The Human Cost of Jihad Denial

Wednesday brought new confirmation of the increasingly obvious fact that the U.S. intelligence apparatus in the age of Barack Obama is woefully unprepared to deal with the foremost threat to the safety of Americans today: Islamic jihad terrorism.

Nor is this lack of preparedness due to a lack of funding (Lord knows there is plenty of that for anything Obama wants to do) or other resources. There are many people who are deeply knowledgeable in the ideology and belief system that inspires Islamic jihad terror, and they are ready and willing to share their knowledge with intelligence officials – indeed, many of them did so during the Bush Administration and the early years of the Obama Administration, before his 2011 purge the counter-terror training materials of the truth about Islam and jihad.

 

That purge came after hard-Left journalistic propagandist Spencer Ackerman wrote a series of “exposes” that supposedly exposed “Islamophobia” in government counterterror training — that is, truthful information about Islam and jihad. See here and here for details. Then Farhana Khera, Executive Director of an Islamic organization called Muslim Advocates, wrote a letter on October 19, 2011 to Barack Obama’s then-Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism and current CIA director John Brennan. The letter was signed by 57 organizations, including many with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA); Islamic Relief USA; the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA); the Muslim American Society (MAS); and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).

The letter demanded that Obama officials “purge all federal government training materials of biased materials” – that is, materials that they claimed were biased against Islam – and “implement a mandatory re-training program for FBI agents, U.S. Army officers, and all federal, state and local law enforcement who have been subjected to biased training.”

The Obama Administration immediately complied. Dwight C. Holton, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon, emphasized that same day that training materials for the FBI would be purged of everything that Islamic supremacists deemed offensive: “I want to be perfectly clear about this: training materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive, and they are contrary to everything that this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stands for. They will not be tolerated.”

And so a year and a half after this purge, on Tuesday night we learned that not only the Russians, but also the Saudis warned U.S. officials about Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s jihadist leanings. The UK’s Daily Mail reported that “the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia sent a written warning about accused Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2012, long before pressure-cooker blasts killed three and injured hundreds, according to a senior Saudi government official with direct knowledge of the document. The Saudi warning, the official told MailOnline, was separate from the multiple red flags raised by Russian intelligence in 2011, and was based on human intelligence developed independently in Yemen.” Moreover, “a Homeland Security official confirmed Tuesday evening on the condition of anonymity that the 2012 letter exists, saying he had heard of the Saudi communication before MailOnline inquired about it.”

However, on Wednesday the Saudi Embassy in Washington denied all this. Embassy officials did not explain, however, how the DHS official who had confirmed the story the previous day got this false information. And so the question of whether or not the Saudis warned the FBI about Tamerlan Tsarnaev joins the strange story of the Saudi national who was questioned shortly after the Boston bombing – both remain full of unexplained anomalies. And Obama officials don’t appear to be in any hurry to clear up those anomalies, because it is likely that the Saudis are backtracking so as to cover up yet more evidence that the see-no-jihad, hear-no-jihad FBI ignored warnings that their politically correct training did not equip them to understand.

Also on Wednesday, three friends of jihad bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were arrested for helping him dispose of material connected to the jihad bombings. These arrests followed assurances from numerous officials that the Tsarnaev brothers acted alone.

That made two intelligence failures in one day: the thorough discrediting of the widely circulated claim that the bombers acted alone, and news of a second country warning the U.S. about a jihadist at a time when U.S. officials are not allowed to know what a jihadist is.

On Tuesday, Spencer Ackerman complained that the examination of counterterror procedures that Obama promised during his press conference that day was unlikely to bear fruit. He noted that James “Clueless” Clapper, the director of national intelligence, was overseeing that review, and “yet before the inquiry has concluded, Clapper is satisfied — as he first said last week, before any review even got started — that the intelligence agencies didn’t drop the ball on Boston.”

 

He should be grateful for that. If the Obama Administration’s review of the massive intelligence failures related to the Boston jihad bombing were thorough, it would lead directly to him.

In any case, Wednesday’s revelations show the human cost of the denial of the reality and magnitude of the jihad threat. Three people are dead and well over 200 wounded because bumbling, ill-instructed (and in many cases reeducated) FBI agents didn’t know how to understand or act upon intelligence they received from Russia and (probably) Saudi Arabia. How many more have to die before the bloody legacy of Farhana Khera, John Brennan, Spencer Ackerman and Barack Obama is decisively rejecte