NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Don’t Bork Gina Haspel By Rich Lowry

Posted By on March 15th, 2018

President Donald Trump’s pick for CIA director is about to experience a good Borking.

No one doubts her professionalism. President Barack Obama’s CIA director, Leon Panetta, told CNN she’s “a good officer,” “who really knows the CIA inside out.” She has the endorsement of Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, and of Mike Morell, who served as acting director of the CIA twice under Obama.

Haspel’s career at the agency since the 1980s, including extensive work undercover in the field, is getting blotted out by her reported involvement in the CIA’s black-site interrogation program, which has become a warrant to say anything about her.

Her critics assert she should be in jail, instead of running free at the CIA, and The New York Times editorial page wrote about her nomination under the headline, “Having a Torturer Lead the C.I.A.”

Not to be outdone in demagogic attacks on anyone associated with our national security apparatus, Sen. Rand Paul calls Haspel “the head cheerleader for waterboarding,” and claims she mocked a detainee for his drooling. The only problem is that this anecdote comes from a book by a contractor who worked with the CIA, James Mitchell, and it describes a man, not a woman, making the comment.

Their factual accuracy aside, the attacks on Haspel are ahistorical in that they ignore the context of the CIA program and unfair insofar as they portray her as a remorselessly cruel prime mover behind it.

The interrogation program began when Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah was captured in March 2002, in the shadow of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Not until December 2001 had the rubble at Ground Zero been reduced to street level. In March, workers began searching for human remains in an area of the towers they hadn’t been able to reach yet. The last column wasn’t removed until the end of May. In 2002, we believed another attack was imminent and preventing it had an urgency fueled by raw memories of an event that was literally yesterday’s news.

In light of this pervasive feeling, it’s unsurprising that a broad political consensus supported doing what was necessary to get information from captured Al Qaeda leaders. The CIA repeatedly briefed select congressional leaders, especially the top Republicans and Democrats on the Intelligence committees. By all accounts, the program met with the assent of lawmakers. Later, when waterboarding become politically radioactive, Nancy Pelosi tried to say she didn’t know about it, even though a CIA memo said the interrogation techniques had been described to her in September 2002.

The briefings go to how the interrogation program wasn’t a rogue operation. It was approved at the highest level of the U.S. government and the CIA sought, and got, explicit legal approval from the Department of Justice. The enhanced interrogations of Zubaydah didn’t begin until Attorney General John Ashcroft verbally approved the methods. When he initially didn’t sign off on waterboarding, the CIA team waited until he did a few days later.

Haspel is connected in the press to the Zubaydah interrogations, although the CIA hasn’t confirmed her participation in the oversight of any particular detainee and insists much of the reporting about her work in this period is erroneous. Again, the Mitchell book suggests a man, not a woman, was in charge at the time. A New York Times report places her at the site in Thailand in question beginning in 2003, when Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding in 2002.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Mueller Witness Is Convicted Pedophile With Shadowy Past By Bradley Klapper & Karel Janicek

Posted By on March 15th, 2018

WASHINGTON (AP) — How did George Nader — Lebanese-American businessman, globe-trotting “fixer,” convicted child molester — get caught up in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation?

The answer, it seems, can be found in the shadows, where Nader has long operated.

His long history included intrepid back-channel mediation between Israel and Arab countries — and a 15-year-old pedophilia conviction in Europe that has not been previously reported. But Mueller, in his investigation of President Donald Trump, his campaign and possible wrongdoing connected to Russia, is focused on Nader’s role in two high-level get-togethers after the presidential election, according to three people familiar with the case.

Nader was caught in Mueller’s web a few days before the anniversary of Trump’s inauguration. He was transiting through Dulles International Airport outside Washington, on his way to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, when his plans changed — abruptly and involuntarily.

Mueller’s investigators stopped him, people familiar with the case said. His electronics were seized and he was then allowed to go see his lawyer. Nader later agreed to cooperate with Mueller’s investigation, said the people with knowledge of the case as it pertains to Nader. They weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the case and demanded anonymity.

Nader is little known to the public, a man who has led a shadowy existence as a go-between across numerous Middle East capitals and who gave testimony to Mueller’s Washington grand jury earlier this month.

Nader joined a meeting at New York’s Trump Tower in December 2016 that brought together presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, chief strategist Steve Bannon — fired by Trump last August — and Mohammed bin Zayed, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto leader of the United Arab Emirates.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

If You’re Buying Scientific American, Here’s Why You Should Cancel Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 15th, 2018

I’ve written often enough about how much the Scientific American has to do with lefty culture wars and how little it has to do with science. But now it had to actually pretend that Obama’s “bitter clingers” slur is science.

Why Are White Men Stockpiling Guns? Research suggests it’s largely because they’re anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market and beset by racial fears

By research, SA means the prejudices of the people doing this “research”.

The American citizen most likely to own a gun is a white male

A member of the majority of the population is most likely to own a gun? #Science

When Northland College sociologist Angela Stroud studied applications for licenses to carry concealed firearms in Texas, which exploded after President Obama was elected, she found applicants were overwhelmingly dominated by white men. In interviews, they told her that they wanted to protect themselves and the people they love.

So obviously she decided that they’re insecure and racist.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

DEALING WITH DICTATORS :MULTILATERALISM FOR A DESPOTIC AGE: DALIBOR ROHAC

Posted By on March 15th, 2018

Democracies need different rules of engagement with authoritarian regimes.

“Iknow very well that right now some are trying to isolate Cuba. We Europeans want to show, on the contrary, that we are closer to you than ever,” said Federica Mogherini, the head of the European External Action Service, in a not-so-subtle dig at the Trump Administration. A few weeks later, Carl Bildt, Sweden’s former Prime Minister, pussyfooted on Twitter around Iran’s aggressive posture in the Middle East: “Yes, Iran obviously sent a drone into Israel airspace. Israel regularly violates the airspace of Lebanon and Syria.”

The idea that political dialogue, or engagement on economic and cultural topics, can bridge the gap between countries governed by leaders who are accountable to voters and taxpayers and those pillaged by a narrow predatory elite counts among the worst misconceptions plaguing foreign policy thinking on the political Left and Right. While the two approaches often differ in their prescriptions, Barack Obama’s multilateralism and Donald Trump’s cynical realism are two sides of the same coin, producing much the same effect: to obscure the motivations of leaders of different countries and the particular incentives that they face.

Fortunately, there is an alternative to both. Even though defending Bush-era neoconservatives might not be the most popular of propositions these days, the neoconservative outlook left little space for the illusion that democracies and authoritarian regimes could behave alike in any meaningful respect in the international arena. That insight needs to be re-learned today by both American and European policymakers.

No social scientist would deny that the nature of a political regime—or its institutions—matters a great deal for domestic policy outcomes. Autocracies dependent on natural resource revenue are less likely to supply public goods and be responsive to the wishes of voters and taxpayers than democracies where public revenue comes from general taxation. Governments facing weak political scrutiny will rely on networks of patronage catering to political loyalists instead of providing public goods and a social safety net for the general public. And so on and so forth.

The same logic extends itself easily to foreign policy. When authoritarians engage in “multilateralism” or “dialogue,” they are not doing the same things as liberal democracies. A government that is accountable to voters faces public scrutiny and criticism of its foreign policy decisions. Large and consequential commitments made by liberal democracies—such as EU and NATO membership, for example—do not reflect just the whim of the leaders of the moment but a broader societal consensus, running across political divides. Not even Poland’s Law and Justice Party and Hungary’s Fidesz question the geopolitical decisions that previous governments made after the fall of communism.

Because of a much smaller number of veto players, one should accord a much lower degree of trust to promises made by authoritarians. Not even the staunchest supporters of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action would dare to argue that the deal means a material shift in the long-term ambitions of Iran’s mullahs, who are likely to scrap it the moment it becomes convenient for them. After all, the regime did not acquiesce to the temporary restrictions on its nuclear program in good faith but only because the Iran Deal also empowered it to play a much more aggressive game in the Middle East.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The High Price of Denial by Douglas Murray

Posted By on March 15th, 2018

They are now admitting what is visible to the eyes of ordinary Europeans may be an admission that things have got so bad — and are so well known — that even Chancellor Merkel and the New York Times are no longer able to ignore them.

If so, one thought must surely follow: imagine what might have been solved if the denials had never even begun?

Is it possible that mainstream politicians and the mainstream media are finally recognising what the European public can see with their own eyes? Two recent occurrences suggest that this might be so.

The first is a concession by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who almost half a year after her party’s embarrassment in national elections has finally managed to put together a coalition government. Last September saw not only Merkel’s party and her erstwhile coalition partners suffer a historic dent in their vote-share, but also saw the entry to Parliament of the five-year old anti-immigration AfD (Alternative for Germany) party, which is now so large that it constitutes the country’s official opposition. If German voters meant to send a message, it could hardly have been clearer.

Perhaps it was even listened to. On Monday February 26, Merkel gave an interview to the German broadcaster N-TV. In it she finally admitted that there are “no-go areas” in her country: “that is, areas where nobody dares to go.” She continued: “There are such areas and one has to call them by their name and do something about them.” The Chancellor claimed that she favoured a “zero tolerance” attitude towards such places but did not identify where they were. Two days later, her spokesman, Steffen Seibert stressed that “the Chancellor’s words speak for themselves.”

Although the Chancellor chose to use few words, that she said these things at all is significant. For years, German officials, like their political counterparts across the continent, have furiously denied that there are any areas of their countries to which the rule of law does not extend. Denials have also issued forth from officials in, among other countries, Sweden and France. In January 2015, Paris’s Mayor Anne Hidalgo threatened to sue Fox News after the station said there were no-go zones in her city. Hidalgo claimed at the time in an interview on CNN that “the honour of Paris” and the “image of Paris” had been harmed. It was a typically extraordinary claim, which ignored that if the “image of Paris” had taken any battering around that time, it might have been due to the massacre of 12 journalists, cartoonists and policemen at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and the slaughter of four people in a kosher supermarket two days later. So concessions like Merkel’s — as opposed to cover-ups like Hidalgo’s — are to be applauded, slightly, when they occur.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Poland: Jihad in Asylum-Seekers’ Clothing by Jan Wójcik

Posted By on March 15th, 2018

The case of Mourad T. highlights a crucial concern: the ability of jihadists to pose as refugees, operating freely around Europe to bring about its downfall.

New information has emerged about a Moroccan national arrested in Poland two years ago for ties to the ISIS terrorist, Abdelhamid Abbaoud. Abbaoud was responsible for the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, which left 130 people dead and another 300 wounded.

Polish prosecutors recently revealed that Mourad T. attended a meeting with Abbaoud and other high-profile terrorists in 2014 in Edirne, Turkey. Polish security officials maintain that Mourad was assigned the role of “scout,” to identify venues for attacks in Europe. Photos of potential targets and an improvised explosive device (IED) were found in his apartment, in the town of Rybnik. Investigators claim that Poland was not among his targets; he was heading for Germany.

Mourad was apprehended through a cooperative effort on the part of Poland’s domestic counterintelligence agency ABW, the CIA and other Western security agencies.

This is not what makes the case particularly worthy of note, however. What does is that Mourad entered Europe with the refugee influx in 2014 by pretending to be a Syrian asylum-seeker, falsifying his date of birth — portraying himself as much younger, to increase his chances to be granted asylum — and travelling through Greece, the Balkan states, Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, and finally to Poland. In 2015, he received a residence permit in Vienna from the Federal Office for Foreigners and Asylum, who were fooled by his false identity and registered him as a Syrian refugee.

By receiving official European documents, Mourad was able to enter Poland, one of the countries that has refused to accept more than a few thousand of the migrants that the European Commission demands they take in, under the EU’s mandatory quota system.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Let Our Stale Foreign Policy Dogma Leave with Tillerson A golden opportunity awaits to bring real change to the State Department. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on March 15th, 2018

Rex Tillerson’s departure from the State Department is an opportunity to correct the fossilized received wisdom that for years has hampered our foreign policy. His replacement, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, seems likely to rejuvenate State by bringing a more realist philosophy to our relations with the world.

From the start Tillerson was a dubious pick to implement the president’s policies, and his differences with Trump were predicated on the same assumptions evident in Barack Obama’s two terms. Obama is the epitome of the globalist idealism that dominates Western political and business elites. In their view, interstate relations and conflicts are best managed with “supranational constraints on unilateral policies and the progressive development of community norms,” as Oxford professor Kalypso Nicolaides put it. This “security community” favors “civilian forms of influence and action,” rather than military, and the “soft power” international idealists regularly tout to create “tolerance between states” and to “move beyond the relationships of dominance and exploitation” by mean of “integration, prevention, mediation, and persuasion.”

Obama’s disastrous foreign policy mirrored these utopian goals, what the New York Times at the beginning of Obama’s presidency identified as a “renewed emphasis on diplomacy, consultation, and the forging of broad international coalitions.” The Times was quoting Obama. In a 2007 Foreign Affairs article, he highlighted the “need to reinvigorate American diplomacy,” and to “renew American leadership in the world” and “rebuild the alliances, partnerships, and institutions necessary to confront common threats and enhance common security.” These goals, moreover, required toning down expressions of American exceptionalism, which he recommended in 2009, and participating in global affairs “not in the spirit of a patron but in the spirit of a partner–– a partner mindful of his own imperfections.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

No Boys Allowed By Mary Grabar

Posted By on March 15th, 2018

Ten years ago while teaching English at Emory University, I noticed a trend. Each year there seemed to be more and more girls on campus. Also, from the time I started teaching college in 1993 as a graduate student, I would hear gripes from male students about their high school teachers and college professors who made them read books by Amy Tan and listen to lectures on feminism, even in math.

As time passed, I also noticed a change in the demeanor of boys. Each year they seemed to become less confident. By 2013, my last year of teaching, many were walking in a stooped-over shuffle and ending statements with a question.

In 2008, in an article for the Weekly Standard, I looked into the decline of boys’ academic performance. Forced to read books about feminine topics and forced to learn under feminine pedagogy, they weren’t performing well academically. While slightly more men than women held bachelor’s degrees in 2005, women made up 57 percent of total fall enrollments and were much more likely to graduate. By 2014, 30.2 percent of women held bachelor’s degrees opposed to 29.9 percent of men. Among younger adults, aged 25 to 34, 37.5 percent of women hold bachelor’s degrees, but only 29.5 percent of men do.

Men in 2008 still held a slight advantage in earning doctorate degrees, but were projected to drop behind women by 2014. Today, women earn the majority of doctoral degrees and outnumber men in law school and medical school, as Tucker Carlson reports. He also reports that younger women now surpass men in rates of homeownership and wages. Men’s addiction and suicide rates are rising, while testosterone levels are plummeting.

From Bad to Worse to “Uncomfortable”
In the intervening 10 years, as things have gotten worse for boys and men, the rhetoric about “white male privilege” has become more strident. There are mandatory classes on diversity. Workshops on “toxic masculinity” tell men they aren’t OK. Men are even attacked forthe way they sit on a chair or a subway seat. Many teachers make it a policy to call on boys last in class and to give girls extra attention. On most campuses when it comes to charges of rape, there is a presumption of guilt. Fraternities have been banished on many campuses.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Lessons from Germany’s ‘Spring Offensive’ 100 Years Later By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 15th, 2018

One hundred years ago this month, all hell broke loose in France. On March 21, 1918, the German army on the Western Front unleashed a series of massive attacks on the exhausted British and French armies.

German General Erich Ludendorff thought he could win World War I with one final blow. He planned to punch holes between the French and British armies. Then he would drive through their trenches to the English Channel, isolating and destroying the British army.

The Germans thought they had no choice but to gamble.

The British naval blockade of Germany after three years had reduced Germany to near famine. More than 200,000 American reinforcement troops were arriving each month in France. (Nearly 2 million would land altogether.) American farms and factories were sending over huge shipments of food and munitions to the Allies.

Yet for a brief moment, the war had suddenly swung in Germany’s favor by March 1918. The German army had just knocked Russia and its new Bolshevik government out of the war. The victory on the Eastern Front freed up nearly 1 million German and Austrian soldiers, who were transferred west.

Germany had refined new rolling artillery barrages. Its dreaded “Stormtroopers” had mastered dispersed advances. The result was a brief window of advantage before the American juggernaut changed the war’s arithmetic.

The Spring Offensive almost worked. Within days, the British army had suffered some 50,000 casualties. Altogether, about a half-million French, British and American troops were killed or wounded during the entire offensive.

But within a month, the Germans were sputtering. They could get neither supplies nor reinforcements to the English Channel. Germany had greedily left 1 million soldiers behind in the east to occupy and annex huge sections of conquered Eastern Europe and western Russia.

The British and French had learned new ways of strategic retreat. By summer of 1918, the Germans were exhausted. In August, the Allies began their own (even bigger) offensive and finally crushed the retreating Germans, ending the war in November 1918.

What were the lessons of the failed German offensive?

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Why Tillerson Had to Go By Arthur Herman

Posted By on March 15th, 2018

In the Trump administration, unconventional, assertive thinking about foreign policy is in; ineffectual, process-driven diplomacy is out.

Of all the abrupt comings and goings in this administration, the dismissal of Rex Tillerson is undoubtedly the most important — maybe one of the most important firings since Harry Truman fired Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War.

By dismissing MacArthur, Truman drew a firm line between military and civilian authority that no soldier since has dared to cross. By dumping Tillerson, Trump has sent a similarly unambiguous message to the entrenched bureaucracy — Foggy Bottom’s version of the “deep state” — and to America’s political elites about the future direction of U.S. foreign policy, hopefully one that will outlast his administration.

To understand what’s going on, let’s stipulate a couple of things.

First, Rex Tillerson is a man of deeply conventional mindset during a deeply unconventional time, a man with no understanding of the rapidly changing face of world trends, especially but not limited to the rise of China as an aggressively revisionist power; Iran’s determined bid for regional hegemony, including getting nuclear weapons; and the fateful dynamic of Russia’s reassertion of its imperial ambitions in Eastern Europe and against the West under Vladimir Putin.

Second, Trump almost certainly did not realize this when he appointed Tillerson secretary of state. He probably assumed Tillerson would bring a businessman’s mindset to the job, as a hard-headed negotiator with a shrewd nose for good deals sharpened by years as a CEO of a global energy corporation, ExxonMobil. Above all, he assumed Tillerson would be someone like himself, who would immediately recognize the place of American interests in the world, and fight for those interests with energy and boldness.