RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

A former brigadier general revealed on Fox News Monday some new information about the White House’s role in U.S. Central Command’s skewing of intelligence to downplay the threats of ISIS and Al Qaeda.

Last week, a House Republican task force concluded in a 15-page report that U.S. military leaders altered intelligence reports “to paint a rosier picture” of the U.S.-led fight against ISIS than intelligence analysts believed was warranted.

The report blamed “structural and management changes” at the intelligence directorate for the distortions, but stopped short of explaining WHY the changes were made. According to Defense News, “the problems followed the change in Central Command’s leadership from Marine Gen. James Mattis, as CENTCOM commander, to Army Gen. Lloyd Austin.”

U.S. Army Brigadier Gen. Anthony Tata (Ret.) filled in some blanks on Fox News Monday afternoon, and if his allegations are true, the scandal reaches all the way to the president’s inner circle.

Tata explained that since Obama withdrew troops from Iraq, “there’s been chaos all over the Middle East.” But because the president campaigned on getting out of Iraq, he didn’t want to hear anything that countered his narrative that it was the right thing to do.

When the official narrative contradicted the facts on the ground, members of the intelligence community cried foul and there was a meeting to deal with the issue.

Via Fox News Insider:

Tata revealed that a source verified to him that he was directed by an individual from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who conducts the president’s daily briefing, to stop producing “products of record” that did not fit the administration’s narrative of a defeated Al Qaeda and a non-threatening enemy in ISIS.

Tata said that the president’s briefer told this individual to call him on secure line if he had any intelligence that portrayed ISIS in a stronger light than what the president had characterized to the public, which would not leave a paper trail.

He said that this distortion of intelligence on ISIS essentially led to the U.S. ignoring the growing threat and giving the terror group two years to take root.

Tata said that it was “highly irresponsible” for a senior official to downplay the intelligence because “now we have a real, valid national security threat that was borne out of this directive to Central Command.” He added that “now there are actually people being reprised against.”

“You have good American soldiers, sailors, Marines and civilians that are being isolated and targeted by people that are in the J-2 [CENTCOM’s intelligence directorate],” Tata said.

The U.S. announced the transfer of 15 detainees from U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Here is a look at the various ramifications of the move.

Who was transferred? Where were they sent, and why?

Fifteen prisoners—12 Yemenis and three Afghans—were transferred from Guantanamo to the United Arab Emirates. The 15 were longtime terrorism suspects, but were never charged with crimes and were part of a group of detainees that the Obama administration has been trying to move to make progress in its efforts to close the facility.
They were sent to the U.A.E. because the Obama administration doesn’t transfer prisoners to Yemen due to the civil war there. The U.S. has no blanket policy against repatriating detainees to Afghanistan, but officials said they defer to the guidance of senior military officials when making decisions about where to transfer them.

Is the administration increasing the tempo of transfers? If so, why?

The rate of transfers out of Guantanamo has picked up, although President Barack Obama’s pledge to shutter the prison has proved elusive, in part because of congressional restrictions against relocating prisoners to the U.S. Meanwhile, officials are trying to whittle the facility’s population by moving out all prisoners eligible for transfer—security conditions permitting—so that the remaining detainee population will make the prison appear too costly to run. The Obama administration also has sped up the parole-like process that is involved in clearing those who have never faced charges for release.

How many detainees are left, and who are they?

When President Obama received his Nobel Prize, he argued that he would regard nuclear proliferation as his primary challenge. This is hardly surprising since even as a Columbia College student he advocated a nuclear free world – a position consistent with the idealism of a student who knew very little about the ambitions of U.S. adversaries. Yet now after eight years in office, the president retains this same arms control illusion.

Since he assumed the oath of office in 2009 the president has pressed for the shrinking and weakening of the U.S. nuclear arsenal armed as evidence by this signing of the New Start Treaty with Russia and avoiding modernization of the aging nuclear platforms.

Japan, Taiwan, among others, reliant on the U.S. nuclear umbrella for security are increasingly uncomfortable with the direction in America policy and are dubious about the reliability of our pledge for nuclear assistance.

To make matters even more confusing for U.S. allies, it appears as if the president is prepared to declare a new policy of “no first use” – a doctrine that contends America would never use nuclear weapons unless an adversary does so first. This seemingly benign gesture undermines decades of intentional ambiguity and the basis of deterrence.

In fact, State Department officials questioned about the matter argue the president’s position is wrongheaded. The fatal weakness in his contention is that it signals to our enemies that they need not fear nuclear retaliation from the U.S. even if they attack us with conventional, chemical, or biological weapons. In any war gaming escalation scenario, our battlefield initiatives end where nuclear weapons might be entertained. No first use suggests to foes that they should act as aggressively as possible short of nuclear war.

Deterrence, which has kept the lid on nuclear weapons since 1945, is undergoing a monumental shift. The Obama Administration 2010 Nuclear Posture Review contended Russia was no longer an adversary, a contention that recent history in Crimea and Syria would challenge. Moreover, it is likely the president will overlook Constitutional restraints on this matter by submitting a proposal to the United Nations Security Council thereby usurping Senate Treaty power as he did with the Iran Nuclear deal.

Does this not describe the administration of Barak Obama? His eight-year tenure in the White House has been nothing less than a “train of abuses and usurpations,” abuses of the office of president and usurpations of Congressional authority. His “Object” has always been to reduce Americans under absolute Despotism.

“…A long train of abuses and usurpations….”

Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, in detailing the numerous charges against King George III, that “…mankind are disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Does this not describe the administration of Barak Obama? His eight-year tenure in the White House has been nothing less than a “train of abuses and usurpations,” abuses of the office of president and usurpations of Congressional authority. His “Object” has always been to reduce Americans under absolute Despotism.

In 1920, H.L. Mencken made some observations that have proven to be prescient and not altogether irrelevant to the character of today’s Social Justice Warriors, aspiring collectivists, and nation transformers:

“No doubt my distaste for democracy as a political theory is…a defect that is a good deal less in the theory than in myself. In this case it is very probably my incapacity for envy….The fact that John D. Rockefeller had more money than I have is as uninteresting to me as the fact that he believed in total immersion and wore detachable cuffs.

“Thus I am never envious, and so it is impossible for me to feel any sympathy for men who are. Per corollary, it is impossible for me to get any glow out of such hallucinations as democracy and Puritanism, for if you pump envy out of them you empty them of their life blood: they are all immovably grounded upon the inferior man’s hatred of the man who is having a better time. There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and the impulse is to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness – to bring him down to the miserable level of the ‘good’ men, i.e., of stupid, cowardly and chronically unhappy men. And there is only one sound argument for democracy, that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men…and the most heinous offense for him is to prove it.

“…Such an attitude is palpably impossible to a democrat. His distinguishing mark is the fact that he always attacks his opponents, not just with open arms, but also with snorts and objurations – that he is always filled with moral indignation – that he is incapable of imagining honor in an antagonist, and hence incapable of it himself….”*