Catastrophe (18 page)

Of course, the real reason Clinton and Holder granted the commutations to the FALN terrorists was to promote Hillary’s candidacy for the
Senate in New York State, the home to the largest concentration of Puerto Ricans in the nation. To warm their reception for this newcomer to New York State, President Clinton was determined to grant the commutations that were being demanded by some of the ultra-left leaders of the New York Puerto Rican community.

But appointing Holder as attorney general is only part of a pattern of Obama designations that send a clear message to those trying to protect us against terrorist attacks: that they—not the terrorists they are investigating—are in the Justice Department’s sights.

The worst new appointee is Dawn Johnsen, the new head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It is the OLC that advises a president on what he can and cannot legally do in terrorist investigations. In a 2008 article entitled “What’s a President to Do? Interpreting the Constitution in the Wake of Bush Administration Abuses,” Johnsen signaled how far backward she would lean over to protect terror suspects’ rights.

Hey, Dawn, how about us American citizens?

The
National Review
’s Andrew McCarthy argues that Johnsen views the War on Terror “as something President Bush started after 9/11 rather than a years-long jihadist provocation to which the United States finally responded.” He notes that “this framework would make it impossible to prosecute as war crimes such pre-9/11 atrocities as the bombings of the USS
Cole
and the embassies in East Africa.”
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Johnsen dismisses President Bush’s justification of warrantless surveillance of al-Qaeda communications into and out of the country as an “extreme and implausible Commander-In-Chief theory.”
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As McCarthy notes, however, “in fact, the practice was strongly supported by federal court precedent and has been reaffirmed by the appellate court Congress created specifically to consider such issues.” Amazingly, McCarthy quotes Johnsen as saying that “job applicants to the Justice Department who have been passed over by the Bush Administration for holding leftist political views should get ‘special consideration’ in Department of Justice hiring.”
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Meanwhile, in moving to close the Guantánamo prison, President Obama has raised the specter that 250 of the most hardened terrorists in the world will be released. (For a fuller discussion of this issue, see the chapter on Guantánamo in our previous book,
Fleeced
.)

One early—and chilling—example of the kinds of men Obama consid
ers fit for release is Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British resident who was freed from Guantánamo in the first few weeks of the Obama presidency and sent home to the United Kingdom where he will face no charges.

Mohamed’s case attracted a lot of publicity when his lawyers alleged that he had been tortured in U.S. custody. Yet now, regardless of his record of crimes against the United States, Obama is letting him go!

He is practically inviting this hardened terrorist to resume his efforts to kill us.

And if Obama isn’t keeping terrorists locked up, why should anybody else? Just two weeks after Obama’s inauguration, Yemen freed 170 men whom “it had arrested on suspicion of having ties to al-Qaeda.”
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The release came right after al-Qaeda had announced that Yemen would be its ongoing base of terrorist activities throughout the Arabian Peninsula. Apparently, Yemen wanted to help out its hometown industry!

Of course, Yemen wasn’t entirely irresponsible in releasing these men. They were freed only “after signing pledges not to engage in terrorism.”
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These were the same kind of pledges Holder got the FALN terrorists to sign—the kind that aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. And, as if that
weren’t enough, news reports reassured us that “local tribal leaders are also expected to guarantee the good behavior of the men.”
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Wow. What a relief.

Yemen hadn’t released the men before because, during the Bush administration, it was concerned that doing so might “increase [Bush’s] reluctance to release Yemeni detainees from the Guantánamo Bay detention facility.”
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Yet under Obama it apparently felt so such trepidation.

Roughly 40 percent of the remaining detainees at Guantánamo Bay are Yemenis.

They’ll fit in nicely with their al-Qaeda colleagues in Yemen!

These stories are horrific enough, but they raise a more fundamental question: Is Obama out of his mind? Why would a president, charged with protecting us, let terrorists go? Why would he appoint the kinds of people he has to the Justice Department?

Let’s remember where Obama comes from. Before he was elected to the Illinois State Senate, his only real job was teaching constitutional law. He has to get up to speed on economics—he’s not doing too well so far—and foreign policy. But when it comes to constitutional law, he’s right in his element.

Obama believes that the Constitution applies equally to the prosecution of criminal defendants and to the gathering of intelligence. He believes you have to get your information in ways that won’t prevent it from being introduced as evidence in a criminal trial.

Who disagrees with this position? President Bush, to be sure—but also President Bill Clinton and even his attorney general Janet Reno. They all recognized that intelligence-gathering activities are not and should not be subject to the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments, which protect us against searches and seizures and other intrusive investigatory tactics. They believed that if you weren’t going to use the information in court to try to lock somebody up, you didn’t need to jump through the constitutional hoops in gathering the evidence.

Barack Obama disagrees. And when it comes to applying his point of view, he’s an absolutist about it.

Of course, he’ll learn. He will come to realize that his constitutional philosophy is leaving us unprotected. Unfortunately, that might not happen until we get hit again.

ACTION AGENDA

As President Obama dismantles the war on terror, the burden shifts to us, the American people, to be more vigilant than ever. In this unilateral disarmament, he has one crucial accomplice: the news media. The liberal press has always regarded 9/11 as a diversion exploited by the right wing to keep political power. They act as if it had never happened. In our previous book,
Fleeced,
we describe how the media minimizes the risk from terrorists, even going to the lengths of biasing its reporting of thwarted attacks so as to understate their likelihood of having succeeded.

We have to watch every move Obama makes—and sound the alarm each time. Only by speaking out when the mainstream media will not can we keep alive the sense of urgency and danger that accurately reflect the times in which we live.

We will likely be hit again. We cannot dismantle our defenses without exposing our people to grave danger. President Obama will come to regret his backsliding on this issue. We can only hope he does so before more lives are lost. He certainly doesn’t seem to get it yet.

The terrorist group Hamas is dedicated to spreading worldwide jihad and to the destruction of Israel. The group reigns supreme in the Gaza Strip, showering Israel with rockets every day as it preaches its doctrine of hate and violence. These days, that’s not news. But what is news—and qualifies as a catastrophe—is that the Obama administration is giving Hamas almost $1 billion in aid—money that is coming straight from the pockets of you, the American taxpayer!

Of course, this aid doesn’t go
directly
to Hamas, which the State Department lists as an Iranian front. Instead, it’s channeled through the group’s old partner, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The U.S. contribution makes up the largest portion of a $4.5 billion package of aid to the West Bank and Gaza, voted by the international community to rebuild Gaza in the wake of the Israeli invasion.
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But Hamas controls UNRWA. It has so infiltrated the UN that the agency has effectively become a front group for Hamas. The terrorist group pulls its strings.

Make no mistake: When we give money to UNRWA, we’re giving a check directly to Hamas.

Caroline Glick, the deputy managing editor of the
Jerusalem Post
and
one of the most astute observers of the Israeli/Middle East scene, minces no words on the connection.

“UNRWA openly collaborates with Hamas,” she notes. “Its workers double as Hamas combatants. Its refugee camps and schools are used as Hamas training bases and missile launch sites. Its mosques are used as recruiting grounds. And…the UN agency is also willing to act as Hamas’s surrogate.”
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Indeed, Peter Hansen, the commissioner-general of UNRWA, concedes that he has terrorists on his payroll. As he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in October 2008, “I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll and I don’t see that as a crime.”
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The links between UNRWA and Hamas are chilling.

According to Congressman Mark Kirk (R-IL), in December 2007 UNRWA confirmed that it gave money to families of suicide bombers.
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In 2002, Israeli troops entered UNRWA camps after repeated terrorist attacks. Arlene Kushner, a reporter for the Israel Resource News Agency, reports that the troops “discovered there small-arms factories, explosive laboratories, and suicide bombing cells.”
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Kushner also reports that “So pervasive is this situation in the camps that Hamas has gained control of the UNRWA workers’ union. In the Gaza Strip, the 2003 elections for union representatives saw Hamas-affiliated candidates gain substantial majorities in all union sectors, securing control of all seats in the teachers’ sector. Moreover, Hamas candidates fully constitute the union’s executive committee.”
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How, then, are we supposed to reconcile our hard-earned position as leaders of the international war on terrorism with the fact that we provide 30 percent of the budget for UNRWA, with its hand-in-glove policy with terrorists? (The European Union contributes 55 percent of UNRWA’s budget. Canada contributes 5 percent.)
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Recently, UNRWA showed its true colors by delivering a letter to U.S. Senator John Kerry during a trip to Gaza—a letter that came from the Hamas foreign ministry!

During the recent Israeli invasion of Gaza, UNRWA served as a regular megaphone for Hamas propaganda. For example, on January 7, 2009, Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for UNRWA, told the Democracy Now radio program that the Israelis had attacked a UNRWA school in Gaza. At first he said that there were “thirty confirmed fatalities and fifty-five injured, including fifteen critically.” Later he said that ten more people had died during the night. The victims, he said, “came—frightened, terrified, vulnerable—to our center. They were coming to what they thought was a neutral United Nations shelter, and then the rest is history—forty people killed.”
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The only problem with Gunness’s story is that it never happened. Three civilians and between eight and ten Hamas gunmen were killed
near
the school when an Israeli military unit was attacked by a Hamas cell. No shell ever hit the school, and no one in the school was injured. As the
Jerusalem Post
reported, the “UN issued a revised report…admitting that as the result of a ‘clerical error’ it was mistaken when it reported that the compound itself was shelled.” Gunness later denied ever saying that the shell had hit the school.
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The UNRWA uses its Web site to appeal for funds, listing banks that will receive funds from contributors—funds that are supposed to go toward rebuilding in Gaza. As Claudia Rosett has noted in
Forbes
, however, “One of [the banks] is the state-owned Commercial Bank of Syria, headquartered in Damascus…. for the past five years this bank has been under sanctions by the U.S. Treasury as an institution of “primary money-laundering concern.”
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In 2004, the Treasury Department enacted sanctions against the Commercial Bank of Syria, charging that it had laundered money from the United Nations’ deeply corrupt oil-for-food program in Iraq. The department also noted that the bank had handled many other transactions “that may be indicative of terrorist financing and money laundering,” including two accounts “that reference a reputed financier for Usama bin Laden.”
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In 2006, Under-Secretary of the Treasury Stuart Levey alleged, terrorists had used the bank to transfer substantial funds. “As a state-owned entity with inadequate money laundering and terrorist financing controls, the Commercial Bank of Syria poses a significant risk of being used to further
the Syrian Government’s continuing support for international terrorist groups,” Levey said. The clients included the terrorist groups Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Hamas.
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Yet, despite UNRWA’s terrible record of collaboration with Hamas, the United States is proceeding to ask its taxpayers to shell out for the so-called relief agency.

In announcing the U.S. contribution, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to great pains to say that “we have worked with the Palestinian Authority to install safeguards that will ensure that our funding is used only where, and for whom, it is intended, and does not end up in the wrong hands”—that is, in the hands of Hamas.
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But since the funds will be under the control of UNRWA, it’s hard to see how they can possibly be kept in the right hands!

Indeed, even if the Palestinian Authority—rather than Hamas—controls the funds, that can hardly be a solution, as the PA’s hands are far from clean. Reporting on one recent Arab League conference, Jonathan D. Halevi of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs noted that “a considerable portion of the aid raised for the Palestinian Authority” at the meeting would go “to support terrorists held in Israeli jails and their families.”
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The Palestinian Authority pays $200 per month to families of prisoners held in Israeli jails for terrorist attacks, to a total of $40 million per year. The aid continues even after their release. Halevi observes, “This aid serves as a form of social security for current and former prisoners and sends a message that their terrorist activities are officially sanctioned by the Palestinian Authority.”
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UNRWA has been in business for fifty-seven years, providing food, medicine, and social services to Palestinian refugees. But as the Jewish Policy Center notes, “it is directly providing financial and material support to the Hamas terrorist organization.”
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UNRWA employs 23,000 local Palestinians in its relief work. Only one hundred of its staff members are international UN personnel from other countries. Its local-friendly hiring policy separates UNRWA from the policies of the UN High Commission on Refugees and UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Fund), which do not employ local people who are also the recipients of agency services.
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At the very least, UNRWA relieves Hamas of the need to spend any of its money on providing services for the Gaza Strip, which it rules. UNRWA takes care of feeding, clothing, housing, and providing education and medical care in the Gaza—allowing Hamas to spend all its money on making war against Israel.

But Yoni Fighel, a former Israeli military governor in the Palestinian territories, says that UNRWA goes much further. He says that “UNRWA workers are permitted to openly affiliate with terrorist groups.” He notes that “as long as UNRWA employees are members of Fatah, Hamas, or PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine], they are going to pursue the interests of their party within the framework of their job…. Who’s going to check up on them to see that they don’t? UNRWA? They are UNRWA.”
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Perhaps UNRWA’s most direct involvement with terrorism is through the schools it owns and operates in Gaza. The schools’ faculty is notoriously pro-terrorist. For example, Suheil al-Hindi, a UNRWA teachers’ representative, spoke approvingly of suicide bombings in Gaza in 2003. “Instead of a condemnation,” one report noted, “al-Hindi received a promotion and was subsequently elected to the UNRWA’s clerks union.”
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The Jewish Policy Center also reports that “there have also been widespread reports of terrorism from UNRWA-supervised facilities, including sniper attacks from UNRWA-run schools, bomb and arms factories in UNRWA camps, the transport of terrorists to their target zones in UNRWA ambulances, and even UNRWA employees directly tied to terrorist attacks against civilians.”
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According to reports in the
New York Times
and other venues, UNRWA has “allowed terrorist groups to use their schools as ‘summer camps’ [for] 25,000 Palestinian children.” But instead of horseback riding and swimming, these kids spent their summer receiving “paramilitary training, including instructions on how to prepare Molotov cocktails and roadside bombs.”
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This is contemporary education—courtesy of the United Nations.

And when these bomb makers get it wrong—as they did when the homes of six Palestinian families on UNRWA’s registry were “destroyed during bomb-making activities, UNRWA concluded there was not enough evidence to deny them benefits under the terrorist exclusion law.”
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But a report from the Global Research in International Affairs Center raises an even more troubling issue: Does UNRWA want to solve the Palestinian refugee problem, or does it want to perpetuate it?

As the center points out, “UNRWA’s job is to keep Palestinian refugees in suspended animation—and at low living standards—until they achieve the goal set for them by…Hamas: Israel’s extinction. In the meantime, their suffering and anger is maintained as a weapon to encourage them toward violence and intransigence.”
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The center notes that “UNRWA schools become hotbeds of anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-Semitic indoctrination, recruiting offices for terrorist groups. UNRWA’s services are dominated by radicals who staff and subsidize radical groups while intimidating anyone from voicing a different line. UNRWA facilities are used to store and transport weapons, actually serving as military bases.”
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In fact, the hypocrisy runs deeper. As the center points out, UNRWA is “the exact opposite of other refugee relief operations.” Whereas other such agencies seek to resettle refugees, UNRWA is “dedicated to blocking resettlement” to keep alive the “thirst for revenge that inspires violence.”
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