RUTHFULLY YOURS

The “most transparent administration in history” is once again revealing the rank hypocrisy of President Obama’s assessment. In a motion filed Monday night, lawyers from the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) asked U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson to delay the transfer of documents related to the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, until after her rulings requiring that transfer can be appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. If their bid is successful, it could push the appeals process past the Obama administration’s time in office. In short, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is trying to run out the clock.

Last July, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the DOJ to turn over a “Vaughn index” of all Fast and Furious-requested documents sought by Judicial Watch, which had filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in June 2012. The records sought by Judicial Watch were those withheld from the Oversight Committee when President Obama cited executive privilege in a transparent effort to protect his Attorney General. U.S. District Court Judge John D. Bates lifted the 16-month delay, despite contentions by the DOJ that turning over the records would interfere with litigation between the agency and the Oversight Committee, which had subpoenaed the same documents.

Bates’ ruling was clear:

In the [February 15, 2013] order granting the stay, this court explicitly noted that the DOJ ‘does not seek, and the court will not award, an indefinite stay pending ultimate resolution of the House Committee litigation,’ and that ‘the benefits of delaying this case might well [become] too attenuated to justify any further delay …Because many of the issues to be resolved in this case do not overlap with the House committee, and because resolving those issues will not risk upsetting the delicate balance of powers in subpoena disputes between the political branches, the Court will require DOJ to produce a Vaughn index here.

Bates also noted that no court has ever “expressly recognized” the executive privilege claims made by Obama preventing these documents from being seen by Congress and the American public.

A month later, with the dispute now being adjudicated by Berman, the DOJ was also ordered to turn over a “privilege log,” a.k.a. a list of the documents being withheld. Both orders were supposed to be fulfilled by Oct. 1, 2014.

On Monday the DOJ made it clear they will make yet another attempt to defy both orders. “The Department respectfully submits that it would be preferable for the parties, this Court, and the D.C. Circuit — if an appeal were taken — to have any injunctive order await the conclusion of the district court litigation to allow for orderly and complete appellate proceedings,” DOJ lawyers wrote.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/islamic-state-find-us-soldiers-homes-show-up-and-slaughter-them
Law enforcement bulletin warned of ISIS urging jihad attacks on US soil : Jana Winter

A law enforcement bulletin obtained by FoxNews.com warned that Islamic State fighters have increased calls for “lone wolves” to attack U.S. soldiers in America in recent months, citing one tweet that called for jihadists to find service members’ addresses online and then “show up and slaughter them.”

There will be “a continued call – by Western fighters in Syria and terrorist organizations – for lone offender attacks against U.S. military facilities and personnel,” warned a July law enforcement intelligence bulletin from the Central Florida Intelligence Exchange, a state-run agency that gathers, assesses and shares threat information and works with the Department of Homeland Security. “These threats will most likely increase should the U.S. or its allies attack the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) in Syria or Iraq.”

In one example cited in the bulletin, a British jihadist encouraged radicals still living in the West to use Facebook and LinkedIn to find and target soldiers.

“You could literally search for soldiers, find their town, photos of them, look for address in Yellowbook or something,” the tweet read. “Then show up and slaughter them.”

On Thursday, Peter Boogaard, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, told FoxNews.com that “there is no credible intelligence at this time to suggest that there is an active plot by (ISIS) to carry out an attack in the United States.”

“Public postings by people claiming to be (ISIS) supporters on social media threatening to carry out attacks against the United States and our allies have been made, and we are aware of them,” Boogaard said in a statement. “The product referenced is based on such open source social media reports from earlier this summer and is not considered to reference specific, credible evidence of a plot against the homeland.”

The bulletin came out long before Tuesday’s indictment of an upstate New York man on a raft of terror-related charges, including attempting to kill “officers and employees of the United States. Mufid Elfgeeh, 30, of Rochester, was indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury on three counts of attempting to provide material support and resources to Islamic State. Elfgeeh was arrested in late May in a Walmart parking lot after a sting in which an FBI informant offered to sell him guns and silencers, which Elfgeeh allegedly wanted to use to kill returning American troops as well as Shiite Muslims living in the region.

Killing U.S. troops on American soil is an increasing focus of jihadists, according to the bulletin, titled “Continued Threat to Military Personnel from Al Qaeda Inspired Homegrown Violent Extremists.” It was sent out on July 8, 2014, “in response to recent social media messaging from Western fighters in Syria calling for attacks against “soldiers in the West.” Instead of luring radicalized Americans to the Middle East, Islamic State will likely encourage them to stay home and kill U.S. soldiers here, the bulletin warned.

Fresh terror busts in Australia expose a common Achilles’ heel of the West: Indiscriminate refugee policies turn free countries into breeding grounds for jihad. It’s the same game in America. Soldiers of Islam have weaponized our blind generosity against us.

In Sydney this week, authorities detained a half-dozen Muslim plotters and arrested a top collaborator in an alleged conspiracy to kidnap and behead a random Australian citizen. The accused mastermind? Mohammad Ali Baryalei, an Afghan refugee turned Aussie Islamic State recruiter. He and his aristocratic family were welcomed Down Under decades ago. Baryalei returned the favor by taking to the streets of Sydney to recruit and radicalize dozens of fellow Muslim immigrants or their children.

Baryalei’s minions include Australian jihadist Khaled Sharrouf, the homicidal son of Lebanese immigrants. Sharrouf is now based in Syria, where he infamously tweeted a photo of his elementary-school-age son brandishing a severed human head.

The Sydney Beheading Bust comes on the heels of a separate outbreak of violence by Afghan refugees aligned with the terror group Hezbollah. In late August, Aussie police broke up a bloody riot involving members of the “420 gang” — Muslim teenage boys and young men who post sword-wielding, AK-47-toting selfies on social media. The self-described “Shia soldiers” quote Hezbollah militant imam Hassan Nasrallah online, while wreaking havoc in Sydney slums offline.

International “human rights” wags have attacked Australian officials for trying to crack down on unfettered immigration from terror-sponsoring states. Now, many of those ungrateful imports are crying “Islamophobia” as law-enforcement authorities try to stop the head-choppers from spilling blood on their soil.

Australia, we feel your pain. America’s unselective and desultory asylum and refugee policies have also enabled jihadists of all stripes and blades to recruit, convert, plot, pillage, rape, and kill.

In our heartland, Minneapolis has become “Little Mogadishu” — a haven for Somali refugees targeted by Islamic supremacists. It’s a deadly two-way street. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy noted in The Grand Jihad: “We not only import Somali aliens, including their ‘traditional leaders.’ We also send back aspiring Islamist militants, including suicide bombers. Since 2006, the FBI has detected that many Somalis are returning to fight on behalf of al-Shabaab, and more are launched from Minneapolis than from any other U.S. haven.”

Some insults and indignations stick. Some injustices don’t fade.

Back when I was around 15 years old I was offered a summertime job. This was in Montreal. I would have to present myself for a brief interview, but since a high authority in town had recommended me, the fix was in, it was in the bag. The interview was a formality.

The man behind the big desk began asking questions…strange questions.

“Your father is Polish. Yes?”

“No, my father is Jewish.”

“I understand,” said the man. “But he is a Polish Jew.”

I did not know what that was, and I said so. Polish? Spanish? What’s the difference?

“Polish Jews,” the man persisted, “are known to be Talmudic, no? Bookish, studious.”

True, my father knew the depths of Torah and Talmud – but bookish? He worked 14 hours a day in the leather trade.

“I am sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean they tend to be lazy.”

Western nations keep the talks going, to justify costly de-carbonization programs at home.

At a perilous juncture in world affairs and with the international system visibly breaking down — the first forcible annexation of European territory since Hitler’s war; a bunch of fanatics and psychopaths, perpetrators of a double genocide, seizing control of a vast swath of the Levant, and American leadership exhausted — the U.N. secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, is convening a summit of world leaders to discuss, of all things, global warming. True, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton calls it the most consequential and urgent set of challenges facing the world, but the leaders of Canada, Germany, China, and India appear not to agree and are giving next week’s meeting in New York a pass.

The idea for the summit is Mr. Ban’s, who has made global warming the overriding mission of the United Nations since becoming secretary general in 2007. No previous secretary general has evinced so little interest in the great matters of peace and war and has so little to show for his efforts. Were it not for the prestige of his job, Mr. Ban would cut a hapless figure, over the years making a string of histrionic warnings and absurdly optimistic forecasts of the imminence of a global warming treaty.

Those might have been understandable at the outset of his term, before hopes for a treaty were repeatedly dashed. Mr. Ban was in Bali at the end of his first year hailing the annual climate talks as the chance to usher in a “a new age of green economics.” After the collapse of attempts to agree on a new treaty two years later, he told delegates at Copenhagen, “You sealed a deal,” which they hadn’t, and promised to have a legally binding treaty in 2010, which there wasn’t.

Having lost the race to have a new treaty in place before the end of the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period, Mr. Ban declared at the start of the 2012 Durban conference, “It would be difficult to overstate the gravity of this moment.” So he gave it his best shot: “Without exaggeration, we can say: the future of our planet is at stake.” In fact, Durban was the high water mark of hopes for a son-of-Kyoto. Agreement in Durban on a road map to an outcome “with legal force” was later eviscerated by developing nations at subsequent conferences.

The fact that ISIS focuses on beheadings rather than elaborate plots makes them that much harder to foil.

On Thursday, Australian authorities claimed they thwarted a plot by supporters of the Islamic State to grab random people off the street and then behead the captured citizens on videotape. Australia’s attorney general said that the massive raid, the largest counterterrorism operation in the nation’s history, involving more than 800 police officers and raids of at least twelve properties, was necessary because, “If the . . . police had not acted today, there is a likelihood that this would have happened.”

Australian prime minister Tony Abbott confirmed that the raids were prompted by intercepted phone calls, from an Australian of Afghan descent believed to be Mohammad Ali Baryalei. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that he is suspected to be the “most senior Australian member of the terrorist group Islamic State, having traveled to Syria in April last year.” A proselytizer for the “Street Dawah Movement,” Barylei “was outspoken and wouldn’t shy from speaking the truth regardless,” a former fellow Dawah member told Fairfax Media. “He wasn’t pleased with living in Australian society and wanted to live in an Islamic society away from open alcoholism, homosexuality, fornication, drugs, and capitalism.”

Baryalei is credited with recruiting at least two fellow Australians to the cause. One, Khaled Sharrouf, infamously tweeted pictures of himself executing prisoners in Iraq and images of his seven-year-old son holding a severed head in Syria. Another fellow Australian, Mohamed Elomar, has also released images of himself holding the decapitated heads of his “enemies.”

So here’s the troubling question: Why did Baryalei bother making the phone calls?

We’ve been hearing for months that the Islamic State is brilliant at social media. The terror group can reach out to supporters, sympathizers, and assassins all around the world with a single tweet, Facebook post, or YouTube video.

If the terror group wants Muslims in Sydney, Australia — or in New York City, or in Topeka, Kansas — to grab innocent people off the street and saw their heads off, all it needs to do is say so. The word will get to the intended ears quickly enough.

Republicans have multiple plans to offer basically the same health-care at lower cost.

Supporters of the Obama administration like to create the impression that there is no viable alternative to the Affordable Care Act — i.e., Obamacare. But that is demonstrably not true. Republican senators Richard Burr, Tom Coburn, and Orrin Hatch introduced a plan earlier this year that would cover just as many people with insurance as Obamacare at a fraction of the cost.

Now we have confirmation, in the form of a new cost estimate, that a similarly constructed but slightly different proposal would also cost less, while covering nearly the same number of people.

The plan, developed and promoted by the 2017 Project — a group dedicated to developing a conservative reform agenda — shares several key features with Burr-Coburn-Hatch:

It repeals the ACA.

It leaves in place the employer-sponsored system of coverage through which the vast majority of working Americans and their families get insurance today.

It would provide new “continuous coverage” protection for people who stay enrolled in health insurance. They could move from employer coverage to the individual market, and vice versa, without their health status factoring into the premiums they owe. Their preexisting medical conditions would also have to be covered by insurance plans, and they couldn’t be denied coverage by an insurer based on their health status.

It provides new federal funding for high-risk pools, aimed at ensuring affordable options for persons with expensive conditions and minimizing the premium effects of more high-cost patients entering the individual insurance market.

It provides new, age-adjusted tax credits for persons who do not get their health insurance through an employer. Workers in firms with 50 or fewer employees could opt for the credit in lieu of tax-exempt employer-paid premiums.

It places an upper limit on the tax preference for employer-paid premiums, pegged initially to a premium level exceeded by 25 percent of employer plans.

It allows participants in the Medicaid program to get the tax credits and thus enroll in the same private insurance plans available to others in the individual insurance market.

According to a retired high-level U.S. diplomat, top aides to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton concealed embarrassing documents from investigators probing the deadly Islamic-terror attack of September 11, 2012, in Benghazi, Libya. For longtime Clinton watchers, this story of sneaky staffers and stashed papers sounds like an episode of a 1990s teledrama called Whitewater.

Former deputy assistant secretary of state Raymond Maxwell says he learned about unusual activity in the State Department’s basement as the Accountability Review Board (ARB) sought official records pertinent to the Benghazi assault, which killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.

“I heard about it and decided to check it out on a Sunday afternoon,” Maxwell told the Washington-based Daily Signal’s Sharyl Attkisson, an Emmy-winning former CBS News correspondent. Maxwell, a 21-year-veteran Foreign Service officer, says he encountered an office director who served Clinton’s leading advisers. She stood among cartons of documents and piles of papers.

“She told me, ‘Ray, we are to go through these stacks and pull out anything that might put anybody in the [Near Eastern Affairs] front office or the seventh floor in a bad light,’” Maxwell told Attkisson. The secretary and top personnel occupy State’s seventh floor.

Maxwell asked his colleague, “‘But isn’t that unethical?’ She responded, ‘Ray, those are our orders.’”

Maxwell says that Hillary’s then–chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, and then–deputy chief of staff, Jake Sullivan, also were in the basement, inspecting pre-attack diplomatic cables and other items and deciding what to show the ARB and what to spare them. Maxwell considered this “an exercise in misdirection.”

In the question of what the group that calls itself the Islamic State should be called, France has decided to officially use “Daesh” — an insulting Arabic acronym used by Kurds and others in the region.

Secretary of State John Kerry has his own moniker for the terrorists that the administration formally refers to as ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant).

“What would you call — I call them ISIS: Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) asked Kerry today at a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting on the administration’s strategy.

“What would you tell the American people? OK, we are doing this support. We are at war. We are a counter-terrorism operation. Whatever you want to call it,” Poe said, referring to Kerry’s insistence on “war” terminology not being important. “Who is the enemy? Define the enemy for me. What would you call them?”

“Well, I call them the enemy of Islam, because that’s what I think they are, and they certainly don’t represent a state, even though they try to claim to,” Kerry replied.

“So, officially, we should refer to them as the enemy of Islam?” Poe asked.

“Well, I do,” said Kerry. “I don’t know if there’s an official whatever. But I hope you join me in doing that, because that’s what I think they are, and [they] don’t they deserve to have a reference in their name that gives them legitimacy.”

“Are they the enemy of the United States?” Poe continued.

“They are an enemy of humanity,” Kerry responded. “…Definitively, it is in the national security interest of our country, with Americans over there with passports learning how to fight and taking part in this.”

Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) said he thought “many” people were “shocked” when Obama “emphasized that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant was in fact not Islamic.”

Twenty days before the caliphate was created, Anne Patterson said “we can do much” to “contain and roll back the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.”
WASHINGTON — One of the point people at the helm of the State Department’s strategy against the Islamic State and coalition-building effort is the U.S. ambassador reviled in Egypt for cozying with the Muslim Brotherhood during the summer 2013 Tamarod protests.

Both President Obama and Anne Patterson were lambasted by protesters as propping up the Muslim Brotherhood and sanctioning the Islamists’ abuses against the Egyptian people. As the U.S. envoy in Cairo, Patterson discouraged the epic protests against Islamist rule and reportedly tried to dissuade Coptic Christians from taking part.

Egyptian protesters were not shy about expressing their feelings of betrayal, hoisting banners that accused Obama of supporting terrorism in backing the Morsi government and holding photos of Patterson smiling and laughing at a meeting with Brotherhood leader Mohammed Badie. “We know what you did last summer,” read one banner, while another said, “Anne Patterson, leave Egypt now and go to hell!!!”

“Wake up America, Obama backs up a fascist regime in Egypt,” said one banner, while another placed an international “no” symbol over Obama’s face and read, “Obama, you can’t fool your people and the world any more. You finance & back terrorism.”

Al-Ahram newspaper ran a piece accusing Patterson of conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood to smuggle fighters in from Gaza to “spread chaos” in the country.

“Your article’s claim that I personally am involved in a conspiracy to divide and destabilise Egypt is absolutely absurd and dangerous,” she wrote in a letter slamming the article [1] as “outrageous, fictitious, and thoroughly unprofessional.”

When she left the ambassador post at the end of August, Egyptians partied [2] outside the U.S. Embassy in a “good riddance” celebration.

Patterson was promoted to assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs at the end of last year.