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Jihad Festering in America by A. Z. Mohamed

Posted By on December 13th, 2017

Saudi influence on American administrations, and relationships between senior officials in both countries, is behind Washington’s ignoring Riyadh’s “well-established… involvement in supporting terrorism and terrorist groups.” — Report by the Institute for Gulf Affairs (IGA), released on June 1.

The IGA report, covering the three-year period since then and including extremely serious charges against both Saudi Arabia and previous U.S. administration and security officials, indicates the urgency with which the current administration needs to treat the issue and act upon it.

A new investigative report reveals that hundreds of Saudi and Kuwaiti nationals residing in the United States — some with dual citizenship, and most students subsisting on government scholarships — have joined ISIS and other terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq during the past three years.

Titled “From American Campuses to ISIS Camps: How Hundreds of Saudis Joined ISIS in the U.S.,” the report — released June 1 by the Washington-D.C.-based think tank, The Institute for Gulf Affairs (IGA) — provides details of the flow of students leaving American institutions of higher learning to fight in the Middle East.

According to a 2016 working paper produced by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Saudi Arabia is the second-largest source of ISIS fighters from Muslim-majority countries, with an estimated 2,500. If the IGA report is accurate, a whopping 16% of these fighters were in the U.S. when they joined ISIS.

An equally disturbing finding of the report is that the Saudi government, which has been monitoring its nationals in the U.S., is fully aware that many of their own citizens are joining ISIS and not only has done little to stop them, but has kept information about the subject from American authorities.

This finding completely contradicts the 2014 State Department assertion that “Saudi Arabia has continued to cooperate with the United States to prevent acts of terrorism … through information exchange agreements with the United States.”

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Trump Withdraws from Globalist Migration Compact Defends U.S. sovereignty on immigration policies. Joseph Klein

Posted By on December 13th, 2017

The Trump administration has decided to withdraw from participation in the United Nations Global Compact on Migration, representing another significant departure from the global governance policies of the Obama administration. In September 2016, during the waning days of the Obama administration, the United States had joined with the other member states of the UN to adopt a “non-binding “political declaration, the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants. They agreed to undertake negotiations towards a consensus on international norms by September 2018 to help guide member states’ immigration policies. U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said in a recent statement, announcing U.S. withdrawal from participation in this globalist compact, that “our decisions on immigration policies must always be made by Americans and Americans alone. The global approach in the New York Declaration is simply not compatible with US sovereignty.”

The New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, Ambassador Haley said, “contains numerous provisions that are inconsistent with U.S. immigration and refugee policies and the Trump Administration’s immigration principles.” The Declaration says, for example, that all migrants are “rights holders,” which are “universal.” It seeks a commitment to “strengthening global governance of migration.” It calls for applying international law to a state’s implementation of its own border control procedures. It calls for migration policies that promote “family reunification” – a euphemism for chain migration. It stipulates that migrant children should receive “education within a few months of arrival” with budgetary prioritization to facilitate this, all without any consideration of cost, language issues or the impact of such prioritization on the funding of the educational needs of the host country’s own citizens.

Predictably, UN officials and open border advocates have protested the Trump administration’s decision “to disengage from the process leading to the global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration,” as UN General Assembly President Miroslav Lajcak put it in a statement issued by his office. They claimed that nothing in the New York Declaration or in an ultimate global compact would be legally binding. National sovereignty would be respected, they promised. If that is so, however, what did Mr. Lajcak mean when, in that same statement, he talked about a commitment to “strengthening global governance of migration,” which is also the language used in the New York Declaration itself?

How would “global governance” work if there is technically no legally binding treaty? It would work through the insidious process of using the United Nations to forge an “international consensus” among representatives of the UN member states around broadly worded “international norms.” Such norms would purport to create, or broaden the scope of, a “universal” right, declared as such by all or a significant majority of the member states. As interpretations of norms acknowledging such rights are repeated in international bodies and incorporated into the laws or judicial rulings of more and more member states, they can then become a part of what international lawyers refer to as legally binding “customary international law,” whether there is a formal treaty or not. In the words of a prominent legal treatise (Restatement of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States), customary international law results “from a general and consistent practice of states that they follow from a sense of legal obligation.”

The UN can set in motion a process under which customary international law is created. As the Restatement treatise notes, the “United Nations General Assembly in particular has adopted resolutions, declarations, and other statements of principles that in some circumstances contribute to the process of making customary law.” A United Nations Global Compact on Migration may well fall into this category. Only if a member state persistently objects to a particular requirement of customary international law, would it generally be exempt from it. That is why it was imperative for President Trump to make clear when he did that the United States would not participate in the global migration compact and that it considers itself to be bound legally only by its own immigration laws.

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Who Really Lost in Alabama Learning the wrong lessons Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on December 13th, 2017

The Alabama Senate election was about everything except Alabama. And in the end, Alabamans stayed home and let the inevitable turnout tide of passion politics take its course. Minority voters rallied to Obama. Republicans stayed home. And the GOP is now holding on to a bare one-seat Senate majority.

The Democrats had abandoned Alabama, along with much of the South. They weren’t interested in Doug Jones until they smelled weakness. And they still aren’t interested in representing Alabamans now. They just want another Senate seat to bring them closer to blocking and impeaching President Trump.

Alabama isn’t a place to them. It’s another chess piece in a Washington D.C. game that they can use to block judicial nominations, shut down the government and reverse the results of the previous election. They have Alabama now, but history suggests that unless they learn the lessons that cost them their former strongholds in the South, they won’t hold on to the seat that they paid a very pretty penny for.

The Alabama River follows a long and meandering course. But not nearly as long and meandering as the dark river of money that poured into the Alabama Senate race.

The tide of cash swirled, eddied and drifted along the secret rivers that flowed from Washington D.C. and San Francisco, from Las Vegas and New York City, and decided an election. Timed spending meant that they could avoid revealing their donors. And the biggest spender in the race had no money.

Some of these rivers had strange names.

There was Highway 31.The real Highway 31 links Alabama to Michigan. But the Highway 31 SuperPAC was a money route worth over $4 million leading back to Washington D.C. and New York City. Behind the local name were Senate Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC and the Obama/Hillary Priorities USA Action which was best known for a slimy ad accusing Mitt Romney of killing a steelworker’s wife.

Soros money may have poured down Highway 31 as the secretive shell group became the biggest outside spender in the race. Even though officially its bank account was empty. Instead consulting firms run by Obama staffers did the work on credit for Highway 31. That meant Highway 31 didn’t have to reveal its donors until after the election. Meanwhile Highway 31 ran an ad warning Alabama voters that their votes in the election were a matter of “public record” and that their “community will know.”

Coming up behind Highway 31 was Stand Up Republic. Like Highway 31, Stand Up Republic is a folksy false front. Behind the name that could easily belong to a jeans company or a chain of comedy club is Evan McMullin, a former CIA agent, Wall Streeter and independent 2016 presidential candidate.

Stand Up Republic claims to be fighting for “democratic norms”. McMullin claims to be a Never Trumper conservative. Neither claim holds up very well considering that the only known donor to SUR is Persian billionaire Pierre Omidyar who provided $250,000 to McMullin’s group. The Franco-Persian tycoon is best known for funding The Intercept, a radical left-wing site that specializes in undermining national security and which will be forever linked to the Snowden spy case.

McMullin has claimed that, “Donald Trump is not a loyal American and we should prepare for the next four years accordingly.” His own loyalties appear to be rather complicated. Omidyar’s SUR grant is listed alongside grants like Veterans Against Islamaphophia and Strategies for American Muslim Communities.

Out of these murky waters came $500K in ads.

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Why Glenn Greenwald Deserves a Pulitzer Prize For his poignant and intrepid rebuke of the American media’s obsession with a false narrative By Lee Smith

Posted By on December 13th, 2017

There’s only one American journalist who truly merits a Pulitzer Prize this year: Glenn Greenwald. He’s been on the biggest story of the year from day one. No, I don’t mean Russiagate, the main stage for the media’s preening self-advertisements of its heroic “resistance,” like “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” In fact, the narrative holding that Donald Trump colluded with Russia is the chief piece of evidence that Greenwald has used to nail the year’s real top story—how the American press became a woozy facsimile of Pravda.

Last week, Greenwald called out the press for its latest blunder: “Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time,” wrote Greenwald. “The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.”

The question of why everyone got the same big scoop on the same day—only to find that the story was totally wrong—is a thread that leads to some very interesting places. So let’s follow it.

CNN claimed that an email sent to Donald Trump and his campaign officials that linked to WikiLeaks documents was dated Sept. 4, 2016—therefore showing that WikiLeaks, and by implication the Kremlin, had offered the Trump campaign an exclusive preview of damaging Democratic National Committee emails. But in fact, the email was dated Sept. 14—10 days later—and linked to a trove of documents that WikiLeaks had publicly released a day earlier, meaning the big scoop proving Trump’s Russia ties was, in fact, a story about spam.

“Surely anyone who has any minimal concerns about journalistic accuracy,” Greenwald continued, “which would presumably include all the people who have spent the last year lamenting Fake News, propaganda, Twitter bots and the like—would demand an accounting as to how a major U.S. media outlet ended up filling so many people’s brains with totally false news.”

I’m not generally a big fan of Greenwald. His attacks on Israel are gross; His continued defense of Edward Snowden, who turned over information to an adversary that may endanger American lives, seems, at best, naïve and self-serving. That said, the last few years have certainly brought me around to his view that abuses of our national-security-surveillance apparatus and the power it gives to unelected bureaucrats are a real threat to how Americans live. But finally it doesn’t matter what I think about Greenwald’s opinions—he might believe that a race of super-intelligent gender-neutral cats rules the galaxy next to ours, or that John Travolta has an important message for all mankind—because good journalism isn’t about the personal or political beliefs of individual reporters. All that actually matters is whether you use the tools of the trade to get the story right.

But that sort of thing isn’t what matters to journalists anymore, or else they wouldn’t have spent the past year running pieces about Trump and Russia that are almost immediately falsified, then updated with clarifications, or corrected, or retracted, and then are vanished down the memory hole—with no institutional accountability or apparent concern for truth. This startling unconcern goes back at least as far as that big Washington Post “exclusive” in January about Russia hacking an electrical dam in Vermont—a story that was entirely false. Since then, it’s all been downhill.

How many times has the media since promised the smoking gun that will finally and incontrovertibly prove that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to swing the Presidency away from Hillary Clinton? Boom! And then nothing. Poof.

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Comprehending the Big Lessons of World War II By Peter Mansoor

Posted By on December 13th, 2017

Victor Davis Hanson’s latest work, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, is a synthesis of existing scholarship on World War II, presented with insights from the history of warfare throughout the ages befitting the author’s expertise in the broad sweep of military history. The book is arranged topically, with sections dealing with air, naval, and land warfare as well as the ideas, weapons, economies, and people that energized, fought, fueled, and led the conflict. Hanson’s analysis of the bloodletting from 1939 to 1945 is perceptive and provocative and his exploration of counterfactuals provides plenty of material for speculation among those well-versed in the history of the war. https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/12/comprehending-the-big-lessons-of-world-war-ii/

Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won (New York: Basic Books, 2017).

Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and noted classicist, makes frequent allusions to pre-modern battles and wars, illustrating how geography, tactical circumstances, and human nature weave their way throughout time. Thus we learn that the Normandy invasion “was the largest combined land and sea operation conducted since the invasion of Greece by King Xerxes of Persia in spring 480 BC,” which led to the epic battles at Thermopylae and Salamis. Hanson also explains what is different about World War II, including the racism and ideology that fueled the conflict and which led to the industrialized slaughter of millions in death camps and by starvation.

Hanson categorizes World War II as a war of machines. The book examines various aspects of long range bombing, carrier aviation, and submarine wars in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, always with an eye to determining why the Allies won and the Axis powers lost. Tiger, Panther, Sherman, and T-34 tanks; Katyusha rocket launchers and American howitzers; Lancaster and B-29 bombers; Messerschmidt, Zero, Spitfire, Hurricane, Thunderbolt, and Mustang fighters; Essex class carriers and fast battleships; the iconic M-1 rifle and Sturmgewehr 44; and other weapons are analyzed for their role in the fighting and outcome of the war. Having examined the implements of combat, Hanson pays due attention to the supreme leaders and military commanders who devised strategy and led operations, as well as the economic output of the great powers that made victory possible or defeat inevitable.

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The very best stories of how Rex Tillerson is destroying the State Department By Ed Straker

Posted By on December 13th, 2017

Rex Tillerson should be the darling of the liberal media. He supported sticking with the Iran deal, which basically allows Iran to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. He opposed stating the obvious: that Israel’s capital is Jerusalem. And he supported the ridiculous Paris climate change treaty.

But the media have been harder on him than on any other Cabinet member. A week does not pass without the publication of explicit articles or opinion pieces calling on Tillerson to resign (such as here, here, here, and here).

Why?

Because Tillerson has been working assiduously to cut the staff of the State Department. He wants to cut the State Department staff by 8%. Liberals are horrified. They don’t have the faintest idea how many people should be working at the State Department. All they know is that however many there are, there shouldn’t be fewer. Even worse, Tillerson hasn’t filled many senior political positions at the State Department, and he’s been criticized for not consulting with the staff there – he makes them feel unimportant!

The media are full of stories of the “understaffed” State Department.

Vox says the understaffed State Department makes the situation with North Korea more dangerous.

The result is a North Korea crisis where America’s typical tools for crisis management – high-level statements and consultation with allies – aren’t functioning. And experts agree that the consequences are unpredictable, but potentially severe.

We need a fully staffed State Department to “make high-level statements.” Or do we? But in the same article, Vox, incredibly, admits that perhaps the State Department just doesn’t matter:

It’s more than possible that all of this amounts to nothing – that we muddle through this latest North Korea provocation and future ones on the strength of America’s long-term commitment to South Korean and Japanese security[.]

Here’s another great quote from the WaPo where in one sentence it also says the understaffing will have a terrible effect – and no effect at all!

The lack of movement on filling ambassadorial posts is not likely to damage U.S. credibility or leverage abroad right away, diplomats and others said, but it threatens to undermine the work of a department that is understaffed and facing severe budget cuts.

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Trump Jr. Asks House Intel Committee to Investigate Leaks from His Dec. 6 Interview By Debra Heine

Posted By on December 13th, 2017

Rep. Adam Schiff’s life just got a little more complicated.

Donald Trump Jr. wants the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to look into leaks of confidential, non-public information he says took place during and after his eight-hour interview with the committee on December 6.

Trump’s attorney, Alan Futerfas, sent a letter to Rep. Mike Conaway of Texas, who took over the committee’s investigation of Russian actions during the 2016 election from Devin Nunes after Nunes recused himself earlier this year amid ethics complaints.

Last week the House Ethics Committee cleared Nunes of claims that he had improperly disclosed classified information while leading the investigation, though Rep. Mike Conaway said Monday that he would continue running the probe.

But while Nunes was falsely accused of leaking, Democrats on the committee have been getting away with leaking like sieves all year.

According to the letter, Trump Jr. and his attorneys were promised that the interview would be “kept strictly confidential and not discussed publicly unless and until the full committee voted to release the transcript.”

Yet while he was still being interviewed, “members of the committee and/or their staff began selectively leaking the information provided during the interview to various press outlets, most notably CNN.”

The letter cited tweets from CNN’s congressional reporter Manu Raju as evidence of leaking.

Don Jr. made case to House investigators that he did NOT tell his father about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, I’m told. Made similar case to Senate Judiciary staff in September
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) December 6, 2017

“Donald Trump Jr. told House investigators that he did not communicate directly with his father when confronted with news reports about his June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, according to multiple sources with knowledge of his testimony,” CNN reported on Dec. 6. CONTINUE AT SITE

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North Koreans Tell Congress About Escaping from Kim’s ‘Hellish’ Regime By Karl Herchenroeder

Posted By on December 13th, 2017

WASHINGTON – Speaking before Congress today, two North Korean defectors offered a glimpse into the brainwashing tactics conducted by Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un’s regime.

Han Ga Hee, who escaped to China in 2002, described propaganda films that North Korea has been circulating. One of those videos falsely shows how South Korean officials “lure” North Korean defectors into the country. The film claims that the defectors are then harvested for intelligence information concerning the DPRK and then executed.

Han, who spoke through an interpreter, told lawmakers on the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Global Human Rights that she fully believed this to be true while growing up in North Korea and that many of her peers thought the same.

That was before Han’s father was effectively put to death by North Korean authorities when he was caught sneaking into China in attempt to find food. He was sent to North Korean prison and beaten with leather belts while standing outside naked in -30 degrees Celsius temperature. He was then forced to kneel before the Tumen River for an entire night, according to Han, and got severe frostbite on his legs, which had to be amputated. He died shortly after the beating. Han told lawmakers that the Kim regime’s declarations on human rights are “laughable.”

Han, who was born in 1980, was inspired to cross the Chinese border in 2002 after listening to broadcasts from Free North Korea Radio. After six years in China, she saved enough money to hire a broker to get her to South Korea. He dropped her off at the Mongolia border with a compass and told her to head north. She walked for several days alone through the desert and was eventually picked up by the Mongolian police. When she reached South Korea in 2008, she met the producers of Free North Korea Radio, who were all fellow defectors. She now works as a news announcer and sound engineer for the radio station.

Hyeona Ji, another defector, told Congress about her four separate escapes from North Korea and various sentences in hard-labor prison camps after being repatriated by Chinese authorities. She detailed numerous atrocities, beatings and deaths inside these “re-education centers,” and how many of the dead were fed to guard dogs. Her ribs were broken in one beating, an injury that still plagues her today because it never healed properly, and she periodically suffers from epileptic seizures.

“North Korea is one terrifying prison, and the Kim regime is carrying out crimes against humanity in North Korea, and it is only a miracle that people – and I, myself – survive the hellish experience of prison camp,” Hyeona said. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Let Mueller Keep Digging The special counsel’s team raises questions about its own fairness and impartiality. By William McGurn

Posted By on December 13th, 2017

At a moment when the special counsel’s team is busy calling its own fairness and impartiality into question, why would Donald Trump even think of firing Robert Mueller ?

When the special counsel picked his team, almost half the lawyers he selected had donated to Hillary Clinton. Legally that may not be disqualifying. It was, however, highly imprudent for a man presiding over the nation’s most sensitive investigation. Not a single Mueller prosecutor had contributed to Mr. Trump.

Those donations now provide the context for more recent revelations about the partisan preferences of Team Mueller. Start with the lead FBI agent, Peter Strzok, who exchanged anti-Trump, pro-Hillary text messages with his mistress, an FBI lawyer named Lisa Page —who was then also working for Mr. Mueller. Andrew Weissmann, the lead prosecutor, not only attended Mrs. Clinton’s election-night soiree but turns out to have cheered an Obama holdover at the Justice Department, Sally Yates, for her refusal to carry out a presidential order. Meanwhile we learn that a senior Justice official, Bruce Ohr, met with both Trump dossier author Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson during the 2016 campaign—and that his wife worked for Fusion GPS.

These developments, alas, have encouraged two horrible responses from Republicans. The first is the call for Mr. Trump to sack Mr. Mueller, an idea news reports say is gaining traction inside the White House. The other is for a new special counsel to investigate the existing special counsel.
Robert S. Mueller. Photo: Universal History Archive/UIG via Bridgeman Images

Either would make a bad situation worse. If the president fires Mr. Mueller now, it will look as though he has something to hide; if another special counsel is appointed, it will further diminish the proper investigative authority here—i.e., Congress. There are better ways forward.

Start with the president. If it’s true that there is no obstruction or Russian collusion, his overriding interest lies in full transparency. In a recent piece for National Review, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy asks why Mr. Trump doesn’t just order the declassification of material such as the FBI’s application for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants to wiretap Trump associates, so Americans can see for themselves whether the FBI used or misused information from the infamous Steele dossier. Good question. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Alabama Sends a Message Roy Moore’s defeat shows that Steve Bannon is for losers.

Posted By on December 13th, 2017

Alabama voters can be forgiven if they preferred to sit out Tuesday’s special Senate election, but those who turned out narrowly elected Democrat Doug Jones to fill the seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The result is a painful lesson for the Alabama Republicans who nominated Roy Moore in the September primary. But it’s also a useful act of political hygiene for the national Republican Party given the accusations of sexual misconduct against the former judge.

The cost of defeat will be high and immediate. Despite his campaign vows to “cross the aisle” to work with Republicans, Mr. Jones will fit right in with Senate Democrats. He will be a reliable vote for Chuck Schumer on any important matter, including judicial nominees. Had he shown even a scintilla of moderation on abortion, for example, he would have won in a rout.

Mr. Moore’s defeat narrows the GOP majority’s margin to 51-49, which will give even more leverage to individual Senators who want to grandstand or satisfy a political constituency. Alabama evangelical Christians who supported Mr. Moore over appointed Sen. Luther Strange in the GOP primary should know that they have now made a conservative Supreme Court nominee less likely if Justice Anthony Kennedy retires in 2018. Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins will hold the balance of judicial confirmation power, and watch the media lobby them in waves.

The good news is that Mr. Moore’s loss may give the GOP a better chance of holding the Senate majority next year. Democrats were primed to make Mr. Moore a national symbol of sexual harassment to drive turnout among women. GOP incumbents would have been asked about Mr. Moore every day.