Tim Sumner

9/11, al Qaeda, Guantanamo, New York Times, Osama bin Laden, September 11, WMD, World Trade Center

New York Times’ poster boy for ‘torture’ and rendition sues U.S.

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How quickly the New York Times forgets. On September 12, 2001, Times’ Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote:

Regardless of whether the carnage is reliably traced to one of the jihad sects, it is true that the magnitude of the pain inflicted on America yesterday moves us into the very exclusive club of democracies for which terrorism is not peripheral, remote or episodic, but a horrible routine.

Mr. Keller was wrong; thanks to President George W. Bush, his administration, the FBI, our intelligence agencies, and the United States military, terrorists attacks on our soil did not become our horrible routine since September 11, 2001.

While the Pile still smoldered at the World Trade Center and anthrax began arriving in peoples’ mailboxes, U.S. officials fanned out across the globe and worked with foreign nations to track down Islamic terrorists. In early October, senior U.S. officials demanded that Pakistan President Pervez Mursharraf fire then Director General of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Mahmud Ahmad. It seems that Lt. Gen. Ahmad was real chummy with senior al Qaeda moneyman Ahmed Omar Sayeed Sheikh. Reliable sources (then and now) say Omar, using the alias Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad, had funded 9/11 lead hijacker Mohamed Atta with $100,000. At the time, the U.S. also presented to President Mursharraf evidence that top ISI officials had previously facilitated meetings between WMD experts and al Qaeda.

With that in mind, look at what the New York Times has never reported about both former Guantanamo detainee Muhammad Saad Iqbal and the radical Islamic Defenders Front.

al Qaeda, Barack Obama, unlawful combatants, War on Terror

Where we fight … we must take the war to the enemy

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Barack Obama intends to afford the “rule of law” to Islamic terrorists as part of his plan to improve the world’s opinion of America. Yet granting to them protections defeats the very reasons the signators to the Geneva Conventions left unlawful combatants unprotected. It would reward those who endanger noncombatants by conducting terrorism from within and visibly indistinguishable from civilian populaces. Leaving terrorists outside the rule of law ensures that individuals who wage war with no regard to humanity find no legal quarter and it dissuades nations from conducting wars by proxy.

Clifford May, writing today in the National Review Online:

[Andrew McCarthy] notes that what we short-handedly call the war on terrorism is complicated by the fact that the existing system of laws and treaties were designed with conventional conflicts in mind. “The animating idea of the Geneva Conventions, adopted in 1949 after the carnage of two world wars, was to civilize warfare,” he writes. “Belligerents opted into the system by conduct” — that is, by obeying the laws of armed conflict.

But members of such groups as al-Qaeda (including al-Qaeda in Iraq), Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Taliban, Hezbollah, and Hamas routinely and egregiously violate the laws of war — for example, by targeting civilians, hiding among civilians, not wearing uniforms, and not carrying their weapons openly.
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It is absurd to suggest that America can prevail in a war against terrorists by prosecuting them after they carry out attacks in which they intend to die. A rational government, conscious of its duty to protect the population, must attempt to prevent and pre-empt terrorists from completing their missions. That requires gathering solid, actionable intelligence. … READ THE REST

Once sworn in, President Obama should retreat from his campaign rhetoric. We should not provide unlawful warriors with legal advantages in furtherance of America’s defeat, the world’s opinion notwithstanding.