Heather MacDonald writes in City Journal (via FrontPage, with thanks to EPG) on the consequences of dhimmitude in law enforcement and the failure to stand up to American Muslim advocacy groups that impede anti-terror efforts:
Yet even if the FBI is now fearless about using its surveillance authority, the strategic challenge is daunting. “The dilemma,” says a big-city police counter-terrorism official, is that “you can’t put a bug in every mosque. And where are you going to put it? In the imam’s office? In the corner where they gather? But should it be the same corner? And who’s the ‘they?’ ” The only solution, he says, is to develop sources and have them watch.
So far, however, federal and local efforts to penetrate the byzantine world of mosque politics have had limited success. After an FBI outreach to a New York mosque, the imam and his deputies reportedly broke out laughing at their successful snow job: “This is great! They’re coming to us?” the imam chortled. The situation is the same in southern California. “We’ll come back from a Kumbayah meeting with a local mosque,” says a police leader, “and realize that these guys who just agreed to help us are in our terror files!” Then there’s the inevitable phone call from the imam three weeks later:
” ‘You need to check this guy out,’ ” and it turns out that the “suspect” has been opposing the imam in local power plays.
The domestic barriers to tracking down potential terrorists explain why so much of the post-9/11 intelligence in the war on Islamic terror has come from the interrogation of prisoners abroad. Yet that source is about to dry up, in the overreaction to the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal. Military and CIA officials have shut down almost all interrogation techniques that were working, such as keeping someone awake over 12 hours a day, because of charges that they constituted “torture.”
Domestic intelligence-gathering therefore will become all the more crucial in the coming year. Unfortunately, most Muslim-American organizations””above all, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)””send out a nonstop message of victimology, telling Muslims that the United States is their enemy and is stripping them of their civil rights. This summer, CAIR distributed postcards at mosques across the country with the infamous photograph from Abu Ghraib of a hooded prisoner standing on a box with wires hanging from his hands. Juxtaposed with the picture was a 2003 quotation from President Bush saying that the United States was leading the fight against torture. The postcards were supposed to be sent to Congress to demand an end to U.S. government torture. Such propaganda lessens the likelihood that Muslims will volunteer information about possible terror sympathizers in their midst.