barry’s books banned

July 23, 2009

A curious tidbit.

A convicted al Qaeda terrorist imprisoned in Colorado’s supermax prison requested barry’s books and was initially denied because the FBI determined one page of barry’s “Dreams From My Father” and 22 pages in “The Audacity of Hope” were “potentially detrimental to national security.” He, however, got his books courtesy of an appeal.

Sean Hannity — aired on July 14th.

FOX Transcript – video courtesy of AnmericasNewsToday1

SEAN HANNITY: President Barack Obama’s books are national bestsellers, but one U.S. prison has deemed them a potential threat to national security.

The federal government’s supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, is home to the likes of unabomber Ted Kaczynski and the blind sheik, Omar Abdul-Rahman — the brains behind the 1993 World Trade Center attacks.

The AP reports that in August, supermax detainee Ahmed Omar Abu Ali requested copies of the president’s books. Abu Ali is convicted of helping Al Qaeda and plotting to assassinate President George W. Bush.

His request was passed along to the FBI, which determined that one page in Obama’s “Dreams From My Father” and 22 pages in “The Audacity of Hope” were “potentially detrimental to national security.”

Although the bureau didn’t identify specific passages, the AP press did provide us with the passages that the prison found objectionable. It’s not difficult to determine which passages on those pages they wanted to keep out of Abu Ali’s hands.

Take this one on the U.S. post-9/11: “I firmly believe… that since 9/11 we have played fast and loose with constitutional principles in the fight against terrorism.”

And then there’s this one about our inability to control the flow of immigrants on our southern border: “Immigrants are entering as a result of a porous border rather than any systematic government policy. Mexico’s proximity, as well as the desperate poverty of so many of its people, suggests the possibility that border crossings cannot even be slowed much less stopped.”

That is a prelude to the president’s assertion that the country has no meaningful national security policy: “Our difficulties there [Iraq] don’t just arise as a result of bad execution. They reflect a failure of conception. The fact is, close to five years after 9/11 and 15 years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the United States still lacks a coherent national security policy.”

Since the initial AP story was published last week, we learned that Abu Ali successfully appealed the prison’s ruling and was given access to the president’s books.

I’m guessing he’s going to enjoy President Obama’s conclusions.