On Tuesday May 22, 2012 at the Union League Club in New York City, the Center for Security Policy bestowed the 2012 Freedom Flame Award to the Honorable Michael B. Mukasey, former Attorney General of the United States. Mr. Mukasey’s myriad accomplishments in American jurisprudence and law enforcement epitomize the commitment to freedom and the practice of peace through strength that the Freedom Flame was created to recognize. Mr. Mukasey served from 2007 to 2009 as the eighty-first U.S. Attorney General following his appointment to that position by President George W.Bush. From 1988 to 2006, he was a federal judge in the Southern District of NewYork, becoming that court’s Chief Judge in 2000. Michael Mukasey rendered a singular public service as the presiding judge in the successful prosecution of Omar Abdel Rahman (the Blind Sheik ) and nine other co-conspirators convicted of the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. The prosecutor in that same case, Andrew C. McCarthy, had the honor of introducing Judge Mukasey. Subsequent to the trial and to his time as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Mr. McCarthy has become one of America’s insightful writers on national security and Constitutional issues; his new book, Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, addresses many of the points he made in paying tribute to Mr. Mukasey. Mr. Mukasey’s Freedom Flame acceptance speech that night was an eloquent assessment of the threat from the doctrine of jihadist Islam from the 1993 World Trade Center attacks to the present day, providing a systematic analysis of the enemy’s ideology. Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center for Security Policy’s President noted that Judge Mukasey’s acceptance remarks provided a characteristically thoughtful, articulate and compelling indictment of shariah law and the Muslim Brotherhood-and those in the U.S. government who are wittingly or unwittingly enabling their insinuation into this country. We at the Center believe future readers will find much wisdom in Mr. Mukasey’s words that night in New York City; his remarks-and those of Mr. McCarthy, introducing him-form this monograph.
