RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=11791

Would a U.S. military response to the use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians be justified? Ruthie Blum and Steve Ganot discuss.

An estimated 1,400 civilians were killed using chemical weapons in an Aug. 21 attack on the Ghouta region in Syria. Government officials from the U.S., Israel, Canada, France, the U.K., Germany, Turkey, and the Arab League hold the Syrian government responsible, and U.S. President Barack Obama is laying the ground for a military response against the Assad regime, while Iran and Russia blame Syrian rebels for the attack.

Iran, Syria and Hezbollah have announced that U.S. military strikes on Syria would be met with retaliation against Israel. Meanwhile, a British Parliament resolution in support of military strikes was voted down, and a number of other key U.S. allies appear to be backing away from supporting an American-led intervention. On Aug. 31, Obama announced that he would first seek congressional approval before ordering military strikes on Syrian targets.

Columnist Ruthie Blum and Israel Hayom editor Steve Ganot discuss the Obama administration’s attempts to deal with the Syrian crisis, and preparations in Israel for the possibility of retaliatory strikes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-say-no-to-a-feckless-syria-strike/2013/09/02/f217f36c-13de-11e3-880b-7503237cc69d_story.html

The Libyan war gave us the doctrine of “leading from behind.” Now, in Syria, we are about to see the birth of a new Obama Doctrine: military action “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”

That’s how one U.S. official described President Obama’s plans for a strike against the Assad regime. This is far worse than leading from behind. At least in Libya, Obama’s reluctant intervention led to the toppling of the dictator. In Syria, administration officials say their goal is to strike the regime without dramatically altering the country’s balance of power. This is nonsensical. The very purpose of military action is to “alter the balance of power” in a conflict. If that is not your objective, you should not use military power.
So what is Obama’s objective in Syria? In an interview with PBS, Obama said it would be to fire a “shot across the bow” of the Syrian regime. Huh? A “shot across the bow” is a warning shot. It is designed to send a message that a far more devastating response will follow if the target does not alter its behavior. But Obama has already ruled out broader military action. “I have no interest in any kind of open-ended conflict in Syria,” he said last week. “I assure you nobody ends up being more war-weary than me.”

In other words, he’s just planning to blow some stuff up.

Maybe that’s why Obama has not been able to build a coalition to join him in Syria. It seems no one (save the French) wants to participate in an attack “just muscular enough not to get mocked.” NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he sees “no NATO role in an international reaction to the [Syrian] regime.” The British Parliament has rejected the use of force in Syria. None of the Middle Eastern nations seeking to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are backing Obama either, because, as The Post reported this weekend, they are concerned that “limited strikes could actually work in Assad’s favor.”

They are right. When you say that your objective is to do just enough “not to get mocked,” you are projecting weakness — and weakness is provocative.

It’s not just the Assad regime that is watching our response. Al-Qaeda is watching. Hamas is watching. Hezbollah is watching. North Korea is watching. China is watching. So is Iran. Let’s not forget that Syria is not the only place where Obama has drawn a “red line” on weapons of mass destruction. In Jerusalem this year, the president declared that America would “do what we must to prevent a nuclear Iran.” Why should the mullahs in Tehran worry about crossing Obama’s red line on WMDs when they see the Syrians cross Obama’s red line on WMDs — and the president’s reaction is to do as little as he can without getting mocked?

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/357412/president-present-john-fund Obama’s pattern of indecisiveness continues — and it has Democrats worried. Washington is abuzz with talk about how much President Obama has damaged America’s credibility with his indecisiveness on Syria. It’s become accepted fact that Obama’s decision-making style resembles that of an academic convening an unruly seminar whose participants he largely disdains. What he […]

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2013/09/02/gulliver-tied-down-by-lilliputians/

One in five applicants for jobs at the Central Intelligence Agency have ties to Muslim terrorist organizations, according to the latest round of Snowden leaks. And Israel is a major target of American counterintelligence. Washington is insane.

Three years ago, the Washington Post sketched the elephantiasis in the U.S. intelligence establishment without, of course, access to the detailed numbers leaked by Edward Snowden last week. It doesn’t matter how much money you spend if you can’t hire people you can trust. If you spend $52 billion in the “black budget,” you create so many conflicting bureaucratic interest groups as to cancel out any possible signal with a wave of noise.

As I pointed out in a 2010 post at First Things, reproduced after the page break, at last count there were fewer than 2,500 Americans studying Arabic at advanced university courses (not counting, of course, the internal training of the U.S. military). Fewer than 250 were studying Farsi. The total pool of truly competent Arab speakers coming out of American universities per year probably is in the low hundreds. How many of these can U.S. intelligence agencies recruit? If we can’t recruit translators among Americans whose background is verifiable, we rely on first- and second-generation immigrants from Arab countries whose background is not verifiable. We should assume that our intelligence services are riddled with hostiles. We are Gulliver tied down by Lilliputians.

Israel, by contrast, has a surfeit of Arabic translators — the language is taught in every Israeli high school, and is easy for Hebrew-speakers to master. Israeli friends of mine who were trained as Arabic translators for intelligence work were sent to guard duty in the Negev because the military had too many skilled linguists.

The U.S. has relied extensively on friendly Arab intelligence services, above all the Egyptians, to fill the gap — except that the Obama administration did its best to bring down the Egyptian military in 2011 and install the Muslim Brotherhood. The Israelis have plenty to tell, but little that Washington wants to hear: Israel never fell victim to the mass delusion about the so-called Arab Spring, and has warned throughout (along with Saudi Arabia) that Iran’s nuclear ambitions must be crushed. Israel therefore is treated as an intelligence target rather than as a collaborator, while the Arab intelligence services who most might help us — Egyptian and Saudi — must regard us with skepticism in the best of cases and hostility in the worst.

America is flying blind into a hurricane. Americans who write about the Middle East now depend on what other countries choose to leak to us. Washington isn’t in the loop any longer.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/an-unconstitutional-military-strike?f=puball

I don’t know why the White House doesn’t just send Syria’s Bashar al-Assad a map of where it intends to attack with Tomahawk and other missiles. The bottom line, however, is that this much heralded military adventure is unconstitutional. The President has no authority to initiate the use of the military against Syria.

This has not stopped presidents from engaging the nation in wars, but the last declaration of war, as specified in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11, occurred on December 11, 1941 against Germany as a response to its formal declaration of war against the United States. Three days earlier Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor initiating a state of war.

As the Tenth Amendment Center points out, “Unless fending off a physical invasion or attack, the president is required to get a Congressional declaration of war before engaging in military hostilities in another country.”

Let us be clear about this. Syria has not declared war on the United States and, while the use of gas goes against an international convention against it, the Assad regime has already killed 100,000 Syrians in a civil war. Nor is Syria the only nation in the Middle East known to have used gas. Saddam Hussein gassed several thousand Kurds in Halabja, Iraq in 1988 and used it in his eight-year war against Iran. The West’s response was to do nothing except to condemn it.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obama-gets-syrias-on-syria

You really wish you had the credentials and clearance to attend a White House press conference, indoors or in the Rose Garden, and have the chance to pose this question to President Barack Obama: “Sir: Why don’t you just go on an extended golfing tour for the rest of your term, and leave the country alone? And, the world, too. You might be able to improve your par.”

Barring that, one could just toss a rotten egg at him. Or an over-ripe tomato. If you couldn’t get the egg or the tomato passed security, you could sacrifice one of your shoes. I don’t think the White House Press Corps shows up barefooted, leaving their footwear in a TSA-style Secret Service bin. You would look silly hobbling out of the press conference in handcuffs, but you will have asked your question, or made your point one way or another.

Whatever you threw at him – the question, the egg, the tomato, or the shoe – Obama just might get the point. Or he may not. Chances are that he wouldn’t get it, because he is truth-proof. Reality is optional for him. It is whatever he wishes it to be, and we mustn’t corner him with inconvenient questions, or shower him with expiration-dated foodstuffs.

Let’s take Syria, and President Bashar Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons. Obama has a “high confidence” that Assad used them. Translated, “high confidence” means a percentile of certainty, and not absolute certainty, based on circumstantial evidence that someone used chemical weapons, because there are bodies to prove it. However, a “high confidence,” in colloquial terms, simply means a “hunch” that Assad used them and not Syrian “rebels” using captured chemical weapons from Iraq. Or from Benghazi. Or from a Mexican drug cartel. Not evidence.

It would be easy to claim that Obama errs. Obama does not “err.” He is not handicapped by an epistemological cataract that prevents him from seeing the truth or that blurs it in a murky mist. The truth is irrelevant to him when it contradicts his wishes. He wishes it to be true that Assad used chemical weapons on Syrians. This will justify his ordering military action against Assad.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/video-jamie-glazov-on-jihad-denial-2/

To order High Noon For America: The Coming Showdown, click here.

In the two-part video interview below, Josh Brewster talks to Frontpage’s editor about his critically-acclaimed United in Hate, his latest book High Noon For America: The Coming Showdown, his family’s struggle for freedom, David Horowitz’s work and influence, and much more.

In Part I, the discussion focuses on Jamie Glazov’s parents’ dissident activity in the former Soviet Union and how it molded his battle against the Left.

Part II deals with Jamie’s United in Hate, his new book, High Noon For America: The Coming Showdown, the legacy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and David Horowitz’s priceless contribution to fighting the Left.

Both parts of the two part series are below:

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/mass-attack-thwarted-in-jerusalem/ As Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) approaches on Thursday this week, the mood here in Israel has been oddly “schizoid.” On one hand, the usual rush on apples, honey, pomegranates and the like for the holiday; on the other, a rush on gas masks as Syria and Iran threaten “retaliation” against Israel for […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-coalition-of-the-unwilling/

In 2004 and 2008, John Kerry and Barack Obama ran for office on a platform of repairing our diplomatic relations with Europe that they claimed George W. Bush had shattered with his unilateral cowboy antics.

Fast forward nine and five years respectively and the diplomatic dream team of Kerry and Obama, one of whom even speaks French, has assembled a Coalition of the Unwilling that mostly consists of France.

Obama and Kerry may have gained France, whose loss under Bush occasioned much agonizing from the Democrats, but they lost the United Kingdom, Italy, Norway, the Netherlands, Poland the Ukraine and the Czech Republic; all members of Bush’s Coalition of the Willing in Iraq.

Prime Minister Cameron lost a vote in the House of Commons over Syria; a defeat that the British paper The Telegraph blamed directly on Obama’s failures of international leadership.

George W. Bush, that rogue cowboy, had gone to the United Nations and reached out to his European allies to encourage them to stand with the United States. Faced with the need to rally Europe, Obama went to play another few rounds of golf and counted on his ambassador to do the work for him. That ambassador, an obnoxious creature named Matthew Barzun whose only qualification for the posting was the amount of money he raised for Obama, was too busy offending the Brits to be of much help.

Obama and Kerry made it clear that they would not bother with the United Nations; dramatically reversing their old position. They assumed that Europe would follow them. They were wrong.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/09/1_in_5_flagged_job_applicants_at_cia_hail_from_terror_groups.html

Gee. You’d think they were interested in infiltrating our intelligence agencies or something.

Washington Times:

An estimated one-fifth of a subset of all applicants for Central Intelligence Agency positions had significant ties to the terror groups Hamas, Hezbollah and al Qaeda, a newly released document from the Edward Snowden collection revealed Monday.

The document — released by Mr. Snowden as part of his National Security Agency intelligence dump — said the terrorist groups worked hard to infiltrate America’s top security agencies. CIA officials uncovered thousands of applicants, roughly one in five of a subset, with “significant terrorist and/or hostile intelligence connections,” the document states, as Ynet News reported.

The specifics of those ties were not revealed, but the groups most often cited as attempting to infiltrate the U.S. intelligence network were al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah.

The NSA, in response, launched investigations into 4,000 instances of suspected abnormal staff activity, Ynet News said. Those investigations included the tracking of employee keystrokes on agency computers and the recording of document downloads.

“Over the last several years, a small subset of CIA’s total job applicants were flagged due to various problems or issues,” one unnamed agency official said, as Ynet News reported. “During this period, one in five of that small subset was found to have significant connections to hostile intelligence services and-or terrorist groups.”