Category Archives: Foreign Policy

September 22, 2015 · 4:15 pm

Birds of a feather and “The Polish Plan”

woodpecker post card -2
Back in 2006 my husband and I took a cross-country trip to New Mexico.  We were going to visit our son at an Air Force base there, where he was assigned, before he deployed to Iraq.   As evening approached we entered the state of Arkansas and decided to stop at a motel for the night.  We ended up at an exit, where the tourist gimmick appeared to be a bird, which was believed to have been extinct for 60 years, but allegedly was sighted on February 27, 2004.

I always like to ask the locals where the best places to eat are, rather than trust online searches or road signs.  So, after we got settled in our room, I went and chatted up the receptionist at the front desk and off we went in search of a local BBQ joint.  As we ate, I kept looking at the pictures of the ivory-billed woodpecker on the walls and I asked my husband if he knew what the big deal was about this woodpecker, which I had never heard of.  He didn’t know either.  Near the cash register were shelves filled with the usual tourist junk, much of it plastered with images of the “ivory-billed woodpecker”.

Yesterday, I commented several times on Senator Marco Rubio’s foreign policy piece, “Obama’s Pathetic Cave-in to Putin’s Power Play in Syria”.  Rubio offers a lot of Cold War sounding rhetoric and insists he will arm the Syrian moderate rebels.  I believe this “Syrian moderate” strategy was foolish from the very beginning  and a recipe to inadvertently place heavy weapons into the hands of ISIS, jihadists or Assad’s forces, because really do “moderates” win wars against committed, hardened fighters?  I doubt it and much to our embarrassment, we have armed “moderates” numerous times in Syria, only to have them walk away with our training and weapons and join ISIS.  Here’s part of one of the exchanges with an ardent supporter of arming “Syrian moderates”:

Lyretail susanholly • 12 hours ago (his response to me)

There were jihadi elements based primarily in eastern Syria in 2012, yes. But if you look at a map of Syria, most of the population centers run along the western edge well away from those early staging areas. That’s where the important action was happening. The infiltration of the jihadi elements into the mainstream opposition came about because western policy toward Syria left the outgunned opposition to Assad nowhere else to turn for support and no incentive not to work with whoever would back them. If you offer nothing, you get nothing. As to ISIS specifically, their strategy from the beginning was to snatch territory from whoever was the winner in local fights between the regime and the opposition. They were spoilers from their inception interested in controlling territory of their own, not cooperating with others against the regime. Conflating them with other actors in the conflict was and is a fallacy.

I read the article you link to. The reference to the fight against Assad becoming “jihadized” is a consequence of the early failure to support the original opponents of Assad enough to be effective on the ground, not a justification for the refusal to do so. That’s rich. We had a window of opportunity, and we let it close. It wasn’t al-Qaeda or al-Nusra that took to the streets by the thousands to protest Assad’s dictatorship. It was ordinary people. Ideally, we should have destroyed both Assad’s air force on the ground and the Al Qaeda training camps out in the eastern desert and mountains that became the source of the jihadi infiltration. Dithering has costs.

As things stand now, most of the original rebels are dead, were absorbed by Nusra and its affiliates, or fled the country. The best thing we can do now is to raise a new force from among these new refugees similar to what was done with Polish refugees in WWII. The half-hearted effort in Jordan has been a farce. Backing Assad as the “lesser of two evils,” however, only guarantees more war and more jihadism.

  • susanholly Lyretail • 10 hours ago (my response to him)

    We had no vital US national interest in Syria – NONE. This misguided post 9/11 policy where we were going to remove safe havens for terrorists who attacked us, by regime change, if necessary, morphed into regime change to democratize the Arab world post Arab Spring. None of it has worked – NONE. Libya’s a gigantic safe haven for terrorists, Iraq too, Afghanistan will be back in Taliban hands, in Egypt we backed the Muslim Brotherhood, the granddaddy umbrella organization for Salafist radicals. You say “Dithering has costs.” Arming rebels in that neck of the woods has costs too. And there’s always unintended consequences when you throw more arms into the mix. We were gunrunning from Libya to Syria from the beginning. Of the rebels we armed I am not sure who is is “moderate” and who is “jihadist”, because the groups change sides and alliances frequently. Benghazi sound familiar – that’s what blowback looks like. Or how about the Seal Team 6 helicopter crash in Afghanistan in 2011.

    “Moderates” will not win against hardened, Islamist fighters.

    I have noticed that the most ardent “arm them” crowd seem to be academics in think tanks with no military experience, while military strategists will raise concerns and discuss possible blowback and unintended consequences from arming foreign fighters. Frantic hunts for manpads ring any bells? How about the “Syrian moderate” last year, Jamal Maarouf, whom Foreign Policy wrote about as our last best hope? We trained and armed him and his band with TOW missiles – he immediately declared a truce with ISIS.

    So your best hope is:

    “As things stand now, most of the original rebels are dead, were absorbedby Nusra and its affiliates, or fled the country. The best thing we can do now is to raise a new force from among these new refugees similar to what was done with Polish refugees in WWII.”

    Yes, the fake Syrian passport business is booming, the Islamists are determined to dupe us any way they can and one wonders who is going to vet these “Syrian moderate” refugees to train into a force capable of defeating hardened Islamist fighters or Assad’s forces. This should go as well as training Afghan security forces – where they sell their US-issued gear at the bazaar, then come back and want more, then there was the endless drug-addiction problem among Afghan recruits. Training Iraqi security forces has worked great too. In Libya we sent in some General Hifter, because we left a gigantic safe haven for terrorists there, in addition to fueling a refugee crisis. It’s not like moving inanimate pieces on a chess board – there are many more than two sides in these fights, alliances and allegiance between factions are fluid, and all these sides get to think and make moves that run counter to your plan. So, now we’re being offered the Polish plan – I will not laugh.

The image above is from a post card I bought at that BBQ joint in 2006.   Our waitress, a very young woman, who looked to be still in her teens, cautiously answered my questions about this elusive “ivory-billed woodpecker”.   I asked her if she thinks the sightings of this woodpecker, long believed to be extinct, are true or a hoax.  She shrugged her shoulders and smiled.  She said she didn’t know for sure, but a lot of “experts” from back East believe it and came to search for that bird.

As I read Patrick Poole’s report at PJ Media today of another Syrian moderate we trained who took our weapons and joined ISIS, I thought our search for “Syrian moderates”, which began based largely on neoconservative think-tank “experts and a young Syria “expert” at the Institute for the Study of War/political director for the Syrian Emergency Task Force, Elizabeth O’Bagy seems much like the search for the ivory-billed woodpecker.

Today, GEN Petraeus  testified before Congress, I am presuming at the request of the likes of Senator John McCain, the neoconservative “Arm Syrian Moderates”, and to offer his insights into the fight against ISIS.  He thinks the US should establish safe zones in Syria, that will ostensibly encourage moderate Sunnis to fight against ISIS.  He stated:

“The central problem in Syria is that Sunni Arabs will not be willing partners against the Islamic State unless we commit to protect them and the broader Syrian population against all enemies, not just ISIS,” Petraeus said using an acronym for the militant group. “That means protecting them from the unrestricted warfare being waged against them by Bashar Assad, especially by his air force and its use of barrel bombs.”

He suggested that the U.S. tell Assad that if he continues to use barrel bombs, the U.S. will stop the Syrian air force from flying.

“We have that capability,” he said. “It would demonstrate that the United States is willing to stand against Assad and it would show the Syrian people that we can do what the Islamic State cannot — provide them with a measure of protection.”

At the same time, Petraeus warned against rushing to oust Assad without knowing who would fill the resulting political vacuum in the country.

Putin has moved Russian military personnel, equipment and fighters into Syria to bolster Assad.  Putin has had meetings with the regional leaders and even with Israel and ironed out an understanding about Russia’s aims to help the Syrian state, to avoid any misunderstanding about how the IDF forces will respond to Assad transferring arms to Hezbollah.  Yet. GEN Petraeus talks about creating some safe zone for imaginary Sunni moderates and he believes they will want to fight ISIS for us, when in truth, those Sunnis’ mortal enemy is really Assad, not ISIS (radical Salafists, who are Sunnis).  Nowhere in Petraeus’ statement is a recognition of Russia’s diplomatic effort and coordination with regional leaders and even Israel or an insistence that we must talk to Putin to avoid escalating this into a US vs. Russian conflict very quickly, if US and Russian planes are operating in tight air space over Syria.  Nope, it’s more magical-thinking that we’re going to create some viable proxy forces to fight ISIS for us.   He argued that the US should not allow Putin to push us into an alliance with Assad.  Instead he’s fine with the US supporting the Baghdad government, which relies heavily on Iranian backed militias to fight the Islamic State.  And we’re going to chug along rebuilding the Iraqi Army – again.  He did deliver the requisite catchphrase to be thrown around – this time, the clever,  Russian-themed one for the pundits to saber-rattle and fear-monger to sway public opinion for another regime change in the Mid-East.  He said:

“He called Syria a “geopolitical Chernobyl — spewing instability and extremism over the region and the rest of the world.””

The experts in search of the ivory-billed woodpecker began their search for the elusive bird in the eastern woods of Arkansas, then spread out to search in 8 different states.  They did not find any.  Last night I believed that poster’s plan, which I facetiously referred  to as “The Polish Plan”,  was laughable, but today with the “geopolitical Chernobyl” hyperbole, it sounds like it just might be an expansion of the neoconservative experts’ new “Syrian moderate” plan – the search for “Syrian refugee moderates”.  One place they likely won’t find any is Poland, because the Poles were smart enough to say they are not Western Europe and they don’t want any terrorists….

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Filed under Foreign Policy, General Interest, Islam, Military, Politics, Terrorism

September 20, 2015 · 12:20 pm

Donald Trump’s response isn’t the problem

Since I haven’t weighed in on the Donald Trump flap last week over the question from the man in the audience asking Trump a question about Muslim training camps in America, which the man prefaced with the assertion that President Obama is a Muslim and not even an American, here it goes with my thoughts.

I like to break statements into parts, because that man’s question had 5 parts, so let’s look at the parts.

  1. The man states we have a problem in American and that problem is Muslims.
  2. President Obama is a Muslim.
  3. President Obama isn’t an American
  4. There are Muslim training camps in America
  5. What will Donald Trump do about the problem (which broadly the man might mean Muslims in America in general or he might have meant the Muslim training camps.  I doubt he was asking about a specific course of action on his assertions that President Obama is a Muslim and not an American).

Let me deal with parts 2 and 3 first, President Obama attended the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago for almost 20 years, where the controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright served as the pastor.  Wright, as we all know, became a lightning rod when his anti-American diatribes became political fodder, because President Obama made statements that Rev. Wright had been his close friend and spiritual mentor for those long years. This begs the question, what are President Obama’s views, since Wright preaches black liberation theology, antisemitism, anti-Americanism and he blamed 9/11 on America, not on the Islamic nuts who attacked us.

I will take the President’s birth certificate, that was reluctantly produced, as legit,which makes him an American, but on the larger issue of his spirit, he has acted in ways that undermine America on the international stage and has consistently used the Presidential bully pulpit to inflame racial hostility and jumped into racial issues in the news, before the facts were even known.  From the “Cambridge police acted stupidly” to his Trayvon Martin comments, on to Ferguson, NY, Baltimore, his track record on fomenting racial tensions and prematurely passing judgment speaks for itself. He does race-baiting and makes grand pronouncements on these issues, which when the dust settles are proven to be lies.  He consults with Al Sharpton, a virulent anti-Semite, a purveyor of hate, a tax cheat, and a proven liar.

In 2009, President Obama appointed Van Jones to be his Special Advisor for Green Jobs.  Jones is an avowed communist and radical, who belonged to a group called STORM, which advocated an actual armed revolution in America, not to mention Jones aligned himself with 9/11 truthers, who believe that attack was an inside job, not the work of Islamic terrorists.

So, while I can’t read another person’s heart, President Obama is an American, but I certainly question his American spirit, even though I never believed he was born outside the United States or that he’s a secretly practicing Muslim.  Religion may play a role in how he leads his daily private life, but in his public life and political decisions, his belief system appears to be far-left, college campus radicalism.  And yes, I consider that “un-American” rather than not being an American citizen and in my book being “un-American” is a greater “sin”.  As President, he has weakened America’s military, undercut America’s credibility around the globe, created and fueled racial animosity and even undercut civilian law enforcement.  He has elevated black thugs as heroes, while casting police officers as the enemy of the people.

On the broad issue of Muslims in America, yes, we have a problem.  The punditry class, both left and right, marches in PC lockstep and bends over backwards to assure us that most Muslims in America are law-abiding, loyal Americans, which is true.  This White House uses the “lone wolf’ to describe attacks inside the US perpetrated by radicalized Muslims – they are never connected to radical mosques or radical imams, nope, they just get on the internet and read up at radical Islamist websites, then attack.  It’s a lie and our media repeats the “lone wolf” explanation from this administration, brushes each case off into the old news repository, out of sight and mind, then off they go ready to nod and repeat the next shallow left-wing spin and repeat administration narratives or jump on the 24/7 cable news punditry soapbox to do an Oprahesque hand-wringing about the anger and hate in America, which always means someone from the political right is the hater, never the young black thug who robbed a convenience store or the double-whammy left-wing special interest poster boy, a black Muslim young man who drove hundreds of miles to wage jihad in America.

What both Muslims and blacks in America have is  a “lone voice” problem.  Peer pressure and group identity politics keeps the vast majority of both groups silent or nodding agreement with the rabid, dominant political leftists who castigate and stigmatize blacks and Muslims who veer away and become “lone voices” in the far, left political wilderness.  Blacks who become vocal opponents of leftist policies, get marginalized and taunted as “Uncle Toms” or “plantation Negroes”.  Muslims who stray from the radical fringe, which plays both advocators of violent Jihadists and the chorus of Muslim victimization, with the refrain of endless Islamophobia, get shunned and face death threats from fatwas.

Even in cases where the connection to a particular mosque with radical Islamist ties emerges, the press doesn’t even ask the questions, but will charge full steam ahead attacking straw men or in the case of the Garland, TX case, they attacked Pamela Geller.  Those two jihadists were connected to the Phoenix mosque.  That imam played the Islamophobia card and pretended he didn’t know anything about one of the suspects being a radical.  Here’s a quote from a CNN report:

“Members of a mosque the suspects attended, the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix, are in shock about what happened, said its president, Usama Shami.

Simpson was a regular worshiper at the mosque until around 2010 or 2011, about the time the FBI arrested him on the false statement charges.

During that time, he offered no signal that he held radical views, Shami said.

“He was a gentle person,” Shami said of Simpson. “He always had a good attitude, a good demeanor.””

Pamela Geller’s actions and motives received endless dissection and castigation by the media, but CNN didn’t dig into investigating that Phoenix mosque or the radical jihadists connections within many mosques in America.   You can google Geller yourself and find her criticized and reviled by the punditry class on both left and right.  But the imam, playing dumb about a radical jihadist within his own mosque, despite knowing full well the FBI has been investigating the radicals within his mosque, got a free pass.

With the Muslim exodus from the Mid-East and beyond into Europe, it’s not unreasonable to be concerned about “Muslim training camps in America”.  Carol Brown wrote a piece on that at the “American Thinker” just today: “Muslims of America terrorist training compounds”.  I certainly would like to know for sure, when terrorist leaders keep ranting for their followers to attack America.

On September 10, 2015, the White House announced that the US will accept at least 10,000 more Syrian refugees (catch that wording at least, which means that’s a low-ball number).  Secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson insists the administration will do a thorough vetting and background checks of refugees to weed out extremists, but how they will do that remains a mystery.  Reports of the huge fake Syrian passport black market recently and since our government does not deal with President Assad’s government in Syria led me to wonder who are they going to consult to “verify” the identities and backgrounds of these refugees. And since 9/11, we, meaning ordinary Americans, have heard many times from the media and “experts” about the many aliases of Islamist terrorists, so Secretary Johnson, just how are you going to do these background checks??? It’s a huge smokescreen with plumes of hot air and lies!

That man in the Trump audience, might be an out and out racist, xenophobe, or he might be just an average American concerned about alarming trends he’s seen with this President.  Of course, the thought occurred to me, immediately that he might be a domestic political plant, a provocateur sent in to create a problem for Trump and create a media storm, in which case it worked.  Both the Democrats and the Republican establishment want Donald Trump eliminated from the race, so this idea is not totally crazy.  The man certainly seemed to recite his question carefully to hit all the “right-wing nut” themes – broad, vague Muslim charge, birther-ism, Obama’s a closet Muslim, then the training camps with echoes of UN black helicopters thrown in. Has the press bothered to check into who that man is? It wouldn’t be the first time competing politicians tried to sabotage one another.

As to how Donald Trump handled it, well, even though I can state that under no circumstances will I ever vote for Donald Trump, in this situation I believe he did the best he could and when put on the spot like that, actually his response was the TRUTH – there are a lot of problems to look at; with radical Muslims and Muslims in general, the first group speaks, “death to America” loud and clear, the later group’s silence is deafening and alarming.

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Filed under Culture Wars, Foreign Policy, General Interest, Islam, Politics, Terrorism

September 18, 2015 · 4:13 pm

A long rant about LIARS

“Let us erect a standard to which the wise and honest may repair.”
– George Washington

Since 2003, America’s political left has led the rallying cry, from foaming mouths, roars loud and furious, “Bush lied, people died!”  The political right coined the phrase Bush derangement syndrome to explain the malady.  The mainstream media has made cornering politicians seeking higher office and demanding a denunciation and apology for supporting President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 to topple Iraqi dictator and serial human rights abuser, Saddam Hussein, a right of passage.

Jeb Bush, trying to rev up a Presidential run this year, has stumbled over how to navigate the question, while the punditry class evaluates his performance, finding anything other than a complete renunciation of his brother’s Iraq decision and begging for absolution acceptable.  The media, left-leaning, but even more so holding to a belief that, as journalists, they serve as the pure of heart, the truth-seekers for a world desperately in need of the bright light of the TRUTH.  The anger and righteousness over the Iraq war decision rest on a belief that President Bush and his administration used cherry-picked or outright fabricated intelligence information to sell invading Iraq to Congress and the American people.

Thus we enter the world of cherry-picking intelligence or even outright fabricated intelligence – the many shades of lying to promote a political agenda.  On September 16, 2015 CENTCOM commander, General Lloyd Austin III, appeared before the Senates Armed Services committee to report on progress in the fight against the Islamic State.  Headlines blare about the failure of the US military to get a $500 million program to train and equip “Syrian moderates” rebels to fight the Islamic State inside of Syria running successfully.  General Austin reported that only 4 or 5 US-trained Syrian fighters are in Syria, with the initial 54 fighters sent in back in July being captured or killed by Al-Qaeda aligned affiliates.  I suspect they might not have been “moderates” to start with and walked off, after receiving training and weapons.

In Iraq our effort to defeat the Islamic State lies in disarray too.  Recently, reports emerged of more than 50 US intelligence analysts in Iraq lodging complaints to the IG’s office, alleging that higher up in CENTCOM their intelligence reports are being altered to present a rosier picture of how the war against the Islamic State is progressing.

At the lead of the arming “Syrian moderates” cheerleaders, one can always find Senator John McCain, the most vocal true-believer in the arming “Syrian moderates” project.  McCain frequently uses the failure to arm “Syrian moderates” a few years ago to sanctimoniously berate  President Obama’s dismal handling of the Islamic State threat.

However, the truth to reemerge recently, which McCain and Secretary of State, John Kerry ignored back in 2013 , when the drumbeat for US intervention in Syria reached crescendo pitch, is that from the beginning of the Syrian civil war, the radical jihadists and Islamists played an outsized role, not moderates.  Several questions need to be answered, first, if Kerry and McCain weren’t relying on US intelligence information, whose information were they relying on and why?  Or were they just cherry-picking intelligence to advance their political agenda?

Once again I’m going to bring up Elizabeth O’Bagy, Syria subject matter expert, who blazed a trail across America’s cable news channels back in 2013, as the font of all knowledge on the rebel forces in Syria.  The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) obviously skimped on vetting her, because as O’Bagy’s connection, working as the political director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF) became known, the ISW fired O’Bagy for lying on her resumé.  O’Bagy had claimed a doctorate degree, which she did not possess.  After a few days of media sensationalism, O’Bagy disappeared from the headlines and settled into a nice cozy job working as a legislative assistant for John McCain.  Yes, in 2013 he hired a woman with connections to some group with close ties to the rebels in Syria and a just outed liar.  No worries, right?

In 2013, McCain, Kerry and the White House relied on information from the SETF and O’Bagy rather than vetted intelligence from our government.  There were reports that the State Department was funding O’Bagy’s Syria research.  Both Kerry and McCain cited O’Bagy’s Wall Street Journal op-ed as a definitive accurate source.  (my posts in the archives at the right for 2013 contain numerous links on the Syrian moderate lies)

Let’s move to another scandal plaguing Washington – Hillary Clinton and her private email server in her home.  There she was running this private server and no one in the Kerry State Department did a thing to secure that server or those emails once they found out about it, instead they’ve run interference for Hillary Clinton.   In her usual covering her butt mode, Clinton hired some small IT firm to manage her server only after Sidney Blumenthal’s email had been hacked by a Romanian hacker, Guccifer.  With the recent State Department release of the emails that Hillary did turn over to them, we know she relied on unvetted information from Blumenthal rather than actual vetted intelligence from our intelligence agencies.

Step back further to Benghazi and there’s the White House weaving a false narrative blaming the attack on that US embassy outpost in Benghazi on incitement over some obscure film from some Coptic filmmaker in America.  This White House took the Clinton propaganda “spin machine” and turned it into a full-fledged fiction-writing effort, which they refer to as “the narrative”.

So, looking back at the “Syrian moderate”lie and the Obama administration lie over the sarin attack in Syria in 2013 – there again, another lie – President Obama blamed Assad before the UN investigation was even complete.  Intelligence information indicated  Syrian rebels possessed WMD capability too, but it ‘s easier to go with blaming Assad the Butcher to advance the policy for US involvement in the conflict.  Yes, Assad has committed atrocities too, but to pretend jihadist nuts are “moderates” and arm them is insanity!

McCain still pushes for arming them and still has O’Bagy whispering sweet “Syrian moderate” lies in his ears – to the tune of  a government salary of over $80,000 a year.  Not bad for a young woman who lied about her academic credentials.  He is the go to invite on all the cable news shows as the Republican senior statesman and expert on foreign policy .

So, we now have those  50 intelligence analysts complaining about CENTCOM officials altering intelligence reports to fit the Obama narrative, a DIA chief forced to retire last year, because he refused to cook the books on intelligence, a Republican “war hero” Senator, who believes some young woman aligned to a Syrian rebel lobbying group over official vetted intelligence and one can only wonder why no one in the press is connecting all these dots.

We, being the American people, but most especially our military, who put their lives on the line to carry out these misguided foreign policies, have been left with nothing but a shell of  a constitutional Republic.  This isn’t about a partisan divide in Washington, it’s about wholesale corruption.  The folks the media turns to as senior statesmen, like John McCain and John Kerry, are at best clueless nincompoops, but they are dangerous liars and dangerously reckless to rely on some lobbying group filled with young Syrian rebel sympathizers (or Islamist sympathizers – hard to tell) rather than carefully vetted information from our own intelligence agencies, especially when that information from the two sources differed so dramatically.

Late night shows recently started inviting Hillary Clinton on and they’re writing scripts to turn her email scandal into nothing more than a right-wing partisan joke.  Yes, they are aiding her in burnishing her lies and criminal conduct into little more than just little bad decisions and a laughing matter.

Last year I contacted several reporters, even that big kahuna of cable news, Bill O’Reilly, and I couldn’t get a single reporter to even talk to me or ask me for details.   I had offered them the real names to the people mentioned in my story.  Not a single taker, yet they fight over interviews with Hillary Clinton, toss her softball questions, debate over how many lies she told and yet most of them would still vote for her.  Bill O’Reilly falls all over himself blabbering on about how he wants to be “fair” to Hillary Clinton and I wonder why he and his crack staff didn’t even bother to ask me for names and details – no response whatsoever.

I shouldn’t be surprised at our lazy journalists – they missed O’Bagy and didn’t bother to check out her background, in fact, I still want to know her entire background and whether she underwent a formal security background check or if McCain waived that.  Hillary has had Huma Abedin, with direct connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, by her side for years and Abedin was handling top secret information.  Again, did Abedin ever undergo a formal security background check?

Reporters don’t even bother to challenge John McCain on his foreign policy “expertise” and in this latest CENTCOM testimony by General Austin,  there’s an Obama-appointed general, carrying out a fool’s mission hunting for “Syrian moderates” to train, and the cable news pundits invite McCain on to rail about the CENTCOM commander and Obama administration failure…  There have been mostly radical jihadists among the Syrian rebels from the beginning and McCain should know that. He’s the chairman of the Senate of Armed Services Committee, so assuredly he gets intelligence information from the US military.

The acceptance of lying by our government officials coincides with the  acceptance of lying in our culture.  Having spent every day since the Impeachment Scandal in 98-99 wondering how I could be attacked in my own home over posting comments on the Excite message boards (Messages of mhere tabbed on my home page) and not having any power or way to prove what happened, all I can say is at some point Americans need to face the truth – they have allowed their government to be taken over by corrupt liars, venal power-hungry sociopaths and foreign influence peddlers and agents.

Long ago, I used to believe that the rule of law protected every American citizen.  Thinking about all the lies and cherry-picked and fabricated intelligence making headlines brought me full-circle to my own situation. I think about,  if the power of the Presidency was used to silence, me, a homemaker who challenged the Clinton spinmeisters during impeachment – on a stupid online message board, then is any citizen really safe?

I wonder how safe I will be if that lying, conniving woman is elected President in her own right and doesn’t have to borrow power from her husband.   Once again I will state that my Messages of mhere story is the TRUTH.  Long ago when I was in the Army, I held a “Secret security clearance”, after an official security background check,  and since then, my record is-  I was a homemaker, a devoted volunteer, don’t have even a speeding ticket on my record and I like to do needlework, cook, and read a lot.  I challenge any journalist to vet my information and dig into what happened to me – of course, the retired general who was sent to attack me was fed lies about me obviously, otherwise he would not have taken on the mission of  silencing me – my best guess is I was cast as an internet terrorist or part of some right-wing militia (those were popular in the 90s) and assuredly he would lie to salvage his reputation too.  Every time I see that lying witch on TV, laughing and making light of her LIES, I get disgusted.  She really is thatwitch2016!  I want to expose what happened to me in the Fall of ’98 and early ’99.  So sick of LIARS!!!

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Filed under Culture Wars, Foreign Policy, General Interest, Messages of mhere, Military, Politics

September 16, 2015 · 4:12 pm

Liars and damned liars!

To keep the pieces of information together – remember the report late last month about the intelligence higher ups within the Pentagon cooking the books on our effort (of lack therof) to defeat the Islamic State. On August 26, 2015, The New York Times reported on an IG investigation:

The investigation began after at least one civilian Defense Intelligence Agency analyst told the authorities that he had evidence that officials at United States Central Command — the military headquarters overseeing the American bombing campaign and other efforts against the Islamic State — were improperly reworking the conclusions of intelligence assessments prepared for policy makers, including President Obama, the government officials said.

By September 9, 2015, that “one analyst”  turned into more than 50 intelligence analysts complained, which The Daily Beast reported:

More than 50 intelligence analysts working out of the U.S. military’s Central Command have formally complained that their reports on ISIS and al Qaeda’s branch in Syria were being inappropriately altered by senior officials, The Daily Beast has learned.

The complaints spurred the Pentagon’s inspector general to open an investigation into the alleged manipulation of intelligence. The fact that so many people complained suggests there are deep-rooted, systemic problems in how the U.S. military command charged with the war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State assesses intelligence.

“The cancer was within the senior level of the intelligence command,” one defense official said.

Along with that happy pile of crap, we’ve been regaled with this training Syrian moderates to fight the Islamic State in Syria since 2013.  On September 3, 2013, I wrote about everyone, from John McCain to John Kerry in the State Department, relying on Elizabeth O’Bagy’s assessment of the situation on the ground in Syria.  O’Bagy ran an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, replete with her map, which looked like the map John Kerry adopted.  I wrote about O’Bagy also being the political director of a lobbying group, the Syrian Emergency Task Force.  I mentioned this on a popular blog, Diplomad 2.0, in the comments section and provided the link to my blog.  Our government was relying on this young woman’s assessment on the “Syrian moderates” in Syria.

On September 15, 2013, I wrote a short blog post stating:

The UK Telegraph ran a report today from IHS Jane’s, stating that nearly half of the rebel fighters in Syria are hardline Islamists/jihadis (report here).  According to Charles Lister, the author of the report, the idea that the insurgency is mostly secular in nature, just isn’t borne out by the facts.  Just a reminder that a week and a half ago  John Kerry was still quoting Ms. Elizabeth O’Bagy, former senior analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, with her lowball estimates of radical Syrian rebels (Reuters report here).   My how “facts” change so quickly ……..

On August 13, 2015, McClatchyDC reported:

“In the first week of September 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry appeared before congressional hearings in hopes of drumming up support for the Obama administration’s plan to retaliate militarily for the Syrian government’s deadly use of chemical weapons outside Damascus.”

the article continues:

“At another hearing that week, Kerry responded to a lawmaker’s skepticism about the existence of moderate rebels by saying that only a fraction of the fighters were “al Qaida and the bad guys.” Maybe 15 to 25 percent, he estimated.
“There is a real moderate opposition that exists,” Kerry said.

If the skeptical lawmaker was reassured, professional Syria watchers were not. Many were aghast at what sounded to them like either dangerous naivete or an outright lie, given that the U.S. government’s own internal assessments had found from very early in the conflict that al Qaida-style extremists were playing an outsized role in the rebel fight.”

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/national-security/article31018362.html#storylink=cpy

Just whose intelligence information was John Kerry relying on?

Now we have the CENTCOM commander, General Lloyd Austin, reporting to Congress this lame crap about how the training Syrian moderates is going and instead of ditching this failed program – they’re revamping it…  All at the American taxpayer’s expense.  Enough already, this isn’t working and this commander should be relieved immediately!!!  And before the press lets Senator John McCain do his usual grandstanding – he has been instrumental in selling bad information to the American public on the “Syrian moderates” and when Elizabeth O’Bagy was fired from the Institute for the Study of War, back in 2013, for lying about her credentials, John McCain hired her to be on his staff.  This “Syrian moderate” delusion is not just an Obama failure, it’s a bipartisan failure.  And maybe, someone can actually tell us who exactly is Elizabeth O’Bagy, who are her contacts in Syria, who is her family, who introduced her to John McCain, and don’t forget McCain’s trip to Syria in early 2013 with the Syrian Emergency Task Force as his guide.  Let’s answer the questions about who all those people he posed with in those Syria trip photos are.  Time to come clean about the whole mess!

When we get the answers to all that, let’s zero in on Huma Abedin and her connections and handlers in the Muslim Brotherhood.  Let’s look at her influence on Madame Secretary during the not-so-glorious Arab Spring. We have been betrayed by witless fools in our own government!

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September 16, 2015 · 3:05 pm

Austin: Only ‘Four or Five’ US-Trained Rebel Fighters Remain in Syria

Commander of U.S. Central Command Gen. Lloyd Austin III testified Wednesday before the Senate Armed

Source: Austin: Only ‘Four or Five’ US-Trained Rebel Fighters Remain in Syria

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September 10, 2015 · 8:02 pm

US will take 10,000 Syrian Refugees

And so it begins: “BREAKING: Despite Terrorism Concerns, U.S. To Accept 10,000 Syrian Refugees”.

Remember the other day when Democratic presidential candidate, Martin O’Malley, urged for the US to take 65,000 Syrian refugees?  Well, that number didn’t come out of thin air – that is the number the UN wants the US to take.  Don’t be surprised if the Obama administration drastically increases this number, after they set the “narrative” in motion to sell this to the American public.   Expect more heart-wrenching stories of women and children in desperate situations, which won’t be hard to find.  There really are desperate refugees fleeing from Syria, but there are plenty from all over the region who have now become “Syrian” to gain entry into Europe.

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September 9, 2015 · 12:57 pm

Who are the feds’ “private contrators” for refugee resettlement?

The following information is from the blog, Refugee Resettlement Watch, run by Ann Corcoran, a homemaker on her rural farm, who began investigating the US government’s refugee policy since 2007. Corcoran reports:

“Federal refugee resettlement contractors on board—have upped the number to 100,000 Syrians”

Within her article are lots of links and she includes the list of non-governmental contractors whom the federal government pays big bucks to handle the relocation of refugees in America. Please note that most are religious charities:

Why isn’t the mainstream media investigating this?

Last year, The Last Refuge blog ran an excellent piece on these religious charities too:

“One Media Outlet Catching On To Massive Governmental Non-Profits Housing The Unaccompanied Alien Minors – “Southwest Key” Under Review”

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September 8, 2015 · 1:34 pm

A revamped Refugee Resettlement Program needed

The refugee crisis engulfing Europe may seem like a “not our problem” issue here in America, but the Obama administration has not closed the door firmly on resettling more refugees from the Mid-East here.  At http://www.msn.com there’s a short news article which states:

“WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is opening the door to the possibility of allowing more Syrian refugees into the United States, marking a subtle but significant change in the White House’s thinking about how best to respond to the mounting humanitarian crisis.

“The administration is actively considering a range of approaches to be more responsive to the global refugee crisis, including with regard to refugee resettlement,” said Peter Boogaard, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said Monday.”

Here’s a link to a USA Today news video, stating that the White House must decide on next year’s quota of Syrian refugees the US will take in by October 1st and also states many Democrat Senators are urging President Obama to drastically increase the number of Syrian refugees.

Although, the refugee crisis at the moment is not a US problem, these murmurs in the news serve as warning bells and it seems likely another massive White House effort at writing a narrative and selling it to the American people will launch soon. I wrote a piece yesterday on things to keep in mind:

The photo of a little Syrian Kurdish boy, Aylan Kurdi, who washed up on shore in Turkey, when the boat his family was in overturned, has become the face of the Mid-East refugee crisis. The world now faces another of those media-inspired propaganda blitzes to force action. Americans need to tread with extreme caution and learn from last year’s Central American “refugee” illusion.

Last summer Americans fell prey to deft propaganda about some, as heretofore unknown, Central American crisis fueling the large influx of illegal immigrants, many children, from that region. The story took flight and suddenly the media produced stories about a gang crisis in Honduras, as the impetus of this influx. Even the New York Times splashed, “Fleeing Gangs, Children Head to U.S. Border.” Reporters rushed to Central America and reported on the terrible gang violence and drug cartels wreaking havoc.

A Huffington Post piece, by Matt Garcia, spells out the semantical magic wand waved to poof these illegal immigrants into protected “refugees fleeing violence”. Garcia writes:

“The upsurge of 240,000 migrants in recent months, 52,000 of them unaccompanied minors, has unleashed the same arguments we’ve witnessed in the endless debates about immigration. But once we consider the twin questions of “why is this happening?” and “how should we respond?” it becomes clear that the current crisis is more of a humanitarian one than it is another chapter in our immigration debates.

The fact that many migrants have come from one of three countries–Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala–suggest that something is wrong there. Although critics of these refugees hate to admit it, the crisis exposes a legacy of flawed American policies in the region: from the CIA-inspired coup d’état in Guatemala (1956), to bribes of Honduran officials to suppress export taxes on bananas by U.S. agricultural conglomerate United Fruit (in the late 1960s and through the mid-1970s), to the US-financed Contra Wars in Nicaragua that consumed its neighbors, and the CIA involvement in Guatemala’s civil war (the 1980s).”

Eureka, it’s all our fault, in this roundabout reasoning, which permeates the political Left in America. If you, being a daily news reader, like me, wondered how this terrible crisis in Central America passed unbeknownst to you, well, it’s because the media, leftist activists and the Obama administration manufactured this crisis to foster another of their “narratives” to sway American public opinion.

Many ironies, like Rahm Emanuel offering to take in refugee children fleeing Central American gang violence to his lovely gang violence plagued Chicago or Nancy Pelosi pontificating that these illegal immigrant children should be treated like refugee Jesus, provided dark humor elements to this surreal crisis, as I tried to figure out, “what in the heck is going on here?” Then, conservatives from Glenn Beck to George Will jumped on board the “save the poor refugee children” bandwagon and after that the story faded from the headlines and this Central American crisis, likewise disappeared too.

The key to understanding the situation lies in understanding how the Refugee Resettlement Program, run by the U.S. State, Health and Human Services and Homeland Security Departments operates. Ann Corcoran, a homemaker working on her farm in rural Maryland, has researched and tracked this program since 2007 and created a website, Refugee Resettlement Watch, to provide information, which our own government tries to shield from scrutiny. Within this Refugee Resettlement Program, many Christian charities rake in big bucks from the federal government to assist in care and relocation of “refugees.”

A conspiratorial mind might believe that the Obama administration calculatingly encouraged this influx of illegal immigration and used a manufactured crisis to give them protected status, all for partisan political purposes, like bolstering Dem voting demographics in key areas around the country. With this current Mid-East refugee crisis, the stakes rise much higher than partisan politics, where mistakes could jeopardize our national security.

Before America begins taking in an influx of refugees from war-torn Syria, Iraq, Libya and other people reaping the harvest of that other leftist propaganda, the not-so-glorious Arab Spring, we must demand a thorough airing and housecleaning of the Refugee Resettlement Program and the implementation of a careful vetting process. State and local governments should be informed by the federal government before refugees are relocated in their communities and outreach programs, geared at integrating refugees in communities should be implemented.  Most of all the American people deserve truthfulness and transparency about the refugees brought into America.  Within Pelosi’s “refugee Jesus downtrodden” from Central America were many violent gang members. Within hordes of Mid-East “refugees” the American taxpayer could be paying for travel and relocation of Islamic State terrorists.

Our national security should come before feel-good gestures. Perhaps, President Obama and his fellow, hand-wringing leaders in Europe might want to rethink their collective failure to deal with the Syrian crisis, the power vacuum they left in Iraq and crafting an Iranian deal, which lifts the sanctions and assures a path to the biggest state-sponsor of terrorism becoming a nuclear power.

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September 7, 2015 · 10:14 pm

Nothing to see here, just move along

Here’s a NY Times update on Hillary’s classified email situation:

“WASHINGTON — A special intelligence review of two emails that Hillary Rodham Clinton received as secretary of state on her personal account — including one about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program — has endorsed a finding by the inspector general for the intelligence agencies that the emails contained highly classified information when Mrs. Clinton received them, senior intelligence officials said.”

Of course, as you read along the Clinton campaign and the State Department, running interference for Hillary Clinton, continue to muddy the issue and downplay it as some sort of minor interagency kerfuffle over classification – nothing to see here, just move along.

In another NY Times piece, “Hillary Clinton to Show More Humor and Heart, Aides Say,” her campaign aides offer up another relaunch of the relaunch, this time the queen will throw off her the stiff, standoffish robes and let her hair down too. Prepare yourself for the warm, softer, funny side of Hillary. One can only wonder how much she’s paying public relations gurus for this complete personality overhaul….

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September 7, 2015 · 10:59 am

Beware of US government and religious charities on refugee crisis

The cry for American action on the Syrian and Mid-East refugee crisis creating havoc in Europe began in earnest with the photo of refugee, Aylan Kurdi, a 3 year-old, Syrian Kurd fleeing Kobani. Of course, the photo leaves you heartbroken and asking all those questions of “Why didn’t we help these refugees?” The feelings don’t speak to the realities though.

Humanitarian impulses come naturally to Westerners, but rest assured humanitarian impulses do not come naturally to leaders like Tayyip Erdogan and Arab leaders in the region. Their humanitarian impulses fall exclusively on helping Muslims and then, only when it suits their political agenda. Erdogan, as a champion of a dead Kurdish child, seems more than a tad disingenuous, in light of his willingness to bomb Kurdish areas with no regard to civilian casualties. The western social justice types and the feel-good political leftists will come out in full force now, to demand we help these poor refugees and trust me they are right on the “poor refugees”, who are victims of collapsing regimes from the very same glorious Arab Spring these left-wing nincompoops swooned about just a few short years ago.

The media will play along pushing this humanitarian cry, as usual, but calmer heads must prevail and more importantly speak out calmly and clearly. We should NOT take in more Syrian and Mid-East refugees, unless and until the Obama administration’s abuses of the Refugee Resettlement Program are investigated and remedied. Once that program gets a complete housecleaning, then a careful, thorough review of how to vet refugees must ensue, so that a comprehensive process is in place to protect Americans from jihadists using the US refugee process to enter the US.

Don’t fall for the emotional hype over a tragic photo. Many leaders around the world are culpable for the mayhem in the Mid-East, and US leadership under President Obama greatly exacerbated the chaos, so don’t trust President Obama to offer more than poorly thought out plans, flimsy, feel-good rhetoric and quick fixes. We can not sacrifice national security of the American people to emotional responses ramped up by the media and activists.

The solution to the refugee crisis lies in resolving the political realities on the ground fueling the crisis and that would take a degree of international will, of which the Arab leaders, Europe, the US, and Russia do NOT possess. The Syrian civil war must be resolved, the Islamic State must be destroyed, and most importantly Iran’s regional aggression must be repelled. Instead, Europe and the US have just pushed through a deal to empower and embolden Iran. Russia continues to play Cold War realpolitik games like a chess match. Without international leadership, the refugee crisis will grow and naively taking in more refugees will only fuel more people to flee their homes. The bottom line is there are no quick fixes.

For some interesting reading check out a website, Refugee Resettlement Watch started by a Ann Corcoran, a much criticized ordinary citizen researcher, who became aware of the Refugee Resettlement Program in 2007. In her book, “Refugee Resettlement and the Hijra to America” (pages 23-24), Corcoran writes that she was busy on her farm in rural Maryland when she became aware of a “church group” bringing refugees into her area without even notifying local authorities. Thus, began her research into this program run through the US State Department, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security,  with many large religious organization being paid large amounts of taxpayer money to aid in this “humanitarian assistance”. 

So, when you see mouthpieces from Christian organizations and churches hit the airwaves appealing to your humanity, beware. The first question reporters should ask them is how much money they are receiving from the federal government to aid refugees in America. You, being the American taxpayer, are being played, by not only your government, but by many religious leaders too!

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