Obama's Policies: America's New Risk from Terrorists

In issuing these executive orders, Mr. Obama is returning America to the failed law enforcement approach to fighting terrorism that prevailed before Sept. 11, 2001.

The column below by John Yoo, which appeared last Thursday in the Wall Street Journal, analyzes some of the decisions President Obama made in his first week as commander-in-chief. Taken together, these decisions, as Yoo notes, “will seriously handicap our intelligence agencies from preventing future terrorist attacks.”

Obama Made a Rash Decision on Gitmo;

By John Yoo [condensed]

During his first week as commander in chief, President Barack Obama ordered the closure of Guantanamo Bay and terminated the CIA's special authority to interrogate terrorists.

While these actions will certainly please his base -- gone are the cries of an "imperial presidency" -- they will also seriously handicap our intelligence agencies from preventing future terrorist attacks. In issuing these executive orders, Mr. Obama is returning America to the failed law enforcement approach to fighting terrorism that prevailed before Sept. 11, 2001.

He's also drying up the most valuable sources of intelligence on al Qaeda, which, according to CIA Director Michael Hayden, has come largely out of the tough interrogation of high-level operatives during the early years of the war. The question Mr. Obama should have asked right after the inaugural parade was: What will happen after we capture the next Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Abu Zubaydah? Instead, he took action without a meeting of his full national security staff, and without a legal review of all the policy options available to meet the threats facing our country.

It's also likely Mr. Obama will declare terrorists to be prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. The Bush administration classified terrorists -- well supported by legal and historical precedent -- like pirates, illegal combatants who do not fight on behalf of a nation and refuse to obey the laws of war.

The CIA must now conduct interrogations according to the rules of the Army Field Manual, which prohibits coercive techniques, threats and promises, and the good-cop bad-cop routines used in police stations throughout America. Mr. Obama has also ordered that al Qaeda leaders are to be protected from "outrages on personal dignity" and "humiliating and degrading treatment" in accord with the Geneva Conventions.

His new order amounts to requiring -- on penalty of prosecution -- that CIA interrogators be polite. Coercive measures are unwisely banned with no exceptions, regardless of the danger confronting the country. Eliminating the Bush system will mean that we will get no more information from captured al Qaeda terrorists.

Every prisoner will have the right to a lawyer (which they will surely demand), the right to remain silent, and the right to a speedy trial. The first thing any lawyer will do is tell his clients to shut up.

The KSMs or Abu Zubaydahs of the future will respond to no verbal questioning or trickery -- which is precisely why the Bush administration felt compelled to use more coercive measures in the first place. Our soldiers and agents in the field will have to run more risks as they must secure physical evidence at the point of capture and maintain a chain of custody that will stand up to the standards of a civilian court.

Relying on the civilian justice system not only robs us of the most effective intelligence tool to avert future attacks, it provides an opportunity for our enemies to obtain intelligence on us.

If terrorists are now to be treated as ordinary criminals, their defense lawyers will insist that the government produce in open court all U.S. intelligence on their client along with the methods used by the CIA and NSA to get it. A defendant's constitutional right to demand the government's files often forces prosecutors to offer plea bargains to spies rather than risk disclosure of intelligence secrets.

Reprinted with permission from

ACT for America

P.O. Box 12765

Pensacola, FL 32591

http://www.actforamerica.org/

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008-2009 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

Ingrid Mattson

When there are Muslims in America who have publicly spoken out against Jihad, why was Ingrid Mattson chosen for this interfaith prayer service?

Today, Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), will deliver a prayer at the National Prayer Service, invited by President Obama. It is sufficiently problematic that ISNA, the organization of which Ingrid Mattson is president, was designated an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial (which produced guilty verdicts on 108 counts). Mattson’s words and views beg the question: When there are Muslims in America who have publicly spoken out against Jihad, against shariah law, and against ISNA, why was Ingrid Mattson chosen for this interfaith prayer service?

In her own words:

"[C]onsider the role of American Muslims in the [specific] context of world events following the terrorist attacks of September 11th. I will acknowledge that since Muslim leadership must be responsive to events, this question cannot be answered completely in isolation of specific circumstances. The appropriate response will necessarily depend on the nature of the threat. At the same time, I will stress that any truly appropriate response must be firmly rooted in faith. [ ] People of faith have a certain kind of solidarity with others of their faith community that transcends the basic rights and duties of citizenship."

She did not author this in an article titled "Stopping Our Muslim Extremist Brothers." Instead, it was titled Stopping Oppression: an Islamic Obligation. Guess what "oppression" she meant.

In a reasoned "translation" of Mattson's words:
the "role" of American Muslims must be judged in a "context" of events that happened after 9/11;
cannot be judged "in isolation of specific circumstances;
and must be rooted in faith with other Muslims, a faith that takes no note of the rights and duties of being Americans first.
Instead, American Muslims "role" must be in solidarity with others of their "faith community."

Forget that American Jews, Catholics, Coptics, Hindus, atheists, Southern Babtists and others came together in a solidarity that specifically transcended their own congregational communities. Instead, they came together in the brotherhood and spirit that comes with having our rights and citizenship guaranteed.

"The true values of America are those which we decide to embrace as our own [because] the American Constitution, like foundational religious texts, can be read in many different ways."

Again, to translate: Muslims can pick and choose which American values to call "true" and then may decided to embrace only those, because they can read anything into the Constitution they wish.

She is wrong when she says the Constitution can be read in many different ways. There are only two ways: Originalism, and non-Originalism which covers everything the Founding Fathers wrote were not the intentions of that document and does not cover most of the things they wrote were the specific intentions of that document. Justifications for following non-Originalism are usually for the purposes of pragmatism, which obviously would serve the Muslim community as it picked-and-chose only the parts of the law they found served the ideas of Sharia, of Shura, of takaful insurance, or of anything else associated with Islam; but specifically nothing that does not serve Allah.

Mattson denies the existence of terrorist cells in the United States: "There's a prejudgment, a collective judgment of Muslims, and a suspicion that well 'you may appear nice, but we know there are sleeper cells of Americans,' which of course is not true. There aren't any sleeper cells. [emphasis added]

Mattson defends Wahhabism. All unbelievers (i.e. Muslims who do not accept the teachings of 'Abd ul-Wahhab, as well as Christians, &c.) were to be put to death. Immediate entrance into Paradise was promised to his soldiers who fell in battle, and it is said that each soldier was provided with a written order from Wahhab to the gate-keeper of heaven to admit him forthwith. Wahhabi

"This is not a sect. It is the name of a reform movement that began 200 years ago to rid Islamic societies of cultural practices and rigid interpretation that had acquired over the centuries. It really was analogous to the European protestant reformation." Center for Security Policy (Research Brief)

Forget that shura is cultural practices and sharia is a rigid and merciless practice of Muslim justice.

When there are Muslims in America who have publicly spoken out against Jihad, against shariah law, and against ISNA, why was Ingrid Mattson chosen for this interfaith prayer service?

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008-2009 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

Will Domestic Violence Stop Stealth Sharia?

U.S. Won't Stop Sharia-Jihad on American Soil;

Americans Are Certain To Try

We are living in very dangerous times for American freedom. It does not come primarily from overt acts of terrorism, such as 9/11. It comes from "stealth jihad", the practice of getting the federal government to either approve of sharia practices in America, like Takaful insurance, or to ignore the practice of forcing sharia principles in the workplace, as Islamacists did at a meat processing plant.

Christians should be worried because they have not had as much progress as Muslims, in their own endeavor of breaking down the walls of the separation of church and state, to get the government to either approve of, or to ignore, the practice of Christian principles. The U.S. wouldn't want to make the Muslims angry, would it, at this time in history, so the living Constitution, rather than the original Constitution, twists the Supreme Law to accomodate them.

Because the secularity of the Constitutional rights of America are not being protected by whatever particular authorities have the power to do so, such as the court system or Congress or State Attorneys General, there is a power vacuum between the People, who deserve justice, and the powers-that-be who are not willing--or who claim to be unable--to stop such Constitutional erosion.

The Constitution has eroded measurably since the end of the Civil War, and no one seems willing or able to stand up and say so. Just the opposite is happening: we have Amendments to State's Constitutions that have the sole purpose of denying rights, and we have a new incoming President who is running full-steam-ahead with the Marxist economic football under his arm.

But these are things Americans have lived with for decades or more, watching the Constitution being torn down from inside the country. We deal with it, though obviously not effectively because the erosion is like that on a mountain side with constant rain upon it and little protection from trees and undergrowth. The Constitution is going to landslide if the rain is not stopped.

Stealth jihad, however, is something new, and something the American people will not stand for--once they realize the severity of the situation. In the vacuum of official worry over sharia-compliance under the Constitution, Americans will soon come to find that sharia Muslims have powers which the Constitution can not give to Christians, Jews, atheists, and others, and that is the power to enforce their beliefs on society where ever justice fails society.

"Take special note of the shariah-compliant supervisory board at AIG," warns Act for America. "Muhammed Imran Usmani is the son and disciple of Muhammed Taki Usmani. The elder Usmani is a 'who’s who' in the Islamist world and an outspoken proponent of aggressive jihad. For example, he has issued numerous fatwas (religious rulings) that provide material support for terrorism.

"The danger of American financial institutions getting in bed with well-known advocates of jihad and terrorism should be obvious to anyone who takes even a cursory look. It was Lenin who stated 'The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.'"

In this case we are not selling the jihadists the rope; we are condeding that they have a right to make us give them rope at our own expense. We concede their right to the rope because we are unwilling to admit that we need to take an Originalist view of the Constitution. To take such a view would cause irreparable harm to the socialism and the anti-individualism already rampant in this country.

But here is the point of this piece: in the vacuum of official power to uphold the Constitition and the Supreme Court rulings on Originalism, such as the acceptance of Jefferson's "wall of separation between church and state," some Americans are going to fill that vacuum with guns and bombs, and they will use them on any Muslim targets they see.

These Americans will be seen as "domestic terrorists," by officialdom, but they will be seen as heros by the Originalists and libertarians and conservatives and others who understand that stealth jihadism is just as insidious and evil as the things we are fighting against in the "war on terror," in our two wars are, in our efforts at Homeland Security.

The problem is, no one in officialdom is securing the homeland against legal attacks on our Constitution from within our own borders. That is partly what is stealthy about this form of jihadism; the sharia-believing Muslims don't have to use bombs against us. They can use against us our own ignorance of how much Constitutional integrity we have already lost, our stupidity, and our compassion to be fair.

Something will have to give, and if officialdom in America does not stop the sharia erosion of the separation of church and state, then some Americans are going to see that guns and bombs will, at the least, stop the jihadists--and possibly the officials--who are converting Americans into virtual Muslims by forcing us to accept that those officials are going to protect sharia Muslims as they have never protected any other form of religious practice in this country.

I would be the first to applaud those who use the guns and bombs against sharia. Those people would be the real heros, not people like me who sit behind a computer screen and tell the rest of America how far we are falling.

But it would be a wasted effort to use guns and bombs, which is why I won't do it myself. It would be wasted because officialdom is hell-bent on twisting the Constitution to their own egalitarian purposes, from the new President on down, and backward for fifteen decades.

A little domestic terrorism is only going to create domestic terrorists. Officialdom will not protect them, and they will be the losers, not the sharia Muslims.

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

Understanding: Islamicism; Militant Feminism

From Act for America

Once again we have witnessed an Islamic terrorist attack incited and justified through appeals to Islam by its perpetrators. On one level it is understandable why so many in the West are unwilling or unable to connect the militant ideology of political Islam to the thousands of Islamic terror attacks that have been committed worldwide since 9/11. We extol the virtues of tolerance and pluralism and believe others in the world do so as well, so it is easy to dismiss such attacks as the work of a few “extremists,” rather than the product of adherence to an ideology.

The fatal flaw in this thinking is this: How can we successfully win a war on Islamic terrorism if we don’t correctly define the threat doctrine that motivates its adherents?

It is argued that most of the world’s Muslims are not terrorists. While true, this fact is irrelevant. Most of the world’s Muslims have never read the Qur’an or the Hadith in a language they can understand. They have not read the hundreds of passages that call for jihad against infidels, nor do they renounce such passages. They do not organize en masse to denounce the terrorist acts perpetrated by other Muslims in the name of Islam, nor do they denounce the frequent exhortations to world subjugation found in the holy books of Islam.

Yes, there are Muslims who have denounced the Mumbai attacks. But examine their denunciations closely and you will be hard-pressed to find renunciations of the supremacist doctrine of political Islam -- the foundation for jihad -- which emanates from its holy books. This is the justification commonly cited by terrorists for their actions. We in the West must come to grips with the uncomfortable fact that terrorism is a symptom of this militant, supremacist ideology.

Terrorism is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

And it is but one of many means used by those who are devoted to the supremacist ideology of political Islam. [all emphases added]

From Pacific Research Institute

by Sally C. Pipes, President and CEO

The national election has finally passed, thankfully without any mandate for 50-50 gender representation of the kind favored by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Susan Pinker, author of "The Sexual Paradox", [wrote] on the ability to make choices as “one of the benefits of living in a postfeminist Western democracy.” Does this mean that facts and common sense have finally prevailed against militant feminism, and that we can all celebrate the victory and get on with our lives? If a recent math controversy is any indication, the answer is no.

Last summer, a study of more than seven million students from grades 2-11, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and published in the journal Science, said that boys and girls perform equally well in math. At least, that is how the story was brokered to the public.

In her story on the study, Wendy Hansen of the Los Angeles Times could not resist taking a swing at Larry Summers, who as president of Harvard reportedly said that boys are more likely than girls to be math geniuses. Mr. Summers didn’t exactly say that, though it is true. As Susan Pinker has pointed out, there are more male geniuses, and also more male idiots. Male dominance of the idiot ranks, which can be easily verified in politics, does not appear to bother feminists in the slightest.

On the other coast, Tamar Lewin of the New York Times had Larry Summers questioning women’s intrinsic ability. He didn’t actually question it, however, but only suggested it was something to consider for further study. As for Tamar Lewin’s portrayal of the new study, she had boys and girls in a dead heat in the math competition. As the headline put it, “No Gap for Girls.” The results of the study are a bit more nuanced than that, as Heather MacDonald pointed out so clearly in City Journal.

Boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, she noted, but boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges. That also squares with Susan Pinker’s observation on genius, but not with Tamar Lewin’s contention that in every category girls did as well as boys. They didn’t.

“This statement is simply wrong,” Heather MacDonald wrote, pointing out that among white 11th-graders, there were twice as many boys as girls above the 99th percentile. Furthermore, among mathematically gifted adolescents, between five and 10 times as many boys as girls have been found to receive near-perfect scores on the math SATs. So why the misleading report?

Since boys and girls perform the same in math, the reasoning goes, any gender imbalance in a math, science, or engineering department, any “underrepresentation,” in other words, can only be due to bias and discrimination. That’s where they are going with the skewed reports. Every workplace, according to the dogma, should break down 50-50 between men and women. If not, it’s all due to stereotypes and prejudice, to be remedied, of course, by government action. We have already noted that the Title IX troops are leading a surge aimed at math and engineering departments.

The study published in Science has some valuable lessons, but not the ones touted by Tamar Lewin. “Far from raising the presumption of gender bias among schools and colleges,” says Heather MacDonald, “the Science study strengthens a competing hypothesis: that the main drivers of success in scientific fields are aptitude and knowledge, in conjunction with personal choices about career and family that feminists refuse to acknowledge.”

With careful scholars such as Louann Brizendine, Susan Pinker, and Christina Hoff Sommers, there is now much more that feminists can refuse to acknowledge. Excuse me if I call this feminaticism: the persistent refusal to acknowledge any science or reality that raises doubts about feminist dogma, and the pursuit of misguided public policies based on those dogmas, even when discredited.

As Heather MacDonald also pointed out, the Wall Street Journal got the story right on the math study, that average scores are similar but that boys predominate at the margins. The author was Keith J. Winstein, so maybe men are also better at journalism about math. Feminaticism, however, seems to have eager advocates in the prestige press, as well as the academy and the legislature. That means, alas, that we can’t relax or take anything for granted, even in a post-feminist Western democracy where women enjoy boundless choices.

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

Is Obama A U.S. Citizen?

Federal Suit to Determine Obama's U.S. Citizenship;

Obama Hires Terrorist Organization to Defend Him

"Phillip Berg has filed a suit in Federal court. [Denver Dem Convention: Clinton Supporter Files to Disqualify Obama] The suit was against Barack Obama and the Democrat National Committee. It asked the court to force Obama to prove he was an American citizen.
If you are Obama, what do you do?

"A. Provide the court with the three documents in question and go back to shaking hands, making promises and smiling for the cameras.
B. Provide images of one of the documents to a friendly website to post, but not to the judge.
C. Ignore the judge, then make a motion to dismiss the case, in lieu of providing the proof.
D. In the meantime, quietly, post a notice at your website, FighttheSmears.com that you had dual citizenship with Kenya.
E. Hire the top gun attorney from the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to fight the case.
F. File a Joint Motion for Protective Order to Stay Discovery Pending a Decision on the Motion to Dismiss (which was) filed on 09/24/08, thereby putting the matter off until–hopefully–after the election.

"Time’s up. What do you do?
Most readers sensibly chose A.
But, if you’re Barack Obama, you chose answers B, C, D, E and F.
A curious response for a campaign interested in 'fighting the smears'". DBKP http://deathby1000papercuts.com/2008/10/obama-birth-cerificate-federal-lawsuit-the-curious-behavior-of-the-obama-campaign/

I highlighted the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) because of the tough, disciplined, and principled arguments made against it for years by ACT! for America and others including many Senators and Congressmen and Women--because Obama's attorney works for a domestic terrorist organization. http://www.actforamerica.org/

"[T]he Islamway website originally operated from Canada until a series of articles was published by National Post reporter Stewart Bell just days before 9/11 exposing that the website published an 'invitation to jihad' and provided instructions on how to train at terrorist camps run by Al-Qaeda. Islamway was defended by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which published several action alerts and press releases decrying the newspaper’s “tabloid journalism” and promoting Islamophobia, directing its supporters to besiege the paper’s editors to complain of the supposedly “anti-Muslim” bias of the reporter. The National Post reportedly received death threats during CAIR’s protest (again, which occurred less than two weeks before 9/11). The Royal Canadian Mounted Police initiated an investigation at the request of B’nai B’rith Canada, but the website relocated to the US, prompting authorities there to drop their inquiry." [emphasis added] http://www.actforamerica.org/index.php/learn/recent-news/268-mainstream-us-islamic-websites-and-terror-

"'CAIR: Names Will Always Hurt You;' The Investigative Project on Terrorism is among those who are critical of new guidelines discouraging the use of terms like "Islamist" ...

"In March 2008, it was reported that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was continuing their efforts to 'train' American FBI agents."

"'CAIR Gets Failing Grades at Running Ohio Charter'; Schools Taxpayers finance religious extremism and academic failure. by Patrick Poole The Ohio ...

"Terror on Trial: Hamas Leaders Used for U.S.-Based Muslim Charity Fundraising"

"When the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was founded, the HAMAS network leaders in the US turned to one of its own, Anisa And El Fattah/Caroline F. Keeble to serve as one of its founding board members. Her two mentors and former employers, HAMAS chief Mousa Abu Marzook and Abdurahman Alamoudi, have respectively been designated a terrorist and convicted of terrorist support. Thus, she is quite familiar with both the overt and more subtle methods of cultural terrorism." [all quotes above from
http://www.actforamerica.org/index.php/component/search/CAIR?ordering=newest&searchphrase=all&limit=30
more from the Academy Blogger

Act! for America's very-outfront spokeswoman is Brigitte Gabriel. "Ms. Gabriel is a former news anchor for “World News”, the Arabic evening news broadcast for Middle East Television seen throughout Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. She covered the Israeli withdrawal from Central Lebanon, the Israeli Security Zone and the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza. Her work was international in scope, bringing her in contact with world figures such as Margaret Thatcher, George H. Bush Sr., Itshak Rabin, Shimon Perez and Ariel Sharon." http://www.actforamerica.org/index.php/learn/about-ms-gabriel [for a complete list of Act! articles Act! on CAIR ]

But Act! is not the only organization taking note of CAIR's radicalism in the U.S.

"Let there be no doubt that the Council on American-Islamic Relations is a terrorist supporting front organization that is partially funded by terrorists, founded by terrorists, and that CAIR wishes nothing more than the implementation of Sharia Law in America." Anti-CAIR http://www.anti-cair-net.org/

Anti-CAIR has the most complete and comprehensive single website against CAIR, but is not as well known as Act! for America. It is frighteningly enlightening to read U.S. Senator Charles Schumer say: "we know [CAIR] has ties to terrorism" [and] "intimate links with Hamas."" Statements From Sept. 2003 Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security

U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer: "To praise [CAIR] because they haven't been indicted is like somebody saying, 'I'm not a crook'" Sen. Boxer discussing her decision to rescind award given to CAIR Official

U.S. Rep. Bill Shuster: "Time and again [CAIR] has shown itself to be nothing more than an apologist for groups bent on the destruction of Israel and Islamic domination over the West."

Anti-CAIR says they "are a group of concerned Americans dedicated to eliminating the Islamist terrorist threat to the United States Constitution.
"We believe that the Council on American-Islamic Relations, (CAIR), is a clear and present danger to our Constitution and our way of life. We will continue to expose CAIR's involvement in supporting Islamist terrorists, terrorist-sponsoring organizations and groups in the United States. (Founded April 2003)"

And this is the group that Obama has hired to defend him?

Note: I will be the featured speaker at the Center For Inquiry (CFI) meeting, October 16, 2008, in Portage, Michigan. The topic is "Atheism as a 'Religion' Protected by Courts According to the Establishment Clause" CEC

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of the
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM, The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:

© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®