Terrorism
June 12, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Marc Thiessen makes a point I was preparing to write up, and wish I had written: The real culprit behind James Clapper’s false testimony to Congress regarding NSA data collection isn’t Clapper, but rather Sen. Ron Wyden who asked the question to which Clapper responded. Since Thiessen went first, I’ll let him explain: What is outrageous is not that Clapper tried to protect classified information in an open session, but
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June 7, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
I agree with John that, from all that appears so far, the NSA’s collection of phone records is not a scandal. No law appears to have been violated; the administration proceeded with permission from the appropriate court; Congress was in-the-loop; and there is no evidence (to my knowledge) that the information NSA obtained was used abusively, oppressively, or in a discriminatory or partisan way. Moreover, as John explained, NSA’s data
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June 6, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Since the Guardian revealed a court order under which the National Security Agency is collecting telephone call data from Verizon, there have been howls of protest from some observers–Al Gore, Rand Paul and the New York Times editorial board, to name a few. But is there anything scandalous about the NSA data collection, or is it just business as usual? Two preliminary observations: First, as John Nolte notes, the major
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May 30, 2013 — Steven Hayward
More evidence that Britain has decided to embrace its cultural suicide comes from The Telegraph, which reports that the British High Commission pressured Kenyan authorities to release Michael Adebolajo, the murderer of Drummer Lee Rigby in London last week, after Kenyan police had arrested Adebolajo in 2010 when Adebolajo was attempting to make his way to Somalia for terrorist training: A Kenyan lawyer who represented the 28 year-old suspected of
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May 27, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
In a post called “The Inevitable Decline of Great Britain (Con’t)”, John wrote that “in Great Britain, the authorities have no idea what to do about the real problem, an endless series of murders and attempted murders by fanatics yelling ‘Allahu Akbar!’” And John is right. However, the British public has at least a clue. A survey taken for the Daily Mail shows that almost two-thirds of voters in the
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May 26, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Charles Enderlin is the France 2 Jerusalem correspondent who broadcast the incendiary account of the death of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura at the hands of Israeli troops operating in the Gaza Strip in September 2000. Based on film footage provided by a Palestinian cameraman, Enderlin’s report has become infamous among students of terrorist propaganda both for its destructive effects and for its probable falsity. The al-Dura affair bids to join the
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May 25, 2013 — Steven Hayward
So take in this screen cap of the latest roster of headlines appearing on the AOL/HuffPo home page. Six of the ten headlines relate one way or another to terrorism or the problem of Islamic jihad. One of them sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb. The country’s in the very best of hands, as Glenn Reynolds likes to remind us.
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May 25, 2013 — Scott Johnson
As ABC and other news outlets had it, the White House billed President Obama’s speech at the National Defense University on the status of our efforts to thwart agitated acolytes of a certain belief system as “The Future of Our Fight Against Terrorism” (for that lapse into Bushspeak regarding “Terrorism,” read “Violent Extremists”). The White House text of the speech is posted here without a title. I thought the speech
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May 24, 2013 — John Hinderaker
The brutal murder of an off-duty soldier by two Muslim activists continues to dominate the news in Great Britain. The scene was utterly bizarre: in broad daylight, in a busy section of London, the two Muslims apparently ran the soldier down with a car, within a block or two of his barracks, and then attacked him with knives and a meat cleaver. They attempted to behead him, apparently not quite
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May 24, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
President Obama’s legendary intellectual dishonesty was on full display once again in his “The Future of our Fight Against Terrorism” address. In essence, the speech called for a pullback, if not an end to, the “war” on terrorism. He prefaced this call with a quote from James Madison: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” And he pushed it home by emphasizing the duration of
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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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