Obama's Snooping Excludes Mosques, Missed Boston Bomber
Homeland Insecurity: The
White House assures that tracking our every phone call and keystroke is
to stop terrorists, and yet it won't snoop in mosques, where the
terrorists are.
That's
right, the government's sweeping surveillance of our most private
communications excludes the jihad factories where homegrown terrorists
are radicalized.
Since
October 2011, mosques have been off-limits to FBI agents. No more
surveillance or undercover string operations without high-level approval
from a special oversight body at the Justice Department dubbed the
Sensitive Operations Review Committee.
Who
makes up this body, and how do they decide requests? Nobody knows; the
names of the chairman, members and staff are kept secret.
We
do know the panel was set up under pressure from Islamist groups who
complained about FBI stings at mosques. Just months before the panel's
formation, the Council on American-Islamic Relations teamed up with the
ACLU to sue the FBI for allegedly violating the civil rights of Muslims
in Los Angeles by hiring an undercover agent to infiltrate and monitor
mosques there.
Before
mosques were excluded from the otherwise wide domestic spy net the
administration has cast, the FBI launched dozens of successful sting
operations against homegrown jihadists — inside mosques — and disrupted
dozens of plots against the homeland.
If
only they were allowed to continue, perhaps the many victims of the
Boston Marathon bombings would not have lost their lives and limbs. The
FBI never canvassed Boston mosques until four days after the April 15
attacks, and it did not check out the radical Boston mosque where the
Muslim bombers worshipped.
The
bureau didn't even contact mosque leaders for help in identifying their
images after those images were captured on closed-circuit TV cameras
and cellphones.
One
of the Muslim bombers made extremist outbursts during worship, yet
because the mosque wasn't monitored, red flags didn't go off inside the
FBI about his increasing radicalization before the attacks.
This
is particularly disturbing in light of recent independent surveys of
American mosques, which reveal some 80% of them preach violent jihad or
distribute violent literature to worshippers.
What
other five-alarm jihadists are counterterrorism officials missing right
now, thanks to restrictions on monitoring the one area they should be
monitoring?
No comments:
Post a Comment