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January 2016

France Moves to Better Coordinate Its Antiterrorism Efforts French intelligence agencies to share information and resources By Matthew Dalton

PARIS—France on Thursday said it is moving to increase cooperation between its domestic and overseas intelligence services, pushing to break down bureaucratic barriers that have hindered its efforts to prevent terrorist attacks.

The government has been seeking to bolster its antiterrorism infrastructure since Islamist militants killed 130 people in Paris in November and another 17 a year ago. A weak point, security analysts say, is the lack of coordination across the multitude of French intelligence agencies, including the police, the country’s foreign intelligence service, its counterespionage agency and a military intelligence directorate.

The French government decided “to deepen coordination between interior and exterior intelligence services in France as well as overseas…particularly from transit zones and sanctuaries where terrorists gather who want to commit acts on our territory,” President François Hollande’s office said after the government’s weekly cabinet meeting.

France, like other Western governments, is scrambling to gather information on Islamic State’s attack planning in Syria, where hundreds of French citizens are still fighting in the ranks of the militant group. France ramped up that effort even before Islamic State operatives from France and Belgium slipped into Europe to sow carnage on the streets of Paris on Nov. 13.

Israel Quietly Courts Sunni States Shared animosity toward Tehran fosters a new push for closer ties By Rory Jones

Growing tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran have raised hopes in Israel that officials can build closer ties with the Gulf monarchies based on their shared animosity toward Tehran.

Led by Dore Gold, director-general of the foreign ministry, Israel has stepped up efforts to mend and improve ties in the region—all in a bid to counter Iranian influence and the threat of Islamic extremism.

A long-standing hawkish ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mr. Gold said Israel and Sunni Arab states face a shared threat in Iran.

“Clearly there’s been a convergence of interests between Israel and many Sunni Arab states given the fact that they both face identical challenges in the region,” Mr. Gold told The Wall Street Journal.

The recent torching of the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Tehran—and diplomatic fallout between the Persian nation and Arab Gulf states—have underlined how common ground appears to be growing.

Iran’s nuclear deal with the U.S. and other foreign powers in July helped spur Israeli efforts to further develop back-channel relations with Arab states, Israeli officials say.

Mr. Netanyahu fought the deal for fear it would encourage Iran to further support military proxies in Yemen and Syria, a concern shared by Sunni Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies.

“What we have seen in the past six months is an intensification of the relationship [with Sunni Arab states],” a senior Israeli official said. “Israel is on the same side.”

Terror Threat Increases on U.S. Southern Border see note

Janet Levy,Los Angeles writes

“More Pakistanis and Afghans (including 4 know Islamic State operatives) on the terror watch carrying American passports entered the United States in October than in the prior 12 month period. These potential jihadists are being transported on remote farm roads instead of interstates and being stashed in Acala, Texas, a ghost town outside of El Paso within easy access of a state highway.Judicial Watch (JW) reports the existence of an ISIS camp within a few miles from El Paso and another camp within proximity of Deming and Columbus, New Mexico.Reportedly, Texas Congressman (Beto O’Rourke) contacted local FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and Border Patrol officers in an effort to identify and possibly intimidate sources that may have been used by JW to break the story of the nearby ISIS camps.There is growing cooperation at our southern border between organized crime and terrorist groups, including Hezbollah, to finance terrorism, launder money and smuggle people and drugs into the U.S.See the report below from New York Analysis of Policy and Government. ”

More Pakistanis and Afghans, including those of military age, carrying U.S. passports, and on the terror watch list illegally entered the United States in the first month of this fiscal year (October) than in all of FY2015 (September 2014 to October 2015), According to a San Diego Reader report.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-California) in a recent letter to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, stated:
“It is routinely said that there is no ‘specific and credible information about an attack on the homeland.’ Despite this assertion, the Southern land border remains vulnerable to intrusion and exists as a point of vulnerability. And evidently there are criminal organizations and individuals with the networks and the knowhow to facilitate illegal entry into the United States without regard for one’s intentions or status on a terror watch list. The detention of two Pakistani nationals underscores the fact that any serious effort to secure our homeland must include effective border security and immigration enforcement.”
According to the San Diego Reader, “Muhammad Azeem and Muktar Ahmad, both in their 20s, surrendered to U.S. Border Patrol agents in September, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One was listed on the Terrorist Screening Database for ‘associations with a known or suspected terrorist. The other was a positive match for derogatory information in an alternative database,’ according to Hunter’s letter. Azeem and Ahmad are among dozens of men – described by Border Patrol agents as “military age and carrying U.S. cash” who began entering the U.S. through a Tijuana-based human-smuggling pipeline in September.”

MY SAY: JANUARY 23, 1968 REMEMBER THE PUEBLO?

It was also an election year and Papa Kim, the present tyrant’s daddy humiliated America.

On January 23, 1968, the USS Pueblo, a Navy intelligence vessel, engaged in a routine surveillance of the North Korean coast was intercepted by North Korean patrol boats. The North Koreans captured lightly armed vessel and demanded surrender of its crew. The Americans attempted to escape, and the North Koreans opened fire, wounding the commander and two others. With capture inevitable, the Americans stalled for time, destroying the classified information aboard while taking further fire. Several more crew members were wounded.

The Pueblo was boarded and taken ashore where the crew was bound and blindfolded and transported to Pyongyang, where they were charged with spying within North Korea’s 12-mile territorial limit and imprisoned.

The United States maintained that the Pueblo had been in international waters and demanded the release of the captive sailors, but President Lyndon Johnson ordered no direct retaliation, but the United States began a military buildup in the area. North Korean authorities, coerced a confession and apology out of Pueblo commander Bucher, in which he stated, “I will never again be a party to any disgraceful act of aggression of this type.” The rest of the crew also signed a confession under threat of torture.

The prisoners were forced to study propaganda materials and beaten for straying from the compound’s strict rules. In August, the North Koreans staged a phony news conference in which the prisoners were to praise their humane treatment, but the Americans thwarted the Koreans by inserting innuendoes and sarcastic language into their statements. Some prisoners also rebelled in photo shoots by casually sticking out their middle finger; a gesture that their captors didn’t understand. Later, the North Koreans beat the Americans for a week.

On December 23, 1968, 11 months after the Pueblo‘s capture, U.S. and North Korean negotiators reached a settlement to resolve the crisis. Under the settlement’s terms, the United States admitted the ship’s intrusion into North Korean territory, apologized for the action, and pledged to cease any future such action.

That day, the surviving 82 crewmen walked one by one across the “Bridge of No Return” at Panmunjon to freedom in South Korea. Commander Bucher, who was a decorated Navy Commander in World War 11 , Korea and Vietnam, but suffered ignominy for his apology, died in January 2004.

The Mirage of a United Europe An idea hatched by its most advanced minds is now what Europe has to find its way past, if it can. by Wilfred McClay

Daniel Johnson’s question—“Does Europe Have a Future?”—appears increasingly to be the question of the hour. Of course, it has been asked before, and many times over. The specter of European failure has been our civilization’s constant companion for a century or more, certainly at least since the horrors of World War I. Yet in our own historical moment the question seems to have achieved a kind of ripeness in a Europe that looks too exhausted either to reproduce or to defend itself.

Still, much depends upon what one means by “Europe.” Is it the ambitious but fraught project of welding the continent into a fluid, borderless, ever more tightly unified economic, political, and cultural union, held together by an abstract invented supranational identity, a common currency adorned with generic secular symbols, and the tentacles of a vast administrative magistracy headquartered in Brussels, and intended to serve as a disinterested substitute for obsolete historical conventions or customs? That is one thing.

Or does “Europe” refer to a certain rich, complex way of life, along with the values and institutions and forms of consciousness that have made that way of life possible: free and self-governing institutions, constitutionally limited governments, prosperity-generating economies, equality before the law, protection of fundamental human rights, freedom of expression and of rational inquiry and imagination, recognition of the dignity of the individual person, a high regard for criticism and self-criticism, and a glorious and cosmopolitan heritage of ideas, stories, artifacts, sciences, languages, faiths, cuisines, literatures, historical consciousnesses, and arguments, all laid out before its heirs as if on a single vast table stretching from antiquity to tomorrow? That is something else again.

The two meanings of “Europe” are obviously closely related, but they are by no means the same, and it is a grave error to conflate them. In fact, the first, newer understanding of “Europe”—the one encapsulated in the initials EU—has in the end necessarily come about at the expense of the second, older one, and the two have inevitably become antithetical. It should by now be evident why this is so. The deep rationale for the EU project lay in a particular conception of the lessons of modern European history—namely, that the very existence of the modern nation-state was to blame for the rivalries and savage wars that in the 20th century wreaked such havoc upon the European continent and much of the rest of the world.

This very influential but very flawed simplification, as Daniel Johnson rightly notes, has never received the searching criticism and correction it deserves. But even if the nation-state’s inherent menace could be made plausible and demonstrable, it would still fail by miles to take the measure of the lost benefits that have ensued from the consequent decision to disregard national polities and cultures and to abandon the forms of sovereignty and the institutions of self-rule that have been essential to the perpetuation of such nations.

The current migration crisis has been a startling reminder of those ignored tradeoffs. Such a crisis could not have occurred without the weakening of the nation-state imposed by the postwar order. Indeed, the crisis has already forced a de-facto flight from the “Schengen” ideal of a borderless Europe, and in at least some quarters seems to be bringing on an uneasy recognition that there may be no workable substitute for the particularisms inherent in l’Europe des patries (the Europe of nations, in the Gaullist formulation cited by Johnson): an older way of understanding and mapping Europe that is more in accord with the shape of human sentiment. Is it really so surprising that Europeans, qua Europeans, are not convinced they are prepared to defend Europe, qua Europe? Or that a steadily growing number of Germans, qua Germans, are mad as hell about the transformation of their culture being imposed upon them by their guilt-ridden elite leaders, and are determined to stop it?

The Obama Administration Races to Finalize a Bad Nuclear Deal by Fred Fleitz

Despite the victory lap President Obama took in last night’s State of the Union address on his nuclear diplomacy with Iran, Democrats and Republicans are worried about Iran’s increasingly belligerent behavior and the Obama administration’s refusal to do anything about it.

This concern was worsened yesterday by Iran’s reported “temporary” seizure of two small U.S. Navy ships and their crews yesterday, an issue that the president did not address in his speech. Iran released the ships and their crews early today after the U.S. government apologized for their accidental straying into Iranian waters.

The president said the nuclear deal with Iran (the July 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) is a great success, and that Iran has complied with its agreement to roll back its nuclear program by sending enriched uranium out of the country and disassembling centrifuges.

Mr. Obama’s remarks tracked with similar statements by Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani that Iran has met the requirements for “Implementation Day,” an important benchmark of the nuclear agreement when most sanctions against Iran worth up to $150 billion will be lifted. According to Kerry and Rouhani, the U.S. could lift sanctions in a few days.

For Iran to reach Implementation Day, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) must verify that Iran has taken a series of steps to roll back its nuclear program. These include disassembling and storing all but about 6,000 uranium-enrichment centrifuges, diluting or sending out of the country all but 300 kg of enriched uranium in exchange for an equivalent amount of uranium ore, and removing the core of the Arak heavy-water reactor. This reactor is to be redesigned with Chinese assistance so that it will produce less plutonium than its original design.

There are some uncertainties that Iran has reached the Implementation Day requirements. First, the IAEA has not yet verified Iran’s actions.

Second, there are discrepancies in figures cited on how much enriched uranium Iran has sent out of the country. Kerry said over 25,000 pounds. An Iranian official said 8.5 metric tons, which equals 18,740 pounds. Further complicating this, the IAEA said in a November report that Iran had 12,639 kg of enriched uranium, equivalent to 27,864 pounds.

Hillary’s Emails: Hating Israel Released emails reveal just how deeply Clinton and her advisers despise the Jewish State Ari Lieberman

There are many reasons to dislike Hillary Clinton. For one, she’s an unrepentant liar, fabricating everything from her Brian Williamesque brush with death in Bosnia to her parent’s pedigree to her claim that she believed a video caused the deaths of four heroes in Benghazi.

She is also unethical, having accepted large sums of money to the Clinton Foundation from countries and entities working on behalf of foreign governments impacted by her decisions as secretary of state. There is some circumstantial evidence suggesting that she may have been influenced by these rather large contributions. In one well publicized case, Russia was able to acquire 20% of the United States’ uranium reserves in an energy deal that required State Department approval. A paper trail from that transaction reveals that the Clintons’ and their foundation benefited from substantial donations issued by entities with vested interests in ensuring the Russian acquisition of America’s strategic assets. Clinton was required to publicly disclose these contributions but never did. The FBI has now expanded its Emailgate probe of Clinton to include whether the possible “intersection” of Clinton Foundation work and State Department business violated public corruption laws.

Hillary Clinton, who fancies herself as the champion of human rights and women’s rights, is also a serial hypocrite. Records show that the Clinton Foundation accepted funds from countries with abysmal human rights records where misogyny is regularly practiced and the principles of due process are routinely trampled upon.

The Mullahs Humiliate America — Again and Again Obama’s appeasement bears its catastrophic fruit. Joseph Klein

On January 12th, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard seized two U.S. naval patrol boats with ten sailors aboard. The vessels had evidently strayed a little over a mile into Iranian territorial waters. Iran released the sailors a day later, but not before trying to reap as much propaganda value from the incident as possible. The semiofficial Fars news agency claimed “the American ships were ‘snooping’ around in Iranian waters.” The captors photographed the sailors after they were evidently forced to their knees with their hands over their heads. The display of such humiliating photographs of disarmed military prisoners is arguably a violation of the Geneva Convention.

Iran used the incident to send a message to Congress – don’t even think about instituting new sanctions. “This incident in the Persian Gulf, which probably will not be the American forces’ last mistake in the region, should be a lesson to troublemakers in the US Congress,” Major General Hassan Firouzabadi, head of Iran’s armed forces, was quoted as saying by Tasnim news agency.

This incident followed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s provocative firing late last December of missiles within 1,500 yards of the Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier, which had been traveling in international waters.

Secretary of State John Kerry put a happy face on the release of the sailors. Kerry thanked the Iranians for their “cooperation” and characterized the positive outcome as proof that the diplomacy leading to the nuclear deal had paid off.

What About the Other Five Americans Iran Is Still Holding? By Arthur L. Herman

To paraphrase Michelle Obama, after seven years of her husband’s being in office, I can safely say many of us are, for the first time in our lives, ashamed to be Americans.

His disingenuous State of the Union speech last night was one reminder of this; the seizing of two Navy riverine vessels by Iranian Revolutionary Guards yesterday was another.

The ten sailors on board those boats are lucky. News agencies have announced that they have just been released. According to CNN, “the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and U.S. officials appear to be at odds over whether the U.S. apologized for the incident before their release.” The release came after Iran had inspected the boats and decided they weren’t engaged in espionage but had simply broken down and then drifted into Iranian waters. Disturbing video of the sailors’ capture shows them disarmed, on their knees and with hands behind their heads.​

It’s not clear which is more pathetic: that Iran apparently demanded an apology from the United States for what was clearly an accident, or that these vessels suffered a mechanical failure in a critical situation and then lost communication with their command ship. It’s a painful reminder that our armed forces have been starved of funds to maintain and repair equipment during Obama’s watch as commander-in-chief, and they’ve also watched their numbers steadily shrink.

Even worse, this incident comes weeks after Iran taunted us by suddenly test-firing a missile less than 1,500 yards away from American ships that were patrolling the Hormuz Straits. We of course did nothing, just as we will do nothing to retaliate against Iran for seizing our Navy personnel this time. Next time, the test-firing might be only 500 yards away, or 500 feet. Next time, American sailors might not be released. And why not? Tehran clearly views America with contempt, pegging us as a feeble former superpower trapped in death-spiral decline. Our own president sees us the same way, so why shouldn’t one of our leading enemies?

Rubio the Reformer, Cruz the Replacer A big problem with the GOP is its agenda; a bigger problem is its very structure. By Michael A. Needham

Yuval Levin has written one of the best analyses of the Republican primary. In it, he argues that the central theme of the campaign is the relationship between America’s political establishment and the public at large, and that each of the four major contenders offers a different diagnosis. To simplify, Trump thinks the establishment is stupid, Christie thinks it is weak, Cruz that it is corrupt, and Rubio that its ideas are anachronistic. There is, of course, an element of truth to each candidate’s message.

Yuval’s framing makes clear an important distinction in the field that is relevant to the ongoing debate on the future of the Republican party. Though the basic “establishment” and “anti-establishment” labels, applied so often to the field by the media, sometimes muddle as much as they clarify, there really are two camps in this primary: Those who seek to revitalize the establishment and the party by fixing their flaws, and those who think there is a more fundamental problem with the nature of the establishment itself, a matter of identity that cannot be repaired merely with the right president or policy platform.

Christie and other so-called “establishment” candidates clearly fall into the former category. So too, though, does Rubio, a candidate with anti-establishment credentials and a genuinely disruptive message and agenda (just ask the insurance industry) that stands out from those of his competitors.