Instead of slowing down the process of bringing in Syrian refugees due to serious problems with vetting them, which includes the rampant fraud with fake Syrian passports, the Obama administration has decided to speed up the process and process 600 Syrian refugees a day according to this Washington Examiner report. The goal is to process 10,000 Syrian refugees for entry into the United States by September 30th. Now, the FBI director stated months ago that there’s no way to vet these people due to no data bases to check their passports, names, etc. against, but leave it to the Obama administration to just write another fake narrative.
Category Archives: Terrorism
Obama’s Syrian refugee program on steroids
Filed under Foreign Policy, General Interest, Politics, Terrorism
Trump “war crime” policy heard around the world
Andrew McCarthy at NRO penned an excellent, must-read piece:
“Culture Rot: Donald Trump Is the Effect, Not the Cause”
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432380/donald-trump-culture-rot
McCarthy writes:
Before our very eyes, the corruption of cultural standards begets the corruption of law and politics. The coarsest part of the debate was Trump’s boorish boast (for which I’m willing to take him at his word, lest the next debate sink to a new low). The most egregious part, though, was Trump’s vow that, as commander-in-chief, he would compel the finest, best-trained armed forces in the history of the planet to commit war crimes — because there are evil people doing unspeakable things, as if that never happened before.
For a number of years in the mid-aughts, we debated the merits vel non of waterboarding. I defended the legality of this interrogation method — in the restrained practice of the CIA, not as cruelly administered historically — mostly based on a strict interpretation of the federal torture statute. It was not an endorsement of the tactic in any particular case. The opposition’s point was well taken that the existence of a legal justification (which they did not concede) would not necessarily make the use of waterboarding good policy. We volleyed ticking-bomb scenarios and slippery slopes back and forth.
As a lawyer, I instinctively believed we should be able to write rules clarifying the extremely rare circumstances in which aggressive tactics could be used. Critics forcefully countered that the very writing of rules was an authorization that would be stretched to cover non-dire circumstances. Jonah Goldberg reminded us about the “hidden law,” which as applied here, counsels forbidding across the board that which should be forbidden in almost all situations, in the belief that if a dire emergency did arise, good people would act outside the law, do what had to be done, and hope that others would understand and forgive.
Since I have already vented in the comments on Mr. McCarthy’s piece, let me just paste it here and be done for today:
When new information comes to light
For a long while, I believed the analysis that our going into Iraq fueled the radical Islamic fervor and set the conditions for ISIS to form, but here’s a new look from David French, “The Rise of ISIS Predates the Fall of Saddam Hussein,”
that dismantles my view and it’s worth studying. More information should prod us to reconsider our previous conclusions, especially on complex geopolitical issues. French quotes extensively from Kyle Orton’s New York Times piece, “How Saddam Gave Us ISIS”, so please read both articles. French begins:
“The New York Times has published a necessary corrective to those who view the invasion of Iraq as essentially Year Zero in the Middle East — the origin point for all the calamities that followed. Have you heard that ISIS is George Bush’s fault? Think again. Writing in the Times, Kyle Orton properly attributes the rise of ISIS in Iraq to cultural and religious forces that long pre-dated the American invasion of Iraq. It turns out that Iraq was no more immune to increased radicalization than any other Middle Eastern state, and Saddam reacted in part by embracing the new religiosity”
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/431380/rise-isis-predates-fall-saddam-hussein
Jay Nordlinger added, “Saddam and Fille,” which also expands on French’s piece.
Definitely worth taking time to reassess what we think we know about the history of Iraq and ISIS, because sometimes those things that Rumsfeld dubbed “known knowns” are shown to be incorrect, making it imperative to be willing to reassess when new information comes to light.
Filed under Foreign Policy, General Interest, Islam, Military, Politics, Terrorism
Blue cheese still stinks
As a child my mother taught us to eat whatever was served when we were guests and to never utter a word of complaint. I vividly recall eating dinner at a friend’s home, where there were 8 children in that family. Her father dished out the food from the head of the table and they passed the plates around to each child. Everyone got the same thing. On this particular night, her mother had made spaghetti and there was a large bowl of tossed salad, from which her father dished out salad and poured on blue cheese salad dressing, then he dished out spaghetti right next to the salad. I had never eaten blue cheese salad dressing and the first bite startled me and made me want to spit it out, but of course I couldn’t do that, so I swallowed it. Her mother asked me if everything was okay and I said, “Yes, everything is very good.” Then I focused my attention on eating every bite of that salad and the spaghetti, without giving any indication that all I wanted to do was barf.
That’s the kind of focus it takes to swallow the blue cheese dressing on the tossed salad of PC lies about Islamic terrorist attacks in America. The reporting of the attack on a Philadelphia police officer by a 30 year-old black man had the mayor of Philadelphia declaring there was no Islam to see with this attack, yet the Philadelphia police commissioner stated that the shooter said he had declared allegiance to ISIS and shot the police officer to defend Islam. Clearly the shooter expressed a religious belief in his actions.
As the afternoon wore on, some politicians and some in the PC media insisted the shooter was nuts, after all the shooter’s mother had told them that her son had been hearing voices and had mental health issues. The mother also reported that her son had become a very devout Muslim.
Are being mentally-ill and being a radical Islamic terrorist mutually exclusive conditions?
The shooter reportedly used a stolen gun. From whom did he get that gun?
The shooter was reportedly a known felon who turned to Islam in prison. Might we inquire if the shooter belonged to a black Muslim prison gang or who his spiritual advisers were in prison? Or is that too inflammatory to ask? Did he attend a mosque?
Late in the evening several TV news reports said the FBI is checking into whether the shooter had traveled to Saudi Arabia. If that turns out to be true, might we inquire where he came up with the money for such a trip?
President Obama always quick to jump into racial dramas where he can cast the police as acting stupidly remained silent on the white Philadelphia police officer shot in cold blood by a young black, self-proclaimed Muslim man, who stated he had pledged allegiance to ISIS. Did I miss the President taking to the air to condemn this terrorist attack on American soil?
Here’s a rundown on the story:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/man-accused-shooting-philly-cop-confessed-committing-act/story?id=36169588
Look, here’s a clue – the black community has it’s own radical Islam problem. Much of it percolates from within the US prison system, where foreign money and Islamic prison gangs convert many young black men to Islam. Outside of the prisons many black gangs and groups recruit, agitate and incite crimes and promote radical Islamic ideology. Clue, they were there in Ferguson and Baltimore, but some hide under benign names like National President of Black Lawyers for Justice . And some of that blue cheese comes straight from the White House. The Islamic/black gang/ black grievance industry nexus needs to be thoroughly investigated. I’ve written about this before: here, here, here.
Blue cheese still stinks, but I think I could choke that down better than these pathetic politicians trying to cover-up the truth.
Added thought: After a look into the Islamic/black gang/ black grievance industry nexus, perhaps it’s time to look into decades of Arab money directed toward American black colleges and black college students too. Perhaps, President Obama can offer some insights into this topic…
Filed under Culture Wars, General Interest, Islam, Politics, Terrorism
A Strategy to Defeat Theo-fascism
Source: Surely, whatever passed for American foreign or military policy in the past three decades is not working. Just as clearly, in case anyone keeps score these days, the dark side of Islam is ascendant at home and abroad. What follows here is a catalogue…
G. Murphy Donovan offers the clearest strategic blueprint to win the war against Imperial Islam, a war that others prefer to euphemize rather than face. This is a must read piece!
Filed under Foreign Policy, General Interest, Islam, Military, Politics, Terrorism
No crows in sight
With the 2016 presidential race well under way, foreign policy “strategies” get tossed about, but so far no candidate has offered a clear policy or worse demonstrated a clear understanding of the threats facing America. While the GOP candidates jostle to outdo each other on sounding tough, Hillary offers more of the Obama failed policies and Sanders doesn’t even have a foreign policy.
My frustration with the foreign policy “experts” centers squarely on the cherry-picking of events, intelligence and “expertise” to bolster domestic partisan political views rather than dealing with what General Mike Flynn referred to as it’s time to “get real”. In order to “get real” it’s way past time to look at American foreign policy actions and then assess how those actions actually fared in achieving the strategic objectives. Another big problem rests with the experts themselves, whose careers and reputations become intricately linked to the policies, leading to myopic clinging to bad policies or policies that worked in the short term, but also instigated large scale, long-term blowback.
For instance, President Reagan armed the mujahadin in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union and thwart Soviet expansion. Certainly, the Soviets were thwarted, but those radical mujahadin evolved into Al Qaeda. Too many Republicans try to ignore or gloss over that nexus of arming radical Salafist nuts, to later find those weapons and training used against the US. The Clinton administration spent the 1990s trying to minimize and trivialize the threat Al Qaeda posed, preferring to turn a blind eye to increasing radicalization and targeting of Western and US interests around the world.
In Bosnia the Clinton administration embarked on choosing a side in a bloody civil war and chose to arm Bosnian Muslim radicals, while the Western press propagandized the combatants, turning some into saints and some into evil incarnate. No clear US national security interest ever surfaced for US intervention, just a lot of feel good humanitarian claptrap. Atrocities were committed by not only the Serbs, but by the Bosnian Muslims too. In the intervening years, arming and aiding the Bosnian Muslims has allowed radical Islamists and Iran to use Bosnia as a European training ground and smuggling corridor into Europe. John Smith, wrote a piece on this yesterday, “Clinton’s Bosnia Adventure Goes South”. John Schindler, at the XX Committee blog, had a piece on this a few weeks ago. Schindler has researched the Bosnia misadventure extensively, penned a book on the subject, but he also offers many free links to information at his blog: “Operation CUT: Bosnia versus the Islamic State”.
After 9/11, the US embarked on a “war on terror”, which took several strategic paths, but none of them achieved a decisive defeat of “terror” or defeat of the Islamist terrorists waging that war. Throughout the GWB years, adminsitration officials endlessly announced the death of Al Qaeda #2 or #3 or “high-ranking”, all to no avail, because this decapitation strategy doesn’t work to degrade or defeat Islamist terrorist organizations. John McCreary’s Nightwatch printed a very insightful comment on this approach 11/7/13.
“It also highlights a degenerative leadership pattern resulting from the US program of leadership decapitation. First, there is always someone waiting for the chance to be leader. Second, the new leaders are less experienced and wise than the men they replace. Third, the new generation of leaders is more extreme and theologically rigid than its predecessors. Finally, the new leaders tend to be unknown to intelligence relative to their predecessors. Decapitation is not a permanent solution to an insurgency or an uprising.”
The Obama administration continues this decapitation strategy, without any positive strategic outcome.
President Obama decided to try a novel and extremely foolhardy approach to extract the US from the stuck military occupations of the Bush administration. Yes, partisan politics aside, the ouster of Saddam Hussein was a strategic mistake. It destabilized the region even more and emboldened Iran. Enter President Obama and he compounds the errors with catastrophic blunders – announcing a withdrawal date before he even got troops on the ground in Afghanistan for his ballyhooed surge, that never materialized. The Taliban hunkered down to wait us out and they sit poised now to seize control of Afghanistan after we leave. In Iraq, Obama decided to pull out too and created a power vacuum, which the Islamic State capitalized on setting up a pseudo-state.
From the minute the glorious Arab Spring hit the news, an endless cycle of feel-good, fairy tale “democratic” beliefs replaced sound, hard-nosed strategic analysis. In Egypt, the US supported the ouster of a staunch US ally, all to champion the Muslim Brotherhood, which US officials, from the President to his intelligence gurus James Clapper and John Brennan, to his clueless Secretary of State, with her MB affiliated top aide by her side, proclaimed as a mostly “secular” organization. Of course, that was a lie, mayhem in Egypt ensued and the Egyptian military restored some semblance of order, albeit within an autocratic military regime state structure. In the process of tossing aside Mubarak, US credibility plummeted, because now all leaders in that region know the US can not be trusted. In that strategic blunder, President Obama cavalierly created an existential threat to Israel, the US’s closest ally in the region. Israel had to rethink it’s entire national security strategy when the Sinai security framework disappeared.
Moving on, the Obama administration and many GOP leaders, like John McCain and Lindsey Graham jumped onto the Arab Spring bandwagon too. Libya became another strategic disaster – the US displaced a strongman dictator, who had been cooperating with US anti-terrorism efforts, all to support some imaginary moderate rebel “freedom-fighters”. That these rebels turned out to be Al-Qaeda-affiliated and Islamist radicals should surprise no one, because here again the intelligence contained these facts, but politicians chose to believe the myths. In the case of Libya, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received updates of unvetted information from her long-time friend, Sidney Blumenthal, who was promoting his own business interests and her own privately-funded intelligence operative, Tyler Drumheller.
Who was the US arming in Libya? And where did the US send those weapons it was gathering up at Benghazi? Well, the likely answers are radical Islamists (you know, the types who are ideological bedfellows of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State). The action then moved to Syria, where the Obama administration and many Republicans decided it was in US national interest to oust a dictator and create another power vacuum. The balanced weighing of vetted intelligence again fell to the “experts” outside of the US intelligence apparatus. In Syria, the Obama administration, many top Republicans, neocon pundits and the media all relied on one young woman as the fount of knowledge on the Syrian rebels – one Elizabeth O’Bagy. How this one young woman became the go-to definitive source that both Secretary of State, John Kerry and GOP leader, John McCain relied on defies reason. How did this one young woman become THE source the US government was relying on???
In Syria, more of the same, the Obama administration had the CIA arming “moderate” Syrian rebels, although all of these rebels are Islamists and none of them indicates a willingness to respect ethnic and religious minorities, but these are the “moderates” the Obama administration chose to back.
GOP candidates like Rubio, still tout the neocon talking points and the one that irks me the most is the charge that if only Obama had intervened sooner in Syria civil war, then things would be different. Why in the hell and by what reasoning is it in US national interests to jump into the middle of a civil war in a country that is not of vital national security interest to the US? This same humanitarian argument is the same one President Clinton used in Bosnia.
And here’s where we are at – none of the candidates on either side wants to actually sit down and objectively assess the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to US foreign policy. Every strategy comes with unforeseen, unpredictable blowback and consequences. Ignoring these unpleasant realities, to prop up partisan, not quite strategic talking points, leaves us falling further and further afield of comprehending the reality on the ground and of being able to choose a better path forward. We are lost in the land of false narratives, faux experts and fallacious reasoning. Surveying the 2016 field, as far as the eye can see, it’s very unlikely any of the 2016 candidates will be able to cut through the crap and as JK advised, “learn to be a crow and seek the golden nuggets” from the pile. The 2016 field appears to be all magpies and mockingbirds – no crows in sight.
Filed under Culture Wars, Foreign Policy, General Interest, Military, Politics, Terrorism, Uncategorized
This and that
The following is a short list of interesting links to read:
Britain designates the Muslim Brotherhood as an ideological organizing force for terrorists – http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/dec/28/muslim-brotherhood-report-by-britain-contradicts-u/
John Schindler details the Bosnian terrorism connection – http://20committee.com/2015/12/22/operation-cut-bosnia-versus-the-islamic-state/
Retired General Mike Flynn discusses President Obama’s ideological fallacies – hint, it’s not about guns or Islamophobia – http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/26/obamas-former-intelligence-director-presidents-strategy-not-working/
JK posted this opinion piece from the NY Times in a comment, but it’s a must read: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/21/opinion/saudi-arabia-an-isis-that-has-made-it.html?_r=1
Now a short personal story on how computer inept yours truly really is. For Christmas, I gave my four granddaughters Kindle Fire tablets. As a loyal amazon customer, how could I pass up Kindle Fires for $49.99? So, because I am an avid book collector (hoarder), there are hundreds of books on my kindle already, but in all fairness, many are free books from their classics listing or old history, that very few people want to read.
So, due to already having given my older two granddaughters plain kindle e-readers last year and linking those to my account, I had put a lot of books in my library for kids – to include many free classics that I deemed appropriate for their ages. After a discussion with my daughter, we decided to link these Kindle Fires to my account and my library, but amazon has this “Family Library” you can set up, which my daughter did for me, but then she told me I would have to sort out which books I wanted to put in their libraries and that’s when the problems started.
I kept trying to remove my books from their libraries to no avail and then I decided that perhaps instead of “remove”, I should be hitting the “delete” books from the Family Library. Of course, in my usual bumbling fashion, I deleted 616 of my books, believing that by removing them from the “Family Library” it was like removing books from my Kindle device – which archives them.
Nope, it deleted them permanently, so I called amazon’s customer service. The poor women talked me through deleting this “Family Library” but then we came to my books. I asked her how to get my books back and at first she said I’d have to repurchase them and I said I’ve spent a lot of money on books for years. Then she had to do some checking and she told me I had deleted 616 books and she asked me which ones I wanted back. I responded, “All of them.”
This lady stayed polite and courteous, even though, as my son told me, “You know she hates you and everyone there is talking about how stupid you are, right?” Justifiably so, but she did restore all of my books to my account and it took her quite a while, because she said there was no way to do them all at once and she’d have to do them one at a time. She asked me if it was okay if she called me back when she was done. And an hour later she called me back and told me all my books were restored and was very gracious and she sent a signed email message:
We’d appreciate your feedback. Please use the links below to tell us about your experience today.
I’ve restored your access to “616 books,” which you previously purchased from the Kindle Store. It is now available to download from your Archived Items or Cloud tab on your device. You can also download your content through the Manage Your Content and Devices page. I am very grateful for that kind and warm approach you gave during the call. I’m glad I was able to help you out today.
I hope I was able to assist you today. Please use the links below to provide us your valuable feedback
I love Amazon.com and that lady deserves a raise!
Filed under Culture Wars, General Interest, Politics, Terrorism, Uncategorized
Muslim Immigration is Exactly What ISIS Wants | Frontpage Mag
Immigration is what ISIS needs to defeat America.
Source: Muslim Immigration is Exactly What ISIS Wants | Frontpage Mag
Filed under Culture Wars, Foreign Policy, General Interest, Islam, Military, Politics, Terrorism, Uncategorized