White House plays Flight 253 blame game

The Prowler reports at the American Spectator:

[A]s it became clear internally that the Administration had suffered perhaps its most embarrassing failure in the area of national security, senior Obama White House aides, including chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod and new White House counsel Robert Bauer, ordered staff to begin researching similar breakdowns -- if any -- from the Bush Administration. "The idea was that we'd show that the Bush Administration had had far worse missteps than we ever could," says a staffer in the counsel's office. "We were told that classified material involving anything related to al Qaeda operating in Yemen or Nigeria was fair game and that we'd declassify it if necessary."
The White House, according to the source, is in full defensive spin mode. Other administration sources also say a flurry of memos were generated on December 26th, 27th, and 28th, which developed talking points about how Obama's decision to effectively shut down the Homeland Security Council (it was merged earlier this year into the National Security Council, run by National Security Adviser James Jones) had nothing to do with what Obama called a "catastrophic" failure on Christmas Day.
"This White House doesn't view the Northwest [Airlines] failure as one of national security, it's a political issue," says the White House source. "That's why Axelrod and Emanuel are driving the issue." . . .

Read the whole thing. Disgusting.

UPDATE: "White House to Critics: Stop Blaming Us While We Look For a Way To Blame Bush."

When passengers become heroes

RiShawn Biddle at The American Spectator compares Jasper Schuringa to the passengers who stopped the Flight 93 terrorists:

[B]oth events prove once again that government alone cannot ensure security and freedom for Americans or citizens in other countries. Ultimately, it depends on ordinary people to rise to an occasion, even at the expense of their own lives.

Read the whole thing. RiShawn is editor of the education site Dropout Nation.

'Wingnut hysteria!'

Right. A Nigerian jihadist tries to blow up a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day, but if you think al-Qaeda was involved, you're a creationist neo-fascist ultra-nationalist nirther. (Safe non-LGF link.)

And we're the kooks, you understand. Me, you, Pamela Geller, Dan Collins, Mike Hendrix, Robert Spencer -- just a bunch of extremist wingnuts.

(Via Memeorandum.)

If Obama's lost Maureen Dowd . . .

. . . he's doomed beyond Hope:

If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch? . . .
Before he left for vacation, Obama tried to shed his Spock mien and juice up the empathy quotient on jobs. But in his usual inspiring/listless cycle, he once more appeared chilly in his response to the chilling episode on Flight 253, issuing bulletins through his press secretary and hitting the links. At least you have to seem concerned. . . .

Once Modo starts eyeing the exit of the Obama bandwagon, what next? Will David Brooks espy an un-meritocratic wrinkle in the president's pants?

Liberals terrorized by Americans

My latest American Spectator column:

When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to detonate an explosive aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day, liberals were quick to warn against the clear and present danger.
It wasn't the threat of al Qaeda-trained bombers blowing up Detroit-bound planes that concerned them. Rather, liberals feared that Americans might blame the Obama administration for failing to protect them from terrorists or -- perhaps even worse -- demand action against the violent extremists who want to kill us all . . .

Read the whole thing. Today, Janet Napolitano admitted that the system failed:

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says the aviation security system failed when a young man on a watch list with a U.S. visa in his pocket and a powerful explosive hidden on his body was allowed to board a fight from Amsterdam to Detroit.
A day after saying the system worked, Napolitano said her words had been taken out of context. She said Monday on NBC's "Today" show that "our system did not work in this instance."

Meanwhile, Napolitano's assertion that this was not "part of anything larger" gets an asterisk in Memphis:

On Christmas Eve, Mohamed Ibrahim was arrested by police in Memphis, TN after allegedly making bomb threats in several local businesses. Witnesses told police that he told them he was a Muslim and that he was starting a jihad.

Robert Spencer sees the Abdulmutallab case as evidence of an epic fail:

Educated at the British International School in Lome, Togo, he was a classic recipient of Western largesse designed to win over the loyalties of Muslims. Yet his encounter with kindly non-Muslim Westerners spending their lives to educate him and his peers did not blunt the fervor of his jihadist fanaticism. . . .

Read the rest.

Another Lutheran Belgian Nigerian arrested aboard Detroit-bound plane UPDATE: 'Nonserious,' FBI says

Probably just a random coincidence:

A second Nigerian man was been taken into custody aboard a jetliner in Detroit after locking himself in the airliner's bathroom, The Associated Press reported.
A law enforcement official told the AP that the incident took place aboard the same Northwest flight that was attacked on Christmas Day.

But remember there is "no indication that it is part of anything larger," according to Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Red Noses and Floppy Shoes. Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin takes a close look at the myth of the "poor oppressed terrorist victim."

UPDATE: Reuters reports the second Nigerian passenger appears to have been merely ill:

The man went to the bathroom repeatedly and did not respond to flight attendants' direction an hour before landing.
"The Joint Terrorism Task Force investigated and the investigation shows that this is a nonserious incident and all is clear at this point," said Detroit FBI spokeswoman Sandra Berchtolv.

Meanwhile, Ivana Trump's reign of terror continues.

Malkin vindicated: 'Lone nut card' played by Napolitano in NWA terror case

When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was arrested after attempting to detonate an explosive aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253, Michelle Malkin ended her Christmas Day post with a prediction:

Victim card/lone nut card in 3, 2, 1 . . .

The administration has evidently decided to go with the "lone nut" angle:

The U.S. has "no indication" that an attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight was part of a larger plot by a terrorist group, a top Obama administration official said.
"Right now we have no indication that it is part of anything larger, but obviously the investigation continues," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on CNN's "State of the Union" program on Sunday.

Right. But what of the connections to al-Qaeda in Yemen?

Authorities say the 23-year-old suspect spent months in Yemen being trained for the Christmas Day suicide mission.
Investigators believe Abdulmutallab was connected to al Qaeda by the same radical imam, American-born Anwar Awlaki, who is linked to the American Army major accused of opening fire at Fort Hood in November.
According to investigators, the bomb . . . was built in Yemen by a top al Qaeda bomb maker. . . .

This is incompatible with Napolitano's claim on CNN that this was not "part of anything larger." One cannot train with al-Qaeda under the influence of a radical imam, and utilize an exploisve designed by al-Qaeda, without being part of something larger.

So far, I've seen no evidence of the "victim card" being played on behalf of Abdulmutallab, but this Associated Press biographical profile of the suspect portrays him as having had a "saintly aura" as a student in England. Give the media time, though. Their best spinmeisters are still on holiday.

UPDATE: Further evidence (as if we needed more) that Janet Napolitano is a useless dimwit:

DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said that the thwarting of the attempt to blow up the Amsterdam-Detroit flight this week demonstrated that "the system worked."
Asked by CNN's Candy Crowley on "State of the Union" how that could be possible when the young Nigerian who sought to set off the bomb was able to smuggle explosive liquid onto the flight, Napolitano responded: "We're asking the same questions.”
Napolitano added that there was "no suggestion that [the bomber] was improperly screened."

(Hat-tip: Blogmocracy 2.0.) If failure to keep a bomber off a plane means "the system worked," then obviously this means no changes to the system are necessary, right? Wrong. The al-Qaeda-trained "lone nut" has just given the Transportation Security Administration the excuse it needed to make commercial air travel even more miserable. My libertarian friend Radley Balko observes:

TSA will apparently adopt a new policy prohibiting passengers from moving during the last hour of a flight. Also, no pillows or blankets during that last hour.
In addition to keeping with its usually tradition of making policy on a reactionary basis, this one wouldn’t even have done anything to prevent the attempt over the weekend.

No doubt, the TSA will also enhance its policy of conducting random searches of elderly women from rural Minnesota in order to prevent CAIR from accusing them of "profiling."

TSA: Protecting You From Olga Swenson!

UPDATE II: Ed Morrissey calls this Napolitano's "Chip Diller moment," and Mary Katharine Ham Tweets:

"The system worked." Jasper Schuringa is "the system," apparently.

The "bring your own Dutchman" approach to airline safety.

UPDATE III: And now The Boss weighs in on the clueless nitwit in charge of DHS:

Beginning with her embrace of the impotent euphemism "man-caused disasters" to the hit job on conservatives and veterans that she was forced to apologize for, to her assertion that crossing the border illegally "isn't a crime per se," to her boneheaded claim that 9/11 terrorists came in through the Canadian border, Ja-No has confirmed time and again that she's not ready for prime time.

Yes, but you've got to give Janet Napolitano credit for preventing terrorist attacks by those right-wing extremists, not to mention her perfect record against the Olga Swenson menace. Just imagine what carnage might have been wrought by elderly Lutheran ladies, if not for the vigilance of DHS!

UPDATE IV: Another anti-terror success for TSA:

Police say Ivana Trump has been escorted off a plane in Florida after she became belligerent when children were running and screaming in the aisles.
Authorities say the first ex-wife of billionaire Donald Trump cursed at the children Saturday, and when flight attendants on the New York-bound plane tried to calm her, she became even more aggravated.

No word yet on whether Ivana's attack was part of a larger terrorist conspiracy by rich divorcees.

Is Baldilocks onto something?

"LGF is gone. Charles Johnson is gone. Face it. He was never ours. How about we let him take his delusions and slanders and paranoias and obsessions and falsehoods with him?"
-- Baldilocks (Juliette Ochieng)

Juliette certainly is not alone in seeing recent blogospheric rumblings as a belated denouement of the LGF meltdown.

The 2001-2005 period, when the Global War On Terror (GWOT) coincided with the rise of the political blogosphere, was also the apogee of what might be called the Karl Rove Center-Right Strategy.

Seeking to maintain maximum support for President Bush and the Republican Party, the Rove strategy involved "triangulation" to neuter Democratic Party arguments on domestic issues. No Child Left Behind, Medicare rescription drug benefits, the 2006-07 push to grant amnesty or guest-worker status to illegal aliens -- these were typical policy initiatives of the Rove strategy.

Especially after the 9/11 attacks, this "center-right" approach was mirrored in the rhetoric of much of the conservative blogosphere. Many GOP-aligned bloggers were understandably eager to elicit the support of liberals, or members of traditional Democratic constituencies, for the administration's foreign policy:

"Oh, look, this person is gay (or black, or feminist, or Joe Lieberman) and yet is strongly in favor of winning the Iraq war."

Which was all fine and good, in terms of the immediate goal of rallying support for the GOP and the Bush administration. Yet by focusing narrowly on a short-term foreign-policy consensus, the Rove center-right approach sowed the seeds of its own destruction.

The Great Unraveling
Once the war became unpopular, and once Democrats were able to shift the political focus to GOP vulnerabilities -- the Mark Foley and Jack Abramoff scandals in 2006, the economy in 2008 -- the Republican electoral coalition that had triumphed in the 2002 and 2004 elections unraveled with astonishing suddenness.

By attempting to unite disparate constituencies without any general agreement on political principles -- except that the U.S. response to terrorism should be forceful and comprehensive -- the Republican Party under Rove's direction had in some sense replicated LBJ's Vietnam-era debacle.

The Democratic hawks who were so key to the Cold War consensus in the U.S. had believed that popular support for fighting communism abroad could be purchased by enactment of liberal domestic policies. And in LBJ's 1964 landslide win over Barry Goldwater, these Democrats believed they had seen the vindication of that strategy.

Yet by 1968, the bloody prolongation of the Vietnam war and the upsurge of domestic chaos -- urban riots and campus protests -- splintered that victorious 1964 coalition so badly that, at one point, polls indicated that Hubert Humphrey might finish third behind Richard Nixon and George Wallace in the 1968 presidential election. (An anti-Wallace campaign led by the AFL-CIO helped prevent that scenario.)

From Values Voters to Obama Nation
For similar reasons, the Republican electoral coalition that seemed so formidable in the wake of the 2004 election -- remember the liberal panic over the "moral values" exit-poll question? -- has proven less durable than advocates of the Rove Center-Right Strategy hoped. Like the Democrats of 1964, the Rove-era Republicans assembled a coalition fraught with unreconciled conflicts.

We should not be surprised that what has transpired in electoral politics has been mirrored in the political blogosphere. Andrew Sullivan was one of the first to leap off the Bush bandwagon, screaming "homophobia" as he went. More recently we've seen Charles Johnson take his leave from the post-Bush Right, screaming "ultranational neofascist theocratic extremism" as he goes.

It is easy to shrug and to dismiss these developments with two words: "Batshit crazy."

However, the batshit craziness is not without cause, and that cause is the failure of Republican leaders -- and prominent conservative communicators -- to articulate consistently the Reaganesque message of freedom.

Last summer, when arguments over the Wall Street bailout were coming to full boil, I used "Libertarian Populism" as the title of an American Spectator column. Nobody's offered me a book contract to elaborate on that "Libertarian Populism" concept, but that idea is exactly what you've seen at work in the past year in the Tea Party movement.

Those Tea Party crowds are responding to a pro-freedom message expressed in populist language, viewing Big Government and Big Business (think: Tim Geithner, AIG, the GM takeover) as corrupt partners in an insider-elite agreement to defraud taxpayers and disempower citizens.

Another 'Time for Choosing'
It was hardly a coincidence that Charles Johnson reacted so harshly to the Tea Party phenomenon. Johnson and his LGF cult have never been libertarian and were "populist" only insofar as that term meant mocking John Kerry and Muslims.

When the political alignment of 2001-04 -- forged by what I've called the Rove Center-Right Strategy -- collapsed in 2006-08, it was inevitable that some supporters of the former Republican coalition would not be part of whatever new coalition emerged to take its place.

Just as the rise of the Reagan coalition resulted in the obsolescence of the liberal Republicans who had been an important part of the Eisenhower coalition, the emerging Tea Party coalition will render obsolete many of those who were part of the G.W. Bush coalition.

As Reagan famously said in 1964, we are at a crossroads, a "Time for Choosing" and I trust that it is with sadness Juliette bids farewell to former friends.

Somalis in Denmark are shocked

Perhaps even shocked, shocked:

The Somali community in Denmark is shocked that [Danish security service] PET is saying a Danish-Somali is the suicide terrorist who was responsible for the suicide bomb that cost 24 people their lives last week in Somali's capital, Mogadishu.
"I know him as a nice, smiling and well-behaved boy. The Somalis in Denmark are shocked that he's accused of being responsible for the bomb," says Ahmed H. Dhaqane, head of the Somali Association in Denmark and member of the Rødovre council for the Social Democrats.
Dhaqane says that the man whom PET suspects was the suicide bomber from Mogadishu came to Denmark when he was five, about 17 years ago, together with his parents, and lived in the Rødovre suburb of Copenhagen. He lived there until he got married to a Somali woman from Copenhagen, after which he moved to Amager (Copenhagen).
"The family is quiet and calm. Also they aren't particularly religious. It isn't a family there have been problems with," says Dhaqane.

That's from Islam in Europe, a blog that provides English translations of European press reports about issues related to Islam.

We await Dave Neiwert's reaction

More right-wing anti-government terrorism?

PARKLAND, Wash. - A gunman walked into a coffee shop and shot and killed four police officers Sunday morning in what sheriff's officials described as a targeted "execution." . . .
The officers were obviously targeted because they were in full uniform, their marked patrol cars were parked outside and no one else was shot at . . .

Read more. And in case you don't know who Dave Neiwert is.

UPDATE: Breaking news, as edited by Dave Neiwert:

Here's the most recent suspect description: blackRepublican man, mid-20s to mid-30s, 5 feet 7 to 5 feet 10, medium build, scruffy and wearing a blackFox News jacket over a gray hoodedGlenn Beck sweatshirt and blue jeans.

All points bulletin for this dangerous Tea Party extremist!

UPDATE II: The slain officers were from the Lakewood Police Department:

This morning a complete coward and threat upon all of society took the lives of four of my Guild members and your sworn protectors in a cold blooded assassination. As I write this I am numb. We were dealt a nasty blow, good men and women I have had the honor of knowing for years are senselessly gone. There is no way to comprehend it, to validate it, or to make sense of any of it. You cannot understand evil like this, as a community we must form a solid bond against criminals and hold them accountable. I know my members and can say with certainty that as a group we will remain professional and will continue to work to protect those of you we have taken an oath to protect. If you know a cop tell them how much you appreciate them, it truly keeps us going.
Please pray for these officers and their families. All of them had significant others and children who are left behind. As a Guild we will do anything we can. If you want to donate to the families our Guild has a benevolent account. Every penny will go to the families; if you want to donate to a specific officer you can write his or her name in the memo section. If the check is made out to LPIG Benevolent Fund at PO Box 99579 Lakewood, WA 98499. I will personally make sure it goes where it is intended. May God bless you four who are in a place so much better than this; you are some of the finest professionals I have ever known. God bless our community today.
Brian D. Wurts, President
Lakewood Police Independent Guild

The manhunt for the killer continues. $10,000 reward. The gunman may be wounded.

Incompetent dopehead pipe-bomber as dangerous as al-Qaeda, lefty implies

Pathetic Loser No. 1:

Police said no charges have been filed against Mark Campano, 56. Police found 30 completed pipe bombs in his apartment along with components to make more, plus 17 guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
Campano is in an Akron hospital with injuries received when one of the bombs exploded. . . .
Campano is a former anesthesiologist who lost his medical license in 2005 because of an addiction to the drug clonidine, according to state records. He had similar problems with the drug as far back as 1994 when he was cited by the West Virginia Board of Medicine.

And here's what a former neighbor said about him:

Barbara Vachon lived next door to Campano at the Center Park Place Apartments for several years and said he was a big reason she moved.
"He was always trying to get me and another neighbor to listen to anti-government tapes and watch anti-government videos," said Vachon. "I would never watch them. He was some kind of radical, and he didn't believe in the government."
"There was a steady stream of creepy visitors going in and out of his apartment," she said.

Well, yeah, the government took away his medical license and busted him for drugs, so an "anti-government" attitude might be expected. Criminals in general are "anti-government." But now meet Pathetic Loser No. 2:

Of course, if this had been a Muslim extremist caught with such an arsenal, we'd be getting talk-show panels on Hannity featuring Michelle Malkin ranting at length about the threat of Islamic jihad, blah blah blah. Not to mention chatty discussion on Fox and Friends and Morning Joe.
But instead, because he's just a white anti-government extremist, hey, let's just give it a big shrug.

Note the apples-and-oranges comparison involved here. A Muslim extremist might be connected to al-Qaeda -- you know, 9/11, embassy bombings, "death to infidels," that kind of thing -- whereas this dopehead loser guy would be connected to . . . ?

Michelle Malkin! Sean Hannity! Fox News!

UPDATE: One of the things that annoys me about this lefty's presentation of the dopehead pipebomber as an "anti-government extremist" is how it is typical of the way liberals argue. Given the liberal predominance in academia and media, liberals become accustomed to debating everything on their own terms.

The only issues that matter are the issues that matter to liberals. And when it comes to discussing those issues, they only wish to discuss certain facts, which can have only one meaning. As much as they love to whine (when losing) that no one recognizez the ambiguity and nuance of the issues, it is liberals who are always oversimplifying things.

Go back to the Matthew Shepard murder, which liberals insisted was a simple story of homophobia, of society's hateful intolerance, of the evils of Christian conservatives, and the need for hate-crime protection for gays.

Alas, the facts didn't fit this narrative. Matthew Shepard was not killed by "society," or by Christian conservatives, he was killed by a couple of two-bit hoodlums. Both of Shepard's killers had records of petty crime (one for dope possession, one for burglary) and neither had any connection to any religious or political organizations at all.

Yet to hear the Matthew Shepard story as told by liberals, you might have thought Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson were hard-core Republican operatives, personally trained as assassins by Jerry Falwell and sent to Wyoming by James Dobson with orders to kill a gay man.

But anyone who tried to point out this discrepancy between the reality of Shepard's murder and the symbolic mythology of "The Martydom of St. Matthew the Gay," was accused of de facto homophobia. In other words, to contest the liberal narrative -- the just-so story of saintly victimhood -- was to invite accusations of complicity in murder. The facts of the case (the identity of the criminals and the nature of their crime) were subsumed by the political template.

So here is this dopehead pipebomber in Ohio -- a genuine menace to society, no doubt -- yet liberals insist the most important facts to liberals are not, inter alia, his evident incompetence or his long history of drug addiction. No, they say, the only thing that matters is that he liked tto "listen to anti-government tapes and watch anti-government videos."

What kind of videos and tapes were these? Heritage Foundation seminars? Alex Jones 9/11 Truth videos? Triumph of the Will? We don't know. There are all manner of things that might be characterized as "anti-government," from libertarianism to anarchism to conspiracy theories. Exactly what Campano's political views were, we don't know and frankly, at this point, it's irrelevant. He wasn't arrested for his ideology, but for making illegal explosives.

Yet here comes the liberal temper tantrum, that this "anti-government extremist" is not getting the same sort of media coverage that he would receive if his name was Abdul and he were inviting his neighbors to watch jihad videos. OK, that's arguably true -- but what's the point?

The point is simply that liberals are desperate to find a symbolic villain who can be used to illustrate the danger of "anti-government sentiment" -- hello, Clay County, Kentucky! -- to serve as an indictment of Glenn Beck, the Tea Party movement and conservatism in general. And thus the bizarre attempt to make the Ohio dopehead pipebomber analogous to al Qaeda, as if the logical alternative to the Bush administration's War On Terror should be an Obama administration War On Right-Wing Extremists.

We could laugh at this, were it not for the reality that such loopy ideas can have disastrous consequences. In the late 1990s, the Clinton administration awared a $1 million Department of Justice grant to Mark Pitcavage to create a program to do "anti-terrorism" training for state and local police. Pitcavage's expertise? You guessed it: Right-wing extremism. So while al Qaeda was plotting the 9/11 attacks, the DOJ was training law enforcement to keep their eyes peeled for militia crackpots.

Now think about the amount of law enforcement manpower devoted to investigating the alleged "anti-government sentiment" in Kentucky that turned out to be suicide. And then compare that to the Army's seeming indifference to the warning signs of the Fort Hood killer.

Ask some of the survivors at Fort Hood if they think we're paying too much attention to Islamic extremism.

Does no one see the economic stimulus?

by Smitty (h/t Insty)

<sarcasm>
Here is an embattled POTUS trying to scare up a few, say, 2,000 jobs for New York, but Just One Minute is all up in arms about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the NY trial. Oh, come on: as some nitwit was saying on the local news, we really can't trust the reliability of the military courts. And think of the 20,000 jobs that will be created or saved.

Never mind the non-command of the Laws of War on display, much less the non-grasp of the duties as Commander in Chief of the armed forces. We're talking about creating, saving, or upgrading ~200,000 jobs here.

This trial promises to be a steady stream of distraction from all of the other issues that the Administration would prefer go unnoticed, and may even directly lead to a US economic Renaissance of Industrial Revolution proportions, only with a little more green spin.

</sarcasm>

It actually could be worse. BHO could try to punt KSM upstream to the Haig Hague or something.

Allen West: 'It is what it is'

The retired Army lieutenant colonel on Fort Hood:

We have become so politically correct that our media is more concerned about the stress of the shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan. The misplaced benevolence intending to portray him as a victim is despicable. The fact that there are some who have now created an entire new classification called "pre-virtual vicarious Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)" is unconscionable.
This is not a "man caused disaster". It is what it is, an Islamic jihadist attack. . . .
What we see are recalcitrant leaders who are refusing to confront the issue, Islamic terrorist infiltration into America, and possibly further into our Armed Services. Instead we have a multiculturalism and diversity syndrome on steroids.
Major Hasan should have never been transferred to Ft Hood, matter of fact he should have been Chaptered from the Army. His previous statements, poor evaluation reports, and the fact that the FBI had him under investigation for jihadist website posting should have been proof positive. . . .

Read the whole thing. Meanwhile, there's also this:

The official said investigators were looking into Hasan's association with the Dar al Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va., in early 2001, about the same time that a radical Islamist prayer leader and two of the Sept. 11 hijackers were there. . . .
Authorities were focusing aggressively on whether Hasan more recently had been following the fiery online sermons and blog postings of that imam, Anwar al Awlaki, the official said.
Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, left the United States in 2002 and is believed to be in Yemen. He is actively supporting the Islamist jihad, or holy war against the West, through his website.
Early this morning, after Awlaki's name was publicly linked to Hasan's, a posting on Awlaki's site was titled "Nidal Hassan Did the Right Thing."

Jihad? What jihad? Nothing to see here. Move along.

UPDATE: ABC News reports:

U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News.

But don't start "jumping to conclusions" or anything.

Fort Hood Massacre: Jeffrey Goldberg on the See-No-Evil elite

When "Sudden Jihad Syndrome" strikes, there is a curious incuriosity in some quarters:

A consensus seems to have formed here at The Atlantic that the Ft. Hood massacre means not very much at all. Megan McArdle writes that "there is absolutely no political lesson to be learned from this." James Fallows says: "The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre 'mean'? A decade later, do we 'know' anything about Columbine?" . . .
It seems, though, that when an American military officer who is a practicing Muslim allegedly shoots forty of his fellow soldiers who are about to deploy to the two wars the United States is currently fighting in Muslim countries, some broader meaning might, over time, be discerned, especially if the officer did, in fact, yell "Allahu Akbar" while murdering his fellow soldiers, as some soldiers say he did. . . .

The whistling-past-the-mass-graveyard reaction Goldberg discerns is quite striking among the opinion elite, if we contrast it to their reactions in other cases.

Remember when Andrew Sullivan fretted about "Southern populist terrorism" in the death of Kentucky census worker Bill Sparkman? (Investigators now believe it to have been suicide.) Remember how Frank Rich interpreted the NY23 special election as "nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war," demonstrating how "the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult"?

The tendency of elites to leap to hysterical, far-fetched interpretations when dealing with phenomena associated (rightly or wrongly) with the Right is counterbalanced by their "nothing to see here" reaction when confronted with events that implicate pet causes of the Left.

The nature of elite reaction is not strictly a matter of the potential political ramifications of events. There is also the matter of complexity and nuance, which are specialties of the intelligentsia. When events seem to teach a simplistic liberal lesson, there is no need to seek out any mitigating factors. Yet when the simple lesson would seem to favor a conservative argument, there is a frantic search for mitigation, or else the event is dismissed as meaningless.

The murder of Matthew Shepard was interpreted as evidence of mass homophobia induced by Christian conservatism, even though the murderers were a couple of two-bit hoodlums with no known ties to the Religious Right. Yet here we have Nidal Malik Hasan reportedly screaming "Allahu Akbar" while gunning down U.S. troops and . . . well, this means nothing.

So instead of a search for meaning, the elite engage in a search for non-meaning. The Fort Hood killer attended a radical mosque? Meaningless!

What is most amusing is how the elite assume that the rest of us are so stupid as not to notice the pattern.

UPDATE: Phyllis Chesler observed Saturday:

Quickly, reflexively, without waiting for more of the facts to emerge, the mainstream print media has already decided that Major Hasan is a tormented “innocent” who must have snapped under alleged conditions of extreme provocation and humiliation. The mainstream media assures people that there is no such thing as jihad; that the Ft. Hood massacre has nothing to do with Islam or with violent jihad; that if there are any victims here, it is not the dead and wounded soldiers . . . but the man accused of their mass murders.

Michelle Malkin wonders, "Why do we have to read British papers to get Ft. Hood jihadist news?!" Meanwhile, Donald Douglas notices that anyone who thinks Islam had anything to do with the Fort Hood massacre has been declared guilty of anti-Muslim "bigotry."

Michelle Malkin: 'Political correctness is the handmaiden of terror'

How true. And I'll risk accusations of Glenn-Beckism by pointing out that "terrorism" and "political correctness" are both legacies of Marxist-Leninist thought.

Lenin advocated "revolutionary terror," first as a means of attacking the bourgeois regime and then, once the revolutioaries had seized power, as a means of intimidating the population and compelling cooperation with the revolutionary agenda.

The phrase "politically correct" is also of Marxist-Leninist origin. The concept of "democratic centralism" required that the Bolshevik vanguard arrogate to itself the authority to dictate what was and was not true, what policies should be pursued, etc. Once the Communst leadership had decided what the proper "party line" was, then all dissenters were said to be politically incorrect, and were anathematized as Enemies of the People.

This was how it came to be that after Stalin after Trotsky -- who had been second only to Lenin in the leadership of the Bolshevik Revolution -- he ordered Trotsky's image airbrushed out of photos of the original revolutionary leadership. And that was only one example of where political correctness led.

It is amazing to me the degree to which this type of Marxist-Leninist thinking has not merely survived, but thrived despite the collapse of the Soviet Union. And nowhere is this more true -- in a deeply ironic way -- than in the way so many conservatives have forgotten the Soviet origins of modern terrorism. I quote from a 1977 Heritage Foundation study:

The International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . . . has been the most important Soviet agency for the support of terrorism. Through this agency, the Soviets established two training schools for terrorists: the Lenin Institute or Institute of Social Studies and the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. Both of them regularly train their students -- 300 to 600 at any one time at the Lenin Institute - -in the techniques of "sabotage, terrorism, assassination, and other kinds of clandestine ar:d violent warfare."

Another Heritage Foundation study from 1984:

The presence in the U.S. of large numbers of disaffected aliens, many from cultures with traditions of political violence, could be of concern. . . . It is not unreasonable to assume that some of these may be sympathetic to the political goals of some terrorist movements that espouse their national, religious, or ideological beliefs. This minority may provide an audience for terrorist propaganda or a valuable infrastructure for terrorist financial or logistical support.

Both of those studies were written by the author of The Soviet Strategy of Terror, published in 1981 by the Heritage Foundation. But the politically incorrect Sam Francis has been airbrushed out of conservative history. So it is that we have lost a vital key to understanding the problem of terrorism by "disaffected aliens . . . sympathetic to the political goals of some terrorist movements."

History, Ancient and Modern
Certainly, it is possible to see the roots of Islamic terror in the 7th century A.D., beginning with the warrior-prophet Muhammed and continuing with the Muslim conquests that advanced by the sword across Turkey and into Asia, over North Africa, to Spain, and into Europe before finally being halted by the Christian victory over the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683.

All of that is relevant background, but has little to do with the specific manifestation of terror-jihad that has arisen in the Islamic world since the 1960s. The fanatical anti-American stance of these groups has very particular connection to the Soviet strategy of terror.

The PLO and Fatah, in particular, received support from a network of communist agents. And the propaganda agents of the Kremlin were also involved. If you'll go back and study it, you'll notice that the Palestinian cause was embraced by the New Left shortly after American student radicals began trekking to Cuba and Eastern Europe for "study."

The skeptic will point out that Marxism is dogmatically atheist, while Islamic terrorism is devoutly religious. True, but it is likewise true that although Marxism is anti-nationalist, the Soviets exploited nationalist sentiment (e.g., in Vietnam) wherever they felt it might advance their long-term revolutionary goal.

Terrorism and 'Liberation'
What is today considered a religious phenomenon -- Islam's jihad against the West -- actually originated with 2oth-century Arab nationalism, of which "Palestinian liberation" was the principle manifestation from the 1960s onward. This was all part of the Soviet agenda of creating satellites via "wars of national liberation."

Whether it was the Viet Cong or the Sandinistas or the PLO, all such revolutionary outfits shared a common anti-American agenda. The Soviets supported all these groups for the same reason: One "brushfire" war at a time, the U.S. could be deprived of potential allies in its Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union, which claimed to speak on behalf of the victims of American "imperialism."

When the Ayatollah's Shi'ite revolutionaries in Iran dubbed America "The Great Satan," they were merely expressing in religious terms what the Soviets were proclaiming in secular terms. In the calculus of the Cold War, what was bad for the U.S.A. was good for Moscow, you see. It wasn't until the Soviets tried to impose their will by direct military intervention in Afghanistan that they got a taste of the fanaticism of "liberation" the Kremlin had done so much to foment.

Of Motives and Murders
The homicidal rage of "Sudden Jihad Syndrome" -- evidently the motive for Nidal Malik Hassan's murderous rampage -- is the legacy of a history forgotten.

Objectively, there is no reason that the Islamic world should be infested with violent anti-Americanism. There is no objective reason why Israelis should constantly be plagued by Palestinian terror, nor that Iranians should suffer under the yoke of the mullahs and Ahmadinejad. The resentments which give rise to these phenomena are unacknowledged fruit of the Marxist-Leninist legacy.

Wherever it is proclaimed that capitalism is exploitation and that the United States is an agent of oppression, then the specific form and rhetoric of "anti-imperialist" violence -- whether religious or secular, ethnic or nationalist -- is just a detail.

All of these latter-day "revolutionary" movements are, in some sense, mere third-hand replicas of a Bolshevik prototype. The Taliban are an Afghan clone of the Khmer Rouge, Hugo Chavez is the Ceauşescu of Venezuela and Saddam Hussein was a Mesopotamian Stalin. Conservatives ought to understand this, and to say it out loud, no matter how politically incorrect it may be to say it.

More effort ought to be devoted to persuading the Islamic world that that their religion ought not require the periodic slaughter of Americans, Europeans or Israelis. But before we can persuade them of this, Americans must first persuade ourselves.

Allen West on the Fort Hood massacre

Press release from the Iraq hero's congressional campaign:

Lt. Col. Allen West (Ret) is a former Fort Hood commander, most recently leading troops there in 2007. West has served in both Iraq and Afghanistan and says the horrible tragedy at Fort Hood is proof the enemy is infiltrating our military.
"This enemy preys on downtrodden soldiers and teaches them extremism will lift them up," West said. "Our soldiers are being brainwashed."
West served more than 20 years experience in the United States Army and although he is waiting for more information to be revealed on Thursday's tragedy, West is certain the military must look at this broader issue on how to prevent Islamic extremism from penetrating our bases.
West has worked closely with the investigation of the planned attack on Fort Dix, New Jersey as well as the bombing of a soldier's tent in March 2003 while stationed in Kuwait. Both have been linked to Islamic extremism.
"The most importantly thing right now is that we objectively assess this situation," West said. "But it is imperative that we take steps to make sure this does not happen again."

Michelle Malkin has more on the massacre, including the news that the killer had come to the attention of law-enforcement six months earlier.

Jihad? What jihad?

Another Belgian-American goes berserk

A madman inspired by Vlaams Belang and incited to violence by right-wing extremists . . . Oh, wait. No.

IT'S THE JIHAD, STUPID!

Couldn't have said it better myself, Pamela. A jihadi psychiatrist? Yeah, there's your irony, Dr. Freud.

Excuse the dark sarcasm. Having spent the past week in upstate New York with Ali Akbar -- yes, that's his real name, and he's a Southern Baptist from Texas -- covering a campaign repeatedly maligned as "radical" and "extremist," there is something especially bitter for me in this ugly reminder that there are still people who want to kill us all, just because we're Americans.

The people who want to kill you are not Tea Party protesters or accountants from Saranac Lake, N.Y. They're not Kentucky populists or Belgian radicals.

Anyone who wants to distract you from real dangers by telling you to fear this week's pet bogeyman -- global warming! creationists! Ron Paul! -- is not your friend. They are fools and liars who cannot be trusted. They are objectively evil.