Remember Ripley’s Believe it or Not? (The odd, the unusual, the bizarre . . .) That amusing concession has been documenting strange phenomena for 90 years. Bill Gertz at the Washington Times has an item that qualifies for the Ripley treatment. Believe it or not,
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.
And why was Mr. Coughlin’s contract with the Department of Defense not renewed? Believe it or not,
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.
It gets worse:
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.
Let’s see: Mr. Coughlin works for the US military, i.e., the chaps we pay to protect us from other chaps doing things like borrowing airliners and crashing them into skyscrapers, to say nothing of Mr. Coughlin’s own (soon-to-be-former) place of employment. Mr. Coughlin, an expert on said chaps, is fired because he runs afoul of “an aggressive ‘outreach’ program to U.S. Muslim groups.”
Hat tip to Andrew Bostom, who has more here. Andrew McCarthy weighs in here.
Jihad Watch reports this sobering assessment from LTC Joseph C. Myers, Army Advisor to the Air Command and Staff College, noted:
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[: How America’s Foes Steal Our Vital Secrets–and How We Let It Happen] 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.
Believe it or not. I believe it.
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