RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/iran-spy-ring-robert-malley-lee-smith

The Biden administration’s now-suspended Iran envoy Robert Malley helped to fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the United States and allied governments, according to a trove of purloined Iranian government emails. The emails, which were reported on by veteran Wall Street Journal correspondent Jay Solomon, writing in Semafor, and by Iran International, the London-based émigré opposition outlet which is the most widely read independent news source inside Iran, were published last week after being extensively verified over a period of several months by the two outlets. They showed that Malley had helped to infiltrate an Iranian agent of influence named Ariane Tabatabai into some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government—first at the State Department and now the Pentagon, where she has been serving as chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Christopher Maier.

On Thursday, Maier told a congressional committee that the Defense Department is “actively looking into whether all law and policy was properly followed in granting my chief of staff top secret special compartmented information.”

The emails, which were exchanged over a period of several years between Iranian regime diplomats and analysts, show that Tabatabai was part of a regime propaganda unit set up in 2014 by the Iranian Foreign Ministry. The Iran Experts Initiative (IEI) tasked operatives drawn from Iranian diaspora communities to promote Iranian interests during the clerical regime’s negotiations with the United States over its nuclear weapons program. Though several of the IEI operatives and others named in the emails have sought to portray themselves on social media as having engaged with the regime in their capacity as academic experts, or in order to promote better understanding between the United States and Iran, none has questioned the veracity of the emails.

The contents of the emails are damning, showing a group of Iranian American academics being recruited by the Iranian regime, meeting together in foreign countries to receive instructions from top regime officials, and pledging their personal loyalty to the regime. They also show how these operatives used their Iranian heritage and Western academic positions to influence U.S. policy toward Iran, first as outside “experts” and then from high-level U.S. government posts. Both inside and outside of government, the efforts of members of this circle were repeatedly supported and advanced by Malley, who served as the U.S. government’s chief interlocutor with Iran under both the Obama and the Biden administrations. Malley is also the former head of the International Crisis Group (ICG), which directly paid and credentialed several key members of the regime’s influence operation.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/22/gop-rep-chinese-spy-operations-against-u-s-soar-under-biden/

A Republican congressman and committee chairman has said that Chinese spying operations on U.S. soil have increased dramatically since Joe Biden took office.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.), Chairman of the House Select Committee on China, said that such operations include a rise in espionage and surveillance operations focusing on American military bases.

“It is worrying that the Biden administration continues to be unable to protect the United States from Chinese Communist Party (CCP) espionage,” said Gallagher in an interview. “The CCP flew a spy balloon across the U.S., hacked senior U.S. cabinet officials, and sent spies to our most sensitive military sites, yet the Biden administration remains committed to failed diplomatic and economic engagement.”

Gallagher also expressed his concerns in a letter sent to the FBI and the Pentagon earlier this week, saying that “there is a growing trend of persons working on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party to obtain sensitive information about America’s military, economic, and technological secrets.”

The most infamous example was in January, when a Chinese spy balloon floated across the entirety of the continental United States; the Biden Administration repeatedly refused to shoot it down, even as American citizens could plainly see the balloon from the ground. It was finally taken down once it reached the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of South Carolina. The balloon’s movements were meant to deliberately take it right over several military bases for intelligence-gathering purposes.

Other incidents in recent years have included efforts by Chinese businessmen and corporations to buy large plots of land in the United States, often located near military bases and other strategic assets. This trend has led to several states passing laws cracking down on the practice, forbidding the purchase of such land by China and other foreign entities.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/milley-national-intelligence-estimate-chinese-spy-balloon-wasnt-spying-on-us/

“The good news is that Milley, unlike the spy balloon, didn’t transmit intelligence back to China because he doesn’t have any.”

A goat picking lottery numbers. Having criminals watch your wallet. Cuban medicine.

These are a few of the things that people have even less confidence in than a national intelligence estimate. But a national intelligence estimate is still down there. Way down there. Even before Russiagate, NIEs were politicized garbage. Remember the 2007 NIE falsely claiming that Iran had halted its nuclear program mocked up as part of a Democrat campaign to undermine the Bush administration?

The difference is that back in 2007, people still took NIEs seriously. Now all you can do is roll your eyes.

It was surely the most bizarre crisis of the Biden administration: America’s top-of-the-line jet fighters being sent up to shoot down, of all things, a balloon – a Chinese spy balloon that was floating across the United States, which had the nation and its politicians in a tizzy.

A tizzy. A spy balloon. How hilarious. Don’t worry folks, it’s all okay. Gen. Milley says so.

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tells “CBS News Sunday Morning” the balloon wasn’t spying. “The intelligence community, their assessment – and it’s a high-confidence assessment – [is] that there was no intelligence collection by that balloon,” he said.

I believe that there was intelligence collection by the balloon, what I don’t believe is that there was any intelligence collection by Gen. Milley and the “intelligence community”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19979/china-infiltrates-american-schools

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has, or has had, ties to 143 school districts in the United States, including 20 near military bases, through its “Confucius Classrooms,” according to a recent report, “Little Red Classrooms: China’s Infiltration of American K-12 Schools” by Parents Defending Education (PDE), a grassroots organization.

Attention to Confucius Institutes has mainly been centered around colleges and universities, but less so on K-12 education. This means that Chinese state propaganda is probably now pretty much all over American K-12 classrooms.

PDE observed that more than $17 million had been spent by the CCP on Confucius classrooms in the US between the years 2009-2023.

“Three of the nation’s top science and technology high schools have ties to Chinese government affiliated programs including Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology has had ties to Tsinghua University High School—the high school affiliated with one of China’s top military schools, Tsinghua University…” — Peter Wood, President, National Association of Scholars, Daily Signal, August 15, 2023.

“[W]hat’s happening in these schools is that they learn that China is a benevolent institution, the heir of an ancient civilization that means nothing but goodwill to the rest of the world… And the notion that you can take children who have some aptitude for the hard sciences and math and get them to view China as a potential partner and friend… all through their educational careers. We’re creating an assembly line for talented young men and women who will be unable to distinguish the American national interest from the Chinese national interest. They’re getting blurred together at a young age and that’s very difficult to undo once it’s done.” [Emphasis added.] — Peter Wood, Daily Signal, August 15, 2023.

Wood noted that CCP infiltration of American K-12 schools is “almost everywhere.”

“[I]t’s concentrated in the feeder schools to elite education, which means mostly West Coast and East Coast, but not exclusively those…. China’s… looking for places where buying influence will yield results in the long term.” — Peter Wood, Daily Signal, August 15, 2023.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/mexican-cartel-bases-used-to-spy-on-enemies-dispatch-hitmen

The different cartels operating in Mexican border cities are setting up their own “intelligence centers” equipped with cameras, communications and a rudimentary dispatch office from where they send information gathered by their cameras, lookouts or sources to their operators. 

Criminal organizations like the Sinaloa cartel or the Jalisco New Generation cartel are setting up proper “intelligence bunkers” from where they keep a tight watch on authorities, citizens and “enemies” along the U.S.-Mexico border, according to Mexican officials and cartel members speaking with Fox News Digital.

In July, the local authorities of the Mexican border city of Tecate, Baja California, found over a dozen “illegal security cameras” around the city allegedly owned by the Sinaloa cartel.

“After an investigation we found these cameras didn’t belong to any of the city or state security forces and decided to remove them in an attempt to combat the criminal organizations operating here,” Tecate’s chief of police, Leopoldo Tizoc Durán, said in a press release. 

In Tijuana, the cartel pays a monthly rent to home or business owners to install security cameras on their properties, according to a Sinaloa cartel operative speaking with Fox News Digital anonymously.

“We pay from 500 pesos to 1,000 ($25 to $50) for installing a couple of cameras around their property,” the operative said. “Those images go straight to a safe house where we have people sending out reports.” 

https://pjmedia.com/columns/rachel-ehrenfeld/2023/09/13/the-biden-administration-and-the-threat-of-another-attack-on-america-n1726858

On Sept. 11, 2001, at 8:45 a.m., I was on the phone with the European Wall Street Journal editor. We were discussing my op-ed on what, at that time, the editor described as an exotic subject: financing terrorism. The paper planned to run it the next day. 

The TV’s regular morning chatter in the background suddenly changed, and a frightened voice announced that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, disrupting our conversation. I rushed to my window, which had a clear view of downtown Manhattan and the World Trade Center, and saw smoke rising in the distance, quickly turning into thick, black clouds engulfing the Twin Towers. Soon, the sky turned black, and the buildings disappeared altogether.

I called the editor back — it was still possible to get a connection to Europe — and after describing the horrors I was witnessing I suggested a new lead for the op-ed. I knew instinctively that this was no accident but a terror attack.

My op-ed, “Evil’s Unwitting Helper,” appeared on the morning of Sept. 12, 2001. I wrote that “terrorism does not happen in a political vacuum. The policies pursued by Western nations impact directly on both the means available to terrorists and the motivations driving their evil agendas. It is imperative that we assess what has gone wrong and begin to set those policies right.”

This disaster was the reason for my writing the book “Funding Evil, How Terrorism is Financed — and How to Stop It,” which detailed the many ways used to fund terrorism and demanded to stop the paymasters who make terrorists’ activities possible so that the horror of September 11 never happen again.

It took some time for the U.S. government to confirm that al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist organizations have been raising money through charitable organizations, fundraising in mosques, and revenues from legal businesses such as used-cars sales, honey manufacturing, clothing stores, groceries, and mining, as well as and illegal businesses, such as drugs, arms, and human trafficking, to mention but a few. Today, as before, they are often still beneficiaries of states that provide money, arms, training camps, and haven. 

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

Recently JFK biographer Ira Stoll argued against the knee-jerk demonization of the defense industry. He described an event at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government at which an executive from defense contractor Raytheon spoke, sparking protests and chants against “warmongers, imperialists and Zionists” who foment unnecessary wars to make money and advance their oppressive ideologies.

This verbal trifecta of ancient leftist clichés and villains reminds us just how old, simplistic, and dangerous our foreign policy idealism is in a world of ambitious state predators.

This idealistic narrative reflects several bad ideas about how we should defend our security and interests, and deal with aggressors. For over a century now, what British historian Corelli Barnett called “moralizing internationalism,” and we call the “rules-based international order,” has assumed that rather than a tragic constant of interstate relations, war is an anomaly to be corrected.

Supposedly, our advances in understanding human nature and motivation can replace war with non-lethal policies for adjudicating conflict. Multinational treaties and covenants, transnational institutions, and international diplomacy can manage interstate conflict and avoid war’s horrors and destruction.

Only the wicked keep this peaceful settling of conflict from stopping war. One villain frequently blamed for wars after World War I is the arms manufacturers, what became known as the “merchants of death,” today one of our sturdiest and most tired clichés. The animus against armament businesses fed the antiwar sentiments of the interwar periods, and promoted pacifism, disarmament, and the reliance on non-lethal methods for settling conflict.

But as George Orwell pointed out in 1940, the horrors of the industrialized carnage of the Great War promoted the question-begging “meaningless slaughter” take on World War I. Even “to have any knowledge of or interest in military matters . . . was suspected in ‘enlightened circles.’” These attitudes contributed to the growth of pacifism, cutbacks in defense budgets, and a preference for multilateral covenants and institutions, all of which contributed to the disastrous policies of appeasement that culminated in Munich.

Yet despite that epochal failure, the antimilitarism, naïve non-violent approaches to resolving conflict, and the moral hazard created by the projection of weakness such polices create, have become the received wisdom of our foreign policy establishment. Just consider the Biden administration’s disastrous attempts to restart the Iran nuclear deal. Under cover of “diplomatic engagement,” we have not just made the mullahs’ path to nuclear weapons easier, but also financed the regime’s malign aggression.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/replicator-drones-pentagon-u-s-military-china-kathleen-hicks-9f585dce?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

The Pentagon said last week that the U.S. will build thousands of drones to counter China, and a 24-month timeline fits the urgency of the Pacific military threat. But beware the idea that nascent technology can patch growing U.S. vulnerabilities on the cheap.

The Pentagon is rolling out an initiative called Replicator that aims to speed up the “shift of U.S. military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap and many,” said Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks in a recent speech. The Chinese Communist Party “has spent the last 20 years building a modern military carefully crafted to blunt the operational advantages we’ve enjoyed for decades.”

Ukraine has deployed cheap drones to great effect, from reconnaissance to apparent sea explosives cobbled together with jet-ski parts. Drone swarms could help the U.S. jam or distract enemy radars and surface-to-air missiles. Armed seacraft could offer more offensive missile power at lower risk to U.S. troops.

Ms. Hicks says new systems will “help us overcome the PRC’s advantage in mass: More ships, more missiles, more forces.” The new drones, styled as “all-domain, attritable autonomous systems,” will help defeat the Chinese plan to push U.S. forces out of the Pacific.

Innovation is welcome, but so is caution about thinking that the U.S. can use better technology to make up for a smaller military, as the U.S. Navy looks set to shrink to 285 ships in the coming years. Ms. Hicks invoked the Cold War example of offsetting Soviet advantage in forces with precision weapons. But Ronald Reagan also built a 600-ship Navy and rejected a false choice between better tech and more ships and ammo. The U.S. won the Cold War with both.