Responding to the Washington Post’s ‘Monitoring America’

To the Editor:

Yesterday’s feature, "Monitoring America," by Dana Priest and William Arkin, intentionally distorts the role of outside experts training local law enforcement in matters related to terrorism.

In an effort to smear the Center for Security Policy, Arkin and Preist erroneously describe the Center’s book, Shariah: The Threat to America, as "expanding on what [Walid] Shoebat and [Ramon] Montijo believe."

This is false. In fact, Shariah: The Threat to America is an independent work of nineteen national security experts, including the former Director of Central Intelligence, former directors of military intelligence agencies, a former counterterrorism agent in the FBI, experts in Shariah law, and many others. Each of the authors is an expert in his own right on a diverse array of national security issues; in that capacity, they can authoritatively address the nexus between America’s national security and Islamic law, called Shariah.

The study of Shariah is important to the nation’s national security because America’s Islamist enemies-from the inhabitants of al Qaeda-linked training camps in Yemen and Pakistan to homegrown American "lone-wolf" bombers-declare, above all other concerns, that they fight to install Islamic law and in furtherance of its explicit dictates.

Shariah: The Threat to America demonstrates that the mainstream legal code understood by many of the world’s Muslims to be divinely sanctioned law (Shariah) is a knowable system of law, making the practice of Islam possible in an organized way.  Its foundational rulings-on issues like jihad, relations with non-Muslims, mandatory punishments for adultery and apostasy, and more-are objectively knowable. The book takes great pains to present the most mainstream Islamic sources, like the classic of Shafi’i law, Umdat Al-Salik (or Reliance of the Traveller: The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law) and, in describing the tenants of Shariah, use texts written by Muslims for an Islamic audience.

In writing on the Center for Security Policy’s book, Shariah: The Threat to America, "Monitoring America" gives no more accurate or deep a description of the nearly 400-page work than dismissive posts on far-left blogs and missives from organizations linked by the US Government to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

Arkin and Preist write, "government terrorism experts call the views expressed in the center’s book [Shariah: The Threat to America] inaccurate and counterproductive. They say the DHS should increase its training of local police, using teachers who have evidence-based viewpoints."

Predictably, the un-named "government terrorism experts" who, according to Preist and Arkin, critiqued the book, could not point to a single assertion or fact that is "inaccurate and counterproductive." Shariah: The Threat to America may indeed be "counterproductive"-but only to politically correct fictions these un-named experts cling to at the expense of national security.

The premise of Shariah: The Threat to America is that America’s law enforcement and national security professionals must orient on the terrorist threat itself, using an unconstrained analysis that should begin with what the nation’s enemies themselves declare as war aims. It is unreasonable and counterproductive for national security professionals to substitute Western rationalizations-like poverty, localized political aspirations, the effect of globalization, or territorial claims-for terrorist groups’ motivations; this analysis will inevitably fail, at the detriment of both America’s foreign policy goals and its own security.

In addition, while lamenting the viewpoints of terrorism experts currently training local police around the country, no article has appeared in The Washington Post describing the other groups involved with training and advising national security professionals, from local police forces to consulting at the National Counterrerrorism Center and the White House: the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and many other groups previously named by the U.S. Government as unindicted co-conspirators in US vs. Holy Land Foundation, the largest and most sweeping terrorism-financing case in America’s history. As recently as this year, a Federal Judge Jorge Solis reiterated the close links between these groups and the recognized terrorist entity Hamas, writing of, "at least a prima facie case as to CAIR’s involvement in a conspiracy to support Hamas." Indeed, according to the United States government, the seed for the most vocal group, CAIR, was created at a Hamas meeting in Philadelphia taped by the FBI as an explicit branch of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee.

Evidently, Arkin and Priest are not concerned about the security implications of or, indeed, the scandal of, relying on associates of a known terrorist entity to provide national security professionals with advice or guidance in combating terror. This pernicious influence is felt less in mandatory sensitivity training than in the ability of groups like CAIR, ISNA, MPAC and others to define what’s known as the "war on terror" for us. Allowing our national security epistemology to be ‘outsourced’ to any group prior to an understanding of what motivates jihadist terrorism is a recipe for both continued potentially disastrous attacks, as well as the confusion and demoralization of watching those with the responsibility to protect us prove to be ineffective and clueless.

The bulk of "Monitoring America" takes a critical look at the gathering of raw intelligence by law enforcement nationally and locally; the effort, made clear by previous reporting from Preist and Arkin, is to enflame civil libertarians about possible violations of privacy at the expense of security. There is, however, no "false choice between liberty and security"-it is difficult, but it is a reality any free society must necessarily negotiate.

The authors, however, do not see the contradiction in their concerns: by maintaining a stubborn refusal to look at the motivating doctrine of terror on its own terms, the nation’s security establishment has no choice but to fiddle with data points and "See Something, Say Something" campaigns at Wal-Mart. Our intelligence bureaucracy decided it was more beneficial to its politically correct shibboleths to ignore the most important determining factor, a legal system that demands jihad.