RUTHFULLY YOURS

In his first televised interview since a non-disclosure agreement was loosened, Dr. James Mitchell, an Air Force psychologist who was an integral part of the controversial CIA enhanced interrogation program, lashed out at the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Monday’s Kelly File. Mitchell, who gave very specific details about the interrogations of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, who was at the time a suspect in the attacks, told Kelly that he’s angry about the report and feels that the disclosure of his identity has put him in danger. Mitchell said, “They had a foregone conclusion.” He believes the CIA put his life and the lives of other CIA officials and their families in danger. “For some sort of moral high ground?” he asked.
Mitchell said that the report didn’t include any Republicans and it didn’t include the CIA. “From my perspective and the perspective of the other interrogators that were involved that I’ve talked to, it seems almost like some secret tribunal. Some Star Chamber. It’s like being caught up in a bad spy novel,” Mitchell told Kelly.

He said the CIA report has accused him and fellow interrogators of “some horrible things” but they can’t be prosecuted because what they did was legal at the time. “They didn’t give us the chance to explain anything. They didn’t bother talking to the people at the CIA or the people who were no longer at the CIA who were involved, like the past directors.” He said the report has stirred up “all of the crazies and all the jihadists and so now we’re getting death threats and we’re getting all kinds of things. ”

“I do not mind giving my life for my country, but I do mind giving my life for a food fight for political reasons between two groups of people who should be able to work it out like adults,” Mitchell told Kelly when asked if his life was in danger.

”No one from the Senate committee has ever asked me a single thing. If they think I’ve abused somebody they should ask me about it. They should point at the piece of the paper, let me review the documents, and let me at least try to explain my…ourselves. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has the opportunity to address the charges against him but I don’t,” Mitchell complained.

Mitchell said he is proud of the work the int

Ban Ki-Moon Negligent on Climate Science By Tom Harris
Ban Ki-Moon Negligent on Climate Science
The secretary general ignores the many scientists who present him with conflicting information.

The climate controversy is one of the world’s most important discussions. At stake are billions of dollars, countless jobs, and — if UN negotiators are right — the fate of the global environment itself.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon should therefore help create a political climate that encourages all global warming experts to contribute to the debate. With a bachelor’s degree in international relations and a master’s degree in public administration, Ban lacks the training to properly assess the science. So his only fair course of action is to encourage his science advisors to carefully consider all reputable points of view about the factors driving climate change.

But Ban does the opposite. He takes sides, choosing to only credit scientists who assert that dangerous climate change is being caused by human activity.

During the UN Climate Change Conferences in 2007 (Bali), 2009 (Copenhagen), and 2012 (Qatar), hundreds of climate experts endorsed open letters to Ban explaining where he was going wrong on the science. Among the scientific luminaries signing the letters were Dr. Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists; Freeman J. Dyson of Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton; Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski, professor of natural sciences, Warsaw; Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, professor of meteorology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu, founding director, International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska; William Kininmonth, former head of Australia’s National Climate Centre; Dr. Gösta Walin, professor emeritus in oceanography, Göteborg University, Sweden; and Dr. Habibullo I. Abdussamatov, of the Pulkovo Observatory, Russian Academy of Sciences.

The secretary general did not even acknowledge receipt of the open letters, let alone address any of the scientists’ points. Yet Ban condemns Canada for not doing more on climate change, while neglecting his own failure to deal fairly with this difficult issue.

Officers chant “Chavez Lives” at their “Studies of the Thoughts of the Supreme Commander Hugo Chavez” classes. But Supreme Commander Chavez was killed by Cuban medicine and his regime and philosophy are on their last legs as the Venezuelan people have turned against his successor.

When Cuban medicine let Chavez die, it also raised a tombstone for the Castro regime. Chavez gave away 100,000 barrels a day to Castro keeping the Communist regime afloat. In return Cuban secret police, organizers and teachers helped keep the Supreme Commander in power. But Hugo Chavez is dead and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, is wildly unpopular. Venezuela has turned into Cuba with food shortages and soldiers in the street and no one wants to live like Cuba.

Not even the Cubans do.

The cult of Chavez portrays him as a holy figure to Venezuela’s poor and to its military officers who are the last firewall of a collapsing government which needs soldiers and street thugs to protect Maduro. But the revolution is collapsing faster than the next wave of officers can be indoctrinated with chants of “Chavez Lives”. This inevitable failure of Socialism is being unintentionally sped up by Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi campaign against American fracking has dumped cheap oil on the market hurting Russia, Iran and Venezuela; all of which rely heavily on energy exports.

Chavez had screamed against capitalism in fiery speeches while building his Socialist revolution around oil exports and financial credit. Now Maduro is stuck with a $5 billion bill and no way to pay it. The former bus driver and community organizer vowed that he would make oil $100 a barrel. Not only does he have no way of doing that outside his own miserable price controlled country, but oil is headed for $50 a barrel and Maduro is stuck denouncing credit rating companies for ranking Venezuela below African countries with Ebola. African countries with Ebola however have lower debt and a financial plan that doesn’t involve delivering a speech denouncing the CIA every hour on the hour.

Maduro and his Cuban handlers know that a debt default is coming. There are basic shortages all over the country of everything from milk to toilet paper. A debt default will make Venezuela’s deeply dysfunctional economy in which no one can buy a new car and people fly out of the country to get dollars to buy basic products on the black market even worse.

Hatred of Women on the March in Iran By Majid Rafizadeh

The hatred, misogyny and injustice against Iranian women has continued to ratchet up under the office of the so-called moderate president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani.

After a series of acid attacks against young women in the city of Esfahan, the Iranian parliament (Majlis) has passed a new bill, which would allow Basij, the governmental volunteer militia, to go around in the streets and give verbal warning to those Iranian women who do not comply with the government’s Islamic dress code.

More recently, stabbing women has become another sign of increased violence. A suspect was recently arrested for stabbing six women in city of Fars in Iran, reportedly for wearing an improper hijab. One of the women was stabbed in the stomach. According to Saham News, the suspect is the son of a Basij Commander from the village of Ghotbabad.

The Basij, which is supervised by the Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, intervenes in the day to day activities of ordinary people, spying on individuals, and attempting to impose the ideological and Islamist doctrine of the Iranian government.

When I used to live in Iran, I, like many Iranian people, witnessed how young girls would be dragged into police cars by the moral police for not complying with the government’s religious dress code. Showing some strands of hair or some part of the body in public can lead to arrest, imprisonment, and fines.

The Vigilante Law to Impose Hijab and Dress Code

The police beat them with clubs and metal brushes. Some of the teenagers were beaten so badly that their heads were covered with bald spots because the hair would no longer grow back from the trauma. (“MJ” a missionary who with his wife sheltered North Korean orphans)

On December 10, 2014, Human Rights Day, the American media was salivating over the Senate Democrats’ report about enhanced interrogation of terrorists, raging over the U.S. government’s violation of jihadists’ human rights. At the same time, condemnation of America’s police forces continued to spread throughout the country, leading to well-orchestrated protests this past weekend. Meanwhile, a Capitol Hill press conference sought to open the eyes of the world to true torture and real police brutality.

The press conference, was sponsored by the North Korea Freedom Coalition (NKFC), under the chairmanship of Dr. Suzanne Scholte. The NKFC was joined by U.S. Representatives Ed Royce (R-CA) and Eliot Engel (D-NY) to focus on the circumstances of nine North Korean teenagers who were forced back to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in May 2013 by the Laotian and Chinese governments. Their whereabouts has been unknown since the repatriation, but recent rumors have suggested that at least some of the seven boys and two girls may have been executed as punishment for leaving Kim Jong Un’s wonderland.

The young people are known as the “Laos Nine” because it was from Laos that they were returned to China and repatriated to North Korea. They had been part of the kkotjebbi (homeless North Korean children living on the streets in China). They were taken in by a missionary “MJ” and his wife, who have saved the lives of many North Korean children, in spite of the risk to themselves.

Police brutality is a daily reality for the kkotjebbi according to MJ. In a statement for the press conference, he revealed that “most of the children were eating what they could find in trash cans and were sleeping in the sewers in freezing conditions,” all the while trying to avoid the notice of the brutal Chinese border patrol guards who beat them with clubs and metal brushes.

MJ said that the children “had no access to medical care and begged on the streets with frostbitten and infected feet.” And yet for North Korean escapees, even facing beatings from the Chinese police and freezing to death are preferable than being caught by the Chinese government and forcibly repatriated to the police state of North Korea.

The mind-numbing savagery of radical Islam plumbed new depths in Pakistan yesterday. Taliban terrorists shouting “Allahu akbar” attacked the Army Public School and Degree College in Peshawar, slaughtering 142 people, including 132 children between the ages of six and 16. Another 10 staff members, including the principal, were also murdered. “They didn’t take any hostages initially and started firing in the hall,” said Maj. Gen. Asim Bajwa, a military spokesman.

The details of the slaughter are horrific. “We were in the education hall when militants barged in, shooting,” said Zeeshan, a student, speaking at a hospital. “Our instructor asked us to duck and lay down and then I saw militants walking past rows of students shooting them in the head.” Another student confirmed those shootings. “The gunmen entered class by class and shot some kids one by one,” he told local media. Jamshed Khan, a school bus driver, also described the scene. “We were standing outside the school and firing suddenly started and there was chaos everywhere and the screams of children and teachers,” he said.

According to the International Business Times, the Taliban monsters allegedly stooped even lower to satisfy their bloodlust. “They burnt a teacher in front of the students in a classroom,” an unnamed military source revealed. “They literally set the teacher on fire with gasoline and made the kids watch.” Moreover, Pakistani officials revealed that many of the dead children brought to the hospital had their heads chopped off.

The assault began around 11 a.m. local time (1 a.m. EST) when seven terrorists wearing police uniforms and suicide vests scaled the wall of the school. They immediately began lobbing hand grenades and shooting indiscriminately at a time when approximately 1,000 of the school’s 2,500 male and female students in grades one through 10 were in attendance. The siege lasted more than eight hours, with Pakistani security forces forced to deal with five “heavy” explosions heard around 5 a.m. EST, in a seeming attempt to hinder rescue efforts. All seven attackers were ultimately killed, with the Daily News reporting that once they were finally cornered by Pakistani commandos “they blew themselves up rather than surrender.” A sweep of the compound for additional explosives was subsequently undertaken.

An unnamed security official illuminated the one and only objective of these savage thugs. “These attackers were not in the mood to take hostages,” he said. “They were there to kill and this is what they did.”

Some of those now criticizing the program as illegal seem oddly uninterested in the laws they themselves helped write.

Considering that the now-abolished Central Intelligence Agency interrogation program adopted in the wake of 9/11 was intended to protect the U.S. from another deadly attack, it is stunning to hear those now criticizing the program issue the solemn reminder that “we are a nation of laws”—while devoting little attention to what was actually in those laws. Odder still, among the critics those who wrote the laws seem to devote the least attention to them.

Take, for example, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the prime mover behind last week’s release of a more than 500-page “ Executive Summary ” of the report by Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. She attaches her own six-page foreword, beginning with the dutiful assurance on the first page that the “horror” of the television footage of the 9/11 attacks “will remain with me for the rest of my life.” Thus credentialed, Sen. Feinstein proceeds to the task at hand: CIA personnel “decided to initiate a program” of “brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values.” Setting aside for a moment the reference to “our values,” that statement is demonstrably false.

Laws are a technical business in which both terminology and chronology play a part. So if the law that criminalizes torture defines it in a certain way, that definition—and no more—is what it is, punditry and cocktail-party figures of speech notwithstanding.

In September 2001, there was but one law that defined torture, making it a crime to act with the intent to cause “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” Severe physical pain or suffering is not defined. Severe mental pain or suffering is defined as “prolonged mental harm” resulting from any of four causes, including causing severe physical pain or suffering.

#ChanukahAction to End Police Violence is a national day of Jewish action in support of criminal justice reform and police accountability. So far actions have been planned in 15 cities, from Brooklyn to San Francisco, where Jews will come together to light the first Chanukah candle and proclaim their commitment to ending police violence against the Black community. I implore you to lend your voice and your feet to the new struggle for Black civil rights by standing up with the Jewish community to proclaim that Black Lives Matter.

Visit http://chanukahaction.org to find an event in your city or to find resources to help you plan your own action.
JAN POLLER RESPONDS
I am a serious guy and I am an activist. I suggest that you google Jan Poller MoveOn.

Do you support Abu Jamal?.

Did you like the new York protestors who yelled:

What Do we want? Dead Cops!
When do we want then? NOW!

Do you think cops get up in the morning and say to themselves “Where can I find a Black or Hispanic” to shoot?

Are you concerned about ISIS/ISIL/IS? How about the Taliban and Boko Haram? How about Nusrah and al Qaeda?

Are you in the least concerned about Hezbollah having 100,000 rockets in contravention to UN Resolution 1701 that ended one of the Lebanese wars? Do you, like Hillary Clinton, have empathy and understanding of Hamas?

http://mosaicmagazine.com/book/menachem-begins-zionist-legacy/?utm_source=Mosaic+Newsletter&utm_campaign=74500eda89-Announcing_Begin_Book&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-74500eda89-41165129
Michael Doran, Douglas Feith, Daniel Gordis, Hillel Halkin, Meir Soloveichik and Ruth Wisse
This collection of brilliant and never-before-published essays by six of the most perceptive observers of Jewish and American life gives fresh insight into the personal, political, and religious character of one of Israel’s most remarkable and controversial figures.

Menachem Begin’s Zionist Legacy explains Begin’s “unabashed and unapologetic commitment to his people before any others”; the misunderstood relationship between Begin and his mentor Ze’ev Jabotinsky; why Begin was detested by his rival David Ben-Gurion; and the true role of Jimmy Carter in the process leading up to the Camp David Accords. And there’s lots more.

Available now from Mosaic Books in all major ebook formats. Forthcoming in hard-cover from the Toby Press in 2015. Published in collaboration with the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University.
Release date

December 2014

FROM MY FRIEND AND E-PAL BUD BURRELL…..

Mornings at the Pentagon By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY
Over the last 12 months, 1,042 soldiers, Marines, sailors and Air Force personnel have given their lives in the terrible duty that is war. Thousands more have come home on stretchers, horribly wounded and facing months or years in military hospitals. This week, I’m turning my space over to a good friend and former roommate, Army Lt. Col. Robert Bateman, who recently completed a year long tour of duty and is now back at the Pentagon. Here’s Lt. Col. Bateman’s account of a little-known ceremony that fills the halls of the Army corridor of the Pentagon with cheers, applause and many tears every Friday morning. It first appeared on May 17 on the Weblog of media critic and pundit Eric Altermanat the Media Matters for America Website.

“It is 110 yards from the “E” ring to the “A” ring of the Pentagon. This section of the Pentagon is newly renovated; the floors shine, the hallway is broad, and the lighting is bright. At this instant the entire length of the corridor is packed with officers, a few sergeants and some civilians, all crammed tightly three and four deep against the walls. There are thousands here.

This hallway, more than any other, is the `Army’ hallway. The G3 offices line one side, G2 the other, G8 is around the corner. All Army. Moderate conversations flow in a low buzz. Friends who may not have seen each other for a few weeks, or a few years, spot each other, cross the way and renew.

Everyone shifts to ensure an open path remains down the center. The air conditioning system was not designed for this press of bodies in this area.

The temperature is rising already. Nobody cares. “10:36 hours: The clapping starts at the E-Ring. That is the outermost of the five rings of the Pentagon and it is closest to the entrance to the building. This clapping is low, sustained, hearty. It is applause with a deep emotion behind it as it moves forward in a wave down the length of the hallway.

A steady rolling wave of sound it is, moving at the pace of the soldier in the wheelchair who marks the forward edge with his presence. He is the first. He is missing the greater part of one leg, and some of his wounds are still suppurating. By his age I expect that he is a private, or perhaps a private first class.

Captains, majors, lieutenant colonels and colonels meet his gaze and nod as they applaud, soldier to soldier. Three years ago when I described one of these events, those lining the hallways were somewhat different. The applause a little wilder, perhaps in private guilt for not having shared in the burden … Yet.

Now almost everyone lining the hallway is, like the man in the wheelchair, also a combat veteran. This steadies the applause, but I think deepens the sentiment. We have all been there now. The soldier’s chair is pushed by, I believe, a full colonel.

“Behind him, and stretching the length from Rings E to A, come more of his peers, each private, corporal, or sergeant assisted as need be by a field grade officer.