Andrew McCarthyAndrew C. McCarthy is a former federal prosecuter and a contributor to National Review and Commentary, among other publications. Mr. McCarthy is the recipient of numerous award, including the Justice Department's highest honor: the Attorney General's Exceptional Service Award (1996). He has served as a Special Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense. His most recent book is Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad. Long before the devastation of September 11, 2001, the war on terror raged. The problem was that only one side, radical Islam, was fighting it as a war. For the United States, the frontline was the courtroom. So while a diffident American government prosecuted a relative handful of 'defendants,' committed militants waged a campaign of jihad -holy war - boldly targeting America's greatest city, and American society itself, for annihilation. It is the jihad that continues to this day. But now, fifteen years after radical Islam first declared war by detonating a complex chemical bomb in the heart of the global financial system, former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy provides a unique insider's perspective on America's first response. McCarthy led the historic prosecution against the jihad organization that carried out the World Trade Center attack: the 'battalions of Islam' inspired by Omar Abdel Rahman, the notorious 'Blind Sheikh.' In Willful Blindness, he unfolds the troubled history of modern American counterterrorism. It is a portrait of stark contrast: a zealous international network of warriors dead certain, despite long odds, that history and Allah are on their side, pitted against the world's lone superpower, unsure of what it knows, of what it fights, and of whether it has the will to win. It is the story of a nation and its government consciously avoiding Islam's animating role in Islamic terror. From the start, it led top U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies to underestimate, ignore, and even abet zealots determined to massacre Americans. Even today, after thousands of innocent lives lost, our eyes avert from harsh reality.
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Dr. Shakil Afridi, a Pakistani physician who helped the U.S. locate Osama bin Laden, has been in jail in Pakistan since he was arrested days after the raid on bin Laden's compound in 2011. In 2013, he was granted a retrial, with a new charge that appears politically motivated: charged with murder in regard to the death, eight years earlier, of a patient he had treated. Afridi has gone on a hunger strike protest his unspeakable prison conditions -- including torture. His former lawyer, Samiullah Khan Afridi, was murdered by the Taliban in March 2015.
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