Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, March 5, 2002

Terrorists in the U.S. are "waiting to strike out,” Egyptian President Hosni Mubarek told the newspaper ahead of his planned visit to Washington today.

He called for "extreme vigilance and close international operation against the scourge.”

There’s just one problem: The FBI can do little or nothing to stop it.

Steven Emerson, in his book "American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us,” says that after the Watergate scandal in the mid-1970s the Senate committee headed by the late Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, spotlighted some abuses and then went to the other extreme. The end result was Congress piously tied the hands of our intelligence agencies.

"I soon learned that the FBI could do little or nothing to monitor such groups,” Emerson writes. The '70s restrictions "had long since prevented the FBI from performing ‘blanket surveillance.’ Investigations could be done on particular individuals and then only if these individuals appeared to be in the act of committing a crime.” In other words, only after most, if not all, of the damage was done.

Emerson quoted former FBI official Oliver Revel as saying the FBI is forbidden even to compile newspaper or other publicly available clippings on such groups without receiving prior permission to open an "investigation.”

In fact, individual FBI agents can and have been sued for deviating from those guidelines.

Sued by the Enemy

"Even more significant,” writes Emerson, an investigative reporter who quit his mainstream media job just so he could pursue this for his book, "the FBI was particularly hamstrung if these groups operated under the auspices of ‘religious,’ ‘civic,’ ‘civil rights,’ or ‘charitable groups.’ This has provided cover for recruiting and fundraising by jihad warriors in the United States.”

Such designations were "more than enough to fool the public, the police, and especially naive leaders of religious or educational institutions” who would then sponsor the organizations in the name of "multiculturalism” and "diversity.”

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, a Democrat leftover from Bill Clinton's Cabinet, insists that there be no ethnic profiling at airport checkpoints.

Don't Offend the Muslim Terrorists

As National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne La Pierre told a C-PAC gathering last month, it’s OK to take grandma’s nail clippers, but we can’t engage in profiling because that might offend some Islamic fanatic with a fake ID, two aliases and no job.

Nineteen out of 19 of the Sept. 11 hijackers all fit the same profile: Young males of Middle Eastern backgrounds and half of them had the name Mohammed. Should people fitting that description be subjected to special attention?

"No, not on that basis alone,” the secretary told CBS’s "60 Minutes" in December.

Bear in mind that we were told last fall that federalizing airport security personnel would somehow "professionalize” them. Anyone who dared to question that was accused (in one case in a headline on the front page of "USA Today”) of blocking tightened airport security.

Emerson’s book opens with a scene where a speaker extended "greetings from the occupied land.”

To the cheers of his audience he described in detail a series of bloody attacks in the Middle East including "entering the building and stabbing all the people” and an instance where a suicide terrorist drove a bus off a ravine, killing 17, including one American.

"I call on my brothers to take up arms with us ... to take up arms and arms alone,” he urged.

The date: 1989. The location: Kansas City.

But the FBI can’t do anything about such threats. Thanks to lawmakers such as Church and then Rep. Don Edwards, D-Calif., law enforcement and intelligence agencies are stymied.

The abuses spotlighted by the Church committee provided cover for left-wingers to do what they had wanted to do for years: put tough curbs on investigations of internal subversion.

They had always been critical of laws that cracked down on the Communist Party or other groups that advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. They argued that such advocacy was protected speech, and the hysteria of the '70s gave them just the opening they were seeking.

As Emerson notes, post-Sept. 11 America is reaping the bitter fruit of that legacy.

Get American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us from NewsMax at a discount.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Bush Administration

Clinton Scandals

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War on Terrorism

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