RUTHFULLY YOURS

On a visit to Nigeria today, Secretary of State John Kerry declared there are “far too many” who join terrorist groups like Boko Haram “because they have trouble finding meaning or opportunity in their daily lives.”

“Because they are deeply frustrated and alienated — and because they hope groups like Boko Haram will somehow give them a sense of identity, or purpose, or power,” Kerry said after meeting with local religious leaders to discuss community building and countering violent extremism in Sokoto, Nigeria.

“We see this in every part of the world — whether we are talking about the Lake Chad Basin or the Sahel, or a village in the Middle East or a city in Western Europe, it’s the same. When people — and particularly young people — have no hope for the future and no faith in legitimate authority — when there are no outlets for people to express their concerns — then aggravation festers and those people become vulnerable to outside influence,” he added. “And no one knows that better than the violent extremist groups, which regularly use humiliation and marginalization and inequality and poverty and corruption as recruitment tools.”

Kerry stressed that “one of our central tasks — and almost every single religious leader I just heard in the other room talked about this task — has to be to remove the vulnerabilities in our own position.”

“To effectively counter violent extremism, we have to ensure that military action is coupled with a reinforced commitment to the values this region and all of Nigeria has a long legacy of supporting — values like integrity, good governance, education, compassion, security, and respect for human rights,” he said.

The Obama administration has been critical of Nigeria’s military campaign against Boko Haram, charging that human rights are being violated as they target suspected terrorists.

No book about the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon has won as much acclaim, and deservedly so, as Lawrence Wright’s “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.” Its multi-talented author, a longtime writer for the New Yorker, even staged a one-man play, “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” about his reporting experiences. Since publishing “The Looming Tower” in 2006, Mr. Wright has gone on to produce two other impressive books: one about Scientology, the other about the Camp David negotiations between Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat.

Now he returns to the subject of terrorism but not, alas, with a truly new book. “The Terror Years: From al-Qaeda to the Islamic State” is a collection of articles that appeared between 2002 and 2015 in the New Yorker—and that remain available online. In a prologue, he says he hopes the book can be “a primer on the evolution of the jihadist movement from its early years to the present, and the parallel actions of the West to attempt to contain it.”

Three of these articles were incorporated in somewhat altered form into “The Looming Tower.” These are “The Man Behind Bin Laden,” about Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current head of al Qaeda; “The Counterterrorist,” about John P. O’Neill, a legendary FBI counterterrorism agent who was obsessed with al Qaeda and died in the Twin Towers; and “The Agent,” about Ali Soufan, the Lebanese-American FBI agent who was one of the few U.S. terrorism investigators fluent in Arabic and who worked closely with O’Neill. Another, “The Kingdom of Silence,” about Mr. Wright’s experience mentoring young journalists at an English-language newspaper in Jeddah in 2004, informed the description of Saudi Arabia in “The Looming Tower.”So if you’re keeping count, “The Terror Years” makes their third appearance in print. The other chapters are slightly fresher and chronicle various aspects of the war on terrorism since 9/11. “The Terror Web” is about Spain’s response to the 2004 Madrid train bombings, which killed 191 people and led the country to pull its troops out of Iraq. “Captured on Film” describes the beleaguered state of the Syrian film industry during the relatively peaceful days of the Assad dictatorship before the outbreak of civil war in 2011. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary…..On Bashar Assad, the butcher of Syria…..While she was Sec. of State

Hillary Clinton’s uncredible statement on Syria By Glenn Kessler https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/hillary-clintons-uncredible-statement-on-syria/2011/04/01/AFWPEYaC_blog.htmlHillary Clinton is known for making provocative statements, but few have generated such a firestorm as her comment last week that the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, may be a reformer. She made her remarks after “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer noted that Assad’s late father had killed 25,000 people during an uprising against his regime. Clinton responded by noting that the son was now in power and he was a “different leader.”

“There’s a different leader in Syria now. Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.”

–Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, on “Face the Nation,” March 27, 2011

“I referenced opinions of others. That was not speaking either for myself or for the administration.”

–Clinton, two days later

Bill on the Charlie Rose Show “http://ejournalofpoliticalscience.org/taheri.html

And here is what Clinton had to say in a recent television interview with Charlie Rose:

“Iran is the only country in the world that has now had six elections since the first election of President Khatami (in 1997). (It is) the only one with elections, including the United States, including Israel, including you name it, where the liberals, or the progressives, have won two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote in six elections: Two for president; two for the Parliament, the Majlis; two for the mayoralties. In every single election, the guys I identify with got two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote. There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.”

So, while millions of Iranians, especially the young, look to the United States as a mode of progress and democracy, a former president of the US looks to the Islamic Republic as his ideological homeland.

But who are “the guys” Clinton identifies with?

There is, of course, President Muhammad Khatami who, speaking at a conference of provincial governors last week, called for the whole world to convert to Islam.

“Human beings understand different affairs within the global framework that they live in,” he said. “But when we say that Islam belongs to all times and places, it is implied that the very essence of Islam is such that despite changes (in time and place) it is always valid.”

There is also Khatami’s brother, Muhammad-Reza, the man who, in 1979, led the “students” who seized the US Embassy in Tehran and held its diplomats hostage for 444 days. There is Massumeh Ebtekar, a poor man’s pasionaria who was spokesperson for the hostage-holders in Tehran. There is also the late Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali, known to Iranians as “Judge Blood”.

Not surprisingly, Clinton’s utterances have been seized upon by the state-controlled media in Tehran as a means of countering President George W. Bush’s claim that the Islamic Republic is a tyranny that oppresses the Iranians and threatens the stability of the region.

Clinton’s declaration of love for the mullas shows how ill informed even a US president could be.

Didn’t anyone tell Clinton, when he was in the White House, that elections in the Islamic Republic were as meaningless as those held in the Soviet Union? Did he not know that all candidates had to be approved by the “Supreme Guide”, and that no one from opposition is allowed to stand? Did he not know that all parties are banned in the Islamic Republic, and that such terms as “progressive” and “liberal” are used by the mullas as synonyms for “apostate”, a charge that carries a death sentence?

More importantly, does he not know that while there is no democracy without elections there can be elections without democracy?

Clinton told his audience in Davos, as well as Charlie Rose, that during his presidency he had “formally apologized on behalf of the United States” for what he termed “American crimes against Iran.”

While President Barack Obama and his would-be successor Hillary Clinton try to convince the American people that everything is fine in regards to the U.S. position in the world and the security of the nation; foreign adversaries are celebrating what they see as the country’s decline. For example, an August 18 editorial in Global Times, the official media outlet of China’s ruling Communist Party, proclaimed “US suffers new setback in Middle East.” The column hailed its axis partner Russia for basing long-range bombers in Iran to attack targets in Syria in support of the regime of Bashar Assad. It is official Washington policy to remove Assad from power to end Syria’s civil war, but Russian and Iranian military intervention has thwarted the half-hearted, slow-motion effort of the Obama administration to aid the Sunni rebels. “More sadly for Washington” continues the Chinese editorial, “Iraq also consented to the passing-through of Russian military aircraft under some symbolic limits.” This is not surprising given that U.S. policy has allowed Baghdad to become a Shiite satrap of Iran. Though this error goes back to the Bush administration, Obama’s withdrawal of all American troops in 2011 allowed the Iraq regime to openly embrace Tehran.

The Chinese editorial ended with the statement, “The old pattern and order is gone in the Middle East, where the US has lost its leverage. From the perspective of the region, the US is declining. Moscow, however, has gained the upper hand.” This change in the balance of power has occurred entirely during the Obama administration, for part of which Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State.

The same can be said about Iran’s stronger position in the region. In has gone beyond sending its terrorist army Hezbollah from Lebanon into Syria. Its own troops are now fighting there as well. It could afford to escalate its war effort because of the generous grant of funds from the U.S. as part of the nuclear agreement which slows (but does not end) Tehran’s strategic weapons program. In the long run, the Shiite theocracy still wants nuclear arms to safeguard its regional dominance. At the moment, however, it sorely needs resources to gain that dominance. It must win the war in Syria and overawe its Arab neighbors.

The ending of Western sanctions and the release of embargoed billions by the Obama Treasury gives Iran the means to advance its agenda, in Iraq as well as Syria. While the U.S. has struggled to recruit local troops, Iran has reportedly created a 100,000-man Shiite militia in Iraq which has largely replaced the regular army as the security force that protects Tehran’s hold on Baghdad. It is apparently easier to get men to fight for a “true faith” than for the soft tenets of Kantian liberalism.

History is not a dusty record of the past. The study of it provides a means by which we improve the future – understanding that which our forebears did well and what they did poorly. We cannot return to the past, but we should not run from it. The past helped form us, individually, as a people and as a nation.

Albert Einstein wrote about education, that it is “…the training of the mind to think.” Living in a free and democratic country, with “God-given” natural rights, it is our duty to know and understand those rights – how and why they were created – and then pass them on. In the movie Chariots of Fire, Eric Liddell explains his need to run: “[God] made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.” We have similar obligations.

For most of his time on earth man has been ruled by men. The concept of men being governed by laws is rare and relatively new – something that is true for the United States and other democracies, an idea that can be traced to the Magna Carta. As reported by the 2016 Freedom House report, only 13% of the world’s population live in democracies. And, according to the same source, for the 10th year in a row global freedom declined. Do American high schoolers recognize the significance of that report – how fortunate they are and how fragile is liberty? In 1995, the U.S. Department of Education suggested programs to address this lack of knowledge. Yet fifteen years later test results conducted by National Assessment of Educational Progress, showed that only 13% of high school seniors were proficient in American history. H.G. Wells wrote that civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. It is, if one believes that liberty is essential to a free life. Keep in mind, its loss leads to darkness and totalitarianism. A democracy functions when the electorate is educated. Authoritarianism thrives when ignorance predominates.

To understand those who came before us and to appreciate the rarity and vulnerability of our liberties, we must know something of the era in which those who formed our nation lived. That requires an understanding of the times. In applying 21st Century standards to 18th and 19th Century values, we can trivially pursue all that was wrong with those who helped mold our culture, society and country, but, in doing so we show ignorance. Looked at that way, why would we honor George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Elihu Yale, Leland Stanford, James Duke, Woodrow Wilson or John C. Calhoun? None of these people conformed solely to the values we cherish today, yet all of them helped provide institutions we esteem. We can fault all eight men. The first three were slave holders. Elihu Yale was an imperialist; Leland Stanford exploited Chinese workers; James Duke made his fortune in tobacco; Woodrow Wilson believed in the superiority of the White Race, and John C. Calhoun was a slave owner and defender of slave owners.
History is not a dusty record of the past. The study of it provides a means by which we improve the future – understanding that which our forebears did well and what they did poorly. We cannot return to the past, but we should not run from it. The past helped form us, individually, as a people and as a nation.

Albert Einstein wrote about education, that it is “…the training of the mind to think.” Living in a free and democratic country, with “God-given” natural rights, it is our duty to know and understand those rights – how and why they were created – and then pass them on. In the movie Chariots of Fire, Eric Liddell explains his need to run: “[God] made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.” We have similar obligations.

For most of his time on earth man has been ruled by men. The concept of men being governed by laws is rare and relatively new – something that is true for the United States and other democracies, an idea that can be traced to the Magna Carta. As reported by the 2016 Freedom House report, only 13% of the world’s population live in democracies. And, according to the same source, for the 10th year in a row global freedom declined. Do American high schoolers recognize the significance of that report – how fortunate they are and how fragile is liberty? In 1995, the U.S. Department of Education suggested programs to address this lack of knowledge. Yet fifteen years later test results conducted by National Assessment of Educational Progress, showed that only 13% of high school seniors were proficient in American history. H.G. Wells wrote that civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. It is, if one believes that liberty is essential to a free life. Keep in mind, its loss leads to darkness and totalitarianism. A democracy functions when the electorate is educated. Authoritarianism thrives when ignorance predominates.

To understand those who came before us and to appreciate the rarity and vulnerability of our liberties, we must know something of the era in which those who formed our nation lived. That requires an understanding of the times. In applying 21st Century standards to 18th and 19th Century values, we can trivially pursue all that was wrong with those who helped mold our culture, society and country, but, in doing so we show ignorance. Looked at that way, why would we honor George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Elihu Yale, Leland Stanford, James Duke, Woodrow Wilson or John C. Calhoun? None of these people conformed solely to the values we cherish today, yet all of them helped provide institutions we esteem. We can fault all eight men. The first three were slave holders. Elihu Yale was an imperialist; Leland Stanford exploited Chinese workers; James Duke made his fortune in tobacco; Woodrow Wilson believed in the superiority of the White Race, and John C. Calhoun was a slave owner and defender of slave owners.

Obama’s ransom payment to Iran out-lies Hillary and even his own Obamacare mendacity.

We have become wearily accustomed to the constant flow of lies in the presidential campaign. Some are important but most are not. They have become a tiresome reminder of why so many people have decided to ignore the whole mess.

Lies in a political campaign should matter but those lies that are the basis for national security decisions — lies that are a matter of policy — can create existential dangers. The lies that President Obama has been peddling surrounding his deal with Iran on nuclear weapons are just such a case.

The website PolitiFact has gotten into the habit of naming the Lie of the Year. In 2012, when it gave the shameful title to Obama’s statement on Obamacare that “If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it,” the label was almost enough to rouse the Republican Party to action.

I began to be hopeful on July 5 when FBI Director James Comey held a press conference to recite the elements of Title 18 US Code Section 793(f) as those committed by Hillary Clinton by using a private, unsecured email system (“Clinton.com”) for top secret matters while she was secretary of state. But when Comey discredited himself and the FBI by saying no reasonable prosecutor would charge her with the crime, I thought we had a winner for Lie of the Year.

Comey didn’t distinguish himself by later describing an FBI interview with Clinton. But then Mizz Clinton told Fox News’ Chris Wallace that FBI Director Jay Comey said she’d been truthful in answering the FBI’s questions. Even the Washington Post’s fact checkers gave her their lowest rating — four “Pinocchio’s” — for that one. Another entry in the contest.

But the lies surrounding Obama’s Iran deal are so deadly, so obvious, and so much a part of his Iran policy that we must remind ourselves of them, expose them and examine them at every opportunity.

Four Americans were hostages. Some had been brought up on bogus charges of espionage, but none were held for any legitimate reason. When it was first revealed that there had been a payment of $400 million in cash to Iran at the same time the hostages were released, Obama denied that the payment was ransom. He said, “We were completely open with everybody about it, and it’s interesting to me that this suddenly became a story again. We do not pay ransom for hostages.”

Obama’s statement quickly overcame Hillary Clinton’s entries in the Lie of the Year contest, but Obama stuck to his story.

(Let’s be mindful of what a ransom is. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “ransom” as “to redeem from captivity or punishment; to procure the release of (a person) or restoration of (a thing) by payment of the sum demanded.”)

Over the last few months, a lot of new information has come out on how the Obama White House misled the American public, Congress and the news media about the nuclear deal with Iran before Congress voted on the agreement last September.

According to a May 5, 2016 New York Times profile of National Security Council Adviser Ben Rhodes, the Obama administration used false narratives to promote the nuclear deal and conducted a campaign to manipulate and mislead journalists as part of a media “echo chamber.”

Several liberal organizations helped facilitate this echo chamber. One of the most notorious was the far-left Ploughshares Fund which sought and received funding from liberal philanthropist George Soros. This included an April 2015 request for $750,000 to use mainstream media to counter opponents of the nuclear deal and parrot White House talking points.

Congressman Mike Pompeo (R-KS) has called for an investigation on whether large payments by Ploughshares to National Public Radio slanted NPR’s coverage of the nuclear deal and kept congressmen who opposed the agreement off the air.

The latest disclosure on how Ploughshares funding may still be distorting the debate over the nuclear deal concerns a Washington Post contributor.

According to an August 16, 2016 Washington Free Beacon by Adam Kredo, Allen Weiner, a Standord law professor and Ploughshares-funded expert, recently penned a Washington Postop-ed defending the nuclear deal but the Post failed to mention that he is on the payroll of the Ploughshares Fund. According to Kredo, Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (where Weiner acts as a senior lecturer), received $100,000 from Ploughshares in 2015. Weiner received a $15,000 payment from Ploughshares for a 2007 paper.

In an email to Kredo, Weiner denied speaking to anyone at Ploughshares about the nuclear deal or knowing the group’s position on the agreement. Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt disputed Kredo’s claim that Weiner is on the Ploughshares “payroll” and said he saw no conflicts of interest.

A month before September 11, 2001, President Bush was given his Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB), with an item entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike the U.S.” The PDB didn’t contain any specific evidence of an impending attack; just that federal agencies had bits and pieces of information indicating a desire to attack the U.S. The problem, as the 911 Commission pointed out, was that the intelligence agencies failed to share with one another what they felt was insignificant intelligence.

Lack of an effective independent cyber threat information sharing puts the nation’s economic stability in grave danger.

Today, American banks and financial institutions are fighting a quite war. This war is raging on the cyber front, with attacks from foreign governments (Russia, China, North Korea and Iran); criminal syndicates; terror organizations, and so-called “lone-wolf” actors. All continually attempt to access banks’ computer networks. Fighting this war is not cheap. A 2015 MarketsandMarkets report estimated private spending on cyber-security to rise to $170 billion in 2020.

The computer networks that allow the global financial markets to communicate with one another make them vulnerable to cyber bank robbers. The only proven way to prevent these attacks it is to go back to the days when a bank’s records were maintained on stand-alone computer systems. But as the Stuxnet malware demonstrated, even “off-line” systems can be hacked.

One way to mitigate some of the risks to the country’s financial networks is deep and sustained information sharing among individual banks, as well as between the public and private sectors. Given the interconnectedness of the nation’s financial system, it makes no sense for each bank to try to “go it alone” when it comes to cyber-security.

The private sector has attempted to do this through the Financial Services Information Sharing Analysis Center (FSISAC), which describes itself as “the only industry forum for collaboration on critical security threats facing the global financial services sector.” The bigger the bank, the greater its cyber threat. Last week eight of the largest U.S. banks, have agreed to share more information on cyber-threats to their systems, under the aegis of FSISAC.

While FSISAC is a good starting point for information sharing, there are obstacles that prevent maximizing its usefulness. Private companies’ and banks’ board members and shareholders are reluctant to share all relevant information—however useful—for fear it may be used by a competitor for business advantage and lead to financial loss. And banks also face legal restrictions regarding disclosure of certain personal/proprietary information.

Indeed, the babies are dying in Aleppo, as Robin Wright posted today:

Last month, four newborns in incubators fought for their lives in a small hospital in Aleppo, the besieged Syrian city.

Then a bomb hit the hospital and cut off power — and oxygen to the incubators. The babies suffocated.

In a joint letter to President Obama this month, fifteen doctors described the infants’ deaths: “Gasping for air, their lives ended before they had really begun.”

The doctors are among the last few in the eastern part of Aleppo, the historic former commercial center where a hundred thousand children are now trapped.

The photo of the bloody 5 year old boy, is one of the ugliest ones I’ve ever seen. We learned more about him later:

More than a third of all casualties in Aleppo are now kids, according to Save the Children.

Among them is Omran Daqneesh, the toddler with the moppish Beatles haircut whose picture captivated the world this week. He was shown covered with blood and dust after being dug from the debris of a bombing in Syria on Thursday. Rescuers placed him, alone, on an orange seat in an ambulance. His stunned, dazed expression mirrored the trauma of a war-ravaged generation. (On Saturday, we learned that Omran’s older brother Ali, who was ten, had died from wounds sustained in the attack.)

I understand that war is hell, as any veteran will tell you. However, this picture is more than the byproduct of bombs. It is the consequence of a foreign policy that has made the world a heck of lot unsafer than it was in 2009.

It started with a reckless withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. It was followed by tough talk about “red lines” that were never followed up. It did not take long for the bad guys in the region to find that President Obama was all about getting reelected in 2012 rather than U.S. national security.

As the invaluable David Pryce-Jones notes, Syria’s second-most important city, Aleppo, is the locus of heavy combat, pitting Russia and Iran, the forces propping up the Bashar Assad, against anti-regime fighters, also known as the “rebels.” David refers to reports that, as he summarizes them, “secular rebels appear to have liberated most of [Aleppo], maybe all of it.” Meanwhile, the estimable Charles Krauthammer observes that Russia is operating out of an air base in Iran (probably yet another violation of Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal with the mullahs). And who does Charles say Vladimir Putin’s air force is targeting? “It’s hitting a lot of the moderate rebels . . . in Aleppo.”

I have been arguing for years (and as recently as last weekend) that there are simply not enough moderate, secular rebels in Syria to overthrow the regime, much less to defeat both Assad and ISIS simultaneously. Suggestions to the contrary are wishful thinking. More important, such suggestions are counterproductive: The illusion of a vibrant secular, pro-Western opposition in Syria is the basis for urging that America throw its weight behind the “rebels,” on the theory that we would be undermining radical Islam.

In truth, we’d simply be empowering one set of anti-American Islamists against another.

At The Long War Journal, Tom Joscelyn, who for my money does the best job in America of analyzing the factions involved in the global jihad, takes a careful look at who is fighting against Assad in Syria. To what should be no one’s surprise — but will apparently be very surprising to many — the bulk of the opposition consists of Islamists.

As Tom explains, two coalitions are spearheading the campaign that has enjoyed recent success against the regime in Aleppo. The first is headed up by al-Qaeda and goes by the name Jaysh al-Fath (Army of Conquest). The al-Qaeda franchise in Syria, until recently known as al-Nusrah, has rebranded itself as Jabhat Fath al-Sham (JFS). It has a close alliance with a group called Ahrar al-Sham (Ahrar), which includes many al-Qaeda veterans and (as Tom notes) models itself after the Taliban (al-Qaeda’s close ally in Afghanistan). JFS and Ahrar run the Jaysh al-Fath coalition, which includes sundry other jihadist militias long affiliated with the al-Qaeda terror network.

Al-Qaeda is well aware of the West’s myopic focus on ISIS (the Islamic State — the al-Qaeda splinter group that began as al-Qaeda in Iraq). This myopia has the U.S. government and much of the commentariat turning a blind eye to other anti-American Islamists, even absurdly labeling them “moderates,” as long as they are not part of ISIS. The leaders of al-Qaeda realize that a great deal of financial and materiel support is to be had in the “moderate rebel” business but that the al-Qaeda brand could be problematic in maintaining the façade. So they have encouraged their franchises to obscure and soft-peddle their al-Qaeda connections — particularly by not brandishing “al-Qaeda” in their names.

It’s working.