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2016

Fifteen Questions Hillary Should Answer Under Oath The public needs to know the truth about Clinton’s private server. By Deroy Murdock

Hillary Clinton just can’t catch a break.

The Democrat nominee’s new long march to the White House gets longer by the day. The scandal over her misuse of state secrets via a lawless, do-it-yourself private server seemed to be behind her last month — thanks to the FBI’s and Justice Department’s whitewashing of what looked, to the naked eye, like high crimes.

But Clinton’s initial clean getaway has bogged down into a standoff.

For starters, Clinton’s go-to excuse — “Secretary Powell has admitted he did the same thing,” as she told CNN last March — has crashed and burned. She also has claimed that she installed her private server because her predecessor made her do it.

“Her people have been trying to pin it on me,” Colin Powell told People magazine last Saturday. “The truth is, she was using [the private e-mail server] for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did.”

Despite the assertions of Clinton and her allies, Powell never had a private server. He did have a private AOL account, for sending personal messages to friends and loved ones and also to transmit unclassified e-mails to State Department colleagues.

Alas, a grand total of two classified e-mails wound up on Powell’s AOL account, according to the State Department’s inspector general. This compares to zero, each, for secretaries of state Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice.

RELATED: If Hillary Is Corrupt, Congress Should Impeach Her

As for Clinton, her server held 2,113 classified e-mails — literally more than 1,000 times as many as Powell’s AOL account, thus rendering hilarious her assertion that, “We both did the same thing.”

Meanwhile, the absolution of FBI chief James Comey and Attorney General Loretta Lynch did not spare Clinton from the federal government’s pesky judicial branch nor the even peskier watchdogs at the conservative law firm Judicial Watch.

The State Department last week agreed to expedite its delivery of all e-mails to and from Clinton that the FBI discovered in its probe of her private, unsecured server. This decision flows directly from Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit before U.S. District Court judge James E. Boasberg, an Obama appointee.

The request for these e-mails spans February 2, 2009 to January 31, 2013, i.e., all but the first twelve days of Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

VIDEO: The Clintons Are Corruption Defined

Judicial Watch hopes to view what Clinton laughed off as “a few more” new messages on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! last night, namely 14,900 previously unrevealed documents that Clinton sent or received via e-mail. The existence of these records became public yesterday.

Judge Boasberg ordered the State Department to develop a plan to expedite delivery of these materials and present it to him on September 22 — just four days before the first presidential debate between Clinton and Republican nominee Donald J. Trump.

“The American people will now see more of the emails Hillary Clinton tried to hide from them,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton stated. “Simply put, our lawsuits have unraveled Hillary Clinton’s email cover-up.”

House Oversight Chairman Has Questions for FBI Regarding Clinton Email Storage By Debra Heine

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz is demanding answers from the FBI regarding the possibility that unauthorized people such as Hillary Clinton’s lawyers and IT staffers mishandled classified emails. This comes a week after Chairman Chaffetz and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte sent a letter to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia outlining the case for perjury against Hillary Clinton, citing several examples where her sworn testimony before Congress was incompatible with evidence collected by the FBI in their investigation into her private email server.

On Monday, the Utah Republican sent a letter to FBI Director James Comey asking if the possibility of “spillage” had been “fully investigated and remediated.”

“Just as classified information may not be provided to anyone without an appropriate clearance, classified information must also not be stored on a computer system that is not authorized to store it,” Chaffetz wrote. “The transfer of classified information from a computer system authorized to store it to one that is not is called spillage.”

According to the Hill, information about the storage of Clinton’s classified emails at her lawyers’ offices, was not included in the documents the FBI gave to Congress last week.

Documents requested in the letter:

Information as to whether the FBI investigated the possibility that Secretary Clinton’s classified emails were improperly stored or accessed by her personal representatives or by individuals at Williams & Connolly LLP, including on any unauthorized electronic devices or media, such as desktops or servers, and the Bureau’s conclusion if it did investigate that;

A description of the manner in which Clinton’s personal representatives and individuals at Williams & Connolly stored any electronic devices and media and physical documents containing Secretary Clinton’s classified emails when they were not in use, and a description of the physical location in which those devices, media, and documents were accessed when they were in use, including the Bureau’s assessment of whether those met applicable security requirements;

What steps were taken to remediate any possible spillage of classified information stored on electronic media or in any of the other various locations in which Secretary Clinton’s emails were stored and accessed;

Whether the FBI informed Secretary Clinton of the classified findings in its investigation and, if so, when;

Whether the FBI is conducting any other related investigations, or has attempted to do so, and the current status of each such investigation;

Whether the FBI referred any of its findings to any other agency for review for potential security violations or misconduct or disciplinary proceedings;

An unclassified copy of the documents provided to the Committee on August 16, 2016, with all classified information redacted.

Israel and Texas: A Growing Alliance By P. David Hornik

Over the past decades Israel has been growing and developing at a phenomenal pace. Thanks to ongoing immigration and a high birthrate, its population has doubled over the past 30 years. Since 1990 its GDP per capita has tripled. And the start-up nation—still very small with a population of 8.5 million—has become a world leader in some of the most important fields.

After a recent visit to Israel as head of a delegation from his state, Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush noted, among other things, that Israel’s water-desalination company, IDE Technologies, is considering a “program in Texas to help cities, communities and industrial partners meet their water needs.” Israeli firms are already helping California solve its water crisis.

It should come as no surprise in light of a recent Scientific American article detailing Israel’s pioneering innovations in this field. Just 15 years ago Israel, one of the world’s driest countries to begin with, was suffering from a drought and at the brink of a water catastrophe. Now, thanks to its revolutionary desalination technology, Israel not only fully supplies its own water needs but is at the forefront of solving the world’s water crisis.

During his visit Commissioner Bush met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and “discussed [with him] several economic areas where Israel and Texas can work together.” Bush noted that “Texas is home to the Silicon Prairie” while “Israel is the Silicon Valley of the Middle East.” We locals call it Silicon Wadi—the Tel Aviv-area beehive of Israeli high-tech companies that a Forbes article speculated could become “the dominant tech ecosystem in the world.”

At present, as Israeli commentator Yoram Ettinger notes, according to a recent study tiny Israel is “one of the top five world high-tech powers.” Only two countries—the U.S. and China—have more companies trading on the NASDAQ. Israel is one of only eight countries in the world to have launched space satellites, “a global co-leader with the US” in that field—and so on.

Of particular relevance to the Texas delegation’s visit was Israel’s offshore natural-gas exploration, which it is doing in partnership with Houston-based Noble Energy. It was Noble that, at the start of the millennium, first discovered the natural-gas deposits off Israel’s coast. Today the huge Tamar gas field is already online, and the even larger Leviathan field is on the way. Israel will be exporting natural gas to Jordan next year, and it is nearing a deal with Egypt. And although the politics are complex, Israel is also talking about possible gas deals with Turkey and with Greece and Cyprus.

Why There Can Be No “Demilitarized” Palestinian State by Louis René Beres

Any treaty or treaty-like compact is void if, at the time of its entry into force, it conflicts with a “peremptory” rule of international law – that is, one from which “no derogation is permitted.” As the right of sovereign states to maintain military forces for self-defense is always such a rule, Palestine would be within its lawful right to abrogate any pre-independence agreement that had (impermissibly) compelled its own demilitarization.

The Palestinian Authority (PA), now officially a Nonmember Observer State to the United Nations General Assembly, will likely seek next month a Security Council resolution favoring full Palestinian sovereignty, probably as part of a cooperative Security Council initiative with France. Following such an initiative, the current U.S. president, or the next U.S. president could then be moved to accept the PA position on the grounds of some prior Palestinian “demilitarization.” Unfortunately, any such acceptance would be without any legal or practical value; therefore no state of Palestine should ever be approved because of any apparent promise of demilitarization.

Whoever wins the November election, the next U.S. president will have to deal with the continuing issue of Palestinian statehood. For the moment, agreeing to any such new Arab sovereignty – a 23rd Arab state – would appear to be contingent upon some prior acceptance of Palestinian “demilitarization.” After all, for a new president to disregard this seemingly prudent contingency would immediately place the United States in stark opposition to Israel.

More precisely, it would put Washington at odds with the core requirements already laid down explicitly by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Nonetheless, there is substantial irony to this obligation. Simply put, meaningful Palestinian demilitarization could never take place. In essence, international jurisprudence could not allow it. First, international law would not necessarily expect Palestinian compliance with any limitations on negotiated agreements concerning national armies and armed forces.

But what if the government of a fully-sovereign Palestinian state were in fact willing to consider itself bound by some pre-state agreement to demilitarize? There is still a big problem. Even in these improbable circumstances, the new Palestinian Arab government could likely identify ample pretext and opportunity to invoke lawful “treaty” termination. Here are some specific examples:

France: The Religious War Few Wish to Face by George Igler

Until a few years ago, the unique recipe for secularism adopted by the French seemed able to guarantee the assimilation of the country’s burgeoning number of Muslims, something now, by criminal and terrorist activity in the country, proven a resolute failure.

Next year’s election results might signal the beginning of the end for laïcité, the long-held French principle of strict prohibition against religious influence in the determination of state policies.

The remains of St. Denis, the patron saint of Paris, who was decapitated in the year 250 during the brutal pagan persecution of Christians, lie north of the French capital in the basilica that bears his name.

The church is historically noteworthy as the first proper work of Gothic architecture, a style influenced by the Crusades. The basilica is now a rarely visited Parisian landmark, lying as it does within the profoundly Islamized enclave of Seine-Saint-Denis.

“You Christians, you kill us,” were the words of the ISIS knifeman who slit the throat of 85-year old Father Jacques Hamel. The elderly priest officiating at the altar of the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray — a mere three kilometres from the centre of Rouen in Normandy — was slain on July 25, as the two terrorists also took nuns hostage. The terrorists were then shot by police.

On August 5, police swept down on a man shouting “Allahu Akbar” [“Allah is the Greatest”] on the Champs-Élysées, the famous central thoroughfare of the capital of France. Video of the arrest shows passers-by: veiled Muslims, tourists, and presumably indigenous French men and women.

Both of these incidents, when aligned with recent mass outrages across France, including the Bataclan Theatre slaughter on November 13, and the mass carnage caused by a jihadist plot in Nice on July 14, point to a startling reality.

Despite the rhetoric by the government of Prime Minister Manuel Valls on removing dual nationality from those guilty of terrorism offences and closing extremist mosques (20 of France’s 2,500 alleged mosques have been closed down to date), the violent consequences of jihadism are a daily reality and concern stalking the heart of most French metropolitan districts.

At 7.5% of the population, Muslims in France make up the highest concentration of Muslims of any country in Europe, according to Pew Research.

For decades, those warning of the inevitable consequences of mass Muslim immigration, during a time in history when Islamic fundamentalist doctrine was on the rise worldwide, have been maligned, prosecuted, imprisoned or assassinated.

With the security infrastructure now proving inadequate to cope with the sheer scale of enthusiasm for religious war amongst those Islamists born in France, and those able to enter the country — thanks to the open border policies of the EU — the threat continues to increase day by day.

Close to the Champs-Élysées, which runs between the Louvre museum and the Arc de Triomphe, lies the official residence of the president of France.

Presently occupied by the Socialist François Hollande, who closely courted the Muslim vote to gain power in 2012, many French people are looking towards the presidential elections scheduled for April and May 2017, to provide a new occupant of the Élysée Palace in the form of Marine Le Pen.

The Choudary Quandary – The Fox in The Hen House Redux by Patrick Dunleavy

Patrick Dunleavy is the former Deputy Inspector General for New York State Department of Corrections. He is the author of “The Fertile Soil of Jihad: Terrorism’s Prison Connection,”which was reviewed here http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/interview-with-patrick-t-dunleavy

With the United Kingdom’s successful prosecution of noted radical Islamic preacher Anjem Choudary for providing material support to ISIS, British officials are now faced with the dilemma of what to with him when he is sentenced Sept. 6.

While he is sure to receive a lengthy period of incarceration, that may create even more problems for counter terrorism officials. In going to prison, he is not actually moving from the frying pan to the fire. A more appropriate analogy is akin to the fox in the hen house. Anjem Choudary has spent the better part of 20 years preaching, proselytizing, and recruiting individuals to a radical form of Islam that encourages jihad as a necessary tenet of the faith. He has done it on street corners, mosques, and in front of television cameras. And like a sly fox, he avoided prosecution in the past because no direct contact between him and a terrorist organization could be proven until now. British authorities uncovered a video of Choudary pledging allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.

When he goes into prison, Choudary will have the opportunity to continue his evil work in an environment that guarantees him a captive audience of people who already have a disdain for government and a predisposition for violence. It is fertile soil.

How successful will he be? We already know of his effectiveness with ex-cons such as shoe bomber Richard Reid, who attended the Finsbury Mosque after his release from prison. Finsbury was one of the places that Choudary was allowed to preach his message of hatred and intolerance to all things non-Muslim. Many of his converts are already in prison for committing terrorist acts.

One of them is Michael Adebolajo, convicted in the brutal murder of 25-year-old Lee Rigby, a Fusilier in the British Army as he was returning to barracks. Since his incarceration, prison officials have had to transfer Adebolajo from the general prison population in Belmarsh because of his attempts to influence and radicalize other inmates. Another Choudary protégé, Richard Dart, was sentenced to six years in prison in 2013 for his part in a plot to bomb a memorial service for British soldiers at Royal Wooten Basset. Also in prison is Junead Khan, convicted last spring for conspiring to kill U.S. servicemen stationed at the RAF Lakenheath Base.

Obama Administration Nears Syrian Refugee Goal: 9,077 Muslims; 47 Christians by Patrick Goodenough

With less than six weeks of the fiscal year to go, the Obama administration is speeding towards meeting its target of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees into the United States, and is currently fewer than 900 refugees away from the goal.

A total of 9,144 Syrian refugees have now been resettled in FY 2016. Of these, 9,077 are Muslims.

Among the 9,144 refugees, 47 (0.5 percent) are Christians and 14 (0.15 percent) are Yazidis–like Christians, a non-Muslim minority targeted specifically by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL) for persecution.

Meanwhile the administration has admitted 8,984 Sunni Muslims – 98.2 percent of the total number admitted this fiscal year – according to State Department Refugee Processing Center data.

The remaining refugees resettled since October 1 last year are 20 Shi’a Muslims, 73 other Muslims, five refugees identified as “other religion,” and one as having “no religion.”

Admissions for August follow a similar pattern: Of a total of 1,593, 12 (0.75 percent) are Christians, 1,552 (97.4 percent) are Sunnis. Another 23 are other Muslims, four are Yazidis, and two are adherents of “other religion.”

The 12 Christians admitted so far this month comprise four Protestants, four Orthodox, one Catholic, and three refugees described simply as “Christian.”

The denominational breakdown for the 47 Christians admitted in FY 2016 is seven Catholic, six Orthodox, four Protestant, one Greek Orthodox and 29 “Christian” refugees.

Since 2011 millions of Syrians of all religious and ethnic backgrounds have fled the civil war, whose antagonists include ISIS, al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra and other Sunni Salafist groups, moderate/nationalist Sunni rebels, Kurds, Shi’a Iran and its Hezbollah ally, other Shi’a militia, and the Assad regime, dominated by the Shi’ite Allawite sect.

Still, the number of Christians among refugees admitted into the U.S. remains disproportionately low, and the number of Sunnis disproportionately high:

Anti-Israel Double Standards Enable Assad’s Brutality by Noah Beck

http://www.investigativeproject.org/5595/anti-israel-double-standards-enable-assad

Syria’s civil war claimed 470,000 lives since it started in March 2011, the Syrian Centre for Policy Research announced in February. That’s an average of about 262 deaths per day and 7,860 per month. The carnage has continued unabated, so, applying the same death rate nearly 200 days after the February estimate, the death toll is over 520,000.

Such numbers are staggering, even by Middle East standards. However, the violence has become so routine that it only occasionally captures global attention, usually when a particularly poignant moment of human suffering is documented. The most recent example is Omran Daqneesh, a 5-year old Syrian boy who was filmed shell-shocked, bloody, and covered in dust after the airstrike bombing of his Aleppo apartment block.

The tragic image of Omran caused outrage around the world, as did the image of Aylan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian boy whose body washed up last September on a beach in Turkey. Yet Omran’s plight demonstrates that, nearly a year after the last child victim of Syrian horrors captured global sympathy, nothing has changed.

If anything, the violence in this multi-party proxy war seems to be getting worse. Since Aylan Kurdi’s drowning, Russia began blitz-bombing Syria in support of the Assad regime. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) estimates that nine months of Russian airstrikes have killed 3,089 civilians – a toll that is greater, by some estimates, than the number of civilians killed by ISIS. By contrast, Syrian civilian deaths caused by U.S. airstrikes are probably in the hundreds (over roughly twice as much time, since U.S. airstrikes began in the summer of 2015).

Israel, One of the World’s Driest Countries, Is Now Overflowing With Water by Rowan Jacobsen

This post by Rowan Jacobsen was originally published on Ensia.com, a magazine that highlights international environmental solutions in action, and is republished here as part of a content-sharing agreement.

Ten miles south of Tel Aviv, I stand on a catwalk over two concrete reservoirs the size of football fields and watch water pour into them from a massive pipe emerging from the sand. The pipe is so large I could walk through it standing upright, were it not full of Mediterranean seawater pumped from an intake a mile offshore.

“Now, that’s a pump!” Edo Bar-Zeev shouts to me over the din of the motors, grinning with undisguised awe at the scene before us. The reservoirs beneath us contain several feet of sand through which the seawater filters before making its way to a vast metal hangar, where it is transformed into enough drinking water to supply 1.5 million people.

We are standing above the new Sorek desalination plant, the largest reverse-osmosis desal facility in the world, and we are staring at Israel’s salvation. Just a few years ago, in the depths of its worst drought in at least 900 years, Israel was running out of water. Now it has a surplus. That remarkable turnaround was accomplished throughnational campaigns to conserve and reuse Israel’s meager water resources, but the biggest impact came from a new wave of desalination plants.

Israel now gets 55 percent of its domestic water from desalination, and that has helped to turn one of the world’s driest countries into the unlikeliest of water giants.

Bar-Zeev, who recently joined Israel’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research after completing his postdoc work at Yale University, is an expert on biofouling, which has always been an Achilles’ heel of desalination and one of the reasons it has been considered a last resort. Desal works by pushing saltwater into membranes containing microscopic pores. The water gets through, while the larger salt molecules are left behind. But microorganisms in seawater quickly colonize the membranes and block the pores, and controlling them requires periodic costly and chemical-intensive cleaning. But Bar-Zeev and colleagues developed a chemical-free system using porous lava stone to capture the microorganisms before they reach the membranes. It’s just one of many breakthroughs in membrane technology that have made desalination much more efficient. Israel now gets 55 percent of its domestic water from desalination, and that has helped to turn one of the world’s driest countries into the unlikeliest of water giants.

Driven by necessity, Israel is learning to squeeze more out of a drop of water than any country on Earth, and much of that learning is happening at the Zuckerberg Institute, where researchers have pioneered new techniques in drip irrigation, water treatment and desalination. They have developed resilient well systems for African villages and biological digesters than can halve the water usage of most homes.

The institute’s original mission was to improve life in Israel’s bone-dry Negev Desert, but the lessons look increasingly applicable to the entire Fertile Crescent. “The Middle East is drying up,” says Osnat Gillor, a professor at the Zuckerberg Institute who studies the use of recycled wastewater on crops. “The only country that isn’t suffering acute water stress is Israel.”

President Obama has accomplished something previously unimaginable: He helped Donald Trump look more presidential than the president of the United States.By Marc A. Thiessen

On Friday, while residents of Baton Rouge were recovering from a historic flood that damaged some 40,000 homes, Obama was on Martha’s Vineyard watching fireworks, following 10 rounds of golf in 16 days. Donald Trump, by contrast, was on the ground in the flood zone, unloading relief materials, touring the devastation and focusing much-needed attention on a disaster that has been largely ignored by the media.

Why wasn’t Obama there? According to a White House statement, “The President is mindful of the impact that his travel has on first responders and wants to ensure that his presence does not interfere with ongoing recovery efforts.”

Funny, that’s precisely why President George W. Bush didn’t come to New Orleans immediately after Hurricane Katrina. And Democrats — including Barack Obama — hammered Bush for it. Unlike Obama, Bush actually canceled his vacation and got on a plane to return to Washington. But he decided not to land in Louisiana so as not to draw resources away from the ongoing rescue efforts and flew Air Force One low over the flood zone so that he could see the devastation firsthand.

Democrats howled. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Bush was “oblivious, in denial, dangerous.” Obama later called Bush “a president who only saw the people [of Louisiana] from the window of an airplane, instead of down here on the ground trying to provide comfort.”

Trump to Louisiana: ‘We’re with you’