News & Politics

A leading gun rights advocate says he is glad Senate leaders will allow votes on a pair of gun control measures in the wake of Sunday’s terrorist attack in Orlando, so that all lawmakers can be put on the record for their votes and because it shows which politicians are willing to trash critical constitutional protections for the sake of their agendas.

“A gun doesn’t have a brain to hate with or a finger to pull it’s own trigger,  In this case it was done by a terrorist who committed mass murder,” said Second Amendment Foundation Founder Alan Gottlieb.  “The question we have here is how to we get those people off the streets without infringing on people’s rights to own a firearm for legitimate lawful purposes, including the right to protect yourself from a terrorist.”

Gottlieb is also chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

On Thursday, Democrats, led by Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., ended a 15-hour filibuster after Senate Republican leaders agreed to hold two gun control votes next week.  While some second amendment defenders saw the GOP move as capitulation, Gottlieb welcomes it with open arms.

“I’m glad, quite frankly, that they agreed to it because I’d like to see people put on the record for where they stand and who’s going to support second amendment rights.  Who’s going to support just plain legal due process rights for all Americans in general.  It’s not just gun rights we’re talking about here.  You take people’s due process rights away, you’ve got a tyrannical government,” said Gottlieb.

Gottlieb is referring to the Democratic proposal getting the most attention, the so-called ‘No Fly-No Buy’ legislation which would prohibit anyone on the terrorism watch list or the TSA’s No Fly List from being able to purchase a firearm.

Polls taken in the wake of the Orlando attack suggest the public is largely in favor of the idea.  Gottlieb says he wants to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists as much as anyone, but not at the expense of our constitutional rights.

“Without proper protections for people to find out if they’re on the No Fly List and a quick way to get off it if they’re wrongly put on it, it’s hard to support this.  As currently written, it is a civil rights nightmare,” said Gottlieb, who elaborated on why he reached that conclusion.

“It’s an anti-second amendment bureaucrat’s dream come true.  There are thousands of people wrongly on the No Fly List who would lose their second amendment rights.  President Obama, Hillary Clinton and the gun prohibition lobby that supports their anti-rights agenda cannot be trusted with that kind of power,” said Gottlieb.

He says right now it is very difficult for Americans to get off these lists once they discover they’ve been added.

“It’s not just putting more people on the list wrongly, it’s getting people on the list wrongly now, getting them off the list,” said Gottlieb.  “We think there are ways to protect due process rights by allowing people to go to court to get their names off the list in quick fashion that doesn’t cost them any money so they don’t lose their second amendment rights.”

On Thursday, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WV, told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that due process was a big problem in trying to stop terrorists and mass shooters.

“The problem we have, and really the firewall we have right now is due process. It’s all due process,” said Manchin.” “So we can all say we want the same thing, but how do we get there?”

Gottlieb says due process must be cherished as much as any other right found in our Constitution.

“You have no way of knowing you’re on the No Fly-No Buy List.  You go to purchase a firearm to protect your second amendment rights.  All of a sudden you don’t have that right anymore and you can’t even figure out how your name got on the list and there’s no legal way to get your name off the list.  You lose your rights forever and you didn’t even do anything.  That’s very un-American,” said Gottlieb.

Despite all the rhetoric, Gottlieb is confident No Fly-No Buy will be defeated.

“When the Senate really gets to this and takes a look at it, they will not adopt anything without due process protections for American citizens,” said Gottlieb.

Gottlieb says the measure to expand background checks and mandate such checks for all gun sales commercial and private is also missing the mark.

“Any licensed gun dealer who sells a gun at a gun show has to put a person through a background check before they buy a gun.  However, if a private person  selling or trading from their collection, they don’t have to go through a background check under federal law.  They do in many states, however,” said Gottlieb, who is quick to point out that provision would not have stopped any of the recent terrorists.

“The terrorist in Orlando went through a background check.  The shooter in the San Bernardino terrorist attack went through a background check.  So when they try to push an agenda that doesn’t solve a particular problem at hand, they’re being disingenuous about their proposals to start with,” said Gottlieb.

He says he’s tired of of guns and the second amendment being blamed for the actions of people.

“The terrorist in Orlando didn’t swear allegiance to the second amendment.  He swore allegiance to ISIS.  We should be going after ISIS, not going after America’s second amendment rights,” said Gottlieb.

 

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review applaud CIA Director John Brennan for telling the truth about the magnitude of the ISIS threat.  They also shudder as more red flags are discovered that should have led authorities to the Orlando terrorist.  And we react to a Vox writer urging Pres. Obama to ban all Americans from buying guns unilaterally.

California state lawmakers are poised to advance legislation they say will promote greater equity at the state’s colleges and universities but religious freedom advocates say it’s just another attempt to advance the LGBT agenda by removing the ability of schools to determine their own criteria for selecting students and personnel and establishing codes of conduct.

The legislation is known as SB 1146, which amends the California Equity in Higher Education Act, or EHEA.  As it currently stands, the statute forbids discrimination based on religion, sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression.  But it also contains a significant exemption for religious colleges and universities.  SB 1146 would change that.

“That state of affairs is unsatisfactory to the LGBT lobby in California.  They want to dramatically restrict the scope of that exemption so that a liberal arts religious institution can no longer maintain, enforce and apply faith-based conduct standards for their students and employees,” said Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Gregory Baylor, who also directs the group’s Religious Schools Team.

He says the problems with this are obvious.

“In essence, it restricts freedom of Christ-centered  institutions of higher education in California that participate in the state tuition assistance program known as Cal Grants,” he said.

Given that countless other schools in California do not use religious criteria to evaluate applicants, staff and conduct, Baylor says there is no good reason to pursue this legislation.

“The reality of the matter is that these schools that have more traditional stances on religious issues, on moral issues, on sexual issues, are in a very tiny minority,” said Baylor.

“This bill is a solution in search of a problem.  There is no problem, except in the eyes of these legislators that these schools hold ‘the wrong views’ on these controversial issues.  So it doesn’t really accomplish anything but it does punish these schools for having these religious views,” said Baylor.

In addition, Baylor says removing the exemption could open Christian and other religious schools to a blizzard of lawsuits.

“You can imagine what sort of things could be called ‘religious discrimination’ by opponents of these sorts of institutions: required prayer, required attendance at weekly chapel exercises, required taking of classes that address theological issues from the perspective of the school’s faith,” said Baylor.

“That is a very serious problem for these religious institutions that want to maintain their religious character by what they do and who comprises their communities,” said Baylor.

Baylor says the Christian schools are fiercely opposed to such controls.

“This is about student choice.  Many of them would like to choose a faith-based environment.  They shouldn’t be disqualified from doing that simply because their school actually is religious and lives out its religious beliefs,” said Baylor.

SB 1146 has already passed in the California State Senate.  Baylor says a series of committee meetings are scheduled in the State Assembly.  Passage could come late this summer or early fall and head to the desk of Gov. Jerry Brown, who is very likely to sign it.

Baylor says the fight goes on to change the minds of lawmakers but he knows the math is working against him as the Democrats dominate the legislature.

“We think that if legislators in the assembly understand that this is really an assault on students, on low income and often minority populations of students, that that might motivate them to protect those students and protect those students that they have,” said Baylor.

“At the same time, there is a political reality, that’s there’s a two-thirds majority of Democrats and they tend to be more sympathetic to the gay rights agenda,” said Baylor, noting the bill passed the senate largely along party lines.

If SB 1146 does become law, Baylor expects legal challenges to follow soon after.

“I do think the bill violates constitutional protections of religious freedom, of freedom of association, equal protection of the laws.  It would be very unsurprising to me  if some of these schools  and the students who would be harmed would commence litigation if this bill becomes law,” said Baylor.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review groan as a new Wisconsin poll shows Trump dragging down Sen. Ron Johnson’s re-election hopes.  They also slam Sen. Joe Manchin for suggesting that due process is the problem in stopping mass shootings.  And they get whiplash as Hugh Hewitt insists Republicans stick with Donald Trump, just one week after declaring him a Stage IV cancer that must be removed.

A former FBI agent who created the bureau’s first counter-terrorism training program says the FBI and many others in the federal government have lost their way and have no idea how to stop terrorism, a problem that he expects to get much worse in the coming months.

In addition to his time at the bureau, John Guandolo is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate who served as a Marine Corps officer in the Gulf War.  In contrast to President Obama’s recent comments, Guandolo says the government’s biggest mistake is failing to identify our enemy in any official capacity.  He now works to train others in counter-terrorism through his website, “Understanding the Threat.”

“Since 9/11, we have actually failed to identify the threat in any professional manner at the national security level.  We have yet to identify the threat, either in our strategic planning documents or our national security documents,” said Guandolo.

He says the consequences of failing to identify the threat have been ghastly.

“What that leads to is what we’ve seen in the last 15 years.  We lost Iraq and Afghanistan.  We have an incoherent domestic counter-terrorism strategy and our foreign policy is upside-down to where we’re literally, to the tune of more than $100 billion, the largest state sponsor of terrorism – Iran – on the planet,” said Guandolo.

And Guandolo says the problem is about to get a whole lot worse as the priorities of our enemies start shifting.

“The global Islamic movement says that it’s going to begin its turn from its total focus on the Islamic world, where it is seeking to impose Sharia law on the Muslim world first and then the non-Muslim world.  That turn is going to begin this year,” said Guandolo.

What will that mean in the West?

“That means instead of a couple of people in San Bernardino, several people in Brussels and lone shooter in Orlando, you’re going to have dozens of jihadis doing multiple operations in conjunction with the Marxists and the socialists of groups like Black Lives Matter, which will be burning and looting cities like they did in Ferguson and Baltimore,” said Guandolo.

It’s in this context that he fears jihadists will attempt to trigger a major chaotic event.

“If those events are precipitated, which they likely will be, from a cyber attack, a power grid attack where power is lost in several states or something similar to that, then it’s truly going to be much more horrific,” said Guandolo.

He says stopping something like that will require massive improvement from the FBI and other relevant agencies.  Guandolo says reports that the FBI had multiple chances to screen Orlando terrorist Omar Mateen and then ignored a concern from Disney that Mateen and his wife were casing the theme park, are signs the feds are not ready for prime time.

“There are a couple of problems here.  The first is the total ignorance of the FBI leadership as to this problem.  [FBI Director James Comey] said in his comments that they were still trying to confirm a motive.  That should be a huge red flag for anybody listening to him or reading a transcript of the comments that he is clueless,” said Guandolo.

But Guandolo says the FBI wasn’t always clueless, namely when he created the bureau’s counter-terrorism training program in 2006.  But it wasn’t long until politics undermined his work.

“Since then, programs like it that are run by people I trained have all been shut down because it’s not politically correct,” said Guandolo.

“The Muslim community said this offended them.  Of course it offends them, because it identifies the leadership of the Muslim community as being members of the Muslim Brotherhood network here whose stated goal is civilization jihad.  Americans have got to wake up to this immediately, because this is going to go downhill rapidly in the next 12-16 months,” said Guandolo.

He says the Orlando case is a perfect example of how the government allows a terrorist to slip through its fingers.  He says the FBI’s interrogation policy is very weak.

“If you had him sitting there and said, ‘Are you a terrorist and do you know of any acts of terrorism that are being planned?’ and he were on a polygraph and he said, ‘No, I don’t,’ he would register as not being deceptive.  That’s because in Islam a terrorist is somebody who kills a Muslim without right,” said Guandolo.

He says a subtle change would make a huge difference.

“If you asked the question, ‘Are you a jihadi?  Are you aware of any jihadi plots or actions to support the jihad in the immediate future?’ and then he said no, he would register as deceptive.  Something as simple as that 99.9 percent of law enforcement don’t understand,” said Guandolo.

Another simple but significant improvement in training, says Guandolo, is to make law enforcement personnel understand what motivates terrorists.

“One hundred percent (of captured terrorists) say they are jihadis waging jihad in the cause of Allah in order to impose Sharia and establish the Islamic State.  Not only do they say the doctrine they are fighting for is Sharia, but their blueprint for everything they do is Sharia,” said Guandolo.

“The fact that we’re not teaching our federal agents and our combat warriors about Sharia is one of the reasons that we’re so catastrophically failing in identifying the threat.  The threat doctrine is Sharia and anybody who subscribes to Sharia and seeks to impose it on others is the threat,” said Guandolo.

According to Guandolo, the bright spot in this frustration is the growing number of local law enforcement officials welcoming the basics of how to investigate possible threats.  He says it’s making a big difference in many communities.

“Once you understand that, it changes how you do interviews, interrogations, basic investigations, when you do search warrants, when you stop somebody in a vehicle for a traffic violation.  What you see and how they talk to you, you know how to interpret with the lens of somebody who actually understands the threat,” said Guandolo.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review celebrate the dismissal of one charge against the man who exposed Planned Parenthood for its sales of baby body parts.  We rip the FBI for not doing more after Disney warned them Omar Fateen was casing the park in April and we suggest setting up Mickey Mouse Clubhouse CTU in the spirit of “24.”  And we rip Donald Trump for trying to convince the NRA to support banning gun sales to anyone on the No Fly List.

President Obama unloaded on Donald Trump and other Republicans for criticizing his refusal to label our enemy as “radical Islam,” saying that changing the term wouldn’t change anything other than giving more fuel to the propaganda from ISIS and other terrorist groups that the West really is at war with Islam.

But a top Trump foreign policy adviser says Obama has it exactly backwards, insisting that identifying the enemy creates clarity to the public and our allies and not creating distinctions actually risks the alienation of all Muslims.

On Tuesday, Obama made comments following his latest briefing in the wake of the horrific Orlando terrorist attack that left 49 dead and another 53 wounded.  At the end of his comments, Obama unloaded on Trump and others who demand that Obama admit who we’re fighting.

“What exactly would using this label accomplish?  What exactly would it change?  Would it make ISIL less committed to trying to kill Americans?  Would it bring in more allies?  Would it bring in a military strategy that is served by this?  The answer is none of the above,” said Obama.

Dr. Walid Phares is a top foreign policy adviser to Trump.  He’s also a longtime terrorism and Middle East scholar and author most recently of “The Lost Spring.”  He says Obama got it entirely wrong.

“The president’s statement is counter-productive to our counter-intelligence activity,” said Phares.

“Our analysts, at least since 2009, have been denied the perception that there is an ideology.  They can use information about a specific jihadist ideology precisely because of what the president has said today.  Therefore, we are missing an opportunity to detect a manifestation of that ideology which would allow us to stop the terrorists before they act,” said Phares.

He says accurately describing the enemy is imperative.  He used World War II as an example.

“What would be the profit of calling Nazis Nazis or during the Cold War calling the Bolsheviks or Communists Communists?  This is the number one goal when you are in a confrontation, is to identify for your allies and for your people who you are fighting against,” said Phares.

He’s says the importance begins in our own counter-terrorism efforts.

“We need our experts within out own agencies to be able to make a distinction between those who are jihadists and those who are not.  If we don’t have this capacity, we’re going to end up having a Major Hasan killing people in Fort Hood without us being able to detect him,” said Phares.

He also says the government can’t expect the public to be an asset in the war against radical Islam if the government can’t define our enemy.

“You need to educate your public.  If the public doesn’t know who the enemy is, what the ideologies, narratives and words are, how will the citizens help you?  How will they detect?  How can they report if they see something, say something?  What is that something they’re going to see or hear about?” said Phares.

He says clarity is also vital in building alliances to eradicate radical Islam.

“President Obama is talking about the world looking at us if we use these words.  Precisely.  The French use Islamist.  The British do the same.  The Russians have the same terminology,” said Phares, who reports even the Arab and Muslim world uses specific words to describe radicals.

Even the grand imam of Egypt, whom Phares says is the equivalent of the Sunni pope, has no problem using clear terminology.

“He calls them Islamists, takfiri, jihadists.  So if the highest figure in the Arab and Muslim world and so many other figures do designate them with these words, what is the president talking about?” said Phares, who met with the grand imam and the Egyptian president.

So where does Obama get the idea that using terms like “radical Islam” would turn all Muslims against us?

“That’s exactly the platform of the Muslim Brotherhood.  That’s exactly what Muslim Brotherhood analysts and advisers are telling our government,” said Phares.

Both Obama and Hillary Clinton are skewering Trump for insisting that the terrorists be labeled as radical Islam.  As a result, Phares says voters have a clear choice in November “between one camp that is in denial” and Trump who is trying to specify who our enemy is.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are not impressed as FBI Director James Comey says the bureau cleared Orlando terrorist Omar Mateen because he insisted all his radical rants were just out of anger and not because he was lined with terrorist groups.  They also hammer Hillary Clinton for only now being worried about Middle East countries allowing their people to fund terrorism.  And they react to the revelation that Mateen was gay.

A former Department of Homeland Security official says it took him only a few hours to connect Sunday’s Islamic terrorist attack in Orlando to December’s carnage in San Bernardino, and he says the federal government’s active refusal to acknowledge reality is “handcuffing” efforts to keep the American people safe.

Philip Haney served nearly a decade at the Department of Homeland Security after it’s inception in 2003.  His responsibilities there included investigations for Customs and Border Patrol through its National Targeting Center.  While there he played a key role in vetting people connected to Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamic group with some 70 million members.

He is the author of the new book “See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Excposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad.”

In less than two days since the massacre at the Pulse club in Orlando, reports have surfaced that terrorist Omar Saddiqui Mateen was investigated multiple times by the FBI but was ultimately deemed not to be a threat, despite professing a link to the Boston Marathon bombers and the terrorist group Hezbollah.

Haney says that should have raised innumerable red flags but he says the FBI’s own training procedures, updates in 2012, stopped common sense from taking the probe any further.

“Just because an individual is affiliated with a known terrorist organization, we can’t automatically assume that individual is a terrorist,” said Haney.

“That’s handcuffing.  That is making it virtually impossible for basic law enforcement actions to be taken.  How can you develop a case if you’re trying to go to probable cause when you’re prohibited from making an association between an individual and the organization that he may be affiliated with,” said Haney.

In addition to the stifling rules, Haney says one hand of government doesn’t know what the other is doing.  He says all relevant government entities are supposed to be coordinated by a joint terrorism task force, but the idea works better in concept than in reality.

“The same thing happened with the Boston bombing.  There was a disconnect in the transfer of information regarding the Tsarnaev brothers prior to that event.  Apparently, there was a disconnect here as well,” said Haney.

Reports that former co-workers were alarmed at Mateen’s angry rants are also chilling to Haney, especially the indications that the employer never followed up on the complaints with authorities out of fear of being politically incorrect.  Haney says it’s the same story we saw in San Bernardino, when a neighbor was suspicious of what was happening at the terrorists’ home but did not report anything out of fear of being labeled Islamophobic.

Haney says the ignored warnings from co-workers also reminds him of another horrific case.

“The first thing that comes to mind when I hear about co-workers being concerned is exactly what happened with Nidal Hasan before the Ft. Hood shootings.  It’s like a tape recorder.  We’re listening to exactly  the same comments from people who raised concerns,” said Haney.

So while FBI Director James Comey says there was no basis to continue the investigation after Mateen insisted his pro-terrorist statements were just angry falsehoods expressed in anger to his co-workers, Haney says a few hours of work on Sunday not only proved Mateen was not a lone wolf but his network of influence can be tied to the San Bernardino terrorists.

After learning that Mateen was affiliated with the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce (Florida), Haney quickly discovered a statement from the center’s imam confirming that Mateen worshiped at the mosque.  He says that connection is important to establish before unraveling the rest of the thread.

“I always follow the same process.  There are individuals and there are organizations.  They are inseparable and one always leads to the other,” said Haney.

Haney then discovered the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce is affiliated with the Sharia Board of America.

“Then I find out that the Sharia Board of America is directly linked to an association called the Rahmat-e-Alam Foundation,” said Haney, who then found the foundation was linked to a very familiar group.

“I’m now realizing I’m about to touch a case that was related to the San Bernardino shootings, the case that the records were deleted from by my own government and a case that was related to the Tablighi Jamaat Initiative that I worked on at the National Targeting Center .  Ultimately, the Tablighi Jamaat case was shut down by the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security out of concerns that the civil liberties of Muslims would be infringed.

But Haney says the trail keeps going, as Rahmat-e-Alam is affiliated with the Darul Uloom Chicago.

“Now we’re overlapping with the San Bernardino case because the mosque in San Bernardino was called Darul Uloom Islammiya,” said Haney.

But there’s more.

“It turns out that the Darul Uloom Chicago organization, which is a madrassa, is directly related to the Islamic Institute of Education case that I worked on as active duty officer,” said Haney.

“All of it goes back to the Tablighi Jamaat case that I worked on at the National Targeting Center.  There was only one degree of separation from the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce and that entire network that I worked on back in 2011,” said Haney.

If Haney could connect that many dots in an afternoon, why couldn’t the federal government do the same?

“Did the FBI have access to any of that information?  I don’t know.  Did the [Customs and Border Patrol organization affiliates have access to this information?  Yes, they did.  Did anyone put the picture together?  It doesn’t look like it,” said Haney.

Haney stresses that these links are critical and meaningful because affiliation for Muslims is hugely important.

“In Islam, there is really no such thing as a lone wolf individual.  In Islam, the sense of community and family is an overriding awareness of everyone,” said Haney.

He says fidelity to the Quran and the Hadith are other pillars of Islamic life, but he says the Islamic approach to homosexuality also cannot be ignored here.

“There is a fourth component and that the cultural, traditional world view, that is violently opposed to homosexuality throughout the Islamic world,” said Haney.

But none of that is enough for the government to remove its blinders with respect to radical Islam, according to Haney.

He was investigated nine times while working at Homeland Security, eight times during the Obama administration.  Three of those probes ran simultaneously.  The government also refused to allow him to see the files relevant to his case and the shuttering of the Tablighi Jamaat investigation.  He was forced to obtain them through Freedom of Information laws.  He says emails among the State Department, Homeland Security and other agencies told the the real story.

“They had concerns about civil rights and civil liberties of these individuals, by the way, who are foreign nationals,” said Haney.

How did the priorities get so mixed up?  Haney says it all goes back to one moment.

“Things really started going sideways after the Holy Land Foundation trial in November 2008, when it was irrefutably proven in federal court that groups like Council on American-Islamic Relations, Islamic Society of North America (and)the North American Islamic Trust were to support for Hamas.  That point is the turning point in the history of counter-terrorism,” said Haney.

“At that point, the administration had to make a conscious decision, whether to act on that law enforcement-based evidence and go forward and shut those groups down or ignore it and create a new policy,  And that’s exactly what they did,” said Haney.  “So people like me, who focused on those groups, ran headlong into the administration’s policy.  Many of us suffered because of it.”

 

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review slam President Obama for refusing to identity the Orlando terrorist’s motivation which was already clear and for suggesting Americans currently identify with the terrorist more than the victims.  They also shake their heads as the federal government had another terrorist under investigation only to let them go and eventually attack.  And they rip both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton for their pathetic responses to the terrorist attack.