Flag at GITMO flies in a way intentionally out of site of detainees.

[Soul Crusher]

Bin Laden’s Death a Victory Over Isolationism
Posted by Jeffrey Scott Shapiro May 3rd 2011 at 4:30 pm in Foreign Policy, Middle East, Obama, Terrorism | Comments (7)
Last night, Americans learned that bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan. President George W. Bush said the killing “marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001.” But the death of bin Laden was also a victory for President Obama who has long struggled against his own far left base ever since they turned against him for reigniting President Bush’s war in Afghanistan.

The president’s decision to maintain a powerful U.S. presence in the Middle East, and making it a top priority to capture or kill Osama bin Laden was a huge blow to far leftists who wrongly presumed that Obama’s foreign policy would largely be an isolationist one.Many of the president’s critics believed that our mission in Afghanistan and Pakistan was misguided, without merit and even hopeless.In fact, Obama’s own base began treating him with the same hatred with which they treated President Bush when he sent troops to Iraq.

On January 24, 2009, the New York Times wrote, “Even as Mr. Obama’s military planners prepare for the first wave of the new Afghanistan ‘surge,’ there is growing debate . . . about whether – or how – the troops can accomplish their mission, and just what the mission is.”  The Times also interviewed former Secretary of State Colin Powell in that same 2009 article who commented, “Think Iraq was hard?” Afghanistan will be “much, much harder.”

But the president was determined, and during a March 28, 2010 visit to a major U.S. base in Afghanistan, the president reassured U.S. troops there, “If I thought for a minute that America’s vital interests were not served, were not at stake here in Afghanistan, I would order all of you home right away . . . The United States of America does not quit once it starts on something. We persevere. And together, with our partners, we will prevail. I am absolutely confident of that.

He was right. Read More »

[Soul Crusher]

In an especially well-timed release this week, Richard Miniter’s MASTERMIND: The Many Faces of the 9/11 Architect, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed reveals Mohammed’s rise to the top of Al Qaeda and his planning of the jihadist attacks on America in 2001.

More than that, though, Miniter’s book includes shocking new disclosures about how the US treats its detainees. Miniter tells Big Peace:

I was stunned to learn while researching Mastermind that Guantanamo detainees succeeded in convincing prison officials to no longer raise the American flag anywhere they could see it. Each morning on every U.S. military base around the world, the American flag is raised to a bugle.  But in the interests of not offending the detainees, it was stopped at Guantanamo.

Released just after the killing of Osama Bin Laden, MASTERMIND combines on-the-scene reporting on three continents, thousands of documents, reports from intelligence agencies in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the United States, as well as eyewitness accounts and exclusive interviews.

Some amazing excerpts:

The Secret Sex Life of a Jihadist
KSM poses as a romantic, but only when the mood suits him. He adores the grand gesture—writing love poems to the wife of his CIA interrogator or, during a break in planning the pope’s assassination, buzzing with a rented helicopter the dental clinic where a Catholic Filipina girlfriend worked. KSM (and his nephew Ramzi Yousef) smiled down at her, while slowly unfurling a banner reading I LOVE YOU. Still, his romanticism had limits. A laptop seized by Philippine police features audio recordings of him mocking the whores he had rented. He was also an avid consumer of porn.

Clinton officials, liberal activists, and camera-chasing lawyers
Clinton’s former attorney general, Janet Reno, agreed to headline fundraising efforts for the American Civil Liberties Union, a liberal Washington- based individual-rights group that has been at the center of legal fights over political issues for more than fifty years. In April 2008, the ACLU announced that it had raised a war chest of $8.5 million to provide a free legal- defense team for the more than three hundred detainees held at Guantánamo. While each of the detainees who had been formally charged, including KSM, already had military lawyers to provide a free legal defense for them, the ACLU was funding civilian lawyers who would attempt to bring legal claims on behalf of detainees in civilian courts and to provide research and support for military-defense lawyers.

Holder the Ideologue vs. Emanuel the Politico
Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, soon went to war with Eric Holder over his plans to prosecute CIA officers and to hold civilian trials for detainees, like KSM, in New York. Holder still wanted to prosecute CIA officials who had interrogated Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other high- value detainees, while Emanuel feared the political ramifications of antagonizing the CIA. “Didn’t he get the memo that we are not re litigating the past?” While playing hardball with the CIA interrogators, whose work had saved hundreds of lives, Holder sought to extend every legal courtesy to KSM and other high-value detainees, who had repeatedly confessed to joyfully mass-murdering thousands of civilians. Holder was still pushing ahead on civilian trials for Guantánamo detainees, the foremost of which was KSM.

Excerpted from Mastermind. Published by Sentinel. Copyright Richard Miniter, 2011.