KGUN9

By JEFF KAROUB
Associated Press Writer

DETROIT (AP) – More than 1,000 documents, including some dating back to the beginning of the Nation of Islam, were found in the attic of a home in Detroit, the city where the secretive movement started 80 years ago, a lawyer said.

Attorney Gregory Reed unveiled some documents, letters and a booklet Thursday at a Detroit mosque, including a rare 1933 signature of Nation of Islam founder W.D. Fard. Reed said the well-preserved documents detail the early structure and teachings of the group founded on the ideals of black nationalism.

“Very few have seen the internal workings of how (the Nation of Islam) was put together,” said Reed, whose Keeper of the Word Foundation oversees collections and exhibits that include the works of Malcolm X, Rosa Parks and Nelson Mandela.

He said the boxes which also included detailed literature about the early movement’s educational and leadership training were recently discovered by an unidentified man whose family members were Nation of Islam “pioneers.” Reed said he was contacted by the family, which owns the home, because of his work with other collections.

Reed described another piece as a “manifesto” handwritten by Fard that became required reading for Nation of Islam members through the 1950s. It was not displayed at the mosque, remaining instead with the vast majority of artifacts remaining in a vault.

He said the material has been reviewed and appraised by several collectors and auctioneers he didn’t name. A foundation set up by the family in association with Keeper of the Word controls the rights to the collection.

Reed said officials with the Chicago-based Nation of Islam are aware of the documents and Reed’s plans to publicly display them at a proposed center in Detroit. He said the family is working with him on plans for the “W.D. Fard Founder’s Center,” which they hope to jointly announce within 60 days.

Messages left Friday by The Associated Press for top leaders of the Nation of Islam were not immediately returned.

Lawrence Mumiya, a Vassar College professor of religion and Africana studies, said the documents should be most revealing and rewarding for scholars and others outside the movement. He said the Nation of Islam has a significant collection that isn’t shared with nonmembers.

“I think this trove of 1,000 documents is very important for scholarship and for the writing of the history of the Nation,” he said. “It won’t change much for the Nation itself, but it may change things for people like myself who have never seen these documents.”

Fard attracted black Detroiters on the margins of society with a message of self-improvement and separation from whites. Fard said whites were inherently evil because of their enslavement of blacks.

The Nation of Islam was rebuilt by Farrakhan in the late 1970s after W.D. Mohammed, the son of longtime leader Elijah Mohammed, broke away and moved many followers toward mainstream Islam.

The Nation of Islam continues to be led by Farrakhan, who has haltingly moved toward mainstream Islam but maintains a separatist ideology.

Nation of Islam members traditionally have believed that God came in the form of Fard; Islam recognizes only one God.

In the past, Farrakhan’s most inflammatory comments have included referring to Judaism as a “gutter religion” and calling Adolf Hitler “wickedly great.” Farrakhan has over the years denied claims of anti-Semitism, arguing his remarks are often taken out of context and that criticism of Jews in any light automatically earns the “anti-Semite” label.

A longtime target of federal surveillance, the movement is highly secretive. Even researchers who follow the group closely do not know how many members or mosques it has, or how much money it makes.

By Doug Hagmann  

Under the administration of Barack Hussein Obama, the United States submitted its first ever “Universal Periodic Review (UPR) report” to the United Nations.  This is the first time in the history of the United Nations that the U.S. has submitted a report to the United Nation’s Human Rights Council, which is the first step in submitting the United States to international review by some of the most repressive and abusive nations in the world.  The 29-page report can be read here.

The report is the product of about a dozen conferences held across the U.S. between January and April 2010. The participants of these conferences featured such luminaries as Stephen Rickard and Wendy Patten, from George Soros’ Open Society Institute; Devon Chaffee, Human Rights First; Andrea Prasow, Human Rights Watch; Imad Hamad (a suspected member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization), American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee; Dawud Walid, Council American Islamic Relations; Nabih Ayad, Michigan Civil Rights Commission; Ron Scott, Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality; Osama Siblani, Arab American News; Shannon Minter, National Center for Lesbian Rights and Cynthia Soohoo, Center for Reproductive Rights, among others.

According to its authors, the report to the United Nations “gives a partial snapshot of the current human rights situation in the United States, including some of the areas where problems persist in our society.” Obviously, one of the “problems” identified with the report is illegal immigration and Arizona’s own initiate to solve the problem through state legislation. SB 1070 has been a particularly thorny issue to the Obama administration, which has now been moved to an international venue and potential international oversight by the United Nations. The stakes for our national sovereignty have been just raised by the submission of this document, which is the first step of “voluntary compliance” to the provisions of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council.

It is no surprise that the report is dripping with the all too familiar “blame America first” rhetoric that has been the gold-standard of “citizen of the world” Barack Hussein Obama. The report promises that “President Obama remains firmly committed to fixing our broken immigration system…” and promises to work “with fellow members of the Human Rights Council.”

Taking counsel from the list of individuals and organizations, some who have openly called for the subjugation of our country to the United Nations and supported our enemies, while engaging in self-flagellation before an international body of dubious distinction… it’s the “gold-standard” of Barack Hussein Obama.

William Kristol

Last Tuesday, standing in front of the Statue of Liberty, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg spoke on the subject of the proposed mosque at Ground Zero. His remarks will be read with curiosity by future generations of Americans, who will look back in astonishment at the self-deluding pieties and self-destructive dogmas that are held onto, at once smugly and desperately, by today’s liberal elites. Our liberation from those dogmas, and from those elites, is underway across the nation. But it’s worth taking a look at Bloomberg’s speech, if only to remind us of what we need to ascend from so our descendants can look back with curiosity at the ethos to which we did not succumb.

As is the way of contemporary liberals, Bloomberg spoke at a very high level of abstraction. He appealed to the principle of religious toleration, while never mentioning the actual imam who is responsible for and would control the planned Ground Zero mosque. To name Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf might invite a consideration of his background, funding, and intentions. Do Rauf and his backers believe in the principles underlying the “inspiring symbol of liberty” that greets immigrants to the United States and before which Bloomberg stood? Bloomberg didn’t say. It apparently doesn’t matter. Toleration means asking nothing, criticizing nothing, saying nothing, about whom or what one is tolerating. This is the Sergeant Schultz standard of toleration: I know nothing.

Knowing nothing, or wishing to know nothing, about the mosque, Bloomberg took it upon himself to lecture his fellow New Yorkers on their obligation to be true to “the best part of ourselves.” That part is apparently the part of us that allows at once for intellectual obfuscation and moral preening. Bloomberg never acknowledged that sane and tolerant people might object to a 15-story Islamic community center and mosque right next to Ground Zero. He could not be bothered to take seriously the reservations and objections of a clear majority of his constituents. “In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists—and we should not stand for that.” So public sentiment be damned. There’s nothing to be learned from the ignorant and bigoted residents of New York.

Instead, Bloomberg lectured: “On September 11, 2001, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked ‘What God do you pray to?’ ‘What beliefs do you hold?’ ” True, certainly true. But Bloomberg did not permit himself to ask what vision of god, what set of beliefs, inspired those who set those buildings aflame. Bloomberg said that it was our “spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11.” But attacked by whom? Bloomberg wouldn’t say.

In fact, he denied the propriety of asking such a question. It would have been one thing—a more defensible thing—if Bloomberg had argued that there was little that could be done legally to stop the mosque and that New Yorkers should therefore make the best of a bad situation. But that was not his message. Instead, Bloomberg came to the Statue of Liberty not simply to accept the mosque, but to praise it: “Of course, it is fair to ask the organizers of the mosque to show some special sensitivity to the situation—and in fact, their plan envisions reaching beyond their walls and building an interfaith community. By doing so, it is my hope that the mosque will help to bring our City even closer together. .  .  . I expect the community center and mosque will add to the life and vitality of the neighborhood and the entire City.”

But have the real, existing organizers of the mosque shown much sensitivity to other New Yorkers? The answer is no—but if you’re a contemporary liberal, you don’t get into the actual, existing facts in order to make a judgment. You govern on the basis of what the organizers’ “plan” nominally “envisions,” you appeal to a hope and expectation that even Bloomberg can’t really believe in. But it allows him to avoid coming to grips with what is really happening and what lies behind the popular sentiment of disgust, even revulsion. 

The conclusion of Bloomberg’s speech was odd: “Political controversies come and go, but our values and our traditions endure—and there is no neighborhood in this City that is off limits to God’s love and mercy, as the religious leaders here with us can attest.” Do the rest of us need Bloomberg’s hand-picked religious leaders to tell us that there are no limits to God’s love and mercy? We do doubt that encouraging this mosque to be built is an appropriate expression of respect for God’s love and mercy for those who were killed almost nine years ago. And we would note that no expression of New Yorkers’ love and gratitude for the victims of September 11 has yet been built at the site of Ground Zero during Mayor Bloomberg’s tenure.

It is likely, we believe, that civic pressure will cause the mosque to be moved elsewhere—Bloomberg’s lecture notwithstanding. But if Bloomberg were to have his way, it’s worth noting that he would presumably attend a dedication of Feisal Abdul Rauf’s mosque at Ground Zero before he would attend a dedication of a proper memorial to those who died there.

Contemporary liberalism means building a mosque rather than a memorial at Ground Zero—and telling your fellow citizens to shut up about it.

Enlarge

Mexico and Washington flip us the bird

By David Karki [May 20th 2010]

Mexican President Felipe Calderón addressed a joint session of Congress today, in which he had the unmitigated gall to effectively give America the finger for Arizona’s passage of a law to try and clean up the mess resulting from his country being a drug cartel-controlled, crime-riddled, corrupt-to-the-core, third-world craphole which he simply wants to keep shoving north of the border rather than clean up – a law not nearly as stringent as Mexico’s own against illegal immigration, by the way.

This disgusting and hypocritical display by itself is not entirely surprising. Nor was President Obama and Congress’ stupidity in having given him the chance to insult us on our own soil to begin with. What was a bit surprising and a lot infuriating and outrageous was seeing Obama wholeheartedly agree with him, Democrats leap to their feet to give him a standing ovation, and Republicans do nothing, too gutless to even get up and walk out much less boo the crap out all of them as they richly deserved.

It could not be clearer that Obama and the Democrats have sided with America’s enemies and against her people. A foreign leader comes to our capitol, stands in the well of the House chamber, openly trashes one of our states and the citizens thereof, and not only is he not thrown out on his ass and told never to come back again, he’s embraced and applauded by the majority of America’s top government officials. And the rest sit there like bumps on logs, not uttering a peep of protest, so terrified of the race card are they.

Far from coming here and lecturing us, it ought to be the American president who goes to Mexico City and tells the crooked politicians of that third-world armpit that it’s inexcusable to have so much crime and poverty when their oil and beaches alone ought to generate a first-world standard of living for all Mexicans.  That Mexicans should grow some cojones and fight like hell to save their country from the drug lords, instead of cowardly fleeing to America and then once there, living off her generosity, hypocritically and ungratefully waving the Mexican flag in everyone’s face. That southwest America has never been Mexico’s and any attempt at reconquista will be treated and responded to as the violation of national sovereignty and overt act of war it is.

And finally that, until such time as conditions in Mexico sufficiently change for the better – or if American military invasion is ultimately the only way to clean up that disaster area south of the Rio Grande once and for all so that the border isn’t a de facto war zone and the rights of American citizens in the southwest are protected – a wall so big and impenetrable that China’s Great one will look like a piece of chain link by comparison is going up from San Diego, CA to Brownsville, TX immediately and permanently. Consider it our double upraised middle finger right back at you, Felipe.

But we all know that such a thing, as based in the truth and deserved as it would be, will not ever happen. Why? Because our own government has sided with Calderón and Mexico against us. They have, by their open embrace of this despicable stunt, committed treason. They have elevated serving another country’s leader and people over serving their own. They have made it clear that they are as committed to the destruction of this country, as it was founded, as any foreign enemy America has ever had.

Mexico at best, in an act of unconscionable irresponsibility, shoves a stinking mess entirely of their own creation and all of the related costs thereof onto us; at worst, they very possibly are setting the stage for attempting to violate and wrest back a portion of America’s sovereign territory. Is there any response to this inexcusable treatment of a neighbor? None whatsoever.

And when one state is finally forced to respond in self-defense, because the federal government absolutely refuses to uphold its sworn Constitutional duty to protect the national border, they allow Mexico’s leader to come here, taunt that state, and applaud him for it.  (Consider that their middle finger joining Calderón’s.)

It matters not that one side openly embraces the jerk-off foreign leader while the other cowardly slinks away – both are equally culpable for their equally sickening reactions and therefore the enemy of all who hold America dear. And we would be far better served to worry about them before anyone south of the Rio Grande, for without the enabling behavior of a treasonous President and Congress, Mexico’s situation would be none of our concern.

Of course, the fact that we have such a government doesn’t reflect well on us; nor does the lack of an immediate and infuriated outcry from all America’s people. That Obama and Congress didn’t feel the need to even try to hide this display is very telling, beyond the extreme arrogance and chutzpah shown. They clearly think that enough of us are either supportive or too wrapped up in whether Lee or Crystal will win American Idol to even notice. Sadly, they may be closer to right than I care to admit.

When something as alarming as this can be perpetrated, and it elicits no response, perhaps the real enemy and threat to America’s future isn’t in Mexico or Washington, but among us – maybe even in the mirror.

“The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the presidency. It will be easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to an electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails us. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The republic can survive a Barack Obama. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president.” — Author Unknown

Heads_Up American Patrol

By Michelle Malkin

Back in 1984, when the late Jeane J. Kirkpatrick gave her famous “Blame America First” speech to the Republican National Convention, liberals at least waited for something bad to happen before blaming America.

Today, Obama Democrats have now mastered the treacherous art of the preemptive global apology. Foggy Bottom is crammed with so many “human rights” zealots embarrassed by the country they serve that the State Department mission statement should be replaced with a condolence card.

Assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Michael Posner is probably not the first Obama State Department official to badmouth America in front of foreign delegations. He was just dumb enough to get caught.

Last week, the former head agitator at the transnationalist outfit Human Rights First trashed our country’s human-rights record to Chinese government officials.

Posner is an unrepentant open-borders radical who has long fought immigration enforcement and vociferously opposed post-9/11 counterterrorism measures to detain enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay. He was active in supporting the establishment of the International Criminal Court, an American-sovereignty-undermining tribunal that would trump U.S. judicial authority over war crimes and “crimes against humanity.”

And New Yorkers may recall that he joined with Human Rights First board member Tom Goldstein, far-left billionaire George Soros, and other American self-loathers in the failed effort to turn the 9/11 Ground Zero memorial into a national guilt complex to showcase how George W. Bush–era counterterrorism policies were curtailing civil liberties.

In short, Posner views our homeland-security policies as unforgivable sins of discrimination. And he couldn’t wait to let China know it.

From Posner’s press briefing on Friday:

Q: Did the recently passed Arizona immigration law come up? And if so, did they bring it up? Or did you bring it up?

MR. POSNER: We brought it up early and often. It was mentioned in the first session and as a troubling trend in our society, and an indication that we have to deal with issues of discrimination or potential discrimination. And these are issues very much being debated in our own society.

The Arizona law is indeed being “debated in our own society” — mostly by a parade of willful ignoramuses from Homeland Security Department secretary Janet Napolitano to Attorney General Eric Holder to State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley, all three of whom have gone on television to attack the Arizona law and then admitted that they have yet to read the legislation.

At least all the know-nothings in Washington who voted to cram the health-care and stimulus bills down our throats without reading them had a semblance of an excuse. Those mammoth packages were thousands of pages long. The Arizona law is a mere ten pages.

The betrayal of America’s interests by the Obama State Department cannot be understated. Posner proactively brought up the Arizona law “early and often” as an issue of “discrimination or potential discrimination” to smear his own countrymen in front of one of the world’s leading repressive regimes — so repressive, in fact, that Posner’s own boss, Hillary Clinton, once demanded that former president Bush boycott the ChiComs over their miserable human-rights record. Posner had nothing to say publicly at the briefing about China’s own draconian immigration-enforcement measures, let alone how it treats its own citizen political dissidents.

But this extreme moral equivalence is par for the course. Remember: The State Department’s legal adviser is former Yale Law School dean Harold Koh, who believes that America is such a flagrant violator of international law that it belongs in an “axis of disobedience” with totalitarian regimes like North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — and that U.S. Supreme Court rulings should “tip more decisively toward a transnationalist jurisprudence.”

And remember: One of President Obama’s closest foreign-policy advisers is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, Harvard law professor, and State Department transition-team leader Samantha Power, who pooh-poohs the threat of a nuclear Iran and praises Obama’s commitment to “crossing boundaries” and “talk to dictators,” as the New Statesman reported.

Then there’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is busy coddling another government that has been bashing Arizona’s law while unapologetically policing its own southern border and kicking out illegal immigrants without a shred of due process: Mexico.

Instead of voicing concern about endangered American citizens, Clinton fretted about the political well-being of Mexican president Felipe Calderón: “We don’t want to make his life any harder,” Clinton said. I guarantee you he won’t show any of the same concern when he comes to Washington on Thursday to beg for more U.S. aid while attacking America as a racist, fascist country.

Foggy Bottom isn’t just stuck on stupid. It’s stuck on American self-sabotage.

NY Post

There they go again — bashing America on the world stage.

Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner reports that in recent talks with China, US officials put America’s human-rights record on a par with Beijing’s.

“Part of a mature [US-Chinese] relationship is that you have an open discussion, where you not only raise the other guy’s problems, but you raise your own, and you have a discussion about it, about your own [problems],” Posner said.

“We did plenty of that.”

Moreover, he said, “experts from the US side” talked about America’s “treatment of Muslim Americans in an immigration context.”

They even ripped Arizona’s new immigration law “as a troubling trend in our society.” Bragged Posner: “We brought it up early and often.”

No doubt they did.

It’s hard to know where to begin here.

Perhaps with the way China deals with its Muslim population — the Uighurs?

Last year, Chinese riot police killed hundreds of them.

America, by contrast, freely admitsMuslim immigrants (Pakistani-born Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad comes to mind) — and the White House can’t bring itself to use the term “Islamist terrorist” even as Islamist terrorists are doubling down on their efforts to kill Americans in the streets.

More misguided moral equivalence?

Posner notwithstanding, Arizona is merely trying to enforce a federal law meant to track lawbreakers who sneak across US borders — by requiring immigrants to carry papers.

China, of course, ships North Korean refugees found on their side of that bleak border back to Pyongyang — where certain, agonizing death awaits them.

There are no valid comparisons here.

China is one of the most flagrant violators of human rights on the planet, and for the Obama administration even to hint that America is on the same plane is despicable.

Once more, for emphasis.

Despicable.

Posner shames America.

CFP

Saturday April 17th

Hood River, OR. – Move America Forward has been contacted by local police in Hood River and informed that a woman named Susan Crowley went to the Hood River police today and pleaded with them to arrest Debbie Lee immediately, for inciting a riot. Susan Crowley who is a member of ‘Columbia River For Peace’ the group organizing that anti-military ‘conference’ is described on their website as a former attorney and the person who initiated the protest against Insitu.

“I’m not the one they have to worry about,” said Debbie Lee, the mother of a hero, Marc Alan Lee the first Navy SEAL to be killed in the war in Iraq. “There has never been any sort of violence initiated by our side at a rally I’ve spoken at or organized by Move America Forward,” she continued, “Cindy, on the other hand, has been arrested more than a dozen times, she’s been banned from the White House and whole cities, I’ve never been arrested. I think Cindy is afraid of a little dissenting opinion and she has to be afraid that our crowd of patriots is going to be a lot bigger than her little crowd of antagonists.”

MAF, which is the nation’s largest grassroots military support group, is holding a huge rally in Hood River, Oregon today to support the troops and oppose the anti-war leftists who are attacking our troop’s missions and the Insitu company which provides drone UAVs for our troops and is a major employer in Hood River.

The police did not indicate that they had any intentions of arresting Debbie.

This Ain’t No Tea Party

By AIM

-Amid recent mainstream media concern over “angry” tea partiers, Roger Aronoff, a media analyst and documentary producer with Accuracy in Media, observed a leftist anti-war rally to see how it compared to the conservative tea parties. The “peace” demonstrators, including four-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader, angrily denounced Bush and Cheney as war criminals, criticized Obama, called the United States an empire, bashed Israel and proudly burned an American flag.

Aronoff had one question for the mainstream media: “Where’s the outrage?”

“Did you see any reporting about the hate-speech and flag burning? I guess MSNBC was too busy that day,” wrote Aronoff at Accuracy in Media’s blog.

He noted that The Washington Post covered the rally, but left out the more extreme elements and never mentioned that President Obama was a target of the protestors.

Aronoff previously defended the tea party movement against allegations of racism by MSNBC “Countdown” host Keith Olbermann. He notes that the tea parties include a broad cross section of America, but if you look at the MSNBC website, you see nothing but white faces.

Aronoff produced a video documenting the demonstration, called “This Ain’t No Tea Party.” It has been featured on FOX News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor and Fox and Friends, and at Hot Air, The Daily Caller, The FOX Nation, BlogWonks, and The Western Journalism Center.

Reuters: Lawyer David Remes, the New York Times’s authority on Gitmo and the Justice Department

By Thomas Joscelyn

John Schwartz of the New York Times has published a piece on the reaction of some conservatives to an ad by Keep America Safe asking for the DOJ to identify government lawyers who previously represented or advocated on behalf of terrorists. The Times, of course, was eager to highlight dissent within conservatives’ ranks over the controversial advertisement.
 
The conservative critics argue that the lawyers’ work on behalf of detainees is a strictly noble pursuit. They point to John Adams’ representation of British soldiers after the Boston massacre as evidence that the lawyers are simply the heirs of a longstanding and honorable legal process. The comparison is absurd for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that Adams did not represent America’s enemies during an actual war, as the lawyers in question have.
 
But the Times article also ends with this:

David Remes, a lawyer who represents 18 detainees, said in a telephone interview from Guantánamo that the deeper point of the attack on the lawyers was political.

The goal, Mr. Remes suggested, “was to make the Obama administration and the Justice Department even more gun-shy than they are on Guantánamo issues.”

What do the conservative lawyers think of David Remes?
 
He is no John Adams.
 
What the Times does not say is that Remes used to work for Attorney General Eric Holder’s old law firm, Covington & Burling. Remes left the firm after an infamous pants-dropping incident in Yemen in 2008.
 
Keep in mind that Yemen is currently home to one of the strongest al Qaeda affiliates in the world — and has been a major recruiting hub for al Qaeda for two decades. That’s why so many Yemenis ended up at Guantanamo in the first place (they comprise more than 40 percent of the current population). To this day, Osama bin Laden maintains deep and troubling ties within the country.
 
According to the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog (LB), here is how Remes explained why he dropped his pants (emphasis added):
 

“At the press conference in Yemen — this is a society where the rule of morality is so strict — I wanted to drive home the degree of humiliation that these searches cause by illustrating a typical body search,” Remes told the LB. “The physical abuse they can stand. The verbal abuse they can stand. But when the military punishes Muslim men by shaving off their beard, or by forcing them to disrobe — for a Muslim man that is a thousand times more cutting than a Westerner can imagine. . .I wish people paid as much attention to the suffering and torment in Guantanamo as they paid to the way I sought to dramatize it.”

 
In other words, on behalf of his Yemeni clients, Remes wanted to demonstrate how anti-Muslim the American military is at Guantanamo. He said this during a time of war, in one of the growing fronts of that war. This does not advance America’s interests or legal process. It harms her image further in the Muslim world. Yet, some lawyers will undoubtedly justify this as a service to Remes’ clients.
 
Would John Adams have dropped his pants inside Britain during the Revolutionary War in order to smear American forces and gain sympathy for his clients? No, that was not how the revolutionary John Adams behaved.
 
To drive home the point, Remes gave an interview to the Yemen Post that same month, during which he said (emphasis added):

They said that in addition to the bad conditions they face every day, they now go through constant physical body searches. They are searched before they enter every room. The search involves pulling down their trousers and having guard’s hands enter inside their underwear, and that is a terrible violation of the personal dignity of these men in particular, and because of their religious beliefs they feel strongly offended and increases their misery. Another complain (sic) that they told me was the punishment of forced nudity they were forced to go through. This clearly violates the Geneva Convention. This is all humiliation. In addition, it seems that this humiliation is done for the sake of humiliation. It is not physical torture only, but physiological torture as well. 

 
Again, Remes portrayed American military personnel at Gitmo as being anti-Muslim. In reality, Gitmo has long been compliant with the Geneva Convention. The idea that the American military is humiliating Muslims just for the “sake of humiliation” is a disgusting smear.
 
During another interview with the Yemen Observer in July 2008, Remes played the blame Bush game and said America has a “neocolonial mentality.” He said shaving detainees’ beards was a tactic comparable to those “practiced by the Nazis against Jews in the 1930’s.”
 
Again, this type of inflammatory rhetoric does not serve some noble legal process. It adds to the well of anti-Americanism that exists in Yemen and throughout the Muslim world.
 
In the same Yemen Observer interview, Remes described his clients as innocents who are wrongly detained. “Crimes against the US would consist of September 11, the attacks on US Embassies and the attacks to the USS Cole. One of my clients is Abdul-Slam al-Hailah. Is he a terrorist? He is a prominent businessman from Sana’a, very influential, very much respected, and well-connected,” Remes said.
 
The name of the detainee Remes referred to can also be rendered as Abdul al Salam al Hilal. To answer Remes’ question: Yes, there is every indication that al Hilal is a terrorist – and an important one at that.
 
Steve Hayes and I previously profiled him for The Weekly Standard. According to documents produced at Gitmo, U.S. intelligence authorities concluded that while al Hilal worked for the Yemeni government’s political security organization (PSO) he used his well-placed position to move al Qaeda terrorists around and get some freed from jail.
 
In the summer of 2000, al Hilal visited the Islamic Cultural Institute in Milan, which was used by al Qaeda to recruit and facilitate the movement of terrorists around the globe. The Italians monitored the institute for some time and shut it down (at least for a time) after the September 11 attacks. The Italians wiretapped the institute, and found al Hilal saying:

Well, I am studying airplanes! If it is God’s will, I hope to bring you a window or a piece of a plane next time I see you. .  .  . We are focusing on the air alone. .  .  . It is something terrifying, something that moves from south to north and from east to west: the man who devised the program is a lunatic, but he is a genius. It will leave them stunned. .  .  . We can fight any force using candles and planes. They will not be able to halt us, not even with their heaviest weapons. We just have to strike at them, and hold our heads high. Remember, the danger at the airports. If it comes off, it will be reported in all the world’s papers. The Americans have come into Europe to weaken us, but our target is now the sky.

 
This was well in advance of the September 11 attacks. That quote, as well other evidence and allegations pertaining to al Hilal’s case, is freely available on the Times’ web site. It is easy to see why U.S. intelligence officials concluded that the Milan wiretaps, including the one cited above, “link the alleged Milan al Qaeda cell to the 11 September 2001 massacres in the United States.”
 
But the Times isn’t interested in that story — or how Remes has slandered American troops and pretended that bad men are innocent Muslims detained by the “neocolonial” American empire.
 
The paper is only interested in the conservatives’ infighting and the conservatives cited aren’t really interested in the actual facts of what the lawyers they defend have been doing all these years.
 
John Adams would be ashamed.

By  Matthew Continetti

What’s the clearest sign the Obama agenda is in trouble? That’s easy: the string of jeremiads in the pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets of fashionable opinion. Unable to tout the administration’s successes, and worried about Republican ascendancy, liberals have assigned responsibility for the mess they’re in neither to their program nor to their methods but to larger, structural faults in American politics and society. Beginning with you.

You aren’t too bright, for one thing. After all, opines Jacob Weisberg in Newsweek, the “biggest culprit” behind “our political paralysis” is the “childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.” You simply do not know what’s good for you. “On many issues these days,” writes the Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein, “the American people are badly confused.” “The people may have spoken,” writes the New -Yorker’s James Surowiecki. “It’s just not clear that they’re making any sense.” In a blog post titled “Too Dumb to Thrive,” Time magazine’s Joe Klein cuts to the chase: “It is very difficult to thrive in an increasingly competitive world if you’re a nation of dodos.”

The problem, as Weisberg sees it, is that America “simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, and other problems.” Note the myopia. For Weisberg, the only conceivable “action” on any issue is limited to the policy preferences of liberal Democrats. No other options spring to mind.

This is nonsense. Just because the public says the economy is important does not necessarily mean it has to support a stimulus measure that has added massively to the debt without much benefit. Just because the public is concerned with rising health care costs does not mean that it has to support a bill that could alter existing health care arrangements and increase costs in the long-term. Steven Pearlstein writes that Americans “want to do something about global warming.” No they don’t. Global warming came dead last in a recent Pew survey of public priorities.

The reason health care, cap and trade, and the other blocks of Obama’s New Foundation are unpopular isn’t public ignorance. It’s that the public sees them as counterproductive—and in many cases beside the point. The people’s representatives have responded to a variety of signals, from falling poll numbers, to town hall protests, to GOP victories in -Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Which is precisely how democracy is supposed to function.

And that’s the problem, says Kurt Andersen in New York magazine. “American democracy has gotten way too democratic.” The “thoughtful, educated, well-off, well-regarded gentlemen” who designed our Constitution “wanted a government run by an American elite like themselves.” But the “populist impulse” abroad in the land today has scared legislators into obeying the people’s demands.

It was not always thus. “In the old days,” Andersen laments, “the elite media really did control the national political discourse” and “presidents and congressional leaders could pretty well manage the policy conversations” without the public trying to butt in. But there’s no going back now; “maybe our republic’s constitutional operating system simply can’t scale up to deal satisfactorily with a heterogenous population of 310 million.”

This liberal uneasiness with democracy is not new. In 2003, in The Future of Freedom, Fareed Zakaria made the case against too much public involvement in government. In 2008, in Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Thomas Friedman dreamed of America becoming “China for a day” so that he could impose his environmental agenda on a truculent populace. In a 2009 New York Times column, Friedman wrote that a dictatorship, “when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today,” has “great advantages” over democratic systems. In the Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows writes that “whatever is wrong with today’s Communist leadership [in Beijing], it is widely seen as pulling the country nearer to its full potential rather than pushing it away.” Nevertheless, the Democrats probably aren’t going to run on “Communist China Does It Better.” 

What makes the liberal jeremiads confusing is that they work at cross purposes. On one hand, you’ve got the attacks on the people’s intelligence and representative government. On the other, you’ve got the attacks on American institutions for not being representative enough. Which is it? Are the people the problem, or is their government? According to Fallows, it’s the latter: “Our government is old and broken and dysfunctional, and may even be beyond repair.”

The culprit is the Senate, which gives equal say to states with small populations and requires 60 votes to pass legislation. Fallows says these minority rights have turned the Senate “into a deep freeze and a dead weight.” “America is not yet lost,” Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times, “but the Senate is working on it.” In a Huffington Post blog, Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, writes that special interests are “using the filibuster to stop legislation that would benefit the little guy,” whether the little guy likes it or not.

You can make a persuasive argument that the filibuster has been deployed too frequently in recent years, especially when it has prevented presidents, Republican and Democrat, from staffing their administrations. Nevertheless, the Senate and the filibuster are there for good reasons: to defuse momentary passions that could have unintended and harmful consequences for the country.

The system is designed to ensure broad consensus before Congress enacts major reforms. Such consensus existed during the New Deal and Great Society. And there was consensus behind certain elements of Reagan’s and Bush’s and Clinton’s programs, as well. That was not the case when George W. Bush attempted to overhaul Social Security, however. The public agreed with Bush that there was a problem, but it did not like his solution. It has had the same reaction to Obama’s proposals.

The liberal program is in disarray because liberals have failed to establish general agreement. They have found that simple majorities do not automatically translate into programmatic success. And when they are met with public opposition and institutional resistance, they do what comes naturally. They blame Americans first.