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‘What Might Have Been’: The Substantive and Clarifying Trumpless Debate by Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on January 30th, 2016

What Rich Lowry tartly labeled “the Trumpless Debate” exposed the fracture of the Republican party’s base with a clarity that the Donald’s presence would not have allowed.

For those of us in the commentariat, the evening was a joy. It was an exhibition of substance and seriousness, a night of lively exchanges where quality candidates took shots at each other that were hard but fair. The Fox News moderators were no wallflowers, but they were clearly determined to make the night about the contestants: Questions were succinct; interruptions were reserved for moments when candidates were unresponsive or in denial over inconvenient, incontestable facts. It was a glimpse, as David French put it, at “what might have been” — without the blaring Trumpet of snark and bully bravado, it was as if Henry Gondorff had never crashed the old boys’ poker game.

But the thing is: Most people who have a stake in the Republican race are not in the commentariat. They are the people who have been ill-served by the old boys. They are no longer impressed by slick-sounding policy wonkery because they are finally on to the charade: The candidates say one thing to get elected and then do very different things once they’ve been elected.

They like Trump precisely because of the wrench he has thrown in the works. He makes the pols and the press feel as powerless as the pols and the press have made them feel. He doesn’t care about the Beltway’s rules; Trump plays by his own and invites them, vicariously, to play along.

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Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. An Interview with Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates

Posted By on January 30th, 2016

The U.S. Has No Global Strategy…The former defense secretary on U.S. gains forfeited in Iraq, America’s rudderless foreign policy and the ‘completely unrealistic’ Donald Trump.
Many Americans probably had misgivings when U.S. troops were withdrawn from Iraq in 2011, but even the most pessimistic must be surprised at how quickly things went south.

Turn on the TV news: Western Iraq, including the Sunni triangle that the U.S. once worked so hard to pacify, is in the hands of a terrorist group, Islamic State, radiating attacks as far as Paris, Jakarta and San Bernardino, Calif.

The battlefield where the U.S. spent most of its blood has become swept up into the chaos of next-door Syria. Refugees from the region are destabilizing Europe. Proxy forces, shadowy groups and national armies representing half a dozen countries are fighting on the ground and in the air. The world seems one incident away from World War III in the vacuum U.S. troops left behind—as when NATO member Turkey recently shot down a Russian jet.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates occasionally meets veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars in his travels. What their effort bought seldom comes up. “We don’t really talk about where we are today,” he says. “You have to assume it’s very painful for a Marine who lost a buddy in Fallujah to see an outfit like ISIS in charge of Fallujah again. Was the sacrifice worth it?”

Mr. Gates, along with President George W. Bush and Gen. David Petraeus, was a prosecutor of the troop surge, a decision unpopular even in the Pentagon to double down on the Iraq war in 2006. His 2014 memoir, “Duty,” which a New York Times reviewer called “one of the best Washington memoirs ever,” makes clear that the suffering of U.S. troops weighed more and more heavily on him as he served under President Bush and then re-upped under President Obama.

Today, if the mess in Iraq comes up, he tells those who served there, “You accomplished your mission. It was the Iraqis that squandered our victory.”

But Mr. Gates also believes the outcome could have been different if the U.S. had kept troops in place. Islamic State wouldn’t have spread its influence across the border from Syria. More important than firepower, he says, was having a four-star representative of the U.S. military present who could “bring Sunni and Kurdish and Shia leaders together, make them talk to each other. When that process disappeared, all the external brakes on Maliki”—Iraq’s then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whom Mr. Gates blames for the unraveling—“disappeared.”

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British Woman Convicted of Joining Islamic State Mother traveled to Syria with infant son, spent three months living with the militant group By Alexis Flynn

Posted By on January 30th, 2016

A U.K. court on Friday convicted the first British woman of joining Islamic State, 26-year-old Tareena Shakil, who traveled to Syria with her infant son and spent three months living with the militant group.

A jury, who heard that Ms. Shakil had once declared her wish “to be a martyr,” found her guilty of belonging to a terrorist organization and encouraging support for a proscribed group.

Ms. Shakil will be sentenced on Monday.

The case provides a rare account of how a Western woman came to be involved in Islamic State amid what authorities have said is a concerning surge in the number of females traveling from Europe to Syria and Iraq. It also sheds a light on the dilemma for authorities on how to treat such women when they return home: as victim or terrorist.

Ms. Shakil, of Burton-upon-Trent, a town in the English Midlands, was arrested by counterterrorist police shortly after her plane touched down at Heathrow airport last February. She told officers

But investigators weren’t convinced. Prosecutors told the court how a raft of evidence showed Ms. Shakil had self-radicalized even before leaving the country, and that her trip to Syria was the final stage in her plan to become a jihadist bride. In the weeks leading up to her departure, Ms. Shakil had become an ever more vocal online supporter of Islamic State online, said prosecutors. Farewell notes left for her family showed she had no intention of returning home, prosecutors said.

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State Department: 22 of Hillary Clinton’s Emails Considered Too Classified to Release First emails to be entirely withheld from public; more than 1,300 have been redacted By Byron Tau

Posted By on January 30th, 2016

The State Department said it would launch its own investigation into whether top-secret information on Hillary Clinton’s personal email server was classified at the time it was sent or received—a dramatic reversal that comes just days before the Democratic presidential front-runner faces the first nominating contest in Iowa.

Department spokesman John Kirby said 22 documents containing highly classified information will be excluded entirely from the release of Mrs. Clinton’s archive. So far, more than 1,300 of Mrs. Clinton’s emails have been redacted, with portions blocked out, due to the presence of classified information, but this is the first example of emails being entirely withheld from public release.

Friday’s announcement is the first time State Department officials have said they have concerns about the classification level of some of the information contained on Mrs. Clinton’s server. Officials have previously said the redactions in the roughly 43,000 pages of her emails so far released were made for information that was classified only after the fact.

The Clinton campaign said the emails in question probably originated on the department’s unclassified system before they were ever shared with Mrs. Clinton.

Locked in a tight primary battle with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Mrs. Clinton now faces the possibility of another investigation, led by the department she ran, into whether she compromised sensitive or classified national-security information.

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European Governments Ignoring Security Warnings? by Judith Bergman

Posted By on January 30th, 2016

“We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples, as well as a different understanding of society and law.” — From a leaked German intelligence document.

The mayor of Molenbeek, Belgium ignored a list she received, one month prior to the Paris attacks, “with the names and addresses of more than 80 people suspected as Islamic militants living in her area,” according to the New York Times. “What was I supposed to do about them? It is not my job to track possible terrorists,” Mayor Schepmans said.

In October 2015, Andrew Parker, director general of Britain’s Security Service, said that the “scale and tempo” of the danger to the UK is now at a level he has not seen in his 32-year career. British police are monitoring over 3,000 homegrown Islamist extremists willing to carry out attacks on the UK.

The head of the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST), Benedicte Bjørnland, was recently a participating guest at a security conference in Sweden, where she warned against further Muslim immigration.

One cannot,” she said, “assume that new arrivals will automatically adapt to the norms and rules of Norwegian society. Furthermore, new arrivals are not homogenous and can bring ethnic and religious strife with them… If parallel societies, radicalization and extremist environments emerge in the long run,” she added, “We will have challenges as a security service.”

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UNFRIENDLY SKIES ON DELTA FLIGHT

Posted By on January 30th, 2016

Delta Flight Attendants Brawl at 37,000 Feet J. Christian Adams

A Delta Air Lines flight from Los Angeles to Minneapolis had to make an unscheduled landing in Utah because two flight female flight attendants got into a fistfight at 37,000 feet.

The Boeing 757 was south of Salt Lake City when the fist fight broke out between Delta employees servicing the flight. The pilot asked air traffic control for a diversion to Salt Lake City because he “wanted to hear from his flight attendants,” according to the Aviation Herald. Delta Air Lines Flight 2598 then diverted to Salt Lake City and safely landed.

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New Al-Shabaab Video Delivers ISIS-Style Threats to West, Cites Bush in Recruiting Pitch By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on January 30th, 2016

A new Al-Shabaab video features ISIS-style threats to strike at the West and uses George W. Bush quotes to try to lure western Muslims to jihad.

The video, an installment of a series called “Mujahideen Moments,” begins with Al-Shabaab members fishing in a river. It then cuts to a group of camouflage-clad jihadis with their faces obscured.

“Firstly I would like to send my greetings to all the Muslims around the world in general and to the Muslims who speak Swahili in specific,” says a light-skinned jihadist in the center, his face blurred. “The time has come for Muslims to wake up and fight the kuffar [disbelievers]. By Allah, we cannot return our long lost glory until we take up weapons and arm ourselves.”

“I swear by Allah, my dear brothers, the feelings of honor and dignity that we the mujahideen feel are indescribable. Even if I wanted to explain it to you I would not be able to do so,” he continues, chiding would-be recruits to “not be content with living a life of oppression under the rule of the kuffar.”

“Make hijrah [pilgrimage] and come to the lands of Islam so that you can defend this religion. We, your brothers here, are proud that we came to one of the lands of jihad, the land of Somalia, where we met with our brothers who trained us how to fight and taught us the art of war.”

Then the message takes another turn reminiscent of ISIS’ video released last weekend of the Paris attackers threatening the West.

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Abbie VanSickle :Obama administration placed children with human traffickers, report says

Posted By on January 30th, 2016

The Obama administration failed to protect thousands of Central American children who have flooded across the U.S. border since 2011, leaving them vulnerable to traffickers and to abuses at the hands of government-approved caretakers, a Senate investigation has found.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, failed to do proper background checks of adults who claimed the children, allowed sponsors to take custody of multiple unrelated children, and regularly placed children in homes without visiting the locations, according to a 56-page investigative report released Thursday.

And once the children left federally funded shelters, the report said, the agency permitted their adult sponsors to prevent caseworkers from providing them post-release services.

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) initiated the six-month investigation after several Guatemalan teens were found in a dilapidated trailer park near Marion, Ohio, where they were being held captive by traffickers and forced to work at a local egg farm. The boys were among more than 125,000 unaccompanied minors who have surged into the United States since 2011, fleeing violence and unrest in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

[Overwhelmed federal officials released immigrant teens to traffickers in 2014]

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300 scientists send letter to Congress accusing NOAA of cooking the books on climate change By Rick Moran

Posted By on January 30th, 2016

One of the least reliable sources for data on climate change is the US federal government. Now, a group of 300 scientists and academics want Congress to investigate the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for cooking the books on climate data in order to erase the pause in the rise in temperature cited by, among other sources, the IPCC.

Incredibly, the NOAA accumulated data by measuring the water temperature from the engine intake valves of ocean going cargo ships. The scientists want Congress to investigate whether the agency violated the Data Quality Act, which seeks to insure the accurate dissemination of scientific information to the public.

Daily Caller:

“We, the undersigned, scientists, engineers, economists and others, who have looked carefully into the effects of carbon dioxide released by human activities, wish to record our support for the efforts of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology to ensure that federal agencies complied with federal guidelines that implemented the Data Quality Act,” some 300 scientists, engineers and other experts wrote to Chairman of the House Science Committee, Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith.

“In our opinion… NOAA has failed to observe the OMB [Office of Management and Budget] (and its own) guidelines, established in relation to the Data Quality Act.”

The Data Quality Act requires federal agencies like NOAA to “ensure and maximize the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information, including statistical information.”

Smith launched an investigation into NOAA’s study last summer over concerns it was pushed out to bolster President Barack Obama’s political agenda. Democrats and the media have largely opposed the probe into NOAA scientists and political appointees, but Smith is determined to continue investigating. NOAA officials surrendered emails to congressional investigators in December.

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A Long Night in Benghazi By Elise Cooper

Posted By on January 30th, 2016

13 Hours is a riveting movie and book. What makes it special is the discussion by the six American heroes about the attack on September 11th, 2012. As with most incidents the names are forgotten, but with these accounts people are able to put a human touch on the terrorist assault against Americans. American Thinker had the honor of interviewing the author of the book, Mitchell Zuckoff, a direct spokesman for the four, as well as two of the heroes from that night, Mark “Oz” Geist, John “Tig” Tiegen. AT also spoke to Jose Rodriguez Jr., former Director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service.

This is the story of an Islamic terrorist attack on the U.S. State Department Special Mission Compound and a nearby CIA station called the Annex in Benghazi, Libya on September 11th, 2012. Four Americans were killed: U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen “Bub” Doherty, and Tyrone “Rone” Woods. The five operators who provided the account are Tiegen, Geist, Kris “Tanto” Paronto, and two others who are known by the pseudonyms Dave “D.B” Benton and Jack Silva. Both the book and the movie tell the story of true heroism in the face of unbeatable odds.

Questions were answered regarding the attacks being premeditated vs. spontaneous, if those in charge were unprepared, was a “stand-down order” given, and what happened with reinforcements. Scene after scene, chapter after chapter the movie and book are an exhausting, pulverizing experience.