RUTHFULLY YOURS

Dubious studies on the danger of hurricane names may be laughable. But bad science can cause bad policy.

Academic publishing was rocked by the news on July 8 that a company called Sage Publications is retracting 60 papers from its Journal of Vibration and Control, about the science of acoustics. The company said a researcher in Taiwan and others had exploited peer review so that certain papers were sure to get a positive review for placement in the journal. In one case, a paper’s author gave glowing reviews to his own work using phony names.

Acoustics is an important field. But in biomedicine faulty research and a dubious peer-review process can have life-or-death consequences. In June, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and responsible for $30 billion in annual government-funded research, held a meeting to discuss ways to ensure that more published scientific studies and results are accurate. According to a 2011 report in the monthly journal Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, the results of two-thirds of 67 key studies analyzed by Bayer researchers from 2008-2010 couldn’t be reproduced.

That finding was a bombshell. Replication is a fundamental tenet of science, and the hallmark of peer review is that other researchers can look at data and methodology and determine the work’s validity. Dr. Collins and co-author Dr. Lawrence Tabak highlighted the problem in a January 2014 article in Nature. “What hope is there that other scientists will be able to build on such work to further biomedical progress,” if no one can check and replicate the research, they wrote.

The Obama administration has brought an accused Libyan terrorist named Ahmed Abu Khattala to Washington for trial. His saga reveals how the government views the Islamist threat, and it’s discouraging. Fortunately, a much better alternative exists.

Abu Khattala stands accused of taking part in the murder of an ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi in September 2012. After an achingly slow investigation, during which time the suspect lived in the open and defiantly gave media interviews, the American military seized him on June 15. After being transported by sea and air to Washington, D.C., Abu Khattala was jailed, provided with a defense attorney, Michelle Peterson, indicted, arraigned, and, after listening to an Arabic translation of the proceedings, he pleaded not guilty to a single charge of conspiracy and requested a halal diet. He potentially faces life in prison.

This scenario presents two problems. First, Abu Khattala enjoys the full panoply of protections offered by the U.S. legal system (he actually was read his Miranda rights, meaning his right to stay silent and to consult with a lawyer), making conviction uncertain. As the New York Times explains, proving the charges against him will be “particularly challenging” because of the circumstances of the attacks, which took place in the midst of a civil war and in a country brimming with hostility to the United States, where concerns about security meant that U.S. law investigators had to wait for weeks to go to the crime scenes to collect evidence, and the prosecution depends on testimony from Libyan witnesses brought over to the United States who may well falter under cross-examination.

Secondly, what good does a conviction bring? If all goes well, a minor operative will be taken out of commission, leaving the ideological sources, the funding apparatus, the command-and-control structure, and the terrorist network untouched. A years-long, cumbersome, expensive, and draining effort will prove a point, not damage the enemy. If Abu Khattala is convicted, administration officials can crow, but Americans will be only marginally safer.

This futility recalls the 1990s, when terrorist attacks were routinely treated as criminal incidents and handled in courts of law, rather than as warfare to be dealt with using military force. In response, I complained in 1998 that the U.S. government saw terrorist violence “not as the ideological war it is, but as a sequence of discrete criminal incidents,” a mistaken approach that turns the U.S. military “into a sort of global police force and requires it to have an unrealistically high level of certainty before it can go into action,” requiring it to collect evidence of the sort that can stand up in a U.S. court of justice.

A nameless woman “dumped on a street, arms and legs cut off, entrails eviscerated” — this is just one testament from Bing West’s account of Fallujah in 2004.

This was the first mini-caliphate of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). West’s quote still matters, because it sums up the real-world impact of Salafi jihadism, the ideology of sick totalitarianism that once inspired Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and that now motivates Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Leading ISIS, Baghdadi is painting Iraq and Syria with the blood of all those who do not yield. And be under no illusions: ISIS does not believe in geographic boundaries. The group intends to export death westward. Its agenda is global.

Nevertheless, now that Baghdadi has stepped out into the open, we can more closely examine his character and agenda. Effective counter-terrorism analysis demands the scrutiny of personalities. Doing so helps us understand what a particular group might be planning next. Applied to Salafi jihadists, this task is a very sobering one. That’s certainly the case with Baghdadi.

This man is a true portrait of death. Having made his name as a battlefield commander and brutal administrator along the Euphrates River in Iraq’s Anbar Province, Baghdadi is the ultimate consequentialist, meaning that he’ll do anything to build his power and achieve his ends. Although details on his pre-2011 activities in Iraq are not easily accessible, we can confidently surmise two things about the leader.

First, he was personally involved in some grotesque crimes. That’s because AQI commanders earned their stripes through the creative pursuit of maximum misery. Whether using the mentally ill as suicide-bomb mules or blowing up crowds of children, AQI has a sense of ordained purpose that propels it to unrestrained violence. In Ramadi, a city in Anbar, AQI’s domination led to an exodus of all who had the means to leave, including many professionals, businessmen, and civil servants. They left behind a deathly ghost town. As Richard Shultz notes in his study of Anbar Province during the Iraq War, AQI’s death fetish was so extreme that it rejected the most solemn of Anbar’s cultural customs: the ability of a family to bury its dead. Indeed, hiding the body of one tribal sheikh it had murdered, AQI sparked a revolution. We know that Baghdadi was part of this; if he hadn’t been, his rise to the top of AQI and then ISIS wouldn’t have been possible. But what AQI’s history in Iraq really tells us is that men like Baghdadi are incapable of strategic caution. Instead, they embrace bloodlust as an end in itself.

Second, though he lacks strategic caution, we can assume that Baghdadi is astute about the need for tactical awareness. After all, he’s proven himself good at staying alive. Having evaded the exceptional counter-terrorism campaign led by General Stanley McChrystal’s Joint Special Operations Command, Baghdadi clearly understands and can adapt to the capabilities of his adversaries.

In Halbig, the courts may finally force Obama to work with Congress if he wants to rewrite the law.

The legal positions of President Obama’s Justice Department have been slapped down unanimously a remarkable 13 times in the Supreme Court in the last two years. Over and over, even Obama’s own two appointees to the court — Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — have held that the president has exceeded his authority and violated the separation of powers. This coming week, we could see the second-highest court in the land rule that the administration broke the law in enforcing a key provision of Obamacare, calling into question once again Obama’s fidelity to the Constitution — and further endangering his signature program.

The case of Halbig v. Sebelius (since renamed Halbig v. Burwell, for the current HHS secretary) was argued before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Court in March. It attacks the central nervous system of Obamacare — the government exchanges that were set up to subsidize health insurance for low-income consumers. If the Supreme Court ultimately finds that the Obama administration violated the law in doling out those subsidies, it could force a wholesale revision of Obamacare. In January, The Hill quoted a key Obamacare supporter as saying that Halbig was “probably the most significant existential threat to the Affordable Care Act.” Jonathan Turley, a noted liberal constitutional-law expert at George Washington Law School, recently agreed, writing in the Los Angeles Times that Halbig “could leave Obamacare on life support.”

President Obama has increasingly exasperated both judges and constitutional scholars with his boasts about going around Congress when it doesn’t give him what he wants. “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” he told reporters before his first Cabinet meeting of 2014, in January. That attitude has prompted his decision to rewrite Obamacare at least 23 times without any involvement of Congress. If Obama’s actions in Halbig are found unconstitutional, then other parts of Obamacare will become more vulnerable to legal challenge, and Congress will probably have a much bigger say in rewriting or reversing aspects of the law.

After all, even Obama has conceded that Obamacare is, to put it politely, rough-hewn. “Obviously we didn’t do a good enough job in terms of how we crafted the law,” he told NBC’s Chuck Todd in November 2013. A prime example? Obamacare established an insurance exchange for each state and authorized the federal government to operate the exchanges in states that chose not to set up their own. But Obamacare’s authors wanted to create strong incentives for states to set up their own health-insurance exchanges — they mandated penalties for states that opted out. In addition, because Obamacare needed the support of every single Democratic senator (plus the two independents in the 2009 Senate), the law’s supporters were forced to accommodate the demands of key fence-sitters. One such was Ben Nelson, then a Democratic senator from Nebraska, who was concerned about excessive federal control of the exchanges. To gain Nelson’s support, the law specified that subsidies for Obamacare could only go through “an Exchange established by the State.” To the surprise of most, over two-thirds of the states declined to establish their own exchanges.

This column was originally published in The Washington Times, Sunday, March 20, 2011. It will be republished at yeoldecracc.com

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/mar/20/sanders-horror-vacui/

President Obama has given new meaning to that epithet “imperial presidency.” It was slung at Richard M. Nixon not only for his extravagant White House “palace guard” — some in kitschy uniforms — but for his more serious unconstitutional overreaching.

But though imperial in his style, Mr. Obama reigns; he does not rule.

Whether on domestic or foreign policy, Mr. Obama abdicates to congressional or bureaucratic control, then spins the resulting muddle as something for which he is not responsible. One sees, for example, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen pontificating far above their pay grades, only to be contradicted either by events or Mr. Obama himself. The president takes a hands-on approach only in maintaining his left-wing political base, be they Wisconsin unionists or Washington lobbies.

This standard operating procedure is reinforced by Mr. Obama’s denigration of historic American accomplishments, often on foreign soil. In the one international arena where he has sought leadership, relations with the Muslim world, the result has been an almost total disaster. Having made what he considered two seminal speeches offering renewed friendship with Islam, he now finds American interests in jeopardy in both locales. Turkey, once a stalwart NATO ally and the site of his first lecture, defies the West on the Iranian nuclear weapons issue, the greatest threat now facing the alliance. His Cairo speech, seemingly falling on deaf ears, was followed by his bemused administration fostering regime change but adding little to the still-undetermined outcome in Egypt.

Of course, Mr. Obama did not create these long-simmering crises. But he contributes to them through his administration’s lack of faith in American power, hard and soft. Favoring multilateralism to American leadership, Ambassador Susan Rice preaches that gospel at the United Nations but neglects reform of the organization’s abysmal corruption and inadequacy. Only when Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi began slaughtering his own people did Washington join the move to redress the charade of Libya’s prominence on the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Aristotle observed nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum — the “horror vacui” — and we are getting a demonstration geopolitically when the world’s paramount power chooses not to lead. Or worse still, when Mr. Obama trumpets a policy without following through. Minor players take the field, exacerbating regional conflicts in an increasingly intertwined world.

As the IDF continues to send the message back to Hamas, now as expected, we hear that “both sides” ought to reflect and stand down.

How bogus to imagine that the Jewish State and Hamas even share the same universe.

For The New York Times it’s already Springtime against Israel because the Jewish State got fed up with swallowing 200 rockets a day – on and off for 10 years. “Israel Hits Mosque and Clinic in Gaza,” runs the latest headline in the Times in an effort to rouse more Israel bashing as it forgets to mention that mosques and clinics and kindergartens are the places from where these ruthless terrorists fire their weapons.

Just yesterday a British journalist collared me and, with that British smile, asked me if I ever paused to consider “the point of view of the other side.” I explained that while German bombs were falling on London, I do not recall Winston Churchill taking a moment to reflect upon the point of view of Adolph Hitler.

Does that answer the question, and if not, Jake Tapper did a marvelous job crushing a PLO mouthpiece when she began giving it the “both sides” song and dance. He nullified her point to point and yes, Jake Tapper works for CNN, so you can never be too sure about anything.

Although you can be sure about the rest of CNN, especially its man on the scene Ben Wedeman, reporting from Gaza, or maybe from inside Israel. In any case, good ol’ Ben was unhappy. This is not a direct quote, but close: “Hamas keeps firing rockets into Israel but they are not hitting anybody. They’re landing in open spaces. So what’s the use?”

We hear you, Ben. Jews are not being killed enough. So what’s the use?

Jews are once again being firebombed and attacked with rocks and bats as they cower in synagogues. In 2014. In Paris.

If you did not think it could happen again you were wrong.
Jews are being attacked again in broad daylight in Europe. And like once before, they cower inside, waiting for the “authorities” to save them.
This time, anti-Israel protesters swirled around the Synagogue Don Isaac Abravanel in Paris, screaming hate-filled epithets and hurling rocks and bottles as the Jews cowered inside, fearful for their lives. At another synagogue nearby, protesters tried to force their way into the building, armed with bats and chairs.
The police were called to assist the Jews to safety. This time they came. What if they didn’t?
Thousands of pro-terrorist protesters surrounded the French shul on Sunday, July 13, throwing rocks into the building as congregants waited inside for police support. They had come to the synagogue on Sunday for a ceremony to honor the memory of the three Israeli teens who were kidnapped and slain: Gilad Shaar, Eyal Yifrach and Naftali Frenkel. The Jews at the other Parisian synagogue were trapped inside after they had gone to attend services.
The protesters tried to attack the Jews because they claim Israelis are killing children in Gaza in what some are calling a massacre.
On Friday night a firebomb went off at the entrance to the synagogue Aulnay-sous-Bois which is a northeastern suburb of Paris. On Saturday a crowd outside a synagogue in an eastern suburb of Paris chanted “death to the Jews” and “slaughter the Jews” in both Arabic and French, and protesters spit on the Jews
So far no one has been hurt. And so far, the call is for the Israelis to show restraint. And so far, the Jews do not fight back, but instead wait for rescue from someone else, or for their leaders to write angry letters.
In Lyon, France, protesters waved Hamas flags and called for the murder of Zionists.
The Bureau of National Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism in France filed protests.
It’s happening again.

Why is the U.S. downplaying or denying attacks against Christians?

“What about the churches which were desecrated? Is this not blasphemy? Where is justice?” — Fr. James Channan OP, Director of The Peace Center, Lahore, Pakistan.

Members of the Islamic group al-Shabaab publicly beheaded the mother of two girls, ages 8 and 15, and her cousin after discovering they were Christians. The girls “were witnesses to the slaughter.” — Somalia.

“Christian teaching is extremely harmful to the mental health of the people.” — Kazakhstan.

Five years’ imprisonment and up to $20,000 in fines for educators if they…speak to a Muslim child of religions other than Islam. — Brunei

Along with an especially jarring list of atrocities committed against Christian minorities throughout the Islamic world, March also saw some callous indifference or worse from the U.S. government.

President Barack Obama was criticized by human rights activists for not addressing the plight of Christians and other minorities during his talks with leaders in Saudi Arabia, where Christianity is actively banned.

According to the Washington-based International Christian Concern [ICC] advocacy group, Obama did not “publicly broach the subject of religious freedom” when he spoke on March 28 with Saudi King Abdullah, despite a letter from 70 members of Congress urging him to “address specific human rights reforms” both in public and in direct meetings with the king and other officials.

“This visit was an excellent opportunity for the president to speak up on an issue that affects millions of Saudi citizens and millions more foreign workers living in Saudi Arabia,” said Todd Daniels, ICC’s Middle East regional manager. He added that it was “remarkable that the president could stay completely silent about religious freedom,” despite pressure from Congress “to publicly address the issue, as well as other human rights concerns, with King Abdullah…”

U.S. officials reportedly responded by saying that “Obama had not had time to raise concerns about the kingdom’s human rights record.”

It’s not often that North Korean-flagged freighters turn up near America’s shores, but when they do, they deserve attention. North Korea has a prolific record of arms smuggling, narcotics dealing, counterfeiting, terrorist ties and missile and nuclear proliferation. So, let’s hope U.S. authorities are keeping a close eye on a North Korean cargo ship called the Mu Du Bong, which late last month called at Cuba, then vanished from the commercial shipping grid for more than a week. This past Thursday, July 10, the Mu Du Bong reappeared at Havana, then began steaming north of Cuba, and as of this writing is cruising the Gulf of Mexico, not all that far from the Mexican port of Tampico — or for that matter, the coast of Texas.

The Mu Du Bong’s mission could be entirely legitimate. But its behavior bears some disturbing similarities to last year’s voyage of another North Korean freighter, the Chong Chon Gang, which last summer sailed into the Caribbean, picked up an illicit load of weapons in Cuba, and got caught trying to smuggle its cargo through the Panama Canal.

Acting on a tip, Panamanian authorities searched the Chong Chon Gang. They discovered some 240 tons of arms and related materiel, including two disassembled MiG-21 jet fighters, additional MiG engines, surface-to-air missile system components, night vision goggles and ammunition — all hidden under more than 200,000 bags of Cuban sugar.

Documents found on board the Chong Chon Gang proved a trove of information for members of the United Nations Panel of Experts on North Korea sanctions, who summarized some of their findings in a UN report released this past March. The U.N. investigators were able to reconstruct an array of techniques with which the Chong Chon Gang tried to hide its illicit mission. They concluded that both the arms shipment and the related transaction between North Korea and Cuba had violated U.N. sanctions on North Korea.

Raymond Ibrahim on ISIS’s Islamic Inspirations — on The Glazov Gang
Shillman Journalism Fellow points to the Islamic roots of the Islamic killing fields.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/raymond-ibrahim-on-isiss-islamic-inspirations-on-the-glazov-gang/