The following excerpts are taken from Marc Thiessen’s book Courting Disaster — and relevant to the discussion post below regarding Obama Justice Department officials who worked previously defending terrorists (point #3 is huge):

Others say that the lawyers at these firms are in fact following a  great American tradition, in which everyone gets a lawyer and their  day in court. Not so, says Andy McCarthy, the former Assistant  U.S. Attorney who put Omar Abdel-Rahman (the blind sheik)  behind bars for the first bombing of the World Trade Center in  1993.

“We need to be clear about what the American tradition is,”  McCarthy says. “The American tradition is that the 6th Amendment  guarantees the accused-that means somebody who has been  indicted or otherwise charged with a crime-a right to counsel. But  that right only exists if you are accused, which means you are someone   who the government has brought into the civilian criminal justice   system and lodged charges against. ”

The terrorists at Guantanamo, McCarthy says, do not qualify  because they have not been brought into the civilian justice system  for criminal trial. “They are being held as enemy combatants in a  war which has been authorized by Congress.”

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Indeed, when the lawyers began litigating these cases, there was no precedent for a right to representation for enemy combatants. McCarthy says, “We’ve had around 5 million prisoners of war in the history of the United States-that’s probably a conservative estimate. Before 2004, it would have been absurd to suggest that enemy combatants in a war had a systematic right of access to U.S. courts.”

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More than that, these lawyers, no doubt intentionally, are  encouraging enemy combatants to violate the laws of war. As former   Defense Department General Counsel Jim Haynes explained in a 2008 speech, “During World War II, the United States detained  more than 400,000 German and Italian prisoners of war in camps  sprinkled around the United States, and had zero successful habeas  petitions. Today, we have less than 300 unlawful combatants  detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and 246 ongoing habeas cases  to go with them…. The legal process afforded these detainees far  exceeds anything that German or Italian soldiers enjoyed at any  time during their captivity within our borders.”

The danger, according to Haynes, is that, “If you give more protections   and privileges to Al Qaeda fighters than to lawful combatants, then you will strip away any legal incentives for people to fight  according to the rules…. You encourage countries and groups to  develop corps of unlawful fighters. Ultimately, you increase the savagery of future conflicts.”

Haynes asks: Why stop at Guantanamo? “Coalition forces hold  tens of thousands of detainees in Iraq and over a thousand in Afghanistan. If the detainees in Cuba receive habeas, should those  detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan receive it as well? Instead of hundreds,   why not tens of thousands of military detainee habeas cases  in federal courts?”" These habeas corpus cases, Haynes says, are  creating “an incentive to violate the laws of war…. What’s in it for  any foe of the United States to abide by those rules if one gets better treatment upon capture by violating them?”

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In fact, Guantanamo detainees now enjoy rights far beyond those  afforded to prisoners of war with full Geneva protections. Nothing  in the Geneva Conventions provides POWs with the right to counsel, access to the courts to challenge their detention, or the opportunity to be released prior to the end of hostilities. Yet thanks to the habeas corpus campaign, al Qaeda terrorists who violate the laws  of war enjoy all these privileges.

There’s an interesting debate between two former Bush Administration officials regarding the Obama’s  attempt to hide the fact that many of the policy-makers in the Justice Department previously defended al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees in private practice. Both Michael Mukasey, former U.S. attorney general, and Marc Thiessen, former Bush adviser, make comparisons to the Democrats smearing of and even attempting to disbar Bush lawyers (such as John Yoo and Jay Bybee) who simply did their job and provided legal advice regarding topics like enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT) and legal versus illegal combatant status.

Mukasey, writing in the WSJ, opines that just because Democrats ruined the careers of Bush lawyers Republicans should not react in kind towards Obama Justice department lawyers who previously defended terrorists (and now write policy on detainees, Guantanamo, etc.). Conversely, Thiessen, in the Washington Post, argues that Republicans are asking legitimate questions about Eric Holder’s Justice lawyers.

Thiessen writes, “The standard today seems to be that you can say or do anything when it comes to the Bush lawyers who defended America against the terrorists. But if you publish an Internet ad or ask legitimate questions about Obama administration lawyers who defended America’s terrorist enemies, you are engaged in a McCarthyite witch hunt.” That’s absoluely accurate, and just the latest example in a never-ending cycle of Liberal selective outrage and media slant.

More to the point, however, having read both arguments, it appears that Mukasey is defending a point that many Republicans (Thiessen, but not all mind you) are not denying: the right of legal council for the accused, even dirtbags.

[Mukasey] A lawyer who represents a party in a contested matter has an ethical obligation to make any and all tenable legal arguments that will help that party. A lawyer in public service, particularly one dealing with sensitive matters of national security, has the obligation to authorize any step or practice the law permits in order to keep the nation and its citizens safe. And a lawyer who undertakes to represent someone whom his neighbors—perhaps rightly—revile as a threat to the public welfare is obligated to bring his talents to bear just as forcefully in favor of that client as he would if he were representing Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, the French artillery officer who in 1895 was found guilty of treason and sent to Devil’s Island for little more than being Jewish.

Nice not-so-subtle use of the race card there, eh? However, what conservatives like Thiessen or Michelle Malkin are arguing is a point of TRANSPARENCY. No doubt Thiessen and Malkin are otherwise outraged, but their first argument is that if Liberals are so very proud of the fact that lawyers who defended terrorists are now serving in very the Justice Department commanded to try these terrorist then why is Eric Holder and the Obama Administration desperately trying to gloss it over or actively obfuscate the truth?

The next argument is one of conflict of interest. Conservatives aren’t necessarily saying no representation for terrorists (a huge myth, by the way, as all Guantanamo detainees have for years both had lawyers and had judicial reviews, basically trials), but saying first that domestic criminal trials are entirely inappropriate for a variety of reasons including the loss of intelligence needed to destroy terror networks and win wars, and second, that lawyers previously charged with protecting al-Qaeda terrorists shouldn’t have the job of trying them now.

[Thiessen] Would most Americans want to know if the Justice Department had hired a bunch of mob lawyers and put them in charge of mob cases? Or a group of drug cartel lawyers and put them in charge of drug cases? Would they want their elected representatives to find out who these lawyers were, which mob bosses and drug lords they had worked for, and what roles they were now playing at the Justice Department? Of course they would — and rightly so. … Should a lawyer who advocates setting terrorists free, knowing they may go on to kill Americans, have any role in setting U.S. detention policy? My hunch is that most Americans would say no.

This is accurate, and the fact that Obama and Holder are looking to move past the criticism instead of defending the practice tells one that they believe it is accurate as well.

As usual Charles Krathammer best summarizes the folly of trying KSM in civilian court.

So why is Attorney General Eric Holder doing this? Ostensibly, to demonstrate to the world the superiority of our system, where the rule of law and the fair trial reign.

Really? What happens if KSM (and his co-defendants) “do not get convicted,” asked Senate Judiciary Committee member Herb Kohl. “Failure is not an option,” replied Holder. Not an option? Doesn’t the presumption of innocence, er, presume that prosecutorial failure — acquittal, hung jury — is an option? By undermining that presumption, Holder is undermining the fairness of the trial, the demonstration of which is the alleged rationale for putting on this show in the first place.

Moreover, everyone knows that whatever the outcome of the trial, KSM will never walk free. He will spend the rest of his natural life in U.S. custody. Which makes the proceedings a farcical show trial from the very beginning.

Apart from the fact that any such trial will be a security nightmare and a terror threat to New York — what better propaganda-by-deed than blowing up the courtroom, making KSM a martyr and turning the judge, jury and spectators into fresh victims? — it will endanger U.S. security. Civilian courts with broad rights of cross-examination and discovery give terrorists access to crucial information about intelligence sources and methods.

That’s precisely what happened during the civilian New York trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers. The prosecution was forced to turn over to the defense a list of 200 unindicted co-conspirators, including the name Osama bin Laden. “Within 10 days, a copy of that list reached bin Laden in Khartoum,” wrote former attorney general Michael Mukasey, the presiding judge at that trial, “letting him know that his connection to that case had been discovered.”

Finally, there’s the moral logic. It’s not as if Holder opposes military commissions on principle. On the same day he sent KSM to a civilian trial in New York, Holder announced he was sending Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, (accused) mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole, to a military tribunal.

By what logic? In his congressional testimony Wednesday, Holder was utterly incoherent in trying to explain. In his Nov. 13 news conference, he seemed to be saying that if you attack a civilian target, as in 9/11, you get a civilian trial; a military target like the Cole, and you get a military tribunal.

What a perverse moral calculus. Which is the war crime — an attack on defenseless civilians or an attack on a military target such as a warship, an accepted act of war that the United States itself has engaged in countless times?

By what possible moral reasoning, then, does KSM, who perpetrates the obvious and egregious war crime, receive the special protections and constitutional niceties of a civilian courtroom, while he who attacked a warship is relegated to a military tribunal?

Moreover, the incentive offered any jihadist is as irresistible as it is perverse: Kill as many civilians as possible on American soil and Holder will give you Miranda rights, a lawyer, a propaganda platform — everything but your own blog.

[Politico] During a round of network television interviews conducted during Obama’s visit to China, the president was asked about those who find it offensive that Mohammed will receive all the rights normally accorded to U.S. citizens when they are charged with a crime.

“I don’t think it will be offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him,” Obama told NBC’s Chuck Todd.

So let me get this straight. The primary rationale, we were told for years, to try Guantanamo detainees in our civilian federal court system was to improve our image and standing around the world. Indeed, back in January 2009 Attorney General Eric Holder said the following: “We will carry out our constitutional duties within the framework set forth by the founders and with the humility to recognize that congressional oversight and judicial review are necessary.”

Aside from the fact that this statement and many others like it from Democrats were both insulting to our military (who for 250 years of precedent had run effective and lawful tribunals during the Revolution, Civil War, and World Wars I and II) and factually inaccurate (military tribunals have both congressional oversight and judicial review), we now find that in just 48 hours the president and attorney general have created exactly what they claimed they wished to avoid via tribunals — the notion of a kangaroo court.

Obama’s statement above is sure to feed the perception around the world that Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) cannot possibly receive a fair trial (and won’t his defense team demand a change of venue on day 1?). Similarly, Holder said the following:

“These are cases that have to be won. I don’t expect that we’ll have a contrary result [other than guilty].”

Brilliant! Holder additionally called it the “trial of the century.” The attorney general and president of the United States both confidently all but guaranteeing conviction and death penalty… How do you think that will play out on Al Jazeera? Won’t it sound like a stacked deck? The script already written? You better believe it. There’s no reset button for Islamic extremists.

Aren’t Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder graduates of law school? If so, how could they make the fundamental gaffe of prejudicing the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM)?

The next problem is a total lack of consistency. After bashing military tribunals for so long, Holder now says that other Guantanamo detainees, such as the USS Cole bombers, will be tried in a tribunal, not in federal court! That, of course, is the better place to try them, but no doubt people will ask — including the defense lawyers — why a federal trial is good enough for the brains behind 9-11 but not good enough for his subordinate.

SEN. GRAHAM: Yeah, nor do I. But here’s my concern. Can you give me a case in United States history where a enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in civilian court?

ATTY GEN. HOLDER: [ACM: LONG PAUSE] I don’t know. I’d have to look at that. I think that, you know, the determination I’ve made —

SEN. GRAHAM: We’re making history here, Mr. Attorney General. I’ll answer it for you. The answer is no.

ATTY GEN. HOLDER: Well, I think —

SEN. GRAHAM: … The Ghailani case — he was indicted for the Cole bombing before 9/11. And I didn’t object to it going into federal court. But I’m telling you right now. We’re making history and we’re making bad history.

Indeed. It’s been said that the 2006 Military Tribunals Act passed bipartisianly in Congress, was crafted almost for the sole purpose of trying KSM. That’s out the window now.

Here’s Bill McGurn:

When it comes to terrorists, you would think that an al Qaeda operative who targets an American mom sitting in her office or a child on a flight back home is many degrees worse than a Taliban soldier picked up after a firefight with U.S. Army troops.

Your instinct would be correct, because at the heart of terrorism is the monstrous idea that the former is as legitimate a target as the latter. Unfortunately, by dispatching Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other al Qaeda leaders to federal criminal court for trial, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will be undermining this distinction. And the perverse message that decision will send to terrorists all over this dangerous world is this: If you kill civilians on American soil you will have greater protections than if you attack our military overseas.

“A fundamental purpose of rules such as the Geneva Conventions is to give those at war an incentive for more civilized behavior—and not targeting civilians is arguably the most sacred of these principles,” says William Burck, a former federal prosecutor and Bush White House lawyer who dealt with national security issues. “It demolishes this principle to give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed even more legal protections than the Geneva Conventions provide a uniformed soldier fighting in a recognized war zone.”

We don’t often speak of incentives in war. That’s a loss, because the whole idea of, say, Geneva rights is based on the idea of providing combatants with incentives to do things that help limit the bloodiness of battle. These include wearing a uniform, carrying arms openly, not targeting civilians, and so on.

Terrorists recognize none of these things. They are best understood as associations of people plotting and carrying out war crimes, whether that means sowing fear with direct and indiscriminate attacks on marketplaces, offices and airlines—or by engaging enemy troops without distinguishing uniforms, so that the surrounding civilians essentially become used as human shields. Terrorists reject both the laws of war and the laws of American civil society. To put it another way, they reject both the authority and the obligations their legal rights imply.

None of this seems to bother Mr. Holder. Since he dropped his bombshell on Friday, much commentary has focused on the possibility that KSM might be found not guilty. That, however, is unlikely: Mr. Holder is not a fool, and everyone in the Obama administration appreciates the backlash that would occur if a KSM trial results in an acquittal. Thus, the men he will send for trial will be those against whom he has the most evidence.

The perversity here is that the overwhelming evidence of their war crimes gain them protections denied a soldier fighting in accord with the rules of war.

It even gains them more protections than their associates who attack military targets. This double standard means that the perpetrators of the USS Cole bombing are sent to military tribunals while the perpetrators of 9/11 are sent to federal court.

Andrew McCarthy has a unique perspective on the move to criminal trials. As an assistant U.S. attorney in 1993, he successfully prosecuted Omar Abdel Rahman (the “blind sheikh”) for the first bombing of the World Trade Center. Even though the cases were somewhat different—that plot was conceived, plotted and carried out on U.S. soil—Mr. McCarthy says the experience persuaded him that federal trials are a bad way of handling terror.

“At first, I was of the mind that a criminal prosecution would uphold all our high-falutin’ rhetoric about the constitution and majesty of the law,” says Mr. McCarthy. “But when you get down to the nitty gritty of a trial, you see one huge problem: The criminal justice system imposes limits on the government and gives the defendant all sorts of access to information, because we’d rather have the government lose than unfairly convict a man. You can’t take that position with an enemy who is at war with you and trying to bring that government down.”

By going down this line, says Mr. McCarthy, Mr. Holder has invited any number of dangers: making the Manhattan courtroom a target for terrorist attack, inviting the disclosure of sensitive intelligence, opening the possibility that some al Qaeda operative will be acquitted and released within the U.S., etc.

Worst of all, he says, is turning the laws of war upside down: Why fight the Marines and risk getting killed yourself or locked up in Bagram forever when you can blow up American citizens on their own streets and gain the legal protections that give you a chance to go free? With this one step, Mr. Holder is giving al Qaeda a ghastly incentive: to focus more of their attacks on American civilians on American home soil.

“It is foolish to think that al Qaeda does not train to our system and look for our vulnerabilities,” says Mr. McCarthy. “Remember what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told his captors when we got him, ‘I’ll see you in New York with my lawyer.’ It seems he knows our weaknesses better than our government does.”

The former prosecutor of the 1993 WTC bombers, Andrew McCarthy, argues that the Obama administration has to know that treating KSM and other illegal combatants the same as a U.S. citizen arrested in the country’s borders and formally charged with a crime will have many adverse consequences related to national security and classified intelligence.

Pres. Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, experienced litigators, fully realize that in civilian court, the Qaeda quintet can and will demand discovery of mountains of government intelligence. They will demand disclosures about investigative tactics; the methods and sources by which intelligence has been obtained; the witnesses from the intelligence community, the military, and law enforcement who interrogated witnesses, conducted searches, secretly intercepted enemy communications, and employed other investigative techniques. They will attempt to compel testimony from officials who formulated U.S. counterterrorism strategy, in addition to U.S. and foreign intelligence officers. As civilian “defendants,” these war criminals will put Bush-era counterterrorism tactics under the brightest public spotlight in American legal history.

This is exactly what President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder know will happen. And because it is unnecessary to have this civilian trial at all, one must conclude that this is exactly what Obama and Holder want to see happen.

During the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama and his adviser, Holder, rebuked the Bush counterterrorism policies and promised their base a “reckoning.” Since President Obama took office, Attorney General Holder has anxiously shoveled into the public domain classified information relating to those policies — with the administration always at pains to claim that its hand is being forced by court orders, even though the president has had legal grounds, which he has refrained from invoking, to decline to make those disclosures. Moreover, during a trip to Germany in April, Holder signaled his openness to turning over evidence that would assist European investigations — including one underway in Spain — that seek to charge Bush-administration officials with war crimes (which is the transnational Left’s label for actions taken in defense of the United States).

Now, we see the reckoning: Obama’s gratuitous transfer of alien war criminals from a military court, where they were on the verge of ending the proceedings, to the civilian justice system, where they will be given the same rights and privileges as the American citizens they are pledged to kill. This will give the hard Left its promised feast. Its shock troops, such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, will gather up each new disclosure and add it to the purported war-crimes case they are urging foreign courts to bring against President Bush, his subordinates, and U.S. intelligence agents.

From indictment to trial, the civilian case against the 9/11 terrorists will be a years-long seminar, enabling al-Qaeda and its jihadist allies to learn much of what we know and, more important, the methods and sources by which we come to know it. But that is not the half of it. By moving the case to civilian court, the president and his attorney general have laid the groundwork for an unprecedented surrender of our national-defense secrets directly to our most committed enemies.

The five jihadists in question are alien enemy combatants currently detained outside the United States. They are not Americans and are not entitled to the protection of our Bill of Rights. That means that in a military-commission trial, they would be given only those rights Congress chose to give them.

At Gitmo, they’ve insisted on representing themselves. In a military commission, we can allow them to do that, but we don’t have to. The commission rules provide for the appointment of military counsel and permit the combatants to retain their own lawyers. This is significant because discovery rules require that the defense be given mounds of information for trial preparation. Much of that information is top-secret intelligence. Importantly, however, we do not have to show the terrorists themselves any classified information. Only counsel who have the required security clearances, and are duty-bound not to reveal the nation’s secrets to the nation’s enemies, get access.

The rules are saliently different in the civilian justice system, where, the attorney general has promised, this case will be treated like any other criminal case. In federal court, defendants — even illegal aliens — are vested with constitutional rights that Congress may not alter or reduce.

Okay, one more post on the Ft. Hood shootings. I couldn’t resist after reading this analysis of the dangers of willful political correctness voiced by a counter-terrorism expert. Note he makes the same point many have previously — had Nidal been pining for, say, Nazism, he’d have been booted out of the military a long time ago.

[Inside the Ring] Patrick Poole, a counterterrorism consultant to law enforcement agencies and the military, said he expects more attacks like the one that occurred at Fort Hood because the Pentagon so far is unable to produce a “threat model” that correctly identifies the threat posed by both internal and external jihadism.

“The case of Maj. Hasan is Exhibit A on existing jihadist threats from inside the military,” Mr. Poole told Inside the Ring. “Had anyone dared to officially protest Hasan’s extremism, they would not only have been risking their military careers, but would have certainly faced a harassment lawsuit fully supported by [some Muslim] groups. … It’s not that warning signs were missed, but they were willfully ignored.”

Mr. Poole said Gen. Casey’s comments on diversity were shocking and indicate that “the Pentagon brass are doubling-down on the see-no-evil, speak-no-evil culture responsible for this incident. And more soldiers are going to die until that changes.”

Among the other incidents of Muslim extremism in the military, Mr. Poole noted the case of Ali Mohamed, an al Qaeda military chief who was an Army sergeant at the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, N.C., during the late 1980s. There he gathered intelligence before defecting to help al Qaeda with its war-fighting skills. Mohamed was allowed to continue working at Fort Bragg despite warnings from both the Army and Egypt’s military that he held jihadist beliefs, Mr. Poole said.

Mr. Poole said the military has policies designed to ferret out neo-Nazis, gang members and those with psychological problems from the ranks but is unwilling to do the same with radical Muslims. “Why these existing rules could not be applied to jihadism can only be explained by the delusion that there is no problem to solve,” he said.

“If jihadist ideology is so isolated from institutional Islam as Islamic groups claim, they should have no real fear of trying to weed out the jihadists in the military, because it has nothing to do with the thousands of Muslims who are serving honorably and courageously,” he said.

What about the doctors and nurses, the counselors and physical therapists at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who every day hear and live with the pain and the suffering of returning soldiers? How many of them then picked up a gun and shot 51 innocents?

… Was anything done about this potential danger [all of the warning signs about Nidal]? Of course not. Who wants to be accused of Islamophobia and prejudice against a colleague’s religion?

– Charles Krauthammer.

There is not a perfect or even agreed upon definition of “Terrorism,” but I think this definition by Yohan Alexander in his 2002 book Combating Terrorism: Strategies of 10 Countries is about the best I’ve read. Consider his definition as you debate whether or not the mass murder by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was terrorism or a case of the crazies (or both):

[On the basis of the act, perpetrator, objective, motivation, target and method] Terrorism is defined as the calculated employment or the threat of violence by individuals, subnational groups, and state actors to attain political, social, and economic objectives in violation of the law. These acts are intended to create an overwhelming fear in a target area larger than the victims attacked or threatened.

It’s important to try and define terrorism, especially after the Ft. Hood shootings. What’s sad is that we still seem to have to do so even after 9-11. And what’s disconcerting is how so many persons hastily refuse to even consider that Hasan was a terrorist even while they condemn others for for doing so without thought or with haste, or both.

Maj. Hasan clearly had a political/social agenda  — he wished to not only avoid deployment to a Muslim country, but championed the idea that any Muslim in the military have the right to refuse deployment to Muslim countries — and illegally pursued the means to achieve it, committing mass murder.

Hasan “exchanged 10 to 20 e-mails” with Anwar al-Awlaki, still wanted by federal authorities, who was imam of a Falls Church, Va., mosque where three 9-11 hijackers attended. Hasan reportedly proselytized Islam to patients, was considered by soldiers who knew him to be seriously disloyal to both the military and his country, and worried fellow doctors by giving a 50-slide Powerpoint presentation promoting conscientious objection for Muslims and filled with disconcerting messages like “We love death more then [sic] you love life!” and “Fighting to establish an Islamic State to please God, even by force, is condoned by the Islam.”

U.S. Intelligence agencies reportedly were investigating Hasan for attempting to contact persons (i.e., plural) with known al Qaeda connections. He “spent time surfing radical Islamic Web sites,” and shouted “Allahu Akbar” — God is great — during his murder spree, thus mimicking Islamic terrorists who have done the same.

Hasan may have even been practicing the terrorist strategy of takfir, where the terrorist attempts to better blend into their role by conducting themselves in a manner of the kefir (unbeliever): Hasan reportedly went to strip clubs similar to how the 9-11 hijackers did (or then again, maybe he’s just a typical sexually-repressed, misogynist, Islamic fanatic who’s also a hypocrite).

Hasan sure sounds like a terrorist. He may not have been a card-carrying member of al Qaeda (there is no such thing), rather just a wannabe, and perhaps even crazy too. It’s not an either-or paradox. He could have both “gone nuts” and been a blatant Islamic militant.

But ask yourself this: If Hasan had been a Tim McVeighesque Bible-thumper who proselytized to patients about an angry Jehovah; who championed conscientious objection for Christians serving against other Christians (say against any further enforcement of Balkan issues); who was a frequent visitor and hate-posting member of neo-Nazi websites; who delivered 50-slide Powerpoints on the evils of gay marriage or abortion; who was known to be in contact with persons connected to white militias or domestic terrorist groups; and then chanted “Onward Christian Soldiers” as he gunned down persons in a Planned Parenthood facility…

… would Hasan still have been in the military or kicked out long before? Would the FBI be calling his pre-shooting behavior “benign” now? Would we be fearing that the same politically correct atmosphere that at least in part exacerbated the chances of success for 9-11 is back with us? Would Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey Jr. be on television defensively arguing the importance of “diversity” and not wishing to offend religious liberties? Would not the media be screaming “[right-wing] terrorist” at the top of their lungs?

The answers to those questions should be obvious to all of us.

Michelle Malkin asks the reasonable question of why the heck do we have to find this out from the UK Telegraph? (Perhaps because that same PC mentality forbids our media from asking the obvious questions).

[UK Telegraph] [Major Nidal Malik] Hasan, the sole suspect in the massacre of 13 fellow US soldiers in Texas, attended the controversial Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Great Falls, Virginia, in 2001 at the same time as two of the September 11 terrorists, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt. His mother’s funeral was held there in May that year.

The preacher at the time was Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Yemeni scholar who was banned from addressing a meeting in London by video link in August because he is accused of supporting attacks on British troops and backing terrorist organisations.

Hasan’s eyes “lit up” when he mentioned his deep respect for al-Awlaki’s teachings, according to a fellow Muslim officer at the Fort Hood base in Texas, the scene of Thursday’s horrific shooting spree.

As investigators look at Hasan’s motives and mindset, his attendance at the mosque could be an important piece of the jigsaw. Al-Awlaki moved to Dar al-Hijrah as imam in January, 2001, from the west coast, and three months later the September 11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hamzi and Hani Hanjour began attending his services. A third hijacker attended his services in California.

Hasan was praying at Dar al-Hijrah at about the same time, and the FBI will now want to investigate whether he met the two terrorists.

Charles Allen, a former under-secretary for intelligence at the Department of Homeland Security, has described al-Awlaki, who now lives in Yemen, as an “al-Qaeda supporter, and former spiritual leader to three of the September 11 hijackers… who targets US Muslims with radical online lectures encouraging terrorist attacks from his new home in Yemen”.