RUTHFULLY YOURS

While meeting with the New York Times last month, President-elect Donald Trump was asked about waterboarding. He explained that Gen. James Mattis, his choice for Defense secretary, said he “never found it to be useful.” The general reportedly advised, “Give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I do better with that.” At the risk of making a man nicknamed Mad Dog mad, I have to respectfully disagree.

Gen. Mattis, a retired Marine four-star, is by all accounts a gentleman, a scholar, and a hell of a warfighter. I have the greatest respect for him, and the full nuance of his views might have been lost in the retelling. But on the subject of questioning terrorists, I have some practical experience. In 2002 I was contracted by the Central Intelligence Agency to help put together what became its enhanced-interrogation program. I spent much of the following six years at “black sites” around the world, trying to extract lifesaving information from some of the worst people on the planet.

It is understandable that Gen. Mattis would say he never found waterboarding useful, because no one in the military has been authorized to waterboard a detainee. Thousands of U.S. military personnel have been waterboarded as part of their training, though the services eventually abandoned the practice after finding it too effective in getting even the most hardened warrior to reveal critical information.

During the war on terror, the CIA alone had been authorized to use the technique. I personally waterboarded the only three terrorists subjected to the tactic by the CIA. I also waterboarded two U.S. government lawyers, at their request, when they were trying to decide for themselves whether the practice was “torture.” They determined it was not.

I volunteered to be waterboarded myself and can assure you that it is not a pleasant experience. But no one volunteers to be tortured.

Waterboarding was never the first, nor the best, choice for most detainees. We started out with the “tea and sympathy” approach and only escalated to harsher methods when it became clear that the detainee held vital information that might save innocent lives and was determined not to provide it. We quickly moved away from enhanced interrogations as soon as the detainee showed even a little cooperation.

The people I dealt with were not run-of-the-mill battlefield detainees, but hardened terrorists. Men like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. These people were hellbent on bringing about further devastation.

I would ask Gen. Mattis this: Imagine being captured by America’s enemies. Would you give up important secrets that could get fellow Americans captured or killed in exchange for a Michelob and a pack of Marlboros?

A new study out of George Washington University underscores that nearly half of all terrorism charges brought since March 2011 are connected to terrorist groups other than the Islamic State.

“The jihadist threat to America goes far beyond the Islamic State (IS),” writes Sarah Gilkes from GWU’s Project on Extremism. “While there has been a relative surge in the number of U.S. persons radicalized and recruited by the group in the last five years, other jihadist organizations, primarily al-Qaeda, remain popular and active.”

She noted that “many American recruits are driven by a broad counter-cultural idealism, and are less tangled up in the minutiae of the power plays that divide such groups abroad.”

From March 2011 to July 31, 2016, 178 people were charged with terrorism-related offenses in this country; 79 of those had no relation to ISIS.

Thirty-eight percent of those accused of working on behalf of a terrorist group other than ISIS attempted or successfully traveled abroad to locations such as Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Forty-six percent of ISIS recruits attempted or completed travel during the same period.

Only four of the people accused of working for terror groups other than ISIS were refugees. Fifty-two of the 79 were U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents, reflecting a trend of truly homegrown jihad. Two were in the country illegally at the time of their arrest, and one was here on a student visa, states the report.

The non-ISIS jihadists were charged in 22 states, with New York having the largest share of cases at 11. Twenty-eight percent of those charged were converts to Islam.

The terror-related arrests involved not just those planning or conducting attacks but fundraisers and recruiters. The tally includes only Salafi jihadist groups and does not include arrests linked to groups like Hezbollah or Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Ohio State University student Abdul Razak Ali Artan on Monday morning set off a fire alarm on campus, the drove his car into the crowd of students evacuating the building. Then he jumped out of his car and began stabbing people with a butcher knife. In a departure from the usual denial and obfuscation, Columbus Police Chief Kim Jacobs was refreshingly honest, saying: “I think we have to consider that it is” a terror attack. Leftists took advantage of the occasion to call for gun control, which might have been a cogent argument were it not for one inconvenient detail: Artan didn’t have a gun. But above all, Artan was a “refugee”: the attack vindicates President-elect Trump on Muslim immigration.

Artan was no poster boy for gun control, but he may have been one for the Islamic State, which issued this call in September 2014:

So O muwahhid, do not let this battle pass you by wherever you may be. You must strike the soldiers, patrons, and troops of the tawaghit. Strike their police, security, and intelligence members, as well as their treacherous agents. Destroy their beds. Embitter their lives for them and busy them with themselves. If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be….If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him….

Intriguingly, before his jihad attack, Artan demonstrated that he knew well how to play the victim card. He appeared in Ohio State University’s The Lantern, in a feature entitled “Humans of Ohio State.” In it, he spoke about being “scared” about performing his Islamic prayers in public:

I just transferred from Columbus State. We had prayer rooms, like actual rooms where we could go to pray because we Muslims have to pray five times a day. There’s Fajr, which is early in the morning, at dawn. Then Zuhr during the daytime, then Asr in the evening, like right about now. And then Maghrib, which is like right at sunset and then Isha at night. I wanted to pray Asr. I mean, I’m new here. This is my first day. This place is huge, and I don’t even know where to pray. I wanted to pray in the open, but I was kind of scared with everything going on in the media. I’m a Muslim, it’s not what the media portrays me to be. If people look at me, a Muslim praying, I don’t know what they’re going to think, what’s going to happen. But, I don’t blame them, it’s the media that put that picture in their heads so they’re just going to have it and it, it’s going to make them feel uncomfortable. I was kind of scared right now. But I just did it. I relied on God. I went over to the corner and just prayed.

Abdul Razak Artan, “third-year in logistic management,” is dead now, so The Lantern can’t go back to him and ask him if he understands better now why people might be nervous about Muslims praying, and why it isn’t just the fault of “the media.”

Federal authorities arrested a Brooklyn driver early Monday on charges of attempting to support ISIS just days before the annual Thanksgiving parade in New York that was the subject of a recent threat in an Islamic State magazine.

A criminal complaint alleges that Mohamed Rafik Naji, 37, a legal permanent U.S. resident and citizen of Yemen, discussed a plot to try to conduct a Nice-style attack using a garbage truck to mow down people in Times Square.

Naji was seized at his apartment on Clarendon Road in Flatbush in a multi-agency arrest. Authorities said he worked as a driver for Uber, though the company told NBC4 that he didn’t work for them.

According to the unsealed complaint, Naji began sounding off on Facebook about his support for ISIS beginning in 2014 soon after the group’s declaration of their caliphate. He even made an ISIS image the cover photo on his Facebook page.

From March to September 2015, Naji traveled to Turkey and Yemen “in an effort to join ISIL.” After flying from JFK airport to Istanbul, Naji emailed his girlfriend back in the United States, telling her, “Everything ok so far I met this taxi guy look like a good guy he said he’s gonna take me short cut almost there inshallah I love u hunny so much.”

Naji allegedly followed up in another email to his girlfriend six days later after trying to access ISIS-controlled parts of Yemen, complaining “it’s very hard to get in I’m on my 5 try.” Two days after that, the complaint states, he told his girlfriend that he and his party “almost got killed today by army” and were hiding in the mountains without food or water — “glad u didn’t come.” He emailed his girlfriend a photo of jihadists on their trek, followed by an admission that he was “thinking of coming back m really really tired.”