RUTHFULLY YOURS

Spook Rebuke Mere men cannot be trusted with arbitrary power, especially power backed by armies.

Usually, a surprising late-night vote in the House is bad news, but passage of the Massie-Lofgren amendment was a pleasant surprise: It would use the power of the purse to block the National Security Agency’s warrantless dragnet spying on Americans’ electronic communications, as well as halt the agency’s efforts to cajole hardware makers into installing so-called back doors for federal snooping convenience, providing a useful stopgap measure while the House and the Senate attempt to work out a package of meaningful NSA and surveillance reforms.

Keep in mind what the NSA is up to. This goes well beyond a sniffer program scanning Karachi-bound text messages for “Death to the Great Satan! Allahu Akbar!” The NSA has been intercepting laptop computers being shipped to customers in order to install software bugs in them, redirecting Web traffic to install malware on computers, installing agents in video games, and generally behaving like an implausible villain in a Robert Ludlum novel. It is using the flimsiest rationales to extend its surveillance to domestic targets. The toothless USA Freedom Bill passed by the House last month was intended to curtail some of this, but would have relatively little practical effect even if it were to become law, its enforcement protocols being remarkably loosey-goosey. The bipartisan amendment put forth by Kentucky’s Thomas Massie (R.) and California’s Zoe Lofgren (D.) passed 293 to 123, and would impose funding restrictions as well as implement a specific ban on any agency effort “to mandate or request that a person redesign its product or service to facilitate” surveillance.

Representative Massie says that the surveillance issue comes up at practically every town hall he conducts. “People are tired of being spied on,” he says.

There have been several legislative efforts to bring the domestic-spying apparatus under control, and all of them have failed. The FISA Amendments Act, for example, contains a number of provisions intended to protect U.S. citizens and legal residents from surveillance under what is, after all, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but the evidence, including a heavily redacted FISA court opinion on the subject, suggests very strongly that federal authorities are operating as though effectively unbound by that law. Given that cash is fungible and that there is a great deal of it floating around these agencies, mere financial restraints may not be enough to do the job, but they would represent a step in the right direction.

The Obama administration’s claim to have been surprised by the wave of children flooding over out borders may turn out to be another political lie of the year. Sundance of Conservative Treehouse noticed a very peculiar advertisement:

On January 29th of this year, the federal government posted an advertisement seeking bids for a vendor contract to handle “Unaccompanied Alien Children“.

Not just any contract mind you, but a very specific contract – for a very specific number of unaccompanied minors: 65,000.

• Why would DHS and ICE be claiming “surprise” by the current influx of unaccompanied minors on the border in June, when they were taking bids for an exact contract to handle the exact situation in January?

• Secondly, how could they possibly anticipate 65,000 unaccompanied minors would be showing up at the border, when the most ever encountered in a previous year was 5,000 total ?

The bid specifics are even more suspicious:

[…] The Contractor shall provide unarmed escort staff, including management, supervision, manpower, training, certifications, licenses, drug testing, equipment, and supplies necessary to provide on-demand escort services for non-criminal/non-delinquent unaccompanied alien children ages infant to 17 years of age, seven (7) days a week, 365 days a year. Transport will be required for either category of UAC or individual juveniles, to include both male and female juveniles. There will be approximately 65,000 UAC in total: 25% local ground transport, 25% via ICE charter and 50% via commercial air.

[…] In addition, the Contractor shall have personnel who are able to communicate with juveniles in their own designated language(s).

Link to the ad here.

This stinks to high heaven. It is time to subpoena the people who placed the ad to give testimony in Congress. We may have a Cloward-Piven strategy on illegal immigration underway.

Hat tip: Lucianne Goldberg

New York Times reporter Jody Rudoren accuses Israel of destabilizing both Israeli-‎Palestinian relations and the new “unity government ” of the Palestinians, and ‎sentencing the Palestinians to collective punishment as it seeks to find the three ‎boys kidnapped a week back, almost certainly by Hamas operatives. The three kidnap victims and their families are, ‎of course, only deserving of a modicum of international sympathy, since they supposedly ‎belong to “settler families” living on land “promised to,” and rightfully belonging to ‎the Palestinians. (In fact, only one of the three families lives in a settlement.) In pretty much every story on the three boys in European papers ‎or The New York Times, it is obligatory to mention the settler aspect, since this ‎suggests the families to some extent had it coming to them for their participation in ‎a colonial enterprise. Perhaps the only thing that could have muddied the waters ‎further would be if the three boys had been wearing Washington Redskins tee ‎shirts at the time of the kidnapping, which ‎would have conclusively demonstrated their lack of concern for all those less ‎privileged and more deserving of the world’s concern.‎

There are of course, plenty of destabilizing things going on in the Middle East, ‎though hitchhiking teenage boys, and the Israeli government’s interest in finding ‎them while they are still alive, hardly fall in that category. The unity agreement ‎between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas was a particularly destabilizing ‎event. With no change in any of the expressed objectives of Hamas, the unity ‎agreement was essentially a formal marriage between the PA and a terrorist entity ‎committed to the murder of Jews in Israel and anywhere else they could find them. ‎That agreement was bound to destabilize Israeli-Palestinian relations, as was the ‎kidnapping of three teenage boys by the new partner in the PA government. ‎

The Israeli search for the kidnappers and their victims is what governments in ‎civilized countries do to protect their people. Kidnapping children is what terrorist ‎regimes do and is designed to destabilize. Hamas clearly sees a path to power in ‎the West Bank, much as it has achieved power in Gaza. Forcing the PA on the ‎defensive — appearing to accede to Israeli demands to cooperate in the search for ‎the kidnappers, while Hamas remains resolute in supporting such attacks, is bound ‎to improve Hamas’ standing versus the PA among a population that loves to glorify ‎terrorist killings and kidnappings and prefers them over deals with the “Zionist ‎entity.”‎

The Hamas message of how Jews should be treated anywhere you can find them ‎seemed to have been well understood in Europe — in Paris and Brussels and ‎Antwerp in recent days. In Antwerp, it ‎appeared to be Jewish 5-year-olds that proved so unsettling and destabilizing to ‎the Muslim attackers. ‎

From the Daily Beast:

On Wednesday, Brett McGurk, the senior State Department official responsible for policy on Iraq, met in Baghdad at the home of Ahmed Chalabi, the former exile leader who was supported by neoconservatives inside the Bush administration before the Iraq war.

I repeat: Ahmed Chalabi? Chalabi is by most accounts an agent of Iranian influence. He is a conman for sure, and in more ways than one. He conned ‘cons (neocons) into thinking the shadowy ex-pat would return to Iraq as “our man in Baghdad” by popular demand. Evidence indicates he was really Iran’s man in Baghdad, or, rather, one of them.

To reacquaint ourselves with Chalabi, here’s a 2007 description of him from Mugged by Reality by John Agresto, a singularly sharp-eyed critic of US policy in Iraq. It captures the futility and insanity of dealing with a character as “patently self-aggrandizing and manipulatively self-interested” as Chalabi was and is.

Agresto wrote:

Chalabi — friend of America, friend of Iran; defender of liberation, defender of theocracy; ally of Bush, ally of Sistani, ally of Sadr; selfless expatriate abroad, self-serving politico in Iraq, convicted criminal in Jordan — is a man whose loyalty changes in every regard except in regard to himself.

And that’s putting a positive spin on it. Here’s another quotation from Agresto:

I remember once when we had a fairly decent interim administrative law that was going to govern the country, and the Ayatollah Sistani immediately said he didn’t like it, he didn’t like it because he thought it gave the Jews back their property in Iran, and immediately, Chalabi changed his vote, and decided that no, now he was going to be on the side of the religious fanatics, not on the side of the secularists. He’s a man who you never know where he’s going to be at any particular time. And I think he serves no one but his own interests.

Are the neocons going home?

By “neocons,” I refer to followers of the hawkish foreign policy school that began to coalesce in the 1970s around New York writers and academics who had rejected their Communist or Socialist lodestar to become vocal anti-Communists. A generation or so later, from Kosovo to Georgia, from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Libya to Syria, from Ukraine and now back to Iraq, they consistently advocate the use of American power, often American troops, to establish and enforce a “liberal world order.”

By “going home,” I mean returning to the Democratic Party.

The question took shape while I was reading a profile in The New York Times about neocon light Robert Kagan — brother of Iraq “surge” architect Frederick Kagan, son of Yale professor Donald Kagan, and husband of State Department diplomat Victoria Nuland. The Times describes Robert Kagan as “the congenial and well-respected scion of one of America’s first families of interventionism.”

If there is something jarring about the “first families of interventionism” moniker — just think for a moment about the families of the soldiers who actually do the “intervening” — it doesn’t seem to be meant ironically. Kagan, in fact, says he prefers to call himself a “liberal interventionist,” not a neocon. This may indeed be more appropriate for the Brookings Institution fellow and New Republic contributing editor that he is, but there’s nothing “conservative,” or even “neo,” about it.

So is this Times profile a “coming out” party? Maybe that accounts for the Times’ distinctly warm and fuzzy coverage. Kagan “exudes a Cocoa-Puffs-pouring, stay-at-home-dad charm,” the newspaper reported — not exactly standard Times treatment for a foreign policy hawk ever-ready, it seems, to give war a chance. Or is it?

I will pause here for a flash or two of full disclosure. Irving Kristol, was not only the “godfather of neoconservatism,” he was my first boss at The Public Interest, where I was an assistant editor. That spot came my way on the strength of a year at the Yale Political Monthly, a student publication I edited after being vetted by the college publication’s co-founder — Robert Kagan. There are other connections, albeit all of them nearly as historical as the ancient Greek specialty of Bob’s professor-father, who was, incidentally, Yale Political Monthly’s faculty adviser.

The Schalit precedent
The most pressing issue in Israel right now is locating Naftali Frenkel, Gil-Ad Shaer and Eyal Yifrach — the teenagers abducted last Thursday by Hamas terrorists — and (hopefully) rescuing them from the clutches of their captors. With each passing hour, there is a growing fear that the country is about to enter into a situation similar to that which followed the kidnapping of Gilad Schalit in 2006.

For five years after Schalit’s abduction, the Jewish state was caught in a trap — understanding that negotiating with terrorists sets a dangerous precedent, yet unwilling to forfeit the life of a young soldier who had become a household name.

His parents, of course, begged then-prime minister Ehud Olmert, and subsequently Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to do everything possible to return their son in one piece. They pitched a tent outside of the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem, where they lived full-time, other than when they took trips abroad to make appeals on their boy’s behalf. They also enlisted the local and foreign media, and rallied the pubic at large.

The greater the success of their campaign at home, the more jubilant grew the jihadists around the globe. The cheer in Gaza over bringing the “Zionist enemy” to its knees was immeasurable. Even Operation Cast Lead at the end of 2008 — during which the Israel Defense Forces first sent leaflets into Gaza to warn innocent civilians to steer clear of the fighting, and then wreaked havoc on the terrorist and other infrastructures there — did not result in Schalit’s rescue.

One reason for the extreme precautions taken in relation to him was the failed mission to rescue 19-year-old Nachshon Wachsman. Wachsman was a soldier who had been abducted by Hamas in 1994. Six days after his capture, he and another Israeli soldier were killed during the military raid undertaken to save him.

This was not the only collective memory that caused much of the public to pressure the government to give in to the terrorists’ demand for massive Palestinian prisoner releases in exchange for Schalit. Another was that a few such deals with the devil had been made in the past. Why should Schalit not be given the same consideration as others before him?

In 1970, for example, an Israeli night watchman was abducted by the Palestine Liberation Organization. The “ransom” Israel paid a year later was the release of a single PLO prisoner. In 1979, an Israeli soldier captured in Lebanon was released in exchange for 76 PLO terrorists. But it was in 1985 that the floodgates opened with what came to be called the “Jibril Deal”: three Israeli soldiers who had been held by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (headed by Ahmed Jibril) were exchanged for 1,150 terrorists.

It has been tried before, so has Entebbe.

Once again we see Jews as helpless victims, arms extended for protection, mercy and assistance. This only brings back painful memories.

How to deal with people who have no heart? Begging never helps.

Jimmy Carter pleaded with Iran to release the hostages, but nothing worked until the moment Ronald Reagan took office.

Of Reagan they were afraid. He was the cowboy. He was the tough guy.

Tough guys don’t dance with terrorists and tough guys don’t plead with terrorists.

Terrorists laugh at us when they see us going to them on bended knee.

They are still laughing at Michelle Obama weeks after she implored Boko Haram to Bring Back Our Girls. The kidnapped Nigerian girls are still missing.

Our three kids are still missing – Naftali Frankel, 16, Gilad Shaar, 16, Eyal Yifrach, 19, and may they be back home safely as this is being written. There is something special about this. We all have sons who resemble them – and just to gaze at their happy faces breaks your heart.

A Kosovo Albanian recruit (accompanied by another at his right) to the new marauders in Iraq, speaks in Arabic while brandishing his U.S./EU-minted, Facebook-approved “Republic of Kosovo” (Republika e Kosoves) passport, which our Congress, State Department, White House, Pentagon, and National Guard have worked—and are still working—so hard against Christian Serbia to “achieve.”

At the end of his short speech, he rejects the passport by tearing, stomping, and putting his dagger through it. Starting from the 2:20 mark of this video recently posted at jihadology.net, thanks to Mickey at Serbianna.com:

“al-Furqān Media presents a new video message from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shām: “Clanging of the Swords, Part 4″:

Praise be to Allah who has granted us the blessing of emigrating for His sake, and has blessed us by causing us to be a part of The Islamic State of Iraq and Shaam. We praise Allah for his blessings and for gathering us together with the lions of The Islamic State from every corner of the world. We praise Allah who granted us the blessing of pledging allegiance to the Ameer (Commander) of the Believers, Abu Bakr Al-Qurashi Al-Baghdadi, may Allah preserve him. Oh Ameer, we’ve pledged to listen and obey, and we’ve pledged to die [for the sake of Allah], so lead us wherever Allah commands you.

Our enemies have a strategic vision for a global conflict, but we don’t

We don’t have a leadership vacuum in the Middle East. What we have is a reality vacuum.

The vacuous “vacuum” chatter is back, reappearing in the Iraq debate after its long run as the all-purpose explanation for internecine Islamic bloodletting in Syria. That should make perfect sense since Iraq is Syria: same players, same bloodletting. Yet, the “vacuum” is wildly different from place to place, which also makes perfect sense . . . but only because the idea of a “vacuum” is nonsense on stilts.

Syria, we are told, disintegrated because President Obama’s abdication created a leadership void — “the vacuum” — that al-Qaeda rushed in to fill. The “moderate” Sunni “rebels,” the story goes, were poised to fulfill America’s top priority, undermining Iran, by overthrowing the Shiite regime the mullahs control in Damascus. But the president failed to back “moderate” Sunni “rebels,” who threw in their lot with al-Qaeda — strictly, we are to believe, owing to Obama’s default, not to the ideological harmony of the “rebels” with the jihadists.

Cross Syria’s eastern border, though, and the vacuum abruptly warps. Now, far from undermining Iran, America’s top priority somehow becomes propping up an Iran-backed Shiite state. Obama’s abdication is thus said to be the failure to “consolidate the gains of the Iraq War” by keeping about 20,000 U.S. troops in place to fend off Sunni “rebels,” who — I know you’ll find this hard to believe — have yet again thrown in their lot with al-Qaeda.

In fact, it turns out that if the same “rebel” gravitates from Syria to Iraq, he’s no longer even a “rebel” anymore; he’s a “terrorist.”

It ought to tell us something that al-Qaeda’s latest incarnation is known as “ISIS.” No, not because it takes an Egyptian goddess of magic to make sense of American policy these days. The acronym is derived from the jihadists’ self-proclaimed name: the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. Al-Sham refers to “greater Syria” or the Levant, encompassing the neighboring territories of Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Cyprus, and Southern Turkey.

Jihadists, you see, do not recognize or much care about national boundaries drawn by Western powers. In the world, as they see it, they are pitted against everyone else — Dar al-Islam versus Dar al-Harb: All must choose the realm of Islam or the realm of war. Significantly, al-Qaeda was not the first to revive this ancient Islamic-supremacist perspective. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the creator of Iran’s revolutionary sharia state, famously proclaimed: