John McCain and ‘Allahu Akbar’

Posted By Robert Spencer On September 4, 2013 @ 12:44 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 9 Comments

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The Daily Star of Lebanon reported that McCain posed with a Syrian rebel kidnapper in a photograph. His office denies that the man identified himself and condemned the group's action. (AP Photo/Syrian Emergency Task Force, Mouaz Moustafa)

Tuesday morning, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) got a bit hot under the collar when Brian Kilmeade of Fox News noted that the Syrian rebels whom Barack Obama and McCain want to aid militarily were shouting “Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!” as rockets hit Syrian government offices. McCain’s response to Kilmeade demonstrated not only his ignorance of Islam, but his abysmal misjudgment of what is happening in Syria. And on the basis of that ignorance, he is aiding Obama’s rush to yet another war.

“I have a problem,” Kilmeade said, “helping those people screaming that after a hit.” That incensed McCain, who shot back: “Would you have a problem with an American or Christians saying ‘thank God? Thank God?’ That’s what they’re saying. Come on! Of course they’re Muslims, but they’re moderates and I guarantee you they are moderates.”

Wrong on all counts. In the first place, it does not mean “thank God,” as McCain seems to have affirmed when he said, “That’s what they’re saying.” Allahu akbar means “Allah is greater” – not, as it is often translated, “God is great.” The significance of this is enormous, as it is essentially a proclamation of superiority and supremacism. Allah is greater – than any of the gods of the infidels, and Islam is superior to all other religions.

Al-Islam.org states this obliquely: “Allahu akbar implies that God is superior to all tangible and intangible, temporal and celestial beings.” This may seem to be an innocuous theological statement until one recalls that Islam has always had a political aspect, and Islamic jihadists always shout “Allahu akbar” when attacking infidels. It is a declaration of the superiority of their god and their way of life over those of their victims. 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta also stated that it was meant to make the infidels afraid. He wrote instructions to jihadists that were found in his baggage: “Shout, ‘Allahu Akbar,’ because this strikes fear in the hearts of the non-believers.”

In equating this war cry, which we recently saw Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood members shouting as they destroyed a church and tore off its cross, with “thank God,” McCain was manifesting the moral equivalence that is not only fashionable these days, but required for acceptance into polite society. Only wretched “Islamophobes” don’t accept the mainstream media and government dogma that Christianity is just as likely as Islam to incite its adherents to violence. That there aren’t any Christians anywhere shouting “thank God” as they fire rockets at anyone doesn’t deter McCain from making this equivalence. Religious dogmas, and that’s what the idea that Christianity and Islam are equally violent is, are not subject to the same standards of evidentiary proof as are more mundane realities.

And he guarantees that the Syrian rebels are moderates? This is the John McCain who, according to Lebanon’s Daily Star, “was unwittingly photographed with a known affiliate of the rebel group responsible for the kidnapping of 11 Lebanese Shiite pilgrims one year ago, during a brief and highly publicized visit inside Syria” in May.

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers later tried to do damage control for this disastrous photo-op, saying: “A number of the Syrians who greeted Senator McCain upon his arrival in Syria asked to take pictures with him, and as always, the Senator complied. If the individual photographed with Senator McCain is in fact Mohamed Nour [the kidnapper], that is regrettable. But it would be ludicrous to suggest that the Senator in any way condones the kidnapping of Lebanese Shia pilgrims or has any communication with those responsible.”

Fair enough. Accidents will happen. Mistakes will be made. But at the time that the picture was taken, McCain didn’t treat it as if it had been some random and meaningless photo-op with people he didn’t know. Instead, on May 28, he tweeted out the photo and added: “Important visit with brave fighters in #Syria who are risking their lives for freedom and need our help.”
Accordingly, it is ludicrous for McCain to be insisting now that “they’re moderates and I guarantee you they are moderates” when he and/or his staff were so out of touch in May that he may have been photographed with a Sunni jihad terrorist. He has already demonstrated his inability to distinguish Syrian “moderates” from “extremists.” So why should we trust him now?

What’s more, while McCain is guaranteeing that the Syrian rebels are moderates, the New York Times reported months ago that “nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.” The situation of the secularists has not improved since then. And the Long War Journal reported on June 29 that the Al Nusrah Front for the People of the Levant, which is “al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria,” has “cooperated with Free Syrian Army units to establish sharia, or Islamic law, in Aleppo and in eastern Syria.” What is the Free Syrian Army? McCain’s moderates: “the US government is backing the Free Syrian Army despite the group’s known ties to the Al Nusrah Front.”

McCain’s appalling ignorance and Obama’s ongoing enthusiasm for all things Muslim Brotherhood, including the Syrian opposition, are leading the U.S. into disaster. McCain, as a leader of the Republican Party, ought to be articulating a coherent and rational alternative to Obama’s potentially catastrophic adventurism and rush to intervene in Syria despite lacking a clear goal and genuine allies on the ground within the country. Instead, he and John Boehner and the rest of the Republican establishment are falling over themselves to see who can say “Me too” to Barack Obama fast enough.

What America needs most in these dark days of fantasy-based policymaking is a loyal opposition. But that is the one thing we do not have. Not in any effective sense, as our warships wait in the Mediterranean for the signal to start firing on Syria, with enthusiastic bipartisan support.

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Syria: John McCain’s Next Libya

He fails to discriminate between friends and enemies. 

By Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com/

June 1, 2013

Sen. John McCain visits rebels in Syria on May 27. (AP)

Did you catch Senator John McCain’s much-heralded (by Senator McCain) trip to the Syrian civil war — by way of our NATO ally Turkey, the lifeline of the Hamas terrorist organization? Yeah, Senator McCain blew into town to prove that all of us dissenters from his latest adventure in “Democracy, Sharia Style” are wacko birds. Surely, the Forward March of Freedom can work just as well in Damascus as it has in Benghazi, Cairo, Baghdad, and Kabul.

Well, he’s probably right about that.

The Maverick is sensitive to the criticism that he has been a smidge less than discriminating when it comes to sorting out America’s friends from America’s mortal enemies. Thus, the immediate objective of his latest Middle Eastern jaunt was to show that the anti-Assad “rebels” — I’d call them the Syrian Mujahideen, which is how most of them think of themselves — are predominantly, indeed overwhelmingly, secular and moderate. Oh, there may be a bad apple or two in the rebel legions, but rest assured that the arsenal McCain wants to dole out to them, in conjunction with U.S.-led aerial attacks on Assad’s forces, will not be yet another exercise in arming the next anti-American jihad. Those who claim we cannot tell the good guys from the bad guys are just a bunch of craven isolationists.

How unfortunate for the senator, then, that he managed, in the midst of this scintillating exhibition, to get himself photographed with Mohamed Nour and Ammar al-Dadikhi (also known as “Abu Ibrahim”) — two of the swell “rebels” from the very moderate “Northern Storm Brigade” who last year kidnapped eleven Lebanese Shiite pilgrims. Nour is the chief spokesman for the Brigade, which is still holding nine of the pilgrims captive.

Oops.

True to form, McCain completely missed the point of his contretemps. His office quickly issued a statement asserting that “it would be ludicrous to suggest that the Senator in any way condones the kidnapping of Lebanese Shia pilgrims.” Well, yes, that’s probably why no one is suggesting it (as Allahpundit explains in an excellentanalysis at Hot Air). No one thinks the Beltway’s progressive Islamophilic consensus affirmatively endorses the jihad. McCain & Co. are just willfully blind to the fact that it thrives on their delusions.

McCain is nothing if not consistent. There was the oops in Qaddafi’s tent back in 2009, when McCain was urging more U.S. aid for the Libyan regime — then acknowledged to be a critical counterterrorism ally of the United States. That was only a few months before the Maverick abruptly pivoted, deciding that the regime we’d been supporting needed to be overthrown. This, he . . . er . . . reasoned, would surely empower our new allies (or was it our old enemies?), the moderate rebels of Benghazi — who were just back home from waging years of jihad against America’s Islamic Democracy project in Iraq. Just as he does now when it comes to Syria, McCain looked out on an Islamic-supremacist sea, saw a couple of progressive islets, and pronounced the rebels his “heroes” — while they blared theirAllahu Akbars, waved their black jihadi flags, and carried out their terrorist atrocities.

Oops again.

There is a stubborn fact Republicans may want to consider as McCain, their wayward foreign-policy guru, tries to browbeat them into Libya Act II — because, you know, Act I has worked out so well. It is this: The Obama administration’s shocking derelictions of duty in connection with the Benghazi massacre cannot erase the GOP fingerprints all over the Libyan debacle. Obama is the one who took us over the cliff, but only after McCain shoved him to the very edge.

Obama’s Libya war, which the president was pleased to lead from behind while McCain whirled in front, was not authorized by Congress. This was fine by McCain, who declared that saving Benghazi was too important to delay over such constitutional trivia as a green light from the American people’s representatives. After all, what would America have done without Benghazi? So Libya now stands as a treacherous precedent that a president may unilaterally take us to war, in consultation with the Arab League’s Islamist regimes, under circumstances in which not only are there no vital American interests to be served but our intervention actually disserves our interests by empowering America’s enemies.

To be generous, post-intervention Libya was a disaster long before our ambassador and three other Americans were killed by jihadists nine months ago. Our mysterious diplomatic facility in Benghazi had been a terrorist target for months before September 11, 2012 — and the purpose for having a State Department mission in a place so notoriously perilous for Americans has still not been explained. Qaddafi’s weapons depots were raided by jihadists and now facilitate their rampages across North Africa. In Libya itself, as Barry Rubincatalogues, armed militias run rampant, Western facilities (such as the French embassy in Tripoli) continue to be attacked, and the al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadists who murdered our officials are the de facto rulers of Benghazi. What passes for a central government is too impotent to establish its authority.

This was not an unforeseeable outcome. It was easily predictable for anyone willing to see the region as it is rather than as he would have it. That will never be Senator McCain, who, when not rubbing elbows with Syria’s motley jihadists this week, was assuring us that Assad’s opponents “are just trying to achieve the same thing that we have shed American blood and treasure for for well over 200 years.”

Yeah, just like in Benghazi. And in Egypt, where a pogrom against Christians is underway, and the Muslim Brotherhood government McCain joins Obama in supporting has just installed a sharia constitution. And in Iraq, where Sunnis and Shiites are back to slaughtering each other under the sharia constitution our State Department helped them write. And in Afghanistan, where, under a similar American-sponsored sharia constitution, the Taliban bides its time while the U.S.-backed Islamist forces turn their guns on their American trainers. And in Turkey, where an Islamic-supremacist regime jails its political opponents, supports terrorist organizations, undermines sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program, and gradually suffocates what was once a pro-Western democracy.

Liberty is not spread by fueling sharia supremacists. The futile hope that propitiating America’s enemies will turn them into our friends is an Obama policy. Shouldn’t the Republicans be offering an alternative — maybe something other than “oops”?

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.

McCain's Mideast Blunders

Jan 19, 2013 

By Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com

I wonder if the jihadists of eastern Libya are still “heroes” to John McCain. That’s what he called them — “my heroes” — after he changed on a dime from chummy Qaddafi tent guest to rabid Qaddafi scourge.

See, the senator and his allies in the Obama-Clinton State Department had a brilliant notion: The reason the “rebels” of eastern Libya hated America so much had nothing to do with their totalitarian, incorrigibly anti-Western ideology. No, no: The problem was that we sided with Qaddafi, giving the dictator — at the insistence of, well, McCain and the State Department — foreign aid, military assistance, and international legitimacy. If we just threw Qaddafi under the bus, the rebels would surely become our grand democratic allies.
This, of course, was a much more sophisticated theory than you’d get from lunatics like Michele Bachmann. Sit down for this, because I know it’s hard to believe anyone could spout such nutter stuff, but Bachmann actually opposed U.S. intervention in Libya. She claimed — stop cackling! — that many of McCain’s heroes might actually be jihadists ideologically hostile to the U.S. and linked to groups such as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the terror enterprise’s North African franchise. She even thought — yeah, I know, crazy — that if Qaddafi were deposed, the heroes would get their hands on his arsenal, ship a lot of it to AQIM havens in places such as Mali and Algeria, and maybe even turn rebel strongholds such as Benghazi into death traps for Americans.
Good thing we listened to McCain, no?
This week, while the guys the senator and the Obama administration aligned us with in Libya (and would like to align us with in Syria) were busy taking Americans and other foreigners hostage in Algeria, in addition to using Qaddafi’s arsenal to fight the French in Mali, McCain was working his magic in Cairo.
An unfortunate hiccup: McCain and his entourage, including fellow Libya hawk Lindsey Graham, showed up on President Mohamed Morsi’s doorstep just as it was revealed that Morsi, while a top Muslim Brotherhood official in 2010, had inveighed against Jews, calling them “blood-suckers” and “the descendants of apes and pigs” and claiming it was incumbent on Egyptians to “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred” toward them.
Thank goodness Morsi was able to explain to McCain that his remarks had been “taken out of context.” I mean, you can see how that could happen, right? You’re making a few benign remarks about perpetuating hatred for enemies you describe as subhuman and all of a sudden they’re calling you an anti-Semite. Why, next thing you know, they’ll be saying Morsi could be an Islamic supremacist who is hellbent on imposing a sharia constitution on Egypt when he’s not otherwise rolling out the red carpet for Hamas and demanding the release of the Blind Sheikh!
Not to worry: McCain & Co. have promised to go to bat for Egypt’s swell president. Sure, he has imposed a sharia constitution just as crazies like Michele Bachmann predicted the Muslim Brotherhood would do if it took power. That would be the same sharia that, less than two years ago, McCain condemned as “anti-democratic — at least as far as women are concerned.” Back then, McCain was warning that the Brotherhood had to be kept out of the government if there was to be any hope for democracy in Egypt. After all, he explained, the Brothers “have been involved with other terrorist organizations.”
Now, however, McCain says he will push for American taxpayers to fork up another $480 million for Morsi. Or, to be accurate, borrow another $480 million. You see, the United States is already so deep in the red that a $16.3 trillion debt ceiling is not high enough. In fact, we’re such a basket case that our debt-service and “entitlement” payments alone put us in a quarter-trillion-dollar deficit hole even before we borrow and print another trillion-plus for such ancillary expenses as the Defense Department, the Obama family’s vacations, and the $80-odd million that funds “democratization” programs at McCain’s International Republican Institute. But hey, no problem — what’s another $480 million on top of the $2 billion–plus the Obama administration has already extended to Morsi’s regime . . . to say nothing of the sizable U.S. taxpayer chunk of the $4.8 billion IMF loan the Brotherhood government is also about to get its mitts on?
Naturally, “extremist” conservatives like Michele Bachmann are wet blankets when it comes to this gravy train, too. Get this: She thinks that when you get to the point where you have to borrow in order to pay the interest on the loans you already can’t pay off, somebody needs to cut off your credit line — not inflate it by another two or three trill. Even more daft: She thinks that if you subsidize an organization, like the Brotherhood, that promotes sharia and Hamas, you’re apt to get more sharia and more terrorism.
But look, that’s the kind of passé thinking we’ve come to expect from Bachmann. She’s the one, you may recall, who had the audacity to argue last year that it might not be a good idea for the secretary of state to keep as a key staffer a woman who worked for several years with a notorious al-Qaeda financial backer whose “charity” is formally designated as a terrorist organization — indeed, worked with him at a sharia-promotional journal he founded and in charge of which he put her parents, Muslim Brotherhood operatives (the surviving one of whom runs an Islamist organization, the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child, that is part of an umbrella entity called the Union for Good — a designated terrorist organization run by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the notorious Muslim Brotherhood jurist).
Congresswoman Bachmann was acting on the obviously irrational belief that Muslim Brotherhood influences in our government might lead to pro-Islamist policies detrimental to American security and interests — as if the State Department might tell pro-American Egyptian military rulers that they should stand down so the Brotherhood could take over; as if the Obama administration might order that information about Islamist ideology be purged from the materials used to train our intelligence agents; as if the Brotherhood, even as it counted its American aid dollars, would impose sharia, prosecute its detractors, and green-light the persecution of minority Christians.
Such insane, Islamophobic scaremongering! Insane enough that McCain, between praising his Islamist “heroes” and championing ever more funding for Islamist Egypt, made certain to lambaste Bachmann on the floor of the Senate over her concerns about Brotherhood infiltration of our government – leading other influential Republicans to follow suit. And now, aping that display, People for the American Way — “PAW,” the outfit created by a hard-left Hollywood icon to smear Robert Bork and derail his Supreme Court nomination — is campaigning to have Bachmann booted from the House Intelligence Committee.
There is a war on over the course of American foreign policy and the security of the United States. The Left has aligned with the Brotherhood — some naïvely relying on the fiction that the Brothers are not the enemy vanguard, others seeing the Brothers as comrades in the quest for a utopian, post-American future. In opposition, the GOP can either continue looking to McCain for leadership or rally behind Bachmann the way the Left always circles the wagons around its stalwarts.
Anyone want to bet me on which way the Republicans will go?
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which was published by Encounter Books.

Brotherhood’s American defenders

Why is the Obama administration shunning potential allies and empowering enemies? Why has the administration gotten it wrong everywhere?


By CAROLINE B. GLICK
The Jerusalem Post
http://www.jpost.com/
26 July 2012


On Wednesday, John Brennan, US President Barack Obama’s assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism, made a quick trip to Israel to discuss Hezbollah’s massacre of Israeli tourists in Burgas, Bulgaria last week.

Hopefully it was an instructive meeting for the senior US official, although his Israeli interlocutors were undoubtedly dumbstruck by how difficult it was to communicate with him. Unlike previous US counterterror officials, Brennan does not share Israel’s understanding of Middle Eastern terrorism.

Brennan’s outlook on this subject was revealed in a speech he gave two years ago in Washington. In that talk, Brennan spoke dreamily about Hezbollah. As he put it, “Hezbollah is a very interesting organization.”
He claimed it had evolved from a “purely terrorist organization” to a militia and then into an organization with members in Lebanon’s parliament and serving in Lebanon’s cabinet.

Brennan continued, “There are certainly elements of Hezbollah that are truly a concern for us what they’re doing. And what we need to do is find ways to diminish their influence within the organization and to try to build up the more moderate elements.”
Perhaps in a bid to build up those “moderate elements,” in the same address, Brennan referred to Israel’s capital city Jerusalem as “al Quds,” the name preferred by Hezbollah and its Iranian overlords.

Brennan’s amazing characterization of Hezbollah’s hostile takeover of the Lebanese government as proof that the terrorist group was moderating was of a piece with the Obama administration’s view of Islamic jihadists generally.

If there are “moderate elements,” in Hezbollah, from the perspective of the Obama administration, Hezbollah’s Sunni jihadist counterpart – the Muslim Brotherhood – is downright friendly.

On February 10, 2011, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper made this position clear in testimony before the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Clapper’s testimony was given the day before then Egyptian president and longtime US ally Hosni Mubarak was forced to resign from office. Mubarak’s coerced resignation was owed largely to the Obama administration’s decision to end US support for his regime and openly demand his immediate abdication of power. As Israel warned, Mubarak’s ouster paved the way for the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascendance to power in Egypt.

In his testimony Clapper said, “The term ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ is an umbrella term for a variety of movements. In the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaida as a perversion of Islam. They have pursued social ends, betterment of the political order in Egypt, etc.”

Watching Clapper’s testimony in Israel, the sense across the political spectrum, shared by experts and casual observers alike was that the US had taken leave of its senses.

The slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood is “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Koran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the path of Allah is our highest hope.” How could such a high-level US official claim that such an organization is “largely secular”? Every day Muslim Brotherhood leaders call for the violent annihilation of Israel. And those calls are often combined with calls for jihad against the US. For instance, in a sermon from October 2010, Muslim Brotherhood head Mohammed Badie called for jihad against the US. As he put it “Resistance [i.e. terrorism] is the only solution against the Zio-American arrogance and tyranny, and all we need is for the Arab and Muslim peoples to stand behind it and support it.”

Badie then promised his congregants that the death of America was nigh. As he put it, “A nation that does not champion moral and human values cannot lead humanity, and its wealth will not avail it once Allah has had His say, as happened with [powerful] nations in the past. The US is now experiencing the beginning of its end, and is heading towards its demise.”
The obliviousness of Brennan and Clapper to the essential nature of Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood are symptoms of the overarching ignorance informing the Obama administration’s approach to Middle Eastern realities.
Take, for instance, the Obama administration’s policy confusion over Syria. This week The Washington Post reported that the Obama administration lacks any real knowledge of the nature of the opposition forces fighting to overthrow the Syrian regime. Whereas one senior official told the paper, “We’re identifying the key leaders, and there are a lot of them. We are in touch with them and we stay in touch,” another official said that is not the case.
As the latter official put it, “The folks that have been identified have been identified through Turkey and Jordan. It is not because of who we know. It’s all through liaison.”
The fact that the US government is flying blind as Syria spins out of control is rendered all the more egregious when you recognize that this was not inevitable. America’s ignorance is self-inflicted.
In the 16 months that have passed since the Syrian civil war broke out, the administration passed up several opportunities to develop its own ties to the opposition and even to shape its agenda. Two examples suffice to make this clear.
First, in October 2011, according to the Beirut-based Arabic news portal al Nashra, Dalia Mogahed, Obama’s adviser on Muslim affairs, blocked a delegation of Middle Eastern Christians led by Lebanon’s Maronite Patriarch Bechara Rai from meeting with Obama and members of his national security team at the White House. According to al Nashra, Mogahed canceled the meeting at the request of the Muslim Brotherhood in her native Egypt.
The White House canceled the meeting days after Rai visited with then French president Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris. During that meeting Rai angered the French Foreign Ministry when he warned that it would be a disaster for Syria’s Christian minority, and for Christians throughout the region, if the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad is overthrown. Rai based this claim on his assessment that Assad would be replaced by a Muslim Brotherhood- dominated Islamist regime.
And nine months later it is obvious that he was right. With Syria’s civil war still raging throughout the country, the world media is rife with reports about Syria’s Christians fleeing their towns and villages en masse as Islamists from the Syrian opposition target them with death, extortion and kidnapping.
Then there are the US’s peculiar choices regarding the opposition figures it favors. Last August, in a bid to gain familiarity with the Syrian opposition, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with opposition representatives at the State Department. Herb London from the Hudson Institute reported at the time that the group Clinton met with was dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. Members of the non-Islamist, pro-Western Syrian Democracy Council compose of Syrian Kurds, Alawites, Christians, Druse, Assyrians and non-Islamist Sunnis were not invited to the meeting.
Clinton did reportedly agree to meet with representatives of the council separately. But unlike the press carnival at her meeting with the Muslim Brotherhood members, Clinton refused to publicize her meeting with the non-Islamist opposition leaders. In so acting, she denied these would-be US allies the ability to claim that they enjoyed the support of the US government.
The question is why? Why is the Obama administration shunning potential allies and empowering enemies? Why has the administration gotten it wrong everywhere? In an attempt to get to the bottom of this, and perhaps to cause the administration to rethink its policies, a group of US lawmakers, members of the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees led by Rep. Michele Bachmann sent letters to the inspectors-general of the State, Homeland Security, Defense, and Justice departments as well as to the inspector-general of the office of the director of National Intelligence. In those letters, Bachmann and her colleagues asked the Inspectors General to investigate possible penetration of the US government by Muslim Brotherhood operatives.
In their letters, and in a subsequent explanatory letter to US Rep. Keith Ellison from Rep. Bachmann, the lawmakers made clear that when they spoke of governmental penetration, they were referring to the central role that Muslim groups, identified by the US government in Federal Court as Muslim Brotherhood front organizations, play in shaping the Obama administration’s perception of and policies towards the Muslim Brotherhood and its allied movements in the US and throughout the world.
That these front groups, including the unindicted terror funding co-conspirators, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), play a key role in shaping the Obama administration’s agenda is beyond dispute. Senior administration officials including Mogahed have close ties to these groups. There is an ample body of evidence that suggests that the administration’s decision to side with the hostile Muslim Brotherhood against its allies owes to a significant degree to the influence these Muslim Brotherhood front groups and their operatives wield in the Obama administration.
To take just one example, last October the Obama administration agreed to purge training materials used by US intelligence and law enforcement agencies and eliminate all materials that contained references to Islam that US Muslim groups associated with the Muslim Brotherhood had claimed were offensive. The administration has also fired counterterrorism trainers and lecturers employed by US security agencies and defense academies that taught their pupils about the doctrines of jihadist Islam. The administration also appointed representatives of Muslim Brotherhoodaligned US Muslim groups to oversee the approval of training materials about Islam for US federal agencies.
For their efforts to warn about – and perhaps cause the administration to abandon its reliance on – Muslim Brotherhood front groups, Bachmann and her colleagues have been denounced as racists and McCarthyites. These attacks have not been carried out only by administration supporters.
Republican Senator John McCain denounced Bachmann from the floor of the Senate. Republican Senator Marco Rubio later piled on attacking her for her attempt to convince the administration to reconsider its policies. Those policies again place the most radical members of the US Muslim community in charge of the US government’s policies toward the Muslim Brotherhood and other jihadist movements.
It is clear that the insidious notion that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate and friendly force has taken hold in US policy circles. And it is apparent that US policymaking in the Middle East is increasingly rooted in this false and dangerous assessment.
In spearheading an initiative to investigate and change this state of affairs, Bachmann and her colleagues should be congratulated, not condemned. And their courageous efforts to ask the relevant questions about the nature of Muslim Brotherhood influence over US policymakers should be joined, not spurned by their colleagues in Washington, by the media and by all concerned citizens in America and throughout the free world.

Questions about Huma Abedin

A State Department adviser has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com

July 21, 2012

Huma Abedin, left, aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, goes over notes with Clinton during her visit to the University Teaching Hospital Pediatric Centre of Excellence in Lusaka, Zambia, on June 11, 2011. (AP)

Der Spiegel pointed out the obvious: “A certain role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the transition process [to ‘democracy’] in Egypt seems acceptable to the Obama White House.” It was early February 2011, the moment when the uprising that would oust Hosni Mubarak was bubbling over in Tahrir Square. The prominent German newsmagazine figured, who better to ask about the Muslim Brotherhood than the American political establishment’s resident foreign-policy genius, John McCain?

So, the reporter asked him, does Obama’s tolerance of the Muslim Brotherhood “concern you”?
Senator Maverick shot back without hesitation: “It concerns me so much that I am unalterably opposed to it. I think it would be a mistake of historic proportions.”

Senator McCain elaborated that he was “deeply, deeply concerned that this whole movement [toward democracy] could be hijacked by radical Islamic extremists.” And what, he was specifically asked, “is your assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood”? McCain pulled no punches:

I think they are a radical group that, first of all, supports sharia law; that in itself is anti-democratic — at least as far as women are concerned. They have been involved with other terrorist organizations and I believe that they should be specifically excluded from any tra nsition government.

In fact, so apprehensive was he over the Brotherhood and its sharia agenda that McCain was quick to brand Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate, as a Brotherhood tool. Many of us watching developments at the time noted the apparent collusion between ElBaradei and the Brothers. McCain went farther: “Oh yeah, I think it’s very clear that the scenario is very likely he could be their front man.”

Senator Straight Talk reasoned that since ElBaradei appeared to be on the same page as the Brotherhood, and was being hailed as a potential Mubarak successor despite having “no following nor political influence in Egypt,” we should assume that he must be in cahoots with the Brotherhood. It did not matter that ElBaradei was a renowned international figure and an important leftist ally of President Obama’s. So pernicious was the threat posed by the Brotherhood that, in McCain’s considered opinion, you just had to assume the worst.

The Spiegel interview was classic McCain; the senator is never at a loss for bloviation. His professed anxiety, only a year ago, over the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as his blithe willingness to assume that ElBaradei must be an Islamist coconspirator, are worth remembering today. For the sage has suddenly decided that the Brothers — unapologetic Islamic supremacists who say outright that they are on a “grand jihad” to destroy America and the West — are a pretty swell lot, after all. Instead, McCain reserves his signature “shoot first, think later” ire for the target he has always preferred: conservatives.

The Arizonan took to the Senate floor this week to lambaste five conservative members of the House who, unlike McCain, are actually serious about addressing threats the Brotherhood poses to American interests. McCain’s bipartisan “Islamic democracy” promoters seem content to keep burning through taxpayer trillions until the Brotherhood is finally running every government in the Middle East. To the contrary, the House conservatives — Michele Bachmann (Minn.), Louie Gohmert (Texas), Trent Franks (Ariz.), Tom Rooney (Fla.), and Lynn Westmorland (Ga.) — have concluded that the Brotherhood needs to be regarded as the serious anti-American business that it is.

Toward that end, the quintet is justifiably concerned that the Brotherhood’s sharia agenda — the one to which McCain used to be “unalterably opposed” — is being abetted not just by some Nobel-toting Egyptian progressive, but by officials in highly sensitive positions inside the United States government.

One official about whom they raise questions is Huma Abedin, deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Ms. Abedin has been an aide since she interned at the White House in 1996 and was assigned to the then–first lady’s staff. The family tie for which she is best known is her husband, Anthony Weiner, the New York Democrat who resigned from Congress in disgrace last year. But it is Ms. Abedin’s parents and brother who have drawn the attention of the five House GOP members. They all have connections to the Muslim Brotherhood — the organization itself or prominent members thereof.

For pointing this out and merely asking the State Department’s inspector general to look into it and report back to Congress — which is part of the IG’s duties under the statute that created his position — McCain & Co. (i.e., his fans in the left-wing media and his admirers in the Republican establishment) are screaming “smear” and “McCarthyism.” McCain’s antipathy toward conservatives (except during election years) is an old story. And it is no secret that he has long been smitten by Mrs. Clinton, whose transnational-progressive leanings mirror his own.

The Maverick is also a man about town — towns like Tripoli. Back in 2009, you may recall, he was an honored guest in the compound of Libya’s dictator, Moammar Qaddafi — celebrating the former master terrorist as an important American ally against jihadist terror, helping to grease the wheels so the Obama administration could increase American aid that would bolster Qaddafi’s military. Yet in the blink of an eye, it seemed, McCain would later be railing that Qaddafi was a dyed-in-the-wool terrorist monster whose military had to be smashed by the United States — in an undeclared, unauthorized, unprovoked war, if necessary — so Libyans could be “free” to elect the Muslim Brotherhood and other assorted Islamic supremacists to their new Parliament.

But the point is that McCain gets around. And when he does, the State Department is often his escort. Between his globetrotting and his case of Hillary hauteur, the senator has gotten friendly over the years with Ms. Abedin, who is said to be smart, able, and quite charming. Ever the Maverick — chivalrous to a fault . . . at least when the damsel in distress is an exotic, progressive sharia-democracy devotee rather than a conservative national-security worrywart from Minnesota. McCain has leapt to Ms. Abedin’s defense against these vicious House troglodytes.

The senator’s tirade featured his trademark indignation, incoherence, and infatuation with immigrant success stories. (Ms. Abedin was born in Michigan, but no reason to let that get in the way of “what is best about America.”) McCain blasted Representative Bachmann and the others, falsely accusing them of doing to his friend Huma what he had actually done to ElBaradei, namely, implicating her as “part of a nefarious conspiracy.”

To the contrary, the House members have drawn no such conclusions. Instead, they have pointed out the State Department’s dramatic, Brotherhood-friendly policy shifts during Ms. Abedin’s tenure as a top adviser to the State Department’s boss. They have asked — completely consistent with national-security guidelines, to which I’ll come shortly — that an investigation into those policy shifts be undertaken.

That investigation would include an inquiry into whether Ms. Abedin’s family ties render her unsuitable for a position that involves access to classified information about the Brotherhood. The shrieks aside, this is not remotely unreasonable, nor is it an inquisition into Ms. Abedin’s decency and rectitude. When I was a prosecutor, the Justice Department would not have let me take a case that involved friends of my family. It’s not that they didn’t trust me; it’s that government is supposed to avoid the appearance of impropriety — legitimacy hinges on the public’s belief that actions are taken on merit, not burdened by palpable conflicts of interest.

Regarding Ms. Abedin’s family ties, McCain rebukes his House colleagues for alleging “that three members of Huma’s family are ‘connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives and/or organizations.’” “These sinister accusations,” he insisted, “rest solely on a few unspecified and unsubstantiated associations of members of Huma’s family.”

Now, I’m perfectly willing to believe that McCain may not know what the words “unspecified” and “unsubstantiated” mean. That, however, would not excuse his use of them in this context. The ties of Ms. Abedine’s father, mother, and brother to the Muslim Brotherhood are both specific and substantiated.

Ms. Abedin’s father, the late Syed Z. Abedin, was an Indian-born Islamic academic who founded the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs in Saudi Arabia. That institute was backed by the Muslim World League. As the Hudson Institute’s Zeyno Baran relates, the MWL was started by the Saudi government in 1962 “with Brotherhood members in key leadership positions.” It has served as the principal vehicle for the propagation of Islamic supremacism by the Saudis and the Brotherhood. That ideology fuels the “Islamic extremism” that, only a year ago, had McCain so worried that he thought allowing the Brotherhood into the Egyptian-government mix “would be a mistake of historic proportions.”

McCain’s frivolous retort is that Professor Abedin died 20 years ago. That would be a great point if someone were accusing Ms. Abedin of being in her father’s institute or the MWL. It is irrelevant when the question is whether it is reasonable to infer Islamist sympathies from her parents’ allegiances — not to make conclusive judgments about her, mind you, but to draw an inference that would merit deeper inquiry. That is standard fare in government background checks. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s emir, has been out of the Brotherhood for more than 30 years. Does that mean the Brotherhood is now irrelevant to his ideological outlook, or to the sympathies of his close associates?

As it happens, the same MWL that supported Abedin père’s institute also helped the Brotherhood establish the Muslim Students Association. The MSA is the foundation of the Brotherhood’s American infrastructure, the gateway through which young Muslims join the Brotherhood after being steeped in the supremacist writings of Brotherhood theorists Hassan al-Banna (who founded the Brotherhood in the 1920s) and Sayyid Qutb (the animating influence of such jihadist eminences as Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden, and the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman).

Speaking of which, it was through the MSA that Egypt’s new president, Mohammed Morsi, joined the Muslim Brotherhood. He was studying engineering in California at the time, the early Eighties. By her own account, Morsi’s wife, Nagla Ali Mahmoud, also joined. She became a leading member of a cognate outfit known as “the Muslim Sisterhood.” And it is here that we get to Huma Abedin’s mother, the Pakistani-born academic Dr. Saleha Abedin.

Dr. Abedin, too, has been a member of the Muslim Sisterhood, “which is essentially nothing more than the female version of the Brotherhood,” according to Walid Shoebat, a former Brotherhood member who has renounced the organization. The Brotherhood is not only the font of Sunni supremacist ideology, it spearheads the international support network for Hamas, the terrorist organization that openly proclaims itself as the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.

According to one report, Dr. Abedin has on occasion represented herself as a delegate of the MWL. Moreover, as William Jacobson documents at Legal Insurrection, Dr. Abedin has led the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC), an Islamist organization that hews to the positions of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s leading sharia jurist. Like Brotherhood entities, the IICWC defends such practices as female genital mutilation and child marriage, which find support in Islamic law and scripture.

Sheikh Qaradawi, of course, is the Brotherhood eminence who promises that Islam “will conquer Europe, we will conquer America.” He is a vigorous supporter of Hamas, and his fatwas lionize suicide terrorism — including the killing of Americans in Iraq. It is Qaradawi who brings us to Huma Abedin’s brother, Dr. Hassan Abedin. He has been a fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies in Great Britain. Contemporaneously, Sheikh Qaradawi was a member of the Oxford Center’s board of trustees. So was Omar Naseef, onetime secretary-general of the MWL as well as the founder of the Rabita Trust — an Islamic “charity” notorious for funding jihadists and for having an al-Qaeda founder (Wael Hamza Julaidan) as one of its chief executives.

These connections are not contrived or weightless — like when the Left wanted to keep Samuel Alito off the Supreme Court because, 40 years ago, he was a member of “Concerned Alumni of Princeton.” Of course, knowing members of an organization whose goals include conquest of the West and destruction of Israel is not a crime. Nor is it a crime to have close relatives who are either members of, or associated with members of, such an organization. Again, however, no one is accusing Huma Abedin of a crime.

The five House conservatives, instead, are asking questions that adults responsible for national security should feel obliged to ask: In light of Ms. Abedin’s family history, is she someone who ought to have a security clearance, particularly one that would give her access to top-secret information about the Brotherhood? Is she, furthermore, someone who may be sympathetic to aspects of the Brotherhood’s agenda, such that Americans ought to be concerned that she is helping shape American foreign policy?

Now, Senator McCain is no stranger to smear. No need to confirm that with Mr. ElBaradei; we’ve watched for years as he has slandered, for example, critics of his advocacy for illegal aliens as “nativists” seeking to reprise Jim Crow laws. Nevertheless, since McCain purports to be a tireless guardian of our security, one would think he’d appreciate the distinction between a smear, on the one hand, and a routine application of security-clearance standards, on the other.

The State Department is particularly wary when it comes to the category of “foreign influence” — yes, it is a significant enough concern to warrant its own extensive category in background investigations. No criminal behavior need be shown to deny a security clearance; access to classified information is not a right, and reasonable fear of “divided loyalties” is more than sufficient for a clearance to be denied.

The guidelines probe ties to foreign countries and organizations because hostile elements could “target United States citizens to obtain protected information” or could be “associated with a risk of terrorism” — note: The Brotherhood checks both these boxes. Thus, when someone is proposed for a sensitive position, it is necessary to consider “conditions that could raise a security concern and may be disqualifying.” These, the State Department tells us, include “contact with a foreign family member, business or professional associate, friend or other person who is a citizen or resident in a foreign country if that contact creates a heightened risk of foreign exploitation, inducement, pressure, or coercion.”

Furthermore, in light of the Brotherhood’s well-known abhorrence of the United States, it is also pertinent that State’s guidelines raise alarms if a person seeking access to classified information has an “association or sympathy” with people who seek to overthrow our government, or even with people who just seek to prevent Americans from exercising their constitutional rights. The Brotherhood does not just aim to upend our system; it would restrict our rights, such as free expression, to the extent they contradict sharia.

In his diatribe, McCain speciously asserted that the GOP conservatives had failed to cite “an action, a decision, or a public position that Huma has taken while at the State Department” that showed she was either “promoting anti-American activities within our government” or having a “direct impact” on harmful policies. Of course, to assess a person’s fitness for a sensitive position, background investigators are not restricted to asking whether someone has committed some transgression. Their main job is to find out whether there are circumstances and competing allegiances that could tempt someone to take positions or actions that could harm the United States. That is why, for example, we have hearings before we confirm federal judges — we don’t just hand them a gavel and hope for the best.

In addition, as McCain knows, Ms. Abedin is an adviser, not a policymaker. She gives advice to the secretary of state. Unless you were in the room with the two of them, you’d never be able to demonstrate what “direct impact” the adviser was having. Again, that’s why people are supposed to be vetted before they get these sensitive positions and before they get access to the nation’s secrets.
Since Mrs. Clinton has been secretary of state, with Ms. Abedin as one of her top advisers, the State Department has strongly supported abandoning the federal government’s prior policy against dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood. State, furthermore, has embraced a number of Muslim Brotherhood positions that undermine both American constitutional rights and our alliance with Israel. To name just a few manifestations of this policy sea change:

The State Department has an emissary in Egypt who trains operatives of the Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations in democracy procedures.

The State Department announced that the Obama administration would be “satisfied” with the election of a Muslim Brotherhood–dominated government in Egypt.

Secretary Clinton personally intervened to reverse a Bush-administration ruling that barred Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the Brotherhood’s founder and son of one of its most influential early leaders, from entering the United States.

The State Department has collaborated with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of governments heavily influenced by the Brotherhood, in seeking to restrict American free-speech rights in deference to sharia proscriptions against negative criticism of Islam.

The State Department has excluded Israel, the world’s leading target of terrorism, from its “Global Counterterrorism Forum,” a group that brings the United States together with several Islamist governments, prominently including its co-chair, Turkey — which now finances Hamas and avidly supports the flotillas that seek to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas. At the forum’s kickoff, Secretary Clinton decried various terrorist attacks and groups; but she did not mention Hamas or attacks against Israel — in transparent deference to the Islamist governments, which echo the Brotherhood’s position that Hamas is not a terrorist organization and that attacks against Israel are not terrorism.

The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer $1.5 billion dollars in aid to Egypt after the Muslim Brotherhood’s victory in the parliamentary elections.

The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian territories notwithstanding that Gaza is ruled by the terrorist organization Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.

The State Department and the administration recently hosted a contingent from Egypt’s newly elected parliament that included not only Muslim Brotherhood members but a member of the Islamic Group (Gama’at al Islamia), which is formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization — so that providing it with material support is a serious federal crime. The State Department has refused to provide Americans with information about the process by which it issued a visa to a member of a designated terrorist organization, about how the members of the Egyptian delegation were selected, or about what security procedures were followed before the delegation was allowed to enter our country.

On a just-completed trip to Egypt, Secretary Clinton pressured General Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, head of the military junta currently governing the country, to surrender power to the newly elected parliament, which is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, who is a top Brotherhood official. She also visited with Morsi; immediately after his victory, Morsi proclaimed that his top priorities included pressuring the United States to release the Blind Sheikh. Quite apart from the Brotherhood’s self-proclaimed “grand jihad” to destroy the United States, which the Justice Department proved in federal court during the 2007–8 Holy Land Foundation prosecution, the Brotherhood’s supreme guide, Mohammed Badie, publicly called for jihad against the United States in an October 2010 speech. After it became clear the Brotherhood would win the parliamentary election, Badie said the victory was a stepping stone to “the establishment of a just Islamic caliphate.”

This is not an exhaustive account of Obama-administration coziness with the Muslim Brotherhood. It is just some of the lowlights.

Senator McCain is an incorrigible vacillator. It is to be expected that he has “evolved” from last year’s claimed opposition to the Brotherhood to a new position, more aligned with that of his friend Secretary Clinton and the Obama administration. Some of us, however, really are “unalterably opposed” to the Muslim Brotherhood. The five House conservatives are asking questions to which the State Department’s own guidelines, to say nothing of common sense, demand answers. Answers not just about Huma Abedin but, far more significantly, about the government’s policy toward virulently anti-American Islamists. Americans deserve nothing less — even if the usual GOP spaghetti spines would prefer to give them nothing, period.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

John McCain’s never-ending war

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
June 22, 2011

Elevating the fallacy of the false alternative to a foreign policy, John McCain and a few others believe Republicans who oppose U.S. intervention in Libya’s civil war — and who think a decade of warfare in Afghanistan is enough — are isolationists. This is less a thought than a flight from thinking, which involves making sensible distinctions.

Last Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” McCain warned that the GOP has always had “an isolation strain.” He calls it “the Pat Buchanan wing,” which he contrasts with “the Republican Party that has been willing to stand up for freedom for people all over the world.” Rather a lot turns on the meaning of “stand up for.”

Between wishing success to people fighting for freedom and sending in the Marines (or the drones), there is as much middle ground for temperate people as there is between Buchanan, a sort of come-home-America conservative, and McCain, a promiscuous interventionist. When asked his response to those, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who say there was no vital U.S. interest at stake when the Libya intervention began, McCain said: “Our interests are our values” and “our values are that we don’t want people needlessly slaughtered by the thousands,” as Moammar Gaddafi seemed to threaten to do, “if we can prevent such activity.” Under the McCain Doctrine, America’s military would have just begun to fight, and would never stop.

Americans are, however, war weary — which is a good thing: What kind of people would they be if they were not? U.S. involvement in the Second World War lasted 1,346 days. U.S. fighting in Afghanistan reached that milestone six years ago (June 14, 2005). America is fighting there, in Iraq, in western Pakistan, in Yemen and in Libya. Where next? Under the McCain Doctrine, wherever U.S. “values” are affronted — and those who demur from this global crusade are isolationists, akin to those who, 70 years ago, thought broad oceans and placid neighbors guaranteed America’s security from Hitler and Japan.

Is Jim Webb an isolationist? Virginia’s Democratic senator, who was Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the Navy, discusses Libya with a trenchancy that befits a decorated Marine combat veteran (Vietnam) and that should shame reticent Republicans:

“Was our country under attack, or under the threat of imminent attack? Was a clearly vital national interest at stake? Were we invoking the inherent right of self-defense as outlined in the United Nations charter? Were we called upon by treaty commitments to come to the aid of an ally? Were we responding in kind to an attack on our forces elsewhere, as we did in the 1986 raids in Libya after American soldiers had been killed in a disco in Berlin? Were we rescuing Americans in distress, as we did in Grenada in 1983? No, we were not.”

McCain, however, says we must achieve regime change in Libya because if Gaddafi survives, he will try to “harm” America. This is always the last argument for pressing on with imprudent interventions (see Vietnam, circa 1969): We must continue fighting because we started fighting.

Sen. Lindsey Graham — Sancho Panza to McCain’s Don Quixote — says “Congress should sort of shut up” about Libya. This ukase might make more sense if Congress had said anything institutionally about Libya.

Although Barack Obama’s shifting reasons for the Libyan war are as risible as his denial that it is a war, some conservatives seem to regard it as “a splendid little war.” That was Ambassador John Hay’s description (in a letter to Theodore Roosevelt) of the Spanish-American War. McCain has frequently expressed admiration for TR, the only president who was an unvarnished imperialist (see Evan Thomas’s book “The War Lovers”). McCain’s bellicosity is, however, at least less obnoxious than TR’s, which represented a toxic strain of early 20th-century progressivism — a cocktail of racialism and political Darwinism.

Regarding Libya, McCain on Sunday said, “I wonder what Ronald Reagan would be saying today.” Wondering is speculation; we know this:

When a terrorist attack that killed 241 Marines and other troops taught Reagan the folly of deploying them at Beirut airport with a vague mission and dangerous rules of engagement, he was strong enough to reverse this intervention in a civil war. Would that he had heeded a freshman congressman from Arizona who opposed the House resolution endorsing the intervention. But, then, the McCain of 1983 was, by the standards of the McCain of 2011, an isolationist.

georgewill@washpost.com

Maverick Malice

Senator McCain gives a dishonest account of interrogations.

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com
May 18, 2011

Shortly after Osama bin Laden met his demise at the hands of U.S. special forces, Michael Mukasey opined in the pages of the Wall Street Journal that harsh interrogation tactics had been key to identifying a courier, which, in turn, led to locating bin Laden’s compound. Such an assessment, from a highly respected former attorney general, was bound to be influential. Indeed, the CIA’s enhanced-interrogation program, used on a select few high-level al-Qaeda detainees following the 9/11 attacks, had figured prominently in Mukasey’s confirmation hearings. He had, at the behest of Congress, thoroughly reviewed the program upon taking the reins at DOJ. Americans would rightly assume that his opinion was not based on speculation; it was the informed judgment of a renowned former federal judge.

That made it too much for Sen. John McCain, a bitter opponent of the interrogation program. McCain has labeled the interrogation tactics “torture” and claims they do not work. At least, that’s what he often claims. Other times, he grudgingly concedes that they do work but says we shouldn’t use them, because they are unreliable and contrary to our values. Still other times, he says he’d expect officials to use them in a “ticking bomb” crisis even though they are unreliable and contrary to our values . . . and that therefore those officials shouldn’t be prosecuted for the “torture” — at least if the tactics worked — even though he wouldn’t want you to think non-prosecution means these tactics are permissible under any circumstances. Is that clear?

Safely returned to the Senate after the party establishment helped him turn back a conservative primary challenger, McCain is predictably back to his familiar role as the Obamedia’s favorite Republican — a distinction earned by ripping conservative Republicans. Thus did the senator take to the pages of the Washington Post to claim that Mukasey’s account was “false.”

Not “mistaken,” mind you, but “false.” It’s a stinging word, one that deprives Judge Mukasey of the assumption of good faith one might have expected an “exemplary statesman” to accord a jurist with a well-earned reputation for probity — though I confess that I am not surprised.

Nor, alas, is it surprising to find that it is McCain who is being disingenuous. As Marc Thiessen deduced in his own Washington Post column on Tuesday, McCain’s attacks are crafted to be technically correct (at least if we define “correct” with the same elasticity McCain uses to define “torture”), but they are “completely misleading.” Far from being false, Mukasey’s conclusion that the intelligence trail to bin Laden traced directly back to harsh interrogation, particularly (though by no means exclusively) the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is on the mark. McCain is the one twisting the facts — all the worse when one considers that the senator has been perfectly willing to rely on intelligence gleaned from “torture” when it suits his purposes.

Mukasey said that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in the “torrent of information” he’d surrendered after being broken by waterboarding, had given up the name of bin Laden’s courier. McCain countered (italics mine for reasons that will soon be apparent):

The first mention of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti — the nickname of the al-Qaeda courier who ultimately led us to bin Laden — as well as a description of him as an important member of al-Qaeda, came from a detainee held in another country, who we believe was not tortured. None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts, or an accurate description of his role in al-Qaeda.

The shameful fact is that McCain is well aware that the name of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti was known to the CIA long before the agency questioned this “detainee held in another country” — namely, Hassan Ghul, an al-Qaeda operative captured in Iraq in 2004. Yet McCain misleads readers into supposing that it was through Ghul that the CIA first learned of al-Kuwaiti’s existence. The senator does not make this claim outright, because he knows it would be false. Instead, he ambiguously conflates the first mention of the courier’s name with details like the description of the courier as “important,” as well as the courier’s whereabouts and his role in the terror network. By this sleight of hand, McCain gives himself deniability were anyone to call him on creating a misimpression (as Mukasey later did).
Thiessen, a former Bush adviser and author of Courting Disaster, the definitive account of Bush counterterrorism, is emphatic: He spoke with several former senior intelligence officials about McCain’s claims, and every one confirmed that the CIA learned about al-Kuwaiti and bin Laden’s courier system from the al-Qaeda detainees who were interrogated in the CIA program — not from Ghul or from an Iraqi government account of its own questioning of Ghul.

This should come as no surprise. Tom Joscelyn, the nonpareil terrorism researcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, notes (here and here) that al-Kuwaiti’s name was given to the CIA during the questioning of Mohammed al-Qhatani, who was captured during the Battle of Tora Bora in late 2001. Qhatani was the would-be 20th hijacker who was stopped from entering the United States during the latter stages of the 9/11 plot, and he became cooperative only after being subjected to harsh interrogation (though he was not waterboarded). Qhatani knew al-Kuwaiti because, at the direction of KSM, al-Kuwaiti had trained him in the use of e-mail and other communications aspects of the 9/11 plot. KSM, of course, was captured in 2003 largely because of information learned in the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, both of whom were waterboarded. As Mukasey correctly said, KSM himself broke after waterboarding and gave up, among many other things, al-Kuwaiti’s name.

So, putting Ghul to the side, the CIA independently knew al-Kuwaiti’s name and that he was an important member of al-Qaeda who had worked directly for KSM. This is not to say the information from Ghul was insignificant. We needn’t deprecate some sources in order to elevate others — that’s McCain’s game. Ghul’s interrogation was significant to the growing mosaic: revealing that the courier, al-Kuwaiti, was close to Faraj al-Libi, KSM’s successor as al-Qaeda’s operations chief.

Moreover, it is absurd for McCain to use Ghul as the linchpin of his morality tale, pitting the purportedly unreliable “tortured” sources versus Ghul, whom readers are led to believe was questioned using conventional procedures — as McCain puts it, referring to Ghul, “we believe he was not tortured.”

In point of fact, as Judge Mukasey reaffirmed in his rebuttal to McCain’s op-ed, no one was tortured under the CIA procedures — the most extreme agency tactic, waterboarding (as carefully designed and implemented), did not come close to the legal line of torture. McCain, however, has been demagoguing harsh tactics as “torture” for seven years, and he has not limited this libel to torture — he cited all of the harsh tactics as “cruel, inhuman, and degrading,” working feverishly in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 to have them banned. It is thus quite something for the demagogue to reverse course — because it happens to fit the narrative he’s trying to sell today: that Ghul wasn’t “tortured” just because he wasn’t waterboarded. U.S. officials acknowledge that he was subjected to several of the harsh tactics — stress positions, sleep deprivation, slamming into a (hollow) wall. If you’ve been following McCain’s histrionics on “torture” since 2004, you’d have to find Ghul every bit as tainted a source as KSM.

McCain curiously makes much of the fact that KSM and al-Libi sought to protect al-Kuwaiti — the former by minimizing his role, the latter by withholding his true name. But as any good interrogator will tell you (and as any layman who has ever sat on a jury can attest), what a witness lies about can be just as edifying as what he comes clean on. In this instance, given what the CIA knew about al-Kuwaiti from all sources, the lies and obfuscations of KSM and al-Libi served to underscore his importance — they were a boon, not a distraction.

What’s more, the misinformation did not come during the waterboarding. Thiessen points out that, if an interrogator asked questions at all while the abusive tactics were being employed, they were questions to which he knew the answers. The purpose of waterboarding (and some other harsh tactics) was not to get information while the tactic was being employed; the purpose was to break the source’s will. The misinformation from KSM and al-Libi, just like the accurate information they provided, came later. Once they became ostensibly cooperative, they then did what every ostensibly cooperative informant does: impart some true information and some untrue information. Determining which is which is the discipline of corroboration. Investigators and intelligence agents don’t stop when the source says something they want to hear — they compare it with other information they know, do follow-up investigation, and figure out whether the source is being straight.

Most disturbingly, though, McCain seems to have gone out of his way to minimize what the CIA learned when al-Libi was captured and turned over to the agency for questioning in 2005. There was a lot more to it than al-Kuwaiti. Al-Libi gave salient information that pointed to Abbottabad as bin Laden’s headquarters. It turns out that al-Libi was known as the “communications gateway” to bin Laden. As Thiessen relates, drawing on a recent WikiLeaks disclosure, once al-Libi began talking, he

“reported on al-Qaeda’s methods for choosing and employing couriers, as well as preferred communications means.” Based on intelligence obtained from [al-Libi] and other CIA detainees, [the WikiLeaks document] states that “in July 2003, [al-Libi] received a letter from UBL’s designated courier” (to whom he referred by a false name, Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan) in which “UBL stated [that al-Libi] would be the official messenger between UBL and others in Pakistan.” The file also notes a vital piece of intelligence: To better carry out his new duties “in mid-2003, [al-Libi] moved his family to Abbottabad . . . and worked between Abbottabad and Peshawar.”

Consequently, even without Ghul, the CIA would have known that bin Laden could be in the Abbottabad vicinity, because al-Libi had relocated there specifically to help him relay messages; that bin Laden communicated with his terror network through a group of trusted couriers; and that al-Kuwaiti was an important al-Qaeda member who had been a protégé in Pakistan of al-Libi’s predecessor, KSM. In considering the intelligence package that led to the bin Laden raid, the contribution of these details — the fruits of cooperation coerced through harsh interrogation — is obvious.

There has always been a good-faith argument against harsh interrogation tactics. One needn’t agree with it to grasp its force: The United States should never engage in abusive practices that suggest torture because it betrays core principles of decency and due process to which we are committed. But McCain and his adherents won’t make their principled stand there, because it would require them to say what they are unwilling to say: Put to the unsavory choice, they would prefer to see innocent people — perhaps thousands of Americans — die than tolerate the slightest physical abuse of any morally culpable terrorist who is withholding life-saving information. So instead they play the game of deny, deny, deny — no matter how clear it is that harsh interrogations were effective and led to concrete results: attacks thwarted and terrorists captured or killed. You are to take it as gospel that if a source was subjected to harsh tactics, you can’t believe a word he says.

Except, of course, when it suits other political objectives. Senator McCain very publicly championed the 9/11 Commission. As he contemplated another White House bid, he saw high-profile support of the commission’s investigation — no matter how much of a dog-and-pony show it became — as a way to showcase his leadership on the great national-security issue of our time. Being a creature of Washington, McCain was also drawn to the commission’s Washington approach: When our ungainly government fails to prevent a quite preventable atrocity because its endless layers of bureaucracy fail to communicate with each other, the answer is to add more layers, more bureaucracy, and, of course, more money.

In its final report, the commission sought an extensive overhaul of the intelligence community and of homeland security. In large part, the commission justified its proposals based on what its investigation had concluded about al-Qaeda: the terror network’s history, organization, goals, and practices. McCain was so impressed by the product that, in 2004, he proposed the 9/11 Commission Implementation Act, seeking adoption of the commission’s suggested framework.

Have you had a look at the commission’s 2004 final report lately? It’s worth a gander, particularly chapters five and seven, as well as the related footnotes. Virtually everything the commission reported about al-Qaeda comes from the interrogations of KSM, Zubaydah, and other high-ranking jihadists who were subjected to harsh tactics. The commissioners never got to examine the sources in person; they relied on the classified reports of the sources’ debriefings by interrogators. Yet the report recites its findings as conclusive fact, generally without qualification.

There were no cautions from Senator McCain about the folly of relying on “torture” evidence. He evidently thought the CIA interrogations laid a foundation plenty sturdy enough for reshaping the U.S. government, including its $40 billion–plus behemoth of an intelligence community. But now you’re to understand that the same interrogations had nothing to do with finding Osama bin Laden.

It takes a maverick.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: After the publication of this column, the author offered additional observations here.)

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.