[FamilyofGod] muslems websites dangerious to u.s.
Hasan, Not KSM, Is Our Real Problem
Violent Islamic Web sites pose a clear and present danger to the U.S.
By
DANIEL HENNINGER
If it accomplished nothing else, the Obama administration's announcement
last Friday to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in lower Manhattan
blew the Nidal Hasan murders out of the news. The KSM fiasco deserves all
the attention it gets. What Hasan represents, however, is a more immediate
concern.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is an old-school jihadi. They sit in far-off
redoubts, assembling terror teams of foreign nationals who now must figure
out how to get themselves and their plot inside the U.S. Not impossible, but
harder than before 9/11.
Hasan is new school. He is what's known as a homegrown terrorist. Virtually
all the Islamic terrorist plots thwarted here in recent years were
homegrown, not designed from afar by a KSM.
Najibullah Zazi, the Colorado airport-shuttle driver arrested in New York
this September and charged with conspiring to detonate bombs, came to the
U.S. in 1999.
The Fort Dix Six, convicted in December of conspiring to attack U.S.
military personnel, were mainly ethnic Albanians whose family came to New
Jersey in the 1980s.
Zakaria Amara, the leader of the Toronto 18, who were planning to blow up
skyscrapers in Canada, was born in a Toronto suburb.
In testimony to Congress in September, the director of the U.S. National
Counterterrorism Center, Mike Leiter, said the Somali terrorist group
al-Shabaab includes "dozens of recruits from the Unites States," mostly
ethnic Somalis.
How do individuals sitting in Colorado, New Jersey, Toronto or Texas
suddenly transform into mass murderers for jihad? Most of the time, they
become radicalized by spending vast amounts of time viewing violent Islamic
Web sites run from abroad.
Two years ago, Lawrence Sanchez of the New York City Police Department's
intelligence division told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that the
Internet is "the most significant factor in the radicalization that is
occurring in America." Mr. Sanchez described this process as "self-imposed
brainwashing."
In New York Times reporter David Rohde's account of his captivity by the
Taliban, he wrote that "watching jihadi videos" was his guards' favorite
pastime. He describes them as "little more than grimly repetitive snuff
films" of executions.
***
If you sit in the United States and watch this stuff 'round the
clock-self-brainwashing-it is fully protected activity. It qualifies as
"speech," protected by the panoply of First Amendment law. These protections
exist nowhere else in the world.
The biggest controversy surrounding Maj. Hasan is that the Army knew about
his radical Islamic sympathies, from the Walter Reed lecture and the
monitored emails to the English-speaking, American-born Yemeni imam Anwar
Awlaki, whose Facebook page, with a reported 4,800 "friends," is depicted
nearby.
The argument is that the Army should have mustered him out of the service
and thereby avoided the 13 murders. Really? After kicking him out of the
Army, there was no probable cause for authorities to surveil a civilian
Nidal Hasan. In time he as easily could have killed 13 Americans in a
suburban Texas mall.
Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, as the judge presiding over the
1995 trial of the "blind sheikh," Omar Abdel Rahman, for the 1993 World
Trade Center bombing, had to instruct the jury that the sheikh's violent,
"holy war" sermons at New York mosques were legal, protected activity (he
was convicted of conspiracy).
There is a mosque in Manhattan at 96th Street and Lexington Avenue, on whose
sidewalk one can hear adherents spouting support for violence against the
U.S. That, too, is protected.
A violent ideology is just an ideology, and that is protected speech. It
requires acts to put in motion aggressive surveillance, such as wiretapping.
I think the Hasan case shows this is wrong, or at least too dangerous. First
Amendment law has never dealt with a widely distributed ideology that has as
its raison d'être the mass murder of Americans and destruction of American
property.
For now this is the way it is: Future Hasans can get jacked up all day on
kill-the-Americans Web sites, and we have to wait until they put in motion a
conspiracy like Fort Dix or the Colorado jihadists. Or until they start
shooting.
Politics is the only recourse.
This is what the political fight was through the Bush years-fights over the
Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps of conversations between U.S. citizens and
foreign suspects, using the SWIFT financial data system to track terrorist
transfers (or, with KSM, military tribunals versus civil courts). The
argument against these policies was that "our values" require that judges
review and approve virtually all such activity.
The problem with this view is that "our values" were already protected to an
unprecedented degree. Raising the bar higher is asking too much of the
people assigned to catch all these self-radicalizing jihadists.
The Democrats have cast their lot with tighter restrictions. The past six
years and a presidential campaign proved that. In the wake of Hasan's 13
dead people, revisiting the limits of our vulnerability has to be on the
table in next year's congressional elections, and then a presidential
election.
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704204304574544010614138416.html
_______________________________________________
Violent Islamic Web sites pose a clear and present danger to the U.S.
By
DANIEL HENNINGER
If it accomplished nothing else, the Obama administration'
last Friday to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in lower Manhattan
blew the Nidal Hasan murders out of the news. The KSM fiasco deserves all
the attention it gets. What Hasan represents, however, is a more immediate
concern.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is an old-school jihadi. They sit in far-off
redoubts, assembling terror teams of foreign nationals who now must figure
out how to get themselves and their plot inside the U.S. Not impossible, but
harder than before 9/11.
Hasan is new school. He is what's known as a homegrown terrorist. Virtually
all the Islamic terrorist plots thwarted here in recent years were
homegrown, not designed from afar by a KSM.
Najibullah Zazi, the Colorado airport-shuttle driver arrested in New York
this September and charged with conspiring to detonate bombs, came to the
U.S. in 1999.
The Fort Dix Six, convicted in December of conspiring to attack U.S.
military personnel, were mainly ethnic Albanians whose family came to New
Jersey in the 1980s.
Zakaria Amara, the leader of the Toronto 18, who were planning to blow up
skyscrapers in Canada, was born in a Toronto suburb.
In testimony to Congress in September, the director of the U.S. National
Counterterrorism Center, Mike Leiter, said the Somali terrorist group
al-Shabaab includes "dozens of recruits from the Unites States," mostly
ethnic Somalis.
How do individuals sitting in Colorado, New Jersey, Toronto or Texas
suddenly transform into mass murderers for jihad? Most of the time, they
become radicalized by spending vast amounts of time viewing violent Islamic
Web sites run from abroad.
Two years ago, Lawrence Sanchez of the New York City Police Department's
intelligence division told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that the
Internet is "the most significant factor in the radicalization that is
occurring in America." Mr. Sanchez described this process as "self-imposed
brainwashing.
In New York Times reporter David Rohde's account of his captivity by the
Taliban, he wrote that "watching jihadi videos" was his guards' favorite
pastime. He describes them as "little more than grimly repetitive snuff
films" of executions.
***
If you sit in the United States and watch this stuff 'round the
clock-self-brainwas
"speech," protected by the panoply of First Amendment law. These protections
exist nowhere else in the world.
The biggest controversy surrounding Maj. Hasan is that the Army knew about
his radical Islamic sympathies, from the Walter Reed lecture and the
monitored emails to the English-speaking, American-born Yemeni imam Anwar
Awlaki, whose Facebook page, with a reported 4,800 "friends," is depicted
nearby.
The argument is that the Army should have mustered him out of the service
and thereby avoided the 13 murders. Really? After kicking him out of the
Army, there was no probable cause for authorities to surveil a civilian
Nidal Hasan. In time he as easily could have killed 13 Americans in a
suburban Texas mall.
Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, as the judge presiding over the
1995 trial of the "blind sheikh," Omar Abdel Rahman, for the 1993 World
Trade Center bombing, had to instruct the jury that the sheikh's violent,
"holy war" sermons at New York mosques were legal, protected activity (he
was convicted of conspiracy).
There is a mosque in Manhattan at 96th Street and Lexington Avenue, on whose
sidewalk one can hear adherents spouting support for violence against the
U.S. That, too, is protected.
A violent ideology is just an ideology, and that is protected speech. It
requires acts to put in motion aggressive surveillance, such as wiretapping.
I think the Hasan case shows this is wrong, or at least too dangerous. First
Amendment law has never dealt with a widely distributed ideology that has as
its raison d'être the mass murder of Americans and destruction of American
property.
For now this is the way it is: Future Hasans can get jacked up all day on
kill-the-Americans Web sites, and we have to wait until they put in motion a
conspiracy like Fort Dix or the Colorado jihadists. Or until they start
shooting.
Politics is the only recourse.
This is what the political fight was through the Bush years-fights over the
Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps of conversations between U.S. citizens and
foreign suspects, using the SWIFT financial data system to track terrorist
transfers (or, with KSM, military tribunals versus civil courts). The
argument against these policies was that "our values" require that judges
review and approve virtually all such activity.
The problem with this view is that "our values" were already protected to an
unprecedented degree. Raising the bar higher is asking too much of the
people assigned to catch all these self-radicalizing jihadists.
The Democrats have cast their lot with tighter restrictions. The past six
years and a presidential campaign proved that. In the wake of Hasan's 13
dead people, revisiting the limits of our vulnerability has to be on the
table in next year's congressional elections, and then a presidential
election.
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
http://online.
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in all we do, we do for GOD!!!!
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