Displaying posts published in

May 2018

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Deep State Mob Targets Nunes By Julie Kelly

By on May 13th, 2018

In an absurd tweet on Wednesday, Lawfare’s executive director suggested that Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) should be replaced as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee:
Susan Hennessey
✔ @Susan_Hennessey

This is a hugely significant story. DOJ and the IC do not trust the HPSCI chair to protect sources and methods that directly risk human lives. Nunes simply cannot continue to serve in the role and Speaker Ryan is wrong to not remove him and appoint a suitable choice like Conaway. https://twitter.com/mkraju/status/994318826404708353 …

That wasn’t even the most moronic tweet in Susan Hennessey’s arsenal. She went on to warn how “the intelligence oversight system is based on trust. Without trust it is irretrievably broken. The [Intelligence Community] and [Department of Justice] don’t trust Nunes and he cannot perform his job functions.” Get that? The Intelligence Community and the Justice department—which have proven to be as political and devious as a Chicago ward boss—are the white hats and Nunes is the black hat.

That is not ignorance on Hennessey’s part: it’s calculated deception.

Fortunately, it’s unlikely that House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) will heed an unreasonable demand from a political partisan tied to the left-leaning Brookings Institution. But it does unveil the latest tactic of the Left (and some on the Right) to discredit and ultimately oust Nunes, the only Republican on Capitol Hill who appears to have his act together when it comes to exposing the players behind the Trump-Russia election collusion scheme.

The Deep State Mob is continuing to squeeze the California congressman after he again threatened to impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for ignoring congressional subpoenas and withholding crucial documents from Congressional investigators. Nunes has minced no words about how the Justice Department and FBI have been “stonewalling” his committee’s investigation for months. And as Nunes inches closer to revealing the stinking core of what is potentially the biggest political corruption scandal in U.S. history, the Deep State Mob is trying to close in on him first.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Senator Grassley appears to be preparing to bust the frame-up of General Flynn By Thomas Lifson

By on May 13th, 2018

Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, the laconic Midwesterner with a steel trap mind, dropped a bombshell yesterday with a letter (the full letter appears below – pdf here) to Deputy A.G. Rod Rosenstein (who supervises the Mueller probe) and FBI director Christopher Wray. But in keeping with Grassley’s style, which has so often misled his opponents into overconfidence, you have to read between the lines to see where he is heading. The end point: uncovering the plot to frame General Flynn for lying to the FBI, including likely criminal acts by senior members of the FBI.

Recall that facing financial ruin, and threats to prosecute his son on unrelated charges, General Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, yet James Comey told the Grassley Committee in a briefing:

[T]he FBI agents who interviewed Lt. General Michael Flynn, “saw nothing that led them to believe [he was] lying.” Our own Committee staff’s notes indicate that Mr. Comey said the “agents saw no change in his demeanor or tone that would say he was being untruthful.” Contrary to his public statements during his current book tour denying any memory of those comments, then-Director Comey led us to believe during that briefing that the agents who interviewed Flynn did not believe he intentionally lied about his conversation with the Ambassador and that the Justice Department was unlikely to prosecute him for false statements made in that interview. In the months since then, the Special Counsel obtained a guilty plea from Lt. General Flynn for that precise alleged conduct.

Comey has since changed his tune, in “a Fox News interview in which he denied he ever told lawmakers that he did not believe Michael Flynn lied.”

General Flynn’s sentencing has been delayed repeatedly, as Judge Emmett Sullivan (who replaced Judge Contreras after he was removed from the case) has demanded that all exculpatory evidence be handed over to him.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey in Syria: Ruling Kurdish Afrin by Sharia Law, Ethnic Cleansing by Sirwan Kajjo

By on May 13th, 2018

Sirwan Kajjo is a Syrian-Kurdish Washington-based journalist and author.

At the onset of the Turkish offensive, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government declared it a “jihad” against Syrian Kurds. Turkish preachers gave sermons justifying the assault as a “holy war.”

Turkey and jihadist groups are now forcing non-Muslim minorities in Afrin to convert to Islam. Yazidi temples, for example, have been destroyed by militants. Yazidi residents have been forcibly taken to mosques to convert to Islam.

Kurdish groups have accused the government of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of carrying out a campaign to create a demographic change aiming at dislodging native Kurdish civilians from their lands and replacing them with Sunni Arabs from Turkish-based refugees camps.

After little more than a month since capturing the Kurdish city of Afrin in northwestern Syria, the Turkish government and its jihadist allies are discussing plans to rule the city by Islamic sharia law.

A meeting recently took place between Turkish authorities and rebel leaders of the al-Rahman Legion to decide how to build an Islamic police force, sharia courts and other religious centers.

Al-Rahman Legion is one of the largest Islamist rebel groups that was in control of the eastern Ghouta, the last rebel-held area in Damascus. The group was recently expelled from the area after a Turkish- and Russian-brokered deal between the Syrian regime and groups rebelling against it, such as Al-Rahman. It has since resettled in the city of Afrin, along with hundreds of families from the Damascus suburban area.

Since 2012, Afrin had been run by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), a U.S.-backed group that had a secular system of governance which rejected political Islam and promoted relatively liberal ideals.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Is France Really an Ally of the United States? by Guy Millière

By on May 13th, 2018

No-go zones are growing rapidly in the suburbs of all of France’s main cities. Shanty towns built by illegal migrants from Africa and the Middle East have sprung up in parts of Marseilles and Paris in the last few years. Islamization is everywhere. In hundreds of mosques, imams deliver fiery anti-Western speeches. Churches are vandalized. The number of rapes is rapidly increasing. Groups of veiled women roam the streets and insult the “immodest”, unveiled, women.

Macron’s most important project since he was elected has been the creation of new Islamic institutions destined to adapt France to Islam — not to adapt Islam to France. Many more mosques will be built, financed with taxpayer money; departments of Islamic culture will open in universities, and imam training centers created.

Macron’s main advisor on this subject is Hakim El Karoui, the author of a book (“Islam, a French Religion”) explaining that Islam is now the main religion in the country; that prejudices of non-Muslims are the source of most troubles, and that helping Muslims to have access to more important positions in French society is of the utmost urgency.

Sadly, it will also be difficult for President Macron, Prime Minister May and Chancellor Merkel to hide that they are appeasers of Islam and the weak commanders of countries they are allowing to decay.

During his recent State visit in Washington, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke of the “long friendship” between France and the United States, and tried to present himself as a reliable ally. His statements, essentially empty words, should be taken with extreme caution.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Did the FBI Have a Spy in the Trump Campaign? By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on May 12th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/did-fbi-have-spy-in-trump-presidential-campaign/The Steele-dossier author told Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson about a ‘human source.’ Something tells me Glenn Simpson did not make a mistake. Something tells me the co-founder of Fusion GPS was dead-on accurate when he testified that Christopher Steele told him the FBI had a “human source” — i.e., a spy — inside the Trump […]

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Radicalism: The Real Shock Was the Reaction of the Americans… by Majid Rafizadeh

By on May 12th, 2018

Dr. Majid Rafizadeh, is a business strategist and advisor, Harvard-educated scholar, political scientist, board member of Harvard International Review, and president of the International American Council on the Middle East. He has authored several books on Islam and US Foreign Policy. He can be reached at

Many extremist Muslims believe that their religious desire is coming true in in the US. Religiously speaking, for extremist Muslims, ruling America is Allah’s (God’s) word. To them, a sacred promise is coming to fruition.

What does being the second-largest religion in a country mean? Voters impact local and national politics, swing domestic elections, elect more representatives from the same religious affiliation, are influential enough to determine who the next president of the United States may be, and change the laws of the land.

This sense of immunity and dismissal led to the downfall of many countries throughout time.

“Soon,” said the letter, “America Will Be Ours”.

“Ours?”

The writer, it became clear, was an extremist Muslim in the U.S. who claimed to be a reputable religious preacher. With each new word, concern grew.

He pointed out, throughout the letter, the “sinful” ways of the West: dancing, drinking, dating…

He expressed disgust that most women did not wear the hijab or participate in prayer five times a day. Then he got straight to the point: “Ours,” he explained, represented Muslims like him.

The sentiment is hardly a new one. A person hears similar proclamations from many Muslim extremists throughout the years. The real shock was not letter but the reaction of many Americans after seeing it.

Such a thing, they said, could never happen. The writer’s words were “just bluster,” nothing to be taken seriously. Most surprisingly, they stated — honestly — that Muslims who speak of such intentions do not really mean what they say, so these threats should not be cause for concern.

The history of the two nations where I grew up — Iran and Syria — taught all of us there a big lesson about living in this kind of ignorance: the reality of how quickly a nation can be consumed by the philosophies of a religious state. An authoritarian and malicious regime, as exists now in Iran — the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism and brutal even to its own people — is something we cannot forget.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran Targets the Gulf by Richard Miniter

By on May 12th, 2018

Our allies are finally becoming force multipliers — joining with America to use its talent and technology finally to defeat the jihadist threat. We should assist and encourage the UAE and Saudi Arabia, not abandon them.

More than 7,000 miles from Washington and far from America’s headlines, a war in Yemen is rewriting America’s strategy against Iran and terrorism.

The three-sided civil war pits two radical Islamist forces — Al-Qaeda’s largest surviving army and Iran’s biggest proxy force — against each other and six of America’s Arab allies. U.S. Special forces carry out covert raids and CIA drones rain down missiles on terror leaders.

The outcome of the Yemen war matters: U.S. forces are fighting there and a new strategy against terrorism is now being tested in the Middle East’s poorest nation.

Since Britain’s Royal Marines marched out of their Aden Protectorate in November 1967, Yemenis have killed each other over nearly every international ideology: colonialism, communism, and radical Islamism. Add in the tribal rivalries and the religious divides between competing versions of Sunni and Shia Islam — and the stage is set for perpetual war. Indeed, Yemen, in every decade since the 1960s, saw bombings, bloodshed and barbarism.

Iran has also seemingly been trying to form a “Shi’ite Crescent” across the Middle East, through Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean.

According to nearly half a million computer files released by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency late last year, captured from Osama bin Laden’s compound, Iran had also offered “support to al-Qaeda in exchange for targeting the Gulf.”

In addition, Iran has been sponsoring Shia uprisings in Bahrain. The US ambassador to Bahrain during the Obama administration evidently turned a deaf ear to pleas from Bahraini officials for help; he presumably feared upsetting the president’s Iran deal, just as Obama had, by failing to act after his “red line” on the use of chemical weapons was crossed in Syria.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Tortured Logic of Kamala Harris By Daniel John Sobieski

By on May 12th, 2018

The question of whether torture is immoral does not have quite the yes or no answer that California Senator and posturing Democratic presidential wannabe Kamala Harris implied it had during the questioning of CIA nominee Gina Haspel. Classic torture is the intentional infliction of excruciating pain and permanent injury. Merely pouring water down the nostrils of a terrorist does not meet that classic definition.

And yes, who is doing it matters. Brutalizing an American prisoner of war to get information to be used to kill more Americans is immoral. Making a Khalim Sheik Muhammed think you might actually drown him, which you have absolutely no intention of doing, to save American lives by disclosing future plans and plots is not an immoral purpose.

Extracting needed information by such methods from the likes of a Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the man who decapitated Daniel Pearl before turning passenger jets into manned cruise missiles, is not an immoral choice What about the choices the murderous and soulless Mohammed, who Kamala Harris turned into a victim, forced his genuine victims to make? As far as we know, Sen. Harris, no terrorists were ever forced to choose death by incineration or jumping out of a 100-story building.

One wonders what Harris would recommend if a terrorist planted a nuke set to go off in an hour in Washington, D.C. Would we tell him (or her): “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be held against you. You have the right to an attorney. Now, please, tell us where you planted the nuke.” In that situation few Americans would be unwilling to attach the battery cables to the prisoner’s privates. Sometimes the end does justify the means.

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

CNN’s Cuomo Asks if America Should Be Blamed for Iranian Aggression Toward Israel By Caleb Howe

By on May 12th, 2018

If you have to choose one aspect of the liberal worldview to hate the most, it should be that impulse to blame bad, negative reactions to sound policy on the sound policy, rather than the bad actor.

To put it in fewer words, we can’t change what we do out of fear of reprisal. Well, we shouldn’t anyway.

It’s funny that this concept is not entirely lost on our friends on the left or our betters in the press. After a terror attack, much lip service is given to the continuation of daily life—to not change who we are or what we do in order to placate evil. But it only seems to apply, for them, to mundane things like attending concerts or trips to the ballpark.

If it’s sound foreign policy or acting in our own national interest that angers a terrorist or terror-supporting regime, however, then suddenly, “blame the victim” becomes all the rage. That’s where Chris Cuomo’s question on Friday morning comes in. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Report: FBI Had Mole Spying on 2016 Trump Campaign By Debra Heine

By on May 12th, 2018

There may have been an FBI spy interacting with the Trump campaign in 2016, Kimberly Strassel reported in the Wall Street Journal Thursday evening, adding fuel to long-held suspicions that an FBI/DOJ mole had attempted to ensnare Trump campaign advisers in some sort of Russian collusion trap.

This revelation comes after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein again backed down after a protracted fight with Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, allowing members to view classified documents about “a top-secret intelligence source that was part of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign.”

The FBI and DOJ had apparently been hiding the critical information from congressional investigators for months in order to protect the top-secret intelligence source.

In a Thursday press conference, Speaker Paul Ryan bluntly noted that Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes’s request for details on this secret source was “wholly appropriate,” “completely within the scope” of the committee’s long-running FBI investigation, and “something that probably should have been answered a while ago.” Translation: The department knew full well it should have turned this material over to congressional investigators last year, but instead deliberately concealed it.

Nunes doggedly pursued the matter, last week issuing a letter and a subpoena demanding more details, but Rosenstein’s response was to accuse the House of “extortion” and claim that “declining to open the FBI’s files to review” was a constitutional “duty.”

“Justice asked the White House to back its stonewall,” Strassel notes. “And it even began spinning that daddy of all superspook arguments—that revealing any detail about this particular asset could result in ‘loss of human lives.’”

The FBI and CIA’s “top-secret intelligence source,” according to the Washington Post’s anonymous law-enforcement leakers, is a U.S. citizen who was involved in the Russia counterintelligence investigation.

Explains Strassel: “When government agencies refer to sources, they mean people who appear to be average citizens but use their profession or contacts to spy for the agency. Ergo, we might take this to mean that the FBI secretly had a person on the payroll who used his or her non-FBI credentials to interact in some capacity with the Trump campaign.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →