RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/u-s-state-department-we-cant-process-special-immigrant-visas-right-now/

My reader who’s trying to get his company’s former employees out of Afghanistan learned that the U.S. State Department has temporarily stopped processing Special Immigrant Visas for the government’s Afghan allies. (For background on this reader and his efforts, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.)

My reader’s latest automated e-mail reply from the State Department arrived Thursday:

 You are receiving this message in reply to the email you sent to the AfghanistanACS@state.gov email address. Please review the information below. You will not receive a response if the answer to your question is covered in this message.

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul suspended operations on August 31, 2021. While the U.S. government has withdrawn its personnel from Kabul, we will continue to assist U.S. citizens and their families in Afghanistan from Doha, Qatar.

While we are currently unable to provide consular services for immigrant visas, including Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs), in Afghanistan, we are developing processing alternatives so that we can continue to deliver this important service for the people of Afghanistan.

The message gives no sense of when or how the State Department will be able to provide consular service for immigrant visas and SIVs.

The message also urges Afghans in danger to see if the United Nations can help them:

Asylum/Humanitarian Assistance:  If you have concerns about your safety, you may contact the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) protection office, which can be reached via their Protection Hotline numbers or email address:  0790691746 and 0704996168 (available on all working days), and afgkaprt@unhcr.org.  UNHCR’s website provides information on asylum procedures abroad: https://help.unhcr.org/.

Dear Mr. Trump, I wish you well, but I hope you do not choose to run for President in 2024.
https://swtotd.blogspot.com/
I write this with all due respect for you and your Presidency. Democrats are in disarray, with a President who is more puppet than leader, and with far-left extremists having seized control of the Party. So, my caution may seem odd. Moderate Democrats recognize they are at risk in the 2022 mid-term elections, barring a miraculous or unforeseen event. But you are a unifying factor for Democrats and independent “Never Trumpers.” Your candidacy, I believe, would unite the opposition and hurt Republican prospects.

Taking a supporting role is against your nature. Nevertheless, my hope is that you will campaign for Republicans in the mid-terms and back their choice for President in 2024. Twice I voted for you. Your disruptive technique was welcome, as I wrote in an essay in January 2019. In my opinion, your Presidency was a great success in every way but one. Deregulation, along with personal tax cuts, unleashed an economy that had been mired in sub-three percent growth. Your corporate tax cuts repatriated an estimated $1.5 trillion, which was reinvested back in the U.S. Unemployment declined and employment increased, especially for minorities. According to the Institute for Energy Research, the U.S. achieved energy independence in 2019 for the first time since 1957. With help of the “Wall,” illegal immigration through our southern border was reduced. At your insistence, our NATO Partners increased their share of spending on defense. China was called out for its aggression in the South China Sea and for its Belt and Road initiative, which creates dependency on China on the part of participating nations. Moving our Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, along with the Abraham Accords, did more for Middle East peace prospects than any other proposals since Israel’s founding in 1948.

You appointed nearly as many appeals court judges in four years as your predecessor did in eight. You added three conservative Justices to the nation’s highest court. You took us out of the toothless Paris Agreement, a sop to climate self-interests, and you vacated the ill-conceived Iran nuclear deal. Despite all the media hype and disinformation to the contrary, you handled COVID-19 as well as could be expected. The dramatic economic slowdown in 2020s second quarter was nearly offset in 2020s third quarter rebound. Regarding the pandemic, you were forced to navigate between myriad (and often conflicting) medical recommendations, all claiming to be based on the latest scientific evidence. Your Operation Warp Speed delivered a vaccine far sooner than medical experts expected.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/11/a-failure-of-memory-and-nerve/

“History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.”

—Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics

I write on the 20th anniversary of the Islamic terrorist attacks against New York and Washington, D.C. No matter where you turn, it seems, the message is the same, a combination of injunction and protestation: “Never forget,” “We remember,” the sentiment invariably bolstered with reminiscences of loss and heroism. 

The loss and the heroism are real, no doubt, but I am afraid that admonitions about remembering seem mostly manufactured. How could they not? Clearly, we have not remembered, and no amount of barking by the president of the United States about what an “extraordinary success” his shameful scuttle out of Afghanistan was can change that. 

If we truly remembered, we would not have allowed four top Taliban terrorists, released by Barack Obama from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for the traitorous Bowe Bergdahl, to assume top positions in the newly formed Taliban government. If we truly remembered, we would not have left hundreds of Americans behind in Afghanistan, ready-made hostages for the new regime.

We spent 20 years and trillions of dollars in Afghanistan—for what? To try to coax it into the 21st century and assume the enlightened, “woke” perspective that has laid waste to the institutions of American culture, from the universities to the military? 

Certain aspects of that folly seem darkly comic now, such as our efforts to raise the consciousness of the locals by introducing them to conceptual art and decadent Western ideas of “gender equity.” Writing in The Spectator, the columnist known as “Cockburn” captures the fatuousness of the program. “Do-gooders,” he notes, “established a ‘National Masculinity Alliance,’ so a few hundred Afghan men could talk about their ‘gender roles’ and ‘examine male attitudes that are harmful to women.’” I wonder if among the “attitudes” discussed were the penchant of certain Afghan men to stone women to death for adultery? “Under the U.S.’s guidance,” Cockburn continues, “Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution set a 27 percent quota for women in the lower house—higher than the actual figure in America!” 

Remarkably, this experiment in ‘democracy’ created a government few were willing to fight for, let alone die for. . . . Police facilities included childcare facilities for working mothers, as though Afghanistan’s medieval culture had the same needs as 1980s Minneapolis. The army set a goal of 10 percent female participation, which might make sense in a Marvel movie, but didn’t to devout Muslims. 

The explicit cost for such gender programs was $787 million; the real cost, as Cockburn notes, was much higher because “gender goals” were folded into almost every initiative we undertook in Afghanistan.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17737/cyberwar-flipping-switches

President Thomas Jefferson’s decision to fight the Barbary pirates was not without its detractors. Many Americans, including John Adams, believed it was better policy to pay the tribute. It was cheaper than the loss of trade.

Sanctions and other punitive measures should address Russia’s refusal to sign onto the so-called Budapest Convention, a pact that obliges signatories to prevent cyber-crimes that are conducted within their borders. European Union nations and the United States are all signatories. Russia has resisted doing so, even as cyber-crime traced to the Russian mafia and other “advanced persistent threat” actors is repeatedly traced to its soil.

An article from the February 2015 issue of Brigham Young University Law Review argues persuasively that “Russia has an obligation to monitor and prevent trans-boundary cybercrime under the standard of due diligence.” But Russia will not, because the cyber-hackers advance Vladimir Putin’s goal of creating havoc and depressing the morale of the countries he targets.

The cat-and-mouse games played every day between cyber-crooks and cyber-cops cannot be ended by one daring raid. But as the stakes of the crimes rise with the world’s reliance on connected systems to operate more and more physical infrastructure, the urgent need to shove the pirates off the deck before they can burn the ship grows more pressing.

Discussing Russian hacking capabilities in a video discussion for the Heritage Foundation recently, Prof. Scott Jasper of the Naval Postgraduate School recalled a hack in 2018 in which the attackers succeeded in penetrating electrical power companies in the U.S., as they did in Ukraine

“We had evidence from CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) that Russian actors had penetrated up to 20 to 24 utilities by compromising vendors that had trusted relationships,” Jasper said. “They had taken control to the point where they could have thrown switches. They did this in Ukraine and flipped the switches of substations. So, this is a real threat.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/10/why-you-cant-watch-the-abc-miniseries-the-path-to-9-11/

On September 6, 2006, the ABC television network aired “The Path to 9/11,” a three-hour documentary, written and produced by Cyrus Nowrasteh and directed by David Cunningham, which covered the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against our country. The program broke with other accounts of the causes of the 9/11 attacks— including by the 9/11 Commission—by casting substantial blame for the attacks on the incompetent foreign policy of the Clinton Administration. 

This program aired only once. A DVD was produced but can no longer be purchased on Amazon.com. The reason? Former Clinton officials and their allies put heavy pressure on the Walt Disney Company—which owns ABC—to censor and suppress the film because it went against their false narrative absolving Clinton’s policies for contributing to the 9/11 attacks and instead putting the blame on the Bush Administration.

What’s stunning about this story today is how similar it is to the denials and outright lies about the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan by Biden officials, and the mainstream media’s willingness to change the subject away from a major foreign policy failure by a Democratic president.

“The Path to 9/11” was tough on both the Bush and Clinton Administrations for not doing enough to prevent the 9/11 attacks.

Some experts criticized Bush’s pre-9/11 counterterrorism policies and criticized him for not acting on intelligence reports in the summer of 2001, warning that “spectacular” terrorist attacks by al Qaeda could soon occur. Although I believe there was some validity to this criticism, the 9/11 Commission noted that U.S. officials were inundated with terrorist threats reports in 2001 concerning almost everywhere the United States had interests, including at home. Most of these reports never amounted to anything. In addition, I believe it was unfair to blame principally the Bush Administration for failing to stop the 9/11 attacks since it had been in office only nine months on September 11, 2001. 

On the other hand, there is strong evidence that eight years of foreign policy incompetence by the Clinton Administration set the stage for the 9/11 attacks, including bureaucratic bungling, failure to take action against al Qaeda, and President Clinton being distracted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal and impeachment.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/so_nevertrumps_are_you_happy_now_with_biden.html

Five years ago, the Trump base could not understand the NeverTrump Republicans who were willing to have the horrible Hillary Clinton in the White House, not the Trump they loathed.  Thank G-d, that did not come to pass.

But today — there is a curious silence in the NeverTrump camp now that they have succeeded in getting the loathed Trump out of the White House…for Biden.  Does anyone hear a Bret Stephens, a William Kristol — even Liz Cheney, whooping and hollering in gleeful jubilation that with President Biden in the White House, the Oval Office is Trump-rein? 

I don’t hear these faux Republican malcontents praising Biden to the heavens — Biden, who probably can’t distinguish COVID-19 from the common cold, Biden, who is a serial liar and likely a sociopath, Biden, whose idea of policy is reverse whatever Trump did (but not necessarily on Afghanistan).  Consider, too, for all the slurs, lies, and contumely hurled at Mr. Trump, no one ever suggested that someone was sending him instructions — except of course the base lie that Putin was his puppet master.  The anti-Trump calumnies included the phony assertion that President Trump was mentally challenged, not fit to be president.  But that was sheer propaganda, indulged in by the NeverTrump Republicans, happily joining the rabid, radical left, with both groups terminally beset by Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Does one hear of Biden Derangement Syndrome?  Fact is, if we were to hear of this malady, the sole person afflicted would be Biden himself.

The truth is that while the NeverTrump crowd still belch fire and brimstone at the thought of a re-elected President Trump come 2024, we don’t hear them crowing about how much better off the country is now that Biden has defeated him.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/the_democrats_funding_islamist_terrorists.html

At 8:45 A.M. on September 11, I was on the phone with the editor at the European Wall Street Journal. We were discussing the op-ed about financing terrorism I had written for the paper, which was to run the next day. The TV’s regular morning chatter in the background suddenly changed, and an anxious voice announced that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. We hung up and I rushed to my window, which has a clear view of downtown Manhattan and the World Trade Center. At first, I saw smoke rising in the distance; before long a thick, black cloud had engulfed the Twin Towers. Later the sky turned black, and the buildings disappeared altogether. I called the editor back—it was still possible to get a connection to Europe—and after describing the horrors outside my window, I suggested a new lead for the op-ed; I knew instinctively that this was no accident, but a terror attack.

This is how my op-ed titled Evil’s Unwitting Helper appeared on the morning of September 12, 2001. I wrote that “terrorism does not happen in a political vacuum. The policies pursued by Western nations impact directly on both the means available to terrorists and the motivations driving their evil agendas. It is imperative that we assess what has gone wrong and begin to set those policies right.”

This is when the idea for writing my book: Funding Evil, How Terrorism is Financed – and How to Stop It, which demanded to stop those who make terrorists’ activities possible—the paymasters, so that horror like September 11 never happen again.

It took some time for the U.S. government to confirm that al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist organizations have been raising money through charitable organizations, fundraisers in mosques, illegal and sometimes legal businesses, from used-cars sales to honey manufacturing to mining, to drug-trafficking, arms, and people smuggling, to mention but a few. They often are also the beneficiaries of states that provide money, arms, training camps, and safe haven. Since radical Islamists terrorists’ goal is to harm America, in 2001, the idea that any U.S. administration would fund such groups seemed preposterous.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/09/13/counter-terrorism-since-9-11/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Criminals or combatants?

The debacle in Afghanistan returns the United States to our pre-9/11 threat environment. In fact, the threats are arguably worse. It would be an overstatement, though, to conclude that we are back to the state of vulnerability that obtained on September 10, 2001. Our counter-terrorism is markedly superior today. That is cause for guarded optimism but not overconfidence. In many ways, it is a reflection of how bad things were prior to 9/11. While national security has dramatically improved since then, there is serious backsliding.

Let’s be precise about why we undertook the effort that has now unspooled into a disaster. When American armed forces were dispatched to Afghanistan in October 2001, the essential mission was threefold. The oft-forgotten first part was to shift the U.S. counter-terrorism paradigm from a law-enforcement model to a war footing.

Second, and most obvious, was to rout al-Qaeda, which had conducted the 9/11 atrocities. From the terror network’s hub, particularly in the Afghan–Pakistani border region (though it had strongholds throughout the country), al-Qaeda orchestrated the attacks in which nearly 3,000 Americans were killed. In nearly simultaneous suicide-hijacking strikes, a total of 19 trained jihadists destroyed the iconic World Trade Center and badly damaged a section of the Pentagon; another plane they’d seized, Flight 93, crash-landed near Shanksville, Pa., thanks to the extraordinary valor of the doomed passengers and crew, rather than plowing into the U.S. Capitol or the White House as jihadists are believed to have intended.

The third mission, the most enduring and thus the most difficult, was to ensure that the terror network was denied sanctuary and state sponsorship, which in Afghanistan had evolved into active military alliance with a like-minded regime, the Taliban.

The 9/11 operation had not been a one-off. Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda’s emir, had established the organization in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s. After a humiliated Red Army withdrew in 1989 (with the USSR’s collapse imminent), bin Laden took the jihad global, targeting the United States — the “head of the snake,” as we were branded by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the bin Laden mentor and jihadist firebrand I prosecuted in the mid 1990s after the cell he’d established bombed the Twin Towers and plotted (unsuccessfully) simultaneous attacks on New York City landmarks. For a time in the early Nineties, al-Qaeda relocated to Sudan. By 1996, though, it had been enticed back to Afghanistan after that country’s takeover by the Taliban — a sharia-supremacist faction that had been forged by Islamist elements in the Pakistani regime as a geopolitical weapon to control its Afghan neighbor while countering rival India. In the five ensuing years, al-Qaeda constantly conspired to attack American targets, occasionally with horrific success: In 1998, the jihadists bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing over 200; and in 2000, they nearly sank a naval destroyer, the USS Cole, killing 17 American sailors.