RUTHFULLY YOURS

The New York Police Department must strengthen oversight of its surveillance practices as part of a settlement of two civil-rights lawsuits accusing the force of unfairly monitoring Muslims after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Under the settlement, filed in federal court Thursday, the police department agreed to changes that include reinstating an independent attorney to monitor surveillance by the NYPD’s intelligence unit—a role that was eliminated after 9/11.

The NYPD also agreed to several other changes in the surveillance rules, known as the Handschu guidelines, a set of policies initially put in place more than 30 years ago to make sure First Amendment rights aren’t violated during criminal probes.

The new guidelines include setting time limits for active investigations and putting in writing an existing NYPD policy that it is illegal to profile anyone solely on the basis of race or religion. The agreement also requires the NYPD to remove a controversial report on radicalization that has been on its website since 2007.
The long-running controversy illustrates the tension between law-enforcement agencies that say they must take steps to remain vigilant in an age of global terrorism, and civil-rights and other groups that say civil liberties shouldn’t be violated in the name of security.

Both the police department and plaintiffs lauded the settlement for protecting the religious and political rights of people in the city without hampering the ability of authorities to conduct terrorism investigations.

“We hope the NYPD’s reforms help make clear that effective policing can and must be achieved without unconstitutional religious profiling of Muslims or any other communities,” said Hina Shamsi of the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the plaintiffs in the case.

Two refugees from Iraq were arrested Thursday on separate charges that they lied to U.S. authorities about their alleged affiliations and activities with terror suspects.

Aws Mohammed Younis Al-Jayab, 23, of Sacramento, Calif., was charged with making a false statement involving terrorism. He is due in court Friday, officials said.

“While he represented a potential safety threat, there is no indication that he planned any acts of terrorism in this country,’’ said Benjamin Wagner, the U.S. Attorney in Sacramento.

According to court filings, Mr. Al-Jayab is a Palestinian born in Iraq who came to the U.S. as an Iraqi refugee in 2012. Between October 2012 and November 2013, while living in Arizona and Wisconsin, he allegedly told others in online discussions that he planned to travel to Syria to fight for terror groups.

Then, in November 2013, he allegedly traveled to Syria and, according to his social media posts, said he was fighting in that country alongside terror organizations, including Ansar al-Islam. Authorities say he returned to the U.S. in early 2014 and has been living in Sacramento.

It’s not every day we can celebrate a less intrusive Internal Revenue Service. But charities and the people who support them will be happy to learn that the IRS has withdrawn its proposal to collect more donor information, including Social Security numbers.

In September the IRS and Treasury Department proposed to give charities the “option” of filing detailed reports on everyone who contributes more than $250 to a charity. The IRS was calling it “voluntary,” which in government means the agency hasn’t gotten around to requiring it yet. We reported on the legitimate fear that new reporting would be required of every nonprofit—including the conservative organizations that the IRS helped muzzle in the 2012 presidential election.

Amazingly enough, in this case the IRS appears to have listened to concerns from the taxpayers who pay their salaries. On Thursday the IRS said it is withdrawing its proposal after receiving “a substantial number of public comments.” Many of the comments “questioned the need for donee reporting, and many comments expressed significant concerns about donee organizations collecting and maintaining taxpayer identification numbers for purposes of the specific-use information return,” said the IRS. The legitimate anger of average citizens was amplified by stalwart IRS watchdogs like Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) on Capitol Hill.

I’ve written a number of novels in which I give the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) the benefit of the doubt. I cast the agency in the role of an ally for justice and as a defender of individual rights and the sanctity of property. FBI agents befriend my heroes, or my heroes befriend them.

Were I pen another novel today and involve the FBI in the plot, the agency would be cast in a villainous role, because it has become a tool and instrument of authoritarian political correctness and enforcement. It would have no more moral or Constitutional legitimacy than does the IRS, the EPA, the DEA, the FDA, or the HHS.

Nominally, as a federal enforcement agency that reports to the Department of Justice, the FBI exists to:

… protect and defend the United States, to uphold and enforce the criminal laws of the United States, and to provide leadership and criminal justice services to federal, state, municipal, and international agencies and partners

Currently, the FBI’s top priorities are:

Protect the United States from terrorist attacks
Protect the United States against foreign intelligence operations and espionage
Protect the United States against cyber-based attacks and high-technology crimes
Combat public corruption at all levels
Protect civil rights
Combat transnational/national criminal organizations and enterprises
Combat major white-collar crime
Combat significant violent crime
Support federal, state, local and international partners
Upgrade technology to successfully perform the FBI’s mission

By the time Obama gets through with “transforming” America, there won’t be anything exceptional about it.

“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” — Barack Obama, October 30, 2008 “We are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history; we’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.” — Michelle Obama, May 14, 2008

Quoting from a Canada Free Press column on Obama’s plans to spy on bloggers, I opened my October 2010 Rule of Reason column, “Obama’s Malice Aforethought” with:

The President Barack Obama’s feelings are hurt.

For most of his time in the White House, Obama has been critical of information about him and his administration posted on the Internet. He’s frequently denigrated bloggers and Internet conservative news & commentary web sites for their efforts to cover stories the so-called mainstream news media refuse to cover, according to critics of his plans to control the “Information Highway.”

Activists participating in CAIR’s lobby day included Abdullah Faaruuq, a Muslim cleric, who, in response to the arrest of Al Qaeda operative Aafia Siddiqui, told Muslims to “grab onto the gun and the sword and go out and do your job.”

“[CAIR] is a Muslim Brotherhood front organization. It works in the United States as a lobby against radio, television and print media journalists who dare to produce anything about Islam that is at variance with their fundamental agenda. CAIR opposes diversity in Islam.” — Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi, Muslim cleric and secretary general of the Italian Muslim Assembly.

Very few American Muslims seem to feel that CAIR is a legitimate voice for American Islam. According to a 2011 Gallup poll, about 88% of American Muslims said that CAIR does not represent them.

CAIR has been denounced by anti-racism groups, the federal government and by other Muslims. When legislators meet with CAIR, they help CAIR impose itself upon Muslim communities as a self-declared representative.

On November 12, 2015, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), with the support of a number of local Islamic groups in Boston, organized a lobbying day at the Massachusetts State House, ostensibly to advocate on behalf of local Muslims.

The State Department’s April 2015 “Country Report on Terrorism” no doubt came as sweet music to the ears of Special Interest Alien (SIA) smugglers. These are the smugglers of migrants from the spawning grounds of Islamic terrorism that, as I have been arguing, American homeland security leaders must strategically target with much greater aplomb to reduce the prospect of a Paris-like border infiltration attack here.

The April 2015 report noted that Latin American nations had only made “modest improvements to their counterterrorism capabilities and their border security” from the previous year(s). It noted corruption, weak government institutions, weak or non-existent legislation, and lack of resources as primary causes for little counterterrorism progress.

Conditions like those are, to SIA smugglers, pretty much a free pass to move their human contraband — and terrorist travelers posing as asylum seekers — from the Middle East through Latin America to the U.S.-Mexico border. That’s how so many of the Paris attackers did it in Europe: their smugglers took advantage of the same advantageous institutional weaknesses in Turkey, Italy, the Balkans, Hungary, Greece, and other countries.

I remember the good old days when President Obama and his Justice Department weren’t so worried about nasty racists and felons having guns. I remember when President Obama and his Justice Department refused to do anything about New Black Panthers with guns, even New Black Panthers with criminal records possessing firearms and others threatening to kill cops.

This week President Obama announced legally dubious plans to force private citizens to behave as if they were federal gun dealers and threatened to place the names of certain Americans on a list to prevent them from obtaining firearms. He sought to expand background checks to gun transactions that Congress has long exempted from federal interference.

President Obama claimed he was very concerned about the wrong people having guns.

He wasn’t always so concerned about the wrong people having guns.

Good for them.

The nation’s largest gun rights organization declined Wednesday to send official representatives to a nationally televised town hall with President Barack Obama on gun violence — just days after the president reignited a discussion over this controversial topic.

“The National Rifle Association sees no reason to participate in a public relations spectacle orchestrated by the White House,” NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam told CNN, which is moderating the live town hall Thursday evening in Virginia. The NRA strengthened its comment after initially saying the White House had “organized” the event.

The NRA, the most influential gun rights group in terms of political persuasion and financial contributions, boasts a membership of about five million people.

While the world burns around him, The Idiot King is maintaining a laser-like focus on an incremental abrogation of the Second Amendment rights of law abiding American citizens. In conjunction with executive action that will do nothing to stop criminals, he’s using his press monkeys to give him a forum to pontificate on gun control, disguised as a town hall event.

The company behind the Keystone XL pipeline has taken legal action against the U.S. government for the Obama administration’s shootdown of the cross-border project.

The permitting process was delayed for years by the State Department. When they finally rejected the application in November, President Obama said the pipeline was nixed because it “would not make a meaningful long-term contribution to our economy,” “would not lower gas prices for American consumers,” and “shipping dirtier crude oil into our country would not increase America’s energy security.”

TransCanada responded today by filing a Notice of Intent to initiate a claim under Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on the basis that the denial was arbitrary and unjustified, the company said today. The company seeks more than $15 billion in damages.

They’ve also filed a lawsuit in federal court in Houston alleging that Obama overstepped his constitutional authority in blocking pipeline construction.