The NY Times is outraged! In a front page expose, today’s edition features yet another secret operation exposed because, well, because they can, and because they, like so many lefties, hate the thought of Muslim extremists having their Constitutional Rights, as extended to the entire world, violated, along with being killed without a long, drawn out civilian trial. But, don’t question their patriotism: Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants
Under the cover of a benign government information-gathering program, a Defense Department official set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants, according to military officials and businessmen in Afghanistan and the United States.
The official, Michael D. Furlong, hired contractors from private security companies that employed former C.I.A. and Special Forces operatives. The contractors, in turn, gathered intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected militants and the location of insurgent camps, and the information was then sent to military units and intelligence officials for possible lethal action in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the officials said.
While it has been widely reported that the C.I.A. and the military are attacking operatives of Al Qaeda and others through unmanned, remote-controlled drone strikes, some American officials say they became troubled that Mr. Furlong seemed to be running an off-the-books spy operation. The officials say they are not sure who condoned and supervised his work.
Which officials? None are actually named. Besides, who, other than pusillanimous lefties, cares? It’s just fine with me that extremist Muslims, members of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and any other group, are tracked and whacked. Better them than us.
It is generally considered illegal for the military to hire contractors to act as covert spies. Officials said Mr. Furlong’s secret network might have been improperly financed by diverting money from a program designed to merely gather information about the region.
It’s also generally illegal to hijack planes and fly them into buildings. It’s generally illegal for terrorists to fight without wearing a uniform of any country. It’s generally illegal to saw a humans head off while alive. You don’t see the NY Times and other liberals complaining about those. In fact, they tend to back the people who do those things.
But, hey, good news: the NY Times has just put every person in Afghanistan and Pakistan in even more danger. Kudos, Fish Wrap! Way to start the work week, giving aid and comfort to the enemy!
Unfortunately
Officials say Mr. Furlong’s operation seems to have been shut down, and he is now is the subject of a criminal investigation by the Defense Department for a number of possible offenses, including contract fraud.
At one time in our country’s past, Furlong would have been a hero for taking the fight to the enemy.
I hate to defend Obama on this one, but, the ACLU has forgotten that KSM and the other 9/11 co-conspirators are NOT American citizens and have no right to a civilian trial. That said, it must give the Left and the ACLU fits that Obama has pretty much been Bush-lite when it comes to Gitmo, terrorists, rendition, as well as expanding the Afghanistan war (which he said he would do time after time on the campaign trail)
The possibility that President Obama could send the self-professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks to a military tribunal has earned him the highest insult from the left — that he’s another George W. Bush.
A full-page ad in Sunday’s New York Times left no doubt as to how the American Civil Liberties Union feels about the possibility of the president reversing the decision to send Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged co-conspirators to civilian court.
“What will it be Mr. President?” the ad asks in boldfaced type. “Change or more of the Same?”
Actually, that’s not fair to Bush, who knew what he was doing. Obama has no clue, and is just flailing away like a single-A ball player at bat against Nolan Ryan. (I’m going to be really disappointed if none of you know who he is.)
“Many of us are shocked and concerned that right now, President Obama is considering reversing his attorney general’s decision to try the 9/11 defendants in criminal court,” the advertisement continues. “Our criminal justice system has successfully handled over 300 terrorism cases compared to only 3 in the military commissions.”
Yes, it has. A good chunk of those were caught IN the United States, which should get them a civilian trial. Those caught outside? Nope. Enemy combatants.
We send our young adults to university to be educated in the ways of the world, we all know. Following that well-worn path, young James Schackleford decided on the publicly funded Florida Atlantic University for his edification and boy did he learn a lesson about modern education last week. Mr. Schackleford learned that the FAU administration prefers on its campus Islamic terrorist supporters over representatives of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom organization. He also learned that it’s open season on all conservatives at our American universities.
At the Boca Raton campus Mr. Schackleford determined that his school needed a chapter of YAF, a 40-year-old conservative student organization, and so gathered a few like-minded students to meet with YAF State Director Daniel P. Diaz to discuss how they should proceed on organizing a chapter in the school.
As the few gathered were meeting, university administrator *David Blank burst into the room and demanded that they cease their meeting and vacate the room. According to the YAF press release, Mr. Schackleford asked for an additional 15 minutes to finish and Blank acquiesced to the request. But the 15-minute grant was short lived.
Upon hearing Diaz address the liberal bias on the FAU campus, Blank stopped the meeting again and boorishly ordered the students to vacate the meeting room. Blank then shut off the room lights, tore down the group’s promotional posters, and called the campus police.
It didn’t end there. According to YAF, the campus police arrived and began to harass the students and Mr. Diaz outside as they were in the process of leaving the campus. The police demanded to see student IDs and then menacingly followed YAF rep. Diaz to his car.
Police told Diaz that they were investigating a “possible trespassing charge,” and then loudly joked that Diaz “probably had tea bags hanging out the back of his car” as Diaz prepared to leave.
Diaz says that the whole incident is proof positive of why a conservative group is needed at Florida Atlantic University.
“If we were a Marxist, Socialist or Liberal group they would have let us finish our meeting, but the university officials and police harassed us because we are conservatives. This was the exact liberal bias on campus that I was discussing in the meeting that these future YAFers experienced firsthand. The university is no longer a place of open discussion and freedom of expression, but a breeding ground of intolerance for conservative beliefs.”
One question immediately comes to mind over this incident: did student organizer Schackleford and YAF representative Diaz officially reserve a room at FAU for their informal meeting? I asked Diaz this very question.
Diaz told me that since it was an informal meeting that should have been over rather quickly, Mr. Schackleford did not think that he needed to officially reserve a room through the university staff. In fact, according to Diaz, himself a former FAU student, such unscheduled meetings occur all the time.
No we did not reserve a room. When I was a student at the university when a room wasn’t being occupied one could go in and meet or study, and as long they left before the next scheduled group arrived they would be ok. After asking around that is how it still is.
In retrospect it was an obvious lapse in judgment not to officially reserve a room. Or perhaps they should have met off campus.
However, that small lapse in judgment does not absolve this oppressive, over-the-top reaction that university administrator David Blank exhibited. After all, not long ago Florida Atlantic University hosted a whole slew of Islamic terror supporters on campus. In 2006, for instance, the Muslim students group at FAU hosted an event at which appeared Hamas and Hezbollah supporter, Al-Haaj Ghazi Khankan; alleged Neo-Nazi, William Baker; and potential co-conspirator of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Siraj Wahhaj.
Apparently it’s perfectly O.K., as far as the FAU administration is concerned, to have Islamofascist terror given full-throated support on its campus but it is a serious no-no to talk about organizing a patriotic American conservative student’s organization there.
Perhaps Mr. Diaz is right in his contention that a YAF chapter is sorely needed at Florida Atlantic University?
*David Blank appears to be the Event Planning Specialist for the Student Union at FAU. He can be reached at dblank@fau.edu.
The Guardian, official mouthpiece of Britain’s pointy-headed establishment Left, can’t help but admit that the Nobel Prize-bedecked Al Gore is a figure of fun. Referring to the Goracle’s recent desperate rant in the friendly New York Times, Guardian contributor Dan Kennedy (a Boston journalism professor) laments that Prince Albert
has not only spent his political capital, but is running a deficit. Mocked by the right every time he pops up, he is no longer in a position to convince anyone who isn’t already convinced — especially when he writes for our most liberal daily newspaper.
It started, of course, with the vicious lies told about Gore during the 2000 presidential campaign, the most notorious of which was that he claimed to have “invented the internet” … the smear campaign that almost certainly cost Gore the presidency.
You don’t get much more vicious than poking fun at a blowhard politician for indulging in excessive self-promotion. It’s almost as mean as saying that skunks stink.
The hate stirred up by that effort has long since congealed into conventional wisdom. Now, whenever Gore speaks out on climate change, he is subjected to withering, fact-free scorn. It has its effect on those trying to figure out the truth. Go ahead. Feel the hate:
“Do you think of your breathing passages as spewing sh*t?” sneered Ann Althouse, referring to Gore’s use of an “open sewer” metaphor.
And Andrew Breitbart’s notorious Big Journalism site ran a commentary by Kyle-Anne Shiver, who said of Gore, “His life as a jet-setting, Nobel Peace Prize-sharing, Oscar-brandishing celebrity is on the line. Without the people’s diehard faith in his religion of global warming, Al will be forced to trade his lifestyle of the mega-rich-and-famous for an ignominious and expensive defense of never-ending lawsuits brought by enraged sucker governments and private investors.”
Not to worry, moonbats. Another hero has arisen to take up the burden of rescuing the polar bears from our freedom and prosperity:
But if Gore’s effectiveness as a climate-change activist has expired, there is nevertheless reason to hope. Because there, in the same edition of the Sunday Times, just a few inches away, was columnist Tom Friedman’s interview with the ghost of climate change present, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham—living proof that it is possible for a conservative Republican not only to be sane, but to work toward real solutions to actual problems.
Grahamnesty is praised for wanting to shut down Club Gitmo (which would be a big propaganda coup for Muslim terrorists and their liberal enablers), for backing racist radical Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, and most of all, for conspiring with the disgraceful Hanoi John Kerry to drive millions of jobs overseas in the name of the global warming hoax with Tax & Charade. They might also have mentioned his support for shamnesty, his denunciation of those who want our border defended as “bigots” who need to “shut up,” his alliance with sinister hard left financier George Soros, the delight he took in Dems taking over the Senate, and his support for leaping toward communism by nationalizing banks.
With uncharacteristic understatement, the Guardian admits that Goober is “well to the left of many South Carolina Republicans.” Fortunately, Tea Partiers are on to Graham; as is the Republican Party of Charleston. Less fortunately, there’s nothing voters can do about him until 2014. Maybe he’ll pull a Specter by then.
On a tip from Floccinaucinihilipilificator. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.
“This is the typically regressive fear tactic that you expect from anybody named Cheney,” said Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor at the Bush era military commissions, who has been a critic of the commission system…
Neal Katyal, who Davis faced off with in the Hamdan case, “was a very talented and dedicated attorney – he was the perfect choice for [his position as deputy Solicitor General," said Davis. "To try to impugn his character or imply he’s part of the 'Al Qaeda Nine' or whatever is just outrageous."
"Back in the 18th century after the Boston Massacre, we provided a zealous defense [to British soldiers], and a lot of people there have the same view,” he said.
With Eric Holder stonewalling Congress, I think conflict of interest is a perfectly legitimate question.
As the GOP sees it, there are two issues involved. The first is the nature of the Justice Department lawyers’ work on behalf of detainees. Republicans aren’t questioning whether terrorist detainees are entitled to attorneys; the courts have said they are, so they have attorneys. The question is whether those very lawyers should then turn around and handle detainee issues for the Justice Department.
Private lawyers can choose to take or not take cases. Sometimes they make their decisions based on money, sometimes on principle, sometimes because they are sympathetic to the accused. The lawyers who worked with the terrorist detainees chose to represent people who are making war on the United States. That’s certainly their right, but it’s entirely reasonable to ask whether they should now be working on detainee issues at the Justice Department.
Look, this terrorist coddling mentality has got to go, and we most definitely can’t have these weak sympathies seeping into positions like these. Legitimate concerns need to be answered. You may think the ad is over the top, but I’m thankful Liz’s group is exposing Holder.
