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2016

Gitmo Closure: One Battle Obama Will Lose The president meets an insurmountable stumbling block. Ari Lieberman

With the possible exception of Richard Nixon, there is no president in modern history that has shown more disdain for Congress and the constitutional process that Barack Obama. In his zeal to establish a legacy, he has systematically used his executive powers to trample upon the Constitution and the legislative branch of government.

Obama is now fixing his sights on closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility housing America’s most dangerous and maniacal foes. He announced his intention to do so on Tuesday, citing a plethora of reasons, each of which lacks merit.

Obama’s announcement coincides with his overall scheme to advance U.S.-Cuba ties. Last week, Obama announced that he would pay a visit to the despotic Castro brothers. That obscene gesture was made contemporaneous with his notice that he would not be attending Justice Antonin Scalia’s funeral, demonstrating to all just how morally bankrupt Obama has become.

Since assuming office in 2009, Obama has had an unhealthy obsession with Gitmo and made it a priority to close the facility. He sees Guantanamo as an extension of American imperialism and a hindrance to closer ties with the Muslim world. Closure of the facility would curry favor with the Cubans and an assortment of repressive Muslim regimes.

Of course, to advance his scheme to close Guantanamo, Obama must make the argument in terms that are palatable to the American public. Establishing closer ties with the Muslim world is not high on the list of priorities for the average American constituent, but security is.

Hillary Clinton is Her Own Worst Enemy Daniel Greenfield

Hillary Clinton is her own worst enemy. Just as Bill Clinton’s worst impulses did more to sabotage his presidency than any Republican, his wife’s worst impulses have always undermined her. Some couples balance out each other’s weaknesses, but Bill and Hillary enable each other’s misbehaviors. While Hillary enabled her husband’s abuse of women, Bill enabled her paranoia and obsessiveness.

Hillary Clinton has a longstanding tendency to turn to a dark conspiratorial mindset when things don’t go her way. She blamed her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky on a “vast right-wing conspiracy”. Her close friend’s papers reveal that Hillary thought Bill had been “driven” to the affair by his “political adversaries”.

It was easier for Hillary to blame her husband’s misbehavior on Republicans than to deal with reality. And her campaign is showing that her worldview hasn’t changed any since then.

The entire FBI investigation would not exist if Hillary Clinton had just followed the law. Instead she chose to engage in a preemptive cover-up of her emails as preparation for her presidential campaign.

The job of Secretary of State had never meant anything to her except as a stepping stone to the White House. She took it to fundraise and build up her resume while maintaining total control over her emails, in violation of the law, while displaying no regard for national security by storing highly classified materials on her own server. But instead of protecting her campaign, the cover-up created its biggest challenge.

Immigration or an iPhone We don’t have an encryption problem; we have a Muslim immigration problem. Daniel Greenfield

The public argument between Apple and the FBI over cracking the encryption on an iPhone used by the San Bernardino Muslim terrorists is one of those ongoing civil liberties debates that negotiate the terms on which we are asked to sacrifice our civil liberties for the sake of Muslim immigration.

We have already made a thousand accommodations and we will make a thousand more. There will be more databases, naked scanners, eavesdropping, vans that can see through walls, backdoors to every server, registrations, warrantless searches, interceptions and regulations. There will be heavily armed police on the streets. And then curfews and soldiers. These things exist in Europe. They’ll come here.

Some libertarians will argue that we should have none of this and no restrictions on immigration. That we should just shrug off each terror attack and move on with our lives.

Eventually though there will be a terror attack that we can’t shrug off and that can’t be minimized by using the cheap statistical trick of comparing Terror Attack X to the number of people who die every year from cancer. Or there will just be an endless parade of daily attacks, bombings, stabbings or shootings, as in Israel, which create a constant climate of terror that will preclude any hollow rhetoric about the number of people falling off ladders each year or getting struck by lightning.

Some hawks will cheer every terror fighting measure short of closing the door on the root cause of the problem. They would rather see every American wiretapped, strip searched and monitored every hour of the day then just stop the flow of Muslim terrorists into this country.

The encryption methods of an iPhone, like the question of how many ounces there are in your tiny bottle of mouthwash, would not be much of an issue, if Muslim migration did not make it one.

Terrorists adapt to the terrain. They use the native population as protective coloration. They can find a way to transform a shoe, a tube of toothpaste or instant messaging on a game console into a terror tool. Just as the left can ‘politicize’ everything, Muslim terrorists can ‘terrorize’ everything. When everything is a potential terrorist tool, then there can be no such thing as privacy or civil rights.

World Council of Churches Starts Seven Weeks of Brainwashing General Secretary Tveit Recycles Dirty Old Water Lies by Malcolm Lowe

Palestinian propagandists constantly disseminate false accusations that Israel steals Palestinian water. Those allegations have been thoroughly refuted many times and are to be catalogued under the rubric of typical Palestinian propaganda lies.

If General Secretary Tveit seriously wanted to help Palestinians, he should explain why Israelis enjoy so much more water per capita — to contrast the brilliance of Israel’s elimination of its former water problems with the utter incompetence of the Palestinian Authority to deal with its own problems. And to exhort the Palestinians to learn from Israel instead of vainly slandering Israel.

Israel now recycles 80% of waste water. Desalination plants have been erected along the Mediterranean coast, so that now Israel has an abundance of water. All this costs money, so Israelis pay more for their water and there is a punitive water price for anything above a legally defined level of domestic per capita water. Under the Palestinian Authority, it is the opposite. Up to 30% of their water has been estimated to go lost in their water delivery systems. Waste water is released to pollute the PA’s land, and some flows downhill to pollute Israel as well. Large numbers of Palestinians either do not pay water bills or simply steal water by illegal connections.

February 12, 2016, was a day of fresh hope for the suffering Christians of the Middle East. Pope Francis of Rome and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow met in Havana, Cuba, to issue a joint message to the world. After pledging themselves to change the history of schism between Eastern and Western Christianity, they placed the contemporary merciless persecution of Christians at the top of their agenda:

“Our gaze must firstly turn to those regions of the world where Christians are victims of persecution. In many countries of the Middle East and North Africa whole families, villages and cities of our brothers and sisters in Christ are being completely exterminated. Their churches are being barbarously ravaged and looted, their sacred objects profaned, their monuments destroyed…”

MAX BOOT: A POSITIONING STATEMENT-NOT POLICY

In November 2014, Congress voted to ban the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the United States. It was not a close vote. The final margin was 91 to 3 in the Senate and 370 to 58 in the House. Those are bipartisan, veto-proof majorities. And since those votes happened, Republicans have gained control of the Senate and increased their House majority.

Yet today President Obama unveiled a plan that directly contradicts the law. He wants to release 35 detainees and move the other 56 to a prison that would be built somewhere in the United States to house them.

In making his case, President Obama repeated the same tired talking points about how Gitmo has been a terrorist recruiting tool, even though there is scant evidence to support this proposition. Even two scholars at the liberal Brookings Institution, Cody Poplin and Sebastian Brady, dispute Obama’s contention. They write:

**Indeed, other issues and grievances seemingly receive much more airtime and emphasis than the detention camp does; and Guantanamo, when mentioned, is often lumped in with other controversial facilities—like Bagram and Abu Ghraib. Detention and abuse of suspected terrorists by the United States, in other words, is a readily discernable motif. But the contemporary propaganda narrative seems to treat that motif as but one category of offenses in a long chain of western transgressions against the Muslim world.

Accordingly, it is hardly clear that Guantanamo’s closure would matter much, so far as concerns the contents of jihadist propaganda. U.S. detention operations at Bagram and Abu Ghraib, after all, are now in the past—but that hasn’t persuaded jihadis to drop their invocations of both prisons in their online literature.**

Poplin and Brady note that Gitmo is especially unimportant in the ISIS narrative. What has really been a terrorist recruiting tool has been the administration’s weakness in the face of the Islamic State. But rather than announce a serious plan to destroy ISIS, Obama finds it much easier to score rhetorical points by announcing a plan to close Gitmo.

His timing is especially bad because, as I argued in the Washington Post, the U.S. needs a detention facility to hold captured ISIS leaders, assuming that we actually capture and interrogate some (as we should). If not Gitmo, then where?

Donald Trump Won in Nevada. So What? By Roger Kimball

“The $64,000 question, of course, is exactly when the rude awakening will come. I pray it will not be too late.”

As expected, Donald Trump won the Nevada caucus handily. Nevada, casino capital of the country, is Donald Trump’s sort of place. Naturally, his supporters are ecstatic, and congratulations to them. As I wrote just a few days ago, however, it is premature for Mrs. Trump to be checking out new curtains for the Oval Office.

Lou Cannon is right: there is nothing inevitable about Donald’s Trump’s nomination (to say nothing of his election, should he be nominated). Here are a few of the things Cannon adduces:

With last night’s win, Trump has only 79 of the 1,237 delegates needed for the nomination. 79, Kemo Sabe.
He is “stuck” in the mid-30s of support, sufficient to win primaries with a platoon of candidates but not in a head-to-head race.
Trump had the lowest percentage of any South Carolina primary winner in the last 10 contests.
Late-deciding voters broke against Trump, giving him a victory margin less than his lead in pre-primary polls.
Jeb Bush’s withdrawal helps Trump’s opponents.
Trump has sky-high unfavorable ratings, with 28 percent of Republicans saying they’d never vote for him. Indeed, Gallup’s surveys show Trump has the highest unfavorables of any presidential candidate in modern history, a net minus 70 among Democrats and a net minus 27 among independents.

I am not saying that Trump cannot win the nomination, merely that I don’t think he will: hence my addition of a question mark to the word “nominee” on the graphic from this morning’s Drudge Report. Trump’s performance — or, more to the point, the performance of the two remaining serious candidates, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio — will be the deciding factor.

Bill Advances to Brand Muslim Brotherhood a Terrorist Organization By Bridget Johnson

A House bill introduced last year by Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist entity cleared the House Judiciary Committee today.

The bill details many links of the Brotherhood to terrorism, including the endorsement of violence in Egypt last year in response to a “war against Islam’s principles.” It notes that Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain have banned the Brotherhood.

Not more than 60 days after enactment of the bill, the State Department would have to submit a report to Congress on whether the Muslims Brotherhood meets the criteria to be designated a foreign terrorist organization — and if not, explain why not.

The legislation has 28 bipartisan co-sponsors. A companion bill from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sits in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

At today’s Judiciary Committee markup, in which the vote was 17-10 to move the bill to the House floor, Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said he was “troubled” to learn that the State Department never considered the Muslim Brotherhood an FTO.

Since its founding in 1928, Goodlatte noted, “the Brotherhood’s strategic goal ‘in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.'”

The chairman stressed that under the designation “this administration would actually have to deny admittance to aliens tied to the Muslim Brotherhood rather than continue to proclaim to the world that the Brotherhood is a moderate and secular organization.”

Plans That Lead Astray: Closing Guantanamo- Patrick Dunleavy

We often hear the line from a Robert Burns poem, “The best laid schemes of mice and men, often go askew,” invoked when someone’s grandiose plans blow up in one’s face.

That may be what we’re in store for if President Obama’s recently announced plan to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and place terrorists on U.S. soil is able to proceed unilaterally without congressional approval. This time, the danger in the plan is to the American people.

Slowly over the years he has been in office, Obama has released numerous terrorists to other countries without adequate provisions to prevent them from returning to the battlefield against U.S. soldiers and civilians.

One recent case is that of Ibrahim al Qosi. He was a member of al-Qaida and a personal aide to Osama bin Laden who was released from Guantanamo in 2012 and sent to Sudan. He recently appeared in a video as a spokesperson for al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

In the video, “Guardians of Sharia,” he calls on people to commit acts of jihad. Clearly his time in Guantanamo did nothing to rehabilitate him. He is the classic recidivist.

The fact that ex-cons often get released from prison neither rehabilitated nor transformed is nothing new. Recidivism rates for common criminals continue to be an issue for sociologists and criminologists to explore.

Issa: ‘Very Hard’ to Stop Obama From Closing Gitmo ‘If He Is Willing to Ignore the Law’ Susan Jones

The Obama administration is prohibited by law from moving Guantanamo Bay detainees to the United States, but President Obama on Tuesday sent Congress his plan for doing just that.

Even before Obama spoke, members of Congress reacted negatively.

“The fact is, it is very hard to stop a president from doing something if he is willing to ignore the law and his oath,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) told Fox News Tuesday morning.

Issa said Obama’s plan to close the military prison in Cuba is not a surprise — he talked about doing it even before he became president.

“But the fact that he’s willing to do it in violation of specific law…(shows that) he has very little to lose, in his opinion. He doesn’t believe that the American people will impeach him, and with the death of Justice Scalia, he probably views that the Supreme Court might back him with a 4-4 decision.”

Issa noted that Obama himself signed the bill that included the provision barring transfers of Gitmo detainees to the United States. “But this is a president that doesn’t respect the law and the Constitution.”

Issa said there isn’t much Congress can do “in a timely fashion” if Obama ignores the law and orders the military prison closed. Congress’s recourse would be to go to court, and the courts are not likely to rule quickly.

Issa said that voiding the Guantanamo lease, which the United States holds in perpetuity, would be more complicated for the president to do. He could order the military to leave Guantanamo, but that places the burden on military leaders.

“I have to be quite candid,” Issa said. “It is the decision that U.S. military leaders have to make. Are they going to obey an unlawful order…to move people from Guantanamo? An unlawful order to close the base?”

Issa said he believes the military may push back on the president. “I can see flag officers resigning rather than obeying unlawful orders.”

Fighting the BDS Movement By A.J. Caschetta

Is it possible for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement to be anything other than anti-Semitic? On January 7, 140 people in Rochester, New York attended a lecture on the topic by Miriam F. Elman, Associate Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. The event was organized and hosted by a local non-profit called Roc4Israel, founded in 2012 expressly to “counter the negative rhetoric towards Israel, expose the rising tide of global anti-Semitism, fight against BDS, and defend Israel’s right to exist.”

As Elman told her audience, “in the Middle Ages Jews were hated for their religion, in the 19th and 20th centuries they were hated for their race and today they are hated for their nation-state.”

Excepting some fringe student groups enthusiastic about boycotting Israel, the BDS movement is mostly absent from the academic scene in Rochester. The president of the University of Rochester, Joel Seligman, is a vocal critic of the movement. And while there are academics in town who sympathize with the movement enough to sign statements, at the moment BDS has no visible academic advocates in Rochester.

Syracuse, NY, located little more than an hour’s drive away, is a different story. Its academic scene has a far more active BDS movement. A group calling itself the Syracuse Peace Council is an active BDS agitator. In May 2015, Cazenovia College hosted BDS factotum Alison Weir (purveyor of the website “If Americans Knew”). Syracuse University itself has some very visible BDS advocates such as Vivian May, Zachary Braiterman, and others.

However, the topic was well-known enough to draw a crowd, on a cold winter’s evening, to an academic lecture. Nearly filling a spacious, tiered-seating auditorium, the audience was far larger than most Political Science or Middle East Studies Colloquia would attract at any of the area colleges.