Center for Security Policy

Earlier this month, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy accused New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie of “misprision of treason” for appointing lawyer Sohail Mohammed, who is Muslim, to the state’s Superior Court. While speaking with Rick Joyner of MorningStar Ministries and The Oak Initiative yesterday, Gaffney said that more people need to be investigated for misprision of treason - the failure to report treasonous activity to a federal official - a federal offense punishable by up to seven years in prison.

After lauding the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was notorious for using ‘red scare’ tactics in government and the entertainment industry in the 1950’s, Gaffney called for the establishment of a “House Anti-American Activities Committee” that would investigate people involved in treasonous activities or their concealment.

Joyner, who Gaffney called one of his “personal heroes,” is also an anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist who previously argued that educators are replacing the Founding Fathers with Muslims in history textbooks and that Christianity and Islam are on the verge of merging into a religion called Chrislam.

Watch:

Joyner: Yet we have people who are part of an organization whose mission statement is to destroy America and we’re putting them in top level government positions, I mean this is at best, it is shocking incompetence on the part of those who have taken a vow to defend us from these very ones. So we want to be bold about that, you know some people when they see this they’re starting to call it, this treason on an unbelievable level, it could be treason, it could be incompetence, both could be deadly.

Gaffney: There is evidence of at best incompetence and at worst, you could argue, it’s treasonous. There’s something else that I would like to introduce as a concept I didn’t frankly know of it myself until fairly recently, also a felony offense in the U.S. code, it’s called misprision of treason. And that is a crime in which an individual, doesn’t have to be a government official but it would apply there but also to private citizens, who knows or has reason to know that seditious activity is under way and does nothing about it. I think we need to include that in the possibilities here because what our friend and co-author Andy McCarthy has called willful blindness may actually be a criminal offense under our statutes and people need to be held accountable.

I’ve called in a column I wrote a couple of weeks ago in the Washington Times for a new congressional oversight committee. Back in the Cold War as we talked about in our first program we wrestled with another totalitarian ideology that was determined to destroy us back when the McCarren Act was enacted, we had what was then called the House Un-American Activities Committee to explore what was going on, who was doing it, who was helping them do it, what the implications would be if it weren’t stopped. I think at the very least a new House Anti-American Activities Committee.

After New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie vocally rejected claims that by appointing Muslim lawyer Sohail Mohammed to be a judge he was abetting the rise of Sharia law, calling talk of creeping Sharia “crazy,” he immediately became a target of the ‘Sharia conspiracy theory industry.’ Stop Islamization of America’s Robert Spencer said it was like if “Christie had appointed as a judge someone who was an attorney for the Ku Klux Klan, or the Aryan Nations,” and Andy McCarthy of the National Review attacked Christie for encouraging the supposedly “anti-Western, anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic, anti-assimilationist” leadership in the Muslim-American community. McCarthy appeared on the Center for Security Policy head Frank Gaffney’s radio show yesterday to discuss Christie, and during the interview Gaffney jumped into the fray.

Gaffney accused Christie of “corruption” and even suggested that the governor is guilty of “misprision of treason.” Misprision of treason is a federal offense that occurs when a person “owing allegiance to the United States and having knowledge of the commission of any treason against them, conceals and does not, as soon as may be, disclose” the treasonous activity to a federal official. Furthermore, whoever “is guilty of misprision of treason and shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than seven years, or both.”

Listen:

Gaffney: You have written the book, literally on willful blindness, is that what’s going on here with Chris Christie, Andy McCarthy? Or is there something more to it? Is there something that is of evidence of a real rot that has begun to manifest itself in terms of, well corruption may be a strong word but I wonder if that’s not an appropriate word for the extent to which we’re not only seeing brush back taking place here but truly at best willful blindness. Another term is malfeasance, or misprision of treason, excuse me. I’m really worried.

Appearing on the television program of ACT! for America, Frank Gaffney called on the US to arrest and prosecute anyone for practicing Sharia law, the legal code of Islam. Gaffney of the far-right Center for Security Policy previously suggested that President Obama is a secret Muslim and that radical Muslims are engineering a takeover of the conservative movement. The Conservative Political Action Conference refused to give Gaffney a platform “because they didn’t want to be associated with a crazy bigot,” according to a CPAC organizer.

Speaking to ACT! for America’s leader Brigitte Gabriel, who believes Obama is a Muslim backed by terrorist groups and demanded that colleges ban the Muslim Students Association, Gaffney said that anyone who practices Sharia should be prosecuted for Sedition:

Gabriel: But a lot of people say that Sharia law is a religious practice, and maybe it should be protected by the First Amendment. Can you please tell us, is it compatible with the Constitution? Should it be protected by the First Amendment as a religious practice?

Gaffney: It is the law of the land in Saudi Arabia and Iran, and anyone who thinks that life is like in either of those two countries is the same as life in America obviously doesn’t nothing about Saudi Arabia or Iran. In fact, it is absolutely antithetical, Sharia is, to our Constitution, and the pursuit of it you said in your comment is incompatible with the Constitution’s Article VI, and therefore being a protected religious practice, it is an impermissible act of sedition, which has to be prosecuted under our Constitution.

Gaffney isn’t the first right-wing leader to say that Muslims shouldn’t be given constitutional protections, and his comments echo a push in state legislatures to ban the non-existent use of Sharia law in courts and an effort in Tennessee to criminalize the practice of Sharia. As Intisar Rabb of Boston College Law School notes, the Tennessee bill could make it “a felony for Muslims to perform everyday religious practices like praying, giving to charity, or fasting because they would be defined as banned Sharia practices.”

Last week Kyle reported that Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council feared that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military will damage recruitment to such an extent that the President would have to “bring back the draft.” Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy is now too sounding the alarm that the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell would lead to the collapse of the volunteer military. In his Washington Times column, Gaffney uses the recent panic about TSA procedures to make his point that the draft will be reinstated if gays serve openly:

Suddenly, just as the Obama-led campaign to foist the radical homosexual agenda on the U.S. armed forces is reaching its denouement, the American people are getting a taste of forced intimacy - and they don't like it. In airports around the country, they are being subjected to intrusions on their personal space by people and machines of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

Team Obama's line is that "most" in uniform think there will be no problem, or at least "mixed" good and bad repercussions. But if even an estimated 10 percent choose to leave the service - let alone 40 percent of Marines, who, according to the leakers, think repeal will cause problems - the effect will be traumatic, possibly devastating, for the U.S. armed forces. If tens of thousands choose not to submit and "vote with their feet," as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, has called on them to do, it may become impossible to rely only on volunteers to staff our military.

In that case, a vote for repeal of the 1993 law barring homosexuals from the military amounts to a vote for reinstating the draft.

Gaffney’s column adds to the increasing scare-tactics by right-wing leaders to stop the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell at all costs. Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy has previously allied with vehemently anti-gay groups to prevent the repeal of DADT, and believes that the greatest threat to the military isn’t gays but President Obama, who he called “America’s first Muslim President.” Even though the Pentagon report is expected to show that the vast majority of troops have no problem with gay and lesbians serving openly and even a Sergeant who spoke to Perkins believes that soldiers will “serve anyway” following repeal, the draft drumbeat continues to grow.