Posted tagged ‘Obama Administration’

Report: Obama Admin. Lied About Rate That Criminal Immigrants Re-Commit Violent Crimes

June 5, 2016

Report: Obama Admin. Lied About Rate That Criminal Immigrants Re-Commit Violent Crimes, Daily Caller, Christian Datoc, June 5, 2016

A new report from the Boston Globe shows that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers may have lied to Congress and the public about the likelihood of criminal immigrants, who should have been deported, to re-commit violent crimes when released into the general population.

The Boston Globe reviewed the cases of immigrants who had been set free in New England from 2008-2102, rather than being deported to their native countries.

Of the 323 criminal immigrants tracked, 30 percent were found to re-commit violent crimes, “including rape, attempted murder and child molestation.”

ICE does not normally publish the criminal records of immigrants, and the Globe only learned the names of the 323 case studies by suing the federal government to release that information back in 2013.

ICE argues a 2001 Supreme Court ruling makes it illegal to indefinitely jail immigrants and will release them into the general population if not deported within six months.

The Globe also found that the 30 percent of re-offenders have a high-likelihood of committing the same type of crimes, against the same victims.

The Globe found that a Massachusetts man was supposed to be deported after he served jail time for bashing his ex-girlfriend on the head with a hammer — but ICE released him in October 2009. Three months later, he found the ex-girlfriend and stabbed her repeatedly. A Rhode Island man who had served prison time for a home invasion was also released from immigration detention in 2009; five years later, he was arrested for attacking his former girlfriend. In 2010, ICE released a man with a lengthy criminal record in Maine; a few months later he grabbed a man outside a 7-Eleven, held a knife to the man’s throat, and robbed him. 

The Globe claims that ICE officials have testified before Congress that the likelihood of these immigrants to re-commit violent crimes is less than 10 percent.

 

Scrubbing Texts is Nothing New for Team Obama

June 4, 2016

Scrubbing Texts is Nothing New for Team Obama, Power LinePaul Mirengoff, June 4, 2016

In a post called “On the Iran deal, lies upon lies,” I discussed the deletion by the State Department from an archived video of an exchange in which spokeswoman Jen Psaki effectively admitted that the administration lied about its nuclear negotiations with Iran. Summarizing the situation better than I did in my post, Jake Tapper explains:

There was a first lie told to us about the secret talks between Iran and the Obama administration. We’ll call that lie number one. Now Jen Psaki acknowledged lie number one later that year, 2013. But then someone removed that acknowledgement from the official video. Let’s refer to the scrubbing as lie number two. And then, three weeks ago, we were lied to again, with the whole glitch thing. We’ll call that lie number three.

The Algemeiner reminds of two past instances of record scrubbing — the kind of dishonesty evinced in what Tapper calls “lie number two” — by the Obama administration (it also cites a couple of examples from previous Democratic administrations). In both prior cases, as with the Psaki deletion, the Obama administration tampered with words in order to promote a false narrative on important matters of foreign policy and national security.

Team Obama did this so recently that when I first read about the Psaki deletion, I thought we might already have written about it. Just two months ago, during a meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House, French president Francois Hollande used the term “Islamist terrorism” when referring to the recent Islamic State terrorist attacks in Europe. As Scott noted here, someone at White House deleted this language from the official White House video.

As it initially did with the Psaki deletion, the White House official claimed there had been a “technical issue” that “led to a brief drop in the audio.” However, he could not explain why the alleged technical problem occurred at the precise moment that the words “Islamist terror” were spoken or how the glitch managed to correct itself in time for Hollande’s next words.

Hollande’s words were inconsistent with the Obama narrative on terrorism, which somehow seeks to deny that the terrorism plaguing the world is “lslamist.” Therefore, the words had to go.

Two years earlier, the White House famously edited the Benghazi talking points. Among other edits, someone changed the characterization of the violence from “attacks” to “demonstrations” before the document was given to Susan Rice for peddling on the major television networks.

Who made the change? When asked this question by Bret Baier, former National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor replied “I don’t remember. . . .Dude, that was like two years ago.”

When asked the corresponding question about the Psaki deletion, State Department spokesman John Kirby gave the same answer, minus “dude” and “like.”

The original version of the talking points contradicted then-operative Obama narrative on terrorism, which held that Obama had essentially conquered it. Therefore, the words had to go.

In the case of the latest scrubbing, Psaki’s statement to James Rosen contradicted the Obama narrative on the Iran nuclear talks, which claimed they were prompted by the election of a “moderate” Iranian president. It also constituted an admission that the administration wasn’t always truthful about its negotiations. Therefore, the words had to go.

Obama’s foreign policy is predicated on a series of lies: the terrorists have been largely vanquished; they are not “Islamist;” the Iranian regime has significantly moderated; the Iran deal was prompted by Iranian moderation, rather than the desire to deal with the regime Obama however radical it may be.

No wonder the truth so often must be scrubbed.

Pentagon Denies Troop Presence on Syria Front Lines Despite Photographs

May 28, 2016

Pentagon Denies Troop Presence on Syria Front Lines Despite Photographs, Washington Free Beacon, May 27, 2016

Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers guard against Islamic State militants at a frontline base near Mosul, northern Iraq, on June 6, 2015, four days before the first anniversary of the second-largest Iraqi city's fall to the extremists. (Kyodo) ==Kyodo

Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers guard against Islamic State militants at a frontline base near Mosul, northern Iraq, on June 6, 2015, four days before the first anniversary of the second-largest Iraqi city’s fall to the extremists. (Kyodo)

The Pentagon Thursday denied the presence of U.S. troops on the front lines in Syria despite photographic evidence showing special operations troops fighting alongside Kurdish forces in an offensive to retake Raqqa from the Islamic State.

Peter Cook, the Pentagon press secretary, maintained the Obama’s administration’s claim that ground troops in Syria are solely serving in advisory and assistance roles in the war-torn region.

“They are not on the forward line. They are providing advice and assistance,” Cook said during a testy exchange with reporters. “That mission has not changed, their role has not changed. They are not leading this fight. They are supporting those forces that are at the leading edge of this fight, and they are doing it in a very effective fashion.”

Near frontline north of the Islamic State bastion of Raqa city, in Syria an AFP photographer saw armed US soldiers http://u.afp.com/ZEZo 

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Fatisah (Syria) (AFP) – US forces on the ground in northern Syria are helping a major offensive against the Islamic State group in its stronghold of Raqa 

Cook refused to comment specifically on the photos.

“What I will say is that special operations forces when they operate in certain areas do what they can to, if you will, blend in with the community to enhance their own protection, their own security… And they might be, again, for visual purposes, might be blending in with the local community,” he said.

The AFP reported that U.S. commandos were seen climbing onto a rooftop “carrying U.S.-made anti-tank missiles.” A fighter with the Syrian Democratic forces told the outlet that U.S. troops are taking part in the group’s operation against ISIS.

The revelations contradict the Obama administration’s insistence that ground troops are in Syria solely to advise and assist local forces.

Ahead of the president’s announcement last month that he would deploy an additional 250 special operations forces to Syria, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes reiterated that U.S. troops would not be acting in a combat role

“Obviously, any special forces troops that we deploy into Iraq or Syria are going to be combat-equipped troops,” Rhodes said. “They’re not being sent there on a combat mission. They’re being sent there on a mission to be advising and assisting and supporting the forces that are fighting against ISIL on the ground.”

One reporter pressed Cook to clarify the difference between a “forward line” and a “front line.” He replied vaguely that he didn’t “have a yardstick measurement” and that the front lines of war are always “fluid.”

State Department sets new single-day record for Syrian refugee approvals

May 25, 2016

State Department sets new single-day record for Syrian refugee approvals, Washington Times

Refugees_c0-33-4544-2682_s885x516Syrian refugees arrive aboard a dinghy after crossing from Turkey to the island of Lesbos, Greece, on Sept. 10, 2015.

The State Department admitted 80 Syrian refugees on Tuesday and 225 on Monday, setting a new single-day record as President Obama surges to try to meet his target of 10,000 approvals this year — sparking renewed fears among security experts who say corners are being cut to meet a political goal.

Officials insisted they’re moving faster because they’re getting better at screening, and say they’re still running all the traps on applicants.

But the new spike in numbers is stunning, with more people accepted on Monday alone than were approved in the entire months of January or February.

“The Obama administration is on full throttle to admit as many people as possible before the time clock runs out on them,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “This is the classic scenario when political expediency trumps prudence, and someone slips through who shouldn’t have, and tragedy ensues.”

Powerless to stop the civil war in Syria, Mr. Obama has instead offered the U.S. as a safe haven for those fleeing the conflict, promising to accept 10,000 refugees between Oct. 1 and Sept. 30. As of Tuesday evening, he’d approved 2,540 — an average of about 10 applications a day.

To meet the 10,000 goal, that pace will have to spike to nearly 60 approvals a day.

Ten Arabic Words: Bracken’s Challenge to National Security Professionals

May 20, 2016

Ten Arabic Words: Bracken’s Challenge to National Security Professionals, Gates of Vienna, May 20, 2016

(A good, strong and highly relevant analysis of our “Global War on Terrorism.” — DM)

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Ten Arabic Words: A challenge to national security professionals engaged in the Global War On Terror

by Matthew Bracken

If you are a politically-correct bliss-ninny with a coexist bumper sticker slapped on the back of your Subaru, and you don’t have the slightest clue what the following ten words mean, then this essay is not meant for you. You are excused.

dawah, dhimmi, hijra, jizya, kafir, shaheed, shariah, takfir, taqiyya, ummah

But if you are a national security professional, senior military officer or political leader involved in any aspect of the “Global War On Terror,” AKA “Countering Violent Extremism,” these are ten words that should already be a part of your working vocabulary. If you can’t readily discuss their meaning, significance, and relationships, then you are worse than a fool, you are disgrace to your office and a danger to your country.

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If you don’t already have a firm grasp of the meaning of these words, then you are as prepared to conduct the GWOT as President Obama’s “Pajama Boy” is prepared to fight a heavyweight MMA champion in a no-quarter steel-cage death match.

If you couldn’t accurately define at least eight out of the ten directly from your personal knowledge base, then as a national security professional, you are an abject failure. You are as dangerously ignorant as a parent who would send his ten-year-old son to a NAMBLA summer camp, because a friendly self-identified “Namblan” neighbor said it was like Boy Scout Camp, but even more fun, and completely free of charge.

In effect, you sent your innocent and vulnerable young son to a summer camp run by perverts, pedophiles and predators, and you didn’t even know it, because you couldn’t be bothered to learn the actual meaning of NAMBLA independently from your helpful Namblan neighbor. Sounds insane, doesn’t it? Nobody could be that stupid, right? Wrong. That level of stupidity is official Obama administration policy when it comes to fighting the GWOT.

So, if you are an Army general or Navy admiral who, right here and now, without looking at your smart phone, cannot discuss how a kafir becomes a dhimmi, and what a dhimmi’s rights and options (if any) are under shariah, then you are as ignorant of your job as an European-theater Army general circa 1942 who did not know a panzer from a pancake, or a schutzstaffel from a schnitzel. A person as ignorant as you should be kept away from any responsibility for protecting our nation. You are incompetent, and you are a fool.

If you don’t know how to determine when a Muslim suicide bomber is ashaheed and when he is a terrorist according to the shariah, then you are as dangerous to our national safety as a North Atlantic ship captain who believes that icebergs are a fairy tale concocted by conspiracy theorists. Full speed ahead, Captain Smith!

If you don’t know takfir from taqiyya, and can’t discuss the meaning and importance of both, you are as useless as a WW2 intelligence officer who didn’t know the Kriegsmarine from the Luftwaffe, (but who thought that one of them was a private flying club, based on conversations that he overheard among his ever-helpful German cleaning staff).

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If you cannot, right now, intelligently discuss the global ummah and its relationship to the OIC in the context of the GWOT, then you should be working for the Department of Parks and Recreation, and not the Department of Homeland Security. If you don’t know what the OIC refers to in this context, put on a dunce cap, and go stand in the corner. And if you don’t know whether your office is in the Dar al Islam or the Dar al Harb, please jump out of an upper-story window, and when you hit the sidewalk, ask any immigrant who is engaged in hijra. He’ll know the answer, even if you do not.

If you don’t know how dawah relates to jihad when faithful Muslims are engaged in long-term hijra, you should turn in your official credentials and take early retirement. You are as oblivious as a WW2 U.S. Army general who thought that the Geheime Staatspolizei were German motorcycle policemen much like our American state troopers, because a helpful German passer-by told him so.

If you don’t know what the three options are for a kafir who violates the shariah when living in the dar al Islam, then please get out of the national security business. If you don’t know why a dhimmi would care about jizya, please retire, and hand your duties over to someone who has the natural curiosity and personal integrity to conduct his own study of our actual enemies and their actual strategies. But in the meantime, you must immediately stop lapping up the false narrative being spoon-fed to you by hostile foreign agents, domestic traitors, useful idiots, and cowards who know better—but who won’t make waves while their pensions are beckoning.

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If your job is national security, and you didn’t score at least an eighty on the ten-word quiz, then you have obviously swallowed the big lie that we can safely delegate the understanding of our Islamist enemies to the WW2 equivalent of “moderate Nazis.” Sounds insane, doesn’t it? But under President Obama, this is indeed our national policy for fighting the GWOT: allow a range of Muslim Brotherhood front groups to conduct America’s narrowly limited analysis of so-called “radicalized Islam,” and thereafter guide our policies toward Islam and Muslims in general.

Here is an important example straight from current events. Please tell us, oh national security professional, whom has the United Nations delegated the critical task of selecting and “screening” the Muslim “refugees” who are currently arriving in the USA at the rate of thousands per month? Any guesses? It is the same organization that the Obama administration has also optimistically granted the authority to choose our new Muslim “refugee” immigrants. If you don’t know the answer, please get out of the national security business.

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So who is it? It’s the fifty-seven-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, headquartered in Saudi Arabia, which I referenced above. The mission of the OIC is to promote the spread of Islam across the globe until there is no moredar al harb, and all of the kafirs have either been converted to Islam, killed, or forced into submission as dhimmis. If you didn’t know, dhimmis are formally and legally subjugated second-class citizens who must pay the specialjizya tax as the price of their being allowed to live under shariah in theummah.

But this special offer is only extended to Christians and Jews: all others must choose between conversion to Islam, and the sword. That is, if their Muslim conquerors grant them the option of conversion. According to the Shariah, the defeated kafirs may also be killed or enslaved, if either of these two outcomes would be considered more beneficial to the ummah, based on local conditions and needs. (Of course, the captured women and girls may be taken as sex-slaves.) Mohammed did all of the above, and he commanded that these practices be continued in perpetuity, and they are.

The charter of the OIC puts Islamic shariah law ahead of secular law. This means, for example, that the official position of the OIC is that Muslims who leave the faith should be killed, and that any faithful Muslim who kills an apostate ex-Muslim has done no sin, but instead should be thanked and congratulated for the deed. It’s the same with adulterers: they should die, and killing an adulterer is no crime.

Yes, that really is their position, and they really do believe it, and much more than that. The OIC is made up of fifty-seven Muslim nations, united by a common belief in the supremacy of Islam, and their mutual obligation to conduct both dawah and jihad until the Dar al Islam covers the globe, and Allah’s eternal and immutable shariah has supplanted godless democracy and all manmade laws. This dawah includes the practice of using taqiyya when making arrangements or having negotiations with as-yet unsubmitted kafirs in the dar al harb.

So it’s no wonder that ninety-nine percent of the “refugees” being “screened” by the OIC and transported into the USA are Muslim, even though the Christians and other non-Muslims (who until recently made up over ten percent of the populations of Syria and Iraq) are suffering a brutal genocide and holocaust at the hands of Islamic State kidnappers, mass-rapists and mass-executioners.

The same OIC which is choosing our Muslim “refugees” is also strong-arming the European Union, the United States and the United Nations into acceptingshariah-compliant religious blasphemy laws, which will turn criticism of Islam into illegal “hate speech.” It’s worth noting that Bill and Hillary Clinton have collected millions of dollars in “speaking fees” and “donations” from OIC members, and perhaps unremarkably, Hillary Clinton also supports outlawing criticism of Islam, if the criticism leads to violence by Muslims.

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In light of this, it’s particularly sad to see disgraced former General David Petraeus heap even more shame upon himself, with his recent call for a mindless capitulation to Islamic extortion threats, extortion threats which have been ongoing against kafirs for 1,400 years. With fourteen centuries of history to examine, “Don’t make the Muslims angry, or they’ll run amok like uncontrollable sub-human savages, and kill lots of innocent people” is a wretched strategy for a former American general and intelligence agency director to espouse.

His call for the end of free speech rights anywhere and anytime that they “offend” Muslims is no different than warning a beaten wife not to anger her chronically abusive husband again, lest he give her yet another violent thrashing—which would then be entirely her fault. In fact, she should be punished again, just for provoking him after being warned not to!

This is not merely the heckler’s veto, which we are, sadly, familiar with today on the American college campus. This is the Muslim terrorist’s veto, and it means forced submission to Islam’s shariah law as the price of temporarily forestalling Muslim violence. Shame on David Petraeus for siding with the perpetrators of Islamic terrorism, and not the victims. But at least his motives are transparent: pure greed. Petraeus, who has no background in finance or economics, is making millions of dollars by hustling in Muslim nations for the multi-billion-dollar global hedge fund KKR. They want something for their money, and he gave it to them in his recent Washington Post column. (Read “Why David Petraeus really wants you to shut up about Islamism,” TheFederalist.com, May 18, 2016.)

Let me offer you another simple test that you may apply to your own national security work space and mission. If you have been ordered to purge the ten listed Arabic words (and others) from your official GWOT lexicon, and instead to hand over the task of analyzing “Islamic radicalism” to alleged “moderate Muslims,” then you are being played for a fool by our nation’s most implacable and devious enemies, both foreign and domestic.

Fifteen years after the twin towers came down, you have no excuse for such obliviousness. After the next 9-11, you will not be able to plead ignorance yet again. As a national security official, you have a duty to perform your own due diligence. You must educate yourself, and reject the politically-correct blindfold that you have been ordered to wrap around your own mind.

Sun Tzu wrote: “if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.”

Today, we are literally outsourcing our intelligence analysis in the GWOT to the OIC and various Muslim Brotherhood front groups. Simply do a search for “Holy Land Foundation, Hamas, CAIR, and FBI” to begin your overdue education. Is it any wonder that the official “Countering Violent Extremism” narrative holds that there is utterly no connection between Islamic terrorism and Islam? That the Islamic State, which quotes chapter and verse of the Koran as justification for its every decision, is not Islamic? That Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Caliph of ISIS, who holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from the Islamic University of Baghdad, knows less about Islam than President Obama and his American-trained national security staff?

In 2016, ignorance of the reality of the Islamist threat is no longer an excuse. Many resources are readily available if you are willing to look unblinkingly at the light of truth. I would suggest the online video lectures given by Stephen Coughlin and Dr. Bill Warner as starting points. Those who need or desire to read an exhaustively researched (over a thousand footnotes) academic treatise on the present Islamist threat should carefully study Coughlin’s “Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad.”

After 9-11, Mr. Coughlin was an acclaimed subject matter expert and frequent high-level lecturer at the CIA, the FBI, and the Pentagon, until 2008 when he was made persona-non-grata on federal property as an unwelcome “Islamophobe.” And who made the determination of Mr. Coughlin’s “Islamophobia?” The same Muslim Brotherhood front groups that our intelligence agencies now rely upon for their understanding of “violent extremism,” which, of course, we are assured has absolutely nothing to do with Islam.

We know this must be true, because President Obama has told us so. Unless, of course, he is practicing taqiyya on behalf of the ummah. Taqiyya is a bedrock principle of Islamic shariah, a ready tool for Muslims to use when they are dealing with kafirs. And not only radical Muslims, but ordinary, everyday, “moderate” Muslims. According to the shariah, it’s not a sin when a Muslim lies to a kafir in order to promote Islam. In that case, taqiyya is just a very clever form of dawah, helping to prepare the kafirs for the final Islamic jihad victory.

Now, go look up the Arabic words that you didn’t know, and read the article again, with fuller understanding. Then, go ask your colleagues how they did on the quiz. In the current threat environment, when mistakes are punished with passenger jets falling out of the sky, seventy is a failing grade for a trained and educated national security professional.

Please strive to do better. Your country is depending on you. Don’t let us down again. Educate yourself, and then prepare to stand firm against the prevailing winds of political correctness. Orwell said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Remember your core values, and stand tall against America’s enemies, both foreign and domestic.

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Matthew Bracken was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1957, and attended the University of Virginia, where he received a BA in Russian Studies and was commissioned as a naval officer in 1979. Later in that year he graduated from Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, and in 1983 he led a Naval Special Warfare detachment to Beirut, Lebanon. Since then he’s been a welder, boat builder, charter captain, ocean sailor, essayist and novelist. He lives in Florida. Links to his short stories and essays may be found at EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com. For his previous essays, see the Matthew Bracken Archives.

FULL: Donald Trump at Morning Joe, May 20, 2016- ‘Would you consider Sanders as your running mate?’

May 20, 2016

FULL: Donald Trump at Morning Joe, May 20, 2016- ‘Would you consider Sanders as your running mate?’ May 20, 2016

(Spoiler alert: The question about Sanders as Trump’s VP choice comes at the tail end of the interview, and Trump’s answer was that Sanders should run as an independent. The interview is wide-ranging and deals with foreign policy, China, Mexico, the Islamist threat, the terrorist attack on EgyptAir and a bunch of other stuff. — DM)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B36FldQmVq4

Federal Judge Orders ‘Deceptive’ DOJ Lawyers to Take Ethics Classes

May 20, 2016

Federal Judge Orders ‘Deceptive’ DOJ Lawyers to Take Ethics Classes, PJ Media, May 20, 2016

(Cf. John Kerry: Enthusiastic Proponent of a ‘Borderless World’. How about a lawless world too?– DM)

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In a stunning rebuke to the Department of Justice Thursday, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen ordered annual ethics classes for the DOJ attorneys who were “intentionally deceptive” during the course of executive amnesty litigation. At issue was whether the DOJ intentionally misled the judge into believing that Obama’s DACA amnesty program would be halted until he made a ruling on a lawsuit brought by 26 states.

From November of 2014 until February of 2015, while the judge was still deciding the case, the Department of Homeland Security gave more than 108,000 illegal immigrants three-year reprieves. They did this after DOJ lawyers led him to believe that they would halt the program during that period. The 26 states who filed a lawsuit were thus misled into “foregoing a request for a temporary restraining order,” Hanen wrote in his blistering decision. “Such conduct is certainly not worthy of any department whose name includes the word ‘Justice.'”

Via the Washington Examiner:

The facts of the deception are not in doubt, Hanen emphasized. “[DOJ] has now admitted making statements that clearly did not match the facts,” he said in the May 19 opinion, first noted by the National Law Journal. “It has admitted that the lawyers who made these statements had knowledge of the truth when they made these misstatements … This court would be remiss if it left such unseemly and unprofessional conduct unaddressed.”

As punishment, Justice Department attorneys who wish to appear in any state or federal court within the 26 states that brought the lawsuit have to undergo annual ethics training. “At a minimum, this course (or courses) shall total at least three hours of ethics training per year,” he wrote.

In another case, such “egregious conduct” would lead him to strike the government’s pleadings, but Hanen decided not to take that step because the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case in April.

“The national importance of the outcome of this litigation outweighs the benefits to be gained by implementing the ultimate sanction,” Hanen wrote. “Striking the government’s pleadings would not only be unfair to the litigants, but also unfair, and perhaps even disrespectful, to the Supreme Court as it would deprive that Court of the ability to thrash out the legal issues in this case.”

Hanen cited multiple instances in which Justice Department attorneys claimed that Department of Homeland Security directive announced in November of 2014 would not be implemented until February 18, 2015, even though they knew that DHS had begun implementing a portion of the order that pertained to the original “deferred action for childhood arrivals” policy announced in 2012.

Justice Department attorney Kathleen Hartnett told Judge Hanen during a January 2015 hearing that nothing would be happening with regard to DACA until Feb. 18, 2015. On Feb. 16, 2015, Hanen sided with the states and issued a preliminary injunction blocking Obama’s actions. Then he found out that the reprieves and work permits had been continuing all along.

That March, the exasperated judge chastised Hartnett for lying to him in January. “Like the judge, the states thought nothing was happening,” Hanen said. “Like an idiot, I believed that”:

A flustered Hartnett repeatedly apologized to Hanen for any confusion related to how the reprieves and work permits were granted.”We strive to be as candid as possible. It truly became clear to us there was confusion on this point,” she said.

Hanen seemed genuinely disappointed that he could not disbar the DOJ attorneys who lied to him, but he did ban them from practicing law in Texas:

The court does not have the power to disbar the counsel in this case, but it does have the power to revoke the pro hac vice status of out-of-state lawyers who act unethically in court. By a separate sealed order that it is simultaneously issuing, that is being done.

In the meantime, perhaps the court-ordered ethics classes will help the “confused” lawyers understand the concept of “justice” a little better.

Top Obama Aide: We are the Ventriloquists that ‘Shape the News’

May 7, 2016

Top Obama Aide: We are the Ventriloquists that ‘Shape the News’, Truth RevoltTrey Sanchez, May 6, 2016

Truth revolt

An interview in The New York Times with President Obama’s assistant and speech writer Ben Rhodes reveals chilling insight into an administration that has positioned itself as a ventriloquist to mainstream press outlets. 

Obama’s presidency happened to coincide with the dramatic shift in how people access news. As the newspaper print business began to crumble and more and more people turned to the Internet for their news, the Obama administration was in the perfect position to seize and control the content that was published. And they did so unabashedly.

Seasoned journalists lost their jobs in droves and took with them decades of knowledge and experience. Replacing them was far cheaper labor: young 20-somethings who were very eager and willing, but had no knowledge of history. The perfect puppets for the Obama show.

Rhodes explains:

“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Based on the conversation with Rhodes and his assistant, Ned Price, the NYT goes on to detail just how “adept” the administration is “at ventriloquizing many people at once:”

The easiest way for the White House to shape the news, he explained, is from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own dedicated press corps. “But then there are sort of these force multipliers,” he said, adding, “We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people [and] I’ll say, ‘Hey, look, some people are spinning this narrative that this is a sign of American weakness’ …  and [then] I’ll give them some color, and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.”

The NYT compared the old spin with the new:

This is something different from old-fashioned spin, which tended to be an art best practiced in person. In a world where experienced reporters competed for scoops and where carrying water for the White House was a cause for shame, no matter which party was in power, it was much harder to sustain a “narrative” over any serious period of time. Now the most effectively weaponized 140-character idea or quote will almost always carry the day, and it is very difficult for even good reporters to necessarily know where the spin is coming from or why.

Spin has always been a part of politics but this president is a master. In fact, spin is the way he started his presidency. Flashback to Obama’s former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn: she explained their press strategy leading up to Obama’s election in 2008:

“Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t absolutely control…

“One of the reasons we did so many of the David Plouffe [Obama’s chief campaign manager] videos was not just for our supporters, but also because it was a way for us to get our message out without having to actually talk to reporters. We just put that out there and made them write what Plouffe had said as opposed to Plouffe doing an interview with a reporter. So it was very much we controlled it as opposed to the press controlled it.”

Obama’s strategy has always been to make the press cover what he was saying. That’s why during his campaigns he preferred doing live interviews so his words couldn’t be edited.

The president’s Jedi mind trick as Hopey-One Kenobi: This isn’t the news you’re looking for. Move along.

Seymour Hersh Says Hillary Approved Sending Libya’s Sarin To Syrian Rebels

May 2, 2016

Seymour Hersh Says Hillary Approved Sending Libya’s Sarin To Syrian Rebels Tyler Durden’s picture

Submitted by Tyler Durden

on 05/01/2016 22:00 -0400

Source: Seymour Hersh Says Hillary Approved Sending Libya’s Sarin To Syrian Rebels | Zero Hedge

Authored by Eric Zuesse via Strategic-Culture.org,

The great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in two previous articles in the London Review of Books (“Whose Sarin?” and “The Red Line and the Rat Line”) has reported that the Obama Administration falsely blamed the government of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad for the sarin gas attack that Obama was trying to use as an excuse to invade Syria; and Hersh pointed to a report from British intelligence saying that the sarin that was used didn’t come from Assad’s stockpiles. Hersh also said that a secret agreement in 2012 was reached between the Obama Administration and the leaders of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, to set up a sarin gas attack and blame it on Assad so that the US could invade and overthrow Assad.

“By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria.”

Hersh didn’t say whether these ‘arms’ included the precursor chemicals for making sarin which were stockpiled in Libya, but there have been multiple independent reports that Libya’s Gaddafi possessed such stockpiles, and also that the US Consulate in Benghazi Libya was operating a “rat line” for Gaddafi’s captured weapons into Syria through Turkey. So, Hersh isn’t the only reporter who has been covering this. Indeed, the investigative journalist Christoph Lehmann headlined on 7 October 2013, “Top US and Saudi Officials responsible for Chemical Weapons in Syria” and reported, on the basis of very different sources than Hersh used, that:

“Evidence leads directly to the White House, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, CIA Director John Brennan, Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar, and Saudi Arabia´s Interior Ministry.”

And, as if that weren’t enough, even the definitive analysis of the evidence that was performed by two leading US analysts, the Lloyd-Postal report, concluded that:

“The US Government’s Interpretation of the Technical Intelligence It Gathered Prior to and After the August 21 Attack CANNOT POSSIBLY BE CORRECT.”

Obama has clearly been lying.

However, now, for the first time, Hersh has implicated Hillary Clinton directly in this ‘rat line’. In an interview with Alternet.org, Hersh was asked about the then-US-Secretary-of-State’s role in the Benghazi Libya US consulate’s operation to collect weapons from Libyan stockpiles and send them through Turkey into Syria for a set-up sarin-gas attack, to be blamed on Assad in order to ‘justify’ the US invading Syria, as the US had invaded Libya to eliminate Gaddafi. Hersh said:

That ambassador who was killed, he was known as a guy, from what I understand, as somebody, who would not get in the way of the CIA. As I wrote, on the day of the mission he was meeting with the CIA base chief and the shipping company. He was certainly involved, aware and witting of everything that was going on. And there’s no way somebody in that sensitive of a position is not talking to the boss, by some channel”.

This was, in fact, the Syrian part of the State Department’s Libyan operation, Obama’s operation to set up an excuse for the US doing in Syria what they had already done in Libya.

The interviewer then asked:

“In the book [Hersh’s The Killing of Osama bin Laden, just out] you quote a former intelligence official as saying that the White House rejected 35 target sets [for the planned US invasion of Syria] provided by the Joint Chiefs as being insufficiently painful to the Assad regime. (You note that the original targets included military sites only – nothing by way of civilian infrastructure.) Later the White House proposed a target list that included civilian infrastructure. What would the toll to civilians have been if the White House’s proposed strike had been carried out?”

Hersh responded by saying that the US tradition in that regard has long been to ignore civilian casualties; i.e., collateral damage of US attacks is okay or even desired (so as to terrorize the population into surrender) – not an ‘issue’, except, perhaps, for the PR people.

The interviewer asked why Obama is so obsessed to replace Assad in Syria, since “The power vacuum that would ensue would open Syria up to all kinds of jihadi groups”; and Hersh replied that not only he, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “nobody could figure out why”. He said, “Our policy has always been against him [Assad]. Period”. This has actually been the case not only since the Party that Assad leads, the Ba’ath Party, was the subject of a shelved CIA coup-plot in 1957 to overthrow and replace it; but, actually, the CIA’s first coup had been not just planned but was carried out in 1949 in Syria, overthrowing there a democratically elected leader, in order to enable a pipeline for the Sauds’ oil to become built through Syria into the largest oil market, Europe; and, construction of the pipeline started the following year. But, there were then a succession of Syrian coups (domestic instead of by foreign powers – 195419631966, and, finally, in 1970), concluding in the accession to power of Hafez al-Assad during the 1970 coup. And, the Sauds’ long-planned Trans-Arabia Pipeline has still not been built. The Saudi royal family, who own the world’s largest oil company, Aramco, don’t want to wait any longer. Obama is the first US President to have seriously tried to carry out their long-desired “regime change” in Syria, so as to enable not only the Sauds’ Trans-Arabian Pipeline to be built, but also to build through Syria the Qatar-Turkey Gas Pipeline that the Thani royal family (friends of the Sauds) who own Qatar want also to be built there. The US is allied with the Saud family (and with their friends, the royal families of Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, and Oman). Russia is allied with the leaders of Syria – as Russia had earlier been allied with Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, Allende in Chile, Hussein in Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya, and Yanukovych in Ukraine (all of whom except Syria’s Ba’ath Party, the US has successfully overthrown).

Hersh was wrong to say that “nobody could figure out why” Obama is obsessed with overthrowing Assad and his Ba’ath Party, even if nobody that he spoke with was willing to say why. They have all been hired to do a job, which didn’t change even when the Soviet Union ended and the Warsaw Pact was disbanded; and, anyone who has been at this job for as long as those people have, can pretty well figure out what the job actually is – even if Hersh can’t.

Hersh then said that Obama wanted to fill Syria with foreign jihadists to serve as the necessary ground forces for his planned aerial bombardment there, and, “if you wanted to go there and fight there in 2011-2013, ‘Go, go, go… overthrow Bashar!’ So, they actually pushed a lot of people [jihadists] to go. I don’t think they were paying for them but they certainly gave visas”.

However, it’s not actually part of America’s deal with its allies the fundamentalist-Sunni Arabic royal families and the fundamentalist Sunni Erdogan of Turkey, for the US to supply the salaries (to be “paying for them”, as Hersh put it there) to those fundamentalist Sunni jihadists – that’s instead the function of the Sauds and of their friends, the other Arab royals, and their friends, to do. (Those are the people who finance the terrorists to perpetrate attacks in the US, Europe, Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, India, Nigeria, etc. – i.e., anywhere except in their own countries.) And, Erdogan in Turkey mainly gives their jihadists just safe passage into Syria, and he takes part of the proceeds from the jihadists’ sales of stolen Syrian and Iraqi oil. But, they all work together as a team (with the jihadists sometimes killing each other in the process – that’s even part of the plan) – though each national leader has PR problems at home in order to fool his respective public into thinking that they’re against terrorists, and that only the ‘enemy’ is to blame. (Meanwhile, the aristocrats who supply the “salaries” of the jihadists, walk off with all the money.)

This way, US oil and gas companies will refine, and pipeline into Europe, the Sauds’ oil and the Thanis’ gas, and not only will Russia’s major oil-and-gas market become squeezed away by that, but Obama’s economic sanctions against Russia, plus the yet-further isolation of Russia (as well as of China and the rest of the BRICS countries) by excluding them from Obama’s three mega-trade-deals (TTIP, TPP & TISA), will place the US aristocracy firmly in control of the world, to dominate the 21st Century, as it has dominated ever since the end of WW II.

Then, came this question from Hersh:

“Why does America do what it does? Why do we not say to the Russians, Let’s work together?”

His interviewer immediately seconded that by repeating it, “So why don’t we work closer with Russia? It seems so rational”. Hersh replied simply: “I don’t know”. He didn’t venture so much as a guess – not even an educated one. But, when journalists who are as knowledgeable as he, don’t present some credible explanation, to challenge the obvious lies (which make no sense that accords with the blatantly contrary evidence those journalists know of against those lies) that come from people such as Barack Obama, aren’t they thereby – though passively – participating in the fraud, instead of contradicting and challenging it? Or, is the underlying assumption, there: The general public is going to be as deeply immersed in the background information here as I am, so that they don’t need me to bring it all together for them into a coherent (and fully documented) whole, which does make sense? Is that the underlying assumption? Because: if it is, it’s false.

Hersh’s journalism is among the best (after all: he went so far as to say, of Christopher Stephens, regarding Hillary Clinton, “there’s no way somebody in that sensitive of a position is not talking to the boss, by some channel”), but it’s certainly not good enough. However, it’s too good to be published any longer in places like the New Yorker. And the reporting by Christof Lehmann was better, and it was issued even earlier than Hersh’s; and it is good enough, because it named names, and it explained motivations, in an honest and forthright way, which is why Lehmann’s piece was published only on a Montenegrin site, and only online, not in a Western print medium, such as the New Yorker. The sites that are owned by members of the Western aristocracy don’t issue reports like that – journalism that’s good enough. They won’t inform the public when a US Secretary of State, and her boss the US President, are the persons actually behind a sarin gas attack they’re blaming on a foreign leader the US aristocrats and their allied foreign aristocrats are determined to topple and replace.

Is this really a democracy?

Obama Admin Awards $270K to Controversial Islamic Charity

April 20, 2016

Obama Admin Awards $270K to Controversial Islamic Charity, Washington Free Beacon, April 20, 2016

hamasPalestinian Hamas militants take part in a rally / AP

The Obama administration has awarded $270,000 to an Islamic charity that has been outlawed by some governments for its support of the terror group Hamas and other jihadist organizations, according to grant documents.

The Department of Health and Human Services has provided a $270,000 grant to Islamic Relief Worldwide, a charity that has repeatedly been linked to terrorism financing and support for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, according to recent grant information.

The grant was awarded as part of a larger project to provide health services in Nairobi, Kenya, through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to the grant.

Some terrorism experts have expressed concern that the administration is providing funds to Islamic Relief given its past ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, ties that have led some governments to outlaw the charity.

The United Arab Emirates and Israel both banned the charity in 2014 after investigations revealed that Islamic Relief had ties to Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other entities engaged in terror financing, according to reports.

An investigation by the Israeli government led to accusations that the charity was providing material support to Hamas and its operatives.

The charity “provides support and assistance to Hamas’s infrastructure,” Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs determined in 2006. “The IRW’s activities in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip are carried out by social welfare organizations controlled and staffed by Hamas operatives.”

The charity further “appears to be a hub for donations from charities accused of links to al Qaeda and other terror groups,” according to an investigation conducted by the Gatestone Institute.

The charity’s “accounts show that it has partnered with a number of organizations linked to terrorism and that some of charity’s trustees are personally affiliated with extreme Islamist groups that have connections to terror,” according to the investigation, authored by terrorism analyst Samuel Westrop.

An audit of the organization’s accounts showed that it had donated thousands of dollars to a charity established by a terrorist affiliated with al Qaeda, according to Westrop.

Israeli authorities arrested the charity’s Gaza coordinator, Ayaz Ali, in 2006 due to his alleged work on Hamas’s behalf.

“Incriminating files were found on Ali’s computer, including documents that attested to the organization’s ties with illegal Hamas funds abroad (in the UK and in Saudi Arabia) and in Nablus,” Israel’s foreign affairs ministry said at the time. “Also found were photographs of swastikas superimposed on IDF symbols, of senior Nazi German officials, of Osama Bin Laden, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as well as many photographs of Hamas military activities.”

The charity attempted to mend its image in 2014 by performing an internal audit. However, experts criticized the effort as unreliable.

“The information provided by [Islamic Relief] on its internal investigation is insufficient to assess the veracity of its claims,” the watchdog organization NGO Monitor wrote in a 2015 analysis. “NGO Monitor recommends that a fully independent, transparent, and comprehensive audit of IRW’s international activities and funding mechanisms be undertaken immediately.”

Patrick Poole, a reporter and counter-terrorism analyst for Unconstrained Analytics, noted that USAID, a taxpayer funded organization, also has donated funds to Islamic Relief.

“Time and again we see federal agencies and departments using taxpayer money to support the enemies of the United States and our allies,” Poole said. “USAID is a persistent culprit in this regard. In 2005 it took an act of Congress, led by the late Rep. Tom Lantos [D., Calif.], to stop USAID from funding Hamas institutions in Gaza. Now we see them doing the same thing, but only using a middleman.”

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment on the grant.