Chicago Is Tough on Guns and Soft on Crime, and the People Suffer

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It’s the sort of gun violence that happens every day, but is conveniently ignored by those who hate guns, except in the hands of repeat violent offenders. A seven-year-old girl was out trick-or-treating with her father in Chicago dressed up as a bumblebee. Suddenly, they were caught in the crossfire of a Latin Kings gang war, and the child was shot in the neck and chest.

While the identity of the suspected gunman has not yet been revealed, the Chicago Tribune is reporting that the target of the gunfire was a 32-year-old Latin King man “with a record of drug and assault arrests.” The man, who refused to cooperate with police even though he was the intended victim, was walking among the children who were trick-or-treating. The seven-year-old girl remains in critical but stable condition.

Once again, we see that so much of the gun violence in Chicago, a city with one of the toughest gun control laws in the nation, is caused by known wolves who are out on the streets despite their criminal records. Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson is too busy fighting with Trump and promoting illegal aliens to actually deal with the epidemic of jailbreak policies allowing the worst gang members to remain on the streets. Politicians often dismiss gang violence as bad people killing other bad people, but this incident demonstrates how innocent people are often killed or injured in the crossfire.

The feds have a history of targeting Latin Kings members in Chicago on drug charges to take them off the streets when they escape justice in the state system. This was the big lie behind the First Step Act. Federal prosecutors don’t target “low-level, first-time, non-violent drug offenders” for long sentences; they target gang murderers and use drug laws (or firearms or racketeering) to get them off the streets.

The results of the federal jailbreak bill already came home to roost in Providence, Rhode Island, last month when Joel Francisco, who was released in February under the First Step Act, was charged with murder. Francisco was serving life in prison for a third drug trafficking charge in 2005 under the “three strikes and you’re out” law. However, he got such a severe sentence not because of drugs but because he was a known Latin Kings member responsible for a lot of violence in the city, including shooting a man in the back of the head, execution-style, in 1997. He pleaded no contest for that incident, so at the time he escaped full justice in the state system. The feds targeted him specifically for this reason, yet the First Step Act released him.

Once Francisco was released earlier this year, he tested positive for drugs several times thereafter and was caught attempting to break into his former girlfriend’s house armed with a knife but was never reincarcerated before the October 2 fatal stabbing for which he was arrested two weeks later.

This is the story of Chicago and other major cities as well. Politicians in both parties misleadingly parade convicts before the cameras who they believe were over-sentenced, but for every one of those, there are hundreds of people who are under-sentenced. Yet there is no voice for those victims. Hunter Best, 26, is another recent example of the worst criminals barely serving time in Chicago.

Best was charged with breaking into two homes in Lincoln Park last May and sexually assaulting two young girls in separate incidents on the same night. Surveillance images, video, and DNA testing all substantiated the charges. Yet, as always, it’s too hard, not too easy, to land a conviction, so, according to CWB Chicago, the prosecutor dropped 26 felony charges, “including four counts of Class X felony home invasion involving a sex offense” and “14 burglary counts and four sex-related charges.” Instead, the prosecutor accepted his guilty plea to just two counts of residential burglary.

According to the original charges, as reported by CWB Chicago, “the 13-year-old girl woke up when Best entered her bedroom. Best remained in the room for about fifteen minutes, kissing the girl and rubbing her shoulders as the girl pleaded with him to leave.” The second girl, eleven years old, told investigators that “the man kissed her on the lips and touched her private areas.” Yet, thanks to the plea bargain, good time credits, and time served, this man will be out of prison in a little more than two years from now.

These stories of the worst assaulters, robbers, and even murderers or child molesters barely serving time, despite massive rap sheets, happen every day. They are the stories politicians in both parties have no interest in telling. It’s a criminal’s world; we just live in it. They get the treats from the special interest groups, while we are left with the tricks – quite dangerous ones. (For more from the author of “Chicago Is Tough on Guns and Soft on Crime, and the People Suffer” please click HERE)

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The Deep State’s Vendetta Against General Flynn Led to the Russia Collusion Hoax

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Long before he met Donald Trump in August 2015, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn was a man marked by the Obama administration.

To them, he was a dangerous ticking bomb because of his deep intelligence knowledge and his outspoken opposition to President Obama’s cavalier attitude toward the resurgent threat of terrorism as represented by the rise of the Islamic State.

Already under the watchful eyes of U.S. and British intelligence for his contacts with Russians, Flynn’s initial meeting with Trump triggered a cascade of events that would eventually lead to Flynn’s coerced guilty plea for lying to the FBI and the entire Trump-Russia collusion hoax investigation.

In August 2012, during Flynn’s tenure as director, the Defense Intelligence Agency released an internal, classified report predicting the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Just three months before the 2012 election, candidate Obama did not want to hear that the war in Iraq was about to reignite thanks to his troop withdrawal and that al-Qaida in Iraq (now ISIS) was on the rise after declaring at the Democratic National Convention that he had “end[ed] the war in Iraq” and put “al-Qaida … on the path to defeat.”

Even as late as January 2014, Obama was still ignoring the threat, famously referring to the Islamic State as the “JV team.”

Punished for being correct, Flynn was removed from his position as DIA Director and forced into early retirement from the military on Aug. 7, 2014, ironically the day Obama announced that U.S. warplanes had begun bombing Islamic State targets, and U.S. troops would soon be dispatched back to Iraq.

Flynn, however, remained on the Obama administration’s radar screen, his past and occurring interactions with Russians being carefully logged by U.S. and British intelligence.

That surveillance would later provide “evidence” of Russian collusion including Flynn’s attendance at a December 2015 dinner in Moscow to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Kremlin-linked English-language news service RT, where he was seated next to Vladimir Putin.

The key and earliest known connection to the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, however, occurred in February 2014, six months before Obama fired him as DIA Director.

Flynn had traveled to England to speak at the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar. It was at that event that individuals, who eventually became key figures in the Russia hoax, appeared, such as Stefan Halper and Sir Richard Dearlove.

According to Chuck Ross of The Daily Caller:

“Dearlove, who served as chief of MI6 from 1999 to 2004, had contact during the 2016 [U.S. Presidential] campaign with dossier author Christopher Steele. He is also a close colleague of Stefan Halper, the alleged FBI and CIA informant who established contact with several Trump campaign advisers. Dearlove and Halper attended a Cambridge political event in July 2016 where Halper had his first contact with Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.“

The actual inflection point came in early 2016 when the Obama administration’s vendetta against Flynn and his alleged Russian sympathies evolved into the Trump-Russia collusion hoax after Trump piled up primary victories.

It was long before George Papadopolous arrived on the scene, the individual often cited by the Deep State as the trigger for the Russia collusion investigation, in particular his meeting with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer in May 2016 in which “damaging material” about Hillary Clinton held by the Russians was allegedly discussed.

The formation of CIA Director John Brennan’s inter-agency Trump task force, which was immediately leaked to the BBC, much to Brennan’s consternation, coincided with Flynn becoming a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign as described by a Reuters article on Feb. 27, 2016, titled “Trump being advised by ex-U.S. Lieutenant General who favors closer Russia ties.”

That Brennan-led task force included not only U.S. intelligence agencies, but likely also foreign services such as Britain’s CIA, MI6, and its National Security Agency equivalent GCHQ, which had access to NSA’s database of recorded telephone conversations and emails.

No doubt, Brennan’s task force employed the services of a network of intelligence freelancers located in Europe, some of whom seem to have had connections with the British secretive strategic intelligence and advisory firm, Hakluyt, founded by former MI6 members and retaining close ties to British Intelligence services.

Those allegedly connected to Hakluyt are Stefan Halper, Sir Richard Dearlove, Alexander Downer and John Brennan, who was photographed meeting with Hakluyt personal in 2018.

Hakluyt’s top executives come from MI6 and it has retired GCHQ officials as board members. Perhaps coincidentally, listed on the board of Hakluyt’s parent company, Holdingham, is Louis Susman, formerly Obama’s ambassador to Great Britain, a major fundraiser for Democratic presidential candidates and reportedly a close friend of Hillary Clinton.

The scheme appears to have involved foreign sources in an artificial feedback loop, gathering unsubstantiated information to support the Russian collusion hoax or feeding back planted CIA information that could then be “legitimately” passed on to the FBI to generate a counterintelligence investigation, where Trump personnel or Trump himself could be interrogated.

Parallel coordination with sympathetic media outlets was an obvious additional option. It is not unlike a disreputable journalist providing disinformation to another journalist, then using that story as verification of his preconceived notions.

Another peculiarity of the Flynn saga occurred during the first meeting between then-President Obama and President-elect Donald Trump held within 48 hours after the 2016 election. Among all the critical national security issues that could have been discussed, Obama offered two pieces of advice, one regarding North Korea and the other an oddly out-of-place personnel employment recommendation — don’t hire Michael Flynn.

The rest is history.

Seeing the indictment of Flynn, Trump’s national security advisor, as the first step towards impeachment, the Deep State applied unscrupulous, if not illegal, tactics to coerce a guilty plea.

In December 2017, Flynn did plead guilty to charges that he lied to the FBI about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in what many regard as an “ambush” interview conducted by Peter Strzok, who was later fired from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative team.

Now it appears that the FBI may have tampered with the notes from his 2017 interview, during which they claim Flynn lied.

The time is long past that the case against Lieutenant General Michael Flynn be dismissed and the real Deep State perpetrators of entrapment and criminal conspiracy be investigated.

(Reposted with permission from the author of “The Deep State’s Vendetta Against General Flynn Led to the Russia Collusion Hoax”, originally posted HERE)

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Lawrence Sellin is a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel with branch qualifications and assignments in Special Forces, Infantry and Medical Services. He served in Afghanistan and Iraq and participated in a humanitarian mission to West Africa. Sellin holds a Master’s Degree in Strategic Studies from the U.S. Army War College and received training in Arabic, Kurdish and French from the Defense Language Institute. He had a distinguished civilian career in medical research after completing a Ph.D. in physiology, followed by an international business career in information technology, where he was a manager and subject matter expert in telecommunications, business process management, and command and control systems. He is also the author of numerous articles on military and national security issues.

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America’s Moral Divide Extends Even to the World’s Most Evil Terrorist

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Former vice presidential candidate John Edwards was right when he said in 2004 that there are two Americas. The reaction to the targeting and death of ISIS leader Abu al-Baghdadi demonstrates the moral divide in this country between normal people and the “elites” more than ever.

Normal people who believe in good vs. evil, victim vs. criminal, and right vs. wrong reacted to the news yesterday the way it’s expressed in Proverbs 11:10: “When the wicked perish, there are shouts of joy.”

Those who believe that criminals are victims, babies should be executed, and murderers should be released from prison, aka progressives, have a difficult time with Trump celebrating the lowly death of one of the most brutal terrorists of this generation.

The Washington Post, in a roundly mocked obituary, titled its screed, “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies at 48.” They have since modified the title to “extremist leader,” refusing to mention which form of extremism.

Could you imagine such a headline from the media about Hitler’s death? For that matter, could you imagine a headline like this regarding a conservative they detest, such as Jesse Helms?

The media seems to have a fascination with humanizing people like Baghdadi, while President Trump rightfully depicts them in the dehumanizing way they acted. Bloomberg published a profile yesterday describing Baghdadi as a man who “transformed himself from a little-known teacher of Koranic recitation into the self-proclaimed ruler of an entity that covered swaths of Syria and Iraq” and said he “was killed along with a number of his followers.”

Rukmini Callimachi, who covers ISIS for the New York Times, in a profile piece at the Gray Lady, felt a need to quote local people who grew up with Baghdadi describing his pious devotion to his mosque and how he cleaned the building.

What exactly is the point in pushing this line of reporting now?

Even Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, in response to a question about the president describing Baghdadi’s death as a “coward” and “dog,” said he felt “a little uncomfortable to hear a president talking that way.” CNN’s Jake Tapper bizarrely felt that there was something wrong with what the president said, although he never explained exactly why it was wrong for him to paint such a “vivid picture” of the terrorist’s demise.

Thornberry qualified his answer by noting that there was utility to Trump taking the glamour away from Baghdadi’s death as an inspirational figure in the eyes of young recruits to terrorism. But why did he need to preface his remarks with the fact that he felt “a little uncomfortable?”

I guess we should just be relieved the Ninth Circuit didn’t place an injunction on Baghdadi’s death.

In reality, this was one instance where Trump’s undisciplined and unorthodox way of speaking is just what the time called for. The entire draw of ISIS was its glamour in martyrdom. Trump did a superlative job dehumanizing him while playing up the bravery of the special operators – all without too much focus on himself. He was actually right on message.

Also, Trump took the time to explain in greater detail and clarity why he believes it’s wrong to have a permanent ground presence in Syria. He deftly explained how ISIS is a bigger problem for Russia and the other neighbors and how it’s not our job to have a permanent presence there, but rather to engage in quick strikes and maneuvers as necessary. Taking away the shine from ISIS recruitment speaks exactly to what threatens us here at home, thanks to all of the people we’ve admitted into our country over the years who subscribe to this ideology. Trump’s rhetoric following this operation did more to deter their actions than a permanent presence in the region, which does nothing but help Russia and the Shiites. (For more from the author of “America’s Moral Divide Extends Even to the World’s Most Evil Terrorist” please click HERE)

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Want to Fight a War? Fight on Our Border, Not Syria’s

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Over 30,000 people will be killed there this year. There are powerful terrorist groups that are defeating government forces, beheading and torturing townsfolk, and controlling every form of human- and drug-smuggling over the border. This is not Syria and the Turkish border. I’m talking about Mexico and our own border.

It is truly astounding how so many of the self-described national security hawks like Mitt Romney, who believe we have blood on our hands for not having troops flung out in Syria during a civil war, never utter a word about the need to deploy troops more aggressively at our own border to combat the cartel terrorists.

The Mexican cartels are defeating the government in major cities. There are battles just south of us; they are shooting at our agents; they have operatives in every U.S. state spreading drugs and gang violence; and they are working with MS-13, which is more of a threat to our communities than anything going on in Syria. Thus, the stability of Mexico matters a lot more to us than the stability of Syria. If Romney, Rubio, and other establishment Republicans, along with Democrat leaders, feel we need several thousand troops at the Turkish border, they should support several hundred thousand troops at our own border, based on a commensurate measure of what actually affects our own security.

Yesterday, Mexican national guardsmen detained Ovidio Guzman López, the son of former Sinaloa Cartel head “El Chapo,” in the city of Culiacán. On Thursday afternoon, Sinaloa members dispatched a stronger force of soldiers and weapons than the Mexican government, and the government was forced to release him. They also released his brother, Ivan. This is a failed narco-state right on our border. The cartels are now officially more powerful than Mexico’s military, even when the government is actually trying to combat them. The government has now lost control of a city of 785,000 people.

What’s even more embarrassing is that this failed operation was done at the behest of our government, which had requested Guzman Lopez be extradited to the U.S. for trial, according to Mexico’s president. That is a black eye for our government and something that should concern Mitt Romney a lot more than Syria.

Here is who truly controls Mexico:

Jaeson Jones, retired captain for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s intel and counterterrorism division, has long been a proponent of taking a more aggressive stance against the cartels and believes this is a wake-up call. “Intense violence rocked Culiacan, Mexico, yesterday as government authorities captured leaders of Sinaloa Cartel,” said the cartel expert, who just took a trip to Mexico to meet with sources. “Only hours later, the president of Mexico would cower and show the world the Mexican government was not in charge of the safety of its country. For years, I have tried to convince our citizens and government how hyper-violent the Mexican cartels have become and why we must designate the Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Yesterday, the world witnessed it; the question now is will the U.S. State Dept. still refuse to take action?”

The cartel members are also very heavily armed.

“We observed .50 cal belt-fed machine guns mounted in armored vehicles, Barrett .50 cal sniper rifles engaging Mexican authorities, convoys of armored vehicles being called into the city along with the use of hand grenades and 40 millimeter grenades,” observed Jones. “They also released prisoners, implemented roadblocks, and a day later, the city is still on fire. Yesterday’s events showed a president cower and a nation kneel. These are not just drug cartels any more.”

It’s truly shocking how nobody in either party in Congress who is ready to die on the hill of the Syrian civil war even utters a peep about the fall of our number one trading partner, which happens to be right on our own border.

You might think this is just a Mexican problem. The issue is that the increasing violence every month is going to impel a new wave of Mexican migration to our border. After steep declines in Mexican illegal immigration for the past decade while the Central Americans began coming, we are now coming full circle and witnessing the early stages of increased Mexican border migration, thanks to the cartel violence.

The Washington Post reports today that there is a new increase in Mexicans asking for asylum at our border. Mexican adults caught at the border have increased 25 percent since the end of July, even as the number of Central Americans has dropped sharply. “In recent weeks, thousands of Mexican adults and children have been camping out in queues at U.S. border crossings, sleeping in tents while awaiting a chance to apply for safe refuge.”

One agent who patrols in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas told me he is already seeing this new trend on the ground. “They are coming from Mexico with an ‘official document’ that has been notarized, which describes their harsh living conditions and threats to safety from the cartels,” said the agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he’s not authorized to speak to the media.

Again, it’s truly astounding how nobody in Congress, the State Department, or the DOD wants to view our own border as a national security problem because it’s not located in the Middle East. It seems like our military only exists for nonexistent borders of other groups around the world. (For more from the author of “Want to Fight a War? Fight on Our Border, Not Syria’s” please click HERE)

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If SCOTUS Won’t Overturn Even Recent Bad Decisions, Why Does Anyone Think Roe Is in Danger?

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It should be a no-brainer that any reputed conservative Supreme Court would easily overturn recent bad decisions limiting sentences of life without parole for juvenile murderers, like the infamous D.C. sniper, Lee Boyd Malvo, who, along with his older partner, killed 17 and injured 10 in 2002 in the D.C. area. Yet here we are, completely unsure whether we have to five justices willing to affirm the long-standing precedent.

Many conservatives somehow think we are building an originalist majority to overturn terrible court decisions from 50 years ago, such as Roe v. Wade, yet no legal analyst seems to think we even have the votes to overturn terrible decisions made by Anthony Kennedy this past decade. Then what good are these much-vaunted Supreme Court nominees?

Before delving into the Malvo case, some background is in order. In 2005, contrary to practice in our country since the Founding, the Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment for juveniles violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment in all cases. Writing for the majority in Roper v. Simmons, Anthony Kennedy applied foreign law to overturn a 1989 Supreme Court decision (Stanford v. Kentucky) and rule that a punishment in practice at the time of our Founding somehow violated our own Constitution. He felt that “the evolving standards of decency” gave him the right to unilaterally amend the Constitution. Liberals never have problems reversing precedents they don’t like when they discover new “rights.”

Well, what’s the alternative to the death penalty for people like Malvo who commit mass murder at the age of 17? Life in prison without parole, right? In Graham v. Florida (2010), Kennedy, joined by the liberals and Roberts, ruled that life in prison without parole for a juvenile is unconstitutional except for cases of murder. Then, in his incremental ad hoc constitutional amendment process, in Miller v. Alabama (2012), Kennedy took it to the next level and joined with the four liberals to rule that state laws mandating life in prison without parole even for murder are unconstitutional. Finally, in Montgomery v. Louisiana, the court retroactively applied the Miller v. Alabama decision to roughly 2,500 people already serving mandatory sentences of life without parole as juvenile murderers. Roberts bizarrely joined in with Montgomery, even though he wrote the dissent in Miller.

Freeze-frame right here. Given that it was Anthony Kennedy who insidiously took a hatchet to long-standing state powers over juvenile justice from 2005 to 2016, and he has now been replaced with the much-vaunted Brett Kavanaugh, shouldn’t we have the confidence that everything from Roper through Montgomery should be reversed? If we are promised by the Republican legal establishment that the new Supreme Court will overturn long-standing bad precedent, it certainly should easily overturn this craziness from just a few years ago.

Remember, we are not debating the policy or political merits of capital punishment or life without parole for juvenile murderers. We are debating the notion that the Constitution prohibits states from passing these laws. No originalist can ever contemplate such a novel idea, and with all the hype surrounding Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, this should be easy to overturn. Anyone calling himself an originalist should agree with what Thomas wrote in Graham v. Florida – that “the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause was originally understood as prohibiting torturous methods of punishment—specifically methods akin to those that had been considered cruel and unusual at the time the Bill of Rights” (emphasis added).

Sadly, none of the legal analysts believe this will happen, and as is the case with so many issues, there is no confidence that anyone besides Thomas and Alito would categorically overturn these four cases.

The issue at hand in Mathena v. Malvo is whether to expand Montgomery to a case where the juvenile murderer wasn’t even sentenced to life without parole under a mandatory guideline. Lawyers for Malvo argue that the jury never really contemplated anything lower than life without parole, so while such a punishment wasn’t mandated, the jury never fully vetted out whether this specific juvenile was “incorrigible,” as required under the Miller decision. The Fourth Circuit agreed with Malvo.

Most of the oral argument time on Wednesday was dedicated to splitting hairs over whether Malvo fits into Miller and Montgomery. And even on that account, some legal bloggers like SCOTUSblog’s Amy Howe hypothesized that “Justice Brett Kavanaugh [is] potentially the pivotal vote.” Howe believes it’s “possible that a majority might try to navigate a middle ground that sends the case back for the lower courts to take a closer look at whether Malvo had a real opportunity to have the judge and jury consider whether his youth might warrant a lighter sentence.”

Time will tell, but notice how it’s not even under discussion that there might be five votes to completely overturn Montgomery and Miller, much less the previous cases. Nobody in the legal world believes anyone other than Thomas and Alito would categorically apply the Eighth Amendment as understood at the time of its adoption. That is because Gorsuch, although decent on many issues, is no Scalia, and Kavanaugh certainly is not. Roberts is getting worse by the day. And while many of these justices will not add to the existing bad case law, their political motivations will make them reluctant to overturn even the most egregious 5-4 decisions of the past decade or two.

Do you think Democrats have any doubt that the current four liberals plus their next potential fifth vote would overturn the Heller decision on gun rights from 2008 in a heartbeat? Heck, in the gay marriage case of 2016, they overturned a 9-0 decision from 1971. The courts have always been a one-way ratchet for the Left and a dead end for conservatives. The Left will toss out 200 years of precedent, history, tradition, and statute overnight on immigration or social issues, while judges like Roberts and Kavanaugh will dogmatically legitimize that breach itself as new precedent that must be accorded the highest degree of respect.

For decades, rather than militating against the premise of judicial supremacy over political questions, the GOP legal establishment has legitimized the concept, albeit with the promise that we would somehow win the supremacy game by “appointing better judges.” It was the ultimate scam for voting Republican rather than looking outside the GOP for a home for conservatism. Now, they believe they’ve finally achieved that goal. Yet nothing has changed. As always, when liberals have a clear majority, they make earth-shattering transformational changes. When Republicans get a majority, the lower courts still make radical decisions, and at best, the Supreme Court merely maintains the status quo. And in some instances, there is at least one GOP appointee peeled off to join with the transformational changes, as we witnessed multiple times last term.

Just remember, in the current legal system, for every Clarence Thomas, there are numerous John Robertses and Brett Kavanaughs – and an endless supply of Ruth Bader Ginsburgs. The capacity and resolve of a good judge to do good is nowhere near the capacity and resolve of a bad judge to do bad. (For more from the author of “If SCOTUS Won’t Overturn Even Recent Bad Decisions, Why Does Anyone Think Roe Is in Danger?” please click HERE)

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Red Flag Laws and the Misguided Worship of Due Process

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Congress is in one of what it euphemistically calls its “District work periods,” and so the pressure is off gun-owners for a fortnight. However, the threat will resume right after Columbus Day — which, surprisingly, is still a federal holiday. Gun-owners correctly perceive their Second Amendment rights to be balanced on the edge of a knife, awaiting the pressure to build again after the next well publicized shooting.

For gun-owners, the pattern is all too familiar: a mass shooting, such as those in El Paso and Dayton, followed by massive amounts of publicity by the anti-gun media and posturing politicians, accompanied by a demand that Congress “do something,” such as red flag laws. In response, gun-owners demand that their elected officials stand firm against the pressure, holding their collective breath, waiting to see how many of those members of Congress who promised to support gun rights in the months before the last election are willing to sacrifice those principles a year before the next election.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) promised that under his bill, to get a federal grant, the state red flag laws would have to provide “due process.” Similarly, President Trump has sought to assure the public that any red flag legislation will provide for “rapid due process.” When questioned, most congressional Republicans say they will support police seizing guns only if rigorous due process is provided. Don’t buy it. Red flag laws violate the Second Amendment, and “due process” is not a magic wand to be waved to make the infringement go away.

Due process is the idea that the government must follow the procedural rules under our system of justice. These guarantees protect Americans against arbitrary decisions by the government to take away life, liberty, and property. The Supreme Court has described due process circularly as “what process is due.” There is no one set of rules for all situations. Typically, the greater the liberty interest at stake, the more extensive the due process protections must be.

Most associate due process with concepts like the right to a hearing, an unbiased decision-maker, the right to be represented by a lawyer, and the ability to present evidence in your defense. But is it really true — as the president and many others appear to believe — that the government can take away someone’s rights, so long as it showers him with lots and lots of due process? The promise of due process is little comfort when those exercising that process have no respect for the rule of law.

Imagine if the government accused you of wanting to be a drug-dealer. You’ve never been charged with — or even accused of — having actually sold drugs. But still, someone thinks there’s a good chance you may in the future. So you’re given a hearing, allowed to hire a lawyer, and permitted to testify why you won’t become a drug dealer in the future. But at the end of the day, a judge still believes there’s an unreasonable risk that you will enter the drug business. So, in order to prevent that possibility, for the next year or so, you no longer have any Fourth Amendment rights. The police may now stop your car and search it any time they wish and enter your home to search for drugs at will. What, that doesn’t sound fair? What’s the problem? You were given loads and loads of due process!

The government can’t strip away Fourth Amendment rights simply because, in doing so, it has complied with due process rights. The Fourth Amendment still protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures” and requires a warrant based on probable cause. Likewise, the Second Amendment protects “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” — regardless of whether the government thinks it’s a good idea that a particular person have guns.

Certainly, young children, illegal aliens, and murderers are not part of “the people” protected by the Second Amendment. Current law makes firearms possession illegal by a person convicted of a felony or who has been “adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution.” But there is absolutely no historical or legal precedent for taking Second Amendment rights away from those who the government’s “precogs” declare may commit a crime in the future.

President Trump should be familiar with this concept. In response to the Mueller investigation, President Trump lamented that he should be cloaked with the presumption of innocence and that it’s a tall order to prove a negative — for someone to show that he didn’t commit a crime. How true. But how much harder is it for a person to prove that he won’t do something in the future? It’s impossible. Yet that’s the standard red flag laws impose on their victims.

Three of the governments in the last century that experimented with their versions of red flag laws, allowing government judges to declare political enemies mentally unfit in order to make it easier to subjugate them, were communist (red) China, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany. Each of those nations had lots of red in its flags.

History has taught us time and again that governments are far more dangerous to liberty than are criminals. A person’s odds of being murdered by a tyrannical government (termed “democide”) are astronomically higher than by a mass shooter. Yet too many people seem oblivious to the fact that far worse than some criminals getting access to guns is a system where the government gets to decide who should be disarmed. In fact, that is the beginning of the end of a free society.

Many people won’t like to hear this, but it has never been the job of government to prevent future crime. If it were, then our entire Constitution and Bill of Rights would stand as an obstacle.

Lindsey Graham has moaned that “the Second Amendment is not a suicide pact.” What he’s really saying is that constitutional rights shouldn’t impede the government doing whatever it wants to do. On the contrary, the Bill of Rights protects the freedoms of all Americans. There’s no way around that. In a truly free society, bad people will sometimes do bad things — like falsely yell “fire” in a crowded theater. The role of government is to punish bad actors and provide justice to victims — after the commission of an illegal act.

If the government takes on the improper role to prevent future crime, that inevitably will result in an Orwellian surveillance state, where freedom is theoretical at best. Many believe we are already on that road, and red flag laws are certainly a big step in the wrong direction.

The maxim is still true that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. A government agent armed with a red flag law is a poor substitute. Even the left-leaning Mother Jones magazine has questioned whether red flag laws would actually stop mass shootings.

Regardless, it is not up to our “overlords” to weigh and balance Americans’ constitutional rights against the potential future danger they may pose. And the robust protection of Fifth Amendment due process rights means little if the process results in the infringement of protections that the Second Amendment unequivocally declares “shall not be infringed.”

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John Velleco is the executive vice president of Gun Owners of America, a national gun rights organization representing more than two million members and supporters. Follow him on Twitter. This article originally appeared in the American Thinker.

How Can Incarceration Rates Be Racist If They Reflect the ACTUAL Crime Rates?

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Under a true system of justice, if you do the crime, you do the time. Law and order deter bad guys. Period. However, once we start social engineering and going soft on crime in order to avoid rightfully incarcerating individuals of particular races, everyone is harmed, including those the limousine liberals purport to help. The most dangerous example is our current rush to push jailbreak legislation under the false premise that black people are incarcerated unfairly and to ignore the appalling levels of crime committed by young black males. It hurts everyone, including law-abiding African-Americans.

If one were to be dropped here from Mars with no preconceived notions about violence in America, one would come away with the impression that white supremacy is the biggest threat to public safety. DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan announced last month that the Department of Homeland Security would be using increased resources to confront “racially based violent extremism, particularly white supremacist extremism.” Yet the reality in the everyday stories from New York, where Jews are being attacked by violent black youths every day, or the knockout game continuing in places like Maryland, paints a very different picture. And it’s backed up by the data.

Cory Booker claims that there is “systemic racism” in our criminal justice system leading to unjust mass incarceration of black people. The facts simply say the opposite. According to the new National Crime Victimization Survey published by the Bureau of Justice Statics, out of the 593,598 interracial violent victimization crimes between blacks and whites reported in 2018, 90 percent were black against white, and 9.5 percent were white against black. That is simply astounding given that black people compose just 12 percent of the general population and white people comprise 62 percent. And the trend is getting worse. As Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute observes, “That ratio is becoming more skewed, despite the Democratic claim of Trump-inspired white violence. In 2012-13, blacks committed 85 percent of all interracial victimizations between blacks and whites; whites committed 15 percent.”

[B]lack-on-white crime is by far the most predominant interracial victimization, followed by Hispanic-on-white. White-on-black and Hispanic-on-black crimes are the rarest form of interracial violence, according to the DOJ’s victim survey.

The lopsided share of crime committed by black people is a problem across the board, but particularly for violent crimes. According to the FBI’s 2018 Uniform Crime reporting, of the 11,514 homicide offenders whose race is known, a whopping 55 percent were black, 42 percent white, and three percent other. Though black people make up only 12 percent of the population, they composed 53 percent of all murder victims in cases where the identity of the victim was known and reported. In cases where the race of both the victim and offender was known, a staggering 88.9 percent of black homicide victims were murdered by black offenders.

To drill down even further, in 2017, black males accounted for 45 percent of homicides, even though they make up just seven percent of the population. That means they commit murders at a rate eight times higher than whites.

In 2018, African-Americans accounted for 54 percent of those arrested for robbery, 34 percent of those arrested for aggravated assault, and 43 percent of weapons violations. In total, they composed 37.4 percent of all violent crime arrests. Yet, despite the complaint about black imprisonment, only 33 percent of state and federal inmates in 2017 were black. And their numbers are dropping quicker than any other group.

All of these numbers were even higher among juveniles. For example, black youth were responsible for 58 percent of juvenile murders, 64 percent of robbery, 41 percent of aggravated assault, 52 percent of motor vehicle theft, and 48 percent of overall violent crime among offenders under 18.

So, if anything, black criminals are underrepresented in the prison population relative to their share of violent crime. Contrary to the endless lies from the political class, black incarceration has nothing to do with drug laws whatsoever. If anything, FBI data show black people are arrested at a slightly lower percentage for drugs than for most violent crime offenses.

Even among the more targeted “hate crimes” documented by the FBI in 2017, black perpetrators were the offenders in 21.3 percent of cases, almost twice their share of the population. According to the NYPD, anti-Semitic attacks in New York City have increased 63 percent over last year, which itself saw an increase from the previous year. And unless you have been living off the grid, you will know that law enforcement is very reluctant to designate crime committed by what the political class considers as “minorities” as hate crimes.

Last November, the New York Times reported, “During the past 22 months, not one person caught or identified as the aggressor in an anti-Semitic hate crime has been associated with a far right-wing group.” In a shocking admission, the paper of record observed that the growing “anti-Semitism bypasses consideration as a serious problem in New York,” because “it refuses to conform to an easy narrative with a single ideological enemy,” given “the varied backgrounds of people who commit hate crimes in the city that make combating and talking about anti-Semitism in New York much harder.”

Well, that is one way to explain it! Those “varied backgrounds” pose a big challenge to intellectual honesty.

To discuss race in the context of criminal justice and public safety and completely ignore this data is to cover up the greatest threats to public safety. Though black criminals commit interracial crimes much more than criminals of other races, they still victimize their own race more than anyone else. Thus, refusing to deter violent black criminals because of the effort to abolish incarceration will harm black victims more than anyone else.

All threats need to be deterred with tough punishment against violent and repeat offenders, but pushing weak laws and distracting with white supremacism will fuel the most rampant violence in this country, which is black-on-black and black-on-white crimes in inner cities like Baltimore and Chicago. Simply letting violent felons off the hook or reducing sentencing because of racial politics will harm everyone. The subtle bigotry of low expectations, pandering, and deflection will get people of all races killed, and the sooner we return to punishing dangerous criminals regardless of race, the more just our system will be. (For more from the author of “How Can Incarceration Rates Be Racist If They Reflect the Actual Crime Rates?” please click HERE)

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Both Republicans and Democrats Are Clueless About Afghanistan

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For eighteen years, we have wrongly applied counterinsurgency doctrine to a proxy war waged by Pakistan against the U.S. and Afghanistan. Bilateral negotiations with the Taliban will not bring peace to Afghanistan nor will it provide an adequate strategy to underpin U.S. national interests in South Asia, the future threat being China in the form of the China-Pakistan alliance.

Both Republicans and Democrats are Clueless about Afghanistan

Up until now, the ill-fated U.S.-Taliban negotiations were comprised of a collection of exit criteria based on relatively narrow War on Terror yardsticks, our presence being our sole bargaining chip in exchange for Taliban assurances, largely unenforceable without that presence.

Whatever strategy we think we’ve had has been constructed of false notions and an unwillingness to accept and act upon the regional nation-state dynamics of which the Afghan conflict is fundamentally a biproduct.

The War in Afghanistan has its origins in the decades-old antagonism between Pakistan and India, spawned by the violence-punctuated partition of the British Indian Empire in August 1947.

Pakistan has always viewed Afghanistan as a necessary client-state, a security buffer against what they consider potential Indian encirclement.

Not surprisingly, Pakistani interference in Afghanistan long pre-dated Soviet and American involvement during the 1980s, but it clearly accelerated Islamabad’s use of 4th generation warfare as an instrument of its foreign policy. That is, Islamist militants were found to be useful proxies for the Pakistani military and its Inter-Service Intelligence agency, the ISI, particularly against India and in Afghanistan, and that retaliation for their use could be largely “immunized” by Pakistan’s newly-acquired nuclear umbrella and its expanding alliance with China.

One source of America’s current dilemma in Afghanistan was the failure by the Reagan Administration, allowing the Central Intelligence Agency to blindly outsource Mujahideen funding to Pakistan’s ISI, which funneled American money and arms not to Afghan nationalists like Ahmad Shah Massoud, but to pro-Pakistani Islamists such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani.

It is now an undisputed fact that the Taliban were created by the ISI beginning in 1994 as a means to intervene in the Afghan civil war and influence the outcome in favor of Pakistani national interests when its previous favored Islamist, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, failed in that effort.

While the U.S. has been fighting the War on Terror in Afghanistan since 2001, Pakistan has been using the Taliban as a proxy to control Afghanistan as part of its struggle with India and to promote the foreign policy ambitions of its “all weather” ally, China.

For eighteen years we have wrongly applied counterinsurgency doctrine to a proxy war waged by Pakistan against the U.S. and Afghanistan. That approach was never a winning strategy as long as Pakistan controlled the supply of our troops in landlocked Afghanistan and regulated the operational tempo through its proxy army, the Taliban, who has maintained an extensive recruiting, training and financial support infrastructure inside Pakistan, immune to attack.

Bilateral negotiations with the Taliban will not bring peace to Afghanistan nor will it provide an adequate strategy to underpin U.S. national interests in South Asia, the premise of which should be that U.S. adversaries do not unduly benefit from our withdrawal. U.S. leaders on both sides of the aisle need to acknowledge some on-the-ground realities.

First, Pakistan, not Afghanistan, is the epicenter of regional Islamic militancy and an exporter of jihad. Actions being taken by Pakistan in Kashmir against India are strikingly similar to those of its Taliban proxy in Afghanistan.

Second, China’s growing geopolitical strength and its increased presence in Pakistan have changed the strategic dynamics of the region, largely rendering whatever remains of U.S. South Asian policy obsolete. The future threat is from China in the form of the Chinese-Pakistani alliance. China’s aim is to dominate South Asia, first economically based on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and Afghanistan’s incorporation into it as a part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.

China then plans to expand militarily using its alliance with Pakistan to establish military bases, particularly on Pakistan’s Arabian Sea coast, thus controlling vital maritime lanes and the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Those bases would provide a critical link between China’s military facilities in the South China Sea and its naval base in Djibouti at the entrance of the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.

An Afghanistan solution should be framed within the context of a new South Asian strategy focusing on preventing Chinese-Pakistani domination. From a politico-military standpoint, two approaches, operating in parallel, are required.

We should adopt a traditional containment policy, including greater cooperation with India. U.S. naval and air power projection should be augmented to counter Chinese attempts to box-in U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf area and outflank the U.S. naval base at Diego Garcia. Additionally, increased financial and economic pressure needs to be applied to Pakistan to restrain its use of terrorist proxies as an element of its foreign policy.

In order to maintain a balance of power, the U.S. should use strategic disruption to thwart Chinese plans to dominate the region by targeting Pakistani vulnerabilities. Tactically, that would involve managing and, when necessary, exploiting the inherent conflicts in South Asia including state-to-state disputes, such as the Kashmir issue, the Sunni-Shia divide and ethnic separatism within Pakistan.

It is such a strategy Democrats and Republicans should be debating, not merely arguing over now meaningless War on Terror platitudes about Afghanistan. (For more from the author of “Both Republicans and Democrats Are Clueless About Afghanistan” please click HERE)

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Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired US Army Reserve colonel, an IT command and control and cyber security subject matter expert and a veteran of Afghanistan, Iraq and a humanitarian mission to West Africa. He receives email at [email protected]

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Why Conservatives Must Fight Judicial Supremacism — and Not Hang Their Hopes on John Roberts

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The reason why judges don’t stand for election is because they are supposed to look narrowly at the law, regardless of their political positions or political pressure from elites in media and culture. Yet Chief Justice John Roberts appears to be crafting vital legal opinions based on nothing more than a scorecard of how often each political side wins on a legal question. The latest revelation that Roberts might have changed his mind on the census case, just as he did on Obamacare, should give conservatives pause about putting their faith in a “conservative Supreme Court” rather than delegitimizing the concept of judicial supremacy in the first place.

Joan Biskupic, a CNN legal analyst and Supreme Court biographer, wrote an “exclusive” exposé on Thursday suggesting that initially, “Roberts was ready to rule for [Secretary of Commerce] Ross and the administration. But sometime in the weeks that followed, sources said, Roberts began to waver.”

The reason this report sounds credible is because, as I noted at the time of the ruling, if you read Roberts’ plurality opinion, the legal reasoning sounds like the opposite of his final order, the same phenomenon that gave away his flip in the Obamacare case. Roberts noted that the citizenship question is the essence of the census, has been with us for most of our history, and that nothing in the Constitution, census statute, or even the rule-making process under the APA precluded the president from doing this. But he then concluded that the case should go back to the lower court because he didn’t like the reason the secretary of commerce gave for why the administration chose to reinstate the citizenship question.

The problem with this rationale is that if there is no violation of statute or the Constitution, then how is there a valid case or controversy against the administration, regardless of the reason they give for a policy, especially something as obvious as asking about citizenship on a census? Whether you are a liberal or a conservative, his decision made no sense.

I have noticed in following many other Roberts decisions that he has an iron political motivation to avoid making the Supreme Court look too “conservative” at all costs. Thus, he finds ways to either allow liberal rulings to stand by not taking up appeals or uses tortured logic to join with the liberals on some other cases, but in a convoluted way that he thinks won’t offend his personal jurisprudence. He so badly doesn’t want to be political that he is more political than anyone else.

In the run-up to this past term’s grand finale in June, many court watchers and commentators that I follow were speculating about a “conservative sweep” in the critical cases. But Roberts found ways to side with the leftists. He did so on a number of criminal “rights” cases, executions, a global warming case, and an administrative state case, in addition to flipping on the census.

There is a simple reason why conservatives should win every case at the Supreme Court: The law compels it. Most (but not all) political cases initially brought to court are from the Left. This is because, in general, leftists control the legal profession and more aggressively litigate political issues, but it’s also particularly true today because Trump is president and they will naturally shoot at anything he does in court. Thus, by definition, the cases the Supreme Court gets are appeals from lower court judges who created insane new constitutional rights or adopted novel rules of standing. Sorry to break it to you, Roberts, but you have an obligation to aggressively swat them down categorically.

Most of the court’s cases are not 50-50 equal constitutional questions. They are legally 100-0 no-brainers but nonetheless are viewed, at least by the elites, as political 50-50 issues or as leftist winners. Any judge, regardless of his politics, is obligated to side with the law, even if that means siding against the political outcome of the more popular political movement in Washington 10 out of 10 times.

Take Obama’s DACA amnesty, for example. Among the D.C. elites, 90 percent of Republicans support it. Heck, even Trump supports it. Nonetheless, anyone with any legal honesty would know that this doesn’t even register as a legal case. There is no way, however much you want the result, to say that Obama can take people whom law requires be deported and give them legal documents, much less mandate that Trump must continue this usurpation. You could be a rabid open-borders advocate from a political standpoint, but you’d have to concede that there is no legal justification, much less legal mandate, for Obama’s amnesty.

But it appears that for Roberts, it would be perceived as an act of right-wing court bias to rule correctly. Thus, either he will employ another tortured legal trick to avoid categorically throwing out the lawsuit, or he will “compensate” for a proper ruling on amnesty by agreeing with the Left in another absurd case. And there are plenty of totally absurd cases to choose from: a ruling creating a right for 7.8 billion people to immigrate, a ruling creating a right for Planned Parenthood to be subsidized, another case where they say transgenderism is in the Civil Rights Act, and yet another case where the Ninth Circuit says the Eight Amendment creates a right for prisoners to undergo taxpayer-funded castration.

No sane person can say the law or Constitution mandates those policies. As such, any honest justice not only must reverse those opinions, but is obligated to do so as early and as categorically as possible. The simple reality is that most cases coming before the court that are very political have a “legal” foundation built upon insanely novel “constitutional” ideas.

Imagine for a moment if the shoe were on the other foot. Let’s say conservatives got their favorite judges to indulge the following propositions: abstinence organizations are entitled to free taxpayer funding, government can mandate that all citizens without a criminal record must own a gun, and government must pay for at least one firearm for people who can’t afford them. Even with gun rights emphatically listed in the Constitution, while the right to immigrate is not, Americans suing for government-funded guns is absurd. And illegal aliens crashing our border and then suing because they don’t like the free medical care they get is even zanier. But the Supreme Court would immediately “side with the Left” in these hypotheticals, and likely call for the removal of those lower court judges mandating taxpayer-funded firearms.

But the Left has successfully made its most insane ideas mainstream and at least a 50-50 toss-up legal questions in the courts. This is why Roberts feels the pressure to make up reasons to rule with the Left and often quietly allows absurd lower court rulings to stand in the “shadow docket,” as he sometimes agrees to overturn others.

Which brings us back to the census case. Nobody had any inkling that Roberts could buy into the absurd notion that the census can’t ask a citizenship question. But he is not governed by law or rationality; it seems he is governed by his perception of the equilibrium of politics in Washington.

This is why conservatives are foolish to agree to judicial supremacism and then put their faith in somehow winning the supremacism game. Instead, it’s time to educate the public in the fact that the courts don’t have the final say over political matters. Courts are every bit as political as the political branches. So let’s keep the politics where it actually belongs, where it is more transparent, and where the public can address their problems through elections. (For more from the author of “Why Conservatives Must Fight Judicial Supremacism — and Not Hang Their Hopes on John Roberts” please click HERE)

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The Primary Threat Now Is Civilization Jihad, and It’s on Our Own Shores

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In my first article commemorating the eighteenth anniversary of 9/11, I discussed how, rather than dialing back immigration from the Middle East, we stepped on the gas pedal, bringing in millions more without any guarantee we can vet them. But there is the other half of the equation: The radicalism already on our shores and not aggressively investigated and prosecuted by the government.

There was a long-standing Muslim Brotherhood network already in this country in 2001 that was instrumental in inspiring and working with those behind the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 as well as other terror attacks. Rather than going after that network with a vengeance after 9/11, our government still treated them as legitimate Muslim community outreach leaders. That problem is still huge today.

In 2009, the Holy Land Foundation terror-funding trial gave Americans a jolting dose of reality when it came out that so many of the leading charity and community organizations within the American Muslim community had significant ties to terror groups like Hamas. Federal Judge Jorge Solis implicated in the Holy Land Foundation terror trial the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and the North American Islamic Trust. His 2009 order denied efforts by CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood affiliates to have their names expunged from the trial record. Solis noted that “the Government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA and NAIT with HLF, the Islamic Association for Palestine (‘IAP’), and with Hamas.”

The judge cited a 1991 memorandum from a Muslim Brotherhood official explaining the organization’s goals in America as follows:

“Understanding the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America” is “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

Rather than following up on this case at every level and actually prosecuting these groups while banishing the Muslim Brotherhood umbrella organizations from polite society, as with KKK, the government indulged their leaders as legitimate partners with the Muslim community. With so many new people coming from the Middle East every year, how do they even have a chance to assimilate into Americanism if these are the ones leading the community and are legitimized by government?

In 2010, counterterrorism expert Patrick Poole, who now writes for PJ Media, wrote a white paper on 10 jihadists living in America who were involved with terrorism and had ties to either the 9/11 group or terror cells that committed prior acts who were indulged by our government, in some cases even after 9/11. Perhaps the best-known example is Anwar al-Awlaki.

Two weeks after 9/11, according to FBI documents released in 2013, our government knew that al-Awlaki bought airline tickets for Mohammed Atta and two of the other hijackers. The flights were in the summer of 2001 and are thought to have been dry runs for the terror attacks. Yet, as Fox News reported in 2010, al-Awlaki was hosted by the military at the Pentagon several months after his disciples flew planes into it for the purpose of “outreach to the Muslim community”! Documents secured by Judicial Watch further confirmed that al-Awlaki was in the crosshairs of law enforcement several other times between 2002 and 2007 but was mysteriously released each time. He is suspected of directing the underwear bomber on Christmas 2009 and was in contact with Nidal Hassan, who murdered 13 people at Fort Hood a month before that. He was eventually killed in a drone strike in Yemen two years later.

Poole details nine other prominent Islamists in America who were treated as partners by our government and military, even though they were hooked up with the very cells responsible for the worst terrorist attacks. One such figure was Ali Mohamed, al Qaeda’s security chief, who was allowed to infiltrate our special forces, training soldiers in Arabic culture at Fort Bragg after being expelled from Egypt in the 1980s. While he was working with one of the most important parts of our military, according to Poole, “he was schooling U.S.-based Islamic militants in weapons, explosives and martial arts, including the cell responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.” He also helped transport bin Laden from Afghanistan to Sudan, trained the Somali forces who attacked our soldiers in “Black Hawk Down,” helped arrange the cell responsible for the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, and arranged a U.S. fundraising tour for Ayman al-Zawahiri, the man who took over al Qaeda’s leadership after the death of bin Laden.

Another example cited by Poole is Sheikh Kifah Mustapha. He was personally named an unindicted coconspirator and fundraiser for Hamas in the Holy Land Foundation case. A year later, he was given a tour of O’Hare airport as a member of the FBI’s “Citizens Academy.”

How in the world did a man who should have been indicted on terror charges but is free to engage in treason to this day obtain a security clearance?

Earlier in 2010, Mustapha’s behavior was repugnant enough that the Illinois state police fired him as a chaplain. When Mustapha filed a lawsuit, with the help of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated CAIR, even the Democrat attorney general was appalled by him. Attorney General Lisa Madigan filed a motion in federal court in 2013 noting that Mustapha “aided and abetted, or at least cheered for, terrorism” after he was caught on a video chanting “terrorist lyrics.”

In October 2010, Eli Lake reported in the Washington Times that then-director of the FBI Robert Mueller was asked about the inclusion of the Hamas cleric in the FBI’s training program, and he refused to answer the question, even as he admitted there are widespread terror links in the sphere of outreach groups the Bureau patronizes.

Indeed, the war on terror is primarily not overseas. It is on our own shores. We need not solve the vexing problems of tribal warfare in Afghanistan to secure our homeland. We need to simply open our eyes and not commit suicide. There’s a reason why our enemies rely on us “sabotaging its miserable house by their hands.” They rely on our own self-destruction for their success. (For more from the author of “The Primary Threat Now Is Civilization Jihad, and It’s on Our Own Shores” please click HERE)

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