Maybe it was this guy.
Posted on 09/02/2014 1:29:38 PM PDT by Retain Mike
The subject here is naval history and the naval history to come. This is particularly relevant, given the subjects I've been immersed in over the last year—the so-called war on terrorism and the attacks of 9/11, what went wrong, and what we should do to fix it. I have learned that what these two institutions—the U.S. Naval Institute and the U.S. Naval Academy—stand for are at the center of what we face as a nation going forward.
The Naval Institute is one of the great intellectual institutions in this country. I first joined when I was an undergraduate in college, and I have been a fan of it for my entire career, with the exception of six short years when I was Secretary of the Navy. Somehow, the institution got off track in those six years. While I was Secretary and a reserve lieutenant commander, I began to read articles by mere lieutenants who disagreed with me. I began to read articles in Proceedings and hear about speeches that I hadn't approved, ideas that had not been cleared—heresies from the 600-ship Navy. It was truly shocking. But after I left the government, somehow I seemed to find that the institution returned to its grand tradition of truth and wisdom.
We are at a juncture today that really is more of a threshold, even more of a watershed, than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was in 1941. We are currently in a war, but it is not a war on terrorism. In fact, that has been a great confusion, and the sooner we drop that term, the better. This would be like President Franklin Roosevelt saying in World War II, "We are engaged in a war against kamikazes and blitzkrieg ." Like them, terrorism is a method, a tool, a weapon that has been used against us. And part of the reason we suffered such a horrific attack is that we were not prepared. Let's not kid ourselves. Some very smart people defeated every single defense this country had, and defeated them easily, with confidence and arrogance. There are many lessons we must learn from this.
We were not prepared intellectually. Those of us in the national security field still carried the baggage of the Cold War. We thought in concepts of coalition warfare and the Warsaw Pact. When we thought of terrorism, we thought only of state-sponsored terrorism, which is why the immediate reaction of many in our government agencies after 9/11 was: Which state did it? Saddam, it must have been Saddam. We had failed to grasp, for a variety of reasons, the new phenomenon that had emerged in the world. This was not state-sponsored terrorism. This was religious war. This was the emergence of a transnational enemy driven by religious fervor and fanaticism. Our enemy is not terrorism. Our enemy is violent, Islamic fundamentalism. None of our government institutions was set up with receptors, or even vocabulary, to deal with this. So we left ourselves completely vulnerable to a concerted attack.
Where are we today? I'd like to say we have fixed these problems, but we haven't. We have very real vulnerabilities. We have not diminished in any way the fervor and ideology of our enemy. We are fighting them in many areas of the world, and I must say with much better awareness of the issues and their nature. We're fighting with better tools. But I cannot say we are now safe from the kind of attack we saw on 9/11. I think we are much safer than we were on 9/11; the ability of our enemies to launch a concerted, sophisticated attack is much less than it was then. Still, we're totally vulnerable to the kinds of attacks we've seen in Madrid, for instance. We face a very sophisticated and intelligent enemy who has been trained, in many cases, in our universities and gone to school on our methods, learned from their mistakes, and continued to use the very nature of our free society and its aversion to intrusion in privacy and discrimination to their benefit.
For example, today it is still a prohibited offense for an airline to have two people of the same ethnic background interviewed at one time, because that is discrimination. Our airline security is still full of holes. Our ability to carry out covert operations abroad is only marginally better than it was at the time of 9/11. A huge amount of fundamental cultural and institutional change must be carried out in the United States before we can effectively deal with the nature of the threat. Today, probably 50 or more states have schools that are teaching jihad, preaching, recruiting, and training. We have absolutely no successful programs even begun to remediate against those efforts.
It's very important that people understand the complexity of this threat. We have had to institute new approaches to protecting our civil liberties—the way we authorize surveillance, the way we conduct our immigration and naturalization policies, and the way we issue passports. That's only the beginning. The beginning of wisdom is to recognize the problem, to recognize that for every jihadist we kill or capture—as we carry out an aggressive and positive policy in Afghanistan and elsewhere—another 50 are being trained in schools and mosques around the world.
This problem goes back a long way. We have been asleep. Just by chance about six months ago, I picked up a book by V. S. Naipaul, one of the great English prose writers. I love to read his short stories and travelogues. The book was titled Among the Believers (New York: Vintage, 1982) and was an account of his travels in Indonesia, where he found that Saudi-funded schools and mosques were transforming Indonesian society from a very relaxed, syncretist Islam to a jihadist fundamentalist fanatical society, all paid for with Saudi Arabian funding. Nobody paid attention. Presidents in four administrations put their arms around Saudi ambassadors, ignored the Wahhabi Jihadism, and said these are our eternal friends.
We have seen throughout the last 20 years a kind of head-in-the-sand approach to national security in the Pentagon. We were comfortable with the existing concept of what the threat was, what threat analysis was, and how we derived our requirements, still using the same old tools we all grew up with. We paid no attention to the real nature of this emerging threat, even though there were warning signs.
Many will recall with pain what we went through in the Reagan administration in 1983, when the Marine barracks were bombed in Beirut—241 Marines and Navy corpsmen were killed. We immediately got an intercept from NSA [National Security Agency], a total smoking gun from the foreign ministry of Iran, ordering the murder of our Marines. Nothing was done to retaliate. Instead, we did exactly what the terrorists wanted us to do, which was to withdraw. Osama bin Laden has cited this as one of his dawning moments. The vaunted United States is a paper tiger; Americans are afraid of casualties; they run like cowards when attacked; and they don't even bother to take their dead with them. This was a seminal moment for Osama.
After that, we had our CIA station chief kidnapped and tortured to death. Nothing was done. Then, we had our Marine Colonel [William R.] Higgins kidnapped and publicly hanged. Nothing was done. We fueled and made these people aware of the tremendous effectiveness of terrorism as a tool of jihad. It worked. They chased us out of one place after another, because we would not retaliate.
The Secretary of Defense at the time has said he never received those intercepts. That's an example of one of the huge problems our commission has uncovered. We have allowed the intelligence community to evolve into a bureaucratic archipelago of baronies in the Defense Department, the CIA, and 95 other different intelligence units in our government. None of them talked to one another in the same computerized system. There was no systemic sharing. Some will recall the Phoenix memo and the fact that there were people in the FBI saying, "Hey, there are young Arabs learning to fly and they don't want to learn how to take off or land. Maybe we should look into them." It went nowhere.
We had watch lists with 65,000 terrorists' names on them, created by a very sophisticated system in the State Department called Tip-Off. That existed before 9/11, but nobody in the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] bothered to look at it. The FAA had 12 names on its no-fly list. The State Department had a guy on its list named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He was already under indictment for his role in planning the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. The State Department issued him a visa. I could go on and on.
Two big lessons glare out from what our investigations have discovered so far. Number one, in our government bureaucracy today there is no accountability. Since 9/11—the greatest failure of American defenses in the history of our country, at least since the burning of Washington in 1814—only one person has been fired. He is a hero, in my judgment: [retired Vice] Admiral John Poindexter. He got fired because of an excessive zeal to catch these bastards. But he was the only one fired. Not any of the 19 officers lost their jobs at Immigration for allowing the 19 terrorists—9 who presented grossly falsified passports—to enter the country. One Customs Service officer stopped the 20th terrorist, at risk to his own career. Do you think he's been promoted? Not a chance.
That is the culture we've allowed to develop, except in the Navy. We've all felt the pain over the last year of the number of skippers who have been relieved in the U.S. Navy: two on one cruiser in one year. That's a problem for us. It's also something we should be mightily proud of, because it stands out in stark contrast to the rest of the U.S. government. In the United States Navy, we still have accountability. It's bred into our culture. And what we stand for here has to be respread into our government and our nation.
Actions have consequences, and people must be held accountable. Customs officer Jose Melendez-Perez stopped the 20th terrorist, who was supposed to be on Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania. Probably because of the shorthanded muscle on that team, the passengers were able to overcome the terrorists. Melendez-Perez did this at great personal risk, because his colleagues and his supervisors told him, "You can't do this. This guy is an Arab ethnic. You're racially profiling. You're going to get in real trouble, because it's against Department of Transportation policy to racially profile." He said, "I don't care. This guy's a bad guy. I can see it in his eyes." As he sent this guy back out of the United States, the guy turned around to him and said, "I'll be back." You know, he is back. He's in Guantanamo. We captured him in Afghanistan. Do you think Melendez-Perez got a promotion? Do you think he got any recognition? Do you think he is doing any better than the 19 of his time-serving, unaccountable colleagues? Don't think any bit of it. We have no accountability, but we're going to restore it.
The other glaring lack that has been discovered throughout the investigation is in leadership. Leadership is the willingness to accept the burdens and the risks, the potential embarrassment, and the occasional failure of leading men and women. It is saying: We will do it this way. I won't let that guy in. I will do this and I'll take the consequences. That's what we stand for here. That's what the crucible of the U.S. Naval Academy has carried on now since 1845, and what the U.S. Naval Institute has carried on for 130 years and hasn't compromised. We all should be very proud of it. We need leadership now more than ever. We need to respread this culture, which is so rare today, into the way we conduct our government business, let alone our private business.
Having said all this, I'm very optimistic. We have seen come forward in this investigation people from every part of our bureaucracy to say they screwed up and to tell what went wrong and what we've got to do to change it. We have an agenda for change. I think we're going to see a very fundamental shift in the culture of our government as a result of this. I certainly hope so. This should be a true wake-up call. We cannot let this be swept under the rug, put on the shelf like one more of the hundreds of other commissions that have gone right into the memory hole. This time, I truly believe it's going to be different.
History teaches that all Republics commit suicide.
History is repeating, and I daresay - ours looks to be more than just a metaphor, but a literal dalliance of offering ourselves to our enemies.
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I'm sorry, I guess I'm slow. What does this mean, exactly? Is this referring to being stopped in the security line? Jobs?
Yes, it is not as always described "Radical Islamism," it is Islam, just as the Iranian Khomeini recently said, there is no such thing as Radical Islam, there is just Islam.
Maybe it was this guy.
mooslums are the enemy. ALL of them want to murder you and your family. Some will step forward to actively do so. The other moozlums support them, directly or indirectly. If you know a moozlum ask them why they do not eliminate moozlums who kill others. Make sure they don’t have a knife nearby or a bomb, however.
War on Drugs
War on Terror
Battling euphemisms is a losing strategy, unless you're a politician or a lobbyist.
Our enemy is not terrorism, its odumbo and his ilk.
he would have had to glass over Iran, Pakistan, and the Saudi arabian peninsula.
You are so close John, but close will not stop the enemy at our gate. Nibble at the corners of the enemy cookie or shine a light on the cardboard facade; elucidate the machinations of the complex enemy, but everyone in political circles is AFRAID to name this enemy.
The fear is that to properly name the foe is to revert to an era of barbaric mentality - a mentality of our forebears who would recognize an evil and then smash it. Our ancestors would name the enemy and rain unholy hell upon his family, land and possessions. With an enemy who accepts only total annihilation of himself, tribe and resources in order to be properly vanquished, our leaders are too afraid to alter our decadent slide and revert to a people of morality, religion and righteousness.
Things could be different if and when the name of the enemy is shouted from the rooftops and measures taken to decimate the scourge of Islam.
You are correct!
Focusing on “Wahhabi Jihadism” rather than Islam itself is just a milder form of the Political Correctness that began this whole “War on Terrorism” charade.
Until “moderate Muslims” begin to publicly denounce “extremist Jihadism” and actively work to expose these ‘Muslim heretics’ they are a part of the problem. Sides MUST be chosen.
Last month Obama said “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. ... It is time to heed the words of Gandhi: “Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit.”
He could not be more completely wrong. He would have us believe that the world is a campfire gathering, complete with S’mores, hot cocoa and the guitar accompanying us as we sing “Kumbaya”, all the while never asking the questions, “Who is this Lord we are asking to come by here, and why do we want Him to do so?”
Many things in the world are very definitely INTOLERABLE. Toleration of cancer in your body leads to death from it. Toleration of unchecked international travel by Ebola patients will lead to a pandemic.
If Muslims want to worship Allah by praying five time each day, making the haji, fasting, alms giving, etc. they are to be tolerated in those religious activities. But as soon as they begin to even talk of the oppression or forcible conversion of “infidels”, they have become intolerable.
Here, Here. We seem to no longer be able to identify any enemy.
Islam is only the product of our real enemy, liberalism is the true enemy. Without liberalism, we could stomp the radical islamists into a mud puddle in a few short years!
Great thread. BTTT!
I may have to admit you folks are right. Two billion out of a world population of seven billion are Muslim, but truly almost all are irrelevant because they are controlled by authoritarian governments that followed violent roads to power. There does not seem to be much left of a spiritual faith component after 900 plus years.
About 1100 AD Hassan bin Sabah, who inherited the Assassin’s Guild, enlightened Islamist societies to terrorism as foundational statecraft for political prosperity. Philosophical and religious lawyers retained their lives, and obtained support for and from dictators by backwards engineering the Koran into useful totalitarian heterodoxies. Concurrently, foundational thought including Jews, Christians and Muslims as ‘People of the Book” became hazardous. Concurrently, men of Saladin’s character and his Sufism stressing individual relationship with God thatexalted individuals in society became marginalized. Concurrently, extraordinary Arab achievements in mathematics, philosophy, science, and medicine submerged within authoritarian and feral societies. Omar Khayyam, Ibn al-Haytham, and Abu Ali al-Hussain Ibn Sina had no successors for uncompromising, independent thought. Such simultaneous extinctions do provide compelling evidence of a pervasive contagion subverting the Middle East.
Now all we see is bloody electioneering among aspiring Islamic totalitarians causing them to grasp and retain their power by crafting superior alliances of human cunning and animal brutality. Once acquired these skills easily replicate through generations for managing philosophies from Democracy to Communism. The natural result in our present time establishes “The Democratic (or) Islamic Peoples Republic of Whatever”.
I often think the world was a better place to live in when it was owned by basically nine countries and any differences were settled by offensives through the Ardennes forest.
So, nuke Riyadh along with Mecca.
Question: What is it that makes any official "beholden" to any special interest?
Answer: Two things; MONEY or IDEOLOGY. The current pResident is ideologically tied to the enemy. The solution for that is not a pretty one. But for the money aspect...
All political donations must be ANONYMOUS. If you don't know to whom you are "beholden", you can't do their bidding. Make it a felony to disclose or to attempt to discover the identity of a donor, with appropriate prison time for violators.
Will some cheat? Sure they will. But the first few frogmarched off in jumpsuits should minimize that!
There is a word for such Muslims: APOSTATES. To a true Islamist they are as worthy of torture and death as we Infidels.
Dems will cheat the system to be sure - I like your anonymous donation idea, even better than full disclosure.
The left is too good at political terrorism to allow them to know that person X gave to a pro-life, pro-marriage candidate.
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