The Idiocy Of Eric Holder- He Just Discovered Home Grown Terrorism

Ever read an article and wonder where have these people been for the last decade? Well that happened to me this morning when I read an ABC News article quoting the Attorney General of the United States of American, Eric Holder, saying that even two years ago, home grown terrorism wasn't concerning.

What was uppermost on his mind, however, is the alarming rise in the number of Americans who are more than willing to attack and kill their fellow citizens.

"It is one of the things that keeps me up at night," Holder said. "You didn't worry about this even two years ago -- about individuals, about Americans, to the extent that we now do. And -- that is of -- of great concern."

"The threat has changed from simply worrying about foreigners coming here, to worrying about people in the United States, American citizens -- raised here, born here, and who for whatever reason, have decided that they are going to become radicalized and take up arms against the nation in which they were born," he said.

The search engine, a wonderful tool, shows a variety of violent acts committed by home grown terrorists and also steps our government have tried to take against it.

On October 23, 2007 (that is three years ago Mr. Holder) the House of Representatives passed the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act with a vote of 404-6.

The bill failed to become law during the 110th congress. Point is, the offering of the bill by Representative Jane Harman (D-CA) shows undoubtedly that Democrats and Republicans were concerned, greatly, over home grown terrorism.

In may of 2008, the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs issued a Majority and Minority Staff Report, by Joseph Lieberman, Chairman Susan Collins, Ranking Minority Member, which also listed just a few examples of the problem seen back then.

The United States has not been immune from homegrown threats, as evidenced by the James case and other incidents. For example:

In December 2006, Derrick Shareef, a resident of Genoa, Illinois, who was not alleged to • be part of a terrorist organization but was inspired by violent Islamist ideology, was charged with, and ultimately pleaded guilty to attempting to acquire explosives as part of a plan to attack the Cherry Vale Mall in Rockford, Illinois.

In May 7, 2007, a group of six men were arrested as part of an alleged plot to attack the Fort • Dix military base in New Jersey. The men – three of whom were legally living in the United States – allegedly watched violent Islamist videos, obtained weapons, and planned and trained for the attack in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

In June 2007, federal law enforcement disrupted an ideologically inspired terrorist plot to • allegedly destroy fuel supplies and pipelines at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.

More from that report:

These incidents and others form part of a growing trend that has raised concerns within the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities. The Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert S. Mueller, discussed this dangerous trend before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on February 5, 2008. Director McConnell testified that:

Over the next year, attacks by “homegrown” extremists inspired by militant Islamic ideology but without operational direction from al-Qa’ida will remain a threat to the United States or against U.S. interests overseas. The spread of radical Salafi Internet sites that provide religious justification for attacks, increasingly aggressive and violent anti-Western rhetoric and actions by local groups, and the growing number of radical, self-generating cells in Western countries that identify with violent Salafi objectives, all suggest growth of a radical and violent segment among the West’s Muslim populations.… The al-Qaida-propagated narrative of an “us versus them” struggle serves both as a platform and a potential catalyst for radicalization of Muslims alienated from the mainstream U.S. population.

To date, cells detected in the United States have lacked the level of sophistication, experience, and access to resources of terrorist cells overseas. Their efforts, when disrupted, largely have been in the nascent phase, and authorities often were able to take advantage of poor operational tradecraft. However, the growing use of the Internet to identify and connect with networks throughout the world offers opportunities to build relationships and gain expertise that previously were available only in overseas training camps. It is likely that such independent groups will use information on destructive tactics available on the Internet to boost their own capabilities.

And, according to Director Mueller:

[W]e face the challenges presented by a third group and that is self-radicalized, homegrown extremists in the United States. While not formally affiliated with a foreign terrorist group, they are inspired by those groups’ messages of violence, often through the Internet, and because they lack formal ties, they are often particularly difficult to detect.

The 24 page PDF report itself can be found here.

Then a blockbuster report from early 2009 reveling 35 known terrorist compounds on U.S. soil.

Search engines are wonderful tools and perhaps Eric Holder should learn how to use one or better yet, read the reports he undoubtedly has access to concerning this issue that date back well over two years ago.

Just a thought.

Others providing examples:

The Jawa Report provides a video release, produced in 2008 (Yes Mr. Holder, again that is two years ago!!) showing the explicit threat of homegrown terrorism.

Just One Minute provides examples that Holder, as Attorney General, should be well aware of that date back to a couple years ago when Holder obviously slept through the year.

No, two years ago the only thing we knew about Reid, Padilla, the Lackawanna Six et al was that Bush was shreddding the Constitution and Gitmo needed to be closed. Two years ago the the DHS was fretting about right-wing haters.

Oh, well - I don't know why Holder wants to credit Obama and say that Muslims only became radicalized in the last two years, but there it is.

I don't know what rock Holder was hiding under for the last decade but perhaps he needs to crawl back under it and stop giving interviews if he is going to spout nonsense such as this.

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Ghailani Verdict: Video Reactions, Family Of The Murdered, Politicians And Pundits

Part #1, found here, of the spectacular failure on the part of the Obama administration in their "test" case of conducting a civilian trial of a terrorist, which resulted in one conviction of conspiracy while acquitting Ahmed Ghailani on 284 other charges, including the murders of 224 innocent people.

This post is video reactions from a family member who is outraged over this miscarriage of justice and other video reactions from politicians and pundits throughout the night and this morning.

Starting with MSNBC who interviewed Edith Blakely who lost a husband and a son in the embassy bombings of 1998. She calls this a travesty.



Representative Burton Addresses the Ghailani Acquittal



Rep. Peter King on Fox News on Ghailani's acquittal:



Obama's Justice Fails: Embassy Bomber Ahmed Ghailani Not Guilty All But 1 Count



Ghailani Verdict a Blow to Department of Justice




YouTube is full of video and reactions.

To top it off, the administration defends this incompetence. I wonder if Obama will have the balls to try to defend this to Mrs. Blakely's face.



Related:

Failure Was Obama's Only Option- 1998 Terrorist Bombing Detainee Found Guilty Of One Out of 285 Charges

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Failure Was Obama's Only Option- 1998 Terrorist Bombing Detainee Found Guilty Of One Out of 285 Charges

Ahmed Ghailani, terrorist bombing detainee, charged with 285 counts of conspiracy and murder in the 1998 terrorist bombings of the United States Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania was convicted of only one charge of conspiracy and acquitted of over 220 murders because of the Obama administration's incompetence.

Barack Obama and Attorney General of the United States Eric Holder decided to have Ghailani tried in a civilian court instead of military, where he was found guilty of just one charge.

That charge was one count of conspiracy to destroy government buildings and property and he was acquitted on four counts of conspiracy, including conspiring to kill Americans and to use weapons of mass destruction, yet the destruction caused by that one count of conspiracy resulted in the deaths of 224 people, including 12 Americans, and injury to thousands of others.


NYT:

The case has been seen as a test of President Obama’s goal of trying detainees in federal court whenever feasible, and the result seems certain to fuel debate over whether civilian courts are appropriate for trying terrorists.

All of which will not see justice because of Barack Obama's failure to understand that civilian courts are not prepared nor capable of convicting terrorists for terrorist acts, the whole reason military tribunals were set up to begin with.

In 2009, when Obama and Holder decided that the 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, should be tried in a civilian court and the debated heated up about the preparedness of civilian courts to convict terrorists, Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee that "failure was not an option."

This travesty with Ahmed Ghailani shows that failure was and is the only option when they attempted to conduct a civilian trial against an enemy combatant.

The families of over 200 murder victims will never see true justice now because of Barack Obama's arrogance and incompetence.

That is a very steep price to pay for a lesson that initial reactions show the Obama administration still didn't learn and are touting the one conviction out of 285 charges as some type of accomplishment!!!

For all the smack talk against President George Bush for his assertions that terrorists be treated as terrorists and not as ordinary American citizens that simply broke the law, he cared. He understood that terrorists acts, plots, and the murder of innocent people should be punished, not rewarded by allowing civilian courts who cannot use all the evidence, including a confession, to replace military tribunals of enemy combatants.

Terrorists are enemy combatants, not civilians.



Reactions

Keep America Safe issued a statement regarding the travesty of the Ahmed Ghailani trial:

“Bad ideas have dangerous consequences. The Obama Administration recklessly insisted on a civilian trial for Ahmed Ghailani, and rolled the dice in a time of war. The Department of Justice says it’s pleased by the verdict. Ask the families of the victims if they’re pleased. And this result isn’t just embarrassing. It’s dangerous. It signals weakness in a time of war. The Ghailani trial was supposed to be a test case for future trials of 9/11 terrorists.

We urge the president: End this reckless experiment. Reverse course. Use the military commissions at Guantanamo that Congress has authorized. And, above all–accept the fact that we are at war.”

Representative Peter King, Republican of New York who will become chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee in January after the midterms put the GOP in control of the House of Representatives, also issued a statement.

“I am disgusted at the total miscarriage of justice today in Manhattan’s federal civilian court. In a case where Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was facing 285 criminal counts, including hundreds of murder charges, and where Attorney General Eric Holder assured us that ‘failure is not an option,’ the jury found him guilty on only one count and acquitted him of all other counts including every murder charge.

“This tragic verdict demonstrates the absolute insanity of the Obama Administration’s decision to try al-Qaeda terrorists in civilian courts.

“This case was doomed from the beginning when the judge excluded DOJ’s key witness who admitted selling the explosives to Ghailani. Where is the justice for the more than 200 people killed and 4,000 injured in the terrorist bombings of our U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania?

“This is a tragic wake-up call to the Obama Administration to immediately abandon its ill-advised plan to try Guantanamo terrorists like the admitted 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed in federal civilian courts. We must treat them as wartime enemies and try them in military commissions at Guantanamo.

“As the next Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, I intend to hold hearings and conduct the necessary oversight on this critical homeland security issue in the 112th Congress.”

Representative Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee nails it when he said "This case was supposed to be the easy one, and the Obama administration failed."

Other reactions

American Spectator:

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who was involved in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Africa, has been acquitted on all but one of 285 counts against him. He's still going to prison for at least 20 years and maybe for life (sentencing comes in January), but the verdict -- which seems to suggest that Ghailani is guilty of conspiracy to blow up the buildings but somehow not guilty of killing the victims -- is an embarrassment for the Obama justice department, and opponents of trying Guantanamo detainees in civilian court are rightly seizing upon it. Keep America Safe and incoming House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King each issued statements earlier this evening.

Hot Air:

Let’s face it. Barack Obama and Eric Holder gambled their entire national-security credibility on the Ahmed “Foopie” Ghailani trial, arguing that they could get convictions of detainees captured abroad by military and intelligence assets while using federal courts as a venue rather than the military commissions that Congress repeatedly authorized for that purpose. Holder scolded critics who pointed out all of the reasons that such a strategy was much more likely to fail for “politicizing” the process, especially in regard to the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whose case is more problematic than Ghailani’s, where the FBI did a large part of the investigation before intelligence assets were used to seize and interrogate Ghailani.

The failure of Holder’s DoJ to win anything more than a single conspiracy count against Ghailani as a result of using a process designed for domestic criminals than wartime enemies shows that the critics had it right all along. It also shows that both Obama and Holder have been proven spectacularly wrong, since a man who confessed to the murder of over two hundred people will now face as little as 20 years, with a big chunk of whatever sentence Foopie receives being reduced by time already served.

Patterico's Pontifications:

As I explained last night, the judge who excluded the witness acknowledged that “national security motivated the CIA interrogations” because “[t]he identities and methods of others involved in those bombings, including the source of the explosives, were of critical importance to national security.” But in a civilian court, which devised exclusionary rules designed to address a different situation (typical police interrogation of criminal suspects), the CIA’s motive was not reason enough to admit the evidence. In a military tribunal, I believe the judges would have given greater weight to the CIA’s benevolent motives and admitted the evidence.

This is why Obama’s decision was such an unnecessary disaster.

You can go see the rest of the reactions and discussions over at Memeorandum.

Utter incompetence on behalf of Barack Obama and Eric Holder.

Related:

Part #2, video reaction of a family member of two of the murder victims, politicians and pundits.

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