Video: Al-Qaeda Defense Attorney Promoted to number 3 at Justice Department

Yesterday, it was learned that a man named Tony West was promoted to the number 3 spot at the Justice Department behind Attorney General Eric Holder and Deputy Attorney General James Cole. The problem with West is that he has represented members of America's enemies, including the notorious John Walker Lindh, also known as the "American Taliban."

While appearing on Fox News to discuss the appointment, former Justice Department voting rights attorney, J. Christian Adams was visibly disturbed by it. When asked the expected question about why representing someone like Lindh should be a reflection on West, Adams raised two very key points. One, West didn't just represent Lindh as well as other individuals who represented America's enemies but he continued to speak glowingly of Lindh after the conviction.

The other point raised by Adams was more about conflict of interest. West used to represent Gitmo detainees and is now responsible for setting policy at Gitmo.

This is very, very disturbing.

Via Fox News:

NRO's Andrew McCarthy Goes after Rand Paul

First, if I was voting in a primary and my two choices were John McCain and Rand Paul, I would vote for the son of Ron every time (hopefully that will quiet the Ron Paul echo chamber for a minute). That said, National Review's Andrew McCarthy completely deconstructs the alleged constitutionalist / isolationist positions that come out of the mouths of the Paul family. In essence, says McCarthy, Rand is so paranoid about government overreach that, by default, he diminishes the true Islamist threats to our nation.

He also rips McCain pretty good too.

Via NRO:

The quest to quell Islamists by democratic processes has only empowered them. It has done nothing to enhance our security against terrorism. It has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars during a time of economic strife. It has actually provoked our enemies, whose ideology — which partisans such as McCain urge us to ignore — calls for waging violent jihad against Western forces that try to implant Western principles in Islamic lands. It has enabled rabidly anti-American Islamists throughout the Middle East to market themselves as “moderate political parties” and bask in the legitimacy the “international community” confers on electoral success — no matter how fraudulently achieved. It has cheapened true Western democracy by accommodating it to authoritarian sharia. 

Worst of all, the Islamic-democracy project has sapped the political will of the American people to take actions that are actually necessary to our defense. Democracy fetishists have worn threadbare the public’s patience. Why confront Iranian aggression or Pakistani duplicity, they wonder, if the price-tag is endless years of nation-building masquerading as warfare? Why bother if our troops are hamstrung in combat, put at risk by rules of engagement that prioritize the safety of ungrateful populations? Why mortgage our children’s future if the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is a sharia state that despises America?

He's right. The Pauliens would refer to this bunch as 'Neocons.' Exporting western Democracy to the Middle East, in hopes that it would serve as a sedative has only given the enemies of the West an opportunity it has masterfully exploited. The quintessential example is the election of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. McCain even called the Libyan rebels his 'heroes' before Gadhafi's fall. Those 'heroes' subsequently flew al-Qaeda flags from Libyan courthouses.

McCarthy's column is about the recently, highly controversial (among Pauliens) defense-authorization bill, which Paul vehemently objected to because it allegedly puts American citizens in far greater danger of losing their first and fourth amendment rights. More from McCarthy:

Claiming the “constitutionalist” mantle, Senator Paul is currently crusading against the concept of indefinite detention for enemy combatants under the laws of war. It is a deprivation, he claims, of the Constitution’s guarantee of due process. And once the government succeeds in rolling back such guarantees, he insists, they are never restored. 

As a matter of constitutional law and of history, this is nonsense on stilts. The framers would have been appalled by Paul’s premise that the Constitution endows alien enemy combatants with the due-process rights of American citizens, particularly combatants who are detained outside the United States, where the writ of neither federal nor state judges runs. The only thing the framers might have found more appalling is the notion that the Constitution licenses lawfare — i.e., that it permits the American people’s courts (which, other than the Supreme Court, are creatures of statute not required by the Constitution) to be used by foreign enemies to put on trial the armed forces of the American people over the manner in which they conduct wartime combat operations that have been authorized by the American people’s representatives (indeed, overwhelmingly authorized, because after almost 3,000 of us were slaughtered on 9/11, the public broadly demanded that the enemy be subdued). 

Paul is attacking the McCain-Levin amendment as if it broke new ground. But the amendment only reaffirms what the Constitution has always provided: Congress has the power to authorize combat operations against foreign enemies, and when it does so, the law of war governs those operations — except to the extent Congress modifies that venerable corpus. Under the law of war, enemy combatants may be detained indefinitely, which is to say, until either (a) hostilities have concluded, or (b) Congress withdraws the authorization of military force, effectively returning us to peacetime conditions.

McCarthy goes to the heart of the problem between George W. Bush Republicans (McCain) and the Alex Jones (Paulien) crowd. Specifically, the US did not identify the real enemy after 9/11 and has us arguing amongst ourselves over how best to defeat it.

Read it all if you can.

Excellent.

Former Gitmo Detainees, Mujahedeen Leading Libyan Rebels

Perhaps the only thing worse than Gadhafi running Libya would be the Muslim Brotherhood running it. Unfortunately for Americans, our military effort over there is aiding in the latter becoming a reality. The more involved we get, the more obvious it becomes. Now it's learned that an Islamic preacher who trained in eastern Afghanistan; a former fighter with the Libyan Mujahedeen; and a guy who spent six years in Gitmo are all leading in the rebels' effort to topple Gadhafi.

Via the Wall Street Journal:

DARNA, Libya—Two former Afghan Mujahedeen and a six-year detainee at Guantanamo Bay have stepped to the fore of this city's military campaign, training new recruits for the front and to protect the city from infiltrators loyal to Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

The presence of Islamists like these amid the opposition has raised concerns, among some fellow rebels as well as their Western allies, that the goal of some Libyan fighters in battling Col. Gadhafi is to propagate Islamist extremism.

Abdel Hakim al-Hasady, an influential Islamic preacher and high-school teacher who spent five years at a training camp in eastern Afghanistan, oversees the recruitment, training and deployment of about 300 rebel fighters from Darna.

Mr. Hasady's field commander on the front lines is Salah al-Barrani, a former fighter from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG, which was formed in the 1990s by Libyan mujahedeen returning home after helping to drive the Soviets from Afghanistan and dedicated to ousting Mr. Gadhafi from power.

Sufyan Ben Qumu, a Libyan army veteran who worked for Osama bin Laden's holding company in Sudan and later for an al Qaeda-linked charity in Afghanistan, is training many of the city's rebel recruits.

Both Messrs. Hasady and Ben Qumu were picked up by Pakistani authorities after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and were turned over to the U.S. Mr. Hasady was released to Libyan custody two months later. Mr. Ben Qumu spent six years at Guantanamo Bay before he was turned over to Libyan custody in 2007.

It's a widely held belief that if Gadhafi stays in power, Barack Obama will suffer grave political damage. If Gadhafi is removed from power, the United States could be placed in more actual danger as the Muslim Brotherhood is almost certain to fill the void. As the Brotherhood consolidates power in Egypt, control of Libya, which borders Egypt to the west is critical to the Brotherhood. The question that continues to dog clear-thinking people is: Why does this administration continue to implement policies that favor the Muslim Brotherhood?

Read it all.

h/t Gateway Pundit

NO MO CLOSE GUANTANAMO TALK

Webmaster Mitch sent this one in from National Review. Underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab is a Nigerian with ties not only to radical Muslim 9/11 Imam, al-Awlaki, who provided spiritual counsel to Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan but to Yemen itself. al-Awlaki should be in American custody since 2002 when he was detained and then released at JFK airport.

al-Awlaki is now in Yemen. Half of Camp Gitmo's detention center is made up of Yemenis. Re-patrioting them to Yemen would put the United States in further danger unnecessarily.

NRO Editors Report:

Less than two weeks ago, the Obama administration repatriated to Yemen six detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. It was a test. About 90 of the 200 or so remaining Gitmo detainees are Yemenis. The president would like to move toward fulfilling his promise to close Gitmo, and thus to appease the antiwar Left, by transferring most of those Yemeni jihadists back home.

On Christmas Day, we got yet another indicator of how reckless this obsession with closing Gitmo is. A well-to-do Nigerian jihadist, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, tried to destroy Northwest Airlines Flight 253, carrying 289 passengers and crew, as it was preparing to land in Detroit after a flight from Amsterdam. The 23-year-old Mutallab attempted to ignite an incendiary chemical bomb, the components of which he assembled in flight after smuggling them onto the aircraft. He reportedly confessed to the FBI that he had been trained and tasked for the operation by al-Qaeda in Yemen.

The absurdity of DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano's words recently is not lost on them either:

There is abundant reason to credit the mutually reinforcing claims of collusion by Mutallab and al-Qaeda. Certainly, they are more believable at this time than the groundless assertion from the homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, that Mutallab is not part of a broader terrorist conspiracy. That lone-wolf theory echoes the preposterous “no terrorism here” assurances the secretary offered after the Fort Hood massacre, notwithstanding solid links between the shooter and an al-Qaeda recruiter. It is nearly as absurd as Napolitano’s assertion that “the system worked” against the Christmas Day strike.

Gitmo has been slowly bleeding out its inmates for some time, meaning the ones that are left are among the most dangerous. Yet, Obama seems totally invested in appeasing that far leftwing radical base of his.

Read the WHOLE THING.