RUTHFULLY YOURS

At a House Oversight Committee hearing yesterday, a State Department official admitted the government does not know the whereabouts of thousands of foreigners who had their visas revoked over terror concerns.

“You don’t have a clue do you?” Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told Michele Thoren Bond, assistant secretary for the Bureau of Consular Affairs.

Bond told the committee that the U.S. has revoked more than 122,000 visas, 9,500 of which were revoked due to terrorism concerns.

Chaffetz asked Bond where those individuals were located now, to which she responded: “I don’t know.”

The startling admission came as members of the committee pressed administration officials on what safeguards are in place to reduce the risk from would-be extremists.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch has no intention of reversing the Justice Department’s defiance of the Inspector General Act. She made that clear during a House Judiciary oversight hearing last month. Indeed, her own Office of Legal Counsel has issued a badly flawed opinion that insists DOJ and FBI officials can, at their discretion, withhold information from the Justice Department’s inspector general — the individual tasked by Congress with investigating those very same officials.

This is an all too “transparent” continuation of the administration’s habit of trying to hide what the government is doing from Congress, the public, the media, and those who are supposed to be policing the executive branch.

Congress created the federal Inspector General (IG) system in the 1970s to combat problems of “waste, fraud, and abuse within designated federal departments and agencies.” Then-President Jimmy Carter said the IGs would be “the most important new tools in the fight against fraud,” and that “their ultimate responsibility is not to any individual but to the public interest.”

Only with independence and absolute access to internal information can the IGs fulfill their intended purpose. And the IG Act of 1978 could not be clearer.

With enabling Republican chumps acting precisely with the fiscal abandon of Democrats, what’s the difference? Who needs any of them?

In Paul Ryan’s acceptance speech as new House speaker, he said: “But let’s be frank: the House is broken. We are not solving problems. We are adding to them. And I am not interested in laying blame. We are not settling scores. We are wiping the slate clean.” In light of his budget-busting deal, what has he done other than become the very problem he castigates?

No doubt, the average American had hoped that statement signaled new leadership, but what it has resulted in is predictable crybaby Boehner-like capitulation. Same as the former speaker’s political expediency, another budget deal has been struck, with Democrats forestalling the threat of a government shutdown and debt default until September of 2017. At the time, Mr. Boehner claimed he was “cleaning the barn,” but what has Mr. Ryan done other than step in it with both feet while simultaneously kicking the can down the road? The old Washington adage of “the more things change, the more they stay the same” is in full holiday display.

Mr. Ryan’s Washington-insider “clean slate” double-speak was cheap political theater – lip service given and just as quickly forgotten. Likewise is his already tiresome clichéd excuses like “we played the cards that we were dealt with as best as we possibly could.” Mumbling such platitudes, Mr. Ryan’s floor-averted eyes and new, impressive peach fuzz lay bare what he is: a feckless political poser. He looks like an errant teenager caught speeding and wrecking the American public’s new Porsche. That Porsche is our faith, dashed once again, in our elected representatives to act like responsible adults with the country’s purse strings.

Some scandals come on fast, and some creep up on Washington. The slow-rolling outrage of 2015—Obama administration secrecy—received a small correction in this week’s omnibus budget bill, but it deserves far more attention. It’s time for the federal government to come back on the grid.

A steady drip of news has shown that for seven years now, the highest (and lowest) echelons of the Obama administration have conducted the people’s business in secret, via private email addresses and other hidden electronic means. They’ve been doing so in contravention of department guidelines, executive orders and statutes that require record-keeping and public accountability. Since those rules are well known and understood, it has to be assumed that they’ve been doing it purposely, to hide their actions.

The New York Times on Thursday revealed the latest email-hider: Defense Secretary Ash Carter. Mr. Carter was confirmed in February, and from the start used a private account to correspond with aides about everything from legislation to media appearances. He may well have discussed far more serious, classified matters, but we don’t know. That’s because we must rely on Mr. Carter’s word that he turned all his work correspondence over to the Defense Department. Just as we must trust that Hillary Clinton didn’t delete anything official from the private server she used as secretary of state.

This month, President Barack Obama’s defense secretary, Ashton Carter, decreed that there will be 220,000 combat military jobs offered to women — including in Army special operations forces and the Navy SEALs. He said, “They’ll be allowed to drive tanks, fire mortars and lead infantry soldiers into combat … and everything else that was previously open only to men.”

Technological changes since the time of the M60 Patton, embodied in the M1 Abrams tank, mean that a woman can probably drive a tank. But what if track pads or a tank track has to be repaired in the field and under enemy fire? Such repairs pose a significant physical challenge to men, who generally have far greater strength than women. Will our military leaders relieve women from such a task, claiming that demanding equal performance creates a “disparate,” sexually discriminatory impact?

For many years, politicians, attempting to ram “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” down the throats of Americans, insisted we should provide unknown millions of illegal aliens, who have circumvented the vetting process conducted by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) inspectors at ports of entry, with lawful status once we secured the U.S./Mexican border. They claimed that this was the only way to deal with millions of illegal aliens, since they could not deport them all.

They blithely ignored the fact that most terrorists did not enter the United States by running our borders and that the only way to adjudicate millions of applications filed by illegal aliens would be to process their applications without any face-to-face interviews and without any field investigations. In essence, they put millions of illegal aliens on an “honor system,” including transnational criminals and international terrorists. They ignored the obvious question, “What could possibly go wrong?”

Disclosures of the lack of integrity to the vetting process of Syrian refugees and the terror attacks conducted in Paris and within the United States over the past few years, provide incontrovertible evidence that the entire immigration system is failing to protect America and Americans.

Amid all the furor over Islamic terrorism in the United States, a few themes are ignored: the role of friends and family of terrorists, and how well the U.S had treated many of those who went on to kill Americans.

Take, for example, the family members of Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook, who recently murdered 14 people and wounded 21 in San Bernardino before being killed by police. The New York Times recently contacted Malik’s sister in Pakistan, Fehda Malik, who insisted that her sister was not an extremist, “She knew what was right and wrong,” Fehda Malik said.

The Times then noted of Fehda herself: “In 2011, on the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, she posted a remark on Facebook beside a photo of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center that could be interpreted as anti-American.”

Farook’s father gave an interview to the Italian newspaper La Stampa shortly after his son’s murderous rampage. He matter-of-factly remarked, “My son said that he shared [Islamic State leader Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi’s ideology and supported the creation of the Islamic State. He was also obsessed with Israel.”

Students at Riverheads High School in Greenville, Virginia, were told to practice calligraphy by writing out the statement “There is no god but Allah. Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” The assignment was given by classroom teacher Cheri Laporte.

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That statement is known as the Muslim statement of faith or the shahada. The school district defended the assignment last week when it met with outraged parents.

“Neither these lessons, nor any other lesson in the world geography course, are an attempt at indoctrination to Islam or any other religion, or a request for students to renounce their own faith or profess any belief,” the district said in a statement provided to Fox News.

Parents told The Schilling Show that their children were not given the translation of what they were writing.

Riverheads High School Principal, Max Lowe, did not directly acknowledge an inquiry requesting confirmation of the incident, clarification of policy, and disciplinary measures, if any, taken against Ms. Laporte.

The school district defended the assignment.

“The statement presented as an example of the calligraphy was not translated for students, nor were students asked to translate it, recite it or otherwise adopt or pronounce it as a personal belief,” the district stated. “They were simply asked to attempt to artistically render written Arabic in order to understand its artistic complexity.”

Further, the district said the assignment was “consistent with the Virginia Department of Education Standards of Learning and the requirements for content instruction on world monotheistic religions.”

In military conflict, bridges figure large. Retreating armies want to blow them up to slow advancing armies; advancing armies want to capture and preserve bridges to aid forward progress. They even bring along their own.

The metaphor of bridges in warfare is one way to contemplate the homeland security problem of how to retard the advancing flow of illegal migrants from the Islamic world to America’s land borders. This human traffic — the sort that camouflaged at least three ISIS terrorists as they traversed to their attack on Paris — is primarily made possible by long-haul human smuggling networks, which bridge distant countries.

These smuggling networks provide the exceptionally long bridges that for years have made it possible for “special interest aliens,” or SIAs — the term for Syrians, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Somalis, Afghanis, Iraqis, Iranians, and the citizens of two dozen other countries where Islamic terrorism organizations exist — to reach the U.S. southwestern border. Given the vast distances to be covered and the necessary stolen passports, ill-gotten visas, fake identity documents, and corrupt airport customs officers who require bribes, ISIS terrorists would be hard-pressed to make the journey without the SIA smugglers.

Philip Haney, the Homeland Security whistleblower whose investigation into Islamic infiltration of the U.S. might have prevented the San Bernardino attack, has written an important op-ed for The Hill, warning of President Obama’s misplaced priorities when it comes to national security. In brief, says Haney, “the Obama administration is more concerned with the rights of non-citizens in known Islamist groups than with the safety and security of the American people.”

There are terrorists in our midst and they arrived here using legal means right under the noses of the federal law enforcement agencies whose mission is to stop them. That is not due to malfeasance or lack of effort on the part of these officers; it is due to the restrictions placed on them by the Obama administration.

Not only did the Obama administration shut down an important investigation that could have connected enough dots to prevent the San Bernardino terrorist attack, they went back and erased the dots Haney was “diligently connecting.” Worse yet, when he complained to the DHS inspector general, the DHS and the Department of Justice subjected him “to a series of investigations and adverse actions, including one by that same inspector general.”