RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/174-house-dems-convicted-terrorists-must-not-be-robert-spencer/

As old Joe Biden would say, Look, Fat, look, here’s the deal: I’ve been warning for years that it would sooner or later become “Islamophobic” to offer even the mildest opposition to jihad violence, and that the “Islamophobia” mongers would become increasingly open about their support for jihad terrorists, and here we are. On Thursday, 174 Democrats in the House of Representatives voted against an amendment to the Rights for Transportation Security Officers Act that would prevent the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) from hiring convicted terrorists.

Yes, you read that right: if these House Democrats had gotten their way, on your next flight, you could have gotten a pat-down from a TSA agent who previously conspired to down the airplane you were planning to fly on. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) explained that the amendment “was pulled back by leadership because the socialist wing of the party did not want to have that amendment go forward on this bill. When it was offered, overwhelmingly the majority of the House would like to see the TSA not hire terrorists or those who have been convicted of sexual misconduct with minors and others. But the socialist wing of the party, that controls now the Democratic Party, said that that could not be offered.”

Allahu akbar, as these prospective TSA employees might have said, the whole thing exploded in their faces: enough Republicans and renegade Democrats votes for the amendment to pass it. But among the luminaries who thought it so important to avoid even the appearance of “Islamophobia” that they opposed an amendment barring terrorists from pawing through your belongings as you made your way through security were the infamous “Squad,” Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D, Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), and Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.), along with the supposedly sane and responsible House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D., Md.).

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/renew_the_patriot_act_or_risk_another_911.html

Before the Patriot Act, the FBI would have been stymied in conducting a counterterrorism investigation involving a now infamous American agent of a foreign power.

Anwar al-Awlaki was born in the United States. Yet, apparently, Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee believe the only thing worth remembering about him is that President Obama “illegally” had him killed in Yemen using a Hellfire missile. (No matter that al-Awlaki: had sent “panty bomber” Abdulmuttalab to blow up a passenger plane over Detroit; attempted to blow up a DHL cargo airplane in flight; had become the well-publicized spiritual leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula [AQAP]; and was heavily guarded in Yemen’s remote tribal areas — sending Americans into those wilds to arrest him would have been difficult and dangerous.)

Most of us vividly recall that twice before 9/11 al-Awlaki met with future hijackers.

I agree with former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy that the collection of metadata should be abolished. Further, I agree that judges are unqualified to conduct national security. Republicans and Democrats in Congress have repeatedly abdicated their oversight responsibilities of our intelligence community. Now, some Republicans are seeking to give the FISA court even more authority. Far too many Democrats — who seek to vest America’s foreign enemies with our constitutional rights — are cheering them on.

Yet Senators Paul and Lee seem to assume America could also safely let the business records and roving wiretap provisions of the Patriot Act expire after March 15, 2020.

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2020/03/asma-uddin-abets-hateful-sharia-supremacism-in-america/

Granting her contention she is “not affiliated (directly) with CAIR or the Muslim Brotherhood”—CAIR having been founded as the political wing of Hamas, which, per the Hamas Covenant is a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot—Uddin nonetheless just accepted CAIR’s sponsorship of her speaking event Tuesday, January 28, 2020, in Maryland. Moreover, Uddin’s calumny about “Gaffneyism” fuses so-called paranoid ideations regarding an “Islamic coup,” with bowdlerization of the Sharia’s living doctrinal and historical reality, past as prologue. For example, here is Uddin’s 2012 apologetic summary negation of theSharia (curiously relegated to a footnote) that completely ignores its doubly totalitarian essence—promulgation of jihad war to submit mankind to its jurisdiction, with the resultant crushing of all basic liberties, including freedom of conscience, and speech, sanctioned discrimination against all non-Muslims, and Muslim women, and barbaric, dehumanizing punishments such as stoning for adultery, and mutilation for theft:  

Sharia is the ideal law of God according to Islam. Muslims believe that the Islamic legal system is one that aims toward ideals of justice, fairness, and the good life. Sharia has tremendous diversity, as jurists and learned scholars figure out and articulate what that law is. Historically, Sharia served as a means for political dissent against arbitrary rule. It is not a monolithic doctrine of violence, as has been characterized in the recently introduced Tennessee bill that would criminalize practices of Sharia.

Uddin’s updated commentary on the Sharia from her 2019 book is equally disingenuous in its omissions, merely reiterating such bowdlerized apologetics: Sharia’s “divine message” blandly analogized to the miracle of rain water in the desert; “my (her) experience does not square with your (the non-Muslim reader’s?) idea of sharia”; “even in states where Muslims want a sharia-based legal code,…what they are asking for is justice and fairness.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/fisa-reform-and-national-security/Repealing vital national-security powers is not the right way to hold government officials responsible for abuse of power.

National security has become an afterthought in the latest national-security debate. The debate centers, instead, on what is called “FISA reform,” the imperative of which appears to be making foreign intelligence surveillance powers harder to use.

I’ve long been worried that this was the way the wind was blowing. That would be apparent to anyone who read Ball of Collusion, my book about the absurd political narrative that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to steal the 2016 election from Democrats through cyber-espionage operations (mainly hacking), after which the new president was to become the Kremlin’s agent in the White House.

This narrative fueled a wide-ranging government investigation, launched by the Obama administration. Under the rubric of highly classified foreign counterintelligence operations, the investigation prominently featured FBI spying on the Trump campaign. (As I noted yesterday, the New York Times is back to describing the FBI’s covert monitoring as “spying,” so I’m assuming the era of garment rending at utterance of the dread s-word is over.)

In the course of that investigation, as catalogued by the Justice Department’s inspector general and highlighted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the FBI serially abused its authority: providing misleading information to the FISC, falsifying a key document, running confidential informants at Trump campaign surrogates in the absence of a sound investigative predicate, making public statements that suggested the president was a criminal suspect (while privately telling him he was not), making private statements (dozens of them) that have convinced reasonable people that bureau decisions were influenced by political bias, and so on.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/republicans-blocking-renewal-commonsense-anti-terrorism-tools/

Our surveillance laws need revision, but this is not the way to do it.

I  wonder if Congressman Andy Biggs (R., Ariz.) has ever heard of Sayyid Nosair. There was a time not that long ago when Nosair was something of a household name, the kind that the Arizona Republican, a strong conservative who cares a great deal about our national security, would know.

Time flies, though, and memories fade. It’s been 30 years since Nosair, a naturalized American citizen and a hardened jihadist, murdered Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane in one of New York City’s most notorious late-20th-century homicides. It has been 25 years since I led a team of prosecutors who convicted Nosair of conducting a terrorist war against the United States — a war waged by a foreign terrorist organization that included the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which was plotted in his upstate New York prison cell.

The question of Representative Biggs’s familiarity with Nosair — to say nothing of many other historical instances of Americans collaborating with foreign powers against American interests — suggested itself when I watched him get interviewed on Fox News Thursday morning (see here, about three minutes in). Biggs was asked to weigh in on the GOP’s ongoing intramural skirmish over what is being called “FISA reform,” but, in actuality, has very little to do with that important subject — at least, not directly.

Biggs reminded Fox’s Ed Henry that “the F in FISA stands for ‘foreign,’” his ill-informed point being that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is supposed to be about the surveillance of foreigners, not Americans. Therefore, the argument continued, we need to reform FISA so it is limited to non-Americans; otherwise, the FBI could once again pretextually use it to spy on President Trump, or on another American political campaign, or on the rest of us.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/terrorist-collaborat

“The mother of Syed Rizwan Farook, the male shooter in the 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack,” the U.S. Attorney for California’s central district reports, “has agreed to plead guilty to a federal criminal charge of intending to impede a federal criminal investigation by shredding a map her son generated in connection with the attack.”

Rafia Sultana Shareef, 66 also known as Rafia Farook, “has agreed to plead guilty to a one-count information charging her with alteration, destruction, and mutilation of records,” according to the March 3 statement.

After the attack, Shareef learned her son Syed had been identified as a suspect, and told family members that Syed and his wife Tashfeen Malik had perpetrated the attack at the Inland Regional Center. Shareef “fed into a shredder” Syed’s map, directly related to the planning of the attack that took place on December 2, 2015. For those who may have forgotten, Bringing Calm to Chaos: A Police Foundation Review of the San Bernardino Terrorist Attacks provides a chilling description by those on the scene.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pentagon-linguist-charged-with-exposing-us-spies-to-hezbollah/

A contractor for the Pentagon has been charged with providing classified U.S. intelligence to a Lebanese national connected with terrorist group Hezbollah, the Justice Department announced on Wednesday.

The department alleges Mariam Taha Thompson, 61, began transmitting the classified intelligence around December 30, when Iraqi militiamen stormed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Thompson is a linguist who at the time was working at a U.S. special forces base in Erbil in northern Iraq.

The classified “files contained classified national defense information including true names, personal identification data, background information, and photographs of the human sources, as well as operations cables detailing information the human sources provided to the United States government,” read an FBI affidavit filed in the case.