RUTHFULLY YOURS

The head of the national security division at the Justice Department was among the agency’s senior officials who objected to paying Iran hundreds of millions of dollars in cash at the same time that Tehran was releasing American prisoners, according to people familiar with the discussions.

John Carlin, a Senate-confirmed administration appointee, raised concerns when the State Department notified Justice officials of its plan to deliver to Iran a planeful of cash, saying it would be viewed as a ransom payment, these people said. A number of other high-ranking Justice officials voiced similar concerns as the negotiations proceeded, they said.

The U.S. paid Iran $400 million in cash on Jan. 17 as part of a larger $1.7 billion settlement of a failed 1979 arms deal between the U.S. and Iran that was announced that day. Also on that day, Iran released four detained Americans in exchange for the U.S.’s releasing from prison—or dropping charges against—Iranians charged with violating sanctions laws. U.S. officials have said the swap was agreed upon in separate talks.

The objection of senior Justice Department officials was that Iranian officials were likely to view the $400 million payment as ransom, thereby undercutting a longstanding U.S. policy that the government doesn’t pay ransom for American hostages, these people said. The policy is based on a concern that paying ransom could encourage more Americans to become targets for hostage-takers.

Mr. Carlin, as head of the division in charge of counterterrorism and intelligence, is one of the highest-profile figures at the department. That he and other senior figures raised alarms underscores how much pushback the State Department proposal provoked.

Since The Wall Street Journal earlier this month reported details of the cash shipment—stacks of euros, Swiss francs and other currencies stacked on wooden pallets—and the Justice Department officials’ objections, administration officials have defended the payment.

At a press conference last week, President Barack Obama described the controversy as the “manufacturing of outrage in a story that we disclosed in January,’’ when the U.S. settled a number of outstanding issues with Iran.

He added, “We do not pay ransom for hostages.”

In his remarks, the president didn’t mention the objections raised by his own appointees within the Justice Department, where, according to people familiar with the discussions, many officials raised alarms that the timing of the cash payment would look like ransom.

White House and State Department officials ultimately decided to proceed with the $400 million cash payment despite the Justice officials’ objections. CONTINUE AT SITE

American defense contractor Raytheon and Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems who work together developing Israel’s Iron Dome-the highly-acclaimed mobile air defense system that has become critical to Israel’s national security-are now collaborating on an American prototype.

The U.S. version of the missile system would help protect U.S. forces in advanced combat positions around the world from a variety of threats including cruise missiles, rockets and UAV’s.

A 2015 trademark filing by Raytheon lists the “SkyHunter,” described as a ground-based missile interceptor system with a guided missile that has electro-optic sensors and adjustable steering fins to track and destroy incoming enemy rockets, missiles, artillery and mortars.

Raytheon is the world’s largest manufacturer of guided missiles and works with Israel’s State-owned Rafael providing key components for Israel’s highly-versatile electro-optic Tamir interceptor missile.

In April, the U.S. successfully tested a modified Tamir missile from a Multi-Missile Launcher (MML) at the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico successfully intercepting a target drone.

The missile system is one of several under consideration by the U.S. Army, though the production costs and successful track record would make a Raytheon/Rafael produced system an ideal proposition for the U.S., Yosi Druker, vice president and head of the air superiority systems sector at Rafael told Sightline’s Defense News.

The missiles would be built in the U.S., rendered compatible for American military standards and “100 percent Raytheon,” said Druker, who added that intelligence sharing would be vital and another valuable asset to the project.

The great American humorists have something in common: hatred.

H. L. Mencken and Mark Twain both could be uproariously funny and charming — and Twain could be tender from time to time, though Mencken could not or would not — but at the bottom of each man’s deep well of humor was a brackish and sour reserve of hatred, for this country, for its institutions, and for its people. Neither man could forgive Americans for being provincial, backward, bigoted, anti-intellectual, floridly religious, or for any of the other real or imagined defects located in the American character.

Historical context matters, of course. As Edmund Burke said, “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” Twain was born in 1835, and there was much that was detestable in the America of Tom Sawyer. Mencken, at the age of nine, read Huckleberry Finn and experienced a literary and intellectual awakening — “the most stupendous event in my life,” he called it — and followed a similar path. Both men were cranks: Twain with his premonitions and parapsychology, Mencken with his “Prejudices” and his evangelical atheism. He might have been referring to himself when he wrote: “There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.”

The debunking mentality is prevalent in both men’s writing, a genuine fervor to knock the United States and its people down a peg or two. For Twain, America was slavery and the oppression of African Americans. For Mencken, the representative American experience was the Scopes trial, with its greasy Christian fundamentalists and arguments designed to appeal to the “prehensile moron,” his description of the typical American farmer. The debunking mind is typical of the American Left, which feels itself compelled to rewrite every episode in history in such a way as to put black hats on the heads of any and all American heroes: Jefferson? Slave-owning rapist. Lincoln? Not really all that enlightened on race. Saving the world from the Nazis? Sure, but what about the internment of the Japanese? Etc. “It was wonderful to find America,” Twain wrote. “But it would have been more wonderful to miss it.”

In high school, I had a very left-wing American history teacher who was a teachers’-union activist (a very lonely position in Lubbock, Texas, where the existence of such unions was hardly acknowledged) for whom the entirety of the great American story was slavery, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the Great Depression, and the momentary heroism of the New Deal (we were not far from New Deal, Texas), with the great arc of American history concluding on the steps of Central High School in Little Rock on September 23, 1957. It was, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, very important to her — plainly urgent to her — that the American story be one of disappointment, betrayal, and falling short of our founding ideals.

Much of this phenomenon isn’t about how one sees society but how one sees one’s self. Literary men invent literary characters, and very often the first and most important literary character a writer invents is himself. Samuel Clemens cared a great deal more about money and the friendship of titled nobility than Mark Twain ever would, and Mencken was in real life subject to the sort of crude superstitions and pseudoscience that Mencken the public figure would have mocked. The great modern example of this was Molly Ivins, a California native raised in a mansion in the tony Houston neighborhood of River Oaks, who liked to take her private-school friends sailing on her oil-executive father’s yacht, who somehow managed to acquire a ridiculous “Texas” accent found nowhere in Texas and reinvent herself as a backporch-sittin’ champion of the common man, a redneck liberal.

The chief interest of Molly Ivins’s writing about Texas is that it demonstrates how little she actually understood the state, or the Union to which it belongs. As with Twain and Mencken, Ivins’s America would always be backward and corrupt, with Washington run by bribe-paying lobbyists (a lazy writer, she inevitably referred to them as “lobsters” — having thought that funny once, she made a habit of it) and a motley collection of fools and miscreants either too feeble or too greedy to do the right thing, defined as whatever was moving Molly Ivins at any particular moment.

Mencken lived in horror of the American people, “who put the Hon. Warren Gamaliel Harding beside Friedrich Barbarossa and Charlemagne, and hold the Supreme Court to be directly inspired by the Holy Spirit, and belong ardently to every Rotary Club, Ku Klux Klan, and anti-Saloon League, and choke with emotion when the band plays ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’” Much of that horror was imaginary, and still is. But we must have horror, especially in politics. How else to justify present and familiar horror except but by reference to a greater horror? In this year’s election, each candidate’s partisans already have been reduced to making the argument that while their own candidate might be awful, the other candidate is literally akin to Adolf Hitler. Yesterday, I heard both from Clinton supporters and Trump supporters that the other one would usher in Third Reich U.S.A. “Don’t tell yourself that it can’t happen here,” one wrote.

The Islamic Republic of Iran was designated a state sponsor of terrorism in 1984. That move came several years after Iran had seized American hostages while demanding $24 billion in cash and gold to be paid into a Muslim bank for their release.

The total, according to Secretary of State Muskie, came out to $480 million per hostage.

Carter eventually reached a deal to release billions to Iran while Muskie claimed that the ransom payment meant that “the United States emerged stronger and Iran emerged weaker.” Such counterintuitive arguments have become a staple of Obama rhetoric which insists that appeasing terrorists somehow weakens them and strengthens us.

Muskie also said the deal would “not to make any arrangement to encourage terrorism in the future”.

That of course was not true. Paying out ransom to terrorists only encourages more terrorism. While the hostages were freed, the terror tactic never went away.

In 1989, Iran was still trying to blackmail President George H.W. Bush by offering to free yet more American hostages in exchange for around $12 billion in assets. The hostages had been seized by terrorist affiliates of Iran which by now had been on the state sponsor of terror list for nearly half a decade.

Carter’s ransom deal blatantly violated the law. His Treasury Department ordered banks to defy the courts which were addressing claims of damages by American companies. While he and his administration insisted that they were not paying ransom because it was Iran’s money (a familiar claim that has been repeated by Obama with his own ransom payment), that’s exactly what they were doing.

It’s how Iran saw it. It’s why Iran kept taking hostages and demanding ransoms.

Everybody is looking for defense dollars. The latest sleuth is Luke O’Brien, an Army “Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Fellow” at the National Defense University. He thinks he has found a $62 billion pot of cash if we just got rid of our land based ICBMs. The money could then be spent on more important conventional military needs.

It is true nuclear modernization of the USA deterrent force will cost $700 billion over the next 25 years according to a study done by the Center for Security and International Studies. At first glance that is a great deal of money. But it averages $28 billion a year for nearly 500 missiles, submarines and bombers, 5-12 types of warheads, the command and control associated with the force, and the nuclear laboratories and facilities supporting warhead production, safety and refurbishment.

This comes to 4.6% of the current defense budget and a projected ½ of 1% of the Federal budget in 2025 at the initial peak of modernization spending.

Now it is also true that to improve military readiness now and restore both our nuclear and conventional deterrent, we need more defense funding in the next five year defense plan, and certainly in the next decade. Otherwise we may end up with a hollow military much as we did at the end of the Carter administration. But killing ICBMs simply doesn’t solve either problem.

In the next ten years the nuclear platforms including nuclear capable bombers, land based missiles, and submarines will cost $135 billion. These funds are roughly divided between sustainment of old systems and modernization for new ones.

The ICBM sustainment is $15 billon while another $7 billion would be for modernization. A modest additional amount is also projected to be spent on ICBM warheads and new command and control systems bringing the total to around $24 billion for the next decade.

1. The 9th Day of Av (the 11th Jewish month) is the most calamitous day in Jewish history, first mentioned in the book of Zechariah 7:3. It is a day of fasting (one of four fast days connected to the destruction of Jerusalem), commemorating dramatic national catastrophes, in an attempt to benefit from history by learning from – rather than repeating – critical moral and strategic missteps. Forgetfulness feeds oblivion; remembrance breeds deliverance.

2. Major Jewish calamities are commemorated on the 9th Day of Av:
*The failed “Ten Spies/tribal presidents” – contrary to Joshua & Caleb – slandered the Land of Israel, preferring immediate convenience and conventional “wisdom” over faith and long term vision, thus prolonging the wandering in the desert for 40 years, before settling the Promised Land;
*The destruction of the First Temple and Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon (586 BCE) resulted in the massacre of 100,000 Jews and a massive national exile;
*The destruction of the Second Temple and Jerusalem by Titus of Rome (70 CE) triggered the massacre of 1 million Jews and another massive national exile, aiming to annihilate Judaism and the Jewish people;
*The execution of the Ten Martyrs – ten leading rabbis – by the Roman Empire;
*The Bar Kokhbah Revolt was crushed with the killing of Bar Kokhbah, the fall of his headquarters in Beitar (135 CE), south of Jerusalem in Judea and Samaria, the plowing of Jerusalem, and the killing of 600,000 Jews by the Roman Empire;
*The pogroms of the First Crusade (1096-1099) massacred tens of thousands of Jews in Germany, France, Italy and Britain;
*The Jewish expulsion from Britain (1290);
*The Jewish expulsion from Spain (1492);
*The eruption of the First World War (1914);
*The beginning of the 1942 deportation of Warsaw Ghetto Jews to Treblinka extermination camp.

3. Napoleon was walking one night in the streets of Paris, hearing lamentations emanating from a synagogue. When told that the wailing commemorated the 586 BCE destruction of the First Jewish Temple in Jerusalem he stated: “People who solemnize ancient history are destined for a glorious future!”

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Precision-guided medium-range missiles, a relatively new technology, are beginning to proliferate in the Middle East. When they work as designed, they can deliver half a ton of high explosive to within meters of their targets. This means that for many targets, they are almost as effective as nuclear weapons. With their capacity to destroy capital facilities like power plants, the loss of only a few of which would severely harm Israel’s economy, they introduce a new way for Israel to decisively lose a war. Israel will have to get the difficult balance between offense and defense right before the next war or it may not have a second chance.

Throughout history, until 1945, a country was basically safe as long as no enemy army could invade and defeat its army. This basic strategic fact became obsolete with the invention of nuclear weapons, which could be thrown or delivered by plane over a defender’s undefeated army and kill hundreds of thousands of a defender’s population with a single warhead.

The first generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) was not accurate enough to present much of a threat to military or strategic targets. They could not reliably hit close enough to destroy an airfield. But large nuclear weapons, each with destructive effects measured in miles, combined with ICBMs whose accuracy was similarly measured, turned the focus of war thinking toward attacks on cities. This represented a new kind of war.

A special kind of “deterrence” thus became the central topic of strategic thinking: deterrence based on the threat of a retaliatory attack that hurts the country to be deterred, but doesn’t necessarily turn the balance of forces in the deterrer’s favor. This new style of deterrence says, “If you hit me, I will hit you back even if I have to do so in a way that does me no good. I will commit myself to hitting you, regardless of its effect on my situation, to stop you from hitting me first.”

This paper is a narrow analysis of strategic concepts in a historical context, omitting diplomatic and arms control considerations as well as several technical issues. Throughout history, countries have faced dangers other than those posed by military attack. And in a nuclear world, there are ways of protecting yourself other than through your own nuclear deterrence.

ICBMs eventually became accurate enough that smaller nuclear weapons could be used, but not so accurate that ballistic missiles without nuclear weapons could be a strategic threat.

More recently, however, technology driven by the computer revolution began to create a new strategic situation for the great powers. This technology controlled a warhead’s accuracy not by improving the precision of the missile’s launch, but by guiding the missile’s warhead as it approached its target.

“Terminal guidance,” as this technology is known, can enable warheads to be delivered over very long distances and to hit within meters of their aim-points. The launch does not have to be perfectly accurate if the final trajectory of the warhead is controlled by guidance that depends not on the initial trajectory of the missile but on equipment on the warhead.

I don’t want to be a broken record on the subject of President Obama’s appalling $400 million cash payment to Iran. I am at a loss, however, to understand how the press — and not just the pro-Obama mainstream media — continues to accept at face value President Obama’s preposterous claim that the transaction had to be structured the way it was (U.S. dollars converted to foreign currency and shipped to Tehran) because the law forbids transferring U.S. dollars to Iran.

The regulations that Obama concedes applied to this transaction do not just forbid sending U.S. dollars to Iran; they forbid exactly what the president did. Specifically, they prohibit Americans from transferring any currency to Iran — including foreign currency. They also prohibit circumventing the ban on sending Iran U.S. dollars by having an intermediary launder the dollars into another asset — such as foreign currency — and then shipping that asset to Iran.

That is common sense. If it were not the case, anyone could get around the anti-terrorism sanctions that prohibit conducting financial transactions with Iran — sanctions the Obama administration swore up and down to Congress it would continue to enforce — by simply converting dollars into, say, euros and francs (like Obama did) and then transferring that foreign currency to Iran. Such transactions are against the law. If you tried to execute one, you could go to jail for a very long time — even if the assets you transferred to the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism didn’t come close to $400 million in value.

The principal point of these sanctions is to squeeze the Iranian regime until it gives up terrorism sponsorship. Consequently, the regulations promulgated to enforce the sanctions prohibit transferring value to Iran. The sanctions are simply another iteration of federal law’s criminalization of material support for terrorism: You are forbidden to send the jihadist regime in Tehran dollars, foreign currency, tangible assets, services — anything of value.

President Obama emerged from his White House Utopia to tell Americans his $400 million cash payment to Iran was not a ransom payment for the return of five Americans held hostage. Even if true – a highly dubious truth – there are questions that emerge from the incident that the president has not and will not address.

If this payment is an overdue judgment that goes back to 1979, why now? If this wasn’t a ransom payment, why did the Iranians contend the prisoners would not be released till the plane landed? If this was a legitimate payment, why pallets of cash in foreign currencies? Money could be wired to Iran via a third party rather than sending an unmarked aircraft in the middle of the night. And if this wasn’t a ransom payment, because as President Obama noted “we do not pay ransom for hostages… because if we did we’d start encouraging Americans to be targeted,” how does he explain the three Americans taken hostage since the January payment?

Whether one accepts the improbable legalistic argument Obama offers, what matters for future U.S.-Iranian dealings is what the mullahs believe. It is obvious they believe that arresting and holding Americans pays off. In a country on the brink of bankruptcy, the U.S. has bailed it out.

The larger question remains: Why would Obama do that? Behind the monetary exchange lies the naïve belief that the assistance the president gives Iran will be reciprocated with the claim Obama prevented yet another war in the Middle East. That is to be his legacy.

Iranian imperial ambitious have made a mockery of this claim with the testing of a new generation of long range missiles and an upgrade in the weapons employed in Lebanon, Yemen and Syria. President Hassan Rouhani has called his negotiations with the U.S. “the greatest diplomatic victory in the history of Islam.” He is probably right.

Was the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the United States a crime or an act of war? In 2009, Rosa Brooks, a professor of law at Georgetown, was brought into Barack Obama’s Pentagon to ponder that question and others like it. Her conclusion about the 9/11 attack: Its legal status is “effectively indeterminate.”

That is a lawyerly finding and not one that is especially useful to policy makers. But such maddening ambiguity is precisely the problem we now face, argues Ms. Brooks in “How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything.” Many of the categories with which we think about national security, she says, have become obsolete.

In a world where our enemies do not belong to armies or wear uniforms—where a weapon can be a roadside bomb or a computer virus—confusion reigns. Do the laws of war apply, allowing for the liberal use of force? Or must we adhere to the laws of peacetime, which constrict the application of force within a web of legal procedures? “We don’t know,” Ms. Brooks writes, “if drone strikes are lawful wartime acts, or murders.” We don’t know “when it is acceptable for the U.S. government to lock someone up indefinitely, without charge or trial.” We don’t know “if mass government surveillance is reasonable or unjustifiable.”
ENLARGE
Photo: wsj
How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything

By Rosa Brooks
Simon & Schuster, 438 pages, $29.95

Thanks to the haziness of our present situation, Ms. Brooks concludes, we are losing “our collective ability to place meaningful restraints on power and violence.” Decisions taken first by George W. Bush and then by Barack Obama, she writes, “have allowed the rules and habits of wartime to pervade ordinary life.” She cites “the militarization of U.S. police forces,” evident in the proliferation of SWAT teams armed with equipment intended for war zones; the blanket of secrecy thrown over court proceedings; and intensified surveillance that can have “chilling effects” on the exercise of constitutional rights.

Such domestic troubles are matched by what Ms. Brooks sees as a disastrous record abroad. Our invasion of Iraq in 2003 brought chaos, she says; our departure in 2011 brought more. In Afghanistan, “we caused untold suffering for the very population we so earnestly tried to help.” The more we try to fix things around the world, she laments, “the more we end up shattering them into jagged little pieces.”CONTINUE AT SITE