Freedom Line Blog

In my column last week, I noted how preposterous it was that the Obama Administration continued to bend over backwards to distance itself from the video (falsely) claimed to have ignited the recent round of violence in the Middle East:

Speaking shortly after the attacks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pronounced, “that the United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video. We absolutely reject its content and message… to me personally, this video is disgusting and reprehensible. It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage.”

Let’s assume for a moment that Clinton is right and that the film was made for the express purpose of working global Islam into a lather. Even taking that as a given, should the apology come from the nation of 300 million where one man produced some two-bit agritprop or from the part of the world where thousands took to the streets in violence because of a bit of inert satire tamer (and, remarkably, less coherent) than the average “Saturday Night Live” episode?

Speaking earlier today at the United Nations General Assembly, President Obama prolonged the inanity:

That [violence and intolerance] is what we saw play out the last two weeks, as a crude and disgusting video sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world. I have made it clear that the United States government had nothing to do with this video, and I believe its message must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity. It is an insult not only to Muslims, but to America as well – for as the city outside these walls makes clear, we are a country that has welcomed people of every race and religion. We are home to Muslims who worship across our country. We not only respect the freedom of religion – we have laws that protect individuals from being harmed because of how they look or what they believe. We understand why people take offense to this video because millions of our citizens are among them.

I know there are some who ask why we don’t just ban such a video. The answer is enshrined in our laws: our Constitution protects the right to practice free speech.

Contra the president, this video doesn’t demonstrate “intolerance.” Stupidity? Yes. Bad filmmaking? Yes. Garden variety prejudice? Maybe. But being critical of the beliefs of others, even to the point of gratuitious rabble-rousing, is not the same thing as “intolerance.” The filmmakers were tolerating Islam; they weren’t advocating that anyone be silenced or harmed. By contrast, Islamists who engaged in violence to the point of cold-blooded murder ostensibly because of a YouTube video were the intolerant ones.

The cherry on top of this whole debacle was the President’s statement on the video to the ladies(?) of The View. As reported by the Weekly Standard:

In the age of the Internet, and you know, the way that any knucklehead who says something can post it up and suddenly it travels all around the world, you know, every country has to recognize that, you know, the best way to marginalize that kind of speech is to ignore it.

Not a terrible idea. And you know what’s a great way to begin implementing this strategy? Not devoting paragraphs to this film at the U.N. when we know that it wasn’t the catalyst for the recent blood lust.

Under current British law, only a few factors can keep a member of the House of Lords from office: bankruptcy, conviction on charges of treason, and holding judicial office amongst them. Apart from that short list, removing a peer requires an act of Parliament, something that last happened nearly a century ago, when two members were removed for supporting the U.K.’s enemies during World War I. With that precedent in mind, Parliament should act to remove Lord Nazir Ahmed, who provides a similar set of circumstances. From the Daily Caller:

British Lord Nazir Ahmed put a £10 million ($16 million) bounty on both President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush Friday, according to The Express Tribune, an English language Pakistani newspaper.

Nazir, who is of Pakistani heritage and a member of the British House of Lords, reportedly made the comments while at a reception in Haripur, a Pakistani city 40 miles north of Islamabad. Nazir told the audience that he was putting the bounty out for the capture of the American leaders in response to the bounty placed on Hafiz Muhammad Saeed by the United States.

Saeed, by the way, is the terrorist thought responsible for the gruesome 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, which killed over 160 people. By his words and his actions (he claims that he would sell his home to pay the bounties for Bush and Obama), Lord Ahmed has shown himself an enemy to Britain, the United States, and the forces of civilization throughout the world. He ought not be allowed in the front door of the House of Lords, let alone in a seat there.

James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, was on Capitol Hill earlier today to brief lawmakers on the biggest national security threats facing the nation in the year ahead. While there was some good news (Al Qaeda, for instance, has been substantially weakened by the death of Osama bin Laden and many of its other senior leaders), Clapper’s warnings about Iran were ominous. As the Washington Post reports it:

The other candidates running for the Republican presidential nomination could learn a lot from Texas Congressman Ron Paul. During his 2008 presidential bid, Paul was essentially Tea Party before Tea Party was cool, delivering a principled defense of the constitution and limits on federal power. That’s all for the good, and it seems to be a growing sentiment throughout the Republican base.

Where Paul is deeply problematic, however, is in his fundamentally flawed understanding of foreign policy. As the Daily Caller reports today, Paul’s latest misstep is his condemnation of President Obama for allowing the drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric who was one of the leading public faces of Al Qaeda:

Speaking to a group of reporters at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire on Friday, Rep. Paul said that American leaders need to think hard about “assassinating American citizens without charges.”

“al-Awlaki was born here,” said Paul. “He is an American citizen. He was never tried or charged for any crimes. No one knows if he killed anybody.”

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, my friend and podcast partner (and frequent guest on “Your Turn”) John Yoo sets Paul and his sympathists to rights:

Today’s critics wish to return the United States to the pre-9/11 world of fighting terrorism only with the criminal justice system. Worse yet, they get the rights of a nation at war terribly wrong. Awlaki’s killing in no way violates the prohibition on assassination, first declared by executive order during the Ford administration. As American government officials have long concluded, assassination is an act of murder for political purposes. Killing Martin Luther King Jr. or John F. Kennedy is assassination. Shooting an enemy soldier in wartime is not. In World War II, the United States did not carry out an assassination when it sent long-range fighters to shoot down an air transport carrying the Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.

American citizens who join the enemy do not enjoy a roving legal force-field that immunizes them from military reprisal.

Lest this be oversimplified to a libertarian vs. neoconservative argument (a caricature of both Congressmal Paul and Professor Yoo), I should note that Richard Epstein — perhaps the leading libertarian legal scholar in the country — happens to agree with John Yoo. If you’re interested in hearing more, you can hear professors Epstein and Yoo hash this issue out on the newest episode of Ricochet’s Law Talk Podcast (hosted by yours truly and available by subscription).

In an interview with CFIF, John Yoo, law professor at the University of California Berkeley and former Justice Department official, discusses a new book that he co-edited: “Confronting Terror: 9/11 and the Future of American National Security.”  The book is a collection of essays by 22 nationally known legal and policy experts and scholars examining the law and policy of the War on Terror, including President Obama’s response to 9/11 and U.S. policy on interrogation methods. 

Listen to the interview here.

Rush may have the bravado. Hannity may be able to move the polls. But when it comes to sheer depth of insight, few figures in conservative talk radio can match the great Dennis Prager. In his most recent column, available on National Review Online, he makes an important point about 9/11 in his trademark style: simple yet profound.

The United States of America is a flawed society. Composed of human beings, it must inevitably be flawed. But in terms of the goodness achieved inside its borders, and spread elsewhere in the world, it is the finest country that has ever existed. If you were to measure the moral gulf between America and those who despise it, the distance would have to be measured in light-years.

If the academic and opinion-forming classes of the world had any moral courage, they would instead have asked the most obvious question that the events of 9/11 provoked: Were the mass murderers who flew those airplanes into American buildings an aberration, or were they a product of their culture?

The further we get from that horrible day, the dimmer our view of the moral horizon tends to become. Here’s to Dennis Prager, for always being a source of illumination.

Attorney General Eric Holder’s stint at the Justice Department has been ignominious. It seems anytime the DOJ is in the news these days it’s either for incompetence (the Mexican gunrunner scandal) or nefariousness (turning a blind eye towards Black Panther voter intimidation). Time to add another brick to the wall being built around the justice system, with the news that the DOJ recently released a radical leftist terrorist from prison. J. Christian Adams, the former DOJ attorney who brought the Panthers intimidation case has the story at Big Government:

Marilyn Buck was a Marxist terrorist who participated in conspiracies that led to the deaths of multiple police officers.  Buck helped the Black Liberation Army, a violent Marxist offshoot of the black panthers, acquire weapons and ammunition.  She participated in the robbery of an armored car where a guard was murdered.  If that wasn’t enough, Buck was also charged with the bombing of the U.S. Senate, Ft. McNair, the Washington Navy Yard Officer’s Club and a New York City federal building.  In many states, Buck’s behavior might have led to a midnight reservation in the electric chair.

Yet Holder’s DOJ unlocked Buck’s jail cell and set her free last summer. Justice concluded that Buck “expressed a dramatic change from her previous political philosophy.”

Adams’ piece goes on to chronicle how a stunning amount of vacous letters written on Buck’s behalf by leftist elites, primarily from academia, secured her release. Sadly, it’s no suprise that the insular world of the university was able to produce so much sympathy for Buck. What is shocking — and inexcusable — is that such pabulum was enough to convince the federal government to put a terrorist back on the streets.

Marilyn Buck doesn’t deserve her freedom. And Eric Holder doesn’t deserve his job.

Reasonable people disagree on the way forward in Afghanistan. Reasonable people, however, don’t tend to work at NPR.

That’s the conclusion we can take from remarks made by John Hockenberry, host of NPR’s “The Takeaway” (full disclosure: I’ve appeared on Hockenberry’s show before — not that it’s earning him any lenience). As the Daily Caller reports:

In an interview with Christine Fair, assistant professor at the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Hockenberry challenged the notion of the Taliban being an enemy of the United States and declared that the idea it could again make Afghanistan a haven for terrorists “an absurdity.”

“I guess, Christine Fair, I’m wondering why this is even a debate,” Hockenberry said. “The Taliban has never been an enemy of the United States. They don’t love us in Afghanistan, but they’re not sending planes over to New York or to the Pentagon and it seems to me much more broadly that the debate needs to happen is what is the sort of multi-state strategy for dealing with rogue nations of all kinds. Yemen is about to fall apart. You’ve got Somalia problems. The idea that terrorists just go to Afghanistan and launch weapons at the United States it seems in 2011 is an absurdity.” 

I’m sure the monotone sophisticates of NPR don’t need any math lessons from out here on the right wing. But, Mr. Hockenberry, a quick review of the transitive property: The Taliban harbored Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. (by sending planes over to New York and to the Pentagon, as I recall). Thus the Taliban is a demonstrated enemy of the U.S.

You can keep the tote bag.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has had an uneven tenure at the Pentagon. In his time serving both the Bush and Obama Administrations, Gates has often been a voice of prudence. At other times, however, he has sounded like a facile opinion columnist, as when he paraphrased Douglas MacArthur to a group of West Point cadets earlier this year, saying, “Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.” Defense secretaries craft policy in reaction to specific conditions throughout the world. As such, it’s unwise for one of them to opine in such absolute terms — particularly when their words could be used to unjustly assail one of their successors.

Gates is right, however, about the aftermath of the assasination of Osama Bin Laden. As Politico reports today:

The amount of information released about the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound has raised concerns about jeopardizing future missions, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said Wednesday.

“My concern is that there were too many people in too many places talking too much about this operation. And we [had] reached agreement that we would not talk about the operational details,” he told reporters at a Pentagon briefing. “I am very concerned about this, because we want to retain the capability to carry out these kinds of operations in the future.”

The code of silence shouldn’t be limited to operational details, however. In the aftermath of Bin Laden’s death, it would have been best for the military and intelligence community to act as if there was little real intelligence to be gleaned from Obama’s Abbottabad hideout, thus keeping from the enemy the fact that our knowledge of terrorist identities and operations was growing exponentially.

Since that cat’s already out of the bag, it’s essential that no information of a more specific variety gets out. The intelligence we collected represents a great asset. But keeping members of a worldwide terrorist network on the run because they’re unsure about what we know is an even bigger one.

As President Barack Obama meets with family members of 9/11 victims in New York today, I hope his press operation back in Washington, D.C. is deciding how to get out of its own way.

Since news leaked of bin Laden’s death on Sunday, the White House communications shop has had to revise, rephrase, and walk back several details of the raid.

Was Osama using one of his wives as a human shield?  No, apparently she voluntarily rushed a Navy SEAL and was wounded.

Was Osama waving a gun at the SEALs?  No, he was unarmed.

Then, pictures of the dead Osama were promised to prove his demise.  Now, we’re told that no pictures will be released and to focus instead on “[t]he broader point…that a group of extraordinary US personnel flew into a foreign country in the dead of night and…flawlessly executed a mission…”

Had fumbling White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and the rest of the Obama Administration focused themselves on such a tight version of events, we probably wouldn’t be distracted with all the post-op corrections.

This kind of ineptitude not only makes Team Obama look incompetent; it makes them look like they can’t tell a good story without ham-handedly putting themselves in the middle of it.

Former Department of Justice official John Yoo is helping set the record straight on how much credit the Obama Administration should be sharing with its predecessor.

Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Yoo makes the case that the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound would have been impossible without Bush era policies such as warrantless wiretapping and enhanced interrogation techniques – both critically important to finding the terrorist mastermind.

And the credit-shifting doesn’t stop there.  When asked by NBC News’ Brian Williams whether waterboarding was used to extract information from detainees, CIA chief Leon Panetta evaded answering.

Here’s the relevant excerpt, courtesy of RealClearPolitics:

BRIAN WILLIAMS: I’d like to ask you about the sourcing on the intel that ultimately led to this successful attack. Can you confirm that it was as a result of waterboarding that we learned what we needed to learn to go after bin Laden?

LEON PANETTA: You know Brian, in the intelligence business you work from a lot of sources of information, and that was true here. We had a multiple source — a multiple series of sources — that provided information with regards to this situation. Clearly, some of it came from detainees and the interrogation of detainees. But we also had information from other sources as well. So, it’s a little difficult to say it was due just to one source of information that we got.

WILLIAMS: Turned around the other way, are you denying that waterboarding was in part among the tactics used to extract the intelligence that led to this successful mission?

PANETTA: No, I think some of the detainees clearly were, you know, they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of these detainees. But I’m also saying that, you know, the debate about whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always going to be an open question.

WILLIAMS: So, finer point, one final time, enhanced interrogation techniques — which has always been kind of a handy euphemism in these post-9/11 years — that includes waterboarding?

PANETTA: That’s correct.

President Barack Obama may not have to defend the chasm between his campaign rhetoric denouncing the Bush Administration’s policies and his use of those same tactics to find and kill bin Laden.  Don’t expect Panetta, his nominee to be the next Secretary of Defense, to be so lucky in his Senate confirmation hearings.

In a new commentary on the death of Osama Bin Laden out today, I wrote:

Bin Laden’s death also reminds us of just how intemperate the climate is amongst our fair-weather friends in the War on Terror. Consider: Pakistani officials were not notified of the operation until its completion, despite the fact that American forces were opened up to the prospect of attack as a result. The only calculation that could justify such a risk? That elements within the Pakistani government may have tipped off Bin Laden if they had the relevant intelligence.

No sooner had the piece been published than Politico reported this nugget from Langley:

The Obama administration didn’t tell Pakistani officials about its plans to raid Osama bin Laden’s compound out of fear that they might warn the Al Qaeda leader or his supporters about the mission, according to CIA director Leon Panetta.

Early on in the planning of the attack, “it was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission” because “they might alert the targets,” Panetta told Time Magazine, which on Tuesday morning published Panetta’s first interview since bin Laden was killed.

For the past decade, America has spared the rod in its relationship with Pakistan because of the conviction that the country’s shortcomings were outweighed by its partnership in the War on Terror. If the leadership there couldn’t be trusted to assist tracking down the biggest target in that war, it would represent a failure. But if it was actively abetting the enemy, it represents a betrayal. America should respond accordingly.

In a bold speech at Saturday’s Munich Security Conference, British Prime Minister David Cameron lashed the rise in Islamist extremism to the permissive multicultural attitude of state bureaucracy.  Announcing a dramatic shift in policy, Cameron called for “making sure that immigrants speak the language of their new home and ensuring that people are educated in the elements of a common culture and curriculum.”

Kudos to the British Prime Minister for delivering a stirring alternative to the bureaucratic-enabled formula of claiming a grievance against the government, getting public funding, and still working to violently attack the hands that coddle.  Care to wager how long it will be to get a similar statement of national principle from the American President?

From President Obama’s remarks earlier today defending his deal with Congressional Republicans to prevent tax increases:

I’ve said before that I felt that the middle-class tax cuts were being held hostage to the high-end tax cuts. I think it’s tempting not to negotiate with hostage-takers, unless the hostage gets harmed. Then people will question the wisdom of that strategy. In this case, the hostage was the American people, and I was not willing to see them get harmed.

Not quite “we refuse to negotiate with terrorists.” Let’s hope the press conference wasn’t airing on Al-Jazeera.

Over at the Investigate Project on Terrorism, an extensive investigative study has revealed that a close associate of Imam Faizal Abdul Rauf (the Muslim leader spearheading the Ground Zero Mosque project) has openly and aggressively claimed that the United States secretly perpetrated the 9/11 attacks on its own people.

Faiz Kahn, who helped found the American Society for Muslim Advancement (one of the groups pushing the mosque), and lead prayers at Imam Rauf’s mosque at least as recently as December, is a radical even by the exalted standards of the 9/11 truthers:

On June 3, 2006, Khan spoke at a 9/11 truth summit called “Revealing the Truth/Reclaiming our Future” in Chicago. In his remarks, he acknowledged that there is a militant Islamist movement, but “the most logical explanation” for 9/11 is that the hijackers were “working for us” in furtherance of a corporate-controlled schemes involving gigantic stock trades, billions of dollars in heroin sales and interest in Caspian Sea resources.

See the website for video that includes some of the most despicable lies you’ve yet heard about what really happened nine years ago.

In a Wednesday night interview with CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf engaged in the following exchange:

Asked if it’s really a good idea to go ahead with his plans to build a mosque and Islamic center at an address so close to Ground Zero that it has become a flash point, Rauf gave a reply that boils down to a threat. Rauf said that if his Cordoba House does not get built on his chosen site near Ground Zero, “The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack.”

Citing Muslim attacks on Danish embassies during the riots in 2006 over Mohamed cartoons Rauf went on to say that the result of this current “crisis” could be that “anger will explode in the Muslim world.” That, he said, could lead to “something which could really become very, very, very dangerous indeed.”

Forbes columnist Claudia Rosett rightfully argues that Rauf’s position amounts to blackmail: either let me build my $100 million mosque at Ground Zero or risk other attacks.

A lot of hand wringing has been indulged making this decision primarily one about prudence instead of law.  That’s silly.  The Ground Zero mosque isn’t about the First Amendment; it’s about national security.  Rauf just admitted as much with his threat of violence.

The U.S. Constitution requires the U.S. government to protect citizens from enemies; both foreign and domestic.  It’s time to stop acting like the Constitution handcuffs America into ceding our land to a man fronting a group – Cordoba House – whose name recalls the farthest Islamic expansion in European territory.

We’re better than that.

With the Ground Zero Mosque raising the hackles of some of the loudest and most cloying voices on both sides of the political aisle, it’s becoming increasingly rare to find a pundit of any ideological persuasion who can put together a reasoned position on the proposed house of worship.

A glaring exception comes courtesy of Christoper Hitchens’ piece on Slate today, where he highlights some of the darker views of Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, the head of the group looking to build the mosque. Foremost among them is Rauf’s unapologetic embrace of the radical regime in Iran — a position that Hitchens rightly notes can’t be squared with any authentic belief in democracy or liberalism.

That’s particularly ironic when you consider how much Rauf and company have wrapped themselves in the flag of tolerance as they push forward on the mosque project, a tactic brilliantly dissected by Hitchens:

Emboldened by the crass nature of the opposition to the center, its defenders have started to talk as if it represented no problem at all and as if the question were solely one of religious tolerance. It would be nice if this were true. But tolerance is one of the first and most awkward questions raised by any examination of Islamism. We are wrong to talk as if the only subject was that of terrorism. As Western Europe has already found to its cost, local Muslim leaders have a habit, once they feel strong enough, of making demands of the most intolerant kind. Sometimes it will be calls for censorship of anything “offensive” to Islam. Sometimes it will be demands for sexual segregation in schools and swimming pools. The script is becoming a very familiar one. And those who make such demands are of course usually quite careful to avoid any association with violence. They merely hint that, if their demands are not taken seriously, there just might be a teeny smidgeon of violence from some other unnamed quarter …

In recent days, many critics of the mosque have been tarred by liberals who use the most extreme examples of opposition to Rauf’s plans to indict the nearly2/3 of the public who are opposed to it (see Frank Rich’s column in the New York Times this weekend for an example). With spokespeople as eloquent as Hitchens, however, that line of attack will ultimately prove fruitless.

Before leaving office, then President George W. Bush allowed his State Department to take North Korea off the department’s list of “State Sponsors of Terror.”  Earlier this year, an international panel concluded that North Korea was responsible for firing on and sinking a South Korean warship, killing 46 sailors.  Today, President Barack Obama’s State Department said this:

State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said during a regular news conference that the sinking was the act of one state’s military against another’s and not an act of terrorism. Thus, it is not ground to put North Korea back on the U.S. terror blacklist.

“It is our judgment that the sinking of the Cheonan is not an act of international terrorism and by itself would not trigger placing North Korea on the U.S. state (sponsors) of terrorism list,” he said.

But Crowley assured head-scratching journalists that if North Korea complies better with “sponsoring” terrorism, the regime will be rewarded.

“We will not hesitate to take action if we have information that North Korea has repeatedly provided support for acts of terrorism,” Crowley added.

So, it sounds like there are two reasons for no relisting North Korea on the “Sponsors of Terror” list.  Both require quibbling with definitions.  First, when a sovereign nation’s military kills members of another sovereign nation’s military, it is not an act of terrorism.  Okay, but it is most certainly an act of war.  Is the Obama State Department implying that North Korea engaged in an act of war?  If so, it seems like there should be consequences for such an act above and beyond concluding that it doesn’t meet an overly technical definition of terrorism.  (Anyone think the South Korean sailors weren’t terrorized as they died?)

The second reason is that “sponsoring” terrorism apparently requires a sovereign nation to have “repeatedly provided support” for acts of terrorism.  But when did sponsoring something require “repeated” support?  Is the local car dealership not a sponsor of a Little League team unless it “repeatedly” sponsors them?  At this point, does “repeated” mean twice, or more than twice?  And is North Korea staying off the list because they did an act directly instead of just “sponsoring” it?  Just tell the North Korean government what it has to do to get back on that list, Mr. Crowley!

People are dying to know.

According to U.S. geologists, Afghans soon may be able to build an economy of something other than narco-terrorism.  The world leader of supplying opium is also sitting on perhaps a huge deposit of lithium, a key mineral used in creating batteries for computers, watches, and other electronic devices.  The effects of such a find could dramatically improve the standard of living in the country by encouraging foreign capital investment as firms seek to mine and process the mineral for export.

But before we get carried away by this newfound, morally neutral revenue stream, let’s pause for a moment to consider the coming liberal backlash.

“See, we did invade because we wanted to exploit the natives and their resources; it just took almost a decade to find out how!”

“Mining for minerals is an environmentally and culturally unsatisfactory way to build an economy.  Afghanistan should be left in a state of nature so that future generations of Bedouins can continue their ancient way of life.”

“Substituting lithium for opium as Afghanistan’s primary export in no way minimizes America’s need to legalize drugs.”

And of course, “These people will never be able to share their resources.”

Now, if General David Petraeus could just find a way to clear out the Taliban and negotiate some fair treaties between Afghanistan and foreign firms he’ll be well positioned for a 2012 presidential run.

H/T: Fox News

It’s amazing in the modern era where information is so plentiful that news pieces more often look like a schizophrenic’s diary entry than a well thought out update on a continuing story.  Today’s example is courtesy of an article in the UK’s The Guardian.  The story begins with the serious, but by no means startling, news that Iran is publicly offering to escort future convoys to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Some readers may remember this is the same regime which sponsored a Holocaust denial conference, maintains a president who promises to destroy the Jewish State, and is the primary supplier of arms and rockets to the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas.

Iran also doesn’t have much love for the United States.  Neither does one of radical Islam’s most corrupt Western supporters, former British MP George Galloway.  An unrepentant Socialist, Galloway seems like many other A-list apologists for totalitarian governments, having secured his status with a speech praising Saddam Hussein in the dictator’s presence, and excoriating American foreign policy in an appearance before the U.S. Senate.

Given just that bit of information, you might think mentioning him at the end of a news story about the coming flare up between Israel and Iran would be adequate:

George Galloway, the founder of Viva Palestina, announced in London that two simultaneous convoys “one by land via Egypt and the other by sea” would set out in September to break the Gaza blockade. The sea convoy of up to 60 ships will travel around the Mediterranean gathering ships, cargo and volunteers.

The paragraph could have introduced Galloway as “Current Hamas financial contributor George Galloway,” or “Oil for Food profiteer George Galloway,” to give a much clearer understanding of the man organizing the September “solidarity” sailing trip.    At the very least, the article could have quoted the announcement from the Viva Palestina website detailing that the talks to plan the trip occurred in Istanbul, Turkey, with Galloway saying he wanted Egypt to guarantee safe passage for the next convoy.  But instead of linking Galloway to the corrupt groups running various Middle East governments, the article reads like he is unconnected from the people he gets paid to support.

Thankfully, David Horowitz and the folks over at Discover the Networks provide much more background and documentation than The Guardian’s Middle East editor.

So, the next time you read or hear a news story and wonder if you’ve heard the name, place, or group before, run it through Discover the Networks before moving on.  Within ten minutes you’ll be way more informed than most of the information gatekeepers in the MSM.