U.S. LEADERSHIP HAS FAILED TO GRASP THE NATURE OF THE ENEMY

December 23, 2008

Exclusive:

KSM ‘Mystifies’ GITMO General

“What God are you praying to? What are you thinking, what is going on up there?”


























Clare M. Lopez

Fox News ran a story on December 16, 2008 about Guantanamo Bay that featured an interview with Army Brig. Gen. Gregory Zanetti, the deputy commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo since February 2008. Gen. Zanetti, a West Point graduate who holds advanced degrees from Boston University and a master’s degree in strategic studies from the Army War College, is a professional money management expert in civilian life. So, while it is understandable that many things about this National Guard general’s first overseas deployment might have been new and different to him, the ideology of the prison’s high profile Muslim inmates should not have been one of them. And yet, for this highly educated, superb professional soldier, the reality that al Qaeda’s top commanders are in fact devout Muslims seems to have left him completely perplexed. That this level of our national leadership in the War Against Islamic Jihad does not yet grasp the fundamental nature of the enemy threat deployed against us is, in its way, even more terrifying than what that enemy wants to do to us.

It was on a recent tour of the Guantanamo Bay maximum security cells that General Zanetti took the opportunity to talk to the Fox News reporter about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al Qaeda master planner of 9/11 and perhaps the best-known of Gitmo’s notorious inmates. The General said that KSM, as he is known, “wants to die – he wants to be a martyr for the cause.” He showed the reporter the arrow provided for maximum security cells that points towards Mecca so the Muslim prisoners know which way to orient themselves for prayer.

What Gen. Zanetti said next, though, betrayed his utter confusion about the terrorists under his guard. He said that KSM prays for hours on end in his cell – and then he blurted, “What God are you praying to? What are you thinking, what is going on up there?”

In 1998, Osama bin Laden (UBL), Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and a loose-knit association of Bangladeshi, Egyptian, and Pakistani terrorist groups (including Lashkar-e Toiba) who termed themselves the International Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders declared war on the United States, Jews and the State of Israel, and liberal democracy everywhere. Attacks on our Embassies in East Africa, the USS Cole, and eventually the American homeland followed. Since 9/11, Islamic Jihadis have struck in Baghdad, Bali, Glasgow, Jerusalem, Kabul, Madrid, London, Mumbai, Thailand, and elsewhere. Countless manifestos from these killer Jihadis leave no doubt about why they do what they do: they believe that Allah and the example of the Prophet Mohammed command them to fight until “religion be only for Allah.” (Q 2:193) The very excellent Middle East Media and Research Institute (MEMRI) issues a steady stream of translated fatwas, Friday sermons, and TV interviews with leading Islamic scholars that all attest to the Islamic belief system with voluminous citations from Islamic doctrine, law, and scriptures, the hadith, and scholarly consensus and interpretation.

The fact that KSM is a U.S. university-educated professional with a degree in mechanical engineering seems not to have diminished his hatred of all things Western in the slightest, but rather actually contributed to his ability to plan the Twin Towers attack. In this, his experience is not unlike that of his Muslim Brotherhood predecessor, Sayyid Qutb, who studied at the Colorado State Teachers College in Greeley between 1948-50 but came away from that exposure to the values of the heartland appalled, horrified, and full of visceral loathing for the American way of life. Qutb’s written works, including In the Shade of the Qur’an and Milestones, remain classics of Islamic Jihadist ideology to this day.

Well might Gen. Zanetti puzzle at how this could possibly be. As a military professional with constitutional responsibility to command the front lines of the U.S.’s war with Islamic Jihad, though, he is required to know how educated professionals (including medical doctors such as al Qa’eda’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri) can yet place their allegiance to Islam above all considerations for human dignity, individual liberty, or pluralistic tolerance. The reason, as anyone who does his homework with the Islamic texts would know, is that these concepts are Western concepts, born of a civic, philosophical, and theological tradition out of Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the Islam of such as KSM or UBL.

That Islam, the Islam of Jihad against all unbelievers, is nonetheless sacred to its adherents. The mindset of a KSM was formed from childhood in the unshakeable belief that Islam and Muslims are truly and morally superior to all other people and faiths. Islamic supremacism holds that Allah commands the subjugation of all the world to Islam and that Paradise awaits those who follow his orders. This is not a devotion that would be easily recognizable to Gen. Zanetti – and yet he is bound by his oath of service to comprehend it. Because if he does not, then he cannot effectively confront and defeat either the enmity or the strategy of those like his prisoner KSM who would convert, subjugate, or kill us all.

Clare M. Lopez is the Vice President of the Intelligence Summit (www.intelligencesummit.org) and a Professor at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies (www.cicentre.com)

SHARIA LAW TO RULE THE U.S. TREASURY?

Treasury submits to Shariah
CSP Decision Brief Nov 04, 2008
By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.



The U.S. Treasury Department is submitting to Shariah - the seditious religio-political-legal code authoritative Islam seeks to impose worldwide under a global theocracy.
As reported in this space last week, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Robert Kimmitt set the stage with his recent visit to Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Persian Gulf states. His stated purpose was to promote the recycling of petrodollars in the form of foreign investment here.

Evidently, the price demanded by his hosts is that the U.S. government get with the Islamist financial program. While in Riyadh, Mr. Kimmitt announced: "The U.S. government is currently studying the salient features of Islamic banking to ascertain how far it could be useful in fighting the ongoing world economic crisis."
"Islamic banking" is a euphemism for a practice better known as "Shariah-Compliant Finance (SFC)." And it turns out that this week the Treasury will be taking officials from various federal agencies literally to school on SFC.

The department is hosting a half-day course entitled "Islamic Finance 101" on Thursday at its headquarters building. Treasury's self-described "seminar for the policy community" is co-sponsored with the leading academic promoters of Shariah and SCF in the United States: Harvard University Law School's Project on Islamic Finance. At the very least, the U.S. government evidently hopes to emulate Harvard's success in securing immense amounts of Wahhabi money in exchange for conforming to the Islamists' agenda. Like Harvard, Treasury seems utterly disinterested in what Shariah actually is, and portends.
Unfortunately, such submission - the literal meaning of "Islam" - is not likely to remain confined long to the Treasury or its sister agencies. Thanks to the extraordinary authority conferred on Treasury since September, backed by the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the department is now in a position to impose its embrace of Shariah on the U.S. financial sector. The nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Treasury's purchase of - at last count - 17 banks and the ability to provide, or withhold, funds from its new slush-fund can translate into unprecedented coercive power.

Concerns in this regard are only heightened by the prominent role Assistant Treasury Secretary Neel Kashkari will be playing in "Islamic Finance 101." Mr. Kashkari, the official charged with administering the TARP fund, will provide welcoming remarks to participants. Presumably, in the process, he will convey the enthusiasm about Shariah-Compliant Finance that appears to be the current party line at Treasury.

As this enthusiasm for SCF ramps up in Washington officialdom, it is worth recalling a lesson from "across the pond." Earlier this year, the head of the Church of England, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, provoked a brief but intense firestorm of controversy with his declaration that it was "unavoidable" that Shariah would be practiced in Britain. Largely unremarked was the reason he gave for such an ominous forecast: The U.K. had already accommodated itself to Shariah-Compliant Finance.
This statement provides an important insight for the incumbent U.S. administration and whomever succeeds it: Shariah-Compliant Finance serves as a leading edge of the spear for those seeking to insinuate Shariah into Western societies.

Regrettably, SCF is not the only instrument of the stealth jihad by which Shariah-promoting Islamists are seeking to achieve "parallel societies" here and elsewhere in the West. The British experience is instructive on this score, too. Her Majesty's government has allowed the establishment of at least five Shariah courts to hear (initially) family law cases. Polygamists in the U.K. can get welfare for each of their wives (as long as all the marriages beyond the first were performed overseas).

Thus far, we in this country may not have reached the point where evidence of this sort of creeping Shariah is so manifest. But Treasury's accommodation to SCF demonstrates that we are on the same trajectory - the one ordained and demanded by the promoters of Shariah, one to which we serially accommodate ourselves at our extreme peril.
After all, the object of Shariah is the supplanting of our government and Constitution, through violent means if possible and, until then, through stealthy ones. Islamists, having secured footholds via their parallel societies, inevitably use those to extend their influence over Muslims who have no more interest in living under authoritative Islam's Shariah than the rest of us do. Inexorably, it becomes the turn of non-Muslims to accommodate themselves to ever more intrusive demands from the Islamists. It is known as submission, or dhimmitude.

Soon - possibly as early as this Wednesday - the Treasury Department and the other federal agencies will be taking orders from representatives of Barack Obama or John McCain. It may be that the outgoing administration's determination to advance the Islamist agenda via "Islamic Finance 101," and what flows from it, may be the first, far-reaching policy decision inherited by the new president-elect. If he does not want to have his transition saddled with an implicit endorsement of submission to Shariah, the winner of the White House sweepstakes would be well-advised to pull the plug on Thursday's indoctrination program and the insidious industry it is meant to foist on the "policy community," our capital markets and our country.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for The Washington Times.