RUTHFULLY YOURS

Fifteen years ago this Sunday, nearly 3,000 Americans were killed in the deadliest attack on the U.S. homeland in our history. A decade and a half later, we remain at war with Islamic terrorists. Winning this war will require an effort of greater scale and commitment than anything we have seen since World War II, calling on every element of our national power.

Defeating our enemies has been made significantly more difficult by the policies of Barack Obama. No American president has done more to weaken the U.S., hobble our defenses or aid our adversaries.

President Obama has been more dedicated to reducing America’s power than to defeating our enemies. He has enhanced the abilities, reach and finances of our adversaries, including the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, at the expense of our allies and our own national security. He has overseen a decline of our own military capabilities as our adversaries’ strength has grown.

Our Air Force today is the oldest and smallest it has ever been. In January 2015, then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno testified that the Army was as unready as it had been at any other time in its history. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert testified similarly that, “Navy readiness is at its lowest point in many years.”

Nearly half of the Marine Corps’ non-deployed units—the ones that respond to unforeseen contingencies—are suffering shortfalls, according to the commandant of the Corps, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. For the first time in decades, American supremacy in key areas can no longer be assured.

The president who came into office promising to end wars has made war more likely by diminishing America’s strength and deterrence ability. He doesn’t seem to understand that the credible threat of military force gives substance and meaning to our diplomacy. By reducing the size and strength of our forces, he has ensured that future wars will be longer, and put more American lives at risk.

Meanwhile, the threat from global terrorist organizations has grown. Nicholas Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told the House Homeland Security Committee in July that, “As we approach 15 years since 9/11, the array of terrorist actors around the globe is broader, wider and deeper than it has been at any time since that day.” Despite Mr. Obama’s claim that ISIS has been diminished, John Brennan, Mr. Obama’s CIA director, told the Senate Intelligence Committee in June that, “Our efforts have not reduced the group’s terrorism capability or global reach.”

The president’s policies have contributed to our enemies’ advance. In his first days in office, Mr. Obama moved to take the nation off a war footing and return to the failed policies of the 1990s when terrorism was treated as a law-enforcement matter. It didn’t matter that the Enhanced Interrogation Program produced information that prevented attacks, saved American lives and, we now know, contributed to the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden. Mr. Obama ended the program, publicly revealed its techniques, and failed to put any effective terrorist-interrogation program in its place.

We are no longer interrogating terrorists in part because we are no longer capturing terrorists. Since taking office, the president has recklessly pursued his objective of closing the detention facility at Guantanamo by releasing current detainees—regardless of the likelihood they will return to the field of battle against us. Until recently, the head of recruitment for ISIS in Afghanistan and Pakistan was a former Guantanamo detainee, as is one of al Qaeda’s most senior leaders in the Arabian Peninsula.

As he released terrorists to return to the field of battle, Mr. Obama was simultaneously withdrawing American forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. He calls this policy “ending wars.” Most reasonable people recognize this approach as losing wars.

When Mr. Obama took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009, Iraq was stable. Following the surge ordered by President Bush, al Qaeda in Iraq had largely been defeated, as had the Shiite militias. The situation was so good that Vice President Joe Biden predicted, “Iraq will be one of the great achievements of this administration.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Perhaps we should replace Winston Churchill’s warning to the British Nation, which he delivered six months before that terrible and fateful act of appeasement towards Hitler at Munich, and apply it to our own American Nation today; particularly during these last eight years under Barack Hussein Obama.

We soon will mark the 15 year old anniversary of that other fateful day in September, 2001; the day when a horrific atrocity in the name of Allah was perpetrated against two of America’s icons: the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

Churchill’s words ring eerily true for all of us now as we face the rising peril of Islamic supremacy. They ring unnervingly true as we witness the appalling political correctness and appeasement by the Obama regime – and by so many Western democracies – towards the barbaric Islamic scourge of jihad and terror that threatens to destroy what is left of freedom and Judeo-Christian civilization.

It is desolating to witness the descent of the United States of America; a victorious nation that truly has been a shining beacon in an often dark and frightening world and now is fundamentally being changed for the worse by a foreboding presence in the White House.

The atrocity of 9/11 was an act of utter evil. But how an enfeebled world, shackled by the unholy trinity of political correctness, multiculturalism and diversity, has failed to confront that evil will haunt us for years to come and give historians bafflement and much to contemplate.

Here are Churchill’s words that now can so sadly be applied to America:

Fifteen years after the carnage of 9/11, American foreign policy is still mired in its fossilized dogmas and dangerous delusions. The consequences are obvious. Iran, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism and long an avowed enemy of the United States, has filled the vacuum of our ignominious retreat from the Middle East, even as the mullahs move ever closer to possessing nuclear weapons. Russia, Iran’s improbable ally, bombs civilians in Syria, kills the Syrian fighters we have trained, bullies its neighbor Ukraine, consolidates its take-over of the Crimea, and relentlessly pursues its interests with disregard for international law and contempt for our feeble protests. Iraq, for which thousands of Americans bled and died, is now a puppet state of Iran. Afghanistan is poised to be overrun by the Taliban in a few years, and ISIS, al Qaeda 2.0, continues to inspire franchises throughout the world and to murder European and American citizens.

So much for the belief, frequently heard in the months after the attacks of 9/11, that “this changes everything.” The smoking ruins and 3000 dead surely had awoken us from our delusions that the “end of history” and a “new world order” had followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, “a world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak,” as George H.W. Bush said in 1990. The following decade seemed to confirm this optimism. Didn’t we quickly slap down the brutal Saddam Hussein and stop his aggression against his neighbors? Didn’t we punish the Serbs for their revanchist depredations in the Balkans? With American military power providing the muscle, the institutions of international cooperation like NATO, the International Court of Justice, and the U.N. Security Council would patrol and protect the network of new democracies that were set to evolve into versions of Western nations and enjoy such boons as individual rights, political freedom, leisure and prosperity, tolerance for minorities, equality for women, and a benign secularism.

The gruesome mayhem of 9/11 should have alerted us to the fact many Muslims didn’t get the memo about history’s demise. Indeed, long before that tragic day in September, we had been serially warned that history still had some unpleasant surprises. Theorists of neo-jihadism like Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb for decades had laid out the case for war against the infidel West and its aggression against Islam. “It is the nature of Islam,” al-Banna wrote, “to dominate not to be dominated, to impose its laws on all nations and extend its power to the entire planet.” So too the leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini: “Those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world,” which is why “Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers.” The kidnapping of U.S. diplomatic personnel in Tehran by a group called “Muslim Students Following the Line of the Imam [Khomeini]” sent us a message that we were engaged in the religious war the jihadists warned would come. But few of those responsible for our security and interests had ears to hear or eyes to see.

Not even when the words became bloody deeds did we listen. The bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks in 1983, which killed 241 servicemen, was supported by Iran and executed by its proxy terrorist group Hezbollah. Our refusal to respond reflected our failure to take seriously Khomeini’s vow to spread his revolution to the whole world. The humiliating televised abuse of our dead soldiers in Mogadishu in 1993, followed by our withdrawal, was exploited by Osama bin Laden in his sermons as signs that America had “foundations of straw.” That same year came the first World Trade Center attack, which killed six and wounded 1,042, an operation inspired by al Qaeda and traditional jihadist doctrine. In 1995 five Americans were killed by al Qaeda operatives at a training facility in Riyadh. In 1996 a truck bomb exploded in front of a residential complex housing Air Force personnel near Dhahran, killing 19 Americans. In 1998 al Qaeda bombed our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Twelve Americans died in Nairobi. And the last warning came in October of 2000, when the destroyer Cole was attacked by a fishing boat loaded with explosive. Seventeen sailors died and 39 were wounded.

Two almost simultaneous events in recent days have shed even more light on the Obama administration’s treatment of America’s enemies.

In Cuba, a Marxist, pro-Russian, anti-American tyranny, the administration pressed hard to abandon decades of policy in exchange for nothing. Human rights conditions there are awful, but the United States did not bargain to end the embargo in exchange for improvements. And since Obama’s announcement of a new policy, which was a simple free gift to the Castros, human rights conditions have deteriorated further.

The most recent event was the first commercial flight to Cuba in decades, from Fort Lauderdale to Santa Clara. Santa Clara is the residence of Guillermo Farinas.

Who is he, and why does he matter? He is one of Cuba’s bravest human rights advocates, a recipient of the Sakharov Prize from the European Parliament in 2010.

The citation says among other things this:

A Cuban doctor of psychology, independent journalist and political dissident, Guillermo Fariñas has over the years conducted 23 hunger strikes with the aim of achieving peaceful political change and freedom of expression in Cuba….For his activism, Fariñas has in recent years been threatened with death and confinement in a psychiatric hospital, beaten and hospitalised, and repeatedly arrested and detained, including at the funeral of Oswaldo Payá, another Sakharov Prize laureate and Cuban dissident.

Farinas is in the 48th day of hunger strike right now and was hospitalized on September 5. I write of all this because last week when that Jet Blue flight landed, the Obama administration celebrated it– but has not said one word about Farinas nor has any American diplomat sought to visit him. (And by the way, that flight was chock full of journalists, as the web siteCapitol Hill Cubans points out, and not a single one of them or of the foreign correspondents from Havana who went to Santa Clara sought to visit and speak with him. They were too busy celebrating, it seems. Capitol Hill Cubans quotes Martin Luther King: “in the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”)

Meanwhile, half a world away the Iranian Navy is making a laughingstock of the U.S. Navy, taunting it with small boat actions that endanger our ships, get within about 100 yards of them, and have forced them to take evasive action to avoid collisions. Reuters reported that

A U.S. Navy coastal patrol ship changed course after a fast-attack craft from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps came within 100 yards (91 meters) of it in the central Gulf on Sunday, U.S. Defense Department officials said on Tuesday. It was at least the fourth such incident in less than a month. U.S. officials are concerned that these actions by Iran could lead to mistakes.

Last year, John McCain told National Review that “the most disturbing briefing that I have ever received” had to do with cyberwar, adding: “We better start doing a helluva lot better job” addressing cybersecurity threats.

Given the current presidential prospects, the chances of that are slim. Donald Trump has made noises about “cyber” (it’s “becoming so big”), but has not outlined any plan. Meanwhile, it’s become undeniably clear that Hillary Clinton’s effort to avoid transparency requirements as secretary of state by setting up a private e-mail server endangered national security, including human-intelligence assets abroad, and that, unable to find more-plausible-sounding excuses, Clinton has opted to plead incompetence: She recently explained that she never realized the “(C)” in certain e-mails she forwarded indicated classified material.

This situation is particularly alarming in the wake of a new report. On Wednesday, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released the results of its year-long investigation into the unprecedented hack of the Office of Personnel Management. The 241-page document is unsubtly titled “The OPM Data Breach: How the Government Jeopardized Our National Security for More than a Generation.”

In March 2014, the Department of Homeland Security alerted OPM that its security had been breached and data stolen. Over the next two months, OPM monitored the hacker’s activity inside its system, developing with DHS a plan to expel him. So narrowly focused was OPM on its target that it did not notice that a separate hacker had gained access to the system in early May, posing as an employee of an OPM contractor. For almost a year, this second hacker operated at leisure in OPM’s system, stealing security-clearance background-investigation files, personnel records, and fingerprint data.

The two attacks, which the Oversight committee says were almost certainly coordinated, constitute the worst cybersecurity breach in American history: “Attackers exfiltrated personnel files of 4.2 million former and current government employees and security-clearance background-investigation information on 21.5 million individuals,” dating back to the Reagan administration. That background-investigation information, the Standard Form 86 or SF-86, which is required of anyone applying for a security clearance, demands an extraordinary range of personal information, as James Comey explained to the Washington Times last year: “My SF-86 lists every place I’ve ever lived since I was 18, every foreign travel I’ve ever taken, all of my family, their addresses. So it’s not just my identity that’s affected. I’ve got siblings. I’ve got five kids. All of that is in there.” (Comey’s was among the data taken.) The hack has been described as “Cyber Pearl Harbor.” Joel Brenner, senior counsel at the National Security Agency, called the stolen information “crown jewels material . . . a gold mine for a foreign intelligence service.” John Schindler, a former analyst at the National Security Agency, has written: “Whoever now holds OPM’s records possesses something like the Holy Grail from a [counterintelligence] perspective.”

I was wrong! In early 2013, my article “The American Babe In The Iranian Wood,” noted, “President Obama and his administration’s incomprehensible handling of Iran, as clueless, overconfident and counterproductive; not a good recipe for dealing with a sophisticated and determined adversary.”

As it turned out, and as every new expose of yet another secret deal shows, President Obama was anything but a clueless Babe. The President who initiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka The Iran Deal, is a sophisticated politician who deliberately and elaborately misled the American people about his concessions to the mullahs, accommodating their nuclear agenda and giving them some $150 billions, purportedly to help strengthen their economy. All the while acknowledging that “some” of that money will pay for the regime’s military expansion and even to fund their terrorist activities. Why was the U.S. President so keen on building up his nation’s sworn enemy’s nuclear capabilities? What was his motive in empowering the mullahs and fueling Iran’s intervention in and destabilization of the Middle East and beyond?

Also, where were the United States’ partners to the Iran Deal? The United Kingdom, Russia, France, and China — plus Germany, and the European Union (EU) participated in the negotiations and signed on. Why?

While the prospect of opening the Iranian market to business was tempting, why would any country, especially with geographic proximity to Iran, be interested in facilitating the belligerent Islamic Republic’s development of nuclear weapons? Has greed overcome existential fear? Or perhaps by the time the deal was announced Iran’s uranium enrichment program was close to or already a fait accompli. In that case, why not partake in the Obama administration’s magic show and reap real profits afterward? Perhaps this can explain why most of the murky details were not leaked.

From the start, President Barack Obama and his top aides viewed a nuclear deal with Iran as a singular good – a goal to pursue on its own rather than linked to Iran’s terror sponsorship, its efforts to destabilize Sunni Arab states, its grotesque human rights record or its other problematic behavior in the region and beyond.

With the deal in hand, administration officials argued, they would confront Tehran over its other activities that threaten the United States and its European partners and that alarm our allies in the region. But, recent events suggest, last year’s global nuclear deal has proved far less liberating then paralyzing for the administration. Washington seems so concerned that Tehran will abandon the deal, as Iranian leaders often threaten, that it refuses to confront the regime over its increasingly reckless behavior.

How important was a nuclear deal, and the broader goal of a U.S.-Iranian rapprochement, to Obama? Important enough that, in a persistent effort not to ruffle the feathers of Iran’s hard-line regime, he refused to support the democracy-seeking Green Movement after Iran’s rigged presidential election in 2009, to confront Syria’s Bashar Assad (a key Iranian ally) as he slaughtered his own people starting in 2013, or to voice outrage over Iran’s human rights crackdown of recent years.

How important does the deal remain to Obama as he finishes his term and ponders his legacy? Important enough, we learned in recent days from the Institute for Science and International Security, that Washington gave Tehran secret exemptions from the deal’s limits on the uranium that it could possess that’s enriched to 3.5 percent and 20 percent purity, both of which could be quickly converted to weapons grade purity in the future. Without those exemptions, Tehran wouldn’t have received the generous relief from tough economic sanctions that it so desperately sought.

VIENTIANE, Laos—One of President Barack Obama’s final turns on the international stage before leaving office spotlighted how some world leaders are testing the limits of U.S. power just months before a new American administration.

From the moment Mr. Obama stepped off the plane in the lakeside city of Hangzhou, China, through his meetings at a summit in Laos, he has faced challenges to his policies and overall American authority in ways large and small.

Russian President Vladimir Putin left the Obama administration empty-handed after intense negotiations on a deal to reduce violence in Syria. North Korea, the glaring setback in Mr. Obama’s Asia policy, tested ballistic missiles. On Tuesday U.S. officials said Iran made yet another provocative move toward a U.S. Navy ship in the Persian Gulf.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte made profane comments about Mr. Obama on the eve of their first meeting, leading the White House to cancel a sit-down with the leader of one of America’s treaty allies. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey was unexpectedly positive in public remarks about relations with the U.S., yet also challenged a core component of Mr. Obama’s strategy against Islamic State extremists: backing Kurdish forces in Syria.

And while Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted Mr. Obama for a lengthy one-on-one meeting and cooperated with the U.S. on climate change, significant areas of tension between the two countries went unresolved.

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said most of these developments “are just the latest installments of long-running sagas,” citing Russia and Syria, North Korea and differences between the U.S. and Turkey over the Kurds.

“They are all manifestations of what I would describe as a world in disarray,” he said.

Still, the Obama administration’s effort to shift U.S. diplomatic and military attention toward Asia has left a mark, sending more U.S. forces, ships, planes and military sales toward the region. Two key steps include a new U.S.-Philippine military agreement implemented this year, and a decision this year to lift restrictions on military sales to Vietnam.

Given U.S. investments in Southeast Asia, and its massive military presence, “it’s China that is trying to compete with U.S. influence in the region—not the other way round,” said Ian Storey, a Southeast Asia expert at the Singapore-based ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute.

“That’s not to say that Southeast Asian countries aren’t eager to attract Chinese money,” he added. “But when you’re throwing your weight around the South China Sea, I think there’s a limit as to how much influence and reassurance you can buy.”CONTINUE AT SITE

As our dispiriting presidential campaign grinds on, the rest of the world is not standing still. And the news is not good.

At the G-20 meeting last weekend, Chinese officials treated the president of the United States and his senior aides with blatant disrespect. As Chinese nationalism surges, President Xi Jinping is asserting his country’s claims throughout the South China Sea, a move that episodic demonstrations of American naval power have failed to halt. Meanwhile, the linchpin of President Obama’s “pivot” to Asia—the Trans-Pacific Partnership—faces opposition from both presidential candidates and hangs by a thread in Congress. Its defeat would deal a heavy blow to American credibility.

In the Middle East, the Syrian civil war continues its bloody course, and the latest effort to negotiate a humanitarian cease-fire with the Russians has foundered over what the administration describes as “trust” issues. Mr. Obama’s prediction that Vladimir Putin’s use of military force would land him in a quagmire described his own state of mind rather than reality. Instead, at modest cost, Mr. Putin has restored Russia’s standing as a key player in the region, while our friends and allies see America in retreat.

In northern Syria, U.S.-backed Kurds have been the only effective fighters against Islamic State. But when Turkey sent its forces across the border, Mr. Obama sent Vice President Joe Biden to Turkey, where he demanded that the Kurds withdraw from ISIS-held territory they had recently seized. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees every manifestation of Kurdish nationalism, wherever it may occur, as a threat to Turkey’s domestic security.

The U.S. is under no obligation to agree with him, especially at the expense of one of the few reliably pro-Western forces in the region. Mr. Obama’s meeting in China with Mr. Erdogan did not yield an agreement. The administration’s brand of “realism” in Syria has ended in a damaging muddle.

The group photo at the G-20 meeting spoke volumes. At one end, President Putin was speaking to President Erdogan, who listened attentively. At the other end, President Obama peered curiously at the colloquy. In the middle, President Xi smiled confidently. As the authoritarian entente cordiale flowers, the U.S. is reduced to a bystander’s role.

Mr. Obama seems to have assumed that events in Syria, however awful to behold, would have no effect on core American interests. If so, he was badly mistaken. The flood of Syrian refugees has destabilized its neighbors in the Middle East and Europe. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Obama administration followed up a planeload of $400 million in cash sent to Iran in January with two more such shipments in the next 19 days, totaling another $1.3 billion, according to congressional officials briefed by the U.S. State, Treasury and Justice departments.

The cash payments—made in Swiss francs, euros and other currencies—settled a decades-old dispute over a failed arms deal dating back to 1979. U.S. officials have acknowledged the payment of the first $400 million coincided with Iran’s release of American prisoners and was used as leverage to ensure they were flown out of Tehran’s Mehrabad on the morning of Jan. 17.
The revelations come as Congress returns from a summer recess with Republicans vowing to pursue charges that the White House paid ransom to Tehran, a charge President Barack Obama has repeatedly rejected. Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) introduced legislation on Tuesday that would bar such payments to Iran in the future and seeks to reclaim the $1.7 billion for victims of Iranian-backed terrorism.

The Obama administration briefed lawmakers on Tuesday, telling them that two further portions of the $1.3 billion were transferred though Europe on Jan. 22 and Feb. 5. The payment “flowed in the same manner” as the original $400 million that an Iranian cargo plane picked up in Geneva, Switzerland, according to a congressional aide who took part in the briefing.

The $400 million was converted into non-U.S. currencies by the Swiss and Dutch central banks, according to U.S. and European officials.

The Treasury Department confirmed late Tuesday that the subsequent payments were also made in cash. CONTINUE AT SITE