UPDATE: wouldn’t you know it: the perpetrator was a Muslim convert:…

Shameful law enforcement, really.

Orange,

You deliberately misunderstand 2 very important things in my & others’ comments:

1. As an agency dedicated to investigating domestically and primarily, but not only, US Persons, they are beholden to the Constitution when orgs that work overseas are not.

2. US Embassies are considered US SOIL.

The parents of those soldiers have every right to smack Barry Obama and Janet Napolitano right in the face!

Just as a footnote, we’ve had more than just 1 “terrorist” attack on US soil, but it’s been mainly lone wolfs suffering from “Sudden Jihad Syndrome.”

Dare we forget:

1. Salt Lake City mall (shooting)

2. Seattle synagogue (hit & run)

3. Dallas residence (standoff w/cops, but were spotted conducting surveillance at local airport)

4. San Francisco synagogue (hit & run)

5. Denver Safeway store (shooting)

6. Philadelphia subway attack (hammer)

7. Chapel Hill campus (hit & run)

8. Houston residence (stabbing of Jewish roommate)

I know I’ve missed quite a few, but I pulled those I recall in recent years…but all of the above individuals mentioned Islam and jihad as their motivation for their actions. Are we to ignore what they admit?

Let’s also remember that intelligence officials found an online al-Qaeda training manual that pushes the “smaller cell” idea, as well as pushing for smaller attacks (rather than the grand-scale previously conducted). This tends, from a terrorism standpoint, to wear down the populace much more effectively than larger-scale efforts, which tend to galvanize victims to fight back.

Are these just “mental” patients waiting to happen? Or is this online manual training those who’ve become “inspired” by the RoP?

Miss_Anthrope on June 2, 2009 at 10:38 AM

Please add to your list the sniper shootings that occured in Washington DC some years ago when a man and his son were shooting people in gas stations… he was Muslim as well….

Another version that circulated at about the same time…

PRESIDENT-ELECT John F. Kerry’s rise to the nation’s highest office came as little surprise following almost four years of remonstrations against President George W. Bush for his bizarre attack on the defenseless people of Afghanistan.

Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was the right man for a nation outraged by the Bush administration’s pre-emptive war, which, it now seems clear, was based on highly speculative intelligence that Saudi Arabian- born terrorist Osama bin Laden was planning an attack on the United States.

Absent absolute proof of such an imminent attack, Bush’s Sept. 10 bombing of Afghanistan earned him international condemnation and, in all likelihood, an indictment in coming weeks. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, appearing last night on “Larry King Live,’ said the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal likely would bring charges of genocide against Bush.

Bush also faces federal charges at home for his baseless arrest of 19 foreign nationals, many of them native Saudis, whose “crime’ was attending American flight schools. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has joined the American Civil Liberties Union in a joint suit against both Bush and former Attorney General John Ashcroft, charging racial profiling, unlawful arrest and illegal search and seizure.

Kerry’s campaign mantra “You go to war because you have to, not because you want to’ clearly resonated with Americans as they tried to make sense of Bush’s Sept. 10 attack on Afghanistan. Neither the president, nor national security adviser Condoleezza Rice convincingly defended their actions during the recent “9/10 Commission’ hearings, which Congress ordered in response to public outcry.

The commission’s purpose was to try to determine what compelled the president to launch a war against Afghanistan. What kind of intelligence suggested that such an act was justified?

The main target of the attack was bin Laden, friend to Afghanistan’s brutal Taliban regime, as well as al-Qaida training camps in that war-ravaged nation. Al-Qaida, an international terrorist network, has been blamed for numerous attacks on U.S. interests, including the USS Cole bombing, which killed 17 sailors.
Even though Bush’s military campaign was successful in ending the oppressive Taliban regime, bin Laden apparently escaped and al-Qaida continues to flourish.
Some intelligence sources speculate that bin Laden’s operatives may be trying to secure weapons of mass destruction from Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

Even though Saddam continues to send money to the families of Palestinian terrorists and is believed to have programs for developing WMD, Kerry says he is committed to containing Saddam through continued sanctions and the U.N. oil-for-food program.

In any case, experts say that intelligence about Saddam’s WMD program is just as speculative as was the intelligence that prompted Bush to attack Afghanistan. The man credited with sounding the alarm on bin Laden and al-Qaida was Richard Clarke, a counterterrorism expert who has served four presidents, including Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton.

In a Jan. 25 memo to Rice, for instance, Clarke urged immediate attention to several items of national security interest: the Northern Alliance, covert aid, a significant new ’02 budget authority to help fight al-Qaida and a response to the USS Cole.

At Rice’s and Clarke’s urging, Bush called a meeting of principals and, after “connecting the dots,’ decided to wage war against Afghanistan.

What did the dots say? Not much, in retrospect. Apparently, the president decided to bomb a benign country on the basis of “chatter’
that hinted at “something big.’

With no other details on the “big,’ and weaving together random bits of information from a variety of questionable sources, Bush and company decided that 19 fundamentalist Muslim fanatics would fly airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon on 9/11.

Under questioning by the “9/10 Commission,’ Clarke denied that his memo was anything more than a historical overview with a “set of ideas and a paper, mostly.’ The bipartisan commission concluded, therefore, that Bush’s “dot-connecting’ had destroyed American credibility and subjected the United States to increasing hostility in the Arab-Muslim world.

Last week, Saddam Hussein and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat joined French and German leaders in condemning Bush and urging American voters to cast their ballots for regime change in America. Kerry was the clear response to that call.

In a flourish of irony and the spirit of bon vivant for which the new president is widely known, Kerry gave his acceptance speech from Windows on the World, the elegant restaurant atop the World Trade Center’s Tower One.

Are military recruiters armed? Seems like they should be. Not that that will stop everything.

AnotherOpinion on June 2, 2009 at 1:11 PM

In the US, only military police can be armed among civilian population, unless martial law is declared. (Think post-Katrina New Orleans.)

Del Dolemonte on June 2, 2009 at 12:53 PM

Excellent what-if fiction. Either way–fiction or reality–those who protect America are demonized. For those who hate America, that is the only way it can be–America is always wrong and always worthy of destruction.

battleoflepanto1571 on June 2, 2009 at 12:12 PM

Excellent rant.

Well, there were no foreign terrorist attacks on American soil after the Clinton-era WTC attacks. But you’re criticizing Clinton anyway. How is this possible?

orange on June 2, 2009 at 11:58 AM

Thanks for the laugh.

Clinton gets the blame, because bin Laden admitted after 9/11 that those attacks were meant to happen on his watch. But they couldn’t finish the training on time.

Moments after being sworn in as the 44th president, Dick Cheney said that disgraced former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice would be turned over to the Hague for trial in the International Court of Justice as a war criminal. Cheney said Washington would “firmly resist” international demands that Bush be extradited for prosecution as well.

On August 7, 2001, Bush had ordered the United States military to stage an all-out attack on alleged terrorist camps in Afghanistan. Thousands of U.S. special forces units parachuted into this neutral country, while air strikes targeted the Afghan government and its supporting military. Pentagon units seized abandoned Soviet air bases throughout Afghanistan, while establishing support bases in nearby nations such as Uzbekistan. Simultaneously, FBI agents throughout the United States staged raids in which dozens of men accused of terrorism were taken prisoner.

Reaction was swift and furious. Florida Senator Bob Graham said Bush had “brought shame to the United States with his paranoid delusions about so-called terror networks.” British Prime Minister Tony Blair accused the United States of “an inexcusable act of conquest in plain violation of international law.” White House chief counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke immediately resigned in protest of “a disgusting exercise in over-kill.”

When dozens of U.S. soldiers were slain in gun battles with fighters in the Afghan mountains, public opinion polls showed the nation overwhelmingly opposed to Bush’s action. Political leaders of both parties called on Bush to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan immediately. “We are supposed to believe that attacking people in caves in some place called Tora Bora is worth the life of even one single U.S. soldier?” former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey asked.

When an off-target U.S. bomb killed scores of Afghan civilians who had taken refuge in a mosque, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Aznar announced a global boycott of American products. The United Nations General Assembly voted to condemn the United States, and Washington was forced into the humiliating position of vetoing a Security Council resolution declaring America guilty of “criminal acts of aggression.”

Bush justified his attack on Afghanistan, and the detention of 19 men of Arab descent who had entered the country legally, on grounds of intelligence reports suggesting an imminent, devastating attack on the United States. But no such attack ever occurred, leading to widespread ridicule of Bush’s claims. Speaking before a special commission created by Congress to investigate Bush’s anti-terrorism actions, former national security adviser Rice shocked and horrified listeners when she admitted, “We had no actionable warnings of any specific threat, just good reason to believe something really bad was about to happen.”

The president fired Rice immediately after her admission, but this did little to quell public anger regarding the war in Afghanistan. When it was revealed that U.S. special forces were also carrying out attacks against suspected terrorist bases in Indonesia and Pakistan, fury against the United States became universal, with even Israel condemning American action as “totally unjustified.”

Speaking briefly to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House before a helicopter carried him out of Washington as the first-ever president removed by impeachment, Bush seemed bitter. “I was given bad advice,” he insisted. “My advisers told me that unless we took decisive action, thousands of innocent Americans might die. Obviously I should not have listened.”

Announcing his candidacy for the 2004 Republican presidential nomination, Senator John McCain said today that “George W. Bush was very foolish and naïve; he didn’t realize he was being pushed into this needless conflict by oil interests that wanted to seize Afghanistan to run a pipeline across it.” McCain spoke at a campaign rally at the World Trade Center in New York City.

If he would have been arrested before he did anything, he would have been quickly released for not doing anything.

Phoenician on June 2, 2009 at 8:00 AM

This is exactly what would have happened had Bush “prevented” 9/11. His opponents would claim the 19 guys he arrested were not terrorists, and then the Democrats would have started impeachment proceedings against him.

So how many more Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad’s are running around?

izoneguy on June 2, 2009 at 8:36 AM

Good question. I am sure there are hundreds, if not thousands, of Jihadists running around this country. How many have been to the Middle East or Africa for training?

Well, there were no foreign terrorist attacks on American soil after the Clinton-era WTC attacks. But you’re criticizing Clinton anyway. How is this possible?

orange on June 2, 2009 at 11:58 AM

you’re kidding right?

had clinton not ordered the “wag the dog-bj-inpsired ‘strike’ on the tylenol factory in sudan looking for cover (and actually hit the afghan taliban camps instead of some feckless strike on empty camps), we could have severely weakened al qaeda in 1998. but oh it made everyone feel “better” after the embassy bombings, pushed kenya right off the front pages

here’s a question — if you have a chance to kill OBL, do you A) do it realizing you might take out some taliban kids or B) listen to the advice of a corrupt security head who was caught smuggling important documents out of DC stuffed in his underewear???

clinton chose “B”

he could have done a million things — increased funding for the northern alliance, stopped thinning down our intelligence services (billy bob had a bizzare faith that ‘technology’ eliminated the need for on-the-ground human intelligence), or heck even responded to the USS Cole bombing

we did NOTHING after Cole — bill had 2 months to do something and does nothing (ironically, both this killer and the cole were in yemen. oh well)

did you know some of the captured al qaeda morons said that the USA’s LACK of reaction to teh uss cole emboldened them on 911? they expected an attack, but not a full fledged occupation of afghanistan? that clinton’s “do nothing” attitude (explained away by his own annoyance with Bush Sr’s somalia involvement as a lame duck) actually allowed AQ to “scale up” their plans?

and isn’t it interesting that all the “warm fuzzies” clinton gave to teh rest of the world meant jack sh## in the future? there’s a couple of hollowed out train stations in madrid, subway lines in london, nightclubs in bali, and parliament houses in delhi that are the result of that “holiday from history”

was bush’s admin at fault? sure. was clinton’s? sure. im not saying clinton=cause. what i am saying is, you must be keith olberman’s pool boy if you think clinton is guilt free and bush is a bumbling idiot.

or perhaps you could kindly tell me what “bin laden determined to strike usa” means, and kindly decode that memo in AUGUST 2001?

(bonus exit irony: bush ignored the ‘bin laden’ memo, and is some bumbling fool… then he says “i wont be fooled again” and follows through against saddam’s UN kicking out and on-the-ground-he’s-making-nukes intelligence, and is seen as some preemptive warmonger)

Have it your way, libs! Must be fun to live in a kindergarden playland and ignore the realities of the ‘real world’! Hey, when is the “colors” center open??????

The FBI is one of the few organizations fighting terrorism who’s constrained by the Constitution

Miss_Anthrope on June 2, 2009 at 10:14 AM

Surely we would prefer that all US organizations fighting terrorism should be “constrained” by the Constitution, right?

The Bush administration learned that lesson the hard way on 9/11 after eight years of flabby response from the Clinton administration after the first World Trade Center attack.

Wait, I thought the standard Republican/Cheneyite talking point was that since there were no foreign terrorist attacks on American soil after 9/11, the Bush policies were a resounding success.

Well, there were no foreign terrorist attacks on American soil after the Clinton-era WTC attacks. But you’re criticizing Clinton anyway. How is this possible?

Clearly it’s possible b/c the Cheney defense is specious.

Now let’s talk about Bush’s flabby response to terror in the months before 9/11. i.e., “Well, you’ve covered your ass now”

Miss_Anthrope on June 2, 2009 at 10:14 AM

Thank you.

Nichevo on June 2, 2009 at 10:37 AM

Two times.

We need to be willing to sacrifice in order to make America great, you know. In the field of terrorism, that means allowing attacks to succeed in order to build a better legal case.

Don’t forget the first one after 9-11, a shooting at LAX in front of the El Al terminal on Independence Day 2002.

Things will only get worse when Al-Qaeda and homegrown nuts adopt the lone gunman approach.