OBAMA MAKING US WEAKER BY THE DAY

The surrender to the Jihad continues.

From Andy McCarthy at the Corner:

Better have something to bite on before you start reading the intrepid Debra Burlingame's Wall Street Journal op-ed this morning — your teeth are going to be gnashing big-time.

Unbelievably, the Obama Justice Department has withdrawn the "special administrative measures" (SAMs) imposed at the federal supermax prison in Colorado against "Shoe Bomber" Richard Reid (the jihadist who tried to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight with nearly 200 people on board). As Debra explains, the "SAMs are security directives, renewable yearly, issued by the attorney general when 'there is a substantial risk that a prisoner’s communications, correspondence or contacts with persons could result in death or serious bodily injury' to others."

Why abandon the SAMs? Because they were a violation of Reid's First Amendment rights to free speech and free exercise of his religion, of course. So the would-be suicide bomber went on a hungar strike and got results: a cave-in from the Obama Justice Department — which works closely with the "human rights" Left (some Obama DOJ lawyers are recruited from this faction; other top Obama DOJ lawyers aligned with it while they were in private practice, volunteering their services to enemy combatants held at Gitmo).

Exactly what was the First Amendment problem here? Debra explains:

In a hand-written complaint, [Reid] asserted that he was being illegally prevented from performing daily “group prayers in a manner prescribed by my religion.” Yet the list of Reid’s potential fellow congregants at ADX Florence [i.e., the supermax prison] reads like a Who’s Who of al Qaeda’s most dangerous members: Ramzi Yousef and his three co-conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui; “Millennium bomber” Ahmed Ressam; “Dirty bomber” Jose Padilla; Wadih el-Hage, Osama Bin Laden’s personal secretary, convicted in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombing that killed 247 people.

The human-rights Left is already incorporating their fabulously successful smear-Gitmo strategy in their attack on our civilian prisons. Even Reid's hungar-strike is page one in the Gitmo playbook. Here's Debra again:

In January, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Colorado issued a statement saying that conditions at supermax are “simply another form of torture” worse than Gitmo which “make a mockery of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’” Last month, the ACLU filed a civil lawsuit mirroring Reid’s religious rights claim on behalf of two terrorism inmates held at the Communications Management Unit inside a medium security prison in Terre Haute, Ind. One of those inmates is Enaam Arnaout, a Syrian-born U.S. citizen serving a 10-year sentence for diverting Muslim charity money to militant Islamic groups in Bosnia and Chechnya. The other, Randall Royer, is serving 20 years for his role recruiting young Muslims in the “Virginia Jihad Network,” a group that used paintball games in 2000-2001 to train for holy war.

Sure it's nuts, but as I detailed a couple of weeks ago, detainee policy in the Obama/Holder Justice Department is now being shaped by former Human Rights Watch lawyer Jennifer Daskal, who thinks incarceration is tantamount to torture (recall her complaint that one jihadist, "a self-styled poet," was being subjected to severe mental trauma: He "found it was nearly impossible to write poetry anymore because the prison guards would only allow him to keep a pen or pencil in his cell for short periods of time").