RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11161/pub_detail.asp

The nation’s largest, most sophisticated law enforcement agency, the New York City Police Department, announced its acquisition of new, high-tech equipment to help police officers keep the city safe from terrorists: the NYPD’s Harbor Unit now possesses six unmanned underwater drones to help bomb technicians and emergency services unit officers to detect suspected underwater explosives.

The NYPD now possesses six underwater drones, with each costing between $75,000 and $120,000 depending on the drones’ capabilities.

These drones help to sweep the city’s waterways and bridges searching for possible bombs and IEDs (improvised explosive devices). In a recent drone demonstration, NYPD officers easily tossed the lightweight — sixteen pound – submersible equipped with lights and sonar into the harbour and sailed it beneath the hull of a large commercial tanker docked close to the Kings County (Brooklyn) Army Terminal.

The police officers showed that they were able to guide the drone via remote control in order to utilize its underwater camera to search below the ship. The drone operators, all of whom are veteran detectives, have been trained to identify what biological or radiological weapons look like and where underwater explosives or narcotics are most likely to be hidden.

Under Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and later his replacement Ray Kelly, the Harbor Unit is used more in performing counterterrorism operations than the unit is used to conduct rescue and recovery operations.

On most days the unit receives several security alerts from the police department’s Intelligence Division each day. This situation demands that the unit inspects suspicious boats below bridges, sweep an incoming cargo ship’s hull, or respond to a report of a “suspicious floating package.”

http://times247.com/ U.S. defense strategy: A smaller, sweeter Army Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta ha… Read more… Obama sidesteps Congress again, appointing 3 to NLRB Hours after making a controversial r… Read more… Odds-on favorite hopes to pull away in N.H. Mitt Romney eagerly pocketed an endo… Read more… Judge rules Muslim attack on Jewish girl […]

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/04/all-american-muslims-very-special-tribute-to-911/ Empathy is the essence of tragedy. To be able to mourn for others we have to feel their loss and make it our own. Most Americans never lost anyone on September 11. Most never knew anyone who died that day in the planes above or the buildings below. And yet we […]

http://news.yahoo.com/former-israel-pm-indicted-graft-property-scandal-084515731.html

THIS IS ABOUT GREED AND MONEY BUT HE IS MORALLY INDICTED FOR HIS SO CALLED “PEACE PLAN” WHEN HE WAS THE ACCIDENTAL PRIME MINISTER AFTER THE STILL SOMNOLENT ARIEL SHARON SUCCUMBED TO A STROKE. RSK

Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert was on Thursday indicted alongside a number of other people for allegedly taking bribes in a massive property scandal, judicial sources said.

The allegations stem from Olmert’s tenure as Jerusalem mayor and will add to the woes of the former premier, who is already on trial on three unrelated counts of fraud and bribery.

Olmert is accused of allegedly accepting bribes to smooth the way for the construction of the huge Holyland residential complex in Jerusalem during his tenure as mayor in the 1990s.

“An indictment has been served on Olmert and others,” a spokeswoman for the courts administration told AFP.

The indictment named Olmert, his former aide Shula Zaken and his successor as mayor, Uri Lupolianski, along with several senior city hall officials, prominent businessmen and property developers.

Last March, the justice ministry said Israeli prosecutors were poised to file charges against 18 people, including Olmert, for allegedly taking bribes during the time when he was mayor of Jerusalem.

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Decline-or-acquiesence–7248

An introduction to our symposium “Is America in Decline?,” held jointly with England’s Social Affairs Unit.

Burke was right!
We are only five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

—Barack Obama, October 2008

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.
—Barack Obama, April 2009

Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.
—Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History

Decline is once again in vogue.1 When we began contemplating a symposium on the question “Is America in Decline” last spring, little did we think that our finger would be so firmly on the pulse of the Zeitgeist. Look around: kindred symposia, essays, and special sections have sprouted up like mushrooms. Some have employed the same title we chose—“Is America in Decline?”—but I’ve noticed a gradual ratcheting up of the rhetorical volume. The current issue of Foreign Affairs, for example, screams in seventy-two-point type: “Is America Over?”

English is not as formal as Latin in distinguishing between questions that are genuine questions and those that expect a certain answer, Yes or No as the case may be. This gives writers and editors a little epistemological wiggle room. “Is America in Decline?” “Is America Over?” Are those genuine questions or covert declarations? You have to read on to find out. Let me say straightaway, then, that we intend our question mark to be a neutral interrogative. There are plenty of sobering observations and depressing statistics in the essays that follow. But the (generally gleeful) certitude that the answer to such questions must be Yes is hasty if not misplaced. The rejoinders “That depends” and “Compared to what?” never seem to receive the attention they deserve.

http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/columns/louis-rene-beres/israels-survival/2012/01/04/

Credo quia absurdum. “I believe because it is absurd.” It is a mantra I have used often here in The Jewish Press in reference to Israel’s persistent security dilemma.At this latest time of testing for Israel, this mantra – an ancient Latin adage – may once again become the Jewish state’s most “reasonable” exclamation.

Ironic, perhaps, but why not? When, after all, have Israel’s critical victories ever been explicable in ordinary military or political terms? When have we ever been asked to believe, convincingly, that an utterly beleaguered country, half the size of Lake Michigan, would somehow be able to survive by combining advanced technologies, coherent military planning, and manifestly clever strategic operations?

At its core, Israel’s “being” is really about the incontestable meanings of “aliveness.” We Jews, both in our prayers, and in our sacred rituals, have always understood the difference between life and death, between the “blessing” and the “curse.” Now, in essence, all Jewish survival, individually and collectively, recognizably or obscured, is inextricably bound up with survival of the Jewish state. Reciprocally, the macro concern of Israel’s physical survival is now always a question about the individual Jew writ large.

The U.S. and Biblical Israel
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/287090

By now, most Americans know that the “two-state solution” is no solution to the war that supremacist Muslims have been waging against the state of Israel since its rebirth in 1948. Most Americans in public life know it too, but in public, nearly all of them pay lip service to the idea of a Palestinian state. To do that plausibly, they have to studiously avoid any public mention of facts about the Palestinians that make it glaringly obvious that a Palestinian state is not in America’s national interest; and glaringly clear that empowering the Palestinians and the forces and ideas they represent is a self-destructive policy — a threat to our national security and a defeat for our values.

In the last Republican primary debate of 2011, Newt Gingrich broke the rules, giving voice to three undeniable facts about the Palestinians. He said: “These people are terrorists,” with an “invented identity,” and they teach their children that hating and killing Jews is their highest purpose in life. Michele Bachmann quickly backed him up with a factual account of the ubiquitous Saudi-financed textbooks that teach precisely that, from pre-school through university. Proper foreign-policy types, on and off the stage, reacted as if all this truth-telling were somehow akin to profaning a sacred script, but the Iowa audience was with the truth-tellers. They applauded wildly.

NO URL HERE…..THE AUTHOR IS AN E-PAL….RSK

I pray you are like me and adamantly refuse to give up your freedom of speech.

If we lose our freedom of speech what will we lose next? Freedom of religion? Freedom of opinion? Freedom of choice? etc?

Our enemies, the fanatic Islamists, want to restrict us from exercising our constitutional right of free speech. Below are instances where they have in one way or another, attempted to, and or succeeded in, limiting our freedom of speech.

One effective non-violent tool the Islamists use is threat. There have been a number of hotels, noted below, that have been threatened, and subsequently caved in, canceling already booked anti-Jihadist events that displeased Muslims.

Meet the Taliban leader Obama wants to release from Guantanamo

http://blog.american.com/2012/01/meet-the-taliban-leader-obama-wants-to-release-from-guantanamo/

As Michael notes, the Obama administration wants to open peace talks with the Taliban and reward them before they even come to the table by releasing senior Taliban leaders held at Guantanamo Bay. Fox News reports that a senior U.S. official has confirmed that “Mullah Mohammed Fazl is among the prisoners being considered for release.”

http://www.paktoday.com/mwtoday/honig30.htm

I remember watching older college friends mastering the Pinochle deck, and then later becoming pretty good myself.

Four-handed Pinochle, pitting opposing pairs of players against each other, was the most popular version, but I soon learned the far more personal three-handed variety as well. The latter involved each player working just for himself; inevitably, this led to two teaming up against the player in the lead…for the time being at least. I recall my late father, of blessed memory, getting upset with me and my younger brother over this. We tried to explain that it was nothing personal…but to no avail.

Keep this in mind as we proceed.

As promised, President Obama has pulled all American troops out of Iraq before the end of the year…for good or for bad. Washington’s war in Mesopotamia is now officially over.

I’ve written lots about this subject over the decades, and my work has been showcased in scores of analyses in print and web publications all over the world. Some examples include the heavily Nobel Laureate-sponsored, Fall 1981 academic journal, Middle East Review ; inclusion on the recommended reference list of Paris’s acclaimed Institut d’Etudes Politique (Sciences-Po); my interview in The Kurdistan Tribune; analyses in the Kurdistan Regional Government’s own publication; dozens of op-eds in web publications such as ekurd.net. Kurdishmedia.com, the Kurdistan National Assembly of Syria, and others as well; major print newspaper articles; etc. and so forth.

Before continuing, for the reader new to Iraqi politics, a review of the following sample articles should prove to be useful. I’ll start out with the latest, before this current analysis, and then provide several earlier op-eds from different sources as well…

Iraq: What Not To Do … http://www.ekurd.net/mismas/articles/misc2011/10/article110.htm

State Department Math … http://www.krg.org/articles/detail.asp?rnr=77&lngnr=12&anr=6589&smap

Why The Double Standards? … http://www.kurdmedia.com/article.aspx?id=9279

Who Won’t Be Making Jokes About WMD … http://www.turkishdigest.com/2005/01/gerald-honigman-who-wont-be-making.html

What’s Your Plan B ? … http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/5793

Okay, enough of the background stuff…let’s move on.

The power-sharing plan in Iraq’s post-Saddam, American-backed federal games gave representatives from each of the three major religious and ethnic blocks key positions in government—Shi’a Arabs, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds.

To no one with functioning neurons’ surprise, no sooner did America exit the scene, there was a return to an upsurge in sectarian violence. Scores of Shi’a were recently blown apart by Sunni suicide bombers.

At the same time that the above was happening, the Sunni Vice President, Tariq al-Hashemi, had taken refuge in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in the north—a guest of Iraq’s President, and one of the two main Kurdish leaders, Jalal Talabani. The Shi’a Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, accused him of orchestrating hit squads against Sunni enemies.

As I’ve written often before, if ever there was a counterpart to the now extinct non-nation nation of Yugoslavia, Iraq is it.

Millions of diverse peoples who hated each other were brought together after the break-up of empires in the wake of World War I. And just as the glue which held together the former was manifested in a powerful, feared dictator (Marshal Tito), the same held true for decades in Saddam’s Iraq. When Tito passed on from Earth, Yugoslavia’s days as a unified state were numbered. Likewise, I wouldn’t place bets on the long-term unity of Iraq with Saddam now gone either…short of massive outside intervention, once again, to further others’ interests.