New English Review
 
July 13, 2009
 
Michael Leiter of NCTC views on Islam and the Long War
 
The Columbia University alumni Magazine,Columbia, Summer edition, had an article,” The Secret Sharer” that included an interview with Michael Leiter, 40 year old head of the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC).  Leiter is a ’91 graduate of Columbia College who opted to become a Naval Aviator after college and saw service flying EA-6b Prowlers in Bosnia and Iraq in the 1990s.  After his Navy service he enrolled in Harvard Law School, was elected as President of the prestigious Law Review and graduated Magna Cum Laude.  Following that he had a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.  When American Airlines flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon it jarred him into thinking about doing something.  He became a federal prosecutor fighting crime. In 2004, he became deputy general counsel on the Robb –Silberman Commission that studied the alleged WMD intelligence fiasco in Iraq.  In November 2007, Leiter’s NCTC predecessor, John Scott Redd, left because of health issues. After a fruitless search by the outgoing Bush Administration, Leiter got the nod to take over the top slot at the NCTC in March 2008 and the Senate confirmed the appointment last June.  President Obama asked Leiter to stay on. The NCTC with a staff of 600 operates out of  a facility in suburban McLean, Virginia.
 
Leiter sees the NCTC’s mission as “… a one –stop shop for mapping out terrorism threat and designing a plan for the U.S. government to counter it abroad. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security allegedly handle  domestic terrorism threats and intelligence.  Leiter feels that this demarcation between foreign versus domestic terrorism threats “… ensure that the apparatus which is developed for international counterterrorism and Al-Qaeda is not appropriately applied to domestic groups.”
 
Leiter  presents his views when it comes to Islam, Al Qaeda and the ‘long war’.
 
More than 50 percent of terrorism victims in 2008 were Muslim, which is a very powerful reminder that this is not about the West being at war with Islam. This is Al-Qaeda completely perverting a wonderful, peaceful religion, leading to death and suffering for Muslims in many parts of the world. . . Al Qaeda’s ultimate goal is to establish a caliphate across the Middle East into North Africa, and into parts of Asia, and expel the U.S. and Westerners and Israel from that caliphate.  This is still at the core of their mission; they believe this, and they believe it very strongly. … There are a wide variety of drivers (political corruption, lack of a political voice and a lack of economic opportunity) behind why a 19 year old in Yemen or Somalia or Islamabad or Morocco would identify with Al Qaeda.
 
The U.S. is not at war with Islam. Al Qaeda is at war with Islam. The U.S. and Muslim –majority countries throughout the world are actually a partnership, and that partnership involves combating Al-Qaeda, but also building hope inside  those countries.
 
These comments bespeak of Leiter’s lack of fundamental knowledge of the totalitarian ideology in the Canon of Islam: the Quran, the Hadiths, Sira and legal rulings.  It would appear from his comments that Leiter and his staff need to review of the Islamic Law War Doctrine analysis prepared by Stephen Coughlin for the Pentagon Joint Staff .  This would enable them to understand why Al-Qaeda and the Taliban strive to  subjugate us, the Infidels, and replace  our government  with a world caliphate  based on Sharia law and ruled by  a strong fundamentalist Emir.
 
Despite Leiter’s role in conducting international counterterrorism for our government, the NCTC is sometimes asked by Congress to opine on domestic threats with links abroad.  One instance of that were Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee hearings chaired by Senator Joe Lieberman in March looking into recruitment by the Somali terrorist group, Al Shabaab among American Somali youths primarily in Minnesota.  
 
In his prepared testimony, Andrew Liepman, deputy director for Intelligence at the NCTC revealed his views on what cause American Somali youths to join up as Jihadis:
I also want to emphasize that we do not believe that we are witnessing any form of community-wide radicalization among Somali-Americans. Many Somali-Americans came to the US to get away from the type of anarchy, chaos, and heartbreak that violence breeds. The overwhelming majority of Somali-Americans are or want to be contributing members of American society, trying to raise their families here and desperately wishing for stability in their ancestral homeland.
 
So, what causes the radicalization of a small but significant number of Somali-American youth? The answer is complex—it is the result of a number of factors, as I mentioned previously—that come together occasionally when dynamic, influential leaders gain access to despondent, disenfranchised young men. Sophisticated extremist recruiters target vulnerable individuals who lack structure and definition in their lives, by offering what parents and outsiders often view as a seemingly innocuous alternative to more common violent subcultures associated with gangs and criminality. These recruiters subject individuals to religiously inspired indoctrination to move them toward violent extremism. They target vulnerable young men—many of them refugees who came here as small children or who are children of immigrants—torn between their parents’ traditional ethnic, tribal, and clan identities and the new cultures and traditions offered by American society. Caught between two worlds, and lacking structure and definition in their lives at home, some youth become susceptible to the draw of gangs and criminality, and in some cases religious or nationalistic extremism. The new group identities that these leaders provide to their followers can expose them to forces that may move them toward violent extremism against people and institutions they have learned to regard as enemies.
 
As we have posted in the wake of the recent stunning revelations of the deaths  in Somalia of four American Somali young men from Minneapolis, the over-arching  factor is the call of Allah- a reflection of the radical Imams and extremist hate mongering in Mosques in America.
 
Fellow Columbia alumni, Dr. Harold Reisman of Carlsbad, California wrote the following letter to Columbia regarding this article and interview with NCTC director Leiter.
 
Mr. Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, was interviewed (Summer, 2009). He must have read the Qur'an, Hadith and Sira and knows that vast tracts of the foundational religious texts of Islam concern the dar al-harb, attacks on kafirs, the need for war, rules of war, methods of warfare, dealing with male and female captives, slavery, treatment of subjugated peoples and division of the spoils. Words and aggressive acts of Mohammed account for over 80 percent of the doctrine of Islam. Just how did Islam expand so far and so fast within two centuries of its founding? Yet,  Mr. Leiter states that Al-Qaeda is ". . . completely perverting a wonderful, peaceful religion..." I suppose it is de rigueur for current government officials to consider Islam a religion of peace. But why, I wonder, do we have to be repeatedly reminded of this counterfactual belief over and over again?
 
So there you have it, the views of  NCTC’s Leiter and staff guiding the fight against ‘man made disasters’ in the long war perpetrated by al Qaeda and its affiliates around the globe and here in America.  
 
http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_display.cfm/blog_id/21876