Mother of USS Cole Victim won't meet Obama

The Mother of USS Cole Victim James Rodrick McDaniels has refused to meet with Obama. Here's a video of her making her case on Niel Cavuto's show on Fox.

McDaniels isn't the only one upset with Obama's coddling of terrorists.

A top officer slammed Obama's decision to seek the withdrawal of charges against the 2000 suspected U.S.S. Cole ship bomber...

...and the president’s order to close the Guantanamo Bay prison.

“Personally, I am very disappointed he has gone forward with this,” said retired Cmdr. Kirk S. Lippold on MSNBC’s Morning Joe show. “But more important is the impact that has on the families who have waited for eight years for justice to have to wait another 120 days.”

Lippold’s comments were a glimpse of what Obama will hear at a Friday meeting with families of victims of the Cole bombing and 9/11 attacks. Lippold said he will be in attendance.

The judge overseeing military trials at Guantanamo ordered charges Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, reversing an earlier decision that the case must go forward despite a request by the president to delay the proceeding.

“We had a legal process in place,” Lippold said. “Now justice delayed, is justice denied.”
Host Joe Scarborough didn’t try to hide his disapproval of Obama’s decision.

“The parents of 17 dead sailors understand we had the process, Mika,” Scarborough said to his co-host, Mika Brzezinski, who was questioning the legal process. “I wonder what President Obama says to the 17 families of these dead soldiers. It seems, Mika, like there is very little to be said.”

Nashiri, who has been in U.S. custody since 2002 but was first charged last year, remains in U.S. custody. After he was charged, he testified that he had confessed to certain crimes after having been tortured over the five years he had already been detained.

Of course, allegations of torture are straight out of the al Qaeda training manual, specifically:

1. At the beginning of the trial, once more the brothers must insist on proving torture was inflicted on them by State Security [investigators] before the judge.

2. Complain [to the court] of mistreatment while in prison.

Here's some background on Nashiri.

Al-Nashiri was propelled into al-Qaeda's senior leadership after the success of the USS Cole bombing.

He joined his cousins and uncles in militant Islam after completing intermediate school in Saudi Arabia. He took part in Khattab's insurgencies in Tajikstan and Chechnya and became a trainer at Khalden camp in Afghanistan in 1992.

Accompanied by Tawfiq bin Attash, he first met bin Laden in the mid-1990s, but al-Nashiri initially refused to pledge loyalty to him because he found the idea distateful.

In 1997, he joined the Taliban and later began work for al-Qaeda. He and his cousin Azzam were tasked to smuggle Russian AT-3 Sagger antitank missiles into Saudi Arabia to use against American targets there. The attack did not take place.

In late 1998, he was tasked by bin Laden to attack an oil tanker off the coast of Yemen. This plot was modified in 1999 to a U.S. Navy warship. Nashiri's operatives failed on their first attempt when an overloaded bomb boat sank in January 2000, but the Cole attack 10 months later succeeded.

His cousin Azzam was the suicide bomber at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1998.

An associate described him as utterly committed to al-Qaeda, suggesting he "would commit a terrorist act 'in Mecca inside the Ka'aba itself' (the holiest site on Islam) if he believed there was a need to do so."

At the time of Nashiri's arrest, he was involved in a number of plots, including one to crash a small plane into the bridge of a U.S. or allied warship in the United Arab Emirates.

He was one of 14 key al-Qaeda operatives and associates transferred from CIA custody to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2006.