image by rees
article from Investor's Business Daily
June 3, 2009
War? What War?
War On Terror: The phrase is actually now a misnomer. Iraq and Afghanistan have been rebranded the "Overseas Contingency Operation," and lawyers are being deployed to fight the real battles.
The strategy of the new administration looks a lot like the course the Clinton administration set us on before Sept. 11, 2001. And we know how that turned out: Clinton relied on prosecutors to fight terrorists, mistakenly treating terrorism as random crime rather than the grave national security threat that it is.
After each al-Qaida attack that occurred on his watch, Clinton dispatched FBI agents and lawyers overseas to collect evidence. This simply bought Osama bin Laden and his henchmen more time to launch their "Big Bang," as counterterrorism officials call 9/11.
Astonishingly, this administration seems to have adopted that failed strategy, which could leave us exposed to an even bigger bang. According to the Los Angeles Times, the Justice Department will now have "a central role in overseas counterterrorism cases."
The administration has expanded its authority to question foreign suspects and gather evidence "to try to ensure that criminal prosecutions are an option." In other words, the FBI is in, the CIA is out, and the Pentagon is gradually being stripped of its war. The Global War on Terror is now a global crime scene. The real battles going forward will be waged inside courtrooms.
The FBI played a lead role in international terrorism investigations before 9/11. Its intelligence proved lousy. The Pentagon and CIA, meantime, have taken the fight to the enemy in their backyard, keeping them off balance. Yet they're being edged out, and the White House has even directed the Pentagon to stop calling what it's doing in Iraq, Afghanistan and other terror fronts a "war."
In a recent e-mail to Pentagon staffers, the Defense Department's office of security review noted "this administration prefers to avoid using the term 'Long War' or 'Global War on Terror.' (GWOT.) Please use 'Overseas Contingency Operation.' " Contingency is code for reacting to trouble, and not going on the offensive — though the aggressive strategy has kept the country free from a major attack for eight years.
In another throwback to the Clinton era, the White House has redirected law enforcement to focus investigations on white supremacist groups.
According to a recent internal report by the Department of Homeland Security, the administration thinks Timothy McVeigh types pose a greater domestic threat than radical Muslims, even though several homegrown terrorism cases have popped up in the last month alone — including Monday's shooting of U.S. soldiers in Little Rock by one Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad. DHS was set up after 9/11 to protect the country from Islamic terrorism.
All this comes on top of the administration's plan to close Gitmo and transfer al-Qaida terrorists into the U.S. court system, treating them as if they were criminal defendants and not the enemy combatants they are.
With each passing month, the administration seems to backslide deeper into a dangerous pre-9/11 mentality that puts the nation at increasing risk of attack.
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