RUTHFULLY YOURS

The United States is at war with international terrorists, who, as the 9/11 Commission noted, must first enter the United States in order to attack it.

Consider the preface of the official government report, “9/11 and Terrorist Travel: Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States” that begins with the following paragraph:

It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.

Furthermore, although much has been made of the lack of integrity with respect to the U.S./Mexican border, the 9/11 Commission Staff Report on Terrorist Travel observed that most terrorists had entered the United States through international airports and then committed visa fraud and immigration benefit fraud to embed themselves in the country.

Page 54 of the report contained this excerpt under the title “3.2 Terrorist Travel Tactics by Plot,” which makes these issues crystal clear:

Although there is evidence that some land and sea border entries (of terrorists) without inspection occurred, these conspirators mainly subverted the legal entry system by entering at airports.

In doing so, they relied on a wide variety of fraudulent documents, on aliases, and on government corruption. Because terrorist operations were not suicide missions in the early to mid-1990s, once in the United States terrorists and their supporters tried to get legal immigration status that would permit them to remain here, primarily by committing serial, or repeated, immigration fraud, by claiming political asylum, and by marrying Americans. Many of these tactics would remain largely unchanged and undetected throughout the 1990s and up to the 9/11 attack.

Thus, abuse of the immigration system and a lack of interior immigration enforcement were unwittingly working together to support terrorist activity. It would remain largely unknown, since no agency of the United States government analyzed terrorist travel patterns until after 9/11. This lack of attention meant that critical opportunities to disrupt terrorist travel and, therefore, deadly terrorist operations were missed.

The commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service on Wednesday denied that he ordered his staff to destroy thousands of emails sought by Congress in 2014 during its investigation into the IRS targeting scandal.

Unapologetic and defiant two years ago, John Koskinen appeared very subdued and contrite today as he expressed “regret” for making incorrect statements during his testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in 2014. “Some of my testimony later proved mistaken,” Koskinen conceded. But he insisted that he had testified honestly to the best of his knowledge at the time.

Via the Washington Examiner:

Republicans on the judiciary panel slammed Koskinen for presiding over the destruction of backup tapes that housed Lerner’s emails.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, highlighted the “coincidence” that occurred when documents that had sat untouched for two years disappeared off the tapes shortly after investigators requested copies.

Koskinen faces potential impeachment at the hands of House conservatives over his handling of the IRS targeting probe, particularly over his pledge to provide emails that had already been erased at the time of his testimony.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) asked Koskinen about his false statement under oath that “every email has been preserved.”

“What did you mean by every email?” Gowdy asked.

“I meant that every email that the IRS had that I knew of had been preserved,” Koskinen stated. “That was my honest belief.”

“Well why didn’t you say that?” Gowdy pressed.

“Well — If I knew then what I know now, I would have testified differently,” said Koskinen. “But at the time, I testified honestly about what I knew and what I’d been told. Nobody regrets more than I do that in some ways this case has been the case that keeps on giving with more information coming out. I wish that all the information had been put out to begin with,” he added.

“It is always always an option to answer,’I don’t know,'” Gowdy said. “Loretta Lynch has made a living of saying ‘I don’t know.'”

He added, “But you were incredibly definitive. You said nothing had been lost. What did you mean by nothing?”

Koskinen answered: “I meant at that time that I had been advised ‘nothing,’ but you’re exactly right, in retrospect, I would have been better advised to say ‘to the best of my knowledge,’ or ‘on the basis of what I’ve been told’ — which was in fact the basis of my testimony.”

Images released of the journal of Ahmad Khan Rahami, the suspected NY-NJ bomber, show mention of a recently killed ISIS leader, but that reference is curiously missing from the federal indictment filed against him yesterday.

Is the Justice Department again trying to hide an obvious ISIS connection or inspiration from this past weekend’s attacks, just as they did when they censored Orlando mass killer Omar Mateen’s pledge to ISIS?

Reporters began showing pages of Rahami’s journal earlier today:

First look at bloody journal discovered with alleged bomber Ahmad Rahami, this page cites Al Qaeda & ISIS leaders pic.twitter.com/AT9VsZS9qu

— Mike Levine (@MLevineReports) September 21, 2016

One of the references on the page is to “Brother Adnani,” an ISIS leader killed in a U.S. drone strike just a few weeks ago.

Media reports place Adnani at the head of the ISIS unit responsible for conducting external terror attacks.

Terror expert Tom Joscelyn noted the Adnani mention, as well as other ISIS-related items, from Rahami’s journal.

It appears from notes written by captured New York bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami that he was motivated by ISIS orders to carry out attacks inside America.

A newly released FBI complaint reveals a passage from a journal Rahami kept that contains “a reference to the instructions of terrorist leaders that, if travel is infeasible, to attack nonbelievers where they live.”

While the terrorist leaders are not identified in the complaint, it quotes fragments of a related passage: ” … back to sham [Syria.] But [unintelligible] this incident show the risk are [unintelligible] of getting caught under [unintelligible].”

It’s not immediately known if Rahami attempted to travel to Syria and join ISIS and its jihad there. But for the past several months, ISIS has called on its supporters to strike in the West if they were prevented from traveling to the lands of the so-called caliphate, including Syria and Iraq.

In May, ISIS spokesman Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani advised followers that if American and other Western authorities “have shut the door of hijrah [migration] in your faces,” then “open the door of jihad in theirs.” In his notes, Rahami appears to comply with the plan, praying to Allah to help him carry out “jihad” at home without interference from “the F.B.I. & homeland security.” He started ordering bomb components in June.

“Make your deed a source of their regret,” said al-Adnani, who was killed earlier this month. “Truly, the smallest act you do in their lands is more beloved to us than the biggest act done here; it is more effective for us and more harmful to them.”

Added al-Adnani: “If one of you wishes and strives to reach the lands of the Islamic State, then each of us wishes to be in your place to make examples of the crusaders, day and night, scaring them and terrorizing them, until every neighbor fears his neighbor.”

Adnani told would-be jihadists they should “not make light of throwing a stone at a crusader in his land,” nor should they “underestimate any deed, as its consequences are great for the mujahidin and its effect is noxious to the disbelievers.”

In its latest issue of Dabiq magazine, “Break the Cross,” the Islamic State encourages Muslims in the West who are unable to migrate to “the Caliphate” to “serve a much greater purpose” by striking “behind enemy lines.”

“The blood of the disbelievers is obligatory to spill by default. The command is clear. Kill the disbelievers, as Allah said, ‘Then kill the polytheists wherever you find them,'” the magazine said.

“As they haphazardly kill Muslims in their war against the mujahidin,” it exhorted, “it becomes even more obligatory for you to attack the Crusader nations and their citizens in their homelands.”

Those who believe that sharia law trumps the Constitution should not be allowed in. And those who look the other way should never become president of the United States.
Hillary Clinton, responding to the knife attack in a St. Cloud, Minnesota mall for which ISIS took credit and the bombing in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood by a gay-hating Afghan-born Islamist who was a naturalized American citizen, warned us about the dangers if radical Islamic terrorism, but of intolerance to Muslim-Americans:

“[L]et us remember, there are millions and millions of naturalized citizens in America from all over the world. There are millions of law-abiding peaceful Muslim Americans,” Clinton said.

Yes, Hillary, there are a lot of naturalized American citizens, including the 858 from what are euphemistically called “special interest countries”, naturalized by “mistake” due to the use of multiple identities and fingerprints not digitized in any database. This speaks to Donald Trump’s about a cessation of admitting refugees from these countries until we know what we’re doing. Clearly we do not. What other mistakes are being made that will naturalize the next Mohammed Atta?

Dzhokhar Tsanaev became a naturalized citizen before he and his brother used pressure cookers to bomb the Boston Marathon. Ahmad Khan Rahami became a naturalized citizen before he became a jihadi Johnny Appleseed, planting pipe and pressure cooker bombs in New Jersey and New York neighborhoods. Both in effect took up arms against the United States and its citizens, which one would think amounts to a renunciation of their U.S. citizenship. Tamerlan Tsarnaev traveled repeatedly to Dagestan and Chechnya, once spending six months there. Rahami traveled to Afghanistan, returning radicalized. Did anyone care to monitor their movements and motives? Hillary says if you see something, say something, yet is the first to cry “profiling” and “Islamophobia” when we monitor Islamist activities and conduct surveillance radical mosques. The San Bernardino shooters could have been stopped if a neighbor had not been intimidated by political correctness into not reporting their suspicious activity.

There are those who warn against trading liberty for safety and protecting the Constitutional rights of naturalized American citizens. Well, my Constitution has a clause about protecting the rights of all American citizens against our enemies, foreign and domestic. We have a right not o be killed. Naturalized citizens are invited to be American citizens on condition of their loyalty to this country and its beliefs. They do not have a “right” to be here.

There are those who remind us that the Statue of Liberty invites the poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. We indeed invite those to America who wish to become American, but not those who live in Islamist enclaves in places like Dearborn, Michigan, and Minneapolis. We are Americans who yearn to keep on breathing, unimpeded by shrapnel from exploding pressure cookers, or being stabbed at the mall by an Islamist who sees America as an infidel waiting to be slain.

I haven’t read Bruce Springsteen’s memoir, “Born to Run,” but I read Dwight Garner’s review of it (NYTimes 9/21/16) and was incredulous about the following declaration: “Mr. Springsteen’s father was a frequently unemployed bus driver among other blue-collar jobs; his mother a legal secretary. They were fairly poor. In their houses – half-houses, more often – there was generally no telephone and little heat.” Bruce grew up in the 50’s and 60’s in the state of N.J. – not in Yoknapatawpha County in the backwoods of Mississippi. In America during the the 50’s, two thirds of all homes had phones and though air conditioning was not yet common, heating certainly was. I won’t quibble about whether or not these statements are partially true but I will say that a boy whose mother was a legal secretary was not poverty-stricken, so why the desire for that illusion? Does it increase his creds as a man of the people to boast that despite being a member of the 1% now, he came from dirt-poor beginnings?

Wealthy democrats in America are often confused and guilt-ridden about their extreme affluence. Hillary Clinton ranted about being in debt when she and Bill left the White House, a statement that was not only a lie but a telling one reflecting her embarrassment about their net worth. Do politicos believe that wealthy people can’t be seen as empathic towards the need of the poor? How strange, considering the billions of dollars that wealthy people have bestowed upon charities to help the needy not to mention to improve parks, libraries, schools, hospitals,, museums, cultural centers – urban environments that exist for all members of society to use and enjoy.

Once upon a time America was super-proud of those super-rich democrats Jack and Jackie Kennedy whose White House was decorated in a manner befitting lifestyles of the rich and famous. No false modesty or embarrassment in the elegant couture of our fashionable first lady or the family compound on Cape Cod – rich meant cultured, sophisticated, articulate and charming. Today, despite the preponderance of so many billionaire democrats – Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, George Soros, Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen, Oprah, Kanye and Beyonce, David Geffen – to name but a few – wealth is more commonly associated by the media with the Koch Brothers in a pejorative way that implies Republican influence peddling and nefarious finagling. The NY Times, whose advertisers represent the shops frequented by the 1% and merchandise too expensive to be labeled, uses its editorial and op ed pages to disparage the very audience at which the ads are pitched.

This is what we know as cognitive dissonance and it should make us squirm with its inherent dishonesty. There was a time when lower middle-class people were proud of being productive workers who didn’t consider themselves poor. Many of them were immigrants who came from the old country where poor meant people without enough to eat, without a house to live in, without the opportunity to work and support a family. Coming to America meant coming to a land of opportunity with free education and the chance to work hard and move on up – if not in one generation, certainly in two. Those people would not have exaggerated their poverty – that would have stripped them of their dignity. Today’s mores allow super-rich celebrities and politicians to tout their humble beginnings as proof of how deserving they are of their subsequent fortunes. I’d prefer reading that Bruce Springsteen was proud of his legal secretary working mom and a father who tried to find work wherever he could. I suspect that any family with enough expendable cash to buy their son a guitar probably had enough for a phone and portable heater. Bruce deserves his fame and fortune by virtue of his creditable talent – no need to flaunt his deprivation of a phone which jars us by ringing so untrue.

Students at the California State University–Northridge sat around in a big ball pit (which they a called a “vent tent”) and talked about hurtful words and their feelings as part of a school-sponsored inclusive language campaign.

According to video and documents obtained by Heat Street, the campaign lasted for a week, was put on by the University Student Union (USU), and cost more than $1,000 in student fees. It’s not clear exactly how much of that money was spent on the ball pit rental, or if there is any research supporting the idea that sitting in a ball pit while having a discussion provides any educational and/or therapeutic benefits.

The USU also printed out posters featuring several words and phrases that it deemed offensive and posted them all over campus. Some of the phrases are actually very offensive (“this b****,” “you are such a f**,” and “you stupid w****”) and others are much less harmless (such as “you’re being so crazy”) but in both cases, the posters are pretty useless. As for the less harmless ones, it’s clear that something like “you’re being so crazy” is often used in a lighthearted manner, perhaps to describe someone who is being silly, and therefore doesn’t really deserve a blanket warning against its use in all cases. As for the clearly offensive ones? Well, as Heat Street’s Jillian Melchior points out, “it’s pretty inconceivable that a university would feel the need to teach college students that it’s not nice to say, for instance, ‘you stupid w****,’ ‘this b****,’ or ‘f**.’”

Other features of the campaign included a spinning wheel with offensive words, which students would spin and then discuss whether they found the language offensive, and a board where students could write for themselves which words they considered to be harmful. According to Heat Street, one student apparently wrote “When I hear the word ‘edgy,’ it makes me feel triggered,” but it’s not clear exactly just what in the fresh hell that student was talking about, or what people on campus are going to be expected to do about it. After all, “edgy” is pretty universally seen as a harmless word. Should people on campus be expected to suddenly stop using it because one random person considers it offensive for some random reason? I feel like the answer there is pretty clearly “no.”