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Remember the old days? Remember when the Obama
administration was fighting the good fight—not against terrorism-- but against
the war on terrorism. Or better, when Obama was making the world safe for terrorism.
A former Obama administration official, named David Asher,
testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last Thursday. He told the
committee that the Obama administration dismantled the law enforcement units
that were working to disrupt Iranian terrorism. That is, the terrorism promoted
by the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
The story does not seem to have made it into the mainstream
press. It comes from the Washington Free Beacon:
The
Obama administration "systematically disbanded" law enforcement
investigative units across the federal government focused on disrupting
Iranian, Syrian, and Venezuelan terrorism financing networks out of concern the
work could cause friction with Iranian officials and scuttle the nuclear deal
with Iran, according to a former U.S. official who spent decades dismantling
terrorist financial networks.
David
Asher, who previously served as an adviser to Gen. John Allen at the Defense
and State Departments, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee Thursday that
top officials across several key law enforcement and intelligence agencies in
the Obama administration "systematically disbanded" law enforcement
activities targeting the terrorism financing operations of Iran, Hezbollah, and
Venezuela in the lead-up to and during the nuclear negotiations with Tehran.
"Senior
leadership, presiding, directing, and overseeing various sections [of these
agencies] and portions of the U.S. intelligence community systematically
disbanded any internal or external stakeholder action that threatened to derail
the administration's policy agenda focused on Iran," he testified.
At the time America could have seriously damaged Hezbollah,
one of the world’s most important terrorist organization. Yet, the Obama
administration, afraid of hurting the delicate feelings of the mullahs in
Tehran, chose not to do so:
The
United States squandered the chance "at a very low financial cost" to
take apart Hezbollah's finances, its global organization, and the Iran proxy's
ability to "readily terrorize us, victimize us, and run a criminal network
through our shores, inside our banking systems—and in partnership with the
world's foremost drug cartels—target our state and society," he said.
"We
lost much of the altitude we had gained in our global effort, and many aspects
including key personnel, who were reassigned, budgets that were slashed—many
key elements of the investigations that were underway were undermined," he
said.
It is a rich irony that leading American foreign policy
experts are bemoaning the fact that the Trump administration has organized
dozens of Sunni Arab states and has led them to commit to fight terrorists. The same experts are gnashing their teeth over those Sunni nations, led by
Saudi Arabia and Egypt, that are boycotting the nation of Qatar, another leading
state sponsor of terrorism, home base for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and
close ally of Iran.
4 comments:
No, he was more interested in controlling the weather.
Obama's conspicuous and willful ignorance of the Islamist threat goes back to Nidal Hasan's deadly "workplace violence" at Fort Hood. This classification prevented the families of these servicemen the benefits they deserved. The strict firearms controls on domestic installations prevented self-defense and slowed the response. Hasan was taken into custody, while his victims weren't so lucky. No terrorism here. Obama was speaking at a tribal conference and couldn't be bothered.
Most importantly, there is something very, very strange about the Obama Administration's posture toward -- and, more importantly, it's active engagement with -- the Islamic Republic of Iran. Incredibly dangerous, naive and unnecessary. I am still waiting for the compelling national security interest(s) behind these moves. I hear nothing. Nothing.
IAC,
"Most importantly, there is something very, very strange about the Obama Administration's posture toward -- and, more importantly, it's active engagement with -- the Islamic Republic of Iran"
Absolutely. I can think of many reasons from the altruistic to the neferious, but there seems to be no way to find out. Past Administrations of both persuasions have made similar moves, but as we are constituted the topic was ultimately the cause of national discussion with consequence. In the case none.
If Obama had been an active Iranian agent, what would he have doe differently?
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