How we enabled the birth of ISIS

In 1948, shortly after the state of Israel was born, the chargé d'affairs of the Israeli Embassy in London got a call from the Foreign Office. "See here, old chap," said the Brit to the Israeli. "You're not playing the game right. We're getting complaints from the police that the ones guarding your embassy are not being invited in for tea at 4 p.m." The Israeli diplomat fell into complete surrender mode. "We're so sorry," he said. "We will correct that beginning this very afternoon."

"And we do hope you will understand," continued the Israeli diplomat. "You see, we haven't had an embassy in 2,000 years!"

The Israelis were duly forgiven.

Maybe we ought to forgive America's shocking security blunder that gave birth to ISIS, simply the worst and most evil force in the world, which is not being defeated by American and anti-jihadist military might. You see, we're relatively brand new in the security and espionage arts. As recently as 1929, Secretary of State Henry Stimson – a conservative Republican no less – was handed a bundle of telegrams from Tokyo to the Japanese Embassy in Washington, intercepted and decoded by a canny team of cryptologists in a government agency known as the "Black Chamber." Stimson grew livid. He immediately canceled funding for the Black Chamber, with the famous comment, "Gentlemen don't read other people's mail!"

It's now been revealed, with great chagrin but no challenge to its authenticity, that ISIS was an outright gift from the Americans to those who would kill all Americans. The worst of the jihadists were tossed behind barbed wire at an American-run prison (in Iraq) known as Camp Bucca. Camp Bucca was nothing less than an outright "university" for Islamic radicals. The hardened radicals were the faculty. The students were the Iraqi "bystanders, men of military age" rounded up after attacks on American troops. The silent custodians were the American prison officials, and the financial "angels" were you and I, the American taxpayers.

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It's been acknowledged without contradiction that the ISIS leaders, including No. 1, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi (who was interned at Camp Bucca for five years), used the "niceness" of their American captors to organize the most virulent and frightening jihadi fighting force in history. All of this was achieved literally under the noses of the American guards who didn't understand Arabic. But let's just suppose Americans trained in the Arabic language had been present at Camp Bucca. They would have been as useful as our traditional milk bucket under a bull. An American who graduated our language programs with A+ grades would have been zero help. The idiomatic slang of the jihadis plus the wildly fluctuating dialectal differences in the many different "Arabics" would have whizzed by the American guards like a Hebrew prayer by a fast-talking rabbi at a tent meeting of anti-Semites.

Can you handle the shame of what should have been? In the early years of baseball's hopeless-helpless-hapless New York Mets, Manager Casey Stengel wrote a book entitled, "Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?"

To anybody with even elementary knowledge of security, Camp Bucca morphing into an American-sponsored University of Jihad would have been impossible with one elementary precaution.

You don't expect American boys with a year or two of Arabic to detect an ISIS metastasizing inside an American-run prison camp. So, you recruit, train and deploy a team of Iraqi Arabs as raggedy as the hardened jihadists themselves, who understand every jot-and-tittle of what's being said by the other inmates but who, when summoned by the Americans for "enhanced interrogation," return to the compound faking the rigors of "torture" but having actually unloaded all they learned eavesdropping on the enemy. Can you handle it? Spies!L

Did you see the movie "Stalag 17"? The Germans infiltrated an "American-speaking" German posing as an American into the POW population. He had a fake name, a fake unit and a fake attitude, and reported to his Nazi superiors on what all the GIs were saying. No prison-break or any other anti-Nazi activity would have had a chance to begin, much less succeed.

"Gentlemen don't read other people's mail!" Like hell they don't! In war, the successful ones do. We had "German soldiers" infiltrated into every POW camp, and we never had a single "incident" thanks to that effective defensive measure. The British made sure every cubic inch of the quarters was bugged where they incarcerated Nazi rocket-and-atomic scientists after the war, just to see if we were missing anything.

John Weitz, famous fashion designer, was born in Germany and served in the American Army during World War II. His job was to mingle with German POWs captured by the Americans and report his feelings and findings while masquerading as one of them.

"Wild Bill" Donovan, who founded the OSS (the predecessor of our CIA), was once approached by a Washington high-society club-woman who wanted him to be their "Man of the Year" because of the very good job he'd done with America's intelligence.

"Sorry, ma'am," said Wild Bill, "I thank you, but I must decline."

"You see," he explained, "If you know that the job I've done has been a very good job, then it's been a very bad job!"

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