representation to mean inciting the detainees; distributing anti-American propaganda; encouraging the detainees to claim they were abused and tortured; and even endangering Guantanamo’s guards by handing out a map of the detention camp’s layout, including the guard towers.</p>
<p>No one has suggested that the seven unnamed DOJ lawyers were involved in those cases or used those tactics. But then that was Keep America Safe’s point in its ad: to establish which of the Guantanamo lawyers is serving in the Justice Department and to determine what influence, if any, they may have over national security policy generally and Guantanamo Bay in particular.</p>
<p>That disclosure may be in the administration’s interest, and not only because Obama was elected on a promise of unparalleled transparency. Although the administration has largely maintained the Bush administration’s detention policies – from rendition and indefinite detention to military tribunals – it blundered badly when it proposed a civilian trial in New York for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. A bipartisan backlash seems to have convinced the administration to abandon that plan. It’s impossible to know if that move came on the advice of any of the Guantanamo lawyers. But if so, the scrutiny brought on by the ad the Left loves to hate may be the perfect opportunity to reshuffle the DOJ ranks in the interest of better legal counsel.</p>
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		<title>Progressives and Conservatives</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-horowitz/progressives-and-conservatives-a-briefing/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=progressives-and-conservatives-a-briefing</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:13:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A guide.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/cornelwest.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-53181" title="cornelwest" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/cornelwest.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="309" /></a></p>
<p>Conservatives look to the past as a guide to the future. The past tells them who human beings are, and how they behave, and what is possible. In their approach to the future, conservatives are pragmatic and ground their hopes in experience. When the Founders were drawing up plans for the Republic they looked at the history of past republics and concluded that democracy was the least problematic form of government but that it posed the danger of a populist tyranny. So they instituted a system of checks and balances to guard against tyrannies of the majority and to provide the public with a cooling off period in which their emotion driven agendas could be corrected by reflection.</p>
<p>Progressives, by contrast, look to an imaginary future as a guide to the present and regard the experience of the past as “reactionary” and “backward.” Progressives have in their heads an image of what the future should look like based on emotion (hope and change), and they discount the experience of past and present as products of ignorance, prejudice and selfish interests, which they are determined to overcome.</p>
<p>Their agendas are actually much worse than this would suggest, since progressives imagine a future that is perfect, a new world in which there is no poverty, no bigotry, no irreconcilable conflict &#8212; where there is “social justice.” Against this imaginary ideal world nothing that exists can be justified or defended, or in the words of the arch rebel “everything that exists deserves to perish.” These were words were spoken by Goethe’s Mephistopheles, and quoted approvingly by Karl Marx.</p>
<p>Progressives are focused on destroying what <em>is</em> in the name of an impossible <em>what-can-be</em> (“hope and change”) and it’s very hard for them – impossible for the truest believers &#8212; to correct course when they are on the march and their programs aren’t working. All contrary counsel is seen not as experience-based wisdom but as obstruction and reaction.</p>
<p>Some years ago there was a C-Span debate between the “Democratic Socialist” &#8212; an oxymoron if there ever was one &#8212; Barbara Ehrenreich and the bloviating Cornel West on the left side and two Heritage Foundation fellows on the right. The subject was socialism and its failure in the Soviet Union and China. The Heritage team pointed out very politely and circumspectly as though embarrassed for the socialists on the platform that progressives had encountered some problems in implementing social justice in these countries and there were some casualties along the way.  Responding, Barbara Ehrenreich said (or words to this precise effect): We’ve only been trying socialism for 250 years and it’s not surprising that mistakes were made. Side note: This woman’s book attacking American capitalism and re-invigorating socialist delusions is assigned reading for students in virtually every university in the nation – at some schools required for all incoming freshmen with no countervailing text.</p>
<p>The investment of progressives in an imaginary future that is perfect is the reason their loyalties to their country often seem uncertain. Every movement force threatening America (or as they would frame it “American power”) however barbaric (think Saddam Hussein or Hugo Chavez or Ahmadinejad or Hamas) can readily be seen by them as striving towards the imaginary future – the utopia of social justice – however distorted. It is always the reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries who are responsible.   Cuba has been bankrupted by a deranged dictator and economic crackpot, but the American “blockade” is responsible. The Palestinians behave like Nazis with a national culture that is a death cult, but Israeli “apartheid” is responsible. Muslim radicals are homicidal racists, but that’s just because they’re oppressed by corporate America. Once they’re liberated and able to enter the kingdom of social justice, they will become enlightened like their progressive apologists.</p>
<p>While sabotaging America’s wars abroad and national security measures at home, progressives will protest  that they are patriotic and love their country, and want it to live up to its ideals. But their love is reserved for an ideal America that doesn’t exist and as long as it is inhabited by flesh and blood &#8212; and therefore corruptible &#8212; human beings never will.</p>
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		<title>Religious Left Rallies for Obamacare’s Final Stand</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/mark-d-tooley/religious-left-rallies-for-obamacare%e2%80%99s-final-stand/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=religious-left-rallies-for-obamacare%25e2%2580%2599s-final-stand</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:00:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark D. Tooley]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Worshipping at the altar of the state.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/wallis.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-53210" title="wallis" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/wallis.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="409" /></a></p>
<p>The Religious and Evangelical Left, plus the Islamic Society of North America and a few others, are making a final Custer-like stand on behalf of much cherished Obamacare.  In an ad featured in <em>The Hill</em>, a Capitol Hill newspaper aimed at congressional staffers, a religious coalition called “Faithful Reform in Health Care” demanded that Congress “complete the task at hand on behalf of the millions who are left out and left behind in our current health care system.”</p>
<p>Supposedly, these insistent religious groups speak on behalf of millions of religious Americans, most of whom are politically more conservative than the general population.  If Americans as a whole reject Obamacare, then almost certainly most religiously active Americans oppose Obamacare.  Presumably, the various bishops and other ostensibly important clerics who signed this ad are hoping that Capitol Hill readers will not realize that most church goers don’t look to Episcopal or Lutheran or Methodist bishops for wise political counsel.</p>
<p>“Opportunities to comprehensively address our broken health care system are rare,” the pro-Obamacare religious coalition insisted with a typical sense of panic. “Decades of failed attempts at reform testify to the difficulty of this task, and we know that the current effort has not been easy. However, we now stand closer than ever before to historic health care reform. Turning back now could mean justice delayed for another generation and an unprecedented opportunity lost.”</p>
<p>Foisting government control of the health care system on America is so urgent that lawmakers are implicitly implored to disregard their constituents’ views.  The old Religious Left, now joined by the emerging Evangelical Left, typically joined by left-wing Catholic groups and the oddly paired Islamic Society, has insisted for much of the last century that biblical social justice equals nearly unrestricted statism.  “We are communities of faith who have supported comprehensive health care reform for decades,” they noted with accuracy in their ad.  “We have also offered vocal support – and occasional constructive criticism – of the health care reform effort over the last year.”</p>
<p>In truth, the Religious Left et al would prefer a Canadian/British style single payer system rather than trifle with Obamacare’s more complicated preservation of private insurance under tight federal control.  But the Religious Left rightly understands that Obamacare’s incrementalism likely would lead to more total government subjugation. So they are willing to be patient.  “We know that no comprehensive health care reform bill will be perfect,” they indulgently opined.  “Indeed, if any piece of legislation ever fulfills our full vision, our vision is far too small,” they candidly admitted.  Likely for much of the Religious Left and its allies, their holistic “vision” would entail coercive state management of every arena of human life.</p>
<p>Traditional Christians and Jews have understood that Providence has a vital vocation for families, religious institutions, private business, independent charities, and a whole range of non-government actors.  Traditionally, they have believed that the government only does, to paraphrase Lincoln, what the people cannot do for themselves.   But the old Religious Left, joined increasingly by Evangelical Left wannabes, leaves almost no civic space for the private sphere.  In their almost totalitarian perspective, the state is an endless cornucopia of goods and services providing for every human need.   Families, churches, businesses and charities become almost inconsequential, or are, at best, mere compliant hand maidens to an all powerful government.  Most religious people would find this fantasy nightmarish.  But this nightmare animates nearly all the social justice activism of religious leftists.</p>
<p>Seizing control of America’s health care industry is naturally a key ingredient of the Religious Left’s statist absolutism.  They rightly understand that Obamacare’s defeat could forever forestall socialized medicine in America.  Hence the dire urgency.  “As people of faith, we envision a society where every person is afforded health, wholeness and human dignity,” their ad sermonized, once again assuming non-governmental solutions are incapable of assuring health or dignity.  Quoting Martin Luther King, Jr, they beseeched:  “Let us not delay health care justice any longer. This is your moment for political courage, vision, leadership and faith. We urge you to take heart and move meaningful health care reform forward.”</p>
<p>There are the usual claims that without government control, chaos and suffering will ensue.  After all, how can anything be accomplished unless tax-funded bureaucrats are in charge?  The religious leftists assert that Obamacare’s demise will mean “tens of thousands will continue to die needlessly each year,” “tens of millions will remain uninsured,”  “health costs will continue to grow much faster than wages,” “many millions of hard-working people and their children will join the ranks of the uninsured,” “businesses…will either drop coverage or will be unable to make needed investments,” and the “nation’s economy – and its ability to create jobs – will suffer.”</p>
<p>How nice that the religious leftists actually mentioned “businesses” and the need for “investments.”  Maybe this was a talking point added by the coalition’s political consultants.  For the Religious Left, private businesses are the enemy, motivated only by greed and private, and to be suffered only grudgingly, and only then if under a tight government leash entailing endless regulation and high taxation.</p>
<p>Signers of this &#8220;Call for Political Courage, Vision, Leadership, and Faith&#8221; include officials of the Episcopal, Presbyterian USA, Evangelical Lutheran, United Church of Christ, and United Methodist denominations, along with Jim Wallis’ Sojourners, Evangelicals for Social Action, the National Council of Churches, Quakers, Mennonites, left-wing Catholic orders like the Maryknollers, a couple Muslim groups and several Jewish organizations.  Some of these groups, or at least their elites, have very little theology any more.  But they are increasingly unified behind a single unifying spiritual principle:  worshipping at the altar of the state.</p>
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		<title>Identifying the Gitmo Nine &#8211; Washington Times</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/identifying-the-gitmo-nine-washington-times/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=identifying-the-gitmo-nine-washington-times</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:09:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=52267</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Washington Times Editorial Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. seems to have a bizarre urge to stick his finger in the eyes of congressmen. On subject after sub- ject, he has refused to give substantive answers to basic, straightforward congressional inquiries. In the latest instance, Mr. Holder&#38;apos;s obstinacy could put national security at risk. This [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/25/identifying-the-gitmo-nine/"><img src='http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/20100118-210016-pic-464789873_r268x201.jpg' alt='' /></a></p>
<p><strong><em>Washington Times</em> Editorial </strong></p>
<p>Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. seems to have a bizarre urge to stick his finger in the eyes of congressmen. On subject after sub-</p>
<p>ject, he has refused to give substantive answers to basic, straightforward congressional inquiries. In the latest instance, Mr. Holder&amp;apos;s obstinacy could put national security at risk.</p>
<p>This page reported in an exclusive last November that Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli, the Justice Department&amp;apos;s third-ranking official, recused himself on at least 39 cases of terrorist detainees &#8211; presumably because his former law firm did work for those detainees, even if Mr. Perrelli himself did not. Our report came in the context of a Senate hearing where Mr. Holder dismissively treated requests from Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, for the Justice Department to provide a list of all detainee cases from which Justice Department lawyers were recused, and the names of the lawyers.</p>
<p>On Feb. 19, after three months of stalling, Holder aide Ronald Welch finally deigned to respond to Mr. Grassley. &#8220;I asked for names, cases and recusals, and in return I received a five-page letter of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo that failed to sufficiently answer my simple questions,&#8221; said Mr. Grassley. Mr. Welch told the senator that at least nine lawyers at the department either represented detainees or worked on amicus briefs on detainees&amp;apos; behalf. But he didn&amp;apos;t name the lawyers (other than two already identified by Mr. Grassley), or the cases or other relevant information.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/25/identifying-the-gitmo-nine/">EDITORIAL: Identifying the Gitmo Nine &#8211; Washington Times</a>.</p>
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		<title>Corruptocrat Eric Holder&#8217;s National Security Cover-Up</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/michellemalkin/corruptocrat-eric-holders-national-security-cover-up/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=corruptocrat-eric-holders-national-security-cover-up</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Feb 2010 05:05:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michelle Malkin]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[How many of Holder's former colleagues and associates are now on the DOJ payroll?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/eric_holder_1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-51998" title="eric_holder_1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/eric_holder_1.jpg" alt="" width="522" height="346" /></a></p>
<p>The White House wants to play Transparency Olympics with the Tea Party movement. President Obama&#8217;s Chief Technology Officer Andrew McLaughlin dared Tea Party activists and conservatives last week to &#8220;push the administration to make its policies more open&#8221; and make it a &#8220;political competition … to see who can be more radical in their openness,&#8221; The Hill reported. So, let&#8217;s start by knocking down Attorney General Eric Holder&#8217;s national security stonewall at the Department of Justice, shall we? Let the sun shine in.</p>
<p>For more than a year, I&#8217;ve been writing about the looming national security and conflict-of-interest problems posed by Holder&#8217;s status as a former partner at the prestigious law firm Covington and Burling. The company currently represents or has provided pro bono representation and sob-story media-relations campaigns in the past to more than a dozen Gitmo detainees from Yemen who are seeking civilian trials on American soil.</p>
<p>The firm wasn&#8217;t just a bit player. It led the charge, contributing more than 3,000 hours to Gitmo litigation in 2007, according to The American Lawyer. At least one known Covington big shot and fellow former Clintonite, Lanny Breuer, now works for Holder as head of the DOJ&#8217;s criminal division. Though he himself did not participate in the detainee cases, Holder&#8217;s celebrity undoubtedly boosted company-wide prestige.</p>
<p>How many of Holder&#8217;s former colleagues and associates are now on the DOJ payroll? How many like them, who worked at other law firms or for left-wing lobbying groups, now inhabit DOJ offices? How many of them have been allowed to work on government terrorism cases related to their past crusades for al-Qaida-tied clients? How many have had to recuse themselves — and have those recusals been full and forthcoming? How can the public judge whether these lawyers are representing America&#8217;s best interests — or those of the jihadis?</p>
<p>GOP Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa has been trying to get answers. DOJ information suppressors have snubbed him repeatedly. As the Washington Examiner&#8217;s Byron York reported on Friday, Holder has now acknowledged that &#8220;at least&#8221; nine Obama appointees in the Justice Department &#8220;have represented or advocated for terrorist detainees before joining the Justice Department.&#8221; But the tight-lipped, taxpayer-funded litigators at the agency won&#8217;t name names or cough up any relevant details.</p>
<p>Grassley asked for &#8220;the names of political appointees in the Department who represented detainees (or) worked for organizations advocating on behalf of detainees … the cases or projects that these appointees worked on with respect to detainees prior to joining the Justice Department … and the cases or projects relating to detainees that they have worked on since joining the Justice Department.</p>
<p>…&#8221; Beyond two DOJ appointees whose work for jihadi defendants had already been made public, Holder gave up nothing. Zip. Zilch.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not even clear that the Gitmo Nine are the end of the line. The list is not a comprehensive tally of DOJ appointees, Holder told Grassley and other GOP senators who pressed for public disclosure. Why not? What are they trying to hide? Who are they trying to spare?</p>
<p>Americans have a right to know whether they are subsidizing jihadi sympathizers, and whether their Justice Department is now a sanctuary for human rights transnationalists and little terrorists&#8217; helpers in the mold of Lynne Stewart, who was convicted of abetting Muslim terrorist mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and spreading messages inciting violence on his behalf while representing him.</p>
<p>Americans have a right to know whether Holder — who put political interests ahead of security interests at the Clinton Justice Department in both the Marc Rich pardon scandal and the Puerto Rican FALN terrorist debacle — has made hiring decisions that provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare.</p>
<p>Tellingly, Holder has treated the GOP&#8217;s national security concerns dismissively. He&#8217;s hoping his nonresponsive blow-off of Grassley&#8217;s request will die on the vine. And just as he used his past lapses in judgment during the Clinton era to argue that they made him more qualified for the job he holds now, Holder argues that the phantom jihadi lawyers on the DOJ payroll are a good thing for the country, so we should just shut up:</p>
<p>&#8220;A prosecutor of white-collar fraud cases may have previously represented defendants in such cases. This familiarity with and experience in the relevant area of law redounds to the government&#8217;s benefit.&#8221;</p>
<p>As usual, Holder puts ordinary civilian crimes on the same footing as terrorism plots and acts of war against our country. But why not let the people decide for themselves whether his staff decisions redound to their benefit? &#8220;The American people have the right to information about their government&#8217;s activities,&#8221; Holder himself said in a press release trumpeting new freedom of information rules last year. Put up or shut up, Mr. Attorney General.</p>
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		<title>Freedom Center Students</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/calvin-freiburger/freedom-center-students/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=freedom-center-students</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Feb 2010 01:25:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Calvin Freiburger]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[
The left has already begun the transformation of many K-12 classrooms into indoctrination projects for its agendas. Concerted campaigns have been launched by the left at high schools geared to converting students into activists against the war and discouraging them from volunteering to serve. Radical pedagogy exemplified by the “Teaching for Social Justice” regimen has [...]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><img class="size-full wp-image-109 aligncenter" title="fcs" src="http://www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org.php5-7.dfw1-2.websitetestlink.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/fcs.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="250" /></p>
<p>The left has already begun the transformation of many K-12 classrooms into indoctrination projects for its agendas. Concerted campaigns have been launched by the left at high schools geared to converting students into activists against the war and discouraging them from volunteering to serve. Radical pedagogy exemplified by the “Teaching for Social Justice” regimen has entered teacher training texts and teacher training graduate courses.</p>
<p>In response to this juggernaut, the Freedom Center has launched our Student Center for Academic Freedom on college campuses and with the same agenda: take politics out of the classroom. The Center has drafted an academic bill of rights for K-12 schools and created a new website—<a href="http://www.psaf.org/">www.psaf.org</a>. The Center has commissioned a book by education writer Sol Stern exposing the radical roots of the “Teaching for Social Justice” phenomenon (its leading intellectual influence is former Weatherman terrorist and current University of Chicago education professor Billy Ayres) and the extent to which it has penetrated teachers’ colleges and textbooks. Stern’s study will be published by Encounter Books in 2007.</p>
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		<title>The Railroading of Geert Wilders</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/robert-spencer/the-railroading-of-geert-wilders/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-railroading-of-geert-wilders</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:20:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=49295</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Netherlands leaves justice behind.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/geert-wilders.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-49297" title="geert-wilders" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/geert-wilders-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a></p>
<p>The Stalinist-show-trial aspect of the Geert Wilders “hate speech” trial in the Netherlands was thrown into sharp relief last week when the Amsterdam District Court refused to allow Wilders to call fifteen of the eighteen witnesses he had hoped to bring forward in his defense. Wilders in response was characteristically direct: “This Court is not interested in the truth. This Court doesn’t want me to have a fair trial. I can’t have any respect for this. This Court would not be out of place in a dictatorship.”</p>
<p>The three witnesses the court allowed Wilders are the Dutch Islamic scholars Hans Jansen and Simon Admiraal, along with the Wafa Sultan. Hans Jansen’s work on Islam is superb and groundbreaking, and he will be an excellent witness, as will Admiraal and the exemplary freedom fighter Wafa Sultan.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, this decision indicates the hollowness of Dutch justice and the court’s bias against Wilders. For some who would have been Wilders’s most effective witnesses were disallowed. He had wanted to call Mohammed Bouyeri, the murderer of Theo Van Gogh.</p>
<p>Why Bouyeri? Wilders, in the bizarre inquisition that has replaced justice in the Dutch courts, is accused of offending Muslims by pointing out that Muslims invoke the Qur’an and Muhammad’s example to justify violence. However, Bouyeri quoted the Qur’an in the note threatening Wilders and others that he stabbed into Van Gogh’s body, and invoked the Qur’an repeatedly during his trial as well. “Kill them, and Allah will help you and guide your hand,” he said. “There’s no room there for doubt or interpretation there.”</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p>Bouyeri would have proven Wilders’ point immediately: he is simply telling the truth about how Islamic teachings incite all too many Muslims to violence – and if telling the truth is now illegal in the Netherlands, so much the worse for the Netherlands. By disallowing Wilders from calling Bouyeri and others, the court has hindered Wilders’ ability to make this case – suggesting (and by no means for the first time) that the Dutch authorities are determined to convict Wilders, and are not going to let any inconvenient facts get in the way of their doing so.</p>
<p>It is not exaggerating to say that the Geert Wilders trial is a defining moment in the history of Western civilization. One would have to go back centuries to find a court case with as much significance for the future course of the free world. If the farrago of “hate” charges against Wilders stick, and he is convicted, it will herald the end of the freedom of speech in the West, as a precedent will have been set that other Western nations (urged on by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which is the organization most responsible for the global assault on free speech) will be certain to follow. The era of enlightenment and the understanding that all human beings are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights will be definitively drawing to a close, and a new darkness will descend over Europe and the free world in general. For once the precedent is established that a man can be jailed and destroyed for offending a privileged class, the idea that every human being has rights that cannot be infringed will be damaged beyond repair.</p>
<p>And even if Wilders prevails, enough damage has been done already. The Dutch law (and there are others like it in other Western countries) that stipulates that someone can actually be tried and jailed for offending another person will remain on the books. Other trials will follow. The law will be used by the governing elites who developed it in order to maintain their power and silence independent and dissenting voices.</p>
<p>For that is, of course, the point of all this. The Dutch authorities stand arrayed on one side, with Wilders standing alone on the other. Yet despite the fact that he has nothing like their numbers, wealth, or resources, he threatens to topple their entire multicultural house of cards – for he has on his side a weapon that all of their power cannot defeat, the weapon of truth. And so they are desperate to silence him, and end forever his truth-telling about jihad and Islamic supremacism.</p>
<p>Yet even if they do silence him, the truth will still be the truth. They will not be able to obliterate it forever. But will they be able to help initiate a long, perhaps centuries long, period of darkness and oppression in Europe and its civilizational children?</p>
<p>Certainly.</p>
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		<title>Byron York: Who are the 300 terrorists held in U.S. prisons? &#8211; Washington Examiner</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/byron-york-who-are-the-300-terrorists-held-in-u-s-prisons-washington-examiner/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=byron-york-who-are-the-300-terrorists-held-in-u-s-prisons-washington-examiner</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Feb 2010 03:44:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=49246</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[&#8220;The Bush administration used the criminal justice system to convict more than 300 individuals on terrorism-related charges,&#8221; writes Attorney General Eric Holder in a new letter to Republican critics in Congress. The letter is part of the Obama administration&#38;apos;s aggressive defense of its decision to grant full American constitutional rights to al Qaeda soldier Umar [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>&#8220;The Bush administration used the criminal justice system to convict more than 300 individuals on terrorism-related charges,&#8221; writes Attorney General Eric Holder in a new letter to Republican critics in Congress. The letter is part of the Obama administration&amp;apos;s aggressive defense of its decision to grant full American constitutional rights to al Qaeda soldier Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the accused Christmas Day bomber. That defense boils down to one sentence: Bush did it, too.Republicans on Capitol Hill object. They argue that one of the reasons some terrorists were handled in the criminal justice system is that it took George W. Bush and Congress years to establish a military tribunal system that satisfied constitutional requirements &#8212; a process that was lengthened by legal challenges filed by some of the same lawyers who now work in Holder&amp;apos;s Justice Department.You can argue about that forever. But there&amp;apos;s one serious factual debate going on about Holder&amp;apos;s letter, and that concerns those &#8220;300 individuals.&#8221; Just who are they?It turns out some lawmakers have been trying for months to get an answer. They&amp;apos;re not saying the claim is false &#8212; they just want to see what it&amp;apos;s based on. But so far they haven&amp;apos;t been able to find out.It started back in May 2009, when President Obama gave his famous National Archives speech outlining the plan to close the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention center. &#8220;Bear in mind the following fact,&#8221; Obama said. &#8220;Nobody has ever escaped from one of our federal &amp;apos;supermax&amp;apos; prisons, which hold hundreds of convicted terrorists.&#8221; Although the president did not put a number on it, various figures, ranging up to 300, have been tossed around in the months since.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Who-are-the-300-terrorists-held-in-U_S_-prisons_-83588677.html">Who are the 300 terrorists held in U.S. prisons? | Washington Examiner</a>.</p>
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