From the diaries, by Erick

The act of terrorism at Fort Hood reminds us all that regardless of what the Obama/Pelosi Team or the elite media call it we are at war with Islamic fascism. Americans must rise up and remind our elected officials, Republican and Democrat, that we will not sit idly by while they bow at the altar of political correctness. Americans must, because President Obama and Nancy Pelosi will not, demand that outrages such as the massacre at Fort Hood be labeled for what they are and treated for what they are—acts of terrorism in the war that radical Islam is waging on the United States.

The emerging facts of the Fort Hood case indicate that Major Hasan is a jihadist bent on killing Americans, particularly American service personnel, in the name of his religion. Reports have indicated that Hasan told colleagues at Walter Reed Hospital that non-Muslims are infidels condemned to hell who should be set on fire. We know Hesan communicated many times with radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki who is tied to Al-Qaeda, and repeatedly exclaimed “Allahu Akbar” as he carried out his brutal attacks.

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James Galyean wrote a post on Friday afternoon that I think we probably ought to focus on a bit more.

The left is celebrating Barack Obama’s decision to send Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to New York City for a criminal trial in a civilian court. In fact, since Friday I have gotten a lot of hate mail from leftists saying I must not trust our due process system.

The problem, however, is just the opposite. I very much trust our due process system to be exceedingly fair to a terrorist who will put great value in his opening statement.

But, that is beside the point. As James Galyean noted, and this is well worth repeating:

Documents from that discovery production [ in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case ], which were never supposed to be provided to anyone outside the defense team, were later found in an al-Qaeda hideout.

Further, let’s be honest — we know that no President of the United States would chance a man like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed going free. Barack Obama would not risk a civilian trial without being sure of a conviction. This then amounts to a show trial, but one where the prosecutors will have to comply with discovery requirements that will potentially put classified material into the hands of Al Qaeda.

It has happened before.

James Galyean is a former federal prosecutor and former counsel on the US Senate Judiciary Committee. He helped draft both the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which dealt with the detention, interrogation, and trial of Guantanamo Bay terrorist detainees. He is currently running for Congress in the 3rd Congressional District of South Carolina.
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The administration’s decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal criminal court in New York shows that President Obama is not serious about our national security. 


KSM conceived, planned, and launched the attacks that killed thousands of American citizens in a war that he and other terrorists declared. He is an avowed enemy of the United States. The criminal justice system is not the proper place to determine his fate. Our criminal courts provide protections to our citizens that should not be provided to a terrorist, and may actually damage national security.


Just think about the discovery requirements that could be placed on prosecutors. For instance, in the trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, prosecutors were required to turn over to defense lawyers a large amount of intelligence information. Documents from that discovery production, which were never supposed to be provided to anyone outside the defense team, were later found in an al-Qaeda hideout. Let me say that again, confidential documents from a trial in New York were later found in the hands of al-Qaeda. 



Now consider that KSM was captured in a lightening raid in Pakistan. The intelligence that led to that capture has been the subject of a number of reports. However, al-Qaeda would love to know for sure where that information came from and how it was obtained. In addition to that, they may be able to learn a number of other things from discovery in this trial.


Consider for a moment the constitutional strictures regarding coerced confessions. Think a liberal judge might want to explore whether waterboarding is too coercive? Or being held in one of the CIA’s black prisons? 



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James Galyean is a candidate running for South Carolina’s 3rd Congressional District. Prior to that time, Galyean was an Assistant United States Attorney and also has some pretty direct connections to the War on Terror.

It was Galyean who helped helped write both the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006. As a result, he has a bed of knowledge and massive amounts of contacts that others do not. And his contacts are telling him that, protestations to the contrary from the Pentagon, Barack Obama has every intention of sending GTMO terrorists to the Charleston, SC Naval Weapons Station.

After all, South Carolina did not vote for Obama, so he sees no fall out in sticking terrorists there. But Galyean makes some pretty convincing points that this is a bad idea.

In August 2007, a sharp Berkeley County Sheriff’s Deputy, James Blakely, pulled over two Egyptian men not far from the station. With the guns and explosive materials found in their car, they could have killed any number of people. And the brig isn’t the only possible target at the station. There are others, both programs and personnel.

SPAWAR is a naval project headquartered at the station that provides classified engineering and other support for overseas projects. Because of that mission and others at the station, over 10,000 people pass through the station’s gates each day. Think those cars would be attractive targets during a terrorist’s military trial at the station? With the media hordes camped outside the gates? What about a nearby daycare center used by the station’s families? Think that couldn’t happen? Google “Beslan.”

There’s also a nuclear fuel transshipment facility and a jet fuel storage tank farm inside the fence. You could throw a rock from any of them and hit the brig. Did I mention there’s over 600 million pounds of explosives stored there too? And reportedly a few nuclear weapons. Anyone want to risk an inbound Gulfstream?

Unlike a lot of the kids in the Obama administration, Galyean knows what he is talking about.

On September 9, 2009, Barack Obama will address a Joint Session of Congress.

He wants to get the trains back on track for health care reform.

As Mike Allen notes, in 2001 President George W. Bush addressed a Joint Session of Congress as the first President to do so outside a State of the Union speech or a traditional first address.

The reason? International terrorism.

On September 9, Barack Obama will do it because of tea party activists. He set the stage and firmed up precedent by allowing his campaign arm, Organizing for America” refer to tea party activists as “right wing domestic terrorists.”

So great a threat are these tea party activists to his failing agenda, Obama will use the bully pulpit to strike back as he pushes for government control of American healthcare.

Representative Alcee Hastings (D, Fla.) is touting his amendment to H.R.2647, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010. Section 524 stipulates a “prohibition on recruitment, enlistment, or retention of persons associated or affiliated with groups or associated with hate-related violence against groups or persons of the United States government.”

As Hastings congratulates himself on a job well done — you know, cuz no one else will — one has to wonder exactly who it is that will determine what a “hate” group is in order to keep the armed forces free of “hate-related violence”? It turns out Hastings has given this power to the office of the Attorney General of the United States. That would be Eric Holder, the guy that wants to release Guantanamo terrorists into the interior of the country.

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So. Last week, Representatives Cantor and Hoyer had a bit of an exchange over where the money we’re giving the International Monetary Fund is going. Cantor wants to know why we’re going to be giving countries that don’t like us at all the opportunity to take our money, and Hoyer wants to know why Cantor is ignoring the way that Hoyer is brandishing Reagan’s name like an apotropaic talisman:

CANTOR: Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time. I will tell the gentleman, New York Times, May 27, 2009, pointed out Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group involved in Lebanon and its government, had talks with the IMF to discuss the possibility of the extension of credit…We are very, very concerned. There is a real possibility that some of the world’s worst regimes will have access to additional resources that will be provided to the IMF, and is he not concerned about that?

[possible snip: the Congressional Record transcript is down]

HOYER: The reason the Reagan administration and the first Bush administration–and I might say, although I don’t have a quote from the second Bush administration, the second Bush administration, as well, was a supporter of the IMF as the gentleman, perhaps, knows.

The fact of the matter is the United States will play a very significant role in the decisionmaking of the IMF because we’re a very significant contributor. It is a red herring, from my perspective, to raise the fact that money could go somewhere. Of course money could go somewhere.

…which Hoyer then followed up with this inadvertent comment, which the Hill’s Blog Briefing Room mercifully omitted:

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Monday, June 8th was the day Pvt. William Long was to ship out for his first duty station in Korea. Instead his journey ended at Arkansas State Veterans Cemetery, there buried with full military honors. He was 23 years old. He was a son and brother. He was a soldier.

Last week, Pvt. Long was killed in the line of duty, in service to his country. Outside the recruiting station where he was serving temporary duty in the Hometown Recruiter’s Assistance Program, Long and Pvt. Quinton I. Ezeagwula were attacked in a craven act of terrorism. Long is the first military member killed by Islamic terror on our shores since September 11th.

Pvt. Long’s funeral was held at Harlan Park Baptist Church in Conway, Arkansas. The service was private, attended by 200 or so family, friends, and fellow military members and veterans. Outside the church the Patriot Guard Riders lined the streets with motorcyles and flags, acting as a barrier between the service and would-be protesters. Gov. Mike Beebe and Rep. Vic Snyder were in attendance. Flags across the state were at half-mast.

Pvt. Long’s brother, Pfc. Triston Long, placed his unit’s insignia in the casket. “My brother taught me valuable lessons and made me the man I am today,” he said. “My commander said, ‘Make your brother one of us.’ I will miss my brother with all that I am, and I serve in honor of him.”

The family’s military tradition and dedication to service were praised by Long’s pastor, John Harrington. “No one is more military, no one is more patriotic than this family right here,” he said. “Military runs through their hearts and their blood.”

Daris Long, father and former Marine, stood behind his son’s casket wearing a red Marine Corps baseball cap and military medals on his chest and read aloud the letter he had planned to give his son on the day of his deployment. He spoke of duty, readiness, committment. “Your day only ends when you’ve done your duty,” he read with emotion. “You and your brother … are both heroes for having the moral courage to stand up when your country needs you most. You are in my hopes and my thoughts and my prayers. You are my son, you are my hero. I love you. Semper fidelis.”

Pvt. William Long did his duty. His day ends with honor. And we honor him.

Though it falls outside his original target of being within 100 days of taking office, President Barack Obama is keeping a pre-inauguration promise by “mak[ing] a major speech from an Islamic capital” this week in Cairo, Egypt.

Obama made what was considered by many to be the safest (and most “obvious”) choice in selecting Cairo for his “high-profile speech that would seek to mend rifts between the United States and the broader Muslim world.” Unfortunately, by deciding to play it safe, a president whose life to this point has revolved around an obsession with being “historic” missed out on a truly historic opportunity.

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Looks like the anti-Bushies lost another one this week when lawsuits against telecommunications companies claiming that they assisted the Bush administration in “illegally spying on Americans” were dismissed in San Francisco.

Federal district judge Vaughn Walker ruled that Congress didn’t violate the Constitution by allowing the U.S. attorney-general to “certify privately to the court that the companies had been asked to co-operate in an antiterrorism programme authorised by the president.” Vaughn cited a law that retroactively gave the telecoms immunity.

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I’m done being nice.  I’ll stay respectful though…… somewhat.

On Monday, 1 June 2009 at 10:15 am local time, The United States was once again the scene of an attack by what some call ‘The Religion Of Peace’.  It was the first such attack on US sovereign land since September 11th 2001.

It took approximately 4 hours after a fatal shooting at a Little Rock Arkansas US Army Recruiting Depot for confirmation to the public that this indeed was a Muslim Terrorist attack on US sovereign soil.

Not only has no action been taken against those who have aided and abetted this act of terrorism, The President Of The United States did not, until approximately 9am Wednesday 3 June 2009, offer any thoughts or words in public about the incident.  Almost 48 hours elapsed from incident to proof of source, to The Federal Bureau Of Investigaton acknowledging the “suspect” was under surveillance, to what you are about to read.

Here is the entire word-for-word statement from The President Of The United States regarding a Muslim Terrorist attack within the United States Of America……..  http://www.katv.com/news/stories/0609/628585.html

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Those wondering how long it would take for the first act of terrorism to be perpetrated on American soil under President Barack Obama did not have to wait long. The murder of a U.S. military recruiter by a Muslim convert in Arkansas yesterday marks the return of the war on terror to America after just four months of the new Administration’s systematic dismantling of the policies and programs that kept the nation safe for over seven years under the Bush Administration.

Some may take issue with that characterization, noting the slaying of abortionist George Tiller by an apparently militant domestic terrorist on Sunday. President Obama certainly was quick to condemn that killing; and his Administration quick to take action to protect other abortion providers. Tiller’s murderer, though a cold-blooded killer, is not a terrorist of the kind that the United States has been fighting since the September 11th attacks. If every murderer were a terrorist, the United States would have to invade most liberal-run cities to put down the violence.

Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, formerly Carlos Bledsoe, is, however, exactly the kind of terrorist that has been prevented from carrying out acts of violence against Americans, until now. Still, the president has not made a statement about the killing.

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) held a torturous press conference today to address charges that she raised no objections when informed in 2002 and 2003 about the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques on terrorist detainees. Pelosi was out of the country last week, so perhaps she can be forgiven for not realizing that the narrative on this story had been set in her absence. It has been pretty conclusively established by records of the briefings she received that Pelosi has been fibbing since the first day she claimed not to have known about the interrogations – probably sometime during the 2006 campaign. But Pelosi acted today like she still has some shred of credibility left on the issue.

“I am telling you they told me they approved these [interrogation methods] and said they wanted to use them but said they were not using waterboarding”

Yes, I am saying that the CIA was misleading the Congress, and at the same time the [Bush] administration was misleading the Congress on waepons of mass destruction in Iraq…Every step of the way the administration was misleading the Congress…and that’s why we need a truth commission.”

Not true. But the kicker comes in her answer to the question of what she actually did once she knew about the techniques. Incredibly, Pelosi essentially blamed President Bush for her Speakership.

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Brothers Dan and Brian wrote earlier this week about the pushback the Obamanauts are encountering in their efforts to shut down Gitmo and ship the terrorists into the US.  It seems that unbelievable assertions such as Rep. Adam Schiff’s (D-CA) blathering that terrorists should get the “same due process as our own troops” and that somehow trying to keep terrorists out of America is a slam against corrections officers are beginning to chip away at the public’s willingness to accept a Gitmo shutdown.

I just ran across this April 3rd Rasmussen survey indicating that Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to shipping Gitmo terrorists into our country.  Seventy-five percent of Americans oppose this terrorist relocation program, with only thirteen percent in favor.  In addition, the public overwhelmingly opposes the Gitmo Terrorist Welfare Program proposed by National Intelligence (?) Director Dennis Blair.

Just 36% now agree with the president’s decision to close the prison camp for suspected terrorists at the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba. Forty-six percent (46%) oppose closing the prison camp, and 18% are undecided.

This marks an eight-point drop in support for Obama’s decision since he announced it in late January when voters were almost evenly divided on the issue. Last November, only 32% thought the prison should be closed.

The opposition to shipping Gitmo refugees back to the US appears to be across the political spectrum, although the Democrats continue to show blind allegiance to Obama and his policies.

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This clip is from the local Fox affiliate in New York today. New Yorkers seem to be very angry about having been chosen for what seemed to many a re-enactment of 9/11. Buildings were evacuated and people fled in fear of their lives. Some were injured trying to escape what they imagined to be a new terrorist attack. And all because the White House wanted to update its file photos of Air Force One, and failed to consider the obvious: that jumbo jets flying at Manhattan without warning are bound to terrify people.

During last year’s presidential campaign, Republicans charged that Obama and his team lacked the experience and judgment to tackle the challenges the nation faces. But did anyone expect that one of those ‘tough’ calls would be whether to send a jumbojet screaming toward Manhattan at low altitude, chased by F-16s? Before today, I would have told you that was one of the easy questions - especially when it was nothing more than a photo-op.

The White House was quick today to throw its own appointee under the bus. Louis Caldera - whom Obama named to this job almost 5 months ago - quickly took the blame for the decision to send the president’s plane to New York for some publicity shots. It appears that Caldera also takes the blame for forbidding information about the flyover to be disclosed to the public. Reports say that the Presidential Airlift Group made the decision to keep this a secret. And according to the White House webpage, the Group falls under Caldera’s jurisdiction.

I see no indication of how many people work under Caldera, or how many oversee his decisions. However, it boggles the mind to think that there were no grownups in the White House who recognized what a terrible idea this was. But then again, lapses in judgment seem to be par for the course with this administration.

We know, because Joe Biden told us, that the Obama administration expects us to get attacked again domestically.

That’s the working M.O. of this administration: no matter what we do, we’re going to eventually get hit again. The Obama administration views the seven years after 9/11 as more a fluke than a successful strategy by George Bush to prevent domestic terror attacks.

So if the working theory is that we’re going to get hit again, what is the best response? After all, the public does credit George Bush with keeping us safe at 9/11.

The best strategy would look something like taking a band-aid off quickly. Get the pain over fast. And if an attack happens quickly enough into the new administration, they can blame Bush.

So the Obama administration is working hard to release all the memos on interrogations, change all the policies Bush implemented, and clear out the old as fast as possible. Never mind that if it were done slowly over time, our terrorist enemies might not be so incited to attack.

If your working premise is that they are going to attack anyway, get them incited quickly, get it over with, and blame Bush.

There is no other justification for so quickly making us less safe.

The newest false meme invented by the Old Media is this claim that ex-presidents and ex-vice presidents have some sort of “tradition of silence” where it concerns commenting on those that take residence in the White House after they leave. The reason the Old Media is pushing this false claim is because Dick Cheney has been commenting on Obama’s security mistakes and the Old Media wants to scold Cheney for his efforts to get the truth to the people.

Certainly it is true that some ex-chief executives have maintained silence after they left office. Still, it isn’t really true that there has been any long tradition of staying silent out of some sort of respect for the new president. But, no matter how many past presidents/vice presidents have remained quiet, the one glaring exception to that so-called tradition is the vp just before Cheney: Al Gore. And this man has been absent in the Media’s attack on Cheney.

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The other day I asked a very serious question: How Many Americans Will Die Because of Barack Obama’s Weak National Security Leadership?

As I noted at the time and have noted previously,

That Obama is sweeping out career intelligence officers is a clear sign he intends to clear out the policies these intelligence officers advocated and implemented — the very same policies that kept us safe for eight years.

But there is an additional, very serious issue at stake here.

The low level guys, the Jack Bauers if you will, are seeing all of this. They see a President right now who made tough decisions in secret and stood by those decisions when they became public, even though those decisions were hugely unpopular. The low level guys intrinsically knew they could kill bad men in undisclosed locations and be supported if the lights came on.

These same men see the incoming President unwilling to stand behind one of their own — a career CIA officer in John O. Brennan. It is an unspoken message to all of them that should they take the bold action needed to keep freedom secure, they may not be backed up by President Obama should the actions come to light.

They will therefore return to their state of being prior to 9/11. And darkness will again start creeping from the shadows.

Obama’s chickens are coming home to roost. Jake Tapper notes today that people inside the CIA are beginning to bristle at Barack Obama throwing them under the bus.

But some experts say the move could have a chilling effect on the CIA even beyond President Obama’s decision last week to release the so-called “torture memos.”

Calling the ACLU push to release the photographs “prurient” and “reprehensible,” Dr. Mark M. Lowenthal, former Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production, tells ABC News that the Obama administration should have taken the case all the way to the Supreme Court. . . .

Lowenthal said the president’s moves in the last week have left many in the CIA dispirited, based on “the undercurrent I’ve been getting from colleagues still in the building, or colleagues who have left not that long ago.”

“We ask these people to do extremely dangerous things, things they’ve been ordered to do by legal authorities, with the understanding that they will get top cover if something goes wrong,” Lowenthal says. “They don’t believe they have that cover anymore.”

That is exactly what I have been saying. Compare the left’s treatment of the present information and memoranda to Valerie Plame. She had not been an active spy for some time and the left demanded Bush administration heads for her name coming out.

On the other hand, here we have present employees of the CIA and those who, up until January 20, 2009, were making life and death decisions in the war on terror being publicly outed by the Obama administration and their compatriots in the media.

One can wonder if Obama just hopes these guys get offed by terrorists so he does not have to actually take a bold stand against the Democrats’ intended witch hunt.

The Obama Administration could do no better than it is presently doing to aid and abet our terrorist enemies without actually, you know, supporting them. When CIA agents and our military are no longer willing to do the deeds in darkness that keep us safe domestically, the terrorists will slowly start testing for weaknesses again.

Remember the scene in Jurassic Park where the raptors kept testing the electric fence to see if the power was still on? Barack Obama just turned the power off and issued a press release to tell the world.

How many Americans will die because Barack Obama just can’t help but undermine our national security?

Once again, we see the truth take a back seat to the best spin by Democrats. NRO’s The Corner blog has an exclusive report on the supposed “180 waterboardings” that the US government conducted on terror suspects and it appears that the truth is a bit different than the spin.

You see, it seems that there weren’t “180 waterboardings” but were instead 180 “pours.” In other words, water was poured on the suspects 180 times. Further, the rules were quite specific. No more than two sessions could be conducted on any suspect within a 24 hour period and no more than 6 “pours” of water were allowed per session.

This means that instead of 180 sessions on the waterboard there was a much lower 30.

But, as Cliff May notes on The Corner blog, all the carefully crafted rules for how to conduct waterboard interrogations reveals a far different situation than the Torquemada-like, torture loving Bush administration that critics are trying to advance.

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According to Glenn Thrush at the Politico:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is pushing back on GOP charges that she knew about waterboarding for years and did nothing.

Pelosi says she was briefed by Bush administration officials on the legal justification for using waterboarding — but that they never followed through on promises to inform her when they actually began using “enhanced” interrogation techniques

So she says she got the legal justification, but they never told her they were actually going through with water boarding.

Well that’s a bit inconsistent with this 2007 Washington Post article:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

“The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough,” said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

Way back in 2002, when Nancy Pelosi was actually rooting for us to win the war, she was happy for us to be water boarding terrorists. But in 2006, when she wa more interested in winning back Congress for the Democrats than the U.S. actually winning a war, she decided to throw under the bus all the people who kept us safe.