Archive for the ‘Terrorism’ Category

Finally.

The man whose face was a staple of our morning papers and evening news for days and weeks after the September 11 attacks is dead. Osama bin Laden was killed in a firefight with Americans — soldiers or intelligence officers; details are still sketchy — outside the capital of Pakistan, President Barack Obama announced late Sunday night.

Two details in that last sentence are particularly important:

• “killed in a firefight with Americans”: This wasn’t an armed drone getting lucky. Americans on the ground, capping an operation that the president described as being in the works since August, met bin Laden in person and sent him to his death, collecting the body in the process. Best of all, none of our guys were hurt (although Pakistani officials say their operatives — more on that in a moment — had a helicopter shot down by bin Laden’s militants).
• “outside the capital of Pakistan”: The compound — CNN reported it as a “mansion” — where bin Laden was killed was in the …

Continue reading A national victory in bin Laden’s death »

WSJ columnist Kim Strassel says the next front in the fight over public-sector unions is your nearest airport:

Even as state battles rage, the Obama administration has been facilitating the largest federal union organizing effort in history. Tens of thousands of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screeners are now casting votes to choose a union to collectively bargain for cushier personnel practices on their behalf.

Liberals are calling it a “historic” vote. It is. Henceforth, airport security will play second fiddle to screener “rights.”

The TSA was created as a response — however ill-conceived — to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. At the time, Strassel explains, airport security was considered too important to allow “rigid unionization rules.” That had changed by the 2008 election campaign, when Barack Obama told union leaders that collective bargaining for TSA employees was a “priority” of his.

Strassel continues:

That’s been the administration’s “priority,” even …

Continue reading How do you make the TSA even more despised? Unions! »

With the Obama administration, everything old is new again. Again.

The latest example is the White House’s white flag on the use of the prison at Guantanamo Bay. The headline, and rightly so, is that the president is flip-flopping on the use of military tribunals for some of the terrorists housed at Gitmo. After all, President Obama has a long and distinguished history of bashing those military tribunals and that prison, as the Wall Street Journal recounts today:

In an August 2007 speech that his advisers touted at the time, Mr. Obama promised to repeal this “legal framework that does not work.” He even claimed that Bush policies undermined “our Constitution and our freedom” and that the Bush Administration had pressed a “false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand,” a line he recycled in his Inaugural Address. He went out of his way to vote against the Military Commissions Act.

So much for all that. Yesterday the senior Administration officials …

Continue reading Obama pulls a Bush on Gitmo terrorist trials »

It turns out that political correctness can be deadly. That’s the upshot of a Senate investigation into Maj. Nidal Hasan — the Army officer-turned-jihadist who killed 13 people and wounded another 32 at Ford Hood, Texas, in November 2009.

The committee issued its conclusions Thursday. Reports the Christian Science Monitor:

According to the report by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I) of Connecticut, chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the committee’s top Republican, some Army officials had raised concerns about Major Hasan’s extremist behavior at Fort Hood and even referred to him as “a ticking time bomb.”

A cursory FBI investigation followed, but between poor coordination with the Defense Department and a failure to use all the intelligence available, nothing was done, according to the report.

The report provides insight into a larger problem, says Matthew Levitt, a former FBI counterterrorism specialist: the US government

Continue reading Senators: Army, feds turned blind eye to Hasan’s radicalism »