According to Lisa Monaco, Barack Obama’s Security and Counter-terrorism adviser, parents have a duty to monitor the attitudes and enthusiasms of their children, and report them to law enforcement if they display symptoms of incipient extremism.
In an address to Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Monaco suggested that “sudden personality changes” in children, including a “confrontational” attitude, might betoken terrorist tendencies. Monaco lamented that “The government is rarely in a position to observe these early signals, so we need to do more to help communities understand the warning signs, and then work together to intervene before an incident can occur.”
This is exactly what was done by Osman Barre, a Somali-born software engineer living in Portland, Oregon, when he became concerned that his teenage son Mohamed Osman Mohamud was being radicalized by exposure to jihadist literature.
Like many other native Somalis, Mohamud was aware of the violence being waged against his homeland – and other Muslim countries – by the Regime in Washington. He was born shortly before the US-led “humanitarian” invasion of Somalia in 1992. He was barely a teenager when the administration of Bush the Younger prodded the Ethiopian government into invading and occupying the country, and he was aware of Washington’s ongoing proxy and drone war against Somalia, in which innocent people are routinely wiped out in “targeted killings” carried out against “suspected militants.”
It’s hardly surprising that Mohamud was resentful of the US government’s behavior in his native land. As a teenager he expressed an interest in traveling to Saudi Arabia, immersing himself in the study of Islam, and then enlisting in what he believed would be a defensive jihad in Afghanistan or Yemen.
By the time his father contacted the FBI in 2009, Mohamud had struck up an e-mail correspondence with militants abroad, and had written essays on physical fitness for jihad-oriented online publications. He had also made plans to work in Alaska in order to raise funds for his anticipated travels abroad.
Barre expressed his concerns to the FBI, which quite helpfully arranged for two of its “terrorism facilitators” to take charge of the 18-year-old’s indoctrination.
Prior to 2010, Mohamud had expressed an interest in traveling to Alaska to spend the summer working as a commercial fisherman. This conceivably could have allowed the troubled young man to find his bearings and discover a non-violent way to act on his ideals and ambitions. The FBI, not wanting to lose a promising prospect for a false-flag operation, detained him at the Portland Airport when he tried to travel to Kodiak and questioning him for several hours.
Rather than leaving the teenager alone, or – dare we imagine – warning him against resorting to violent crime, the FBI operatives took an inventory of his attitudes and grievances and groomed him as a patsy. After cutting him off from productive employment, the Feds isolated their chosen victim, systematically indoctrinated him, gave him thousands of dollars in cash, and then deployed him against the civilian population in Portland in a staged pseudo-terrorist plot.
Dr. Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who interviewed Mohamud extensively following his arrest, testified that being forbidden to travel to Alaska was a “pivot point” in the young man’s life. He had wanted to “make a lot of money,” and when that opportunity was foreclosed the young man became severely depressed, and thus even more malleable in the practiced hands of the Regime’s Terrorism Facilitators.
“Prior to his meeting” with the FBI’s terrorism recruiters, Sageman concluded, Mohamud “had a low probability of turning to violence.” Under the guidance of the FBI, however, Mohamud – by that time 21 years old — was lured into a Homeland Security Theater operation involving an attack on a Christmas ceremony in Portland with an inert bomb provided by his federal handlers. After the Feds heroically thwarted a plot of their own contrivance, Mohamud was convicted on terrorism-related charges and awaits sentencing.
All of this was made possible by an earnest but misled father who behaved just as Commissarina Monaco prescribed: He contacted the Feds to report that his son was displaying “dangerous” attitudes.
In addition to being informants, the Feds want parents to act as terrorism recruiters, identifying troubled young people – usually boys – who can be fed into the FBI’s Homeland Security Theater apparatus.
Cooperative parents who fulfill that supposed obligation should understand that they are acting as target-spotters, as well. Ms. Monaco fills the position once occupied by incumbent CIA chief John Brennan, who had previously been the keeper of the “Kill List” used by Barack Obama and other key advisers during Tuesday meetings in which targets for drone strikes are identified.
A May 29, 2012 New York Times report of one of this secretive committee’s meetings described a roster of “15 Qaeda suspects” in northern Africa, many whom “were teenagers, including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years.” Several of the prospective drone targets, the paper points out, “were Americans.”
This was the same process that, about eight months earlier, led to the Obama Regime’s drone murder of 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, whose only crime was to be the son of a man regarded as an enemy of the State. There’s compelling evidence that Abdulrahman’s execution was official retaliation against the Awlaki family for refusing to help the Regime track down and kill the boy’s father, militant Islamic Anwar al-Awlaki.
Monaco’s speech makes it clear that the Regime expects parents to turn in their politically troublesome children. The murder of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki demonstrates what the Regime is willing to do in order to punish families who refuse to collaborate.
William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.
Copyright © 2013 William Norman Grigg
