Jihadist’s Three Mistakes Saved American Lives

Sure, New York dodged a bullet this week, big time, but through no fault of the US government. Ironically it was Faisal Shahzad’s own mistakes that foiled the bomb plot that could have cost the lives of hundreds of people in Time Square Saturday night.

First, the terrorist obviously hadn’t mastered the simple art of lighting the candle. A few simple, common sense tweaks in his bomb construction could have made him the most infamous jihadist since the 9-11 terrorists.

Shahzad’s second mistake, keeping in mind that he wasn’t dedicated enough to Bad God to swap his life for 70 virgins and a one-way trip to the Great Brothel in the sky, he didn’t preplan his exit from the US. If he had left the country immediately he would likely have made it.

And finally, he was in the country legally, and, as every undocumented worker in Arizona knows, that is no way to break the law in the United States. We love our illegals here. Okay, that one was a joke.

But it is the government’s mistakes that should really concern us.

Faisal Shahzad’s ten years in the US and his eventual citizenship a year ago should have screamed “jihadist.” He followed a prototypical plan put in place by Muslim extremists decades ago for the insertion of terrorists into this country.

The government’s first mistake was that this 7th century throwback was even in the country to begin with, as are thousands just like him. Drop into your local liquor store and meet one today. If you live in New York take a cab.

Shahzad married into his legal resident status.

FBI files are chock-full with Muslim terrorists who have in the past gained legal status and, in not a few cases, citizenship in the US using the marriage scam. They include bombers in the first World Trade Center attack, African US Embassy bombers, aids to Osama bin Laden, the Hezbollah cigarette-smugglers, and nearly a dozen failed New York bombers.

Americans have long shared a corporate guilt over the internment of Japanese Americans at the beginning of World War II. But Roosevelt’s reasoning in rounding up the Japanese was sound. He had to quickly secure the nation’s West Coast, the most vulnerable location for an invasion.

One can argue his methodology, thousands of good Japanese Americans should have been screened and returned to their homes within a couple of months, but the threat was real and he had no choice other than to ignore that threat.

I have complained for years now that the Bush administration is the real culprit in the failed War of Terror. In the first place we are not at war with terror, we are at war with Islamists, and he should have sought a formal declaration of war against them.

Secondly he should have immediately interred US Muslims and rapidly screened them for ties to subversive groups, and if necessary declared marshal law do it. After quick screening, 90% of them should have been returned to their homes and businesses.

Without a doubt the interment of legal residents, not to mention citizens, violates the Constitution, but it was necessary if the administration was to identify resident enemies. FDR did this by executive order.

The government of course will not do this again, regardless of the fact that it is the only sane way to conduct a war against covert enemies within a broad group of our society. However, if we don’t do something fast, one of these guys is going to get lucky.

There are things the government can do:

1) Cancel all student, tourist and work visas

2) Pass Joe Lieberman’s new legislation revoking citizenship to anyone joining a terrorist organization

3) Tighten qualifications for citizenship to 15 years

4) Revoke marriage as a pathway to legal residency

5) And, since we have a No Fly List, we might actually try using it.

Obama-Think: The Apples and Oranges of War and Law

Once again, this White House has shown itself to be, not only inept at dealing with a war that is increasingly coming back to where it began, at Ground Zero, but bizarrely unattached to the fact that we are a nation at war at all.

From the Littlerock Army Recruitment Shooting in July last year, to this week’s failed attempt on New York City, not only Obama, but virtually every member of his cabinet has been slow on the uptake.

When Eric Holder gave an unprecedented early hour press statement this morning, actually using the word, te … te … te … terrorist, Fox News anchors Gregg Jarrod and Ainsley Earhardt found themselves wondering aloud why the Attorney General would be taking an interview at such a late hour.

He wants to appear to be on top of this, someone opined. When Fox News has to defend Holder you know we’re in trouble. Yet it is classic Obama-think. Downplay the seriousness of an event – even deny it – then rush to play catch-up later.

What we are witnessing here is not a glitch of bureaucratic incompetence, although the administration right down to the file clerks certainly fits that definition.

It is retrograde, pre-9-11 thinking. Certainly not on the part of the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, they did a splendid job, but within the administration itself.

To understand it, one must understand the rationale of the New Left in the United States. We are not at war. The World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks were in some way justified for the racist policies of an oppressive nation long overdue for a comeuppance.

Even if the attack was a terrorist attack, it was not organized; it was an amateur, an overzealous lone wolf, who acted without the cooperation of the – and they have trouble getting this word out, as well – enemy.

Why does the administration have trouble admitting Islamic jihadists are the enemy? Because capitalism is the only enemy they know. For the last 30 years every Poly-Sci student in the US has been taught to believe it.

It is the reason most Americans were left scratching their heads when the President waited four days to make a statement after the Christmas Day Bombing attempt.

While the Right in America has long seen this school of thought scornfully comic in its naïveté, the way we have cavalierly addressed it for nearly 50 years has brought it horrifyingly center stage.

It is Obama-think and it is mainstream.

This is where apples meet oranges: The progressive see’s the former war on terror as a civil rights issue; they see war as a negotiation.

It is both hopelessly naïve and conspiratorial, and long before Obama, it infiltrated our government and armed services. War by its very definition demands that a nation either breaks the enemy’s will to fight, or utterly destroys that enemy. Civil rights become largely irrelevant.

Do you see that happening in this war? In Afghanistan? Did we see it in Iraq with Bush? No. What we are seeing is nation-building passivism that prevents our military from bringing the enemy to their knees. T-ball warfare, no winners, no losers.

And while we are trying to persuade the Afghanis to replace their opium crops young men and women are dying.

How long are you willing to subject your children to that kind of scenario? How many steel boxes draped with American flags will be enough? How do we win against an enemy that will not be defeated by our goodwill?

It is the same on the US front. The administration after a rudimentary interrogation, once again Mirandized this terrorist, and there has hardly been a peep in the press.

Obama’s fundamental misunderstanding of the necessity of quick, decisive action will eventually cost more domestic casualties. We must either pull out the stops in this war, or we will lose it.

Barack the Gas Guzzler: Explore, Baby, Explore

With tens of thousands of Americans out of work, Barack Obama continues in his attempts to divert his critics’ attention with cheap PR stunts and empty promises. His announcement this week that his administration will lift exploration restrictions off small portions of the Atlantic Seaboard and the Gulf of Mexico, is another stall tactic designed for nothing more than show.

Meantime, Russia, China and Venezuela are preparing to drill 90 miles off our coast in Cuban waters.

The coastal waters of the United States are perhaps the most exhaustively explored regions in the world for petroleum deposits. The state of California is bankrupt, and it is practically drowning in black gold, the result of nearly 60 years of bans on coastal drilling by Democratic legislators. There is presently more untapped oil in the US than in all of the Middle East.

And if Iran alone cuts off oil exports in the Middle East, the impact will be crippling. Think what would happen if Saudi shipments were curtailed for some reason.

T. Boone Pickens recently said that if the President would lift bans and introduce a program to convert much of the country’s transportation to natural gas, we could literally cut OPEC in half in 10-years time. Mr. Pickens – whom we can assume knows something about petroleum and gas – is still waiting for the government to call.

For decades the Democrats have stifled energy production and refinement with environmental scares while accusing Republican administrations of fight wars for foreign oil. It is time the American people wake up. We are behind France – every liberal’s dream nation – in nuclear energy, and the EPA Department of Interior are leveling impossible restrictions on drilling and coal mining.

And still, Barack Obama is about to make another end run on his economy-wrecking energy policy. He will, if Americans don’t speak out, ram yet another multi-trillion-dollar program that the country doesn’t want through Congress.

Environmental impact reports at this late date are nonsense. Oil companies long ago perfected safe drilling technology. There will certainly always be some risk, but delay is not worth the stability of our economy. ANWR is virtually untapped and oil rich; the Bakken Formation in Montana and North Dakota as well as other areas of the country have untapped fields, and natural gas in abundance. http://www.naturalgas.org/overview/resources.asp

Instability in the Middle East makes an immediate and aggressive petroleum and gas policy imperative to the future of the nation’s economy and security. Our large transportation vehicle will not run on corn syrup and electrical outlets.

President Obama’s environmental impact stalls will find us in peril if he doesn’t get off his liberal rear and act now.