Justin's Political Corner

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) suggested on Friday that the was FBI unable to ask deceased Boston marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev about Islam during its 2011 interview with him due to President Obama’s “political correctness,” thus allowing the bombing to take place.

Gohmert said on the House floor that the Obama administration has prevented intelligence officials from discussing Islam. “It was in that 9/11 commission report, before this administration took over and implemented political correctness,” he said, arguing the FBI’s training manuals were “systematically purged” in 2011 to conform to Obama’s worldview.

The facts don’t line up with Gohmert’s claims, however. In 2011 it was revealed that FBI’s counterterrorism training courses were full of misleading views about Islam, including that mainstream Muslims are “violent” and “radical.” In response to the revelation, the FBI purged its training documents of all that mischaracterized all Muslims as being especially prone to terrorism.

When it comes to questioning Tsarnaev, the FSB — Russia’s domestic intelligence service —reached out to the United States in 2011 regarding its fears that he — an ethnic Chechen — was a security threat. In response, the FBI launched a three-month investigation into Tsarnaev, including interviews with him, his family, and his communications and internet usage. Following that review, the FBI determined there wasn’t enough evidence to continue to monitor Tsarnaev’s activities. When the FBI reported that to Russia in Oct. 2011, requesting further information about why the FSB believed Tsarnaev was a threat, Russia reportedly never responded.

Gohmert has proved no stranger to promoting wild theories related to Islam during his time in Congress. At various times, the Texan has stated that wide gun-ownership is needed to protect against Sharia law, that Obama intervened in Libya to allow al Qaeda to spread, and that the president is seeking to take credit for starting a new Ottoman Empire. Interfaith groups have called upon Gohmert in the past to drop his Islamophobia, seemingly to no effect.

h/t:  Think Progress

An envelope sent to the U.S. Senate office of Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) included a substance that has tested positive for Ricin, two sources say.

It was not immediately clear when the envelope was received. But it arrived in a Senate mail facility, which has now been closed for more testing. All congressional mail will now be processed through the U.S. House facility.

The Senate went into recess shortly after 6 p.m. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and FBI Director Robert Mueller were briefing senators on Tuesday afternoon. A DHS official said that the briefing was intended to address cyber-security, but that the letter involving Ricin came up.

Ricin is a toxic substance made from castor beans. Ricin poisoning could cause symptoms such as respiratory distress, fever, cough, nausea, and tightness in the chest, as well as heavy sweating and chest tightness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

H/T: Politico.com

The non-partisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed complaints Thursday with both the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) alleging that Karl Rove and his secretive Crossroads GPS violated election law and may have engaged in a criminal conspiracy to do so.

Under campaign finance law and FEC regulations, 501(c)(4) groups, like Crossroads GPS, can raise unlimited funds from wealthy individuals and corporations without having to disclose their donors. The only time donors to these secretive groups must be disclosed is when donors give more than $200 explicitly “for the purpose of furthering an independent expenditure.”

CREW also notes that, in a 2011 letter to the FEC, Crossroads GPS said that it “understands the applicable reporting regulations” and that, should it receive “any contributions that are required to be reported,” it would do so as required. Given this, CREW argues, the violations “were deliberate” and “are subject to criminal as well as civil penalties.”

Crossroads GPS may also be in hot water for its apparent failure to register as a charity in Virginia, as required by law.

Brian Camenker’s organization MassResistance is out with a new “report” arguing that the “homosexual and transgender movements” are using the FBI and CIA to “crack down on pro-family groups and citizens.” He appeared on Crosstalk with host Jim Schneider of VCY America yesterday to warn that efforts by the government agencies to create a more open workplace for their gay and lesbian employees and to engage with the gay community to prevent and prosecute anti-gay hate crimes is part of a pernicious plan that will “do a lot of damage” and harm the Religious Right. Camenker said he is “really scared” of the FBI now that it has become an “out homosexual organization” that is “embracing the gay agenda” by trying to stem the tide of anti-gay hate crimes.

Camenker: It’s unbelievable. The FBI is just unbelievable to see. They have started a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender program on their careers website and they apparently have even gone from there to embracing the gay agenda, having a gay advisory committee, welcoming homosexuals as FBI agents, getting involved with pride events, but more than that going to gay pride events and encouraging homosexual activists to report hate crimes and working with them against pro-family groups. So this is what we’re seeing the FBI doing according to their own writings and according to the writings of the gay newspapers. We have one on our website, one of the gay newspapers in San Francisco, ‘FBI Encourages LGBTs to Report Hate Crimes,’ it is very, very frightening to see. The FBI is very powerful and they can do a lot of damage if they are out to get you.

Camenker: When an individual describes himself as being gay or lesbian, transgender or something, invariably that person is hostile to the pro-family position and is vigorous about pushing the entire agenda. We’ve seen that in the schools, we’ve seen that all over the place. We’re really scared about the FBI being this out homosexual organization.

Even the CIA isn’t safe from the “gay agenda.” “In the old days you thought of the CIA as being this internal spy organization but now what they are doing is they are actually participating in these activities” like gay pride events, lamenting that gays are no longer banned from serving in the agency. “Man, this is really, really, really bad,” Camenker said.

h/t: Brian Tashman at RWW

Federal authorities announced late Friday they were dropping the four-year criminal investigation into Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio and would not be pressing abuse of power charges against him.

The announcement came late on a Friday ahead of a long holiday weekend. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona made the disclosure through a three-sentence press release. An auto-response email from the office’s spokesman said no one would answer questions about the decision. An outgoing message on the spokesman’s cell phone said the same thing.

Arpaio’s office said he had no immediate comment but planned to hold a news conference at 10:30 p.m., Eastern time.

The move put an end to an investigation that began in 2008 and included use of a federal grand jury. Multiple high-level Maricopa County sheriff’s officials testified before the grand jury in 2010, but the probe went quiet in recent months.

The FBI led the investigation and was said to be looking at whether Arpaio used the powers of his office to target his political enemies. At one point in 2009, his office along with the county’s elected prosecutor were investigating at least 14 local government officials, all of whom had defied Arpaio in some way. The targets included judges, politicians and others officials high up in local government.

The news release said federal authorities were dropping the case against current and former members of both the sheriff’s office and the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.

The decision comes just three days after Arpaio, 80, won the Republican primary for sheriff, a race in which he was unopposed. First elected in 1992, he is seeking a sixth term in office this year and will face off against Democrat Paul Penzone and independent Mike Stauffer in November.

H/T: Nick R. Martin at TPM

This horrible fucker should be rotting in jail! Maricopa County Residents should vote out Fascist Goon Arpaio and replace him with Paul Penzone (D)!

This is beyond the beyond. As in far beyond Pluto. Except that I’m quoting directly from a report by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. True, It’s happening in Mississippi, which some may consider a world away. But dammit, it’s still our country.

The system established by the City of Meridian, Lauderdale County, and DYS to incarcerate children for school suspensions ‘shocks the conscience,’ resulting in the incarceration of children for alleged ‘offenses’ such as dress code violations, flatulence, profanity, and disrespect.

But at least, you know, the children must be actually farting? Nope.

The Justice Department has been investigating the agencies since December 2011 and found that the police department arrests children without probable cause, violating the children’s Fourth Amendment protections of unlawful search and seizure.

How do these kids end up in jail?

You and I may not live in a police state. But the children of Meridian, Mississippi? They would likely tell a different tale — if they weren’t afraid to speak.

H/T: jpmassar at Daily Kos

Earlier this year, a virus infected millions of computers around the world that caused the infected computers to visit fake websites and prevented owners from visiting security websites to remove it.  In an effort to stop the virus, the FBI set up several clean servers so that those infected would still be able to access the internet and remove the virus from their computers.

So how is Janet Porter and her Faith2Action organization reporting this news? By suggesting that the FBI is trying to take away your internet access.

h/t: Kyle Mantyla at RWW

In August 2007 the New York Police Department released a report called “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat,” claiming that the looming danger to the United States was from “unremarkable” Muslim men under 35 who visit “extremist incubators.” The language sounds ominous, conjuring up Clockwork Orange–style laboratories of human reprogramming, twisting average Muslims into instruments of evil. And yet what are these “incubators”? The report states that they are mosques, “cafes, cab driver hangouts, flophouses, prisons, student associations, non-governmental organizations, hookah (water pipe) bars, butcher shops and book stores”—in other words, precisely the places where ordinary life happens.

But the report wasn’t based on any independent social science research, and actual studies clearly refuted the very claims made by the NYPD. The Rand Corporation found that the number of homegrown radicals here is “tiny.” “There are more than 3 million Muslims in the United States, and few more than 100 have joined jihad—about one out of every 30,000—suggesting an American Muslim population that remains hostile to jihadist ideology and its exhortations to violence,” Rand’s 2010 report found. “A mistrust of American Muslims by other Americans seems misplaced,” it concluded. This year, an analysis by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security also described the number of American Muslims involved in domestic terrorism since 2001 as “tiny.” “This study’s findings challenge Americans to be vigilant against the threat of homegrown terrorism while maintaining a responsible sense of proportion,” it said. And a 2011 Gallup survey found that American Muslims were the least likely of any major US religious group to consider attacks on civilians justified.

Every group has its loonies. And yet the idea that American Muslim communities are foul nests of hatred, where dark-skinned men plot Arabic violence while combing one another’s beards, persists. In fact, it’s worse than that. In the past few years, another narrative about American Muslims has come along, which sows a different kind of paranoia. While the old story revolves around security, portraying American Muslims as potential terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, the new narrative operates more along the axis of culture. Simple acts of religious or cultural expression and the straightforward activities of Muslim daily life have become suspicious. Building a mosque in Lower Manhattan or in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, or in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, becomes an act of “stealth jihad.” Muslims filing for divorce invokes the bizarre charge of “creeping Sharia.” A dual-language Arabic-English high school in New York is demonized as a “madrassa.” The State Board of Education in Texas determines that reading about Islam is not education but indoctrination. Changing your Muslim-sounding name to one with a more Anglophone tenor triggers an NYPD investigation, according to the Associated Press. Even the fact that some Butterball turkeys are “halal” was enough to fire up the bigotry last Thanksgiving, the most American of holidays.

A Washington Post/ABC News poll taken in October 2001 found that 39 percent of Americans held unfavorable opinions of Islam. After dipping for a few years, the number rose to 46 percent in 2006 and reached 49 percent—basically half the population—in 2010, the last year the question was asked. (Other recent polls show similar results.) Such anti-Muslim attitudes are not merely absorbed by law enforcement and the military or reflected on the airwaves and in the words of our politicians. Rather, the idea that American Muslims are to be feared or loathed or excluded from the United States is being actively promoted.

This past September, Wired broke the story that the FBI tells its counterterrorism agents in training that mainstream American Muslims are probably terrorist sympathizers, that the Prophet Muhammad was a “cult leader” and that the religiously mandated practice of giving charity in Islam is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.” The training materials, which stated that FBI agents had the “ability to bend or suspend the law and impinge on freedoms of others,” identify other insidious techniques Muslims use for promoting jihad, including “immigration” and “law suits”—in other words, the ordinary uses of the American political system. The revelations forced the FBI to remove 876 pages from its manuals.

Another egregious example that recently came to light is that the NYPD, as part of its training, screened The Third Jihad, a film that claims “the true agenda of much of Islam in America” is “a strategy to infiltrate and dominate” the country. The film ran on a continuous loop for somewhere between three months and a year of training and was viewed by at least 1,489 officers. Yet another example involved Army Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley, who taught a course at the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Staff College that informed senior officers that the United States would have to fight a “total war” against the world’s Muslims, including abandoning the international laws of war that protect civilians (deemed “no longer relevant”), and possibly applying “the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki” to destroy Islam’s holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Claiming “Islam is an ideology rather than solely a religion,” the class taught that the United States was “culturally vulnerable” to this threat because of its “‘judeo-christian’ [sic] ethic of reason and tolerance.” The Pentagon canceled the course in the wake of the revelations, and Dooley maintains a nonteaching position, pending an investigation.

The consequences of these efforts to promote anti-Muslim beliefs and sentiments influence how American Muslims practice their faith, engage with their neighbors, cooperate with law enforcement, work at their jobs and study at school. Anti-mosque activity, according to the ACLU, has taken place in more than half the states in the country. And American Muslims, who make up 1–2 percent of the population, account for more than 20 percent of religion-based filings with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Republican politicians, meanwhile, have been falling all over themselves to vilify Muslims, especially during the presidential primary. Herman Cain proclaimed that “a majority of Muslims share the extremist views,” initially vowing not to appoint any Muslims to his cabinet. Rick Santorum endorsed religious profiling, saying that “obviously Muslims would be someone [sic] you’d look at.” Newt Gingrich compared Muslims to Nazis in 2010, when he opposed building an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan. “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington,” he said. And, in 2007, Mitt Romney said, “Based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration.” Whatever happened to the matter of qualifications? But hey, if you’re a Muslim, that’s all you’ll ever be. Romney has hired Walid Phares, part of the active anti-Muslim network, as a foreign policy adviser, and GOP voters continue to consider that President Obama is a Muslim in large numbers (52 percent of Mississippi GOP members thought so in March).

It gets stranger still. When media portrayals of everyday American Muslim life are produced, the very ordinariness is attacked as a lie. TLC’s show All-American Muslim premiered in November to favorable reviews. The show, which focused on five Lebanese-American Shiite Muslim families in the Dearborn, Michigan, area, was a bit of a yawner for racy reality TV, but it was a useful kind of ethnography for Americans unfamiliar with the stuff of daily American Muslim life. Immediately, the organized anti-Muslim network kicked into gear. The Florida Family Association, basically a one-man show run by David Caton, led a boycott of the show via e-mail that was quickly picked up by the extreme right-wing anti-Islamic blogosphere, and led to Lowe’s and Kayak.com pulling their ads. Caton’s e-mail read, “The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish.”

Follow the logic. The only thing accepted as “normal” for a Muslim is to act like an extremist. Ordinary Muslim folk appearing to live ordinary Muslim lives? That’s just plain suspicious.

Does this mean that the United States is an Islamophobic country? Of course not. Large support for American Muslims exists in many quarters [see Laila Al-Arian’s essay in this issue, page 31]. Polls may suggest that about half the population is anti-Muslim, but that leaves half that isn’t. In many quarters of the country, there is genuine, not suspicious, interest in American Muslims and the realities they face, as evidenced by the fact that TLC produced All-American Muslim. Aasif Mandvi’s contributions to The Daily Show routinely deflate the power of this contemporary prejudice, and libraries, museums, classrooms and houses of worship across the country now regularly include Muslims and Islam in their programming in an attempt to further understanding and combat bigotry.

American Muslims have responded to events over the past decade and the expansion of an anti-Muslim network largely by being more, not less, visible. The number of mosques grew 74 percent over the past decade, despite the opposition Muslims sometimes confront in their construction. Even if a 2011 poll found that 48 percent of American Muslims reported experiencing discrimination in the previous twelve months, they also showed more optimism than other Americans in the poll that their lives would be better in five years (perhaps, in part, because of today’s discrimination). The guiding belief in the American Muslim community today is that the country will recognize that Muslims have always been and will continue to be a part of America.

h/t: http://www.thenation.com/article/168383/fear-and-loathing-islam

See Also:

Jack Shaheen, “How the Media Created the Muslim Monster Myth”
Petra Bartosiewicz, “Deploying Informants, the FBI Stings Muslims”
Laila Lalami, “Islamophobia and Its Discontents”
Abed Awad, “The True Story of Sharia in American Courts”
Ramzi Kassem, “The Long Roots of the NYPD Spying Program”
Max Blumenthal, “The Sugar Mama of Anti-Muslim Hate”
Laila Al-Arian, “When Your Father Is Accused of Terrorism”

The FBI announced today that George Zimmerman could be charged with a federal hate crime, a charge that would mean Zimmerman could face the death penalty if convicted. The FBI made the announcement shortly after Zimmerman’s lawyers received the list of witnesses and evidence materials, which included never before seen accounts of the shooting from witnesses, new footage and new 911 call recordings.

State Prosecutors made the case that Zimmerman, who admitted to fatally shooting 17 year old Trayvon Martin, profiled and stalked the youth prior to a confrontation, which lead to Martin’s death, something that has prompted the FBI to investigate the possibility of raising the charge from second degree murder to a federal hate crime.

h/t: Liam Patrick at AddictingInfo.org

A course at a military academy that taught US officers to prepare for “total war” with Islam does not represent an isolated incident, campaigners have warned.

The Pentagon moved swiftly to distance itself from revelations that officers in a defense department class were taught that “Hiroshima”-style tactics would be needed to combat the threat from Islam.

In a July presentation, Dooley claimed: “We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam’. It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.” He proposed a four-stage solution that included the possibility of reducing Islam to “a cult status” and threatening Saudi Arabia with starvation.

Dooley brought in several ideological allies to support his conclusion, including Shireen Burki, who in 2008 told future military decision makers that “Obama is bin Laden’s dream candidate”. John Guandolo, a former FBI employee, presented students with an array of materials including a paper in which he argued: “It is a permanent command in Islam for Muslims to hate and despise Jews and Christians.”

The influence of anti-Islamic rhetoric has also found its way into municipal police departments. The New York police department has been the subject of increasing scrutiny amid a series of reports from the Associated Press revealing the existence of the department’s so-called “Demographics Unit”, which has been used to map out ethnic communities. The unit focused on a list of 28 “ancestries of interest”, all of which are predominantly Muslim. In the course of over two dozen articles, the AP laid out how the NYPD – with the help of CIA advisers – infiltrated mosques, Muslim community centers and local colleges.

In January the New York Times revealed the department had played the Third Jihad – a film which claims that American Muslims of all stripes are in the midst of an effort to seize control of the country – for 1,489 police officers. The NYPD initially denied that any officers had seen the film and that it was not involved in its production, but was eventually forced to admit that police commissioner Ray Kelly participated in an interview for the film.

h/t: Raw Story