RUTHFULLY YOURS

The regimes of Turkey, Iran, and Syria all have large Kurdish minorities, and apparently do not want Kurds within their states to seek either autonomy or union within an independent Iraqi Kurdistan, and view an independent Kurdistan as a possible ally for Israel.

ERBIL — There is a sense of unity throughout Iraqi Kurdistan. The two political rivals, which have controlled Kurdistan’s politics for decades, appear to have “buried the hatchet” deep enough to withstand any continuing differences over policy and tribal interests. The Kurdistan Democratic Party [KDP], which represents the Barzani Clan, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan [PUK], which represents the Talabani Clan, remain well represented in the parliament with the KDP controlling 38 out of 111 seats and the PUK 18.[1]

There is little public mention of this past rivalry; here, clan-centered local politics seems to have been replaced by a grander vision of a future independent Republic of Kurdistan. The only major decision regarding this future development is the question of the proper timing for the declaration. There are, however, a few variables that may delay the birth of this new, non-Arab state in the Middle East.

One variable is the fate of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [ISIL]. The Kurds appear to have regained their self-confidence after a late-summer scare when ISIL forces inflicted a series of defeats on Kurdistan’s peshmerga troops. American bombing raids, Iranian Qods Force volunteers, and pro-Iranian Shia militia helped stabilize the military landscape even as Western investors fled the region.

Another variable is U.S. State Department pressure on the Kurds to remain within the Iraqi state. It appears that economic reality combined with American persuasion have succeeded in postponing the birth of the Kurdish nation-state.[2]

On Tuesday evening, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro delivered the keynote address at a conference on “America’s Standing in the World” held at Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. In his speech, Shapiro warned Israelis not to assume that the results of last month’s midterm elections have made his bosses in Washington powerless in pressing for Palestinian statehood.

“Here is a caution, lest anyone jump to conclusions,” he said. “Divided government, in which one party controls Congress and the other the Executive Branch, does not necessarily mean foreign policy gridlock.”

On the contrary, he added, “Presidents often surge and engage even more intensively in national security affairs in their final years in office.”

Don’t worry, Mr. Ambassador. Israel is under no illusions on that score. Obsessions die hard, after all. And an American administration that is enabling Iran to laugh its way to nuclear armament (among other international catastrophes) has but one piece of low-hanging fruit to pick — and pick on — before going down in history as the disaster it has been all along.

Nothing new there.

Nor was it a surprise that the State Department rushed to dispel rumors, based on a Haaretz report earlier this month, that the U.S. was about to threaten Israel with sanctions over settlement construction. Though neither the Obama administration nor the extreme left-wing Israeli newspaper is trustworthy, in this case, the latter sounded plausible — which goes to show how much faith Israel has lost in its strongest ally.

It is in this context that two recent events must be taken. One is the fall of the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on December 2, paving the way for new elections in March. The other is the death of senior Palestinian Authority official Ziad Abu Ein on Wednesday.

Netanyahu’s coalition collapsed as a result of internal battles regarding the so-called “peace process” — a euphemism for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders. To put it simplistically, the key divide that separates the two main parliamentary blocs concerns the issue of whether the onus for a peaceful two-state solution rests on Israel. Those who believe it does understand American pressure. Those who pay attention to Palestinian words and deeds — which jibe with global jihad — view the Jewish state as under assault.

Al Sharpton at the White House It sometimes seems as if he spends more time there than anywhere else. Why? By Brendan Bordelon

This, the tail end of 2014, is Al Sharpton’s moment.

Despite the firebrand minister’s shrinking physical stature, his presence on the national stage has never loomed larger. From Ferguson to Cleveland to Staten Island, black men dying at the hands of police have catapulted America’s racial obsession to new heights — carrying Sharpton along with it.

He stands solemnly with Michael Brown’s family at televised press conferences. He appears alongside Eric Garner’s grieving widow on Meet the Press. He delivers nightly sermons on race from his prime-time perch at MSNBC. Though the rehabilitation is far from perfect, it’s a far cry from the days of Tawana Brawley, Freddie’s Fashion Mart, and “white interlopers.”

How to explain the strange new respect accorded to Sharpton? Start with the White House.

Considered politically toxic by Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Sharpton has been enthusiastically embraced by President Obama. He has bragged about helping to pick a new attorney general and communed with the current one. In fact, a much-quoted Politico profile last summer described Sharpton as Obama’s “go-to man on race.”

Given the reports of phone calls and text messages frequently exchanged between Sharpton and top Obama officials, a complete accounting of the relationship may be impossible. But a perusal of the White House visitor log — which shows 61 visits by Sharpton since 2009 — illustrates the extraordinary access Sharpton has had to the president and his top advisers.

The Democrats’ CIA report overlooks the indispensable clues enhanced interrogation provided.

The location and elimination of Osama bin Laden was among the greatest achievements of the American intelligence community in the War on Terror — and “enhanced interrogation” had nothing do with it, according to the Senate Democrats’ “torture” report, released earlier this week. According to the much-touted study, “the vast majority of the documents, statements, and testimony highlighting information [that enabled the bin Laden operation] from the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, or from CIA detainees more generally, was inaccurate and incongruent with CIA records.” The minority report released by six Senate Intelligence Committee Republicans claims differently.

The majority report documents that the CIA had information about Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, the courier whose identification and tracking made possible the bin Laden raid, as early as 2001, and that over the next year they obtained a telephone number and e-mail address believed to be associated with him, details about his age, physical appearance, and family, and information that he was closely tied to bin Laden. According to the majority report, all of this information preceded the use of enhanced interrogation on any CIA detainees.

The CIA, meanwhile, has insisted on the importance of enhanced-interrogation techniques. In a May 2011 radio interview, former CIA director Michael Hayden said, “What we got, the original lead information — and frankly it was incomplete identity information on the couriers — began with information from CIA detainees at the black sites.” Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee around the same time, CIA director Leon Panetta stated that “the tipoff on the couriers came from those [detainee] interviews,” a claim he reiterated two years later on CNN’s State of the Union. Other CIA officials testified similarly.

How is one to assess these claims?

Two methodological problems that plague the majority report are likely crucial here. First, the report relies entirely on documentation, which even the report admits is incomplete. Not a single person involved in the CIA’s rendition, detention, and interrogation program — from top officials to interrogators — was interviewed.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether we crossed the line, but Feinstein’s story goes too far.

The Senate Intelligence Committee spent roughly $50 million on its investigation into the CIA and apparently couldn’t find Michael Hayden’s phone number.

The committee portrays Gen. Hayden, the former CIA director, as a liar who deceived Congress about the agency’s interrogation program, yet the committee couldn’t be bothered to interview him.

That’s because the committee, led by California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, didn’t bother to interview anyone. The committee didn’t want to include anything that might significantly complicate its cartoonish depiction of a CIA that misled everyone so it could maintain a secret prison system for the hell of it.

The Feinstein report scores some points. It makes plain that the CIA program wasn’t adequately controlled, especially at the beginning, that it went too far, and that the agency became too invested in defending it.

But the thrust of the report is devoted to the proposition that torture, or harsh interrogation, never works. This is important to critics of the CIA program because they are almost never willing to say that torture is wrong and that we should never do it — even if it sometimes works and potentially saves lives. They lack the moral conviction to make their case solely on principle.

Even though its executive summary runs more than 500 pages, the report lacks basic context, specifically an account of the post-September 11 environment in which nearly everyone expected another attack and wanted to do everything possible to avoid it. This is why the likes of the impeccably liberal Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, could say after we captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 2003 that we should be “very, very tough with him.”

The interrogation program was born against this backdrop. No one was saying of KSM, “Let’s give him some dates and olives and hope, once he finds out what nice people we are, he spills his guts and gives up Osama bin Laden’s location.”

I met and heard him when he was stumping for newly elected Rep. Lee Zeldin in NY…The man is brilliant, charming, charismatic and a true conservative. Would he could replace John Boehner….rsk
K Street’s Biggest Opponent By Kim Strassel
Jeb Hensarling has been a lonely figure fighting earmarks, subsidies and tax preferences. It’s time more Republicans joined him.

Texas gave America the Lone Ranger, and then—because it is a generous sort of place—in 2002 it gave the country an updated version of him: Rep. Jeb Hensarling. The Republican has spent a decade riding herd on cronyists who give capitalism a bad name by giving or taking special government favors. With the coming dawn of a Republican Congress, we’re about to see if the rest of the GOP sees the wisdom of joining Mr. Hensarling’s posse.

Washington’s Lone Ranger was at it again this week in the fight over reauthorizing the Terrorism Risk Insurance Program, a “temporary” program created in 2002 that requires taxpayers to absorb the costs of insurance payouts after an attack. Mr. Hensarling earlier this year set his sights on the program and methodically elevated the subject of its industry payoffs into a Washington hot topic, causing one unnamed industry lobbyist in October to gripe about the reauthorization delay: “If Jeb Hensarling were not in Congress, a bill would have passed with enormous support.” The Texan didn’t get all the reforms he wanted in the reauthorization bill that did pass this week, but he got some. And he made his point.

The episode was classic Hensarling. The congressman stepped down from the House leadership after the 2012 election to become chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, where he could be at the center of restoring what he calls the “bedrock” GOP principle of “free enterprise.” From that perch, Mr. Hensarling has doggedly worked to dismantle crony government programs that reward the well-connected business elite. While his efforts have rarely resulted in total victory, they have created flash points and forced his fellow conservatives to publicly justify their mercantilist tendencies.

At last, a chance to right a wrong after the ‘workplace violence’ slaughter at Fort Hood by an Islamist fanatic.

There has finally been a significant upturn in the case of the 2009 Fort Hood terror attack in Texas that took the lives of 13 Americans—a saga drenched, since its inception, in official lies and evasions. Not to mention the Defense Department’s studious indifference to the fate of the more than two-dozen survivors, many suffering serious wounds, but who discovered themselves ineligible for the Purple Heart and medical benefits given to military personnel injured in combat. Thanks to strong bipartisan support, the House agreed last week to an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2015 that would provide such benefits for Fort Hood’s and other military victims of terror attacks on American soil.

The provision is now given a good chance of passing the Senate. The question remains whether President Obama will veto it as he has, in the past, threatened to do with any such bill.

In the repeated pronouncements of the Defense Department and the office of the president, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan ’s shooting spree at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center—while shouting “Allahu Akbar!”—could not be categorized as a terror attack. Therefore the surviving servicemen and women could not be said to have suffered combat-related wounds.

Army spokesmen declared that Hasan’s assault should be considered a “criminal act” by a single individual. Or, in the classification soon to become famous, a case of “workplace violence”—an infuriating description that would stick, burning, in the throats of Americans with a memory of that day every time they heard it.

The Senate’s misleadingly dubbed “torture report,” an executive summary of which was released by the Senate Intelligence Committee, is a shameless and dangerous act of political grandstanding and moral preening. The investigative report of the CIA’s long-suspended interrogation program reflects nothing more than just how firmly the progressive mind is stuck in the old Vietnam War paradigm, their master narrative of American crime and left-wing righteousness. Once more, we see how reactionary is the ideology of the left, their minds unable to accommodate historical change, new ideas, or even coherent thinking.

Jose Rodriguez, a 31-year veteran of the CIA who ran the interrogation program, has detailed the hypocrisy and untruths of the report. He reminds us that in the aftermath of 9/11, lawmakers demanded that the intelligence agencies do everything possible to stop another attack. Indeed, Feinstein in May 2002 told the New York Times that “we have to do some things that historically we have not wanted to do to protect ourselves.” In her comments on the Report’s release, however, Feinstein referred to the Geneva Convention and said, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, (including what I just read) whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” Twelve years later, the political advantages of moral preening have trumped the recognition that hard choices have to be made sometimes to fulfill the federal government’s highest duty, which is to keep the citizens safe.

Rodriguez also explodes the report’s canard that the enhanced interrogation techniques were not legally sanctioned. They were in fact reviewed in 2002 and 2005 by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and in 2009 were investigated by Eric Holder’s DOJ, which did not file charges. Rodriguez also debunks the claim that the CIA withheld information concerning their use from government officials. Rodriguez should know, since he was there when the CIA briefed Senator Feinstein and House Representative Nancy Pelosi on the techniques. And he exposes the lie that EITs did not yield vital information, an assessment also contradicted by ex-CIA chief Michael Hayden, who said of the charge that it “is so untrue” that it “actually defies human comprehension. We detained about 100 people, we had a Home Depot-like warehouse of information from those people.” Former CIA chiefs James Woolsey, Porter Goss, George Tenet, and, with shrewd equivocation, Leon Panetta, along with ex-Attorney General Mike Mukasey and current CIA chief John Brennan, have confirmed that EITs did provide valuable intelligence.

Ernst Eduard vom Rath was a German diplomat representing the Third Reich in Paris in 1938. In November of that year he was shot and mortally wounded by a 17-year-old Polish Jewish youth, HerschelGrynszpan, who had been living in Germany. Vom Rath was 29 years old. Ironically, vom Rath had earlier expressed anti-Nazi sympathies, evidently based on the Nazi treatment of Jews, and was under Gestapo investigation at the time for being politically unreliable. He died of his wounds two days after being shot. Hitler used the assassination as an excuse to launch Kristallnacht, a pogrom against German Jews, shortly after the death. My father attended school with Grynszpan and knew him casually; Dad escaped to America by the time of the assassination.

Now try to imagine how the Western media would report World War II if they were using the exact same rules of journalism that they apply to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The assassination of vom Rath by a Jewish youth would be universally held up to illustrate that the German-Jewish conflict was a circle of violence, an ongoing bloody conflict whose roots are so old that no one remembers them, a conflict where each side claims it is retaliating for the violence that the other side perpetrated, a conflict whose causes are all blurred by eons of history. Sure the Germans were murdering Jews, but then there was the vom Rath assassination, proving the violence was two-directional, symmetric. Close investigation could probably find a few other examples of Jews using violence against Germans. Innocent lives are being lost on both sides. Such senseless tragedy. Why can’t both sides just live and let live?

Of course, such a representation of World War II would not only be an absurdity but also an obscenity. World War II was not about a “cycle of violence” between Germans and Jews. It was unambiguously a campaign of annihilation and oppression of Jews committed by Germans. The fact that one can identify a handful of outlier events such as the assassination of vom Rath does not convey any symmetry to the “conflict.” Indeed to misrepresent the Nazi campaign of extermination against Jews as some sort of “symmetric” pair of movements of violence would be proof that the person so misrepresenting the situation was a Nazi-sympathizer and an anti-Semite.

The Middle East conflict is not a cycle of violence. It is not a “symmetric” campaign of retaliation by Jews against Arabs and Arabs against Jews. The Middle East conflict is as unambiguously a unidirectional campaign of violence and atrocities as was World War II. It is about Arabs murdering Jews and not the inverse. It is about Arabs seeking to deny Jews their human rights and their right to self-determination, and not the inverse. The Middle East conflict consists of a century of atrocities perpetrated by Arabs against Jews.

Next month Americans will experience the fifteenth anniversary of the time that the President of the United States shook his finger at the country and informed it, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never.”

Bill Clinton was lying. But the lie was more significant than the thing that he was lying about.

When the lie came crashing down, Clinton and his defenders deconstructed the English language, questioning the meaning of every word in his sentence rather than admit that the lie was a lie.

Given a choice between telling the truth or challenging the definitions of such words as “sex” and “is”, they decided to burn their dictionary.

Clinton’s antics set the stage for a current administration which can never be caught in a lie because it’s lying all the time. Obama and his people don’t just lie, they lie about the lies and then they lie about those lies. Bringing them in to testify just clogs the filters with an extra layer of lies.

Invite Gruber to testify about the time that he admitted that the administration had been lying and the only thing that will happen is more lies being told by a man who is there only because he lied.

Like the old lady who explained her cosmology to Bertrand Russell as being “turtles all the way down”, with modern progressives it’s lies all the way down.

Lena Dunham served up a rape accusation against a conservative Republican named Barry only to hide behind the ambiguity of being an unreliable narrator. The unreliable narrator likewise takes the stage at the University of Virginia where a high profile case has dissolved into contradictory stories in which it becomes difficult to tell whether it was the reporter or her subject who was doing the lying.

The unreliable narrator has crossed over from a fictional device in novels to memoirs, journalism and into politics.