The War on the War on Terror-the ACLU teams up with Portland to Fight Joint Terrorism Task Force (Updated)

The Religion of Conquest has a great post on this topic and quotes Pamela Geller on the ACLU and Portland’s city council:

What is ironic is that the operation that found and stopped Mohamud is precisely the kind of law enforcement work that Portland’s leaders, working with the American Civil Liberties Union, rejected during the Bush years. In April 2005, the Portland city council voted 4 to 1 to withdraw Portland city police officers from participating in the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Mayor Tom Potter said the FBI refused to give him a top-secret security clearance so he could make sure the officers weren’t violating state anti-discrimination laws that bar law enforcement from targeting suspects on the basis of their religious or political beliefs.

ACLU Applauds Portland City Council Ending Role in FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force

Money Quote from Video
“what it really points out… is that, on this Thanksgiving day weekend we can’t allow the ACLU to make terror policy in this country.”

April 28, 2005 – PORTLAND, OR Citing the need for greater oversight over its own police officers, the Portland City Council voted 4-1 in support of Portland Mayor Tom Potter’s revised resolution that will end Portland’s participation in the local FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). Potter and FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Robert Jordan have said the two agencies would continue to cooperate in terrorism investigations and that the Mayor will be seeking secret clearance to allow him access to some classified information.

The vote came after weeks of negotiations between the City and the Justice Department which failed to resolve the City’s concerns regarding police officer oversight. In a City of Portland proposed resolution, the mayor would have been given the necessary clearance to provide meaningful oversight of the officers who worked directly on the JTTF. At the U.S. Attorney and the Mayor’s request, ACLU representatives took part in discussions of the resolution….

FrontPage Magazine has a newer article connecting the ACLU’s push to support terrororists and to fight the War on Terror. IN their post, “Collaborating With the Enemy in the War on Terror,” we find the following:

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) have injected themselves into the war on terror as never before, leaping to the defense of the man often described as the spiritual leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula: Anwar Al-Awlaki. There’s little doubt that Al-Awlaki provided aid and inspiration to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian “underpants bomber,” and to the Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad. He has also called for the murder of civilians like Salman Rushdie and the young Seattle cartoonist who initiated “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day.” Yet, despite the danger that Al-Awlaki continues to represent to the free world, the ACLU and the CCR filed suit in federal court to protect the radical cleric’s “rights.”

Al-Awlaki’s father, Nasser Al-Awlaki, asked the two groups for help after he learned that the Obama administration has targeted his son for assassination. Because the cleric was born in New Mexico, the ACLU and CCR maintain that he is entitled to due process in America’s legal system. Defending his organization’s decision to defend Al-Awlaki, Vincent Warren, the executive director of the CCR, said:

That’s what we do. We file lawsuits. …[W]e don’t believe the US should be wreaking violence for political reasons. It should be up to a court, not just the US government, to decide whether al-Awlaki poses a threat. The US should not be conducting the killing of US citizens outside the legal process, far away from any battlefield.

The proposition that the US is “wreaking violence for political reasons” is patently ludicrous. The United States is at war with a determined enemy and the fact that this particular conflict involves asymmetrical warfare does not relieve the president of the United States from his duties as commander in chief. Al-Awlaki isn’t “far away from any battlefield” because he and his fellow terrorists have defined the battlefield as the whole planet earth.

…(read more)…

It is ironic that while the ACLU has fought Christmas celebrations and the Christmas holiday while supporting terrorists — this has come to “The Christmas Tree Bomber.”