Khatallah’s Acquittals on Benghazi Murders Show, Again, Need for New System We need a designation of the enemy that homes in on its ideology. By Andrew C. McCarthy

There was never going to be justice for the American war dead of the Benghazi attack. The jihadist strike on the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities was too bound up in the politics of the 2012 presidential election. Moreover, the prosecution of the lone defendant charged in the attack was a product of the progressive ideological insistence that acts of war can seamlessly be downgraded into mere penal offenses, adjudicated with all the due-process strictures that implies.

This bull-headed conceit is a fiction, and thus the experiment is a failure.

It is not my purpose to make a competing “I told you so” claim that Ahmed Abu Khatallah should have been designated an enemy combatant and consigned to military detention and trial. Yesterday, after an eight-week trial in civilian federal court in Washington, Khatallah was acquitted on the most important charges against him — the charges that arose out of the murders of U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stephens, State Department employee Sean Smith, and CIA security contractors Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods. Despite these 14 acquittals, he was convicted on four charges involving material support for terrorism, destruction of property, and carrying a firearm during a violent crime. There is no reason to believe that the outcome would have been more just — or even that we would have an outcome yet — had the case been assigned to the existing, deeply flawed military-commission system.

Instead, in positing two points, I want to restate a plea that we stop playing with fire and move beyond the deadening “military v. civilian” debate — Is it a war or is it a crime? — that has undermined American counterterrorism for 16 years.

Point One: The identification of our wartime enemy must be made with more precision — which is to say, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) under which we have been operating since October 2001 badly needs superseding. It is the AUMF that determines who can properly be regarded as an unlawful enemy combatant. Only unlawful enemy combatants may be detained, interrogated, and prosecuted outside the civilian justice system. It is not clear that the AUMF would have supported Khatallah’s designation as an enemy combatant, notwithstanding his murderous jihadist attack on U.S. government facilities. Part of that is because of the way the Obama administration distorted al-Qaeda, but another part is the increasing obsolescence of the AUMF.

At present, many if not most of the jihadist organizations we confront did not even exist when the AUMF was enacted (although most carry the DNA of al-Qaeda, as that network existed 16 years ago). The problem has long been obvious, even if we remain willfully blind to it: Our enemy is not a particular jihadist network; it is sharia-supremacist ideology, drawn from a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, which spawns virulently anti-American, anti-Western jihadist factions. The factions come and go, their names changing over time — al-Qaeda, ISIS, Ansar al-Sharia, al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb or in the Arabian Peninsula, and on and on. The constant is the ideology. It is what catalyzes the jihadists and knits their ever-evolving forces together.

We need a designation of the enemy that homes in on the ideology and brings within its sweep all these conforming groups. The current AUMF, to the contrary, is circumscribed by a long-ago event (9/11) and the entities (whether terrorist organizations or nations) that were complicit in it.

Point Two: To repeat what I have been arguing for over a dozen years, we need a national-security court. At the moment, we have two models for prosecuting enemy-combatant terrorists: the civilian justice system and the military-commission system. Neither one of them is a good fit. Khatallah’s case underscores the incurable deficiencies of civilian prosecution for acts of war that occur outside U.S. jurisdiction — as did the 2010 trial of Ahmed Ghailani, who was acquitted on 284 of the 285 terrorism counts arising out of his participation in al-Qaeda’s 1988 bombings of American embassies in eastern Africa. Yet, the military justice system is also inadequate to the task of addressing a non-traditional enemy who crisscrosses between the civilian sphere and combat operations.

A SALTy Proposal Frantic high-tax states are trying to preserve the state and local deduction by arguing—misleadingly—that they subsidize everyone else. Steven Malanga

As a Republican bill that would eliminate most of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction advances through Congress, it is prompting newfound concern from politicians and the media in high-tax states about the burdens their wealthy residents face. California governor Jerry Brown, who helped engineer a massive tax hike on his state’s richest residents in 2012, called the federal proposal to end the exemption for local taxes a “gross manipulation” of the tax code and an “attack” on his state—where 98 percent of households earning more than $1 million use the deduction (on average, claiming $462,000 in state and local taxes on their federal tax form). New York governor Andrew Cuomo labeled the reform a “scam,” though Democrats and Republicans have supported it over the years.

The New York Times, under a headline that urges readers to “take claims about the state and local deduction with a grain of salt,” rejected the principal Republican argument for eliminating the deduction: that it serves as a subsidy for high-tax states because it lets them keep their taxes high while giving their residents a break on federal taxes. Instead, the Times argued, states like New York send more money to Washington in taxes than they get back in federal spending, so residents deserve the federal deduction. “Saying Indiana subsidizes New York through the deduction ignores net revenue and spending,” the Times contends. Echoing that argument, Cuomo calls New York a “donor state” to the federal government.

Politicians from high-tax states like New York, California, and New Jersey have made this case for decades, dating back to when former New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan first began tracking taxes paid by residents of each state to Washington and comparing them with the amount of federal money flowing into each state. Others have continued Moynihan’s exercise, tracking these flows, but often in the most superficial ways, designed to create the illusion that some states are “dependent” on Washington because they get more than they send, while others are “donors” to the rest of the country.

Trump Has Democrats Running in Circles By Brandon J. Weichert

Earlier this week, President Trump made waves when he announced there would be no deal with the Democrats in the forthcoming budget battle. He increased the swells when he also insisted there would be no tax increases, contrary to Democrats’ wishes. On December 8, the government faces yet another partial shutdown unless the president and Congress can agree on a mechanism to fund it through the end of the year.

In response, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and the handful of other Leftist holdovers in Congress took to the airwaves—yet again—to portray Trump as an irrational leader. Schumer publicly ruminated how it would be better for congressional Democratic leaders to iron out deals with congressional Republicans over both the pending budget battle and the tax reform legislation.

Can you blame them? Trump is running circles around Schumer and the Democrats—to say nothing of congressional Republicans.

What Schumer and the Democrats don’t understand is that Trump has already outmaneuvered them. Schumer has no desire to work with Trump because he doesn’t know what he’s getting. Trump’s unpredictability has left the entire political class cowed. The Democrats can only behave as the party of “No!” and the Republicans have no choice but to limp along after Trump, lest they suffer at the polls.

This is good for Trump and even better for America.

Matt Lauer and the Decline of Media Authority Add to problems of bias and technology new questions of morality. James Freeman

Two more media stars were fired on Wednesday due to allegations of sexual misconduct. Matt Lauer and Garrison Keillor are the latest celebrities to lose their jobs in a cascade of accusations and revelations that began with the October exposure of the many misdeeds of film producer Harvey Weinstein. If recent history is any guide, some will say that other industries are just as bad as the ones that produce information and entertainment. But the hopeful news is that this may not be true, based on the results of a new public opinion survey.

As for Mr. Lauer, co-anchor of NBC’s “Today” show, the speed of his exit from his longtime perch atop the world of morning broadcast television was striking. According to the Journal:

NBC News Chairman Andy Lack said in a memo to staff Wednesday that the network received a detailed complaint from a colleague about misconduct by Mr. Lauer that represented “a clear violation of our company’s standards.”

The alleged incident between Mr. Lauer and the staffer took place during the network’s coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, a person briefed on the matter said.

“While it is the first complaint about his behavior in the over 20 years he’s been at NBC News, we were also presented with reason to believe this may not have been an isolated incident,” Mr. Lack added.

Ari Wilkenfeld, a lawyer for the accuser, said his client “detailed egregious acts of sexual harassment and misconduct by Mr. Lauer” in a meeting Monday night with members of NBC’s human resources and legal departments. Mr. Wilkenfeld said NBC “acted quickly and responsibly” in investigating the claims and firing Mr. Lauer.

As far as this column can tell, Mr. Lauer has not commented publicly on the allegations. In the matter of Mr. Keillor, this doesn’t appear to be a case of unwanted prairie home companionship, but rather a workplace issue. According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

Citing “inappropriate behavior with an individual who worked with him,” Minnesota Public Radio said Wednesday it has terminated its relationship with Garrison Keillor, the former host of “A Prairie Home Companion” who helped build MPR into a national powerhouse.

Maximum Pressure on North Korea China and the U.S. still haven’t imposed the toughest sanctions.

Kim Jong Un tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile in the early hours of Wednesday, and the data suggest it could hit all of the continental United States. If North Korea is allowed to perfect its warhead technology, it will be able to hold the U.S. hostage to nuclear ransom. The Trump Administration is right that the U.S. can’t live with this threat, so what more should it do to prevent it?

Conventional wisdom says that Pyongyang already faces extreme economic and diplomatic pressure. But in reality the United Nations and U.S. only began to impose broad sanctions last year, and even U.S. allies such as Singapore and Thailand have been slow to enforce them. China and Russia continue to support the Kim regime—China through oil exports and other commerce, and Russia through payments for North Korean slave labor.

Shutting down those lifelines should be a top priority. After the North’s intermediate-range missile launch in September, the U.S. circulated a draft resolution at the United Nations Security Council to do just that. But Russia and China resisted and the U.S. caved; Resolution 2375 only capped oil exports and labor contracts. The Trump Administration portrayed the unanimous vote at the U.N. as a victory, but the resolution kept open many of Pyongyang’s cash lifelines.

The U.S. even rewarded Beijing for the vote by pausing the process of sanctioning Chinese companies that violate sanctions. That pause ended last week when the Treasury Department put four companies based in the Chinese city of Dandong on its financial blacklist. Treasury is playing catch-up with a June report on sanctions-busting firms by the private research group C4ADS. The U.S. government continues to hold back on other “secondary sanctions,” especially against Chinese banks, for fear of losing Beijing’s cooperation.

But China’s internal enforcement of sanctions is patchy. Chinese banks froze the accounts of some North Korean customers while continuing to finance Chinese companies that are breaking sanctions rules. Imports of coal from North Korea have continued in violation of a U.N. resolution in August that banned all trade in North Korean coal. The Trump Administration can make an example of these firms and expose Beijing’s failure to honor its sanctions promises.

The U.S. response to Wednesday’s missile tests should also include security measures. The redeployment of tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea is needed to deter a nuclear attack from the North. Showing Pyongyang that American forces would retaliate overwhelmingly to an attack on a U.S. ally, even at the risk of an ICBM attack on the U.S. mainland, would help prevent Kim miscalculating.

The deployment of more Thaad missile-defense radars and launchers to South Korea would send a strong signal to China that its support for Pyongyang has consequences. At the end of last month Beijing bullied South Korean President Moon Jae-in into freezing deployment of the Terminal High-Altitude Air Defense system. But the U.S. should insist it needs new Thaad units to defend its own forces and deter attacks from the North.

The U.S. and South Korea can also expand their programs to encourage North Koreans to defect. The Kim regime’s former Deputy Ambassador to the U.K. Thae Yong-ho has good ideas on how to do this. Mr. Thae, who fled to freedom in the South last year, testified to Congress last month on human-rights messages that will resonate in the North.

Denzel Washington: Positive Change in Black Community ‘Starts in the Home’ By Tom Knighton

Denzel isn’t just one of the most established black actors in Hollywood. He’s one of the most established actors, period. As such, he probably has the leeway to confront Hollywood’s enforced Leftism that most actors do not have.

In an interview, Washington told The Grio where positive change in the black community needs to start: “It starts in the home,” the actor said. He went on to argue:

If the father is not in the home the boy will find a father in the streets. I saw it in my generation and every generation before me, and every one since.

Washington isn’t talking about boys finding a literal father figure to guide them on the right path. He’s talking about the streets themselves raising kids, and that path is nothing but trouble:

If the streets raise you, then the judge becomes your mother and prison becomes your home.

Washington is right, of course. Next to slavery, the greatest sin committed by the Democratic Party was the destruction of the black family by LBJ’s supposed “War on Poverty.” It created a perverse financial incentive for America’s black population — the largest recipients of LBJ’s programs at the time, still poor due to Jim Crow laws just being abolished — to no longer live in family units. Many opted to ignore marriage, as single motherhood led to greater benefits.

A strong family — with a father and a mother — does wonders to prevent kids from following in the erstwhile footsteps of many of their peers. In fact, black kids being raised with a married mother and father overcome virtually all of the current differences in outcomes between races.

Denzel Washington clearly understands this. Too bad so many of our politicians don’t have the courage to point out the obvious.

ANOTHER ANNIVERSARY: RAEL JEAN ISAAC

The hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration has passed to mixed reactions. It has been celebrated, as it deserves to be—the achievements of the Jewish state that emerged from it are breathtaking—but also attacked and denigrated.

Some of the attacks are unsurprising. The “Foreign Minister” of the “State of Palestine” Riyad Malki said it was bringing legal proceedings against the British government in British and international courts, in his words, to “compel the British government to apologize and make reasonable reparations to make up for that tragedy [the Balfour Declaration] including recognizing the State of Palestine.” The UN is using the occasion to set aside $1.3 billion to fund Palestinian legal campaigns against Israel and to support creation of an independent Palestinian state.
Emily Thornberry

More unsettling are some British reactions. Melanie Phillips reports that Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn refused to attend the dinner celebrating the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, a dinner attended by Prime Minister Netanyahu as the guest of Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May. In his place he sent the Labor shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry who made no secret that she saw nothing to celebrate. In an interview with the Middle East Eye news site, Thornberry said: ”I don’t think we celebrate the Balfour Declaration but I think we have to mark it…and I think probably the most important way of marking it is to recognize Palestine.” Even more unsettling are the reactions of some hitherto respectable Jewish organizations. For example, the American Jewish Historical Society has clearly gone over to the dark side with its plan (only withdrawn under pressure) to “commemorate” Balfour with speeches by two anti-Israel activists, partnering with the viciously anti-Israel Jewish Voice for Peace.

Which brings us to the importance of another anniversary that went totally unremarked: the 24th year anniversary this September of the signing of the Oslo accords in Washington. There is a direct connection between the rampant, ever-growing hostility to Israel and the so-called “peace” agreement Rabin signed with Arafat. Until then, Arafat had been a terror chieftain whose fortunes were in sharp decline. Whatever the failures of Israel’s 1982 campaign in Lebanon, it had one major success, forcing the PLO, which had sowed havoc in both Jordan and Lebanon, to find refuge in Tunisia, a backwater where it remained weak and constrained. With Oslo Israel bestowed vigorous new life on the PLO—and on the worldwide assault on her own legitimacy.

As remarkable as Israel’s stupidity was the enthusiasm with which it was greeted by Israel’s supporters (a reminder—think catastrophic global warming—of just how wrong a “consensus” can be). As American Jewish organizations vied for a place on the White House lawn to witness signing of the “historic” peace agreement, AFSI was a lone pro-Israel organization in denouncing the agreement and in pointing out its inevitable disastrous consequences. There would be individuals who spoke out and indeed traveled to Oslo to protest the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Arafat, Rabin and Peres. These were the people who at the time we called “the real heroes of Oslo,” including Rabbi Avi Weiss, Ronn Torossian, David Kalb and Joshua Meisels of the Coalition for Jewish Concerns (AMCHA) as well as New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who brought a group of prominent New Yorkers to Oslo.

Move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem It’s the right thing to do, and it would be a political victory for the White House By Wilson Shirley

President Trump needs a win. Fortunately, one is within reach.

In 1995, Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, a law that mandated moving America’s embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to a “unified” Jerusalem by May 31, 1999. But that move never happened, and, as Ambassador John Bolton pointed out in his recent congressional testimony on the subject, the U.S. embassy to Israel remains the only American embassy not located in the host country’s capital.

How has the Jerusalem Embassy Act not yet been fully executed? One of the law’s provisions grants the president the authority to bypass its penalty for not moving the embassy by issuing a waiver, renewable every six months, which invokes “the national security interests of the United States.” The latest waiver was issued on June 1 of this year.

Every president since 1999, from Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump, has kept up the unending string of waivers, declining to move the embassy to Jerusalem. Some of them have promised, as candidates, to make the move, but none have followed through. The next waiver is set to expire on December 1. On that day, Trump can break the streak.

Security concerns do not merit a waiver of this provision of the Jerusalem Embassy Act. It is true, as events across the Arab world in 2012 showed, that U.S. embassies and consulates are targets for attacks by violent extremists. That has been the case since at least 1998, when al-Qaeda terrorists blew up American embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya.The response of the United States to those attacks, however, was not to withdraw from Nairobi or Dar es Salaam. As Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law professor Eugene Kontorovich argued in his own congressional testimony, after these very attacks “the Executive undertook to hunt down and punish the perpetrators, while Congress appropriated extraordinary amounts for improved security at diplomatic facilities around the world.”

Recent events do not suggest that beginning to grant Jerusalem equal status with other world capitals would significantly endanger American security. Last April, Vladimir Putin’s Russia became the only country on Earth to actually recognize West Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state. The silence across a Middle East split on religious lines, riven by proxy wars, and aflame with extremism was deafening.

America’s policy of maintaining its embassy in Tel Aviv was born not of security concerns, but of legal deference to the U.N. General Assembly’s Resolution 181, a 1947 proposal that would have made Jerusalem into an international city governed by a “Special International Regime,” while partitioning the rest of Mandatory Palestine into Arab and Jewish sections.

Who Watches the Watchmen? History shows that special counsels almost inevitably overstep their mandates. By Victor Davis Hanson*****

Former FBI director Robert Mueller was supposed to run a narrow investigation into accusations of collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and the Russian government. But so far, Mueller’s work has been plagued by almost daily improper leaks (e.g., “sources report,” “it emerged,” “some say”) about investigations that seem to have little to do with his original mandate.

Now, there are leaks claiming that Mueller is going after former national-security adviser Michael Flynn for his business practices before he entered the Trump administration. Specifically, Mueller is reportedly investigating Flynn’s security assessment and intelligence work for the Turkish government and other Turkish interests. Yet possible unethical lobbying on behalf of a NATO ally was not the reason Mueller was appointed.

The Roman satirist Juvenal famously once asked how one could guard against marital infidelity when the moral guardians were themselves immoral. His famous quip, translated roughly as “Who will police the police?” is applicable to all supposedly saintly investigators.

Independent counsel Ken Starr was supposed to look into Bill Clinton’s supposed shady Whitewater dealings in Arkansas. He ended up investigating every aspect of Clinton’s life, including his many sexual escapades.

No doubt Clinton was a philanderer. But it was not Starr’s mission to prove to the nation what it had already suspected when it voted Clinton into the Oval Office.

In 2003, Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed as special counsel (by now-notorious former FBI director James Comey) to determine whether Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, had illegally exposed the allegedly covert status of CIA operative Valerie Plame. As with the Starr investigation, Fitzgerald soon presided over a media circus.

When the investigation was over, Libby was charged on five counts even though Plame may not have been a covert CIA agent at all. Also, it was reported early in the investigation that Fitzgerald knew that someone other than Libby (Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage) was almost surely guilty of first leaking Plame’s status.

But Fitzgerald was desperate for a big administration scalp. So he continued to lead an investigation that resulted in Libby’s conviction on four charges — in part based on Libby’s supposed disclosures to journalist Judith Miller. In her memoir, Miller later disavowed that Libby had ever given her classified information.

Special-counsel investigations are only as good as the society at large that orders them. The idea that a godly inquisitor, invested with extralegal authority, can somehow use superior wisdom and morality to solve an unsolvable ethical problem is a stretch.

Usually, these chasing-your-own-tail appointments are born out of media and political hysteria. The special counsel immediately feels enormous pressure to find anything to avoid being accused of running a “whitewash” or wasting time and money.

Germany: Surge in Migrant Attacks on Police “Migrants Have No Respect for Us” by Soeren Kern

“The police cannot win a war with the Lebanese because we outnumber them…. This applies to all of Gelsenkirchen, if we so choose.” — Lebanese clan in Gelsenkirchen, Germany.

Observers surmised that the real reason for the judge’s leniency was that he feared his family might be subjected to retribution from the clan.

Freddi Lohse, the Vice Chairman of the DPolG German Police Union in Hamburg, said that many migrant offenders view the leniency of the German justice system as a green light to continue delinquent behavior: “They are used to tougher consequences in their home countries. They have no respect for us.”

Violent attacks against German police have reached epidemic proportions, and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door migration policy is to blame, official statistics show.

The Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA) reported 36,755 attacks against German police in 2016 — or an average of 100 per day, a significant increase over previous years.

Violence — including verbal and physical assaults, and even murder — against police is rampant in all 16 of Germany’s federal states. According to the BKA, the epicenter of the problem in 2016 was North Rhine-Westphalia (8,929 incidents), the state with the largest migrant population, followed by: Bavaria (4,930); Baden-Württemberg (4,355); Berlin (3,154); Lower Saxony (3,030); Hesse (1,870); Saxony (1,573); Rhineland-Palatinate (1,537); Hamburg (1,339); Thüringen (1,228); Schleswig-Holstein (1,237); Brandenburg (1,009); Saxony-Anhalt (899); Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (658); Saarland (521); and Bremen (486).

Preliminary data, recently leaked to German public radio, indicate that in terms of violence against German law enforcement officers, 2017 will be a record-breaking year. In Berlin alone, attacks against police this year are up 70% in Görlitzer Park, 35% at the Warsaw Bridge and 15% at Kottbusser Tor, according to the Berliner Morgenpost.