RUTHFULLY YOURS

Senior officials in Germany’s army have called for background checks on all new recruits after discovering that dozens of soldiers with links to jihadi groups have enlisted in the country’s armed forces.

More than 60 recruits with Islamist links have already been exposed as Bundeswehr officials hastily proposed a draft amendment calling for new screening process to eliminate potential Islamist recruits as well as right and left-wing extremists, according to the Sunday’s Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

Military leaders are warning that infiltration means jihadists can quickly acquire both military skills and weapons training that can then be used to carry out attacks either inside Germany or abroad.

Under new fast-tracked proposals, army officials want pre-screening of new recruits ahead of acceptance into the country’s armed forces.

More than 800 Islamists, many of them German citizens, have left the country to join the ranks of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, as the country struggles with a growing radicalization problem.

Of those who have left to go fight alongside ISIS, more than 120 have been killed and over 200 have returned, according to Germany’s Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere.

Additionally, at least 29 ISIS recruits have previously served in the German army, according to an internal military reportreleased in April.

Currently, only soldiers serving with Germany’s armed forces are monitored for signs of radicalization, but new laws call for another 90 officers who will carry out more than 20,000 checks on new recruits at an estimated cost of more than $9 million.

Germany is presently on a high state of alert following a series of deadly attacks last month linked to the Islamic State.

“Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder,
is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they
call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason and the mind becomes
a wreck.” —Thomas Jefferson, to James Smith, December 8, 1822

You ask yourself: Why do the “gullible” make it so easy to mock and ridicule them? But, then, one could spend a career wondering about the cerebral workings of our politicians and other notables. Why is a stone so quiet, and inanimate? Because that’s just the way it behaves, or doesn’t behave. Here is a selection of memorable gaffes (or lies masquerading as innocent gaffes or lapses in synaptic activity).

We start with our reality-challenged, addled Secretary of State, John Kerry, who recently uttered something in Bangladesh that wins some kind of award for upper class twitism. According to CNS new and other sources, he opined:

Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday during an appearance in Bangladesh that the media could “do us all a service” if they didn’t cover terrorism “quite as much.”

What would he prefer the MSM to cover, instead of the continued spate of Islamic terrorism? It isn’t as though it regularly reported the rapes by Muslims in Germany and Sweden, or the numerous honor killings in Muslim countries, or the number of gays thrown off of roofs in ISIS territory. Perhaps the annual pie-eating contest in Indianapolis? The annual Iditarod race in Alaska? How about the horrendous murder rates in “gun-controlled” Chicago? Nix the latter. It would be too much like reporting on Syria.

No country is immune from terrorism,” Kerry said at a press conference in Dhaka, Bangladesh. “It’s easy to terrorize. Government and law enforcement have to be correct 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. But if you decide one day you’re going to be a terrorist and you’re willing to kill yourself, you can go out and kill some people. You can make some noise. Perhaps the media would do us all a service if they didn’t cover it quite as much. People wouldn’t know what’s going on.”

And that’s okay with Kerry. “Ignorance is Strength,” don’t you know? What the people don’t know won’t hurt them, until the next terrorist attack hurts them by the score. This piece of mental gibberish is in line with the German-Swedish policy of suppressing any news that would tend to make native Europeans less enthralled with how consistently and ubiquitously savage their new “refugee” neighbors” are. As the National Review’s Jim Geragehty noted on August 30th,

You can’t write satire about this administration anymore; it’s become too inherently contradictory and absurd.

Not even Saturday Night Live could make up this kind of statement for laughs. It’s too bad Edgar Bergen, the ventriloquist, isn’t around to create a John Kerry dummy.

In an important report issued yesterday, the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington, D.C. arms-control think tank, revealed that Iran was secretly granted exemptions to the July 2015 nuclear agreement (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA) so it could meet compliance requirements for what the agreement calls “Implementation Day” — when Iran was to receive an estimated $150 billion in sanctions relief.

Not coincidentally, the same day Implementation Day was announced (January 18), U.S. officials also announced a swap of 18 Iranian prisoners held by the United States for five U.S. citizens who had been illegally held by Iran. An additional 14 Iranians were removed from an INTERPOL wanted list.

The Institute report cites an unnamed official who said that without these exemptions, some of Iran’s nuclear facilities would not have been in compliance with the JCPOA by Implementation Day.

The exemptions were granted by the JCPOA’s “Joint Commission,” composed of the parties to the agreement: Iran, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, China, and Russia. Some of the exemptions were significant and allowed Iran to not report activities with nuclear weapons-related applications. These exemptions were:

Allowing Iran to violate a cap of 300 kg for its enriched-uranium stockpile under certain circumstances. The Commission gave Iran an exemption for reactor-grade enriched UF6 (uranium hexafluoride, the feed material for enrichment centrifuges) in the form of low-level and sludge waste. This may have been a minor violation although the report said the amount of this material is unknown.

Ignoring “lab contaminant” UF6 enriched to 20 percent uranium-235 judged as “unrecoverable.” Although this may also be a minor violation, the report says the amount of this material and how it was judged unrecoverable is not known.

Exemption for large “hot cells.” The JCPOA allows Iran to operate or build hot cells (shielded chambers used to handle radioactive substances), but to ensure they are used for peaceful purposes such as producing medical radionuclides, Iran agreed that for 15 years these cells will be limited to no more than six cubic meters. The Commission gave Iran an exemption to operate 22 larger hot cells. According to the Institute report, these larger cells could be secretly misused for plutonium-separation experiments. The Institute also raised concerns that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is not adequately monitoring Iran’s hot cells and that Iran is exploiting this exemption to win approval to operate more hot cells with volumes greater than six cubic meters. This is a potentially serious exemption because plutonium-separation experiments have only one purpose: developing the capability to produce plutonium nuclear-weapons fuel.

The report also noted two other secret decisions by the Joint Commission.

Iran “has fully implemented its required commitments.” That was the representation Obama secretary of state John Kerry made to the American people in announcing on January 16 — “Implementation Day” of President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal (aka, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) — that international economic sanctions were consequently being lifted against Iran.

Secretary Kerry added that “Iran has undertaken significant steps that many, and I do mean many, people doubted would ever come to pass.” Still, Kerry promised, the Obama administration would continue watching the mullahs like a hawk, thus “assuring continued full compliance” with the regime’s JCPOA commitments.

The same day, President Obama signed an executive order lifting a number of U.S. economic sanctions against Iran. We now know he also set in motion a furtive $400 million cash transfer to the regime as a ransom (which the administration calls “leverage”) for the release of four American hostages — the first installment of a carefully structured $1.7 billion side payment to Iran (ostensibly in settlement of a failed 1970s arms deal), details about which the administration continues to withhold from Congress and the public.

All of this was based on this purported “full implementation” of Iran’s “required commitments” under the JCPOA touted by Obama and Kerry. And all of it was a deliberate, audacious, elaborately plotted lie.

The Institute for Science and International Security (hereafter, the Institute) reported on Thursday that Iran was not in full compliance with its JCPOA commitments on Implementation Day, as was required — we were led to believe — before Iran was to get sanctions relief. What’s more, the Obama administration not only well knew that Iran was not in compliance; it also colluded with Iran, through the secretive JCPOA device known as the “Joint Commission,” in order to exempt Iran’s multiple violations from compliance requirements.

Got it? As Obama and Kerry were telling you that Iran had “fully implemented its required commitments,” and that the administration would continue working energetically to ensure future continued “full compliance” with those commitments, Obama and Kerry were working with Iran to excuse its flouting of its commitments — and, it turns out, to lay the groundwork for future “exemptions” from compliance.

On August 4, during the course of a press conference, Obama gave his interim assessment of his nuclear agreement with Iran. “It worked,” he insisted.The time for complaining about President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran has passed. The time has come to overcome the damage enormous damage his signature foreign policy accomplishment has caused.

To understand why this is the case, it is important to understand the breadth and depth of Obama’s failure.

A year after the deal was signed, Obama argued, events have proven that he was right and the deal’s critics were wrong.

“You’ll recall that there were all these horror stories about how Iran was going to cheat and this wasn’t going to work and Iran was going to get $150 billion to finance terrorism and all these kinds of scenarios, and none of them have come to pass,” he proclaimed.

Obama then snidely swiped at the deal’s opponents saying that it would be “impressive” if the people who criticized the deal would own up to their mistakes and admit that it worked.

As it works out, everything that Obama said about the deal with Iran during his press conference was a lie.

Some of his lies became apparent within hours.

For instance, Obama falsely claimed that Israel now “acknowledges this has been a game changer and Iran has abided by the deal and they no longer have the sort of short-term breakout capacity that would allow them to develop nuclear weapons.”

On Monday, the Iranian propaganda outlet, Tasnim, reported that Iranian anti-aircraft crews succeeded in detecting and warding off a U.S. spy drone that strayed into Iranian airspace from neighboring Afghanistan. If true, it would mark yet another US-Iranian clash in the region. Though the instant confrontation was relatively minor and did not result in injury or damage, it is demonstrative of the more aggressive and assertive tone the Iranian military is taking with respect to its dealings with the United States and the region since the signing of Obama’s much touted Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the plan that provides the Islamic Republic with a legal pathway toward acquiring nuclear weapons.

According to a U.S. defense official, U.S. and Iranian naval vessels interacted on at least 300 occasions in 2015 and on more than 250 occasions this year alone. Many of those encounters were relatively benign but some were the result of egregious Iranian provocations.

In December of 2015, Iranian navy boats fired rockets within 1,500 feet of aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman. On January 12, 2016, an Iranian drone flew uncomfortably close to the Harry S. Truman. A U.S. Navy spokesman called the flyover “abnormal and unprofessional.” The Navy could have easily downed the drone but inexplicably chose not to. Such an action would have sent the Iranians the proper message without causing loss of life but the drone was nevertheless allowed to conduct its surveillance unmolested.

The very day that the drone was shadowing U.S. naval forces, the Iranians seized 10 American navy personnel and two Riverine Command Boats near Farsi Island in the Arabian Gulf. The RCB is heavily armed and armored but despite overwhelming firepower, the RCB crews humiliatingly surrendered to the Iranians without firing a shot. The crew and its commander displayed an abject lack of fighting spirit. A Pentagon investigation revealed that there were morale and training problems as well as a number of human errors that led to the shameful fiasco. Several officers were reprimanded and relieved of command as a result.

Kerry’s ruffled ostrich feathers

You’ve got to hand it to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for being consistent when it comes to his view of global terrorism. In Bangladesh on Monday, he reiterated his position to members of the press.

“Perhaps the media would do us all a service if they didn’t cover it quite as much,” he said at a briefing at the Edward M. Kennedy Center in Dhaka. This way, he explained, “People wouldn’t know what’s going on.”

This was Kerry’s clumsy way of acknowledging that though the phenomenon exists, its individual perpetrators — who “decide one day … to be … terrorists and [are] willing to kill [themselves], and go out and kill some people, [in order to] make some noise” — should not be given a spotlight. Indeed, he said, “no country is immune” from the phenomenon, because “it’s easy to terrorize.”

In other words, since suicide bombers who slaughter innocent people are a dime a dozen, the best way to burst their publicity-seeking bubbles is to ignore them. Especially when there are more pressing matters to tackle, chief among them the weather. Yes, in the eyes of America’s top diplomat, climate change is what ought to be concerning the global community, and tackling it requires everyone’s undivided attention.

In June, Kerry went as far as to say that refrigerators and air conditioners are a threat on a par with mass murder. In Vienna to amend the 1987 Montreal Protocol that would phase out hydrofluorocarbons in household appliances, he announced, “It’s hard for some people to grasp it, but what we … are doing here right now is of equal importance [to Islamic State and other terrorist groups], because it has the ability to literally save life on the planet itself.”

A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said the State Department should turn over all materials related to allegations in a new think-tank report charging that Iran got secret exemptions in the nuclear deal to get the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action completed on schedule.

The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security report said “some nuclear stocks and facilities were not in accordance with JCPOA limits on Implementation Day, but in anticipation the Joint Commission had earlier and secretly exempted them from the JCPOA limits.”

“The exemptions and in one case, a loophole, involved the low enriched uranium (LEU) cap of 300 kilograms (kg), some of the near 20 percent LEU, the heavy water cap, and the number of large hot cells allowed to remain in Iran. One senior knowledgeable official stated that if the Joint Commission had not acted to create these exemptions, some of Iran’s nuclear facilities would not have been in compliance with the JCPOA by Implementation Day,” wrote authors David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector, and Andrea Stricker.

They added that the “secretive decision making process risks advantaging Iran by allowing it to try to systematically weaken the JCPOA. It appears to be succeeding in several key areas.”

“Given the technical complexity and public importance of the various JCPOA exemptions and loopholes, the administration’s policy to maintain secrecy interferes in the process of establishing adequate Congressional and public oversight of the JCPOA. This is particularly true concerning potentially agreement-weakening decisions by the Joint Commission. As a matter of policy, the United States should agree to any exemptions or loopholes in the JCPOA only if the decisions are simultaneously made public.”

The institute has remained neutral on whether or not the nuclear deal should have been implemented.

Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) called the revelations “yet another example of the administration’s false choice it presented to the American people in selling the flawed Iranian deal that provides the mullahs a patient pathway to the bomb.”

“The American public deserves answers from the administration, and I expect the State Department to release all relevant materials and to fully explain these allegations,” Gardner added.

State Department press secretary John Kirby told reporters today there was no loosening of the low-enriched uranium stockpile rule, insisting it “hasn’t changed; they’ve not exceeded that limit.”

“As many of you know, it’s written right in the JCPOA, which established the Joint Commission, that the work of the Joint Commission would be confidential,” Kirby said. “Unless the Joint Commission decided otherwise, and it’s right there in the JCPOA itself. And it’s designed that way.”

“…I also would assert that the Joint Commission has not and will not loosen any of the commitments and has not provide any exceptions that would allow Iran to retain or process material in excess of its JCPOA limits that it could use in a breakout scenario.”

Kirby said Congress “has been kept informed” of the commission’s work.

Barack Obama, during the 2008 presidential campaign, was presented to the people of the United States—and, more broadly, to the people of the world—as the candidate best suited to play the role of unifier. President George W. Bush had been the Great Divider but now the time had come for everyone to put those discordant days behind us and embrace the one we had been waiting for, and so begin an era of repair and restoration. A sizeable proportion of Americans continue to approve of President Obama—close to 50 per cent in some polls—and yet the blistering populist campaigns pursued by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump (and, in a sense, Ted Cruz) throughout the current presidential campaign season suggest that his time in office has increased discord in the country.

Barack Obama positioning himself as the Healer-in-Chief was always a problematic notion. Edward Klein’s The Amateur (2012) is vitriolic in tone and underestimates Obama’s political savvy, and yet his rationalisation of Obama’s original popular appeal—masterminded by political consultant David Axelrod—remains relevant:

[Axelrod] performed a brilliant piece of political legerdemain … He devised a narrative for Obama in which the candidate was presented as a black man who would heal America, not divide it, a moderate non-partisan who would rescue America, not threaten it.

Candidate Obama, the politician with the most radical voting record in the US Senate, could be trusted by mainstream America to bring the nation together.

President Obama has failed as national peacemaker because he is not a “centrist” or mediator. The provenance of his systematic worldview can be found in the thinkers of the New Left, from Frank Marshall Davis and Edward Said to Jeremiah Wright. The Reverend Wright’s “God damn America!” outburst encapsulates the New Left’s aversion to the fundamentals of America’s capitalist democracy. America is not to be healed so much as reconfigured. The great ideological fissure in the United States, then, is between their so-called libertarian-socialism—the “spirit of 1968” as Dinesh D’Souza has tagged it—and a revolution with far deeper roots: the “spirit of 1776”.

Edward Klein’s insight is only one explanation for why so many Americans failed to grasp the sharp nature of Barack Obama’s ideology. Not the least of these is that the forty-fourth president long ago took a leaf out of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (1971). President Obama, in short, eschews the pitfalls of the “rhetorical radical”. He avoids the undisguised anger and belligerence common to many activists and, in its place, adopts the public persona of what Alinsky called the “radical realist”. This could be summed up in four words: Don’t frighten the horses. Thus, Barack Obama typically expresses himself with the poise and equanimity of a venerable conciliator, and yet a more contentious outlook is invariably at work.

Socrates is rumored to have said that the only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing, and maybe we should adopt a version of the Greek philosopher’s motto when it comes to the nuclear deal with Iran. To wit, we are learning again that what the Obama Administration says Iran can do under the agreement, and what Iran is allowed to do, are almost never the same.

The latest discrepancy was revealed Thursday in a report by David Albright and Andrea Stricker of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a think tank in Washington D.C. that specializes in nuclear issues. The agreement specifies that Iran is to limit its stockpile of reactor-grade, low-enriched uranium (LEU) to no more than 300 kilograms for 15 years. Tehran shipped more than 11 tons of LEU to Russia last year, and the Administration has trumpeted the Islamic Republic’s supposed compliance with the deal as a way of justifying wider sanctions relief.

But as Mr. Albright and Ms. Stricker note, Iran‘s “compliance” came about thanks to a series of secretive exemptions and loopholes that the Administration and the deal’s other signatories created for the mullahs sometime last year. Had those exemptions and loopholes not been created out of thin air, the authors report, “some of Iran’s nuclear facilities would not have been in compliance” with the deal.

Among the exemptions: Iran was allowed to keep more than 300 kilos of low-enriched uranium provided it was in various “waste forms.” The deal was also supposed to cap Iran’s production of heavy water at 130 tons, but another loophole now allows Iran to exceed that. In a third exemption, Iran was allowed to maintain 19 large radiation containment chambers, or hot cells, which are supposed to be used for producing medical isotopes but can be “misused for secret, mostly small-scale plutonium separation efforts.”

The White House has waved off the ISIS report by insisting it “did not and will not allow Iran to skirt” its commitments. The non-denial would be more credible if the Administration hadn’t last year agreed to a secretive process in which Iran was allowed to inspect its own nuclear-related military facilities.