Terrorism
May 23, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
President Obama delivered an address today at the National Defense University called “The Future of our Fight Against Terrorism.” Actually, part of the speech was about the past, including much self-congratulation and some shots at President Bush. This part of the speech is revisionist rubbish. As Max Boot explains: Obama said, for example, that after he came into office, “we unequivocally banned torture, affirmed our commitment to civilian courts, worked
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May 23, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Minnesota is home to the largest Somali community in the United States, numbering at least 25,000. If it takes a village, we have a couple. Yet we know amazingly little about the Somali community, probably because we are afraid to ask the relevant questions. We know they are mostly Muslim — we can see the hijabs, we are familiar with the many local controversies to which their faith has given
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May 22, 2013 — Steven Hayward
There’s an old saying in journalism—a story just “too good to check out.” You can tell the media’s bias not only from what they won’t check out, but what they won’t even consider checking out, let alone reporting. News item: a deranged young man, James Holmes, shoots up a Denver theater last summer killing 12, and ABC News’s Brian Ross goes on the air to note that there’s a “James
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May 22, 2013 — John Hinderaker
One of my favorite adages goes like this: Any damn fool can learn from his own experience, what you want to do is learn from other people’s experience. Actually, you could say that the ability to learn from other people’s experiences is the only thing that makes human progress possible. The Europeans have had a lot of bad experiences. A few of them we have learned from; most, sadly, we
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May 17, 2013 — Scott Johnson
CBS News reports: Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev left a note claiming responsibility for the April 15 attack on the Boston Marathon, reports CBS News senior correspondent John Miller. Sources tell Miller that Tsarnaev wrote the note in the boat he was hiding in as police pursued him, and as he bled from gunshot wounds sustained in an earlier shootout between police and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. It reads
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May 6, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Saturday was the anniversary of the Kent State shootings in 1970. The keynote speaker at the annual commemoration service on the Kent State campus was Bill Ayers, Barack Obama’s political mentor. At the time of the Kent State confrontation, Ayers was underground, a terrorist on the run. Terrorists are perhaps less popular today then they were forty years ago, and after Ayers’ speech, a reporter had the temerity to ask
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May 2, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday the FBI posted images of three suspects captured by surveillance cameras on the grounds of the U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi, Libya, when it was attacked on September 11, 2012 — the attack that resulted in the deaths of Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Why has it taken the FBI eight months to get around to releasing the images if they need the help? That’s
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May 2, 2013 — Scott Johnson
When I heard that Barack Obama had rededicated himself to closing Gitmo in his press conference on Tuesday (transcript here), the adage about insanity and repetition came to mind. James Taranto quotes Obama’s statement and notes how Obama agrees with the assumption regarding the Gitmo detainee hunger strike that was embedded in the question by CBS’s Bill Plante. Sounding like he’s speaking on behalf of the Gitmo detainees — is
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May 1, 2013 — John Hinderaker
No details yet, but the Boston Police Department says it has taken three more suspects into custody in connection with the Boston Marathon bombing. Early odds favor the guys with the “Terrorista 1″ license plate. UPDATE: It looks as though my Terrorista guess was right. The Boston Globe has more: Three college students have been arrested by federal authorities in connection with the Boston Marathon bombings, a law enforcement official
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May 1, 2013 — John Hinderaker
I have been slow to criticize the Obama administration over the Boston Marathon bombing. I can readily understand that federal agencies cannot actively track 500,000 or more people who are on the terrorist watch list, and I think the most obvious lessons to be drawn from the Tsarnaevs’ terror spree relate to immigration and welfare policy. But now the Daily Mail reports that Saudi Arabia, as well as Russia, warned
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April 30, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Victor Davis Hanson borrows the concept of the Borg from Star Trek (“the fictional alien race that appears as recurring antagonists in various incarnations”) to capture the Obama administration’s groupthink reformulating the war on terror. The Obama Borg, as Hanson dubs it, dissociate Islam from terrorism. The denial has reached absurd proportions with results that would be laughable if they weren’t so serious and pathetic. We are all familiar with
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April 29, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Mike Rogers, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is as perplexed as I am about the circumstances associated with the Mirandization of the surviving Tsarnaev terrorist. Accordingly, he has written a letter to Eric Holder posing questions for the Attorney General. Concerned that the interrogation of Tsarnaev may have been “conducted in a manner that prematurely cut off a lawful, ongoing FBI interview to collect public safety information,” Rogers tells
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April 28, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
That’s the question posed on Fox Sunday News by Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House homeland security committee. McCaul stated: “I think the experts all agree that there is someone who did train these two individuals.” It’s easy to understand this consensus. The Tsarnaev brothers had a fairly sophisticated operation — seemingly beyond what they could have picked up solely from the do-it-yourself websites they apparently frequented. But if
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April 27, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
I have never practiced criminal law (except briefly at the international level) and have not studied it since 1974. Thus, like most Americans, much of what I think I know about criminal procedure comes from watching television and movies. My viewing experience does not include any instances in which a judge read a criminal defendant his or her Miranda warning in the middle of police interrogation. Thus, I was shocked
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April 25, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Many commentators have criticized the Obama administration for prosecuting Dzhokhar Tsarnaev criminally, which entailed giving him Miranda rights and providing him with a lawyer. But apart from the wisdom, in principle, of promptly commencing a criminal prosecution in this case, the sequence of events raises obvious questions about what the administration is up to. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured last Friday evening. At that time, his condition was described as critical.
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April 25, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has its roots in the October 27, 1993 conference at a Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia that was attended by 25 supporters and members of Hamas. The 1993 conference had as its purpose the subversion of the Oslo Accords. Israel had to be destroyed, not accommodated. Among those in attendance was Nihad Awad. The FBI monitored and recorded the meeting. The evidence derived from the
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April 24, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The Boston Globe has been engaged in serious damage control on behalf of the Cambridge mosque attended by Tamerlan Tsarnaev. In “About that mosque,” we noted the mosque’s well known Islamist flavor. There’s a story there, and Oren Dorell glimpses it in USA Today’s “Mosque that Boston suspects attended has radical ties.” Dorell’s article is must reading in its entry. One highlight is the purported refutation of its thesis by
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