Displaying posts categorized under

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Child Sexual Assault Cover-Up in Idaho By Janet Levy

The recent sexual assault of a five-year-old girl in Twin Falls, Idaho, and the reaction by public officials and the media amounting to a cover-up dramatically illustrate, yet again, how the West battles against the harsh reality of unlimited Islamic immigration. The incident occurred June 2 at the Fawnbrook Apartments in Twin Falls where prosecutors allege a 5-year-old girl was sexually assaulted. Two juvenile suspects, boys, ages 14 and 10, were detained, charged and released. A third, a 7-year-old boy involved in the incident, was not charged. The boys are from Iraqi and Sudanese families, but it’s unclear if they are refugees or how long they’ve been in the community.

Public officials released few details about the incident, stating that the suspects are juveniles about whom information is routinely withheld. This only caused outcry from locals who were incensed by the incident itself, failure of officials to provide information, lack of media attention and release of the boys from a juvenile detention center within six days of their arrest. Outraged residents reignited calls to close the Twin Falls refugee center, a drive that failed a year earlier.

Further outrage occurred when the Justice Department stepped in, allegedly to address the concerns of distressed residents. Obama-appointed U.S. Attorney Wendy J. Olson threatened the community and media with federal prosecution if they “spread false information or inflammatory statements about the perpetrators.” Although Olson later explained that her comments were made because Twin Falls City Council members had received threats of violence against them, her statements convinced many critics that she was attempting to silence the community and not merely quell outrage or assuage the concerns of locals that the incident will be thoroughly investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice.

The crisis in Twin Falls is understandable given its history of refugee immigration. The small city has only about 47,000 residents, yet is has became a beachhead for Muslim immigration as a result of the work of a refugee center there managed by the College of Southern Idaho. The CSI refugee center dates back to the 1980s and is one of four agencies in Idaho working with refugees over the years.

Together they have brought in refugees from countries spanning the globe, including Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, the Congo, Bhutan and more recently, Iraq and Afghanistan. Some put the total number of refugees in the state at 20,000 since 1970. Since September 2001 alone, the U.S. State Department has sent more than 11,000 refugees to Idaho, more than 96% Muslim, from Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan and Syria.

FBI—for Burying Information The bureau seeks “to prevent disclosure” in Orlando. James Taranto

The FBI is trying to control what the public learns about the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, the Orlando Sentinel reports:

A June 20 letter from the FBI, attached to the City [of] Orlando’s lawsuit over withholding 911 calls and other records from 25 media outlets including the Orlando Sentinel, was also sent to the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office with instructions pertaining to how they should respond to records requests.

The letter requests that agencies deny inquiries and directs departments to “immediately notify the FBI of any requests your agency received” so “the FBI can seek to prevent disclosure through appropriate channels, as necessary.”

The Seminole County Sheriff’s Office sent the Sentinel the letter Tuesday night in response to a request for documents, video and audio recordings from the early morning hours of June 12.

A spokeswoman for the Sheriff’s Office said the FBI sent them the letter Monday night and “instructed us to forward it to anyone requesting records.”

Seminole County is to the north and east of Orange County, which includes Orlando. On Twitter, Sentinel reporter Gal Tziperman Lotan posted the full letter, signed by Tampa-based Special Agent Paul Wysopal. “He refused comment Wednesday,” according to the Sentinel report.

The FBI’s position here is not without logic. The investigation of a terrorist attack is primarily a federal responsibility, so one might expect decisions related to the case, including about public disclosure of information, would be made centrally. The Sentinel notes that the lawsuit—which seeks a declaratory judgment as to what documents should be released—was moved from Orange County Circuit Court to federal court after the city named the U.S. Justice Department as a defendant.

But one is inclined to view the FBI’s actions with suspicion, in light of last week’s hamhanded nondisclosure. As we noted, the bureau released a transcript of one of the attacker’s calls to 911 with his declarations of fealty to the Islamic State and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, censored. (He made other calls, whose content has yet to be made public.)

After enduring several hours of ridicule, the FBI released the transcript. It was surely no coincidence that the nondisclosure was consistent with the Obama administration’s agenda, both political (playing down terrorism during an election year) and ideological (denying that Islamic terrorism is Islamic).

Obama’s Climate Policy Is a Hot Mess The president hails the Paris Agreement again—even though it will solve nothing and cost trillions. By Bjorn Lomborg

When President Obama flew to Ottawa, Canada, on Wednesday to meet with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, promoting their climate-change policies was near the top of the agenda. “The Paris Agreement was a turning point for our planet,” the leaders’ joint statement said, referring to the climate pact signed with fanfare in April by nearly 200 nations. “North America has the capacity, resources and the moral imperative to show strong leadership building on the Paris Agreement and promoting its early entry into force.”

Attracting rather less attention than the Ottawa meeting was a June 22 hearing on Capitol Hill. Testifying before the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy extolled the Paris Agreement as an “incredible achievement.” But when repeatedly asked, she wouldn’t explain exactly how much this treaty would actually cut global temperatures.

The Paris Agreement will cost a fortune but do little to reduce global warming. In a peer-reviewed article published in Global Policy this year, I looked at the widely hailed major policies that Paris Agreement signatories pledged to undertake and found that they will have a negligible temperature impact. I used the same climate-prediction model that the United Nations uses.

First, consider the Obama administration’s signature climate policy, the Clean Power Plan. The U.N.’s model shows that it will accomplish almost nothing. Even if the policy withstands current legal challenges and its cuts are totally implemented—not for the 14 years that the Paris agreement lasts, but for the rest of the century—the Clean Power Plan would reduce temperatures by 0.023 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.

President Obama has made grander promises of future carbon cuts, beyond the plan’s sweeping restrictions on the power industry, but these are only vaguely outlined now. In the unlikely event that all of these extra cuts also happen, and are adhered to throughout the rest of the century, the combined reduction in temperatures would be 0.057 degrees. In other words, if the U.S. delivers for the whole century on the very ambitious Obama rhetoric, it would postpone global warming by about eight months at the end of the century.

Or consider the Paris Agreement promises from the entire world using the reduction estimate from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the organization responsible for the Paris summit. The U.N.’s model reveals a temperature reduction by the end of the century of only 0.08 degrees Fahrenheit. If we generously assume that the promised cuts for 2030 are not only met (which itself would be a U.N. first), but sustained throughout the rest of the century, temperatures in 2100 would drop by 0.3 degrees—the equivalent of postponing warming by less than four years at the end of the century. A cut of 0.3 degrees matches the finding of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis of the Paris Agreement last year.

The costs of the Paris climate pact are likely to run to $1 trillion to $2 trillion annually throughout the rest of the century, using the best estimates from the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum and the Asia Modeling Exercise. Spending more than $100 trillion for such a feeble temperature reduction by the end of the century does not make sense.

Some Paris Agreement supporters defend it by claiming that its real impact on temperatures will be much more significant than the U.N. model predicts. This requires some mental gymnastics and heroic assumptions. The group doing climate modeling for the U.S. State Department assumes that without the Paris Agreement emissions would be much higher than under any realistic scenario. With such an unrealistically pessimistic baseline, they can then magically show that the agreement will cut temperatures by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit—with about 1.5 degrees of the drop coming from a reduction of these fantasy carbon emissions. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary’s Strange Security Adviser How did a big-money Clinton donor get on an expert panel next to nuclear scientists? By Kimberley A. Strassel

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been forced to acknowledge over the past week that the former secretary of state did not, as she had claimed, turn over all her work-related email to the State Department. The new story is that her deletion of these emails was an oversight. Team Clinton is hoping therefore that you won’t hear the story of Rajiv K. Fernando, which would suggest the oversight tale to be yet another untruth.

Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of Mr. Fernando, because you arguably never should have. Mr. Fernando is a one-time Chicago securities trader who in July of 2011 somehow found himself sitting on the International Security Advisory Board, with the ability to access the nation’s most sensitive intelligence.

Mr. Fernando had no background that would have qualified him to sit on the ISAB alongside the likes of former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, former Defense Secretary William Perry, a United Nations chief weapons inspector, members of Congress, and nuclear scientists. That Mr. Fernando didn’t belong was apparent. “We had no idea who he was,” one board member told ABC News. So how exactly did he get there?

We now finally know, thanks to State Department internal emails that the government was forced to turn over to the watchdog group Citizens United. And thanks to ABC News, which began digging into Mr. Fernando’s bizarre appointment when it first happened.

In August 2011, ABC requested a copy of Mr. Fernando’s resume from the State Department. This, the internal emails show, sent a press aide reeling to find answers to how a trader had ended up on the ISAB. Even the aide noted that it was “natural to ask how he got onto the board when compared to the rest of the esteemed list of members.”

The response came only a few hours later in an email from Wade Boese, chief of staff for an undersecretary of state: “The true answer is simply that S staff ( Cheryl Mills) added him,” Mr. Boese wrote. “Raj was not on the list sent to S; he was added at their insistence.”

S, in this situation, stands for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Ms. Mills, a longtime aide, was her chief of staff. Why would Hillary want to entrust the nation’s secrets to a man with no intelligence experience?

Here’s what we do know: Mr. Fernando, before his plum appointment, had given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the William J. Clinton Foundation. He had been a top bundler for Mrs. Clinton in her 2008 presidential run, and later a major Obama fundraiser. He gave tens of thousands more to a political group that helped Hillary pay off her 2008 campaign debt by renting her email list.

The 2011 emails reveal that the State Department knew it had a problem on its hands. “We must protect the Secretary’s and Under Secretary’s name,” the press aide warned. Ms. Mills, the messages say, asked staff to “stall” the news organization. Damage control came in the form of Mr. Fernando’s quick resignation, on grounds of “additional time needed to devote to his business.” Uh huh. CONTINUE AT SITE

The America-Hating Obama ‘Homeland Security’ Appointee … And the mindset that permitted the Orlando massacre to take place. John Perazzo

Good ol’ Barack Obama. So deeply do he and his administration love America, that they felt secure enough in their own patriotism to appoint an America-hating radical to the Homeland Security Advisory Council’s Subcommittee on Countering Violent Extremism (SCVE). After all, they undoubtedly reasoned, what possible harm could such an individual do in that kind of a setting? Perhaps you’ve heard of her—a young woman named Laila Alawa, born to Syrian parents who immigrated to the United States when the girl was ten. Soon after she became a U.S. citizen in April 2015, Ms. Alawa wrote: “I will always be Syrian. I will always be from Syria. I will always be of Syria.”

Ain’t that nice?

Ms. Alawa has long regarded the United States as a nation that oppresses and abuses Muslims, as she explained in a July 2014 piece which she wrote for The Guardian. Therein, Alawa says that ever since her arrival in America, she has “learned to view” law-enforcement officials and “my new government” with “a certain level of suspicion”—particularly after 9/11, when “stories of warrantless deportations, faith-based workplace discrimination (and termination), and arrests that resulted in unending detention were common.” Citing the “constant surveillance, government stings and wannabe informants” to which she believes Muslims in the U.S. are being subjected, Alawa laments that “my long-held suspicions have been confirmed—the knowledge that my faith makes me suspicious in the eyes of the government to which I’ve pledged my allegiance…. We know that we’re often discriminated against by our government and our fellow Americans.”

This young woman has a very bright future in the Democratic Party if she wants it. Heck, she already sounds downright Hillary-esque, and she’s only 25!

Alawa regularly disseminates views like these in her work as an opinion writer for The Guardian, Salon, Glamour, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, and The Islamic Monthly. Further, she hosts The Exposé, a weekly podcast “tackling tough topics with snark and wit.”

In addition, this multi-talented woman is also a self-described “online activis[t]” whose mission is “to elevate the voices of those who are often not heard.” Her Twitter posts are rife with allegations of — (what else?) — American racism and “Islamophobia.” Some examples:

Loretta Lynch’s Private Meeting With Bill Clinton Prior to Release of Benghazi Report Why would the Attorney General, who sets the tone for law enforcement, do this?Michael Cutler

On Tuesday, June 29, 2015 ABC News-15 based in Arizona reported, “US Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Bill Clinton meet privately in Phoenix before Benghazi report.”

According to the report the meeting was not a chance encounter but was apparently an arranged meeting between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch on board her government airplane.

The appearance this meeting creates, in and of itself, calls into question the judgment of the Attorney General of the United States – America’s “Top Cop” who sets the tone for law enforcement for the entire federal government and, as a consequence, for law enforcement agencies at all levels from coast to coast and border to border.

And make no mistake – appearances can be critical. This was a message that was repeatedly hammered home by my bosses when I served as a Special Agent for the former INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service).

Let me describe two such instances in order to properly set the stage and provide a bit of context to the meeting between the former president of the United States and the Attorney General.

When I began my career as a special agent back in the 1970’s one of my bosses, a gentleman by the name of Frank Johnson who was the section chief for the Frauds Unit where I was assigned, would hold what were known as “Payday Meetings” because every other Thursday we would stand on line and be issued out paychecks- this was long before direct deposit was implemented. These meeting provided management with an opportunity to inform the agents about any changes in priorities and to provide us with whatever information they deemed was essential to enable us to to our jobs effectively and safely. These meetings also provided agents to inform each other about any information that they might need as they pursued their assigned investigations.

At the conclusion of each of those meetings, Frank Johnson would accentuate each syllable by jabbing his ever-present cigarette in the air as he looked around the room and said, “As federal agents, it was not enough that we never engaged in wrong doing- but that we must never give the illusion of doing wrong!”

We knew that Frank was not just spouting a slogan- because he held himself to a higher standard than he held those of us who worked under him- this is what true leadership is all about.

As for the second incident – I had become an agent just months earlier and was eating lunch at a local restaurant located across the street from our offices in lower Manhattan, when an attorney I had met when I was assigned as an Adjudications Officer or Examiner as those who adjudicated various applications for immigration benefits were known. The attorney had represented several aliens I had interviewed in that earlier assignment and conducted those marriage interviews you likely have seen in various movies about aliens who marry citizens to acquire lawful immigrant status.

I had just order desert at the end of my meal when the attorney who, like myself, was sitting at the counter of the restaurant move next to me to engage in innocuous banter. Suddenly one of my supervisors noticed me as he was walking by the restaurant and quickly entered the restaurant. He walked up to me and whispered in my ear, “Mr. Cutler, when you are finished with your lunch you are to report directly to my office.” He quickly left the restaurant and I quickly headed back to my office and went to his office- with quite a bit of consternation. Clearly he was not happy.

Stonewalling Muslim Homophobia When gay people ally with their killers. Daniel Greenfield

At the recent New York City LGBT Pride parade, marchers carried a rainbow flag imprinted with black letters, “Republican Hate Kills!” That same day, Islamist Turkey dispersed an attempt at a gay pride parade in Istanbul with tear gas and rubber bullets. Turkish cops in gas masks wearing black converged on a few hundred protesters, seized their rainbow flags and detained a number of prominent figures.

The week before that, a Trans Pride parade in Istanbul had been shut down the same way. Last year, the gay pride parade had been stopped with tear gas and water cannons.

The overlap of the date for the event with the Islamic period of Ramadan ended up dooming the parade. It was eventually banned for security reasons because “provocative acts and events may take place when the sensitivities that have emerged in society are taken into account”. What did that mean?

The Anatolia Muslim Youth Association had warned that it would act “to prevent fa…ts from marching”. The Muslim Youth Association, a notoriously jolly bunch, had previously made headlines for putting up anti-Christmas posters showing Muslims punching Santa in the face.

Only in the Muslim world does a War on Christmas go together with gay-bashing.

The Muslim Youth Association is one of the leaves on the old Islamist Milli Gorus tree. Milli Gorus believes in a vast Jewish-Catholic-Protestant conspiracy against Turkey. The biggest leaf on that tree though is the AKP whose Islamist politicians rule over Turkey. The Muslim Youth Association still worships at the altar of Necmettin Erbakan, the bigoted former Islamist Prime Minister of Turkey who served as a mentor to Turkey’s current big boss Erdogan.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch Met Privately With Bill Clinton The two were coincidentally at the Phoenix airport at the same time ????!!!!By Devlin Barrett

Attorney General Loretta Lynch met privately with former President Bill Clinton in Arizona on Tuesday, but Ms. Lynch told reporters that the two didn’t discuss the investigation into his wife’s email use as secretary of state.

Ms. Lynch said at a press conference that the Clinton meeting was unplanned. Mr. Clinton was apparently waiting to fly out of the Phoenix airport when Ms. Lynch’s plane coincidentally landed there. The former president then walked over to the attorney general’s plane to speak to Ms. Lynch and her husband.

“Our conversation was a great deal about his grandchildren. It was primarily social and about our travels,” Ms. Lynch told reporters in Phoenix on Tuesday.

“We talked about former Attorney General Janet Reno, for example, whom we both know, but there was no discussion of any matter pending for the department or any matter pending for any other body. There was no discussion of Benghazi, no discussion of the State Department emails, by way of example,” she said.

The two did discuss the recent vote in the U.K. to leave the European Union, but the Justice Department isn’t involved in that issue, she said.

An aide to Bill Clinton said no topics were discussed beyond what was described by Ms. Lynch. A spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

But others suggested the meeting could send the wrong message. “It’s probably ill-advised because it does create the appearance of impropriety,” said Ken Sukhia, a former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Florida who is now running for Congress as a Republican. “You don’t necessarily have to talk about the subject to garner some good will [from prosecutors] by having that kind of conversation.”

‘There was no discussion of Benghazi, no discussion of the State Department emails, by way of example.’
—Attorney General Loretta Lynch

Even in cases that aren’t publicly known, a lawyer or prosecutor would know that “having an unscheduled, impromptu meeting like that raises a question of was there impropriety…and particularly given the high profile of the Clintons and the very heightened attention that is being given to this issue of the emails,” Mr. Sukhia said. CONTINUE AT SITE

Willful Blindness and Radical Islam: My Testimony By Andrew C. McCarthy

On Tuesday, I was a panelist at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on “Willful Blindness: Consequences of Agency Efforts to Deemphasize Radical Islam in Combating Terrorism.”

The hearing was held by the Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights and Federal Courts,” chaired by Senator Ted Cruz (R. Tex.). I was one of six panelists. Video of the hearing, which lasted about three hours, is available on the Judiciary Committee website (here). The written testimony I submitted prior to the hearing is (here).

I was also asked to make an opening statement. Below is the prepared version of that statement (which I had to edit down a bit for purposes of time while delivering it at the hearing).

————————-

Chairman Cruz, members of the committee, my name is Andrew C. McCarthy. For over eighteen years, I was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, retiring from the Justice Department in 2003 as the chief assistant United States attorney in charge of the Southern District’s satellite office.

I worked on terrorism investigations and trials in various capacities following the jihadist bombing of the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993, and continuing through the end of my Justice Department tenure. This included several weeks helping supervise our command post near Ground Zero in lower Manhattan in the aftermath of the jihadist atrocities of September 11, 2001, in which nearly 3,000 Americans were killed by al-Qaeda jihadists in the worst domestic attack by a foreign enemy in American history.

From 1993 through early 1996, I led the investigation and successful prosecution of the jihadist cell that carried out the World Trade Center bombing and subsequently plotted an even more ambitious attack: simultaneous bombings of various New York City landmarks. In October 1995, after a nine-month trial, all defendants were convicted of various offenses, principally including seditious conspiracy to wage a war of urban terrorism against the United States.

In light of our discussion about radical Islam this afternoon, it is worth noting that our case taught me there are very much two sides to this story. The first Muslims I encountered in our case were not terrorists. They were Muslims seized with American patriotism who helped us infiltrate and disrupt the jihadist cell led by Omar Abdel Rahman, better known as “the Blind Sheikh.”

Following my retirement from the Justice Department, I worked on a bipartisan task force of former government officials in connection with an effort to assist Congress in assessing amendments to the October 2001 USA PATRIOT Act. I also served for several months as a consultant to the deputy secretary of Defense, during the time when the Defense Department was both cooperating with the 9/11 Commission and attempting to structure a military justice system tailored to the detention and trial of alien enemy combatants.

Is Brexit vote a validation of Trump’s campaign? Up to a point. Mark Thiessen

Donald Trump’s trip to Scotland on the day Britain voted to leave the European Union looked, in hindsight, like a stroke of political genius. “My timing was great because I was here right at the epicenter of the crisis,” Trump told reporters. But Trump was not in Scotland because of Brexit; he was there to promote his golf courses. In an interview a few weeks earlier, he did not even know what Brexit was. It was serendipity, not strategy, that brought Trump to Scotland. Trump’s the guy who swallowed a lucky horseshoe.

But it’s true that his timing could not have been better. Trump is now arguing that the Brexit vote is validation of his upstart presidential candidacy. And he’s not entirely wrong.

Like Trump’s campaign, Brexit was a revolt against open borders. British voters blamed the E.U. for a wave of migration that has fundamentally transformed their country. One third of “Leave” voters said they cast their ballot for Brexit because it “offered the best chance for the UK to regain control over immigration and its own borders.”

Brexit was also, like Trump’s campaign, a revolt against an establishment out of touch with the struggles of ordinary, working-class citizens. With Brexit, in the words of Spectator editor Fraser Nelson, “pensioners in the seaside towns, the plumbers and chip-shop owners” delivered “the biggest slap in the face ever delivered to the British establishment in the history of universal suffrage.”

As in the United States, the anti-establishment sentiment driving Brexit was on both the right and left. As former prime minister Tony Blair pointed out, the “Leave” campaign could not have succeeded “without finding common cause with a significant segment of Labour voters . . . worried about flatlining incomes and cuts in public spending . . . [who] saw Brexit as an opportunity to register an anti-government protest.” In Britain, Blair says, the Brexit campaign saw “a convergence of the far left and the far right.” Could the same happen here? A Post-ABC News poll last month found it might, with 20 percent of Sanders supporters saying they would support Trump over Hillary Clinton in the general election. This month that figure has slipped to just 8 percent.

But here is the fundamental difference between the Trump and Brexit campaigns: Brexit was also a revolt against centralized power. British voters were tired of edicts from Brussels and wanted to put decision-making power back in the hands of the British people. This was the single biggest driving force of the Brexit campaign. Nearly half of pro-Brexit voters said the principal reason they wanted to leave the E.U. was “the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK.” As U.K. secretary of state for justice and Brexit supporter Michael Gove put it, “By leaving the EU we can take control . . . Like the Americans who declared their independence and never looked back.”