US Citizenship and Homegrown Terrorism

Dear readers, today let's consider what former US Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who served under President Bush and understands the problems and practices asociated with terrorists in America, has to say about the Boston Marathon bombings. Mukasey wrote an op-ed piece published in The Wall Street Journal Sunday. In it, he said that the Boston Marathon bombings were unmistakably a jihadist act, but that the Obama administration has disbanded the CIA interrogation group charged with investigating such plots, leaving America more vulnerable to future threats. Mukasey looks beyond the threat posed by the brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, “...if your concern is over the larger threat...then worry - a lot.” ~~~~~ WORRY #1. Mukasey wonders how the High-Value Interrogation Group (HIG) will even be able to do its job. HIG was formed by the FBI after the “underwear bomber” was read his Miranda rights in 2009 because President Barack Obama had disbanded the CIA interrogation program that might have run the interrogation of the bomber without Miranda rights. The two prigrams are very different in their tactics and goals, according to Mukasey. He criticizes the FBI for watering down its training materials at the request of controversial Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups such as the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America, noting that they no longer even mention references to militant Islamism. “Does this delicacy infect the FBI's interrogation group as well?” he asks. "Will we see another performance like the Army's after-action report following Major Nidal Hasan's rampage at Fort Hood in November 2009, preceded by his shout 'allahu akhbar' - a report that spoke nothing of militant Islam but referred to the incident as 'workplace violence'?...If tone is set at the top, recall that the Army chief of staff at the time said the most tragic result of Fort Hood would be if it interfered with the Army's diversity program," Mukasey writes. ~~~~~ WORRY #2. Mukasey also wonders whether the probe will look into the FBI’s previous questioning of Tamerlan, after questions were raised by a foreign government, presumably Russia, about radical leanings.“ Tamerlan Tsarnaev is the fifth person since 9/11 who has participated in terror attacks after questioning by the FBI,” Mukasey writes. ~~~~~ WORRY #3. The Tsarnaevs obviously were conducting a suicide operation, Mukasey says, though not the type in which one blows himself up along with his intended victims. Rather, the brothers went about it “in the way of someone who conducts a spree, holding the stage for as long as possible, before he is cut down in a blaze of what he believes is glory." It had been believed such attacks were unlikely on American soil since organizers would find it hard to find enough spiritual support to keep would-be suicide attackers focused. “That analysis went out the window when the Tsarnaevs followed up the bombing of the marathon by murdering a police officer in his car - an act certain to precipitate the violent confrontation that followed,” Mukasey writes. US defenses put in place since 9/11 have led to smaller, less complicated crimes, according to Mukasey, pointing to the Times Square attempted bomber. These smaller events are still intended to send a message of terror But Mukasey suggests that message may be lost on a President who seems preoccupied with Islamic sensibilities, and not American security. "There is also cause for concern in the President's reluctance, soon after the Boston bombing, even to use the 't' word - terrorism - and in his vague musing on Friday about some unspecified agenda of the perpetrators, when by then there was no mystery: the agenda was jihad." ~~~~~ WORRY #4. For five years there have been claims that Americans need to learn how to change the Muslim world’s perception of the United States. Mukasey notes that few have focused on a more important question: why we are hated. He says that the ideology of hatred began with the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in the early part of the 20th century. The ideology has regarded the United States as its principal adversary since the late 1940s, when a Brotherhood principal, Sayid Qutb, visited this country and was aghast at what he saw as its decadence.” One of the most influential Muslim thinkers of the last 100 years, Qutb is required in the curricula of the Arab world's finest universities. The first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, US embassy attacks in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, and the 9/11 attacks were all fueled by hatred of American values that has its roots in Qutb's writings, according to Mukasey, yet despite this, no outreach is extended to critical Muslim organizations in the United States, such as the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, that speak out against the totalitarian Islamic ideology, Mukasey points out. "There are Muslim organizations in this country, such as the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, headed by Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, that speak out bravely against that totalitarian ideology. They receive no shout-out at presidential speeches; no outreach is extended to them," he added. At least one person seems to agree with Mukasey about the FBI. South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsay Graham says the FBI is going to need more legal clout in order to effectively track Muslim extremist activity in the United States. On Monday, Graham called on Congress to “revisit’’ the laws controlling the FBI’s ability to track Islamic radicals. He noted the agency interviewed Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011 at the request of the Russian government, which wanted to access his ties to Chechen terrorists, but Tsarnaev didn’t become a radical islamist until later. "In 2012 and 2013, when he became more radical, when he went on the Internet, when he interacted with this imam in Boston, the FBI tells me there are limitations on what they can do in situations like that,” Graham said in an interview with Fox News. “What the FBI told me sounded very reasonable. But the FBI's hands are tied here when it comes to following radical Islamist websites, and we're at war, folks. And if we don't realize it, there's gonna be more of this....I don't want a police state,” Graham added. “But I want a nation where the police can protect us.” ~~~~~ Dear readers, the elephant in the American legal room, the unspoken fact here is that tge older brother was a legal US resident and the younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who survived, is a naturalized US citizen. If Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had bombed and killed people in Boston as a "non-terrorist," he would have received his Miranda rghts and the federal case would go forward according to normal procedural rules. But Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is not the Aurora cinema killer. He is a radical islamist aligned with foreign groups and organizations whose goal is the destruction of the United States. The US is a country of laws...and it makes huge efforts to see that its laws are applied evenly so that even the most despicable of criminals gets a fair trial. Criminal. Is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev a criminal or is he something else that makes his rights something else, too, something lesser? Think about this question. It is not easy to answer despite those who would instantly say that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a lesser being under US law. We'll consider this question tomorrow.