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September 2016

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Militants Dressed as Doctors Attack a Kandahar Hospital The hourlong firefight was the latest incident in a hospital in Afghanistan, one of the most dangerous countries for aid workers. By Ehsanullah Amiri and Jessica Donati see note please

By on September 12th, 2016

“Militants????” what happened to the word “terrorists” ?????? RSK

Two militants dressed as doctors raided a hospital in Kandahar supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross on Monday, killing at least one emergency room patient in an hourlong firefight, Afghan officials said.

The men, armed with pistols and suicide vests, wounded two other people before being shot dead by Afghan security forces, the officials said. The firefight took place in wards among patients, they said.

The first militant was quickly shot by an intelligence agent, while the second escaped further into the hospital before being killed by security forces about an hour later, said a spokesman for the Kandahar governor. Angry families outside protested to be allowed into the compound to rescue trapped relatives as the gunfire rang out across Afghanistan’s second largest city.

An Afghan intelligence officer and a policeman were also killed in the attack, a foreign official in the country said. Afghan authorities didn’t confirm their deaths.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

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Coddled on Campus Students who say they’re ‘triggered’ by Mark Twain are appropriating—to borrow their term—language formerly applied to PTSD victims. Jonathan Marks

By on September 12th, 2016

In May, student protesters at Seattle University’s Matteo Ricci College bared their psychic wounds. The college had “traumatized, othered, tokenized, and pathologized” them, assaulting their “mental and emotional well-being.” That is, Matteo Ricci had maintained its signature humanities core, with its focus on classics of Western civilization. It had thereby “erased” the “personal and ancestral voices” of some students and neglected their “pain.” The protesters demanded that this “psychologically abusive” behavior end. They demanded a curriculum that “decentralizes Whiteness” and focuses on “systems of oppression,” such as “capitalism.” And they demanded the head of the college’s dean, Jodi Kelly.

Rather than question any premise of the protesters, Ms. Kelly promised a “comprehensive review” of the curriculum “in response to [their] concerns and requests.” Faculty and staff would undergo “racial and cultural literacy training.” Consultants would be hired. Seattle University’s president, Stephen Sundborg, hastened to add that he, too, wished to sit at the protesters’ feet, that he could not “pretend to know how deep their pain goes, the amount of harm it has caused or the extent of our own shortcomings.” Ms. Kelly, placed on administrative leave, has escaped into retirement.

If we resist the urge to pronounce the protesters insane and the administrators craven, we might ask whether student activists are right that even the most liberal campuses in America are bastions of prejudice. In “Campus Politics,” a valuable attempt to understand the protests that have swept American universities, Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history and education at New York University, explains why this question is rarely even posed within those universities.Matteo Ricci’s protesters are typical in using the language of psychology to justify their demands. Other generations of protesters, Mr. Zimmerman says, certainly invoked “the language of psychological health and illness,” but today’s protesters use it “as never before.” When students speak of being “triggered” by Mark Twain, for example, they are appropriating—to borrow one of their terms—language formerly applied to victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. This “increased psychologizing of campus politics” makes it hard to challenge activists. “How can you argue with someone who feels pained or traumatized?” At Scripps College, protesters said that even a rather mild, moderated discussion program risked “retraumatizing minority participants” who could expect no “public intervention” when “white participants invalidate[d] the experiences that students of color generously share[d].” The program has been suspended.

Matteo Ricci’s administrators are typical in rolling over. University leaders in the 1960s sometimes considered protesters “an existential threat to the university itself,” Mr. Zimmerman says. Today’s university leaders greet protesters “with explicitly open arms and avowedly open hearts,” as well as apologies and cash. President Peter Salovey of Yale, having already committed $50 million to increasing faculty diversity, handled his protesters by acknowledging their pain, admitting that Yale had failed them and pledging to commit additional resources to their preferred causes.

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Terry McAuliffe’s Legal Contempt He refuses to abide by a court ruling on the voting rights of felons.

By on September 12th, 2016

President Obama has charted new levels of executive defiance, but even he hasn’t refused to obey a Supreme Court ruling. Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe has sought to follow Mr. Obama’s executive hubris, and now he’s gone further and is acting in contempt of the court that has rebuked him.

In July the Virginia Supreme Court struck down his executive order restoring voting rights to 206,000 felons. Under Virginia law the Governor can grant clemency on an individual basis. But the justices wrote that “Governor McAuliffe’s assertion of ‘absolute’ power to issue his executive order” runs “afoul of the separation-of-powers principle” in the Virginia constitution. The individual clemency power, the court admonished, “does not mean he can effectively rewrite the general rule of law.”

Mr. McAuliffe replied that he “cannot accept” the ruling. He called it a “political decision” that “reminded” him of Bush v. Gore and that the justices were “scared” of the legislature. He has since acted on his defiance by restoring rights to some 13,000 felons who had already registered to vote when the state Supreme Court’s decision invalidated his executive order.

The Democratic Governor claims he is restoring these voting rights by the thousands on an “individual” basis. And he says he plans to do so for all of the more than 200,000 remaining felons by the time his term ends.

This is contempt of both the court and the legislature, or what is known as the “suspension” of a law simply because an executive disagrees with it. This is why the Founders wrote the Constitution to protect against such actions by kings, and Virginia Republicans have now gone to court again to stop him. Their filing last week, submitted by former U.S. Assistant Attorney General Chuck Cooper, argues that Mr. McAuliffe’s mass restoration orders “have precisely the same scope, precisely the same effect, and accomplish precisely the same unconstitutional suspension of Virginia’s felon-disenfranchisement law.”

The brief says the court identified two characteristics of an unconstitutional suspension of the law, and both depended on the substance—not the form—of the Governor’s actions. Mr. McAuliffe has nullified the Virginia Constitution’s guidelines on felon voting simply because he dislikes those rules. His new actions are also precisely the same “expansive scope and generality.” The court rejected Mr. McAuliffe because he had “rewritten the provision to invert the rule and the exception.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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Clinton’s Medical Mistrust Her record of deception calls for an independent review of her health.

By on September 12th, 2016

By now you know that Hillary Clinton has pneumonia, though the Democratic nominee and her staff seem to have spent two days hoping no one would find out. Yet the public is entitled to evaluate the health of a potential President, and the lack of candor is corroding whatever trust Americans still put in her. Mrs. Clinton has a moment to come clean, and she should allow independent physicians to inspect her medical records.

On Sunday morning Mrs. Clinton abruptly slipped out of a 9/11 memorial in New York. Her campaign said nothing for more than an hour, though some in the press reported she departed for medical reasons. Mrs. Clinton turned up at the Manhattan apartment of her daughter, Chelsea. The campaign said she had become “overheated” at the service but was recovering. “I’m feeling great. It’s a beautiful day in New York,” Mrs. Clinton said outside Chelsea’s pad later in the morning, posing for a photo with a young girl on the street.

But a video of Mrs. Clinton’s exit from the 9/11 service emerged: Aides and Secret Service agents lifted her into a van after her legs seized up and buckled. Sunday evening the campaign announced that the Democrat had been diagnosed with pneumonia—on Friday. Mrs. Clinton’s physician, Lisa Bardack, released a statement that didn’t clarify the type or severity of the pneumonia, which was discovered during a visit for a “prolonged cough.”

Oh, and that cough? Mrs. Clinton and her allies for a month derided anyone who wondered about it as “deranged.” As Mrs. Clinton said in a recent interview: “I think on the one hand it is part of the wacky strategy—just say all these crazy things and maybe you can get some people to believe you.” Her press secretary told reporters who dared write about her coughing to “get a life,” and her Praetorian Guard in the press corps ran headlines like: “Can we just stop talking about Hillary Clinton’s health now?”

Rumors about Mrs. Clinton’s vitality have floated around the darker precincts of the internet, not least Donald Trump’s Twitter account, but that isn’t why the public is skeptical. One reason is that the Clintons for two decades have told the truth only when caught lying, and sometimes not even then: sexual misadventures, email servers, fiascoes in Libya, dictators donating to the family foundation and more. Is it far-fetched that the pair would obfuscate and stonewall about medical conditions?

Mrs. Clinton has already offered up her health as a campaign issue. She recently told FBI investigators that she could not remember some briefings on classified information because she was recovering from a concussion in 2012. The incident resulted in a blood clot in Mrs. Clinton’s head that would eventually dissolve, according to a two-page letter released last year by Dr. Bardack. Mrs. Clinton stayed on blood thinners as a precaution.

That medical event is reason enough for Mrs. Clinton to release her neurological records, but there are others. The former secretary of state suffered blood clots in 1998 and 2009, about which the public knows little. At age 68 she’s among the oldest presidential nominees. People are living longer, but the actuarial reality is that medical risks compound in the late 60s and early 70s.

Mrs. Clinton canceled a trip to the west coast, and a campaign spokesman said Monday that she would release more medical records in “the next couple days.” It isn’t clear what the collection would include, and on the same day her communications director insisted on Twitter that the public knows “more about HRC than any nominee in history.”

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Hillary’s Health and Hillary’s Secrecy: Charles Lipson

By on September 12th, 2016

For weeks, Hillary Clinton’s supporters said all questions about her health were out-of-bounds, the product of conspiracy theorists. She had a cough. She had an allergy. Move along, nothing to see here.

At Clinton Campaign Central that’s still their story and their sticking to it. For the rest of us, the debate is now over. Hillary ended it herself with a “health episode” at a 9/11 memorial service, leaving early and wobbling to her car, helped by aides. It was more than a cough. It turned out to be pneumonia, Clinton’s doctor now says, and the Democratic presidential nominee had not disclosed it until the episode forced her to do so.

The episode itself and Clinton’s delay in revealing her condition are certain to lead to more discussion, more questions, and, if the campaign so far is any indication, more personal attacks from both sides.

After Sunday’s events, it is entirely reasonable to ask questions about Clinton’s health—and Donald Trump’s. (He has told us almost nothing.) It is equally reasonable to ask whether Clinton and her campaign are still being forthright about these health issues.

The reason for this skepticism is simple: They’ve said as little as possible about Mrs. Clinton’s health, and what they have said has sometimes been misleading. Since that same characterization applies to her answers about her email and private server, and because more disquieting revelations about them continue to dribble out, she has no chance of shutting down a new discussion about her health.

That’s what happens when you lose your credibility. Even truthful answers are greeted with skepticism.

Clinton’s hurried exit from the 9/11 event and her campaign’s subsequent disclosure that she had already been diagnosed with pneumonia raises two main questions:

The answer the first question is no, she disclosed nothing; the answer to the second is yes, she tried hard to block all coverage.

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THE LADY MACBETH OF LITTLE ROCK: DANIEL WATTENBERG NOVEMBER 20, 2015

By on September 12th, 2016

“There are those who would say of Hillary’s involvement in radical politics, “Aw, she was just a kid.” But she wasn’t just a kid. She was a middle-aged woman of 40 when sponsoring the hard left from her perch at the New World Foundation. Moreover, she has not, as far as I know, publicly repudiated or even distanced herself from the views or activism described in this article, and her husband’s presidential campaign was the perfect occasion to do so. There is no reason she ought to be forgiven, when she hasn’t repented. Especially since she is right now doing her utmost to drive her husband’s campaign into her own corner of the Democratic party, where the liberal left and the radical left meet.”http://spectator.org/64728_wests-rude-houseguests/

At the Democratic debate last Saturday night, Hillary Clinton was caught in a political blunder — she brought up her radical days as a ’60 student activist. As it happens, there was a lot more where that came from, as Daniel Wattenberg’s seminal piece from the 1992 campaign captured for all time. She was in short never one to go soft. Again, from the August 1992 American Spectator.

Hillary Clinton has been likened to Eva Peron, but it’s a bad analogy. Evita was worshipped by the “shirtless ones,” the working class, while Hillary’s charms elude most outside of an elite cohort of left-liberal, baby-boom feminists — the type who thought Anita Hill should be canonized and Thelma and Louise was the best movie since Easy Rider. Hillary reckons herself the next Eleanor Roosevelt. But, standing well to the left of her husband and enjoying an independent power base within his coalition, Hillary is best thought of as the Winnie Mandela of American politics. She has likened the American family to slavery, thinks kids should be able to sue their parents to resolve family arguments, and during her tenure as a foundation officer gave away millions (much of it in no-strings-attached grants) to the left — including sizable sums to hard-left organizers. She is going to cause her husband no end of political embarrassment between now and November — and who knows how long afterward.

By the morning of June 5, four top Clinton campaign aides — David Wilhelm, George Stephanopoulos, Eli Segal, and Stanley Greenberg — had had enough of Susan Thomases and Harold Ickes, two ultra-liberal campaign aides who had fastened themselves to Hillary. According to a Clinton insider, the four had concluded that “Susan Thomases is running this campaign with Harold Ickes through Hillary,” and gave Bill Clinton this ultimatum: “Either [Thomases] goes, or we’re all going and she can run the campaign.” Ever the Conciliator-in-Chief, Clinton managed to avert a mass resignation by the top echelon of his campaign staff. “They papered all this over for the time being, but it won’t last,” says the insider.

Thomases, a New York lawyer, is “the most doctrinaire liberal or old-line thinker around” the campaign, says a Clinton adviser. “Someone who just doesn’t get any of the reform/New Covenant message.” Ickes, son of Roosevelt’s New Deal Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, is anathema to many centrist Democrats who rallied early to the Clinton candidacy. In 1988 he was Jesse Jackson’s convention manager. In 1972, he was a key delegate selector for George McGovern, bending party rules to disestablish traditional Democratic constituencies — middle-class and socially conservative — in favor of student, feminist, and minority activists. A Clinton insider calls him “the most evil man on the face of earth,” adding: “He has done more single-handedly to destroy the Democratic party than anyone else.”

The immediate cause of the threatened walk-out was a national poll that the four, along with Frank Greer, had worked on with Thomases. When, despite opposition from Thomases, the others prepared to run the poll, Thomases complained to Hillary. The latter interceded with her husband, and the poll was killed. But the poll was small potatoes compared to the strategic coup that Hillary and her allies pulled off in blocking the move of Clinton’s campaign headquarters from Little Rock to Washington, a move many considered inevitable after Clinton’s victory in the New York primary. In Little Rock, lines of authority are fuzzy, and Hillary’s temple dogs roam free. By keeping the campaign in Little Rock, they simultaneously froze out ideological adversaries linked to the centrist, Washington-based Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and a group of seasoned national campaign professionals. “Hillary’s probably the only person in this campaign who wanted it to be in Little Rock. The DLC crowd and the centrists — all of Washington — have basically been left high and dry,” says a campaign source.

An influx of senior political talent would have left Mrs. Clinton’s politically inept allies licking envelopes — Thomases is the political genius who guided Bill Bradley, a New Jersey institution since his All-America days at Princeton, to a 50-47 re-election squeaker over underfunded, unknown challenger Christine Todd Whitman in 1990. And moving the campaign to Washington would have meant more conventional wife-of duties for the gaffe-prone Hillary. “You bring it to Washington and the first thing you do is you get the Tom Donilons, the John Sassos, and all the grown-ups involved with real experience. They’re going to —number one — kick out the Thomaseses and the Ickeses,” explains an insider. “Number two, they’re going to put Hillary in a very different position in the campaign.”

Hillary Clinton’s unfavorable poll ratings have risen as high as 29 percent in recent months. “Negatives” of 40 percent are generally fatal for a candidate; for a new-to-the-national-scene wife of a candidate, negatives in the 30 range are disastrous. The image of Mrs. Clinton that has crystallized in the public consciousness is, of course, that of Lady Macbeth: consuming ambition, inflexibility of purpose, domination of a pliable husband, and an unsettling lack of tender human feeling, along with the affluent feminist’s contempt for traditional female roles.

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The Election: Issues, not Personalities by Sydney Williams

By on September 12th, 2016

Cheered on by the media, abusive and personal invective have dominated the campaign. But beneath the mud-slinging, the election is really about issues that are critical – policies that will shape the country over the next one or two decades. To the extent these topics get ignored, we the people are the losers.

There are dozens of issues facing the electorate: public school education; the economy; the Supreme Court; immigration; race relations; inequality; political correctness; national security; the war against Islamic terror and extremism; cyber-attacks; disintegrating democracies in Latin America; and relations with Russia, China, Iran, Israel and Europe. This essay will focus on the first two problems: public school education and the economy.

This is not to trivialize other issues. A Democrat victory in November will assure that the Supreme Court becomes more activist – with relativism subsuming universal moral truths, and the bending of the Constitution to fit an interpretation that suits current mores. Immigration has been elemental to our success as a nation; but we need a policy that promotes legal immigration and that relies on secure borders. While it is unrealistic to deport eleven million illegals, we cannot allow criminal aliens to remain, nor should we permit sanctuary cities to take the law into their own hands. Does anyone believe that United Health and Aetna dropping out of ObamaCare markets will be positive for the pricing of health insurance? Or that a single payer will allow for better and less expensive healthcare? Sadly, our first African-American President has presided over worsening race relations. National security remains a priority. The next President needs to be forthright with the American people about Islamic terrorism and how long the war against it might last. She or he needs resolve and leadership. We cannot back away from our responsibilities and commitments. The world is fortunate that the strongest nation on the planet is one with democratic principles and free market capitalism.

However, education and economics are fundamental to success in all endeavors. A democratic republic requires an educated electorate. Similarly, we cannot do all we want, or be all we would like, without a robust economy based on free market principles. When children graduate from high school without basic groundings in English, math, history, science and geography, we assign them to lives of deprivation. When our economy is seen principally as a source of revenue to government, and when regulation is biased toward the large and the favored, we find ourselves on the path to diminished economic returns.

The most highly regarded indicator of high school competence is the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which every three years tests half a million 15-year-olds in math, science and reading, in 70 countries and educational jurisdictions including the other 34 OECD nations. Results for the 2015 tests will be released in December, but the ones for 2012 showed American students lagging in achievement. They ranked 17th in reading, 20th in science and 27th in math – essentially unchanged from tests taken twelve years earlier. The problem is not our children – the success of Basis charter schools in Arizona and Success Academy charter schools in New York show the capability of minority and impoverished students. The problem, in one word, is unions. Union leaders are more interested in expanding membership than in producing qualified graduates. Non-teaching administrative jobs have proliferated. In most cities and towns, public schools are monopolies. Unions don’t want school competition, especially from those that hire non-union employees, which is why they fight charter schools and voucher programs with such intensity.

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Newt Gingrich: 9/11 anniversary — 15 years of strategic defeat, dishonesty and humiliation

By on September 12th, 2016

“I will begin by saying what everybody would like to ignore or forget but which must nevertheless be stated, namely, that we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat.” — That was Winston Churchill’s description of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s surrender to Hitler in the Munich Agreement of 1938.

Yet Churchill’s words also apply to where the United States is today.

Our men and women in uniform have been heroic.

Many have signed up to serve again even after being wounded.

Our tactical units remain the best in the world.

Our intelligence officers and diplomats have risked their lives in service to the country.

The problem is not with the sincerity, the courage, the energy or the effort of individual Americans.

The problem has been the approach of a bipartisan Washington political elite that has squandered 15 years, thousands of lives, many thousands wounded, and trillions of dollars with no coherent strategy, no honest assessment of the challenge, and no willingness to learn from failure and develop new strategies and new institutions.

Since September 11, 2001, we have moved from righteous anger and clarity of purpose against the forces of terrorism in the immediate aftermath of the attacks to now sending $1,700,000,000 in cash to the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.

We have watched our efforts in Iraq collapse while our efforts in Afghanistan decay.

We have seen the Middle East grow more violent, more chaotic, and more ungovernable despite 15 years of American and allied effort.

Fifteen years ago this week, terrorists killed 2,977 Americans in the worst surprise attack on our homeland since Pearl Harbor, 70 years earlier. In fact, 574 more Americans were killed on 9/11 than on December 7, 1941.

It was a huge, tragic, and deeply emotional shock. And yet the 9/11 attack was not the beginning of our war with Islamic supremacism.

By 2001, we had been at war with the Iranian dictatorship (still to this day listed by the State Department as the leading state sponsor of terrorism) for 32 years, when Iranians seized the American embassy in Tehran. Mark Bowden described the event appropriately in the title of his book, “Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam.”

From an American perspective, that war had continued in Lebanon in the 1980s and in Saudi Arabia, East Africa and Yemen in the 1990s.

In 2001, the terrorist war came to American soil with shocking results.

American anger was vivid and deep. President Bush reacted with powerful, clear, morally defining words.

In his address to the Joint Session of Congress, just nine days after the 9/11 attack, President Bush asserted “on September 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country.”

President Bush described a huge goal. “Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated,” he said.

President Bush described the scale of the challenge, saying, “Americans are asking: How will we fight and win this war? We will direct every resource at our command–every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war– to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.”

Bush went on to warn that “Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have seen. …Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”

President Bush wisely warned that “the only way to defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life is to stop it, eliminate it, and destroy it where it grows.”

Four months later, in his 2002 State of the Union Address, President Bush described North Korea, Iran and Iraq as an “Axis of Evil”.

Bush warned that “the United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” The Congress applauded.

And that was the high water mark of the response to 9/11.

Just this week, North Korea had its fifth nuclear test. Last week North Korea launched three missiles in direct violation of United Nations Resolutions.

We now know that while deceiving the Congress and the American people, the Obama Administration has sent $1,700,000,000 to what even the State Department says is the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, the Iranian dictatorship.

Iraq, at great cost in American lives, wounds and money, has degenerated into a mess dominated by Iran and by ISIS.

How did we go from brave words to defeat, dishonesty, and humiliation?

Tragically, after heroic leadership in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (who can forget President Bush in New York standing next to the fireman and promising that the people who attacked New York would hear from all of us?) and after delivering exactly the right words to Congress, the Bush administration failed to plan for how big, how hard, and how long the fight with Islamic supremacists would be.

Almost immediately, the lawyers began imposing rules and regulations.

It was decided not to declare war even though President Bush had described 9/11 “as an act of war” in his congressional address.

The State Department began pushing back against an honest, clear statement of who was attacking us.

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Iran’s Desert of Hate A water-starved country can’t turn to the one country that could help. P. David Hornik

By on September 12th, 2016

Iran’s pistachio farms are dying of thirst.

That may not, in itself, seem like major news. But it has a greater significance.

After crude oil, pistachio nuts are Iran’s biggest export, with only the United States producing more. Yet a drought lasting years, along with uncontrolled pumping of water by farmers, has created a situation where the pistachio crop is drying up.

AFP reports that:

In Kerman province in southern Iran, cities have grown rich from pistachios, but time is running out for the industry.
Some 300,000 of Iran’s 750,000 water pumps are illegal—a big reason why the United Nations says Iran is officially transitioning from a state of “water stress” to “water scarcity.”
In 2013, Iran’s chamber of commerce carried out a survey showing that Kerman province was losing about 20,000 hectares (49,400 acres) of pistachio farms every year to desertification.

Overall, Iran’s water crisis is so severe that it could lead to mass internal migration and emigration. Even in the water-scarce Middle East, Iran is one of the most imperiled countries. Drought conditions were one of the factors that led to Syria’s civil war with its horrendous consequences.

The above-linked AFP report notes that some Iranian pistachio farmers have “taken matters into their own hands” and installed drip-irrigation systems—which save their crops, allowing them to flourish again while using up to 70 percent less water.

The systems, however, are expensive, and only farmers with “cash and connections in Tehran” can obtain them.

What the report doesn’t mention is that modern drip irrigation is a technology that was invented and developed in Israel. From Israel, drip irrigation has spread throughout the world and was a key factor in the Green Revolution in Asia and Africa.

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UN Security Council Falters in Face of North Korean Defiance Kim Jong-un calls the international community’s bluff. Joseph Klein

By on September 12th, 2016

North Korea is reported to have conducted its fifth and largest underground nuclear test on September 9th. According to South Korean officials, monitors had picked up unusual seismic activity near a North Korean nuclear test site. For its part, North Korea did not deny that it had conducted a test. To the contrary, North Korea’s state media claimed that the test would enable North Korea to produce “a variety of smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear warheads of higher strike power.”

The explosive power of North Korea’s latest test is estimated, subject to further verification, to be approximately double the size of North Korea’s last test conducted in January 2016 and five times the explosive power of its test conducted during the first year of President Obama’s presidency in 2009. Four of the five nuclear tests that North Korea has conducted occurred under Obama’s watch. According to experts, North Korea is likely by 2020 to be able to build a workable intercontinental missile fitted with a nuclear warhead, with enough nuclear material accumulated to build up to 100 such warheads. The New York Times has quoted one expert, who has traveled to North Korea and formerly directed the Los Alamos weapons lab in New Mexico, as saying that North Korea has made a strategic shift from regarding its nuclear weapons as mere bargaining chips to “deciding they need a nuclear weapons fighting force.” In any case, bargaining chip or not, North Korea has continually breached the previous promises it has made to freeze its nuclear activities in return for economic aid.

Moreover, North Korea’s most current provocation is once again in violation of a succession of United Nations Security Council resolutions, including one passed in March that contained a range of new punitive sanctions and embargoes imposed on the rogue regime. They have not worked. In fact, it seems that North Korea’s missile launchings and nuclear tests combined are outpacing the ineffective measures the Security Council has been taking to try and deter them. In just the last month alone, North Korea has conducted four missile tests. Just three days before North Korea’s latest nuclear test, the Security Council had pulled together a press statement condemning the previous missile tests and alluding to the possibility of even more punitive actions if North Korea persisted in its violations. The press statement said in part: “The members of the Security Council reiterated that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea shall refrain from further actions, including nuclear tests, in violation of the relevant Security Council resolutions and comply fully with its obligations under these resolutions…The members of the Security Council agreed that the Security Council would continue to closely monitor the situation and take further significant measures in line with the Council’s previously expressed determination.”

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