Showing posts with label World. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World. Show all posts

Sunday, January 05, 2014

THE BENGHAZI WHITEWASH: The New York Times engages in outright journalistic malpractice

Guest post by Kenneth Timmerman

The New York Times has done excellent reporting on Libya. The newspaper was among the first to reveal that U.S.-approved arms for the Libyan rebels had fallen into the hands of jihadi groups and, more generally, on the rise of al Qaeda-affiliated groups in Libya and North Africa. So the paper’s Dec. 28 “investigation” that determined with utter certainty that the attacks of Sept. 11, 2012, in Benghazi were caused by a YouTube video would be baffling if it weren’t so obvious an attempt to exonerate the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton from responsibility for the deadly failures in Libya that cost the lives of four brave Americans.

The Times’ report misconstrues known facts and simply sweeps under the table mountains of evidence of al Qaeda’s ties to Libyan jihadi groups.

In June 2012, for example, more than a dozen different jihadi groups put the black flag of al Qaeda on parade in Benghazi in what they hoped would be a three-day show of force. Thousands of jihadi fighters, many of them in Pakistani and Afghan dress, paraded through the streets of Benghazi with hundreds of gun trucks.

For The New York Times, though, the black flags were merely “the black flags of militant Islam” and apparently bore no relation to al Qaeda. “Benghazi was not infiltrated by al Qaeda,” The Times flatly asserted.

In August, Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens put his name to a cable with the auspicious title, “The Guns of August,” that explicitly warned about the security vacuum in Benghazi and Tripoli. “What we have seen are not random crimes of opportunity, but rather targeted and discriminate attacks,” the cable warned.

It was one of dozens of cables detailing the growing chaos in Libya that were turned over to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee after repeated stonewalling by the State Department. My sources say it came on the heels of an alarming security briefing by the CIA chief of station for Stevens and the Embassy security team. But for The New York Times, the cable simply “struck an understanding tone about the absence of effective policing.”

Saturday, January 04, 2014

John Kerry's Tenuous Grasp on Reality Endangers the Entire World

Guest post by Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger

The value of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's assessments and proposed peace agreement, which would reduce Israel to a 9-to-15 mile waistline (the pre-1967 lines), in the increasingly raging Middle East, is consistent with Kerry's track record.

Kerry's Syrian track record

Until the eruption of the civil war in Syria, Kerry was a member of a tiny group of U.S. senators -- along with Chuck Hagel and Hillary Clinton -- who believed that President Bashar Assad was a generous, constructive leader, a reformer and a man of his word. Kerry was a frequent flyer to Damascus, dining with Assad and his wife at the Naranj restaurant in central Damascus. Following a motorcycle ride with Assad, he returned to Washington referring to the president as "my dear friend."

In September 2009, Kerry opined that "Syria is an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region," while Assad was conducting hate-education, repressing his opposition, hosting and arming terrorist outfits like Hezbollah, cozying up to Iran, and facilitating the infiltration of jihadists into Iraq to kill U.S. soldiers. WikiLeaks disclosed that on February, 2010, Kerry told Qatari leaders that the Golan Heights should be returned to Syria and that a Palestinian capital should be established in east Jerusalem. "We know that for the Palestinians the control of Al-Aqsa mosque and the establishment of their capital in east Jerusalem are not negotiable."

According to the London Telegraph, Kerry was a fierce critic of the Bush administration's hardline against Assad, advocating a policy of engagement -- rather than sanctions -- against terror-sponsoring Syria. In March 2011, Kerry subordinated reality-driven hope to wishful-thinking-driven hope: "My judgment is that Syria will move; Syria will change, as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States and the West." However, more than 200,000 deaths and 2 million refugees later, Assad's Syria has certainly changed for the worst. In January 2005, following another meeting with Assad, Kerry said: "This is the moment of opportunity for the Middle East, for the U.S. and for the world. ... I think we found a great deal of areas of mutual interest ... strengthening the relationship between the U.S. and Syria."

On September 3, 2013, Kerry assured his colleagues that "the Syrian opposition has increasingly become more defined by its moderation." However, Assad's opposition consists, mainly, of anti-U.S., Islamic supremacists, Shariah-driven, anti-democracy, the violently intolerant Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaida, whose subversive vision transcends Syria, encompassing the Abode of Islam as a prelude to the grand assault on the Abode of the Infidel.

DEMOCRAT LOGIC COMIX: Reichstag Edition

Another one from Biff Spackle:



Hat tip: Liberal Logic 101.

The New York Times Shreds Obama

Guest post by Caroline Glick

The New York Times just delivered a mortal blow to the Obama administration and its Middle East policy. Call it fratricide. It was clearly unintentional. Indeed, is far from clear that the paper realizes what it has done.

Last Saturday the Times published an 8,000-word account by David Kirkpatrick detailing the terrorist strike against the US Consulate and the CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. In it, Kirkpatrick tore to shreds the foundations of President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism strategy and his overall policy in the Middle East.

Obama first enunciated those foundations in his June 4, 2009, speech to the Muslim world at Cairo University. Ever since, they have been the rationale behind US counterterror strategy and US Middle East policy.

Obama’s first assertion is that radical Islam is not inherently hostile to the US. As a consequence, America can appease radical Islamists. Moreover, once radical Muslims are appeased, they will become US allies, (replacing the allies the US abandons to appease the radical Muslims).

Obama’s second strategic guidepost is his claim that the only Islamic group that is a bona fide terrorist organization is the faction of al-Qaida directly subordinate to Osama bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Only this group cannot be appeased and must be destroyed through force.

The administration has dubbed the Zawahiri faction of al-Qaida “core al-Qaida.” And anyone who operates in the name of al-Qaida, or any other group that does not have courtroom-certified operational links to Zawahiri, is not really al-Qaida, and therefore, not really a terrorist group or a US enemy.

These foundations have led the US to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan. They are the rationale for the US’s embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood worldwide. They are the basis for Obama’s allegiance to Turkey’s Islamist government, and his early support for the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition.

They are the basis for the administration’s kneejerk support for the PLO against Israel.

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power

Guest post by George Friedman

When I wrote about the crisis of unemployment in Europe, I received a great deal of feedback. Europeans agreed that this is the core problem while Americans argued that the United States has the same problem, asserting that U.S. unemployment is twice as high as the government's official unemployment rate. My counterargument is that unemployment in the United States is not a problem in the same sense that it is in Europe because it does not pose a geopolitical threat. The United States does not face political disintegration from unemployment, whatever the number is. Europe might.

At the same time, I would agree that the United States faces a potentially significant but longer-term geopolitical problem deriving from economic trends. The threat to the United States is the persistent decline in the middle class' standard of living, a problem that is reshaping the social order that has been in place since World War II and that, if it continues, poses a threat to American power.

The Crisis of the American Middle Class

The median household income of Americans in 2011 was $49,103. Adjusted for inflation, the median income is just below what it was in 1989 and is $4,000 less than it was in 2000. Take-home income is a bit less than $40,000 when Social Security and state and federal taxes are included. That means a monthly income, per household, of about $3,300. It is urgent to bear in mind that half of all American households earn less than this. It is also vital to consider not the difference between 1990 and 2011, but the difference between the 1950s and 1960s and the 21st century. This is where the difference in the meaning of middle class becomes most apparent.

New York Times: We Had a Reporter Embedded With Terrorists in Benghazi During the Attack

Based on the headline, I really thought the Twitchy story entitled "NYT: ‘We had a reporter on the scene talking to the attackers during the [Benghazi] attack’" was satire. It wasn't.

What’s that? The New York Times had a reporter on the scene of the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya? Reporter David D. Kirkpatrick, who wrote this weekend’s piece on Benghazi, says it was invaluable to have a reporter on the ground talking to the attackers during the attack.

Which begs the question: who in the hell was this "reporter" and just what the hell was he doing during the attack -- and for the last 15 months? Biff Spackle offers some possibilities:


This scandal needs to go viral.


Saturday, December 28, 2013

NSA Data Collection Program Called "Orwellian" by Federal Judge Stopped a Total of... Zero Terror Attacks

Last week Federal Judge Richard Leon had some harsh words for the NSA's massive data collection programs, including the one that collects all telephone calls in America:

I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval. Surely such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment...

[It uses] almost-Orwellian technology.

The irony is rich. As Roger Aranoff observes, "...had [this] happened on George Bush’s watch, they could have been calling our government fascist, expressing hyper-outrage, and demanding impeachment."

An investigation by Michael Isikoff of NBC News found that the NSA's unconstitutional domestic data collection programs helped to stop the following number of terror attacks: none.

A member of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was “absolutely” surprised when he discovered the agency’s lack of evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had thwarted any terrorist attacks.

...Under the NSA program, first revealed by ex-contractor Edward Snowden, the agency collects in bulk the records of the time and duration of phone calls made by persons inside the United States.

...The conclusions of the panel’s reports were at direct odds with public statements by President Barack Obama and U.S. intelligence officials. “Lives have been saved,” Obama told reporters last June, referring to the bulk collection program and another program that intercepts communications overseas. “We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information.”

...But in one little-noticed footnote in its report, ... Section 215, based on the provision of the U.S. Patriot Act that provided the legal basis for it – had made “only a modest contribution to the nation’s security.” The report said that “there has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the outcome [of a terror investigation] would have been any different” without the program.

The panel’s findings echoed that of U.S. Judge Richard Leon, who in a ruling this week found the bulk collection program to be unconstitutional. Leon said that government officials were unable to cite “a single instance in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk collection metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the Government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature.”

...The comparison between [the] 702 overseas interceptions and 215 bulk metadata collection was “night and day,” said Stone. “With 702, the record is very impressive. It’s no doubt the nation is safer and spared potential attacks because of 702. There was nothing like that for 215. We asked the question and they [the NSA] gave us the data. They were very straight about it.”

In other words, the Obama administration (yawn) lied to the American people yet again.


Hat tip: BadBlue News

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Ferocious, Weak and Crazy: The North Korean Strategy

Guest post by George Friedman

North Korea's state-run media reported earlier this year that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has ordered the country's top security officials to take "substantial and high-profile important state measures," which has been widely interpreted to mean that North Korea is planning its third nuclear test. Kim said the orders were retaliation for the U.S.-led push to tighten U.N. sanctions on Pyongyang following North Korea's missile test in October. A few days before Kim's statement emerged, the North Koreans said future tests would target the United States, which North Korea regards as its key adversary along with Washington's tool, South Korea.

North Korea has been using the threat of tests and the tests themselves as weapons against its neighbors and the United States for years. On the surface, threatening to test weapons does not appear particularly sensible. If the test fails, you look weak. If it succeeds, you look dangerous without actually having a deliverable weapon. And the closer you come to having a weapon, the more likely someone is to attack you so you don't succeed in actually getting one. Developing a weapon in absolute secret would seem to make more sense. When the weapon is ready, you display it, and you have something solid to threaten enemies with.

North Korea, of course, has been doing this for years and doing it successfully, so what appears absurd on the surface quite obviously isn't. On the contrary, it has proved to be a very effective maneuver. North Korea is estimated to have a gross domestic product of about $28 billion, about the same as Latvia or Turkmenistan. Yet it has maneuvered itself into a situation where the United States, Japan, China, Russia and South Korea have sat down with it at the negotiating table in a bid to persuade it not to build weapons. Sometimes, the great powers give North Korea money and food to persuade it not to develop weapons. It sometimes agrees to a halt, but then resumes its nuclear activities. It never completes a weapon, but it frequently threatens to test one. And when it carries out such tests, it claims its tests are directed at the United States and South Korea, as if the test itself were a threat.

There is brilliance in North Korea's strategy. When the Soviet Union collapsed, North Korea was left in dire economic straits. There were reasonable expectations that its government would soon collapse, leading to the unification of the Korean Peninsula. Naturally, the goal of the North Korean government was regime survival, so it was terrified that outside powers would invade or support an uprising against it. It needed a strategy that would dissuade anyone from trying that. Being weak in every sense, this wasn't going to be easy, but the North Koreans developed a strategy that we described more than 10 years ago as ferocious, weak and crazy. North Korea has pursued this course since the 1990s, and the latest manifestation of this strategy was on display last week. The strategy has worked marvelously and is still working.

Egypt Stays One Step Ahead of Obama [Dan From New York]

Guest post by Dan From New York


I had argued some time ago that the fall of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt dealt a crushing blow to Obama’s scheme to empower the Islamist side in Israel’s volatile region – one which would be hard-to-impossible for Obama to turn back.

Now comes word the Egyptian military has taken further steps to shore up its gains; gains which Obama is now in no position to reverse.

To date, most of Obama’s foreign debacles have been easy for him and the White House media to sweep under the rug.

But this one is different. It’s disruptive, permanent and impossible to cover up.


12/25/2013

Egypt Names Muslim Brotherhood a Terrorist Group


CAIRO (AP) — Egypt's military-backed interim government has declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group, a dramatic escalation that gives authorities more power in cracking down on them.

Hossam Eissa, the Minister of Higher Education, read out the Cabinet statement after long meeting on Wednesday.

Eissa said: "The Cabinet has declared the Muslim Brotherhood group and its organization as a terrorist organization."

Eissa added that the implications of the declaration punish those who belong to the group, financing it and those promoting the group's activities.

Continue reading here...

Image: Frontpage

Monday, December 23, 2013

Susan Rice Stars as Pajamaboy on "60 Minutes"

Guest post by Investor's Business Daily

NSA Spying: The diplomat who blamed four American deaths in Benghazi on a video claims the denials by the director of national intelligence of blanket surveillance of Americans were inadvertent false representations.

It might have been slightly more credible had Pajama Boy appeared on CBS' "60 Minutes" broadcast on Sunday instead of Susan Rice. The current national security adviser and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations participated in a puff piece that might have been an episode of, "Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?"

For viewers, it was deja vu all over again.

Rice went on five Sunday talk shows on Sept. 16, 2012, five days after an al-Qaida-linked terrorist attack killed four Americans — including the first U.S. ambassador to die on duty in three decades — to parrot the administration lie that it was a spontaneous demonstration provoked by a video. This time, she claimed she had no time to revisit a "false controversy" about talking points, or, as President Obama has described Benghazi, just one of many "phony scandals."

Rice did have time, though, to repeat the line that she subbed for Secretary Hillary Clinton that Sunday because Clinton "had just gone through an incredibly painful and stressful week" and "had to reach out to the families, had to greet the bodies upon their arrival at Andrews Air Force Base."

Part of that stressful week in September 2012 included Clinton repeating the video lie to Charles Woods, father of Tyrone Woods, one of the four killed in Benghazi, in front of his son's casket.

Saturday, December 21, 2013

DISGUSTING AND OUTRAGEOUS CRIMINALITY: DHS Helping Drug Cartels Engage in Human Trafficking

Guest post by Investor's Business Daily

Border: A federal judge finds that the Department of Homeland Security, instead of arresting cartel members and the clients who pay them to smuggle children into the U.S., helps the drug lords complete the transactions.

Former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano once proclaimed the U.S. border to be as secure as it has ever been. Yet her department has been found by Judge Andrew S. Hanen of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Texas to have actively undermined that security by enabling drug cartels engaged in the lucrative smuggling of children.

The case before Judge Hanen — United States of America v. Mirtha Veronica Nava-Martinez — underscores the Obama administration's total disregard for the laws that the president swore to faithfully execute.

It also shows that the administration's cooperation with the cartels goes far beyond supplying them with assault weapons in Operation Fast and Furious.

Friday, December 20, 2013

ANOTHER HISTORIC FIRST: Federal Judge Rules Obama Administration "Aids and Abets Human Trafficking"

Irony: The first African-American president is actively helping human traffickers, slavers and smugglers:

A federal judge in Texas has issued a searing indictment of the Obama administration’s immigration policy. He accuses the government of “completing the criminal mission” of human traffickers “who are violating the border security of the United States” and assisting a “criminal conspiracy in achieving its illegal goals.” The judge calls the administration’s behavior “dangerous and unconscionable” and says that “DHS should cease telling the citizens of the United States that it is enforcing our border security laws because it is clearly not. Even worse, it is helping those who violate these laws.”

...On December 13, federal district court Judge Andrew S. Hanen of Brownsville, Texas, issued his order in U.S. v. Nava-Martinez. It described in shocking detail the malfeasance of the government. Mirtha Veronica Nava-Martinez, an admitted human trafficker and resident alien, pleaded guilty to attempting to smuggle a ten-year-old El Salvadoran girl into the U.S. This was Nava-Martinez’s second felony offense; she was convicted of food-stamp fraud in 2011...

...DHS delivered the child to the mother and took no enforcement action: “It did not arrest her. It did not prosecute her. It did not even initiate deportation proceedings for her.” As the judge said, “instead of enforcing the laws of the United States, the Government took direct steps to help the individuals who violated it,” conduct for which any “private citizen would, and should, be prosecute.”

What especially angered the judge was that this was the fourth case of this nature that he “had in as many weeks.” All involved “human traffickers who smuggled minor children [and] were apprehended short of delivering the children to their ultimate destination.”

As the judge observed, human trafficking is controlled and helps fund the Mexican drug cartels. Which means President Obama and his lawless DHS is helping funding the Mexican drug cartels, having already armed them during its malevolent Operation Fast and Furious.

Make no mistake: these traffickers are slave traders. During the course of 2013 alone, the judge noted that he had "seen instances where aliens being smuggled were assaulted, raped, kidnapped and/or killed" and subject to “exploitation and trafficking of children” as well as “violence, extortion, forced labor, sexual assault, or prostitution” to which they subject children and adults.

Judge Hansen concludes with an angry retort to the Obama administration's oft-used claims of "prosecutorial discretion":

[The Court] is not aware of any accepted legal principle, including prosecutorial discretion, that not only allows the government to decline prosecutions, but further allows it to actually complete the intended criminal mission... The DHS should enforce the laws of the United States — not break them.

This administration is historic, alright: an historic disgrace.


Related: FEDERAL COURT: Obama’s Partnership With Mexican Drug Cartels Goes Far Beyond Guns.

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

INFLATION: Keeping It Real

Guest post by Jim Quinn

The BLS reported the CPI this morning. They tell me that inflation is well contained and has only risen by 1.2% in the past twelve months. Our beloved Federal Reserve chairman is worried inflation is too low. It is fascinating that the only people worried about inflation being too low are Ivy League educated economists and bankers whose wealth depends upon the middle class sinking further into poverty. As a person who lives in the real world, I can honestly say I like it when the things I need to buy cost less today than they did last year. When did inflation become a good thing for the average American? Our country was somehow able to grow from a fledgling new country to a world power in just over a century while experiencing mild deflation, except during times of war. The fallacy that inflation is beneficial to the common man has been peddled by bankers since 1971 when Nixon and his cronies closed the gold window and unleashed the inflationary boogeyman in the form of feckless politicians, captured Keynesian academics, and greedy soulless bankers.

It is no coincidence inflation accelerated the moment politicians, academics and bankers were unleashed to spend your money at will in order to obtain votes, Nobel prizes in economics, and ill-gotten obscene levels of wealth. David Stockman described Nixon’s dreadful sellout of the American people in his brilliant new book:

“Nixon’s estimable free market advisors who gathered at the Camp David weekend were to an astonishing degree clueless as to the consequences of their recommendation to close the gold window and float the dollar. In their wildest imaginations they did not foresee that this would unhinge the monetary and financial nervous system of capitalism. They had no premonition at all that it would pave the way for a forty-year storm of financialization and a debt-besotted symbiosis between central bankers possessed by delusions of grandeur and private gamblers intoxicated with visions of delirious wealth.” -David Stockman – The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America

The USD has lost 83% of its purchasing power since 1971. The moment Nixon began playing politics with the USD and bullied the Federal Reserve Chairman into pumping up the money supply prior to the 1972 election, the inflation genie got out of the bottle and led to the miserable stagflation of the 1970′s. It took extreme measures by Paul Volcker to get it back under control in the early 1980′s. Since Volcker we’ve had nothing but academics and toadies who have chosen to change the definition of inflation in order to mislead the average American regarding how badly they are getting screwed. Every refinement, tweak, adjustment, or revision to the calculation of CPI has been designed to produce a lower figure. Why control inflation when you can just change the calculation to suit your purposes?

Over the proceeding decades, the BLS has sliced and diced the CPI in such a way that they can make it say whatever TPTB want it to say. They need to keep the mushrooms (you) in the dark regarding your standard of living deteriorating, while the beneficiaries of inflation (bankers, politicians) see their standard of living soaring. They have made hedonistic “adjustments”, quality “adjustments”, substitution “adjustments” and geometric weighting “adjustments”, all with the sole purpose to reduce the level reported to the American people on a monthly basis.

Monday, December 16, 2013

China lands rover on the moon while U.S. space program is reduced to begging the Russians for rides

Guest post by Investor's Business Daily

Unexceptional: China becomes the third country to land a spacecraft on the moon in preparation for a manned visit. Meanwhile, U.S. astronauts have to ride Russian spacecraft to fix toilets on the International Space Station.

Tourists visiting the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where one of America's retired space shuttles now resides, were no doubt able to see news reports of the landing of China's first lunar vehicle, a solar-powered rover, on the surface of the moon.

The landing of the rover 37 years after the last such mission by the Soviet Luna 24 sample-return voyage in 1976 makes China just the third nation to accomplish such a feat, joining the U.S. and Russia. Clearly, Beijing intends to be a player in space, just as on the global scene. On both scores, the Obama administration seems intent on making the U.S. a spectator.

The Chang'e 3 spacecraft and its lunar rover, sent aboard a Long March 3B rocket launched on Dec. 2 from Southwest China, is the latest triumph of an ambitious military-backed space program. Its goals include a manned orbiting space station and landing Chinese astronauts on the moon, possibly to plant their flag next to the U.S. flag left there in 1969. The rover itself is called Yutu or Jade Rabbit after the pet of Chang'e, Chinese mythology's goddess of the moon.

On Oct. 15, 2003, China's first manned spaceflight sent astronaut Yang Liwei on a 21-hour mission. An 8.5-ton space station module orbited in September 2011 was launched into space aboard a Long March 2F rocket. It was to be the prototype for a planned 60-ton Chinese space laboratory to be in orbit by 2020.

Saturday, December 14, 2013

OH, THE HUMANITY: Warmal Colding Strikes Syria

I wonder how the climate grifters like Michael "Piltdown" Mann will explain Earth's slow, inevitable slide into global cooling? You know, caused by the one factor the Climategate kooks forgot to countenance? You may know it as the "Sun":


Quick! Someone find fat-boy some tree rings -- I hear they taste like onion rings!