RUTHFULLY YOURS

Next month, we will mark the 24th anniversary of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

The prosecutions that followed, including the one I was privileged to lead against the terrorist cell of Omar Abdel Rahman (“the Blind Sheikh”), were pivotal in the development of American national security policy. Up until the 9/11 attacks, almost all of these prosecutions took place in the jurisdiction of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

On Wednesday night, I participated in a Federal Bar Council program on “The Second Circuit and Terrorism” along with former Attorney General Michael Mukasey (the former chief judge of the SDNY who tried the Blind Sheikh case), Judge Joseph Bianco (my former SDNY colleague who later served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Bush Justice Department), and Roger L. Stavis (who represented Sayyid Nosair, one of the principal defendants in the Blind Sheikh case) in a panel moderated by Fordham Law School Professor Karen Greenberg (who directs Fordham’s Center on National Security). Below is my speech at the start of the program.

Since I don’t get back to my old haunts nearly as much as I’d like to, it is a thrill to be here in our grand courthouse in the Southern District of New York, among so many old friends and colleagues. It is a real privilege to participate in this panel on “The Second Circuit and Terrorism,” with people I’ve learned so much from over the last — I don’t even want to think about how many years have gone by. Let’s just say there was a lot more hair on my head, and a lot less of, well, me, when I first met most of them.

My role at the beginning of this evening is to give a brief overview of how terrorism prosecutions have evolved. What happened here in the Second Circuit, and particularly in the cases that originally sprung out of our SDNY office after the World Trade Center was bombed in February 1993, is ingrained in the foundation of American national security policy — both in terms of what the judicial system could achieve, and where other components of government needed to step up and fill security voids.

In addressing this topic, I’ve always thought it important to point out that when terrorism arrived in our homeland in the systematic way we have experienced it in the last quarter-century, nobody sat around the table and thought about how we should respond to it. There was no grand policy debate asking, “Is this a crime, or is it a war?” “Is our civilian process of criminal prosecution up to this, or do we need to resort to military justice and the ancient laws and customs of war?”

What happened, instead, was an explosion.

When a critical incident occurs domestically, regardless of whether it appears to be terrorism, a major accident, or a natural disaster, it is the first responders who answer the call — police, firefighters, emergency medical personnel, and the like. Back in 1993, we didn’t even think about the military or our intelligence community, which are restricted by various statutes and regulations from operating inside the homeland.

When South Carolina Senator Tim Scott endorsed Trump’s pick for attorney general, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, liberals attacked him on Twitter as inauthentically black. Scott shot down their racist attacks with dignity and class, winning widespread admiration.

Racism is still alive and well in this country, and perhaps more in politics than in the police force. If a black conservative dares to rear his head, racist liberals will silence him on account of his race. Or so it proved for a sitting U.S. senator.

“William Smith and Tim Scott are house niggas,” tweeted @Simonalisa, whose tweet (and even her Twitter account) has been deleted. Scott shut her down with one word: “Senate.”

Other liberals attacked Scott as a “house boy,” an “Uncle Tom,” and worse.

“Alabama housenigger tim scott comes through for his massa great grandson,” tweeted R T.E.D., an account whose tweets are private, Twitchy reported. To this, Scott replied, “Just BTW – SENATE.”

Another Twitter account (which presently has no tweets at all) described the South Carolina senator as “a White man in a black body” for supporting Sessions, according to Twitchy. Here, Scott revealed both grace and wit.

“Is that like a Liger?” Scott asked, without missing a beat. Helpfully, he included a link to Google search results on the word “Liger.” CONTINUE AT SITE

I like to joke that I am never wrong, then correct myself: oops, yes I was wrong once, that was on March 25, 2008, around ten in the morning. Nonsense, of course. But I do want to say, however arrogant it may appear, that I have been generally right in my political predictions. The point is not to assume a peculiar form of dispensation, but to show that being right requires only a little practice.

Here are just three examples.

1. Terror. Returning to London from a literary symposium at the University of East Anglia in Norwich in mid-June 2005, I entered the Tube station at King’s Cross on the Piccadilly Line and immediately saw that this would be an ideal place for Islamic terrorists to strike. Considering the growing Islamization of the U.K., the atmosphere of threat, the wariness of authorities to move against Islamic supremacism or even to name it, the proliferation of terror preaching imams at radical mosques, and the fact that a heavily trafficked, unsecured public transport site is a perfect venue for urban mayhem, King’s Cross seemed an obvious target. I wrote as much in the then-in-progress manuscript of The Big Lie. The attack occurred shortly afterward, on July 7, 2005. My editor Malcolm Lester had me cancel the passage prior to publication lest readers assume I had inserted it retroactively to surreptitiously affirm my prescience.

2. Obama. I wrote to my Jewish friends — some of them prominent figures in literature and journalism who were ecstatic over candidate Obama’s comforting July 23, 2008 Sderot address to the Israeli people — that the man was not to be trusted and would assuredly go back on his word. Although he was riding a wave of popularity and goodwill, I predicted that despite his syrupy phrases and consoling manner he would eventually show his true colors as Israel’s devoted enemy and would do everything he possibly could to harm the Jewish state. All that was needed to arrive at this conclusion was a modicum of research into Obama’s history, his mentorship by Marxists and Muslims reflexively sympathetic to the Palestinian victimhood narrative, and a close reading of body language and exaggerated inflection. My colleagues were amused and not a few disturbed by my evident cynicism. “Israel has a true friend in Obama,” one well-known commentator opined. To another I wrote: “Nothing this fellow says can be believed, not a single syllable. He is a liar from the womb. How can you not see that?” His reply was to accuse me of advanced paranoia.

My debate with Alan Dershowitz, hosted on FrontPage Magazine a few years later, followed the same pattern. Proud of his president for having visited the embattled Israeli town of Sderot and for having Israel’s back, he fell for every lie that escaped Obama’s lips. (As I write this, Obama has perfidiously refused to use the once-reliable American veto in the December 23, 2016 U.N. Security Council resolution against Israeli so-called “settlements,” doing major damage to the Jewish state.) As with many of my Jewish friends, Dershowitz could not admit he was wrong, but merely kept repeating a series of flabby clichés and fixed talking points, never once addressing my arguments showing that Obama was a hypocrite and an enemy-in-friend’s-clothing. It is only quite recently that the redoubtable Dersh has reversed himself, but that is always easier after the fact. “Experts” like Dershowitz, shackled to belief and convinced of superior insight, are people who learn late what was obvious early — assuming they learn at all. Thinking is harder than rethinking, which is why they are almost never right.

Every time we say the Pledge of Allegiance, we confess that we are “one nation,” but there is less and less cultural evidence of that. In fact, after eight years of perhaps the most divisive president in American history, we are more balkanized than ever. Not only have the ethnic divisions been exacerbated by the constant allegations of racism and white privilege, but we now contend with a whole new set of tribal identities. We are not only segmented by racial classifications of black, white, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American, but shoehorned into the mix are sexual categories of gay; lesbian; bisexual; transgender, and, according to Facebook, 56 other gender identities.

With the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, the time has come to take a bold step toward unity. To borrow from the president-elect, it is time to make America unified again. We will never be perfectly unified, but we can reverse the politics of division and reorient our culture toward unity.

Since the election, Mr. Trump has called for solidarity. We need to make that sentiment tangible. The left’s identity politics fosters the narrative of victim versus oppressor, white male versus everyone else, white privilege versus black “empowerment,” capitalist versus worker, and now enlightened sexual liberators versus the bigoted, hateful traditional Americans.

It is an effective strategy for obtaining and holding power, but the whole country suffers for it. President Obama and his fellow liberals have unleashed racial hell on our country, moving us away from our vision of “one nation under God with liberty and justice for all.”

Sixty-two police officers were murdered in 2016, twenty-one in ambush killings because of the false narrative that police are hunting down and killing unarmed black men. The mainstream media, liberal elites, and the president have promoted this cancerous myth, and it has metastasized. In the latest racial horror, four young black suspects filmed themselves torturing a victim because he was white and disabled. They made him recite phrases such as “I love black people.” They taunted him for alleged support of Donald Trump and hurled profanities against Mr. Trump and “white people.” These are the inevitable results of the left’s destructive strategy of identity politics.

Billionaire hedge-fund manager George Soros lost nearly $1 billion as a result of the stock-market rally spurred by Donald Trump’s surprise presidential election.

But Stanley Druckenmiller, Mr. Soros’s former deputy who helped Mr. Soros score $1 billion of profits betting against the British pound in 1992, anticipated the market’s recent climb and racked up sizable gains, according to people close to the matter.

The two traders’ divergent bets are a stark reminder of the challenges even acclaimed investors have faced following Mr. Trump’s unexpected victory. Many experts had predicted a tumble for stocks in the wake of the election, but instead the Dow Jones Industrial Average has climbed about 9% since Election Day.

Stocks have fallen broadly in the past couple of sessions, hurt in part by a reversal for smaller companies and the financial industry. A decline in both sectors helped push the Dow industrials down more than 150 points in the past two sessions.

For the past couple of years, hedge funds and other professional investors have complained that placid conditions made it difficult to generate trading profits. Brevan Howard Asset Management LLP and Moore Capital Management, both multibillion-dollar hedge-fund firms, are among those that managed to turn a losing year into a winning one after the election, according to people familiar with them.

Last year, Mr. Soros returned to trading at Soros Fund Management LLC, which manages about $30 billion for Mr. Soros and his family. Mr. Soros was lured back by perceived opportunities to profit from economic troubles he was anticipating in China, within the European Union and elsewhere, according to people familiar with the matter.

Trump’s alleged kinky escapade in a Moscow hotel never passed the sniff test, despite the whiff of uric acid his detractors claimed to discern in that improbable briefing paper. Nevertheless, in emptying a chamber pot of suspicion on the incoming president, it served its purpose.
It was almost official as of a day or two ago: Donald Trump is a urine fetishist beholding to Vladimir Putin, who has in his vault surreptitiously filmed footage that will make the incoming president now and forever the Kremlin’s servant and tool. Laughable nonsense and now largely discounted in its most explicit details, there remains a distinctly Russian angle to the farce best summarised by the Western saying ‘no smoke without the fire’. Smoke smears and sullies those over whom it is blown, and this would seem to have been the intent of those who so eagerly believed and propagated the monstrous absurdity of pee parties in the presidential suite of Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton.

Rumor, innuendo, gossip, slander, defamation, mudslinging – call it what you will, but do not overlook the intended result: to de-legitimize a president before he can begin to implement his agenda. That such an improbable tale gained traction can be explained by something the best liars understand as if my instinct: start with verifiable and accepted facts as your lie’s foundation, then weave mischief amongst them.

Thus we begin with the fact that Trump visited in Moscow in 2013 and stayed at the same hotel as did Obama and his family in 2009. Now add another known fact: that the honey trap has been a favourite means of ensnarement since Adam was persuaded by Eve to eat that fateful apple. The KGB raised the gambit almost to an art form.

Consider, for example, the compromising of French Ambassador Maurice Dejean, who was ‘caught’ during an illicit tryst with his KGB lover by her ‘husband’. Damaged goods, he was dismissed by Charles De Gaulle, his wartime friend. Then there was Sir Geoffrey Harrison, British ambassador to Moscow and the tall, elegant and dignified epitome of of the stiff-upper-lip Englishman. He was entrapped by his chambermaid but confounded the spooks by reporting the fling to his superiors before the KGB could blackmail him. Given the provenance of the honey trap, what could be more natural on the part of those predisposed to oppose Trump than to react on cue to the allegation, even though unsourced, that he, too, had tumbled into its tender embrace?

Judging by the jubilation of Russia’s elite at news of the Trump victory — the relationship with Obama and Clinton having long ago descended to the septic — why would this not be so, even minus a soggy hotel mattress? You can see a hint of that disdain in one of the official photos of Mrs Clinton and Putin meeting in the Kremlin. Putin sits in a chair adjacent to his guest, thighs splayed so wide it as if he is putting his genitals on display – classic body language of the Alpha-male both dominating and displaying his contempt for the female of the species. Clearly, theirs was no entente cordial.

Russian influence within potentially hostile governments is well known, Alger Hiss and the Cambridge Five being but two examples. So why not a compromised and cooperative Trump as well? Accept that premise, as did his piss-takers earlier this week, when social media ran riot with jokes (“Obama, you’re out. Trump urine“), and all his future dealings with Russia must by necessity be viewed beneath a cloud of darkest suspicion.

Up until this morning, Kellyanne Conway seemed to be the coolest head advising Donald Trump and re-interpreting him for public consumption. No matter which t.v. channel she appeared on, she had that relaxed smile and even-toned voice that seemed to indicate moderation above all. She reminded us of how he modified some of his rashest statements to indicate that once a winner, he was after all, capable of self-reflection. We began to believe that he was sincere in his desire to bring Americans together after a blistering and polarizing campaign.

And now comes the news that Kellyanne will be the first sitting White House official to address the Anti-Abortion march in person, in Washington at the end of this month, a mere week after the president takes office. Is there a more inflammatory issue for American women? No one would deny Kellyanne the right to support whatever cause she believes in but is this public endorsement a sign of good judgment? After hearing Mike Pence state categorically that whatever his personal beliefs were, Roe v Wade is the law of the land and not likely to change in the near future, is this really a smart way to start bringing democrats and republicans together? Isn’t this the most specifically self-defeating preface to getting confirmation for Supreme Court nominees? Now that Trump has been elected, it’s hard to see who benefits from this unique and aggressive demonstration of total partisanship.

Since there’s no chance that Kellyanne accepted this invitation without Trump’s approval, it’s more than disappointing to the many women who voted for him and were both impressed and swayed by her judicious persona, that this is their opening salvo to the majority of women in our nation. I suspect that I speak for many others when I confess that they have just begun to lose me at “hello.”