The Republican Establishment's 'Mike McQueary' Moments

When Penn State assistant coach Mike McQueary saw what appeared to be the penetration of a young boy by Jerry Sandusky in a shower in 2001, he saw evil. He punted when he told head coach Joe Paterno instead of going to police; Paterno knew evil had penetrated his program. He punted too, when he went to Athletic Director Tim Curley and senior vice president Gary Schultz instead of to police. Curley and Schultz punted when Sandusky was let off the hook, a decision endorsed by president Graham Spanier, who essentially sealed the deal.

Each man had his own 'Mike McQueary' moment (MMM).

It was a moment of truth during which, individuals came face to face with evil and after which, they chose complicity with that evil over defeating it. With each passing day, those individuals implicated themselves further with their silence. They had chosen Sandusky's side in one respect; they all had a vested interest in preventing the evil truth from coming out because they were all implicated in suppressing it.

The jig was up in 2011 and Sandusky's defenders paid a price for not coming clean. It was made steeper by how much time had passed without them doing so. It was made much worse by them being found out instead of coming forward.

The heart of the U.S. Government was penetrated by evil too, beginning in at least 1992, when Abdurahman Alamoudi – a Muslim – began buying influence with both political parties. After Clinton was elected, Alamoudi landed a job with the State Department in 1997 as an Islamic affairs advisor. Based on his professed support for Hamas just a few years earlier, it was a 'Mike McQueary' moment for the political establishment.

Another MMM came in October of 2000, when Alamoudi stood on a stage outside the White House and referred to Bill Clinton by name while espousing – through a P.A. system – his support for both Hamas and Hezbollah:



It was as if the Clinton administration's inaction was a foreshadowing of McQueary's behavior. Right outside its window, the occupiers of the White House could see a man who had penetrated America's power centers via the State Department. It's important to keep in mind that establishment Republicans like Senator John McCain and Speaker John Boehner held seats in the Senate and the House, respectively at the time. Was it an MMM for them too?

In what is believed to be the same year that Alamoudi was cheering Hamas and Hezbollah outside the White House, he was also meeting with George W. Bush and Karl Rove, despite the concerns of intelligence officials, that Alamoudi had ties to Osama bin Laden and the “blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdul-Rahman. This would mean that Bush agreed to meet with a man connected to individuals found to be responsible for both World Trade Center attacks, one of which had already taken place.

At that meeting, Karl Rove was handed a book entitled, The Cultural Atlas of Islam. It was authored by a man identified as a co-founder of two Muslim Brotherhood groups – The International Institute of Islamic Thought and the Association of Muslim Social Scientists of North America (AMSS). Was the book vetted? If so, it didn't stop meetings between Bush, Rove, and individuals tied to the Brotherhood, from taking place. 'Mike McQueary' moment?

In June of 2001, another individual who would eventually be convicted of charges related to funding terrorism – Sami al-Arian – met with Karl Rove at the White House as part of a 160-member delegation from the American Muslim Council, a group founded by... you guessed it, Abdurahman Alamoudi, who was also present. This was after Alamoudi pledged support for Hamas and Hezbollah outside the White House one year earlier. 'Mike McQueary' moment?

The Washington Post reported about the multiple warning signs available to the Bush administration prior to AMC's visit. Vice President Dick Cheney was scheduled to speak to the AMC but backed out after a Jerusalem Post article identified AMC as a supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah; this demonstrates that the administration was not nearly as ignorant about who it had chosen to associate with. 'Mike McQueary' moment?

If none of those things served as 'Mike McQueary' moments, the violent penetration of America on September 11, 2001 did. One can imagine that the look on McQueary's face when he saw Sandusky with a young boy in that locker room shower wasn't much different than this:



Had the proper course been taken at Penn State, McQueary would have gone straight to police and Sandusky would have been summarily jettisoned from the University in handcuffs in 2001. There was a problem, however. An investigation conducted by Former FBI Director, Louis Freeh determined that Curley and Schultz became aware of Sandusky's penchant for young boys as early as 1998, when the mother of an 11-year old boy reported that an assault on her son had taken place in the shower. No charges were filed. In 2011, as the scandal was reaching critical mass, Schultz denied knowledge of the 1998 incident in an email he wrote in 2011.

Did knowledge of the 1998 incident contribute to the covering up of the 2001 incident? Dealing with Sandusky properly in 2001 would have involved very uncomfortable questions about the 1998 incident. As we now know, failure to deal with the 2001 incident properly involved a great deal more than uncomortable questions; Schultz lied about his knowledge of the 1998 incident. Does he wish he would have done in 1998 what he was unable to do in 2011, when such a decision was whisked from his control?

Six days after 9/11, George W. Bush stood with CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad inside a mosque and spoke of Islam in very peaceful terms. On September 26, 2001 Bush welcomed individuals with distinct Muslim Brotherhood ties into the White House. Among them was AMC president Yahya Basha, Salam Al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), and Muzammil Siddiqi, then president of the Brotherhood's Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).

When Rove was confronted after the meeting about the decision to welcome such individuals into the White House, he allegedly said, “I wish I had known before the event took place.”

That statement is as believable as Schultz's contention that he didn't know about the 1998 incident when he denied knowledge of it in 2011.

On October 12, 2001 George W. Bush did something Paterno, Schultz, Curley, and Penn State president Graham Spanier did a few months earlier; he identified a responsible party. One such party was the Rabita Trust, an entity that, even according to the United Nations, was involved in the “financing, planning, facilitating” activities of “Al-Qaida”. Like Sandusky, the man who founded Rabita – Abdullah Omar Nasseef – has essentially escaped accountability. As the one time Secretary General for the Muslim World League, Nasseef led a group that is heavily financed by the Saudi government.

In February of 2002, Anwar al-Awlaki was allowed to penetrate the Department of Defense as an honored guest at a plush luncheon. CAIR Executive Director was one of the invitees. Later that year, al-Awlaki was detained at JFK airport after landing. Despite there being a warrant for his arrest, al-Awlaki was released. He eventually traveled to Yemen, where he inspired Fort Hood Jihadist, Nidal Malik Hassan, who would go on to murder 14 at the Texas Army post.

Interestingly, none other than Abdurahman Alamoudi helped to lay the groundwork for the increased presence of Muslim chaplains in the U.S. Military when he founded the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council (AMAFVAC) in 1991.

Jerry Sandusky founded The Second Mile and was able to penetrate young boys for years. One of the reasons he was able to do so was because those charged with stopping him chose instead, to implicate themselves by covering up his crimes. The Muslim Brotherhood continues to penetrate the U.S. Government for similar reasons.

The consequences for those who chose to cover up for Sandusky will be far less than those who have chosen to cover up the truth about the penetration of America by her enemies. The bad news is that there will be far more victims.

In any case, those in the Republican establishment who choose to close their eyes, ears, and mouths can be expected to utter words similar to those uttered by Joe Paterno when he finally realized it would have been much better had he come clean in 2001 than face a day of reckoning years later:

“It is one of the great sorrows of my life. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more.”

It would seem, however, that the Republican Party establishment has had quite a few more 'Mike McQueary' moments than Penn State did.

Video: Sarah Palin hits back at Dick Cheney

Why is Sarah Palin still scaring the Republican establishment? She's not running for anything. Why do members of that establishment feel the need to continue to go after her? The answers to those questions are that she still wields power (see Ted Cruz vs. David Dewhurst). It smacks of a case of 'thou doth protest too much.' Dick Cheney was the latest to do so, this Sunday, calling McCain's decision to select her as his running mate in 2008 a 'mistake.'

In reality, if 2008 taught us anything, it was that McCain was the mistake and the best thing he did was select Palin.

While appearing on Greta, Sarah Palin hit back at Cheney.

Via Daily Caller:

“Well, seeing as how Dick — excuse me, Vice President Cheney never misfires, then evidently, he’s quite convinced that what he had evidently read about me by the lamestream media having been written what I believe is a false narrative over the last four years, evidently, Dick Cheney believed that stuff, and that’s a shame,” Palin said. “So he characterized me as being a mistake.”

But Palin argued that the mistake wasn’t her selection. It would have been if she declined the nomination and pointed to her high numbers at the time of the 2008 presidential race that made her an attractive candidate.

“Here’s where the mistake would have been, Greta, I believe. It’s had I not answered the call — I was honored to get to run for vice president of the United States alongside Senator John McCain. I was honored to accept the nomination from the GOP. And I think that the mistake would have been me just deciding that, ‘Hey, I love my 86-87 percent approval rating up there in Alaska as the governor, moving and shaking and watching corrupt politicians and businessmen go to prison for crony capitalism, working on 16 to 20 percent of domestic energy supplies being able to be increased via Alaska’s resource development, ethics reform legislation that I was working on — that led to that 86 percent approval rating.”

People often forget that Palin did what the Republican establishment, which refers to her as things like a 'mistake' or unqualified, consistently prove incapable of doing - holding themselves and others accountable. In that regard, Palin was more qualified than McCain - in 2008. At minimum, she almost dragged McCain across the finish line despite his apparent unwillingness to cross it.


There are several reasons why the establishment resents the Tea Party. The former has a few secrets it doesn't want the latter to have access to. Sarah Palin - along with the candidates she continues to endorse and help win - represents forces that are demanding accountability from an establishment that doesn't like those forces and individuals on its heels.

Cheney says it was a 'mistake' for McCain to pick Palin in 2008

Just some comments before I get to the video of Dick Cheney telling Americans that McCain's decision to name Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008 was a 'mistake.'

On today's program, I looked at the string of head-scratching incidents relative to the Bush administration's refusal to deal with the Islamic threat to the United States by the likes of Al-Qaeda Godfather Abdullah Omar Naseef. If you've ever wondered about the root causes of the animosity for the Tea Party that exists within the Republican establishment, the intelligence available to the Bush administration both before and after 9/11 about the perpetrators of 9/11 is something the establishment doesn't want Tea Partiers like Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann getting too close to.

Naseef had distinct ties to the Saudi Arabian government; he was named in a civil lawsuit in 2004 by the families of 9/11's victims. However, he wasn't identified by the Bush administration as a target of American ire after 9/11, which he definitely should have been. Here is what Andrew McCarthy had to say about Naseef's history of escaping U.S. accountability relative to his ties to al-Qaeda:

…in 2004, he was named as a defendant in the civil case brought by victims of the 9/11 atrocities. (In 2010, a federal court dropped him from the suit — not because he was found uninvolved, but because a judge reasoned the American court lacked personal jurisdiction over him.)

The questions I posed were simple: Why was Naseef merely relegated to being a defendant in a civil case? Why wasn't he targeted by the Bush Administration? Why wasn't he prosecuted by Bush's Justice Department like, say, Abdurahman Alamoudi, who had been a State Department employee during the Clinton administration? In October of 2003, Alamoudi was arrested and ultimately convicted of financing terrorism.

If Alamoudi's background was given even a cursory look, it would have become obvious that Naseef was a bigger fish the administration should have been very interested in; it wasn't. Naseef skated and the threats posed by him and his underlings to America are graver than they've ever been. There was the reality of Bush granting access to Alamoudi despite big red flags. Here's a photo of Alamoudi standing with George W. Bush, circa 2000.

From History Commons, via Newsweek:

Presidential candidate George W. Bush and his political adviser Karl Rove meet with Muslim activist Abdurahman Alamoudi. The meeting is said to have been brokered by Republican lobbyist Grover Norquist. Little is known about the meeting, which will not be reported until 2007. At the time, Alamoudi is head of the American Muslim Council (AMC), which is seen as a mainstream activist and lobbying group. But Alamoudi and the AMC had been previously criticized for their ties to Hamas and other militant groups and figures (see March 13, 1996). Bush and/or Rove will meet with Alamoudi on other occasions (see (see July 2000, June 22, 2001, September 14-26, 2001). US intelligence learned of ties between Alamoudi and bin Laden in 1994 (see Shortly After March 1994); he will be sentenced to a long prison term in 2004 (see October 15, 2004).

Then, of course, there was Bush's decision to stand with CAIR six days after 9/11, at a mosque:

In 2002, a terrorist entity known as the SAAR Network was targeted by U.S. authorities. Both Naseef and Alamoudi were connected to SAAR (Alamoudi was an executive assistant). Yet, despite all of the evidence required to convict Alamoudi, we're to believe that the Justice Department just overlooked Naseef?!

Hardly.

Alamoudi wasn't the only terrorist who was given access to Bush. Sami al-Arian was another, via History Commons:

Sami al-Arian attends a meeting in the White House complex with President Bush’s adviser Karl Rove. Al-Arian is one of 160 members of the American Muslim Council who are briefed on political matters by Rove and others. Al-Arian had been under investigation for at least six years by this time, and numerous media accounts reported that US investigators suggested al-Arian had ties to US-designated terrorist groups. Yet al-Arian passes the Secret Service’s stringent security check, enabling him to attend the meeting.

NEWSWEEK, 7/16/2001; WASHINGTON POST, 2/22/2003] “A law-enforcement official… [said] the Secret Service had flagged al-Arian as a potential terrorist prior to the event,” Newsweek later reports. “But White House aides, apparently reluctant to create an incident, let him through anyway.” [NEWSWEEK, 3/3/2003] In 2005, al-Arian will be found innocent of serious terrorism charges, but sentenced to almost three years in a US prison on lesser charges (see December 6, 2005). Abduraham Alamoudi is also at the meeting. US intelligence have suspected Alamoudi of ties to bin Laden and Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman since 1994 (see Shortly After March 1994). Rove and Bush met with Alamoudi in 1999 and 2000 as well (see 1999 and July 2000). Alamoudi will later be sentenced to 23 years in a US prison for illegal dealings with Libya (see October 15, 2004). [WASHINGTON POST, 2/22/2003]

Here's a photo of Alamoudi (far left), George W. Bush (center), and Karl Rove (far right):

So what does all this have to do with Dick Cheney telling ABC News that selecting Sarah Palin as the VP running mate in 2008 was a mistake? It's anecdotal as much as anything. The Republican establishment in general and the Bush administration in particular messed up in a major way by not going after the government of Saudi Arabia after 9/11. Any serious attempt to find out the truth would have led to Abdullah Omar Naseef - an al-Qaeda leader who was connected to the Saudi government.

We're left to conclude that the establishment will fight tooth and nail to prevent the truth about what it did (and failed to do) both before and after 9/11. Until these people come clean and 'fess up, America will be placed in ever increasing danger.

When the establishment relinquishes power within the GOP, the Tea Party movement will not only seize it but will finally have access to all of the intelligence about how the establishment so roundly miscalculated; that establishment will do all it can to prevent that from happening.

Take a look at what Cheney said today, when viewed within that context:


Of course, if you remember being taken aback by what Barbara Bush said about Sarah Palin back in 2010, maybe we're getting closer to understanding why. Perhaps it has something to do with the threat to the establishment of the group Palin represents. That threat very well could be the truth about our flawed post-9/11 strategy being revealed:



**UPDATE** In light of this angle, I thought it relevant that Liz Cheney would tweet in disagreement with her father about Palin: