It could be said that Americans are making far too big a deal out of the fact that the FBI reportedly hasn’t yet set foot at the scene of the so-called crime scene in Benghazi, Libya, where Ambassador Chris Stevens was tortured, and murdered on Sept. 11 of this year.
It’s not like the presence of FBI agents would make much of a difference. The crime scene has never been secured so any “evidence” agents might find will be hopelessly tainted.
And even if the scene had been properly secured, earlier this year the Obama administration slapped handcuffs on the FBI, preventing it from carrying out proper investigations.
Since March of this year, FBI agents have been directed not to treat individuals associated with terrorist groups as potential threats to the nation.
The fact that a terrorism suspect is associated with a terrorist group means nothing, according to the FBI document, “Guiding Principles: Touchstone Document on Training.” The “touchstone” document, dated March of this year, is available online but hasn’t been reported on by major media outlets.
Federal Bureau of Investigation agents have been instructed that “mere association with organizations that demonstrate both legitimate (advocacy) and illicit (violent extremism) objectives should not automatically result in a determination that the associated individual is acting in furtherance of the organization’s illicit objective(s),” the touchstone document states.
This is a bizarre kind of procedural fairness as viewed in a funhouse mirror, applying something akin to a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard to an FBI investigation. Such an evidentiary threshold may be appropriate for a criminal trial, but it sets the bar far too high for mere investigations. This new rule no doubt provides aid and comfort to the much-investigated phony civil rights group known as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
The touchstone document also invokes the gods of political correctness by making FBI agents afraid of being called “racist” – even though almost all Islamic terrorism suspects come from the same part of the world.
“Training must emphasize that no investigative or intelligence collection activity may be based solely on race, ethnicity, national origin, or religious affiliation,” the touchstone document states. “Specifically, training must focus on behavioral indicators that have a potential nexus to terrorist or criminal activity, while making clear that religious expression, protest activity, and the espousing of political or ideological beliefs are constitutionally protected activities that must not be equated with terrorism or criminality absent other indicia of such offenses.”
In other words, the idea that Islam is a religion of peace is now official FBI policy under President Obama.
The touchstone document was examined in The Project, a documentary film about the Muslim Brotherhood’s plan for America that aired last week.
One of the movie’s arguments is that Americans’ civil rights and political correctness are weapons of infiltration used by our Islamofascist enemies. This happens to be consistent with Saul Alinsky’s fourth rule of “power tactics”: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” In other words, Islamists are using Americans’ inherent goodness, their sense of fair play, including an aversion to being accused of racial stereotyping, against America.
Five congressmen sent a letter in June to Michael E. Horowitz, Inspector General at the Department of Justice, about the touchstone document, protesting that it and other Obama administration “policies and initiatives strike us as deeply problematic with respect to our national and homeland security.” The letter was signed by Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), Thomas Rooney (R-Fla.), and Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.).
This isn’t the first time a Democratic administration has thrown up roadblocks that hinder terrorism investigations.
The touchstone document brings to mind the 1995 diktat written by Bill Clinton’s “Mistress of Disaster,” then-Deputy Attorney Jamie Gorelick. Gorelick’s directive, titled “Instructions on Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence and Criminal Investigations,” provided proof of the Clinton administration’s distaste for fighting Islamic terrorism and hindered investigations, according to DiscoverTheNetworks:
“Because the memo created a barrier for U.S. intelligence agencies to share information with the FBI, one of its unintended consequences might have been to prevent the FBI from receiving the necessary intelligence to stop the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the worst in American history.”
While two George Soros-funded nonprofits, the Center for American Progress and Media Matters for America, use the Alinsky playbook to try to convince Americans that “Islamophobia,” a make-believe mental disturbance, is a threat to American democracy and pluralism, the Obama administration is currently in full-time damage control mode as the president’s foreign policy aimed at appeasing totalitarian Islamic theocrats collapses. The administration has been sucking up to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a 57-state (56 sovereign states and the Palestinian Authority) group that considers itself the Caliphate reborn.
The Obama administration may even be planning to promote Saudi-style anti-blasphemy laws at the behest of the Muslim world, as Congressman Trent Franks was horrified to discover when questioning a senior Justice Department official this past summer.