BOOKS, CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

How Obama And Biden Broke History’s Greatest Military

Posted By on August 18th, 2021

https://www.conservativehq.org/post/how-obama-and-biden-broke-history-s-greatest-military

In January of 2009 as Barack Obama and Joe Biden took the oath of office the United States stood at the peak of military power – our country proudly maintained the most lethal, most experienced, best educated, most technologically advanced and most expensive military establishment in history.

How then did we go from that proud moment to being defeated by an irregular force using mostly World War II and Cold War era weapons in a country where we had spent trillions of dollars and more than 2,300 lives and won battle after battle?

The answer to that seemingly complex question may be found in a slim volume Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad by our friend Steve Coughlin.

Coughlin, who is now retired from the Army, had a distinguished career as an attorney, decorated intelligence officer and noted specialist on Islamic law, ideology and associated issues as they relate to terrorism and subversion. In September 2001, right after 9/11, he was mobilized from his private sector career and assigned to the Directorate for Intelligence, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Targeting (JCS-J2T). Over time, his responsibilities evolved into intelligence support to information operations and strategic communications from a targeting perspective.

In 2007, Coughlin was awarded a Master of Science of Strategic Intelligence from the Joint Military Intelligence College / Defense Intelligence Agency on the threat analysis aspects of Islamic law and related doctrines. As a Major in the United States Army (res.), Coughlin was later assigned to USCENTCOM where he served in both an intelligence and strategic communications / information operations role.

From 9/11, to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the “Arab Spring,” and the rise of the Islamic State Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad explains how we got where we are in the war Islam has declared on the West and how we were destined to fail due to the decisions made by Obama and Biden.

What Coughlin discovered once he entered the Intelligence Directorate was that in the Pentagon there was a preference for political correctness over accuracy and for models that were generated not by what the enemy said he was, but for what academics and “cultural advisors” said the enemy needed to be based on contrived social science theories.

And then the 2008 election brought Barack Obama and Joe Biden to the White House, and put ideologues associated with them in charge of the Pentagon, CIA and State Department.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Since New DHS Alert, You’re a Potential Terrorist if You Oppose White House Lies Has our nation sunk to a new low? Gen. Michael Flynn

Posted By on August 18th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/new-dhs-alert-youre-potential-terrorist-if-you-gen-michael-flynn/

https://www.westernjournal.com/exclusive-gen-flynn-since-new-dhs-alert-potential-terrorist-oppose-white-house-lies/

On Sept. 17, 2021, our nation will celebrate the 234th anniversary of our beloved U.S. Constitution.

The fact that this document has lasted for such a period is a remarkable feat. Legal scholars have reviewed national constitutions that have been adopted since 1789 and concluded that they lasted an average of only 17 years.

But as I travel the country, Americans are asking me, “How much longer do we have before our constitutional protections are wiped away? How long before our nation descends into a real tyranny?” One friend went as far as saying, “If you criticize this administration, they call it hate speech; if you disagree with their actions, they call you a domestic terrorist.”

My friend wasn’t exaggerating, reading the most recent Department of Homeland Security issuance on Friday of a nationwide terrorism alert message titled “National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin.”

To be frank, I was stunned and found myself asking, have we, the United States of America, sunk to a new low? Although we are approaching the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks against our nation, this terrorism alert does not say one word about Muslim extremism being a threat and it barely mentions al-Qaida.

Rather, this terrorism bulletin focuses on the Bidens’ political opponents. Its sweeping rhetoric was so broad that it could put under suspicion more than half of all Americans. Is the Biden administration redefining domestic terrorism? Will having a pro-American set of beliefs and using the word “patriot” get you labeled a domestic terrorist?

The alert focuses on those who resist the Anthony Fauci COVID-19 narrative, stating that “threats are also exacerbated by impacts of the ongoing global pandemic, including grievances over public health safety measures and perceived government restrictions.” I wonder what “perceived” government restrictions they had in mind — aren’t the real restrictions damaging enough?

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Biden’s Afghanistan Catastrophe Increases Terror Threat in US Biden administration, meanwhile, focuses solely on “domestic extremists”. Michael Cutler

Posted By on August 18th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/bidens-afghanistan-catastrophe-increases-terror-michael-cutler/

The twentieth anniversary of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 is just a few weeks away.

The first step in solving a problem is to acknowledge that there is a problem.

The good news is that the Biden administration acknowledges that America faces an increased threat of terrorism, especially as the 20th anniversary of the terror attacks of 9/11 by al-Qaida approaches.

The bad news, even as the Taliban has now taken back all of Afghanistan because of the Biden administration’s abysmally failed policies, the Biden administration, incredibly, is entirely focused on the threats posed by domestic terrorists and extremists.  

Biden utterly ignores the failures of the immigration system that continue to undermine national security and public safety in this especially dangerous era. 

On August 13, 2021 the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a press release titled, DHS Issues New National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin.

The focus of the press release, and as you will see, the NTAS Bulletin was Domestic Terrorism without a single reference to possible entry of foreign terrorists into the United States even as it addressed the elevated threats posed by various terror groups as the 20th anniversary of the terror attacks of 9/11 is nearly upon us.

In fact, the above-noted press release included this excerpt:

Under the Biden-Harris Administration, DHS has increased the development, production, and dissemination of intelligence and other actionable information central to countering threats in the current environment.  DHS has established a new, dedicated domestic terrorism branch within the Department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A).  Further, DHS has established the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3) to help build local prevention frameworks to provide communities with the tools they need to counter terrorism and other targeted violence.   

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Where Are the Gays? While the Taliban prepares to execute gays, Western gay-rights groups focus on “gender-reassignment surgery.” Bruce Bawer

Posted By on August 18th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/where-are-gays-bruce-bawer/

In the last couple of days, as the Taliban consolidated its position in the Afghan capital, I had to go all the way to New Zealand to find an English-language gay news website which acknowledged that this lightning reconquista wasn’t exactly a great development for gay Afghans.

Under the headline “Taliban Plan to Crush Gay Men to Death as they Close in on Capturing Afghanistan,” the Gay Express reminded readers that during the years of Taliban rule (1996-2001), adulterers were executed, thieves subjected to amputation, girls over 10 denied schooling, movie theaters closed, Western TV and music banned, women forced into burkas, and men ordered to wear beards.

In what seems a strict violation of the unwritten rule of Western gay media – i.e. never to say anything positive about the U.S., and especially about Republican governments in the U.S. – the Kiwi website noted that “[w]hile homosexuality has always remained illegal in Afghanistan, laws making it punishable by death were repealed when the United States invaded in 2001.”

But that, warned the website, will surely be reversed, given Taliban judge Gul Rahim’s recent assurance, in an interview with Bild (Germany), that gays, under a new Taliban regime, would be “crushed to death by toppling walls.”

But that story was, as noted, an outlier in the gay Anglosphere. When I turned from the Gay Express to other sites, I found nary a word about the Taliban’s grim plans.

At Pink News (UK), the highlighted stories concerned the firing of a gay teacher by a Christian school in Sydney, Australia; a ban on Pride flags at another school in Newburg, Oregon; and the loss of a lawsuit by Hobby Lobby, a chain of arts-and-crafts stores, which had refused to let M-to-F transsexuals use its ladies’ rooms. 

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Does Climate Change Cause Extreme Weather Now? Here’s a Scorcher of a Reality Check By Eric Felten

Posted By on August 18th, 2021

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/08/17/does_climate_change_cause_extreme_weather_now_heres_a_scorcher_of_a_reality_check_789878.html

The Pacific Northwest was hit with a record-shattering heat wave in June, with temperatures over 35 degrees higher than normal in some places. On June 28, Portland, Ore., reached 116 degrees. Late last week the region suffered another blast of hot weather, with a high in Portland of 103 degrees. The New York Times didn’t hesitate to pronounce the region’s bouts of extreme weather proof that the climate wasn’t just changing, but catastrophically so.

To make that claim, the Times relied on a “consortium of climate experts” that calls itself World Weather Attribution, a group organized not just to attribute extreme weather events to climate change, but to do so quickly. Within days of the June heat wave, the researchers released an analysis, declaring that the torrid spell “was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”

World Weather Attribution and its alarming report were trumpeted by Time magazine, touted by the NOAA website  Climate.gov , and featured by CBS News, CNBC, Scientific American, CNN, the Washington Post, USAToday, and the New York Times, among others.

The group’s claim that global warming was to blame was perhaps less significant than the speed with which that conclusion was provided to the media. Previous efforts to tie extreme weather events to climate change hadn’t had the impact scientists had hoped for, according to Time, because it “wasn’t producing results fast enough to get attention from people outside the climate science world.”

“Being able to confidently say that a given weather disaster was caused by climate change while said event still has the world’s attention,” Time explained, approvingly, “can be an enormously useful tool to convince leaders, lawmakers and others that climate change is a threat that must be addressed.” In other words, the value of rapid attribution is primarily political, not scientific.

HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Suspected terrorists crossing border ‘at a level we have never seen before,’ outgoing Border Patrol chief says by Anna Giaritelli

Posted By on August 18th, 2021

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/border-patrol-chief-suspected-terrorists-coming-across-southern-border

Unprecedented numbers of known or suspected terrorists have crossed the southern border in recent months, the outgoing Border Patrol chief said.

The head of the Border Patrol, Rodney Scott, told his 19,000 agents before retiring on Aug. 14 that their national security mission is paramount right now despite the Biden administration’s focus on migrant families and children who are coming across the United States-Mexico boundary at record rates.

“Over and over again, I see other people talk about our mission, your mission, and the context of it being immigration or the current crisis today being an immigration crisis,” Scott said in a video message to agents, obtained by the Washington Examiner. “I firmly believe that it is a national security crisis. Immigration is just a subcomponent of it, and right now, it’s just a cover for massive amounts of smuggling going across the southwest border — to include TSDBs at a level we have never seen before. That’s a real threat.”

TSDB refers to known or suspected terrorists, as identified in the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database.

“Your peers or you are taking criminals, pedophiles, rapists, murderers, and like I said before, even TSDB alerts off the streets and keeping them safe from America,” Scott said. “Even if we processed several thousand migrants that day and even if thousands of them were allowed into the U.S., you still took those threats off the street, and I think that’s worth it. So please don’t ever undersell how important your mission is.”

The surge of migrants from mostly Central American countries has prompted Border Patrol to pull more than 40% of agents from the field to help transport, process, and care for people in custody, meaning fewer agents are able to patrol for national security threats. Often, smugglers send over large groups of families and children to divert agents to one area and then run other contraband or people over the border where agents are not present.

Shortly after taking office in January, CBP told members of Congress that federal law enforcement had stopped four people on the terror watchlist. A CBP news release about these specific encounters was taken down from the government agency’s website hours after going up, prompting complaints from Republicans about the Department of Homeland Security’s transparency.

The congressional briefing confirmed what House Republicans had said during a border tour in Texas in March. House Homeland Security Committee ranking member John Katko, a former federal prosecutor who was based in El Paso, Texas, during his time as a lawyer, said the international cartels were “masterfully” exploiting the border due to an easing of Trump-era border restrictions.

“People they’ve caught in the last few days [in Border Patrol’s El Paso sector] have been under the terror watchlist,” Katko said. “Individuals that they have on the watchlist for terrorism are now starting to exploit the southern border.”

The four terror watchlist matches represented a greater number than the average total seen in recent years. Although several thousand people are denied entry to the U.S. at airports each year as a result of being on the list, it is unusual for people to be encountered trying to get into the U.S. between land border crossings. The four matches were citizens of Serbia and Yemen.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How Did We Go From Energy Dominance To Energy Begging In Just 8 Months?

Posted By on August 18th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/18/how-did-we-go-from-energy-dominance-to-energy-begging-in-8-months/

In his first day in office, President Joe Biden embarked on a campaign to rein in domestic oil and gas production. On his 204th day in office, he was pleading with OPEC to increase its production to stem the sharp rise in gasoline prices, to which OPEC said no dice.

Virtually overnight, the nation has gone from Trump-era “energy dominance” to a Carter-era energy crisis.

But unlike Jimmy Carter, who blundered his way into gasoline shortages, Biden is intentionally creating the current situation to pay homage to climate “crisis” environmentalists.

During his presidential campaign, Biden promised to “get rid of fossil fuels.” Since taking office, he’s been busy trying to carry out that pledge.

One of the first things he did in office was to call a halt on oil and gas leases on federal lands and off our coastlines, and has yet to resume allowing them even after a federal judge ordered the administration to do so. He shut down construction of the Keystone Pipeline. He blocked energy development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He directed federal agencies to “eliminate fossil fuel subsidies as consistent with applicable law.” He’s promised to add some $90 billion to the industry’s tax burden by eliminating what he calls tax “subsidies.”

Even now, the administration “is preparing to release a blueprint for limiting sales of U.S. drilling rights as rising oil and gasoline prices highlight the risks of curtailing domestic crude production,” reports Bloomberg. “The Interior Department also is expected to limit new leases in some sensitive coastal and Western areas and begin a broad study of the climate effects of oil and gas development on federal property.”

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran’s Renewed ‘Promise’ to the Palestinians by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on August 18th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17648/iran-promise-palestinians

[T]he leaders of various Palestinian factions are seeking Iran’s support for their jihad (holy war) against Israel.

This means that Iran under Raisi will continue to provide the Palestinian terrorist groups in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip with financial and military aid.

Iran did not promise to contribute to the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of last May’s 11-day war between Hamas and Israel. Iran did not promise to build new hospitals and schools in the Gaza Strip. Iran did not promise to help the two million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip cope with the rising number of Covid-19 infections.

Iran’s renewed promise to help the Palestinians in their fight against Israel shows that the mullahs in Tehran feel emboldened by the perceived weakness of the Biden administration and other Western powers in dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat.

The silence of the US and the rest of the international community towards the latest threats from Iran and its Palestinian proxies signals that it is only a matter of time before the Palestinian terror groups’ jihad toward Israel, most likely enthusiastically assisted by Iran, resurges in a way that is entirely expectable.

As the Biden administration continues to talk about the need for confidence-building measures between Israel and the Palestinians to create an environment to reach a two-state solution, the leaders of various Palestinian factions are seeking Iran’s support for their jihad (holy war) against Israel.

Leaders of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and other factions who visited Iran recently to attend the inauguration of President Ebrahim Raisi, seem to be satisfied with the promise they received from the mullahs in Tehran.

The Biden administration wants to advance confidence-building measures between Israel and the Palestinians. The Palestinian terrorist groups and their supporters, however, want confidence-building measures with any country that is willing to support them in realizing their dream of destroying Israel.

The Biden administration can probably promote some form of confidence-building measures between Israel and the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas. There is no way, however, that the Biden administration would be able to advance such measures between Israel and Iran’s Palestinian proxies.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Two Intelligence Failures by America’s Leaders by Pete Hoekstra

Posted By on August 18th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17656/america-intelligence-failures

Just as the most optimistic among our leaders believed that Afghanistan had the potential to become a fledgling democracy, our leadership insisted that…. China would become a “stakeholder in the international order” and a trusted trading partner. Increased political freedom would follow economic growth, and a huge new marketplace would be opened to the West.

Now, though, China’s role in the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has revealed undeniably just how hostile China is to the West, and how dismissive it is even of its supposed allies in the developing world…. Apparently, more than four million lives worldwide were a small price to pay for increasing China’s power at the expense of the U.S. and its allies. When will our leaders open their eyes to that fact and act decisively to counter China’s ever more obvious attempts to achieve dominance over the West?

For years, it has been evident for anyone to see that our Afghanistan and China policies were not only ineffective, but that we were courting disaster by our lack of effective response. Our leaders have refused to acknowledge the increasing, and increasingly compelling, signs that our policies toward Afghanistan and China were failing. That is the true intelligence failure.

Let us hope and pray–and demand–that our leaders respond more effectively against the emerging China fiasco. The horrific scenes of the last few days will pale in comparison to what the world will experience if we stand aside and watch while China succeeds in its goal of becoming the world’s preeminent superpower.

One major intelligence failure by our leaders every twenty years is already one too many.

The U.S. and the West are experiencing two unfolding intelligence disasters. Oxford Languages succinctly defines the two possible meanings of the word “intelligence:” (1) the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills, or (2) the collection of information of military or political value. What we are experiencing today is not chiefly a failure to collect information, but the ever more tangible inability of our leaders to apply the information they have acquired.

The two debacles began to unfold around the turn of the millennium, within twelve months of each other. We are now seeing the fruits of the first failure play out 24/7 before our very eyes: the stunningly rapid fall of Afghanistan despite twenty years of sacrifice and investment. The second, the failure to understand and counter the growing threat posed by China, is set soon to prove itself just as disastrous as the first. In responding to each of these two challenges, our leadership has demonstrated a profound lack of insight and skill: a true failure of intelligence.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Biden’s disgraceful retreat By Jeffrey James Higgins

Posted By on August 18th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/bidens_disgraceful_retreat.html

By abandoning Afghanistan, the U.S. has given Islamic radicals a base to train, plan, and project terrorism.

For more than a decade, I hunted terrorists as a supervisory special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration, and I believe the United States’ abandonment of Afghanistan is a disgraceful, immoral, and short-sighted foreign-policy disaster. 

On September 11, 2001, I was one of the first rescuers to reach the World Trade Center after it collapsed. I stood in the rubble and swore an oath to seek vengeance against the Islamists who targeted the U.S. I pushed my agency to investigate narco-terrorism and spent the next 14 years pursing terrorists across the globe. I helped open DEA’s office in Kabul, wrestled a suicide bomber, fought Taliban in combat, and chased terrorists across five continents. I achieved the first precedent-setting narco-terrorism arrest and convicted the world’s most prolific heroin trafficker.  

For days, I’ve been receiving frantic messages from Afghan allies who are trapped in Afghanistan or have families still in grave danger. The U.S. has a moral obligation to protect Afghan citizens who fought side-by-side with Americans against the Taliban, Islamic State, al-Qaeda, Haqqani Network, and other terror groups. Right now, Islamists are going house-to-house raping and murdering American allies. The rapid abandonment of the Afghan military and our other allies is unconscionable, but there is still time to expand the beachhead at Kabul International Airport and evacuate tens of thousands of Afghans who will be murdered for believing in democracy and human rights.

Despite problems with reconstruction, the war in Afghanistan has been successful. The purpose of the invasion was to depose the Taliban regime that provided a haven for al-Qaeda, and to combat terrorism. The U.S. achieved those goals by pushing the Taliban into Pakistan and denying the country to terrorists for almost twenty years. Southwest Asia has the highest concentration of terror groups in the world, and it is the epicenter of radical Islamic terrorism. A strong military presence in Afghanistan has facilitated intelligence, law enforcement, and military operations against Islamists who want to destroy the West. The advantage of maintaining a military presence in Afghanistan has been obvious.