New Book Release: Willful Blindness by Andrew C. McCarthy

By FDD Senior Fellow Andrew C. McCarthy

Former Terrorism Prosecutor Draws on Personal Experience to Show Why Law Enforcement Must Not be Our first Line of Defense in War Radical Islamist Terrorism
 

Washington, D.C. (April 14, 2008) – In Willful Blindness, A Memoir of the Jihad, FDD Senior Fellow and former terrorism prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy draws on his fifteen years of experience on the front-lines of radical Islam’s Jihad against the United States to deliver a comprehensive and scathing review of America’s response to our enemy’s declaration of war.

Leading the Justice Department team that prosecuted the “Blind Sheikh” and his followers in the wake of the 1993 WTC bombing, McCarthy saw the severe limitations of law enforcement and criminal prosecutions in the war against terrorism.

McCarthy argues, “for militants willing to immolate themselves in suicide-bombing and hijacking operations, mere criminal prosecution is a provocatively weak response: trials in the criminal justice system inevitably leave too many militants in place and they encourage the notion that the nation may be attacked with relative impunity.”

He details how domestic law enforcement and the U.S. intelligence community have a long history of failing to take Jihadsim seriously. This failure, he argues, has its roots in the Western world’s refusal to accept that Jihad is not an aberration from the teachings of Islam, but is a religious duty imbedded with the Quran. And since the time of the Prophet Muhammad, Jihad has meant military action against non-believers.

It is this refusal to acknowledge the reality of Jihad as a constant international threat to the United States that has left our counter-terrorism efforts mired in procedural technicalities and bureaucratic infighting.

“In the war against radical Islam, the great calling of our generation, what was true when the enemy declared war fifteen years ago remains true today. If we are too obsessed with law, and liability, we are shrinking from our highest duty: to protect lives,” McCarthy writes.

Willful Blindness was released today by Encounter Books.