A Terror Mastermind Comes to New York

Robert Spencer

In a revealing move, the Obama Administration has announced its intention to try captured al-Qaeda jihad terrorist Abu Anas al-Libi in federal court in New York City. Al-Libi, who was involved in the jihad bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, has been held for the last week and a half on a ship in the Mediterranean, but now he is on his way to the U.S., where his trial is certain to be an international media circus – and yet another exhibition of Obama’s thoroughgoing denial of the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat.
Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) is unhappy. “It is despicable,” he said Tuesday, “that under the direction of President Obama foreign terrorists who have targeted and killed innocent people are being provided the same rights as American citizens. If al-Libi were instead detained in Guantanamo Bay, he could be held for the duration of hostilities, his interrogation could continue, and still stand trial.”
Inhofe pointed out that Obama’s decision to bring al-Libi to the United States hindered investigators’ ability to interrogate him. Al-Libi, Inhofe said, “was only questioned 10 days out on a ship in the middle of an ocean,” but “now that he is on U.S. soil, he will be read his Miranda rights, making it much more difficult to gather intelligence to prevent future attacks.”


Inhofe concluded that “the president’s agenda to close Gitmo is a blatant unwillingness to confront global terrorism, and it only emboldens our enemies to continue their despicable acts against humanity.”

That is true. Obama wants al-Libi tried in federal court in New York City rather than held as an enemy combatant because it is his Administration’s policy that there is no enemy and no war. The iron dogma of the Obama White House is that there is no jihad against the United States; there is, rather, only a small collection of miscreants from an organization, al-Qaeda, that twists and hijacks the peaceful religion of Islam, and that is on the ropes.
If al-Libi went to Guantanamo, that legendary and despised torture chamber where prisoners must endure meals bereft of olives and honey and try to take their minds off their sufferings by popping in a Harry Potter DVD, the Obama Administration would be contradicting that iron dogma and tacitly admitting that there’s a war on – even, perish the thought, a war on terror.
The Administration has declared that war over again and again; how embarrassing it would be to lock up a combatant in that war now, so long after it has been consigned to the dustbin of history. Either the Obama Administration would have to try to portray al-Libi as the contemporary counterpart of those Japanese soldiers who were found hiding in jungles decades after World War II ended, refusing to believe that it was all over and that the Rising Sun was rising no more, or it would have to admit that the war on terror isn’t over, and that al-Qaeda is not on the ropes, and that there is still a concerted worldwide effort by Islamic jihadists to wage war against and subjugate non-Muslims in the name of jihad and Islam.
That is never going to happen. Instead, in the service of perpetuating and defending the politically correct fiction that jihad terror attacks are isolated acts of law-breaking rather than acts of war, al-Libi is to be tried in federal court. He now has the right to remain silent, which he certainly will exercise in regard to the identities and actions of his fellow jihadis, but which he will be unlikely to take advantage of should his case come to trial. For that would be an opportunity for al-Libi, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others before him, to try the United States and its foreign policy before the court of world opinion, manipulating Leftist contempt for actions taken in defense of America to proselytize for Islam and demonize those whom he considers its enemies.
If he did that, however, Al-Libi would be in the wrong: America is not the enemy of Islam, and not at war with Islam, as Barack Obama has reminded the world numerous times. But all too many Muslims are at war with the United States, and the Administration’s anxiousness to appease their peaceful coreligionists and deny the reality of their jihad must amuse and comfort them no end. For they undoubtedly know that the foolish infidels have no chance whatsoever of prevailing against an enemy they refuse to acknowledge or even name.
They undoubtedly saw the Obama Administration scrub counter-training materials of all mention of Islam and jihad; they unquestionably saw and certainly applauded. They no doubt also see how opposition to jihad is routinely stigmatized in the mainstream media as “racism” and “Islamophobia.”
The jihadists whom Obama refuses to acknowledge know what all this means, and where it is tending, and what the world is likely to look like in another five or ten years. The federal trial of Abu Anas al-Libi in New York City is just the latest symptom of a much larger problem, a malady of the mind and the soul that is deeply afflicting the body politic, which for the most part remains unaware that it even exists. And so it advances unimpeded. The patient may yet become aware of his condition before it’s too late, but it is getting very close. The malady may in the end prove fatal before it is even noticed.
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Don’t miss Jamie Glazov’s video interview with Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield on why the Obama administration insists on “Reading Al Qaeda Terrorists Their ‘Rights’” (starts at the 11:08 mark):