Sarah Palin is the other whom Yoda spoke about.
This was forwarded to me by a friend who recently finished a couple of years in Iraq. My friend is in Army Intelligence and is obviously on some intelligence-related Yahoo groups. He’s currently stationed in Germany.
At his request, I’ve deleted all identifiers from this post.
All I can say is that with this kind of idiocy at the Pentagon, including having an Islamic extremist on the staff of the Deputy Defense Secretary, we are doomed to lose the war.
Subject: Fwd: ISLAMIC ISSUES: Commandant’s Army Advisor Note:Joint Staff Islamic Law Scholar
From: [snip]
Date: January 5, 2008 12:18:15 AM EST
To: [snip]
Subject: ISLAMIC ISSUES: Commandant’s Army Advisor Note:Joint Staff Islamic Law Scholar
Below my signature block is a letter pertaining to a member of the Islamic Issues List, and the events unfolding at the Pentagon.
The seriousness of this action and the potential to silence analysts and deliberately blind the senior leadership of the military in the middle of an ideological war can not be overstated.
Again, this has implications for every member of this list.
[snipped signature block]
My apologies. This happened shortly after January 1 this year. I fear I’ve let some of my friend’s serious stuff pile up and I’m now trying to clear the backlog.
From: [snip]
Reply-to: [snip]
To: grendelreport@yahoogroups.com, PMCs-OFFLIST@yahoogroups.com, Individual-Sovereignty@yahoogroups.com, Intel-Hist@yahoogroups.com, osint@yahoogroups.com
Sent: 1/4/2008 11:42:38 P.M. Eastern Standard Time
Subj: [osint] Commandant’s Army Advisor Note: Joint Staff Islamic Law Scholar sacked....
MAJ (USAR) Stephen Coughlin is to my knowledge the only Islamic Law scholar on the Joint Staff…
He is a lawyer by training and a reserve Military Intelligence Officer. His first interface with Islamic Law began in Pakistan where he was investigating and prosecuting an intellectual property rights case about 10 years ago. Reviewing Pakistani property rights law, he kept seeing footnoted references to the Quran and sharia law…
I have long argued and wondered why our military from senior leaders down to tactical level are so unread and unstudied on Islam, jihad in Islam, even the topic of terrorism. I have often contrasted this unconscionable wartime state of affairs, with the due diligence the US military showed since I was a cadet at West Point 30 years ago, where we lived, ate, slept and drank Soviet warfighting doctrine...it was the threat we oriented on and we
developed our own doctrine around-- “AirLand Battle” in the early 1980’s.
Can anyone show me where the equivalent of the Soviet threat doctrine series for the global war on terror is published?
…It has not been done.
Yet today we are in the process of prosecuting war, that from doctrinal perspective, we fundamentally do not understand. Over two years I have had 90 of the Army’s top majors come through ACSC, across all branches including MI and special operations forces, and only one had read a book with the title Understanding Terror Networks, that by Marc Sageman...
Note: I just had to check with my local library for the Sageman book. Yep, they have it. I’ll be reading it shortly.
Just before Christmas I presented a lecture on Understanding Terrorist and Insurgent Support Systems to an interagency audience at the Joint Special Operations University, that included Joint Staff and Joint Command officers, DIA and other IC reps, DHS and law enforcement… there, two people had read Sageman’s work...two out of the special ops community. The third individual was Sageman himself.
More importantly we have not studied Islamic Law and few have seen or heard of even the English translation of it that has been in print for years, none had at JSOU or had read a work titled Understanding Jihad, War and Peace in the Law of Islam or even The Quranic Concept of War...I can go on but let me be frank.
This failure of intellectual preparation is a leadership failure, and it is as the 9-11 Commission warned, a failure of vision.
We have spent much intellectual capitol revamping and analyzing our own doctrine as it relates to counterinsurgency...it’s time we do our homework on the threat.
Coughlin has briefed senior Marine Corps leaders and staff and has presented his thesis in various military educational venues...by all accounts the veil of ignorance is lifted for all but only a few who are afraid to face what Islamic Law, doctrinal Islam, says and means with respect to jihad and how it plays out across the Islamic world from al Qaida, to the Saudi government, to Pakistan to the Muslim Brotherhood…
What Coughlin did was provide the epiphany in his over 300-page Joint Military Intelligence College thesis titled, “To Our Great Detriment”: Ignoring What Extremists Say About Jihad” that is meticulously documented
and powerfully argued.
In short, he argues we have in fact intellectually pre-empted our military decision making process and intelligence preparation of the battlefield process, the critical step 3—“evaluate the threat.” Strategically we have
failed to do that by substituting policy for military analysis, for substituting cliché for competent decision processes.
We began on September 12, 2001 with “Islam is a religion of peace” which soothed ideological sentiments of many but has failed us strategically, short-stopped the objective, sytstemic evaluation of the threat doctrine.
“Islam is a religion of peace” is fine for public policy statements, but is not and cannot be the point of departure for competent military or intelligence analysis...it is in fact a logical flaw under any professional research methodology...you have stated the conclusion before you have done the analysis.
If one has studied the implication of the Holy Land Foundation trial discovery documents as I have, as a former DIA senior military analyst, and understanding as even Bill Gertz has written in his book, Enemies about the
dismal record of our counter-intelligence one has to wonder and question the extent we are in fact penetrated in government and academia by foreign agents of influence, the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamists and those who truly
in essence do not share our social compact.
The termination of Stephen Coughlin on the Joint Staff is an act of intellectual cowardice.
We can only hope he can be positioned in his next venue to continue to educate our military for the fight we are in-- if we don’t understand the war and the enemy we are engaged against we remain vulnerable and we cannot
win.
No victory in the war on terror.
r/
LTC
Commandant’s Army Advisor
Air Command and Staff College
Maxwell AFB Montgomery, AL
DSN
Comm.
So what brought on this letter? See this article.
Inside the Ring
January 4, 2008
By Bill Gertz - Coughlin sacked
Stephen Coughlin, the Pentagon specialist on Islamic law and Islamist extremism, has been fired from his position on the military’s Joint Staff. The action followed a report in this space last week revealing opposition to
his work for the military by pro-Muslim officials within the office of Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England.
Mr. Coughlin was notified this week that his contract with the Joint Staff will end in March, effectively halting the career of one of the U.S. government’s most important figures in analyzing the nature of extremism and
ultimately preparing to wage ideological war against it.
He had run afoul of a key aide to Mr. England, Hasham Islam, who confronted Mr. Coughlin during a meeting several weeks ago when Mr. Islam sought to have Mr. Coughlin soften his views on Islamist extremism.
Mr. Coughlin was accused directly by Mr. Islam of being a Christian zealot or extremist “with a pen,” according to defense officials. Mr. Coughlin appears to have become one of the first casualties in the war of ideas with
Islamism.
The officials said Mr. Coughlin was let go because he had become “too hot” or controversial within the Pentagon.
Misguided Pentagon officials, including Mr. Islam and Mr. England, have initiated an aggressive “outreach” program to U.S. Muslim groups that critics say is lending credibility to what has been identified as a budding
support network for Islamist extremists, including front groups for the radical Muslim Brotherhood.
Mr. Coughlin wrote a memorandum several months ago based on documents made public in a federal trial in Dallas that revealed a covert plan by the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian-origin Islamist extremist group, to subvert the United States using front groups. Members of one of the identified front groups, the Islamic Society of North America, has been hosted by Mr. England at the Pentagon.
After word of the confrontation between Mr. Coughlin and Mr. Islam was made public, support for Mr. Coughlin skyrocketed among those in and out of government who feared the worst, namely that pro-Muslim officials in the
Pentagon were after Mr. Coughlin’s scalp, and that his departure would be a major setback for the Pentagon’s struggling efforts to develop a war of ideas against extremism. Blogs lit up with hundreds of postings, some
suggesting that Mr. England’s office is “penetrated” by the enemy in the war on terrorism.
That’s obviously the case. Mr. England should not be harboring the enemy in his office.
Kevin Wensing, a spokesman for Mr. England, said “no one in the deputy’s office had any input into this decision” by the Joint Staff to end Mr. Coughlin’s contract. A Joint Staff spokesman had no immediate comment.
So the Deputy Defense Secretary is harboring the enemy, who engineers the removal of the only Pentagon specialist on Islamic law, thus maintaining the myth that Islam is a religion of peace. What B.S. But then, I deny that Islam is a religion. It’s a fascist political movement.
GET ME OUT OF HERE ...
Oh, and here's some kind of visitor flag counter thingy. Hey, all the cool blogs have one, so I should too. The Visitors Online thingy up at the top doesn't count anything, but it looks neat. It had better, since I paid actual money for it.