NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

In Spy-Agency Revamp, Michael Flynn Shows His Influence Donald Trump’s pick for national-security adviser has been skeptical of the intelligence community By Gordon Lubold and Shane Harris

Posted By on January 7th, 2017

In 2010, then-Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, at the time the top U.S. military intelligence official in Afghanistan, slammed the U.S. spy apparatus he helped to oversee as bloated and out of touch. Four years later, he was fired as the head of the military’s largest intelligence agency—in his view for speaking truth to power about the inadequacies of the nation’s national security preparedness.

Today, Gen. Flynn, who retired in 2014 as a lieutenant general, is in a position to again push his views of how America should protect itself, this time as President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for national security adviser.

Gen. Flynn and senior Trump advisers are eyeing potential structural changes to components of the U.S. intelligence community. The Wall Street Journal reported this past week that transition team officials have discussed paring back the authorities of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and reducing the size of its staff, and also discussed possible changes at the Central Intelligence Agency.

The effort is still the subject of internal discussions, and the Trump transition team has made no formal plans, people familiar with the discussions said. Sean Spicer, a Trump spokesman, said Thursday that discussions have been “tentative,” and denied there were plans for an overhaul.

“The president-elect’s top priorities will be to ensure the safety of the American people and the security of the nation, and he’s committed to finding the best and most effective ways to do it,” Mr. Spicer said.

But Mr. Trump’s aggressive skepticism of the intelligence community clearly echoes Gen. Flynn’s views on both the organization and the quality of national intelligence and the need for changes, according to officials familiar with the transition team and Gen. Flynn. As the president-elect’s closest adviser on national security, he briefs Mr. Trump on developments and sits in on classified presentations from U.S. intelligence officials.

The Trump transition team said Gen. Flynn wasn’t available to comment.

In a series of tweets, Mr. Trump has questioned intelligence conclusions that Russia-linked hackers intervened to help him win the election. Current and former intelligence officials have said that they see Gen. Flynn’s influence in those tweets and in Mr. Trump’s frequent allusions to the intelligence community’s botched 2002 analysis of Iraq’s suspected weapons program.

“I absolutely see Mike Flynn’s fingerprints on that,” said a former U.S. official with ties to the Trump transition who is familiar with Gen. Flynn.

Proposed changes to the Office of Director of National Intelligence have been offered for years by critics who said the office had grown too large and beyond its original scope. In that respect, some officials said Gen. Flynn’s proposals could be the latest iteration of longstanding proposals. Others also detect a whiff of revenge.

Gen. Flynn was removed as head of the agency by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, and Michael Vickers, the civilian head of Pentagon intelligence at the time, because of his poor management of the agency, said U.S. officials who were familiar with his removal. CONTINUE AT SITE

ISRAEL Comments turned off

6 MINUTE VIDEOS ON ISRAEL BY YORAM ETTINGER

Posted By on January 7th, 2017

Western media and policy-makers try to seduce Israel to misread Palestinian and Islamic terrorism, to make-believe that “one’s terrorist is someone else’s freedom fighter;” that Palestinian terrorism is a reaction to occupation; that Palestinian terrorists are “lone wolves” not institutional….

6-minute-video: Israel facing Western seduction

6-minute-video: Iran – a clear & present danger to the USA
Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”
YouTube 6-minute-video on-line seminar on US-Israel and the Mideast
Video#29: http://bit.ly/2hVvebW; entire 40-video-seminar: http://bit.ly/1ze66dS

The Ayatollahs’ pursuit of nuclear capabilities – irrespective of the July 2015 agreement with the US – aims to achieve a mega capability, in order to remove the mega US obstacle to their 2,500-year-old mega goal of dominating the region and the globe….

6-minute video: Iran’s curriculum reflects Ayatollahs’ policy
Ambassador (ret) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”
YouTube 6-minute-video on-line seminar on US-Israel and the Mideast
Video#30: http://bit.ly/2iSO5m8; entire video-seminar: http://bit.ly/1ze66dS

The July, 2015 agreement between Iran’s Ayatollahs and the Permanent Members of the UN Security Council and Germany has not moderated the Ayatollahs, according to a June, 2016 study by Prof. Eldad Pardo of Iranian K-12 school textbooks, which are the most authentic reflection of the mission, strategy, tactics, character, worldview and general direction of rogue regimes, such as the Ayatollahs….

The text of the 40-video-YouTube seminar on US-Israel relations and the Middle East is available at: http://theettingerreport.com/

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Pence hails House motion on Israel, ‘our most cherished ally’ VP-elect applauds resolution calling Security Council’s anti-settlements resolution a ‘one-sided’ obstacle to peace

Posted By on January 7th, 2017

Vice president-elect Mike Pence on Thursday hailed a vote by the US House of Representatives declaring a United Nations Security Council resolution a “one-sided” obstacle to peace.

The House resolution was seen as a rejection of the Obama administration, which did not veto UNSC Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlements as illegal.

“Great to see strong bipartisan vote in Congress opposing recent UN resolution against our most cherished ally,” Pence tweeted early Friday morning. “America stands with Israel.”

House Resolution 11 declared the UN motion a “one-sided” effort that is an obstacle to peace, placing disproportionate blame on Israel for the continuation of the conflict and encouraging Palestinians not to engage in direct, bilateral negotiations.

Passed by a vote of 342-80, the measure puts the lower chamber of Congress firmly against President Barack Obama’s decision to withhold the US veto power from shielding Israel against the censure.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The IDF’s new social contract : Caroline Glick

Posted By on January 7th, 2017

Sgt. Elor Azaria, who was convicted of manslaughter Wednesday for shooting a terrorist in Hebron last March, is a symptom of what may be the most dangerous threat to Israeli society today.

Azaria, a combat medic from the Kfir Brigade, arrived at the scene of an attack where two terrorists had just stabbed his comrades. One of the terrorists was killed, the other was wounded and lying on the ground, his knife less than a meter away from him.

A cameraman from the foreign-funded, Israeli- registered anti-Israel pressure group B’Tselem filmed Azaria removing his helmet and shooting the wounded terrorist. According to the military judges, the film was the centerpiece of the case against him.

The day of the incident, the General Staff reacted to the B’Tselem film with utter hysteria. Led by Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkot and then-defense minister Moshe Ya’alon, Israel’s generals competed to see who could condemn Azaria most harshly.

For the public, though, the issue wasn’t so cut and dry. Certainly Azaria didn’t act like a model soldier. It was clear, for instance, that he acted without proper authority and that his action was not permitted under the rules of engagement then in effect in Hebron.

But unlike the IDF’s senior leadership, the public believed that the fact that it was B’Tselem that produced the film meant that it had to be viewed with a grain of salt.

The name “B’Tselem” was seared into the public’s consciousness as an organization hostile to Israel and dedicated to causing it harm with the publication of the UN’s Goldstone Commission Report in 2009. Among the Israeli-registered groups that provided materials to the biased UN commission charged with finding Israel guilty of war crimes during the course of Operation Cast Lead against Hamas in late 2008 and early 2009, B’Tselem made the greatest contribution.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

A testament to Israeli engagement : Ruthie Blum

Posted By on January 7th, 2017

A guilty verdict, coupled with a pardon, would be the perfect end to this horrible story.

On Wednesday, the verdict was issued in the trial of IDF infantry soldier Elor Azaria. The military court ruled that the 19-year-old medic, serving in the Shimshon Battalion of the Kfir Brigade, was guilty of manslaughter and unbecoming conduct, for his part in the March 24 killing of a knife-wielding Palestinian terrorist in the Tel Rumeida neighborhood of Hebron.

Due to the controversial nature of the trial, which from the outset was a political lightning rod, the verdict was not only broadcast live on all Israeli channels, but it was read aloud by the judge in its entirety. The many months’ worth of witness testimony and arguments from the prosecutors and defense attorneys boiled down to two main questions. The first was whether it was Azaria’s bullet that actually killed the subdued terrorist, whom he shot in the head. The second was whether Azaria’s action was warranted, or genuinely perceived as such by the soldier — who said he believed the terrorist was wearing a suicide belt under his jacket — causing him to make the kind of split-second judgment call required when facing a real-time enemy threat.

The reason that this particular case swept the country by storm had to do with the way it was handled from the minute that Azaria’s comrades came under attack at the height of the so-called “lone wolf intifada” — characterized by stabbings, car-rammings and, most recently, arson.

The left-wing foreign-funded NGO B’Tselem, which holds its own government responsible for terrorism against Israelis — on the grounds that Palestinian violence is an expression of justified frustration at their plight as an “occupied” people — was on the scene filming the event.

To counteract the group’s purposeful ambush to highlight IDF wrongdoing, particularly for international consumption — politicians and much of the public promptly came to Azaria’s defense. Many of us railed against the overly stringent rules of engagement that govern the Israeli military. The Hebrew term for the concept — “purity of arms” — says it all in a nutshell.

Meanwhile, members of the IDF top brass and the former defense minister made statements indicating that they had already decided that Azaria deserved to be punished. So, a case that should have been treated to a thorough internal investigation before it came to light was an immediate circus at which everyone had ring-side seats.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Good Morning America By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on January 7th, 2017

Lyrica, Xeljanz, Latuda, Brilinta, Entyvio, Vedolizumab, Toujeo, Prevagen, Xarelto – these are but a sampling of the words I learned while watching television news between 6 and 7:30 a.m. Some, like Lyrica or Brilinta might be new baby names for girls; some might belong to bellicose monsters – Vedolizumab and Xarelto; others have a tentative connotation – prevagen. All carry warnings of severe side effects, some including possible death, for which final effect seems a more fitting adjective. I wondered who names these drugs and whether that is a discrete profession or the product of a staff party with too much alcohol. Are these names with their strange letter combinations the substitute for the unreadable handwriting all doctors previously used to exclude us from their special knowledge? In our digital-happy world where prescriptions must be wired instead of written by the doctor, we may soon no longer need the pharmacists who were trained to decipher those heiroglyphics. One can only wonder at how frequently the wrong medication was previously procured and whether or not that made any difference.

After all, medical protocol tends to reverse itself every decade or so. We now “know” that peanuts should be offered to babies as early in their infancy as six months. Of course you must be certain that your baby won’t go into anaphylactic shock by feeding them – I use that ungrammatical pronoun so as not to offend any infant who might have a gender preference different from their visible nether-parts – an egg and seeing what happens. Babies who die from eggs wil not do well with peanut butter either.

Back to the inscrutable and often unpronounceable names for drugs – my second theory is that their expense necessitates a name that is rare and exotic and never encountered before. None of has ever seen an actual entyvio so we can imagine that its obscurity implies difficulty to harvest or even create in a test tube, making its astronomical price tag more justified. If, for example, you have to send couriers to the steppes of Kalookistan on Mongolian horses to search for entyvio leaves, of course it will cost a lot more than a drug that has only five letters in its mediocre name – advil, for one. While it’s true that the lengthy phenobarbitol is still not overpriced, that illustrates the difference between polysyllabic words and completely unrecognizable ones. We can make out pheno, a common prefix, and there’s that friendly barbi at the end. Try parsing vedolizumab for anything familiar and you’ll get my point.

I am grateful that I don’t need to ask for any of these drugs out loud and in full disclosure, I have to add one more word that did appear in the morning time slot and was not related to big pharma – trivago. Though I would have guessed it was a misspelled acronymic cure for vertigo, it’s actually a website for checking comparative hotel prices. Well, at least you don’t need a prescription for it so it’s safe to just forget it until they come up with a more ingenious name that you might actually remember – like hotelprice.com.

HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

MICHAEL CUTLER MOMENT: PRESIDENT TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION/JIHAD CHALLENGE

Posted By on January 7th, 2017

This special edition of the Glazov Gang presents The Michael Cutler Moment with Michael Cutler, a former Senior INS Special Agent.

Michael discusses President Trump’s Immigration/Jihad Challenge,as he looks forward to the new president putting security back into the Department of Homeland Security.

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch Ingrid Carlqvist focus on How Sweden Became Absurdistan, as she shares her fear that her country could become the first Sharia state in Europe:http://jamieglazov.com/2017/01/06/michael-cutler-moment-president-trumps-immigrationjihad-challenge/

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

ALEC GROBMAN: THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION-WISHFUL THINKING DIVOTCED FROM REALITY

Posted By on January 7th, 2017

From the time of the British Mandate in Palestine (September 29, 1922 to November 29, 1947) to the present, numerous British, American and European government commissions and official emissaries have come to the region to investigate the underlying causes of the Palestinian Arab/Israeli dispute. Academics and journalists have added their own analyses.

In the absence of a solution, a myriad of myths continue to proliferate about the conflict. US Secretary of State John Kerry joins the pantheon of American diplomats, academics and journalists who appear either ignorant of why the dispute remains intractable, or are blinded by their contempt for Israel or their own biases. Many seem psychologically incapable of accepting the reality that Palestinian Arabs refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist, and that until they do so, the war against the Jews will continue.
Two Basic Questions Not Addressed

Some of these “experts” are so “obsessively focused” on the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria as “obstacles to peace,” they fail to ask two fundamental questions: Do the Arabs want a two-state solution? Is establishing a separate Arab state in the best interests of Israel and the West?

For many of Israel’s enemies and detractors, even the suggestion of abandoning this formula is proof that Israel does not want peace. The assertion that once the matter of the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria is resolved, a peaceful resolution of the conflict will be achieved, is fallacious. There is no mention of the homicide bombers; pervasive incitement in the schools, mosques and social media; attempts to deny Jewish connection to the land of Israel; the Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries; or the deadly rock-throwing and fire-bombing attacks, beatings and stabbings.

Rarely, if ever, is there any recognition that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasir Arafat 94 percent of Judea and Samaria, which he refused, and then launched the second Intifada. Ten years later, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas 93.6 percent of Judea and Samaria with a one-to-one land swap. This means that expansion has not significantly reduced the land available for establishing a Palestinian Arab state.

To secure Abbas’s consent, the Jewish communities of Elon Moreh, Ofra, Beit El and Kiryat Arba would be destroyed, Hebron abandoned, and Jerusalem divided. In the process, tens of thousands of Jews would be expelled from their homes. Abbas rejected the offer.
Why Do Arabs Reject the Two-State Solution?

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

David Singer: Anti-Israel Security Council Resolution 2334 violates UN Charter

Posted By on January 6th, 2017

Any attempt by the Security Council to enforce Resolution 2334 or to pass any new Resolutions based on Resolution 2334 will also be illegal.

Article 80 preserves the legal rights vested in the Jewish people to reconstitute the Jewish National Home within 22 per cent of the territory comprised in the 1922 Mandate for Palestine (“Mandate”). That territory includes what is known today as Area “C” located in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and East Jerusalem (“disputed areas”).

Resolution 2334 seeks to erase and annul – not preserve – those vested Jewish legal rights in the disputed areas by:

1. Claiming that Jews now presently living – or seeking in the future to live – in the disputed areas constitutes “a flagrant violation under international law” – when in fact their right to live there is sanctioned by Article 6 of the Mandate and Article 80.

2. Alleging that the right to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in the disputed areas requires the consent of any other party.

3. Calling on all States to discriminate between Jews living in the disputed areas and Jews living in Israel.

4. Discouraging Jews from living in the disputed areas when Article 6 of the Mandate specifically encourages close Jewish settlement in the disputed areas.

The questionable legality of Resolution 2334 needs to be urgently resolved by the Security Council itself seeking an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”) under Article 96(a) of the United Nations Charter.

The General Assembly so acted when it sought an advisory opinion in 2003 from the ICJ on the legality of the security barrier erected by Israel.

That decision was fundamentally flawed because contrary to Article 65 (2) of the ICJ Statute – two vital documents – the Mandate for Palestine and Article 80 – were not included in the dossier of documents submitted to the ICJ for consideration by then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan – an omission never explained until today.

Give the ICJ half the documents and you will only get half a judgement.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Agents and Agencies Donald Trump should push for intelligence reform. By Kevin D. Williamson —

Posted By on January 6th, 2017

The Wall Street Journal reports that Donald Trump’s recent public criticism of U.S. intelligence agencies presages an effort to reorganize the nation’s sundry spy bureaucracies. Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, denies that the president has any such plan in mind.

If he doesn’t, he damn well should.

The plan described in the Journal is not unlike the one described in National Review on December 9 by Fred Fleitz of the Center for Security Policy, which would scale back the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), a post-9/11 innovation intended to create a central authority to ensure cooperation and coordination within the herd of cats that is the intelligence community. Fleitz and others have argued that ODNI is just another ladle full of federal alphabet soup — CIA, DIA, NIC, etc. — doing very little more than adding a layer of bureaucracy.

Conservatives have a blind spot for spies, cops, and soldiers. The psychology here is pretty straightforward: A great many conservatives (myself included) who are habitually and instinctively skeptical of grand federal plans were insufficiently beady-eyed when it came to President George W. Bush’s big plans for Iraq, and some of that (again, speaking for myself first and foremost, but not, I think, for myself alone) is purely reactionary. When I see a bunch of dopey white kids with dreadlocks from Haverford College, the Workers World Party, and Chaka Fattah on one side of a barricade, I instinctively want to be on the other side. (This is especially true at the moment for Fattah, the longtime Philadelphia Democrat and Hugo Chávez fanboy who is headed to the penitentiary for corruption.) This is, to be sure, an imperfect heuristic.

There is a question of agents and a separate question of agencies. Many of us, especially conservatives, are inclined to respect and admire those whose profession consists in performing necessary violence: police on the beat in New York City, soldiers patrolling Mosul, and intelligence operatives who, if they are doing their jobs, will never hear the words “Thank you for your service.” But bureaucracies have lives and characters of their own, irrespective of the sort of men they employ. The public schools are made up mostly of good people, but they don’t work very well. One imagines that most IRS agents are scrupulous and dedicated. (The DMV people just hate us.) Out of the field of operations and into the cubicles and corner offices, the NYPD, the FBI, the Department of Defense, and the Central Intelligence Agency are bureaucracies like any others, and suffer from familiar bureaucratic ailments.