RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2487/Saudi-Follies-Part-2.aspx

Let’s pick up where last week’s column left off with that Saudi national in Boston – Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, the 20-year-old “student” who was acting suspiciously enough after the Boston bombing to be “detained” under guard at the hospital and named a person of interest in the April 15 attack.

That same day, law enforcement searched Alharbi’s Boston-area apartment for seven hours, leaving with bags of evidence at around 2 a.m. on Tuesday, April 16. On Tuesday afternoon, a sub-agency of the Department of Homeland Security created what is called an “event file” on Alharbi, calling for his visa to be revoked due to ties to terrorism. That same afternoon, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper would inform the Senate Intelligence Committee that Alharbi was now merely a “witness.”

This exonerating designation pulled the public eye off of Alharbi, but only temporarily. On Wednesday night, April 17, Steven Emerson refocused our attention on Alharbi when on Fox News’ “Hannity” show, the terrorism expert broke the news that Alharbi was scheduled to be deported on “national security grounds.”

Since then, however, it has been a struggle to keep this sensational story in sight. The administration has categorically dismissed it, and the media have followed suit – which is better than anything the Saudi dignitaries sweeping through Washington after the Boston bombing could have hoped for.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has done her overbearing best to discredit even elected officials with the temerity to ask questions about it. In an April 18 exchange with Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., Napolitano exploded when Duncan, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, asked why the Saudi witness, apparently connected to terrorism by his deportation order, was slated to leave the country when the Boston investigation was just beginning? Calling the premise of the congressman’s question a “rumor,” Napolitano replied: “I’m not going to answer that question. It’s so full of misstatements and misapprehensions that it’s just not worthy of an answer.”

Really?

Maybe Her Secretary-ness was relying on alterations to the original Alharbi file that, The Blaze would later report, were made on the evening of Wednesday, April 17, “to disassociate him (Alharbi) from the initial charges.”

But it was too late – and here’s where the story gets really juicy. Glenn Beck and The Blaze have now reproduced a copy of a page from the original April 16 file on Alharbi. In terse government lingo, this document makes clear that 1) Alharbi was a terrorism risk to the public, and 2) federal authorities who permitted him into the country were negligent. No matter what Napolitano says, this story is no rumor.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/346664/print

Aid for veterans is much in the news: No one will confuse “Lest We Forget,” the epitaph engraved on countless memorials, with the motto of the Department of Veterans Affairs, mired in its inability to provide timely medical care to hundreds of thousands of disabled veterans. While government exposes its inherent ineptitude, some young warriors are taking matters into their own hands to make sure wounded comrades receive the care they and their families need. I wanted to share with NRO readers the story of Nine Line, founded by Danny Merritt — a brave soldier and member of the extended National Review family — and its efforts to help a real American hero, Eddie “Flip” Klein, and others who have paid dearly to protect our freedoms.

JACK FOWLER: Danny, tell the uninitiated what “Nine Line” means as a military term, and how that translates to your new mission.

DANNY MERRITT: A Nine Line MEDEVAC request is a call for help when you-know-what hits the fan in combat. In military terms, “you have to call in a Nine Line” means the most important call you will ever have to make. It’s a call to get a wounded soldier off the battlefield.

When they are out of harm’s way and back home, these soldiers still need and deserve our help. So I started Nine Line Apparel and Nine Line Foundation to continue to help them, not only along the road to recovery, but also as they try to rebuild their lives in the most normal of ways. Nine Line is going to be a lifeline and an advocate for these true heroes.

FOWLER: There are a number of foundations and organizations that aim to help wounded warriors and their families. What makes Nine Line different? What is the back story here?

MERRITT: We started Nine Line in order to help out a classmate — Eddie Klein, better known as Flip — of my brother, Tyler Merritt. While on patrol in Afghanistan last October, Flip lost both legs and his arm during combat operations. We wanted to be able to help Flip, other service members, and their families, and we were going to do it differently. The philosophy of Nine Line is simple: “One Service member and their family at a time.”

Nine Line is payback. After my first enlistment in the Army, I got accepted into Valley Forge Military College for their Early Commission Program. I was excited but realized quickly that I could not afford it. The Mustang Scholars Foundation provided a scholarship that helped offset the cost. That charity made getting a commission through Valley Forge Military College a possibility. It made it a reality. And it changed my life.

The guys behind Mustang — Tony McGeorge, Peter Connors, Tom Bentley, and others — came up with a direct way to support soldiers like me. Their kindness gave me a great push in the right direction in life. I have benefited from other people’s help, and now I am in a position to pass it along, to pay back to others the kindness shown me. My brother Tyler and I decided to help others in our own way, to do it directly, to make it personal. And that’s how Nine Line came about.

Nine Line Apparel and Nine Line Foundation is our vehicle to help others who paid a significant price fighting for all Americans abroad. Our mission is to help severely wounded service members by raising funds to offset their cost of recovery, to retrofit their homes and vehicles, to support their children’s education, to give deserving service members and their families that important additional support they need in order to get their lives back to normal — to a new normal — as soon as possible. Who better to help combat veterans than combat veterans?

FOWLER: Tell us a bit about Tyler and Flip — what class were they in?

MERRITT: Tyler and Flip were classmates at West Point, and their class motto was “Never Falter, Never Quit.” But this is more than just a motto — Tyler and Flip live by this term. And even after more than 100 surgeries, Flip continues to fight on. He has overcome some of the most physically and mentally tough challenges, and he seems to do it like it’s just another day.

Tyler is an Army captain, currently a SOAR Special Operations pilot for the elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, which was credited with delivering SEAL Team 6 to kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. The “Night Stalkers,” as it’s known, is not Tyler’s specific unit, but he’s among the top 1 percent of Army pilots.

FOWLER: Flying helicopters?

MERRITT: Yes.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/346680/black-flags-behind-those-green-lines

I don’t often disagree with my good friend Cliff, but we continue to see things very differently when it comes to Syria. Five thoughts.

1. It is not certain that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons. I heard Defense Secretary Hagel, who is not the clearest fellow in any event, say our intel community had “some degree of varying confidence” that Syria had twice, on a “small scale,” used sarin. That is a hedge if ever there was one. Coming days after it seems the government had a uniform degree of strong confidence that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was nothing to be concerned about, it’s not exactly something I’d bet the farm on.

2. Let’s assume Assad did it. This would not change the underlying problem: Assad’s opposition is rife with assorted Islamic supremacists and jihadists. These include elements of al-Qaeda, the organization with which we are at war, and whose ardent pursuit of chemical and biological weapons has not only been noted but formally alleged in indictments for years. I am not saying we have no friends in the opposition. But, as in Egypt, they are a weak part of an opposition led by Muslim supremacists who hate the West. That is not going to change, no matter what weapons Assad uses.

On this score, Cliff’s argument repeats the standard interventionist narrative: Obama failed to act in support of the pro-American (or, at least, anti-Islamic-supremacist) faction(s) of the opposition, creating a void that allowed “well-funded jihadist and Islamic forces [to] take the lead on the battlefield.” I wrote about this narrative in a recent column. There is no evidence in Syria, any more than there was in Egypt or Libya, that there was, at any point, a thriving, pro-American faction that was capable of taking the lead against the dictatorial regime. The most virulent opposition to the Assad regime has, for decades, been the Islamic supremacists — the Muslim Brotherhood and its allied violent jihadists. There is no void. This is the dynamic in the Muslim Middle East: You rationalize U.S. aid and sacrifice by telling yourself you are only helping the good guys, and then, once the regime is toppled, it turns out there aren’t enough good guys — so you end up with the Muslim Brotherhood. If Assad is replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, that is not progress for America.

3. To be clear, I am not joining the argument of my friend Daniel Pipes that we should support Assad. I have contended, as Daniel does, that if America’s enemies are determined to make war on each other, we should let them. But I don’t believe we should strategically orchestrate or elongate the war — jumping from side to side to keep it going. I am advocating that we stay out of something that is their problem and that we had no role in instigating. To put ourselves in the position of being responsible for the terrible suffering attendant to someone else’s war in the absence of any vital American interest is something I beieve we’d come to regret deeply.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/kerrys-shocking-demand-to-israel-free-terrorists/print/

It may seem amazing, but in the wake of the Boston attack the Obama administration is pressuring Israel to free terrorists guilty of particularly heinous acts of murder.

On Wednesday the Knesset “discussed America’s demand that Israel release terrorists as a good will gesture to the Palestinian Authority.” The demand is part of intensive efforts by Secretary of State John Kerry to revive Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on a peace settlement—efforts that are amazing in their own right considering that the Palestinian Authority has consistently shown for 20 years that it is incapable of accepting Israel and not interested in a state “living in peace” beside it.

Kerry—with Iran at the brink of a nuclear capability, Syria a maelstrom of clashing terror factions, Egypt close to economic collapse, and North Korea threatening nuclear aggression—has in recent weeks been meeting with PA president Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, Riyadh, Amman, and Istanbul.

Abbas’s preconditions for resuming negotiations are the same as they have been for years: Israel committing beforehand to a withdrawal to indefensible borders, prohibiting Jewish building in Judea, Samaria, and parts of Jerusalem, and releasing terrorists from prison. Israel is reportedly, at this point, rejecting all these demands.

The Obama administration is also “preparing a multi-billion dollar economic initiative that would bring international businesses and major infrastructure projects to the West Bank”—again, nothing essentially new but, rather, part of a 20-year tradition of Israeli, U.S., and European efforts to bribe the Palestinians into adopting Western norms and practices of peace, prosperity, and tolerance.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/its-time-to-do-something-about-knives/print/

The gun control background check measure may have been defeated, but that just means it’s time to move on to knife background checks.

Knives are all around us. Most people own 2 or 3. Some even own a dozen. Some knives are safely dull but others can cut through anything. Flip through the television channels late at night and you can catch infomercials in which grinning men in red aprons cut through wood, metal and leather with knives that anyone with a credit card and no common sense can buy.

Most people don’t think about knives at all. They don’t think about knife culture. They don’t think about what’s wrong with a society that allows anyone to buy a set of Japanese ceramic knives that claim to be able to cut through bone faster than any other knife on earth for only $29.95 plus shipping and handling.

They don’t think about the knives until the knives come after them.

On April 14th, Dylan Quick, a Lone Star College student, stabbed fourteen fellow students, many in the face and neck. Quick had fantasized about stabbing people to death and wearing their faces as masks since he was eight years old. And with a knife, he almost succeeded in making his dream come true.

It would be all too easy to fall into the trap of blaming Dylan Quick for his actions, but we must look deeper and ask, what about the knife? Without the knife, Quick would have been just another college student fantasizing harmlessly, like most college students do, about cannibalism and necrophilia. It was the knife that made Dylan Quick dangerous. He wouldn’t have gotten very far stabbing people with his hands.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/lloyd-billingsley/the-fbis-favorite-imam-sounds-off-on-boston/print/

In 2009, the Federal Bureau of Investigation gave its community leadership award to Mohamed Abdul-Azeez of the Sacramento Area League of Associated Muslims (SALAM) Islamic Center in California’s capital. Now the Egyptian-born imam has responded to the bombing of the Boston Marathon.

Abdul-Azeez told the Sacramento Bee that he posted on Facebook his “deepest condolences to the families of the victims of today’s explosions in Boston.” The eight-year-old victim could have been his son, whom he had considered taking to the event. The imam and his wife watched the news in tears, “but ever since this thing went down, I don’t want to have to apologize for any crime that’s been committed. I’m weary of having to deal with this pressure all the time, whenever something stupid happens in the world. I feel similar to a gun owner worried about gun laws all the time because people are shooting people, or a Jew who has to worry about the atrocities being committed in Israel.”

Steve Magagnini of the Bee asked Abdul-Azeez if he saw any connection between the Chechen suspects and “their so-called Muslim identity.”

“The whole thing has a fishy stench to it,” the imam said. “The story is riddled with inconsistencies.” Abdul Azeez said the imam at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center told him that “those two kids” never attended a service there. They might have attended a smaller mosque in Cambridge, “but they are not masjid-going people.”

Further, “If the FBI has known about these guys for years and received intelligence about them from the Russians, how come they’ve been allowed to operate with impunity? And terrorists from Islamic traditions don’t run, don’t hide. They take a bullet in their chest. That’s been a very consistent pattern.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/how-the-left-yearned-for-a-white-american-bomber-on-the-glazov-gang/

How the Left Yearned for a White American Bomber — on The Glazov Gang

This week’s Glazov Gang had the honor of being joined by actor Basil Hoffman, (The Artist), actor Dwight Schultz (DwightSchultzFansite.nl) and
Ann-Marie-Murrell, the National Director of PolitiChicks.tv.

The Gang members gathered to discuss: How the Left Yearned for a White American Bomber. The discussion occurred in Part I and centered on the Boston Massacre and David Sirota’s article in Salon which expressed his wish that the Boston Marathon bomber would be a white American terrorist. (See Daniel Greenfield’s analysis of it here.)

Part II focused on Rachel Maddow’s Brain Numbing Attack on David Horowitz. The Gang analyzed why MSNBC’s terminally sophomoric host scoffs at an author’s books without reading them. The dialogue shed light on how and why progressives oppress blacks and Hispanics while pretending to be their saviors. (See Frontpage’s article on it here). The segment also touched on: Will Americans Soon Live Like Israelis?

See both parts of the two-part series below:

Part I:

Part II:

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/boston-and-the-infantilism-of-jihad-denial/print/

First of all, I don’t care about the psychology of the Boston jihadists – whether the older one put pressure on the younger one, etc. All we need to know is that they were jihadists, and therefore our enemy. Period.

What I do find myself preoccupied by is the psychology of those Americans who, even before the perpetrators were identified, hoped against hope that they weren’t Muslims – and who, after the perpetrators were identified, were quick to assure us that Islam had nothing to do with it. Or who argued that, even if the brothers were motivated by Islam, that little detail doesn’t matter, and we shouldn’t focus on it.

I’m fascinated by the mindset of those who sought to obscure the vital moral distinctions in this case by waxing philosophical about such matters as the complexity of human character and the power of history. For example, David Remnick, in the New Yorker, described the Tsarnaev family as “battered by history…by empire and the strife of displacement, by exile and emigration.” Many commentators strove mightily to make the case that, in the final analysis, we’re all equally guilty and all equally victims.

Then there’s the repulsive U.N. hack Richard Falk, for whom the lesson of the Boston bombings is that “self-scrutiny and mid-course reflections on America’s global role is long overdue.” There’s been a lot of that going around. And what about those who have preferred to see the brothers not as jihadists but as Chechen separatists, who were driven by an understandable, even noble, antagonism to Russian tyranny (and who had, apparently, somehow mistaken Boston for Moscow)?

And let’s not forget Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir, who insisted on Saturday, the day after the younger Tsarnaev was taken into custody, that “we still have no idea what role their religion and national background may or may not have played in motivating the crime.” These sentences from O’Hehir deserve to be quoted in full:

…it’s not entirely fair to suggest that Americans think one kid killed by a bomb in Boston is worth more than 12 kids killed in Afghanistan. It’s more that we live in a profoundly asymmetrical world, and the dead child in Boston is surprising in a way any number of dead children in Afghanistan, horrifyingly enough, are not. He lived in a protected zone, after all, a place that was supposed to be sealed off from history, isolated from the blood and turmoil of the world. But of course that was a lie.

What, exactly, is O’Hehir doing, or trying to do, here? He’s trying to shift our attention away from the jihadist murder of eight-year-old Martin Richard to children killed in Afghanistan – not the innumerable children killed by jihadists, of course, but those who die as the result of the actions of American soldiers at war. In short, O’Hehir wants to draw our attention away from a jihadist act on U.S. soil to American military actions abroad, the implied idea being that they are more or less comparable – although America’s crimes are, presumably, more extensive and thus more deplorable and more deserving of our attention than those committed by the Tsarnaevs.

O’Hehir doesn’t dare to suggest explicitly that the American military strike was twelve times morally worse than the jihadist act – but he doesn’t have to. The implication is there. Also present is the implication that the act of jihad was perhaps not in fact an act of jihad at all, but rather a (legitimate?) reaction to American acts abroad.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/obama-clintons-benghazi-lies-exposed/

A searing new Interim Progress Report released by the GOP chairmen of five House committees reveals the disturbing extent of the Obama administration’s deceit and manipulation over the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. As the 43-page document details, not only was gross incompetence to blame for the success of the attack that cost four Americans their lives, but a concerted effort at the highest levels of government was undertaking to cover up the debacle, deceive the public and shield officials, including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama, from responsibility.

Ranking Democrats on the same five committees, who said they were not included in writing the report, dismissed it as politically motivated. “You are sacrificing accuracy in favor of partisanship,” they said in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

Hardly. Dividing the timeline into three sections — before, during and after the attack — the report paints a damning picture of the Hillary Clinton-led State Department, which knew “the threat environment in Benghazi was high and that the Benghazi compound was vulnerable and unable to withstand an attack, yet the Department continued to systematically withdraw security personnel.”

The smoking gun revealed in the report — contrary to Hillary Clinton’s congressional testimony that requests for additional security in Benghazi never reached her — was that “an April 2012 State Department cable bearing Secretary Hillary Clinton’s signature acknowledged then-Ambassador Cretz’s formal request for additional security assets but ordered the withdrawal of security elements to proceed as planned.” A Senate report, “Flashing Red: A Special Report on the Terrorist Attack at Benghazi,” released on December 31, confirmed the lack of security, citing ”extremely poor security in a threat environment that was ‘flashing red.’”

President Obama was blamed for the lack of security as well, in that he “failed to proactively anticipate the significance of September 11 and provide the Department of Defense with the authority to launch offensive operations beyond self-defense.” The report noted that the Intelligence Community was not to blame for anything, in that they “collected considerable information about the threats in the region, and disseminated regular assessments to senior U.S. officials warning of the deteriorating security environment in Benghazi, which included threats to American interests, facilities, and personnel.”

The 2013 report’s most scathing assessments concern the post-attack response by the Obama administration that “willfully perpetuated a deliberately misleading and incomplete narrative that the attacks evolved from a political demonstration caused by a YouTube video.” The report excoriated the administration’s so-called “talking points,” revealing that

after a White House Deputies Meeting on Saturday, September 15, 2012, the Administration altered the talking points to remove references to the likely participation of Islamic extremists in the attacks… removed references to the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa’ida in Benghazi and eastern Libya, including information about at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi.

Furthermore, the report states, “Senior State Department officials requested–and the White House approved–that the details of the threats, specifics of the previous attacks, and previous warnings be removed.”

The timeline following the attack reveals a carefully orchestrated disinformation campaign that began with the president, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice peddling the YouTube video story, even as government emails surfacing six weeks later revealed that both the State Department and the White House were told during the attack that terror group Ansar al-Sharia took credit for it. The video charade continued until September 19, when Matt Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, became the first administration official to label Benghazi a terrorist attack, even as Obama continued to push the video lie a day later. On September 24, during a taping of “The View,” the president still refused to label Benghazi a terrorist attack. “We’re still doing an investigation,” he said.

As the facts became known, Clinton blamed ”the fog of war” for her initial lies, while White House spokesman Jay Carney claimed the White House was giving out the best information it had at the time, but the information had “evolved.”

Other lies by the administration are also forcefully rebutted in the 2013 report, including claims that the talking points were altered to protect classified information of the FBI investigation, noting that the FBI itself “approved a version of the talking points with significantly more information about the attacks and previous threats than the version that the State Department requested,” and that even “limited due diligence” of an Intelligence Committee (IC) report would have made it clear that “the situation was more complex than the narrative provided by Ambassador Susan Rice and others in the Administration.”

The final post-attack conclusions noted that the administration’s decision to conduct an FBI investigation, as opposed to one by military or other intelligence sources, “contributed to the government’s lack of candor” and “significantly delayed U.S. access to key witnesses and evidence and undermined the government’s ability to bring those responsible for the attacks to justice in a timely manner. ”

That delay was underscored by the reality that 15 days after that attack, it was reported by CNN that the FBI was still waiting to get access to the area. That would be the same CNN that found ambassador Christopher Stevens’ journal on the floor of the unsecured compound — three days after the attack.

Unsurprisingly, the White House pushed back Wednesday, accusing Republicans of creating a political distraction. White House National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden claimed that the report goes over old ground and that some of its conclusions conflict with those reached during an internal investigation conducted by the State Department itself. “The State Department’s Accountability Review Board–the independent body charged with reviewing the attacks and evaluating the interagency response–released its report which specifically found that the interagency response was ‘timely and appropriate’ and ‘helped save the lives of two severely wounded Americans,’ while also making important recommendations to improve security that we are in the process of implementing,” she said.

Hayden is, unfortunately for the Obama administration, misrepresenting reality. The thrust of the State Department’s Accountability Review Board’s report was completely different. “Systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department … resulted in a special mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place,” it said.

Hillary Clinton supposedly took ”full responsibility” for those deficiencies –responsibility best described by Clinton herself in a testy exchange with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, when he accused her of blaming non-existent protests for the deaths of four Americans. “What difference at this point does it make?” Clinton asked.

Furthermore, the four officials ostensibly terminated because of their mistakes leading up to the attack remained on the State Department payroll. And while spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Clinton “has accepted [Assistant Secretary of State] Eric Boswell’s decision to resign as assistant secretary for diplomatic security, effective immediately,” she neglected to mention that Boswell gave up only the presidential appointment as assistant secretary, not his other assignments. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) illuminated reality. “State Department officials proclaimed …that heads would roll…Now we see that the discipline is a lie and all that has happened is the shuffling of the deck chairs.”

http://pjmedia.com/blog/coast-guard-warns-budget-shift-opens-u-s-to-more-smugglers/?print=1

WASHINGTON – The commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard warned a Senate panel on Tuesday that shifting the focus of the U.S. Navy from the Western Hemisphere to the Pacific region will lead to an uptick in drug smuggling.

Admiral Robert J. Papp, appearing before the Senate Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard to discuss the service’s 2014 budget request, said the service branch has worked cooperatively with the Navy on interdiction operations along Central American smuggling routes.

The Coast Guard, in fact, maintains law enforcement detachments on many Navy ships to strengthen efforts against transnational criminal organizations that “are financed by narcotics that arrive by way of the sea, leaving behind a wave of crime and instability in their wake.”

Drug smugglers, Papp said, are “growing smarter, bolder and they’re taking greater risk and increasing danger to our homeland.” But the Obama administration’s proposal to shift the focus of naval operations contained in the 2014 budget request means the Coast Guard won’t be able to rely to as great an extent on their detection and monitoring assistance in the Caribbean.

“Unfortunately, with the reduction of resources, my highest focus is for the Western Hemisphere – the arctic, closer to our shores and most notably in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific where we have the drug trafficking routes,” Papp said, adding that in past years the availability of Navy personnel and vessels “has been a force multiplier for us.”

“So the loss of the Navy ships in the Caribbean ultimately is just going to result in more drugs that are making it through,” Papp said.