The U.S. congress with strong bi-partisan majorities overrode President Obama's veto of a bill that allows the families of American victims of terrorism to sue states that sponsor terrorist attacks. The catalyst behind the legislation was new evidence about Saudi complicity in the 9/11 attacks, and the bill would allow victims of those who were murdered sue the government of Saudi Arabia. Iran is also a likely target.
The vote in the senate was 97-1, and was led by Chuck Schumer(D-NY) who made an impassioned speech urging his fellow Democrats to vote to veto the bill. The one holdout was Harry Reid (D-Nevada)who is retiring from the Senate this year with his ill-gotten gains intact and a reputation of being the worst, most divisive Senate Majority leader in history. Vice presidential candidate Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) chose to skip out on the voting even though he was in town. Given his Muslim Brotherhood ties, I'm not surprised.
In the house, the vote was 348 to 77.
The argument against the bill was that it would allow other countries to retaliate and sue us. At a time when Iran is kidnapping hostages and holding them for ransom, that argument holds little water. And when it comes to the Saudis, Qatar and other nations in the region, they need us a lot more than we need them.
This is the first time President Barack Hussein Obama has ever been overruled.
Today was the anniversary of the murder of almost 3,000 Americans at the World Trade Center. It's a day that never fails to embarrass me, and I think it embarrasses a lot of my fellow Americans.
Many of us have trouble explaining exactly why it embarrasses us. But embarrassment is a function of the emotion of shame, and shame is a highly fitting emotion to feel today. It is like a foul stench in the air.
It's the rancid smell of defeat and humiliation.It's the putrid odor of our dead who were never avenged. Because we did precious little to avenge them. Or to use their deaths as an inspiration for victory over their attackers.
Oh, we put some jihadi subcontractors in jail, even killed others, but we've yet to actually look at the root causes behind why we were attacked or deal with the real perpetrators, the nations that fund, harbor and nurture jihad against the West. If President Obama has his way, we won't even allow them to be sued in court by the victims for damages.
After 9/11, Americans knew who was responsible for the carnage and were ready to be led to victory. We knew exactly who was pulling the strings back in the Middle East, who was spending billions promoting the same ideology that resulted in us being savagely attacked.
Unfortunately, some of those same people were long time friends and business partners of the Bush family and other influential folks, which made things awkward - to say the least.
So instead of actually naming our enemies and their ideology - Islamist fascism - the president announced that America was now involved in a war on 'terror', that we should all calm down, that the creed of our enemies meant peace, that the goal of this war was `safety and security' rather than victory, and that everything would be all right if we would just go shopping.
Since then, in spite of some of the bravest warriors ever to fight under out flag, we've been losing. And this war has been fought with increasingly costly half measures. Is it any surprise it's still going on? That it always will until we change course completely?
Not only have we not accomplished anything, we're actually retreating. At this point, we know clearly that both the Saudis and Iran were complicit in 9/11. Not only weren't they punished, but we're actually giving them money, and in Iran's case, the go ahead to pull off another 9/11 using nuclear weapons.
Anyone who is paying any attention at all knows exactly where the support network of jihad is located and how it functions. As Mark Steyn once memorably put it, they are hiding in plain sight. But we have allowed ourselves to be bullied or coerced into not seeing. We've even been told that seeing the truth for what it is somehow shameful and 'racist'.
Think about that for a second.On the one hand, we are shamed because we have yet to avenge 9/11 by defeating the people that murdered 3,000 innocent Americans. And on the other hand, we are told that we should be ashamed for even wanting that, for not just getting over it and acquiescing to just living with accepting continual attacks and paying jizra to Islam like the defeated infidels we are.
After fifteen years, 9/11 isn't even called the anniversary of 9/11 anymore. Some bright minion in the Obama Administration came up with the idea of calling it the 'National Day Of Service.' Is it any wonder that so many younger Americans have no clue what this is about? They were too young to understand what happened, and then they were subjected to the prog-fascist indoctrination that passes for our educational system. They were told that 9-11 was an inside job or was due to US Imperialism.That it was somehow our fault because we were somehow insufficiently subservient to the issues and concerns of Islam.
Appeasement has been the order of the day and a defensive crouch our default position.Our ancestors,the men and women who built this country would alternately laugh at us and turn from us in disgust.
That is where we are right now. This is how far we've fallen.
Like everyone else, I have my own memories of 9/11. I was on my way to my office after dropping my children off at school and turned on Howard Stern. And there it was...the horror, the outrage, the defiance, the tears of people watching their city endure the unendurable. I still have that entire broadcast on the hard drive of one of my computers.
After letting all of the day's horror sink in, I walked outside that night to get some air and look at the sky, an old habit of mine. Up above was a crescent moon with a star nearby...the living picture of Islam ascendant, triumphant.
It's something I've never forgotten and never will.
The moon, like all else on this earth goes in phases. I sense the beginning of a new phase, and to be honest I'm not sure what that portends. Will we regain our honor, our courage and our freedom and put the ghosts of 9/11 to rest? Or will we continue to retreat until there is no more retreating?
The House approved legislation Friday by voice vote that would allow families of 9/11 victims to sue the government of Saudi Arabia, CBS News has confirmed.
The Senate passed the measure back in May, , which was sponsored by Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Chuck Schumer, D-New York.
President Obama, of course opposes it and has threatened to veto the legislation. His reasoning? That if we start suing other countries, gee, they might sue us!
As if the United States was in the habit of financing attacks by our countrymen that kill 3,000 people.
But this president's attitude symbolizes something worth looking at.
This comes shortly before the 15th anniversary of 9/11, a day that changed our lives forever and has never been properly dealt with to see that it doesn't happen again. Our present government with it's talk of 'workplace accidents' and 'man-made disasters' government is obviously back in the pre 9/11 mindset, when the run up of mounting attacks before 9/11 like the first WTC bombing, the attack on the USS Cole, the bombing of our embassies in Kenya and other incidents were pretty much ignored at worst or treated as a simple law enforcement problem at best. And unfortunately a number of Americans are in that same mindset.
It's plain to see what the results of that mindset are.
Both the Saudis and Iran were complicit in 9/11. It's time they were brought to account.
The Democrat-dominated Senate Intelligence committee finally made public its report on the CIA’s interrogation policy during the Bush years. There was no credible reason to make this report public,since the Justice Department has already investigated this not once but twice and failed to file any charges.
These incidents of enhanced interrogation - which hardly constitute torture in any case,given the circumstances - occurred over a decade ago. Members of America's security establishment, including Democrats Leon Panetta and former CIA Director George Tenet were emphatic in their opposition to this report being released publicly because of the danger to national security. Releasing this and allowing the Professional Left and the media to go crazy has provided what amounts to a primer for jihadis in what to expect from American interrogators and what to claim was done to them in the future. It intimidates those men charged with interrogating known terrorists and makes them less effective and it endangers personnel serving overseas as well as to American prisoners in and the hands of Islamic State and elsewhere. As Colonel Ralph Peters and others put it, it amounted to aid and comfort to America's enemies..or would if we were actually in a declared war.
So why release this publicly now? Simple, really. It accomplishes three things. First it provides political cover for Democrats who were fully briefed about the enhanced interrogation techniques at the time and who now claim they knew nothing, particularly Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, wielding the gavel for the last time and Senator Jay D. Rockefeller IV from West Virginia who is now leaving the senate. The second reason is to afvance the narrative beloved by the Left, that America is always guilty. And that leads to the third reason, score settling with the CIA, and crippling it so that it no longer can function. The rest of the Democrats on the committee are either lame ducks on their way out who no longer care or hard edged members of the Left like Ron Wyden and Barbara Mikulski, who have always hated things like the CIA as a matter of principle.
Senator Rockefeller has been known to try this sort of thing before, and as it happens, there's a clear record he was fully briefed on all of this at the time. Senator Feinstein's record of selective memory on this is almost as laughable as her California colleague Nancy Pelosi's.
Yes, they knew, and just picked a convenient time to drop the bomb.
None of the Republicans on the committee participated in this dangerous nonsense and exercise in political thuggery,not even Susan Collins. This committee report was exclusively a Democrat project.
NBC's chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel was fairly blunt about this, to the point where I'm surprised it got on the air:
I think this is really about changing the narrative of American history. This process went on, it was a brutal process. It was legal at the time, whether it should have been legal or not, I think, is highly debatable. It was legal at the time. The CIA was asked to do it. The CIA was passing on its intelligence to the President. So everyone in the world knew what was going on, including by the way, the Senate, which is now pretending to be a bit of a babe in the woods. They knew what was going on at the time and in many cases were quite happy with the intelligence they were getting.
I think this is about rewriting the narrative of history. When we look back, how are we going to remember the period? Are we going to remember a period in which the rogue evil CIA was beating people, in some cases to death, and the politicians didn't know about it? Or are we going to look back and say the politicians were plenty aware of this, the CIA beat people to death, and then Senate tried to come out and say, "Well, you know, we didn't know anything about it," and trying to wash their hands of the situation? And to be honest, I think it's a little bit of the latter.
Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., a 31-year CIA veteran who ran the program reiterated this in an outspoken editorial today in the Washington Post. Not only was congress fully briefed, but they actually urged the Agency to do whatever it took to defeat al-Qaeda in the days after 9/11.
Like most essentially disloyal and self serving politicos, they were more than willing for far braver men and women to do what was needed to protect them..just as they are now willing to disparage their efforts and put the lives of others at risk for their own personal gain and false narrative.
Not only that,but a bi-partisan group of former CIA heads and intelligence personnel, in anticipation of this nonsense have actually put together a response and a website to give a true picture of what actually went on, and to rebut the more egregious of the report's accusations.
The allegations themselves? A lot of them are second and third hand accounts of supposed misdeeds that remind me a lot of the sort of 'evidence' used in failed attempts to try to court martial and imprison the Camp Pendleton 8 or those three Navy Seals who performed a hazardous mission to capture the terrorist in charge of murdering four Americans in Falluja. But briefly, what the media frenzy is about here is that in order to save American lives, our CIA interrogators and others (of course, the report only mentions and attacks the CIA) water boarded known terrorists, kept them in stress positions for long periods of time, subjected them to sleep deprivation, and at times allegedly threatened their loved ones to induce them to give intelligence on what were imminent threats to American lives.
Oh, the humanity!
I've actually explored the subject of torture before, back when Attorney General Eric Holder released the so-called 'torture memos' which came to nothing except to seriously lower the morale and efficiency of the men tasked with interrogating America's enemies and to inform al-Qaeda and other jihadis about our interrogation techniques and the limits placed on our interrogators:
The problem with most physical torture is that it can be incredibly inefficient much of the time. Given an individual with a sufficiently strong will, it can take hours, days, months or even years to accomplish the desired end.
Combining the administration of drugs like sodium penathol, baradanga, and sodium amytal with a skilled interrogator is normally quicker, more efficient and easier on the basement janitorial crew afterwards. It also eliminates the nasty problem of false confessions and information that sometimes tends to go with the territory when you get your answers by using an electric drill on somebody's hands. However, there's no doubt that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques can work quite well, especially when a threat is imminent and time is of the essence. And they're useful tools as psychological threats to promote cooperation, even if the techniques themselves aren't used.
I'll even go a step further and let you know that if I thought a jihadi had knowledge of an imminent attack (which turned out to be the case with Khalid Sheik Mohammed and probably with others)and I was in a position to make the call, I'd have done exactly the same thing and perhaps even gone a bit further. American lives matter, to use a slightly different version of a popular slogan out there these days.
When I wrote that five years ago, I suggested that what was really needed was a covert, clear policy that could be invoked in situations when information is needed quickly and American lives are at stake as well as suggesting a few other non-violent but effective psychological techniques that could be used in such cases.
Of course, this being the era of Obama, nothing like that has even been considered, let alone implemented.
For now, this sordid attempt at revisionism and political kabuki theater will of course be front page news,pushed by the usual suspects. Of course, none of those usual suspects is going to blame these senators and their accomplices - I can think of no more appropriate word - when and if we get hit with a major terrorist strike in the future.
Nor will they want anyone to make the connection that it happened because we missed out on operational intelligence because our CIA was handcuffed in how it gathered information, or because our interrogators were too intimidated to question jihadis in custody with sufficient vigor to save American lives.
Instead, they'll be looking to blame someone else. Anybody else.
UPDATE: The Committee's Republicans were unanimous is disputing this report's findings. In fact, they have filed a minority rebuttal disputing it in detail.
While President Obama and his team talk about giving peace a chance and clear the way for Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, the Iranian regime sent another crystal clear message to America about how much they hate us and want to destroy us.
Yesterday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was in Beirut, Lebanon and took time out to visit the grave of Imad Mughniyeh, make some effusive and laudatory remarks and lay a wreath at his tomb.
Who was Imad Mughineyeh? Here's a partial recap, for those of you unfamiliar with him.
He was one of the founding members of Hezbollah, a member of Yasser Arafat's Force 17 elite terrorist squad and briefly of al-Qaeda. He was a jihad superstar. If terrorism had an all star team or a World Cup squad, he'd be a prominent member. Before he was assassinated in 2008, he had spent literally decades murdering Americans, Jews, Lebanese, and anyone else on the hit list of his masters in Tehran.
Mughniyeh was in charge of the planning and execution of the deadly 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 Americans and 58 French nationals as well as another half a dozen Lebanese. Until 9/11, he held the record for murdering the most Americans in one attack. He also engineered the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the beating to death of Navy diver Robert Stethem, as well as the kidnapping and torture of Americans in Lebanon throughout the 1980s, including the CIA’s Beirut station chief Major William Buckley, who was eventually butchered after enduring 15 months of being tortured on film by Mughniyeh, with the videos being sent to the White House.
Mughniyeh was also indicted in Argentina for his role in the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 with a death toll of 29 and the bombing of the Jewish community center in the same city in 1994 that killed 85 people and injured hundreds.
Mughniyeh was the liaison man between Iran, Hezbollah and the PLO who organized the infamous Karine A arms ship, which involved an illegal cargo of Iranian heavy weapons, paid for by Yasser Arafat and being trafficked to the PLO via Hezbollah on an Iranian ship with a PLO crew. The Israelis intercepted it, and Arafat's lying about it to then-President George W. Bush even though documents on the ship clearly showed the PLO's involvement was the final straw in breaking relations between the two.
And those are just the high points of his career, omitting literally dozens of less publicized murders. And of course, there's Mughniyeh's involvement in 9/11.
The 9/11 Commission stated in its report that there was "strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of Al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were the future 9/11 hijackers."
The Commission recommended that this be investigated further, but neither the Bush Administration or the Obama Administration chose to do so for reasons unknown.
Several families of the victims of the 9/11 attack filed suit in Federal Court and in 2011, Federal Judge George Daniels in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York ruled that Iran and its terrorist proxy Hezbollah, had joint responsibility with al-Qaeda for the 9/11 attacks.
On page 240 of the 9/11 Commission’s final report, it mentions that a “senior Hezbollah operative” accompanied some of the future 9/11 hijackers on their final airline flights into and out of Afghanistan, Iran, and Lebanon.
Thanks to the evidence that came out at the trial, including a great deal of recently declassified material and 25 hours of sworn testimony from three former Iranian intelligence officers, we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the “senior Hezbollah operative” was none other than Imad Mughniyeh, the man Iran honored yesterday. Not to mention the direct participation of top Iranian government officials like former Iranian defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi.
Mughniyeh was the perfect liaison man between al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and Iran, because he was one of the handful of people trusted implicitly by all three parties.And he had a track record.
As the evidence that came out in the trial showed, in addition to overseeing and financing Mughniyeh’s extensive involvement in recruiting, guiding, and training the hijackers, Iran provided vital material support to the hijackers by ordering its border and passport officials not to stamp their passports when they crossed Iranian territory. That meant they could enter the U.S. with clean passports, and no questions asked.
It's actually quite natural that Iran should honor the likes of Imad Mughniyeh, an important soldier in their de facto war against America and the West.
What's unnatural and disgustingly craven is how our president is reacting to it.And of course, the message this is sending to the Iranians.One can only imagine the contempt they must have for us.
Something rattling the blogsphere thew last two days is an op-ed in the New York Post by investigative reporter, author and columnist Paul Sperry. It concerns an alleged cover up by the Bush Administration on Saudi involvement in 9/11:
After the 9/11 attacks, the public was told al Qaeda acted alone, with no state sponsors.
But the White House never let it see an entire section of Congress’ investigative report on 9/11 dealing with “specific sources of foreign support” for the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals.
It was kept secret and remains so today.
President Bush inexplicably censored 28 full pages of the 800-page report. Text isn’t just blacked-out here and there in this critical-yet-missing middle section. The pages are completely blank, except for dotted lines where an estimated 7,200 words once stood (this story by comparison is about 1,000 words).
A pair of lawmakers who recently read the redacted portion say they are “absolutely shocked” at the level of foreign state involvement in the attacks.
Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) can’t reveal the nation identified by it without violating federal law. So they’ve proposed Congress pass a resolution asking President Obama to declassify the entire 2002 report, “Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.”
Some information already has leaked from the classified section, which is based on both CIA and FBI documents, and it points back to Saudi Arabia, a presumed ally.
The Saudis deny any role in 9/11, but the CIA in one memo reportedly found “incontrovertible evidence” that Saudi government officials — not just wealthy Saudi hardliners, but high-level diplomats and intelligence officers employed by the kingdom — helped the hijackers both financially and logistically. The intelligence files cited in the report directly implicate the Saudi embassy in Washington and consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks, making 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war.
Sperry goes on to detail a number of specific instances, all of them factual, as is his habit. He cites Saudi diplomats like Saudi consulate official Fahad al-Thumairy, Saudi intelligence agents Omar al-Bayoumi, Osama Bassnan actually set up safe houses for the 9/11 hijackers and provided them with funds. He relates how these men set up private meetings for the hijackers with American al Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who fled America to escape terrorism charges and was later killed by a drone in Yemen.Bassnan later fled America as well after 9/11.
He also says that then-Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar and his wife sent checks totaling some $130,000 to Bassnan, much of whom went to the hijackers and to al-Qaeda. The questionable donations are not actually not classified, but a matter of public record...yet nothing happened to Bandar and he was simply recalled.
it is also a matter of record that a number of Saudi government official and nationals were given priority after 9/11 in getting out of the country, including members of the bin-Laden family.
None of this is news, frankly, to anyone who took an honest look at 9/11. Nor is the news on how FBI attempts to investigate 9/11 were stymied by the Bush Administration.
Where Sperry and I part ways is his conjecture that this was an organized attack and an act of war by the Saudi government.
What we had instead, I think, was a number of high level members of the Saudi government and the royal family, plus others in the Gulf Emirates who funded and supported bin-Laden, mostly because, you know, jihad. Some were more involved than others, but probably few of them really believed a second attack on the WTC would succeed, or that it do the damage it did. If you recall, even bin-Laden was pleasantly surprised as how successful the attack went.There was no upside to the Saudis attacking the U.S.
So now we come to the Bush Administration's role in this.
Revealing that high level Saudis had been involved in 9/11 would have meant a declaration of war. Now had I been president, I would have had no problems going there, or at the very least getting a full Saudi mea culpa, financial compensation, the guilty Saudis repatriated back to America to stand trial and an end to their financing mosques and jihad friendly imams here in America.
But President Bush's relationship with these people was, shall we say, somewhat different.
As more than one Bush biography relates, the Bush family was so close to Prince Bander that his nickname within the family circle was 'Bandar Bush'. And a look at Neil Bush of Silverado Trust fame also reveals the family's close connections with the Gulf States.
Nor is it limited to the Bushes. A look at the 'bi-partisan' Carlyle Fund(a huge mega-hedge fund mainly run by former cabinet members, influential congressmen and yes, a few former presidents that included substantial investments by the bin-Laden family), the plethora of six and seven figure speaking and 'consulting fees' enjoyed by a number of political figures on both sides of the aisle including the Clintons, Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and former senators Bob Dole and Tom Daschle just to name a few, the vast amounts spent to fund presidential libraries and foundations, former president Bill Clinton's special 'business relationship' with the Sultan of Dubai that made him a multimillionaire and helped fund Hillary's Clinton's last presidential campaign..lots of members of our ruling class have had their snouts in the trough.
Which by the way, might just tell you why America has never sought to seriously become energy independent even though we have ample oil and are one of the top five petroleum exporters.
In any event. let's just say taking out Saudi Arabia would be bad for business with all that money involved...not to mention that as keeper of the Muslim shrines at Mecca and Medina, a strike at the Saudis might have widened the scope of the war just a bit.
Or would it? Aside from the Saudis and the Gulf Emirates, there was another Muslim country that was very much complicit in 9/11. And unlike The Saudis, we are talking about direct, proven government involvement.
Iran facilitated the transit of the 9/11 hijackers into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, just like they allowed entry to al-Qaeda fighters after we invaded their stronghold in Afghanistan.
On page 240 of the 9/11 Commission’s final report, it mentions a “senior Hezbollah operative” who accompanied some of the future 9/11 hijackers on their final airline flights into and out of Afghanistan, Iran, and Lebanon.
It's now known beyond any doubt that the “senior Hezbollah operative” was our old friend Imad Mugniyeh. You'll remember that he was not only a member of al-Qaeda but a founding member of Hezbollah and a former member of Yasser Arafat's Force 17. He was the commander of the operation that killed 247 marines in Beirut, the man who tortured to death Marine Colonel William Buckley,videotaped the proceedings and sent it to the White House, and the facilitator in the Karina A arms shipment, which involved Iranian weapons sent to the PLO.
Mugniyah was the natural liaison man for the 9/11 hijackers as well,because he was one of the few people trusted by by all parties involved...Hezbollah, Iran and al- Qaeda. He was finally sent to hell in 2008, most likely by the Israeli Mossad.
The 9/11 commission report strongly suggested further investigation of the Iranian complicity at the time, but neither the Bush Administration or the Obama Administration ever saw fit to follow up.
As evidence given in the trials show, in addition to directing Mughniyah’s extensive involvement in recruiting, guiding, and training the hijackers, Iran provided vital material support to those hijackers by ordering its border and passport officials not to stamp their passports when they crossed Iranian territory. That meant they could enter the U.S. with clean passports, no questions asked and was of huge help in maintaining their cover.
Not only that, but there's evidence that emerged from the trials that the hijackers may even have received some training in Iran.
According to testimony by a former senior Iranian intelligence officer, Abolghasem Mesbahi, Mugniyeh helped train the hijackers in a camp set up by the MOIS, Iran's intelligence service. Mesabi, who has also been a witness for the German BND in investigating and trying cases involving Iranian assassins of expatriates and dissidents in that country, testified in Federal court that al-Qaeda received instruction in spy craft, explosives, communications, operational guidance and time on a flight simulator purchased by Iran from China for the exact model of domestic airliner the hijackers would use in the 9/11 attacks...which Iran did not have as part of its domestic air fleet in IranAir at the time.
None of this has ever been followed up on.
So, if we were actually talking about going after the perpetrators of 9/11, it seems like Iran Hezbollah, and probably the Saudis and some of the Gulf Emirates might have been on our list. Pretty specific targets, either for a diplomatic or military reckoning. Instead, we went after al-Qaeda, the jihad subcontractors, and we have done so in two consecutive administrations. Worse than that, we continue to appease these regimes who were involved in butchering 3,000 of our fellow Americans.
Rep. Peter King (R-NY) has talked several times about reconvening the 9/11 Commission to get some answers. As you might imagine, the response from the White House has not been overwhelming and I doubt it will happen.
The complicity of a number of Muslim countries is what they're not telling you about 9/11, and that's why more evidence of Saudi complicity in 9/11 is no big news.
The real story is how we got from there to where we are now over the past 12 years, and why. That's what we have yet to find out.
"I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word....the German compass is pointed toward peace." - British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain describing his talks with Adolf Hitler to the British people, 1938.
Now that the talks on Iran's illicit nuclear program have started in Geneva, the Iranians are already revealing that they're a farce that will mean nothing, just as they always have.
As the latest round of talks was being scheduled, Majlis Speaker and former Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani said that Iran has more enriched uranium than it needed and said that it could be used as a bargaining chip with the West, referring to a previous plan advanced by Russia to enrich Iran's uranium outside Iran,ostensibly to prevent any weaponization.
In fact, at this point the only thing the Iranians are saying they'll negotiate is the level and quantity of enriched uranium and the type and number of centrifuges...in exchange for a complete lifting of sanctions:
"We are supposed to enter into a trust-building path with the West," Araqchi said. "In their point of view, trust-building means taking some steps on the Iranian nuclear issue, and in our view, trust is made when the sanctions are lifted."
And trust, of course will take time, from the Iranians viewpoint.As much time as possible. Meanwhile, the centrifuges are spinning.And Iran admits to already having 200 kilograms (440 pounds) of 20 percent-enriched uranium, a form that can be quickly upgraded for weapons use. That's within spitting distance of what's needed for a nuclear weapon, and based on their previous track record the Iranians might well have a lot more than that hidden away.
In fact, according to the terms of the talks President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry agreed to, the Iranians can even continue to enrich uranium freely while the talks continue. And while those talks go on, the Iranians are also taking advantage of the diplomatic engagement to conceal materials and fortify their nuclear sites.
So, where does this leave us? Let's summarize:
President Obama has apparently accepted the Iranian position that they have the right to enrich uranium.He has done this in spite of the regime's support of terrorism, its complicity in 9/11, it's history of duplicity and lies on its nuclear program, and its often expressed hatred for The Great Satan, as the Iranian regime refers to America.
President Obama has swallowed assurances by Iran that they have no interest in nuclear weapons, that Iran's nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes ( which is why they kept it hidden and clandestine for so long), and that Iran's Supreme Leader the Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons..even though he didn't , and no record of the supposed 'fatwa' exists.
The Iranians will be allowed to continue enriching uranium. We have no way of verifying how much or to what degree, or really anything much while the talks continue and perhaps even after they're completed.President Obama has also apparently accepted the Iranian demand that enriched uranium will stay in Iran under Iran's control.
No mention at all has been made of closing down the top secret Iranian nuclear plant at Fordo, or its heavy water plant at Arak, which has no peaceful application, but can only be used to drive a reactor manufacturing weapons grade plutonium, a second path to nuclear weapons.
And President Obama and his team are willfully ignoring the fact that once you have the capability of enriching uranium to any degree and a full fuel cycle, you're able able to produce nuclear weapons. They are also apparently willing ignore the fact that a peaceful nuclear program can exist without requiring uranium enrichment or plutonium production. Only a nuclear weapons program does.
All else aside, this pretty much ignores Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s four stipulations for Israel's acceptance of a nuclear accord with Iran....halting uranium enrichment, removing enriched, easily weaponized uranium stocks from Iran's control, shutting down the secret Fordo underground enrichment plant and shutting down construction of the heavy water reactor in Arak.
None of that is on the table any more.Instead, the Israelis, who have been threatened with annihilation repeatedly by Iran merely got an assurance from Secretary Kerry that the Obama Administration is "mindful of Israel's security needs."
That likely carries about as much weight as the assurances of France's Socialist Prime Minister Holland, whose election was largely due to carrying 90% of the votes of France's Muslims.
Netanyahu has reacted to he and his country being totally blindsided with some tough rhetoric.In an interview with the BBC, he said, "If this regime gains access to nuclear weapons, it will become eternal, like the regime of North Korea."
He's not likely wrong about that. This entire affair has the same stench that accompanied the Clinton Administration's 'negotiations with Kim Jong-Il. The circumstances are similar - a large power sponsoring the creation of a dependent, nuclear-armed fascist regime on its borders for what it perceives as border security for itself and as an occasional flashpoint to keep the West off balance and preoccupied.
But a nuclear-armed Iran is an infinitely bigger deal. It's situated in a much more strategic area, is a larger and more important country that is a major supporter of Islamist, and will be a much more significant problem for America and the West than North Korea ever was.
Along with the rhetoric, Netanyahu also gave the order for a display of muscle, perhaps intended as much for the West as for the Ayatollahs. He had the IDF pull off a very public series of exercises testing their ability to carry out long range missions, dogfights against foreign aircraft and air-to-air refueling over Greek airspace in conjunction with the air force of that country. Coupled with Netanyahu's UN speech, the message it transmits is 'don't say we didn't warn you.'
This is all very well, but comes very late in the game.
The Israelis obviously retain the ability to severely damage Iran's nuclear weapons program. But by waiting this long, Netanyahu has committed a huge strategic blunder. A military strike now, however justified, will put Israel in the position of 'damaging peace negotiations', as well as confronting a much more difficult task militarily. And the luxury of time no longer exists, with Iran perhaps months away from having a nuclear weapon deployed.
Regular members of Joshua's Army will remember that I've stated many times on these pages my belief that President Obama's intention all along was to get Israel to take out Iran's nuclear facilities.That way, he not only avoids dealing with Iran but can call for 'a nuclear free Middle East', demand Israel get rid of its nuclear deterrent, retreat to indefensible borders and have his anti-Israel UN ambassador Samantha Power lead the charge to demonize Israel and work to have the UN slap them with sanctions when they refuse.
Netanyahu should have seen this kind of appeasement coming back in 2009 when President Obama first took office and made his hostility towards Israel evident. An Israeli strike in 2009, 2010 or 2012 would have not only been far easier militarily but would have avoided Israel being put in the position it now faces diplomatically.
It remains to be seen exactly how this plays out, but one thing is certain.By delaying the inevitable, Benyamin Netanyahu bears full responsibility for putting Israel in this position. It happened on his watch.
Odd it is that for the second time in less than a century the West appears to be willing to make a deal with the devil, forgo its own interests and ignore the fate of six million Jews threatened with extinction...but this time at least, the Jews are armed and can defend themselves.
Today, in Washington DC, thousands of patriotic bikers poured into the capitol in a rally to honor 9/11 and protest a 'Million Muslim March' heavily touted by Muslim Brotherhood front groups like CAIR and ISNA.
The 2 Million Bikers to DC ride didn't draw two million participants, but it probably drew a couple of hundred thousand. The 'Million Muslim March' ended up drawing at most a hundred or so participants, and by some counts as little as 25 or 30.
Bikers went out in groups of fifty from the starting point, the Harly-Davidson store in Maryland's Prince George’s County. in a line that stretched for close to half a mile and kept growing.
Because the bikers were denied a permit by federal and local authorities that would have offered the riders a police escort through traffic, the actual ride was a lot more complicated than it should have been.
This was a sore spot with organizers who thought the denial was politically motivated, especially since the Muslim event received a permit easily. The American Muslim Political Action Committee (MPAC, a Muslim Brotherhood front group, scheduled a rally for 9/11 to draw attention to what they call 'unfair fear of Muslims' after the Sept.11 terrorist attacks. Of course, they picked 9/11 to do so, something I'm sure a lot of people saw as insensitive and even aggressive.
Here are some reactions, as quoted in the Washington Times:
Waiting for the call to put up his kickstand, 68-year-old Jim Hearley said he rode his bike about 650 miles from Ellijay, Ga., to show his support.
“I had to do it. It was the patriot thing to do,” the former Marine and Vietnam veteran said, adding that the Muslim rally was what originally drew him to the ride.
“Any other day it probably wouldn’t have been as big as it is, but it pissed off a lot of veterans and a lot of Americans.”
“They picked the wrong day to do it,” said Kelly Volb, a 42-year-old Pennsylvania woman who attended the ride. “This is to remember everyone who perished on 9/11, out of respect to them.”
While he waited for the ride to begin, Danny Johnson shook hands with fellow riders and recounted memories of being in New York City 12 years ago. The self-described bishop with the Heat of Fire City Church in Louisville, Ky., gave last rites to victims at the Brooks Brothers store on Liberty Street across from ground zero. He said he has spent every Sept. 11 since in Manhattan — until this year.
“I think America has spent 12 years at a funeral,” the 52-year-old said. “We’ve got to revive our country and do something different than we’re doing. It’s time it had a resurrection.”
Egyptian rioters stormed the U.S. embassy in Cairo today. They climbed over the wall, trashed the grounds, removed the American flag,ripped it to shreds and hoisted in its place the black flag of jihad, which reads "There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his messenger."
As always, westerners are bending into pretzel shapes to try and come up with why this occurred while avoiding the obvious.
The excuse given was that was that a movie was supposedly being made about Mohammed. No real details, but apparently that was all that was needed to gin up the festivities. Another news source is claiming that this was supposedly about a symbolic 'trial' of Mohammed carried out by Terry Jones and his group, who symbolically burned a Qu'ran last year.
Actually, when it comes to Muslim violence, no real reason is needed. And if you're a ferengi, an infidel, even appeasing them buys you no peace. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton found that out last July when her motorcade was attacked by a mob.
The reality that no one wants to openly admit is that today's display is a party, a fiesta.
Today is 9/11, and many Muslim worldwide regard it as a day of victory over the west and in particular, America, the Great Satan. Remember, they have a home town hero to cheer. Mohammed Atta, leader of the hijackers was an Egyptian, and a former Muslim Brotherhood member just like the current head of al-Qaeda, Ayman Zawahiri.
Needless to say, the Obama Administration was quick on the draw with an apology. A statement was issued on behalf of the embassy saying that it "condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims -- as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions."
"Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy," the statement said. "We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others."
Yes indeed, they certainly do condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Unless of course they're Jews, or Christians so unfortunate to be living in Islamic countries, or Catholics in America who adhere to their church's teaching on abortion and birth control. Respect for their religious sensibilities is apparently a different matter.
We give the Egyptians over two billion in aid, forgave over a billion in debt we were owed and were instrumental in helping them obtain a badly needed IMF loan. All that wasn't enough to buy us even a basic level of respect from these people and I actually understand why.
In this neighborhood, everyone kicks the cringing dog with impunity.
In the past, any country daring to desecrate our flag and invade U.S. sovereign territory- for that is what an embassy is considered to be- would have rued the day they did so.
Not any more. It's all about appeasement, which only breeds more of the same.
You can hardly blame much of the Muslim world for having contempt for us. It's their usual attitude towards dhimmis.
I ordinarily wouldn't even take notice of something like this appearing in Pravda-on-the-Hudson, especially given their record of endangering our troops and our country by leaking classified information. But these shameless,brazen lies demand a response.
This is an op-ed entitled 'The Deafness Before the Storm', and its premise is fairly simple - that the Bush White House was deaf to 9/11 warnings and thus allowed it to happen.
The writer is one Kurt Eichenwald, and he has top grade, cutting edge knowledge and experience with national security , since his credentials include being an ex-New York Times reporter and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Oh wait, maybe he doesn't.
At any rate, Mr. Eichenwald writes about a classified August 6th 2001 briefing President Bush received the threats posed by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. As Eichenwald himself admits, this briefing mainly consisted of a history and description of bin-Laden and al-Qaeda with zero specifics on any actual or imminent operation or threat.There were good reasons why that's true, which we'll examine in a moment.
But then we get to the meat of Mr. Eichenwald's attack. He writes that while this declassified briefing revealed nothing of much use, there were other briefings that haven't been declassified that reveal 'negligence' - even though he hasn't read them. He bases this premise on what he claims were 'excerpts' he read.
Let's look at what he cites.
According to Eichenwald:
On May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.{..}
“The U.S. is not the target of a disinformation campaign by Usama Bin Laden,” the daily brief of June 29 read, using the government’s transliteration of Bin Laden’s first name. Going on for more than a page, the document recited much of the evidence, including an interview that month with a Middle Eastern journalist in which Bin Laden aides warned of a coming attack, as well as competitive pressures that the terrorist leader was feeling, given the number of Islamists being recruited for the separatist Russian region of Chechnya.
And the C.I.A. repeated the warnings in the briefs that followed. Operatives connected to Bin Laden, one reported on June 29, expected the planned near-term attacks to have “dramatic consequences,” including major casualties. On July 1, the brief stated that the operation had been delayed, but “will occur soon.” Some of the briefs again reminded Mr. Bush that the attack timing was flexible, and that, despite any perceived delay, the planned assault was on track.
So, what we have here, en toto, is vague information of a possible attack with no specifics, no named target and no real details. Damn that George W. Bush and those evil Republicans for not possessing clairvoyance!
Some of you might recall the many threats and warnings of a major strike al-Qaeda issued after 9/11 that never came to pass.There was no way to do anything more in those cases but follow up leads and continue digging, something the New York Times severely impacted by releasing the details of our surveillance program for al-Qaeda to read. Yet because this one unimaginable attack succeeded a few months after President Bush took office, it was - say it with me - Bush's Fault.
Of course, what we really had in the months before 9/11 was an intelligence failure. Let's examine exactly why our intel on 9/11 was so faulty.
Ever since the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the Clinton Administration regarded Islamist terrorism as a pesky law enforcement problem rather than a national security threat, and aside from lobbing a few cruise missiles at what turned about to be an aspirin factory, very little was done to take it seriously, even as the attacks increased in frequency and severity.
As part of this approach, Assistant Attorney General Jamie Gorelick built what amounted to a wall that prevented different intelligence agencies from sharing information on the grounds it might affect the terrorist's legal rights.
So intel operations like Able Danger, who had actually tracked the hijackers from Afghanistan to Germany and identified Mohammed Atta and most of the other hijackers months before 9/11 were prevented by the Clinton Justice Department's official policy from sharing this intel with other agencies.
Had the FBI been alerted to what Able Danger knew, Atta's name could have been put on a list that would have tagged him as someone to be watched from the moment he stepped off a plane in Newark, New Jersey. Surveillance of Atta, who lived openly in Florida for over a year, and who acquired a driver's license and even an FAA pilot's license in his real name, might well have made it possible for the FBI to stop the Sept. 11 attacks before they occurred. Except thanks to Gorelick's wall, the FBI wasn't given access to that information.
Even more poignantly, Gorelick was exempted from having to testify under oath in front of the 9/11 commission, none of this was examined by the commission in any detail and the Democrats on the panel were happy to gloss over it.
At this point, we also don't know exactly the extent of what the Clinton Administration concealed about 9/11, thanks to the theft of classified documents by former Clinton National Security adviser Sandy Berger. We do know that the government of the Sudan offered us Osama bin-Laden on a platter but the Clinton Administration refused to accept him. And that there were at least two other times we could have taken out bin-Laden but the orders weren't forthcoming from Mr.Bill, who had other pressing matters in the Oval Office to attend to. On one famous occasion, our CIA had bin-Laden's location pinpointed in Afghanistan and a missile targeted, but they simply couldn't find the president.
You might remember the threats to attack their broadcast license that the ex-president and the Democratic leadership in congress made to ABC and its then owner Disney over the film `The Path to 9/11' , which resulted in certain changes being made to the version of the movie that was shown to downplay all that.
Of course, you won't read any of this in Mr. Eichenwald's piece.
After an op-ed filled with asides and innuendos, he covers himself by writing:
"Could the 9/11 attack have been stopped, had the Bush team reacted with urgency to the warnings contained in all of those daily briefs? We can’t ever know."
But one thing we do know is that if the Clinton Administration had taken Osama bin-Laden as the serious threat he was and had been more concerned with national security than some terrorist's potential legal rights, there was a definite chance that Osama bin-Laden would either be in U.S custody or have been halal hamburger courtesy of a tomahawk missile prior to 9/11. And that Mohammed Atta and the other hijackers might have been apprehended before 3,000 Americans were murdered.
There’s much you can say about George W. Bush's presidency, but accusing him of being responsible ignoring intel he never received and being responsible for not preventing 9/11 is a ridiculous premise and an obvious exercise in disinformation.
Speaking hours after Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had publicly blamed the bombing Wednesday at Bulgaria’s Burgas airport on “Hezbollah, directed by Iran,” Ahmadinejad described the attack as “a response” to Israeli “blows against Iran.”
“The bitter enemies of the Iranian people and the Islamic Revolution have recruited most of their forces in order to harm us,” he said in a speech reported by Israel’s Channel 2 TV. “They have indeed succeeded in inflicting blows upon us more than once, but have been rewarded with a far stronger response.”
He added: “The enemy believes it can achieve its aims in a long, persistent struggle against the Iranian people, but in the end it will not. We are working to ensure that.”
Ahmadinejad’s speech was interpreted in Israel as asserting that the Burgas bombing was a revenge attack for the killing of Iranian nuclear scientists, for which Iran has repeatedly blamed Israel.
His remarks contrasted with a condemnation of the Burgas bombing by the Iranian Foreign Ministry earlier Thursday.
“The Islamic republic, the biggest victim of terrorism, believes terrorism endangers the lives of innocents… is inhumane and so strongly condemns” it, the Arabic-language television channel Al-Alam cited foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast as saying. “Iran’s position is to condemn all terrorist acts in the world,” he added.
Yes, the Iranians would never have anything to do with terrorism. Lessee.. there's their complicity in 9/11, the bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, the murder of countless Lebanese politicians, journalists and civilians, the execution style murder of US troops by the Revolutionary Guard in Iraq, the supplying of arms to groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and al-Shahab who are recognized terrorist groups by our State Department...the list is literally endless for this evil, soulless regime and doesn't even stop with what they've done to their own people.
In a long awaited decision, Federal Judge George Daniels in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York ruled that Iran and its Lebanese terrorist proxy Hezbollah, had joint responsibility with al-Qaeda for the 9/11 attacks.
As I mentioned previously, this is by no means new or even previously unknown material. The 9/11 Commission stated in its report that there was "strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of Al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were future 9/11 hijackers." There's more than just 'strong evidence' that Iran allowed members of al-Qaeda into Iran after we invaded their stronghold in Afghanistan. That's exactly how so many of them got to Iraq so easily via Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran.
On page 240 of the Commission’s final report, it mentions a “senior Hezbollah operative” accompanied some of the future 9/11 hijackers on their final airline flights into and out of Afghanistan, Iran, and Lebanon.
It's now known beyond question that the “senior Hezbollah operative” was our old friend Imad Mugniyeh. You'll remember that he was not only a member of al-Qaeda but a founding member of Hezbollah and a former member of Yasser Arafat's Force 17. He was the commander of the operation that killed 247 marines in Beirut, the man who tortured to death Marine Colonel William Buckley,videotaped the proceedings and sent it to the White House, the liaison man in the Karina A arms shipment, which involved Iranian weapons sent to the PLO.
Mugniyah was the natural liaison man for the 9/11 hijackers as well,because he was one of the few people trusted by by all parties involved...Hezbollah, Iran and al-Qaeda.
The 9/11 commission urged further investigation at the time, but neither the Bush Administration or the Obama Administration ever saw fit to follow up.
As evidence given in the trials show, in addition to directing Mughniyah’s extensive involvement in recruiting, guiding, and training the hijackers, Iran provided vital material support to those hijackers by ordering its border and passport officials not to stamp their passports when they crossed Iranian territory. That meant they could enter the U.S. with clean passports, no questions asked.
This was probably what Saddam Hussein was talking about when he mentioned that he thought a strike on the U.S. was imminent, but that 'no ties to Iraq will be seen.' Given that the Iraqis had already gotten away with involvement in the first World Trade Center bombing ( and likely the Oklahoma City bombing), Saddam wasn't expecting anyone to draw a line to Iraq this time, especially since he may have known of or suspected Iran's involvement in the coming carnage.
Iranian assistance to al-Qaeda didn't stop with the 9/11 attacks, as you already know if you read this site. After Tora Bora, al-Qaeda's top leadership and a number of fighters were able to flee to safety in Iran aided and abetted by the regime, including Ayman Zawahiri and Osama bin-Laden. Many of the fighters ended up in Iraq and Afghanistan, while bin-Laden and Zawahri returned to Pakistan.
These and other details were revealed by declassified material that came out in the trial and 25 hours of sworn testimony (filed under seal) from three former Iranian intelligence officers, who described the direct participation of top Iranian government officials like current Iranian defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi as well as Imad Mughniyah's role.
The next step, since this is a civil trial, will likely be to obtain financial judgments, which may ultimately involve seeking reciprocation in European courts that recognize US judgments.
Of course, the real question to be answered is one I posed before, one some of us have been asking for a long time - exactly why did we go after Saddam Hussein and ignore the real threat in Iran? Especially since our government was made aware of Iran's complicity?
From the Iranian standpoint, they have to be astounded as well. They've taken over an American embassy with impunity, killed our soldiers, armed, trained and abetted our enemies and provided essential support for the worst terrorist strike on America's soil in our history.And these people are now actively seeking nuclear weapons via a rogue program.
Any of these actions are normally grounds for war. Yet the United States continues to attempt to 'engage' with the Iranians.
If I were them, I would assume that America was so petrified of Iran, so ineffectual and decadent that no accommodation with America was necessary and no attack or insult too insufferable to offer. I would hold America and its leaders beneath contempt.
That is likely how they regard us, and I certainly can see why.It will unfortunately make a violent confrontation at some point that much more likely.
As usual, they're probably lying. We actually have one of the perps in custody.
But what they may not be lying about is the rationale for the ramping up of rhetoric by the Obama administration ( emphasis mine) :
An aide to Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday denied US allegations that the Islamic republic was involved in a plot to kill the Saudi envoy to Washington.
“This is a prefabricated scenario to turn public attention away from domestic problems within the United States,” Ali Akbar Javanfekr, the president’s press adviser, told AFP.
“The US government and the CIA have a lot of experience in diverting public attention from domestic problems in the United States. We have to wait now to know the details of this prefabricated scenario to know the US government’s objectives,” he said.
Let's examine a few things.
Iran is a rogue nation and state supporter of terrorism who has been in a state of war with us since 1978. They or their proxies have killed US troops in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan, supplied weapons to our enemies. There's even some credible evidence they may have helped facilitate 9/11.
They actually engaged in a shooting war with the U.S. in the Persian Gulf back in the 1980's, and then there's their illegal nuclear program, the constant threats and bluster and their direct arming of our enemies.
President Barack Obama has been an enabler and appeaser of Iran ever since he took office (and to be honest, so was President Bush before him to a large degree). Nothing I mentioned above ever caused him to falter a single bit in 'engaging' with the mullahs or extending what he called 'an unclenched fist' in their direction, no matter how often they spat in his hand.
Now, all of a sudden, President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton are pounding their chests and issuing war cries about an 'unacceptable escalation'? Why now?
What's changed, of course is the president's poll numbers. With an election coming on, President Obama might just see some forceful engagement in Iran as a way to boost those ol' approval numbers. It wouldn't surprise me one bit.
This president frequently channels Jimmy Carter, and you may recall the boost in President Carter's popularity when the Iran Hostage crisis began. Before that, he failure to show even a semblence of acumen in running the U.S. economy or its foreign policy had him doomed to be a one term president.
But once the mullahs moved against our diplomats, the American people rallied around him - at least until they finally figured out that an incredibly weak president was going to be as feckless with the Iranians as he had with the commies and virtually everyone else. Then his ratings plummeted again. Meanwhile the mullahs were smart enough to release the hostages the day President Reagan took office even at terms that were actually far less than what they had been demanding of Carter.
If our current miserable excuse for a commander-in-chief has ideas of taking on Iran to bolster his political future, I applaud the action if not the motivation, provided it's done properly...which it likely won't be with President Obama in charge. A few things to consider:
The last thing we need is another war by diktat with foggy objectives. Unlike Libya, the president will need to make the case to Congress. I doubt he's capable of that, but will public opinion sit still for another war like Libya? Especially if the Obama Administration deliberately hampers our military with suicidal Rules of Engagement, encouraged by turgid presidential homilies about Islam, the religion of peace?
We have over one hundred thousand troops and billions in equipment stranded in a land locked Afghanistan surrounded by hostile territory. Some provision is almost certainly going to have to be made to get them out.
major strikes will need to be made on Iran's missile bases,infrastructure and nuclear facilities. And Iran's navy will have to be sunk, in order to keep the Shatt al-Arab in the Persian Gulf unobstructed. This is no time for half measures. Is President Obama capable of that?
Some provision is going to have to be made for our troops in Iraq.It's doubtful the Iraqis will aid their fellow Shi'ites, but they will not want the onus of sheltering U.S. troops, especially if the mullahs have the Iranian trained and armed militias like the Mahdi Army attack.
The Russians have billions invested in Iran, and the Chinese need Iranian oil. Depend on them to obstruct any of the UN resolutions or internationally based actions people like President Obama or Hillary Clinton are so fond of. Ditto when it comes to NATO,some of whose members depend on Russian oil and gas and with the European winter coming on.
The president is also likely to face hardline pressure from Putin to back off from Iran - something Obama has been notably deficient in dealing with in the past. In fact, the only real allies we're likely to have will be Australia and Israel, with maybe the Saudis and the Gulf nations in support roles. Given president Obama's hostility towards Israel, is he going to be prepared to make use of our mosy loyal ally in the Middle East?
Speaking of oil, the president is going to have to reconsider his de facto ban on drilling, something a number of his enviro-wacko supporters won't like at all. A war in the Persian Gulf would of necessity spike the oil market
Above all, is this president prepared to forgo the heady pleasures of nation building after the war's over? Aside from the fact we can't afford it (even less than we could in Iraq)rebuilding Iran would totally ignore the jihadi mentality, which is actually what we're fighting against.For that Islamist mindset, a large amount of rubble and casualties sends a certain invaluable message about the drawbacks of certain actions against America.
These are all things I hope President Obama is considering if he's contemplating a wag the dog moment.Frankly, I wonder if he has.
There's a video that's surfaced of President Obama and the First Lady at the 9/11 memorial last Sunday that's given rise to a certain amount of controversy.
In a brief clip, Michelle Obama turns to the president in the middle of the ceremony when the the bagpipes are playing, and says something to the president. He nods agreement, she shakes her head and rolls her eyes.
Now, you can't make out exactly what she was saying, so various people have come up with their own interpretations. To my pal Thomas Lifeson over at American Thinker, it looks as though she is saying, "All that for a flag!"
James Robbins over at The Washing Times gets it as 'a skeptical looking Mrs. Obama leans to her husband and appears to say, “all this just for a flag.” She then purses her lips and shakes her head slightly as Mr. Obama nods.'
The Soros-paid galley slaves over at Media Matters quote Kristina Schake, communications director for First Lady Michelle Obama as saying: "The words, meaning and context in these claims are all wildly off the mark. The First Lady was commenting to the President on how moving and powerful it always is to watch all that America's firefighters and police officers do to honor the flag. It was an emotional moment on a powerful day and she was awed by the ceremony and all that the flag symbolizes."
That didn't exactly look to me like what the president's bitter half was saying and the body language definitely doesn't fit.To me, it does look very much like the F-bomb was dropped, which would fit in with the body language a lot better , but in all fairness my lip reading skills are limited, although I do have a certain amount of experience figuring out what someone is saying to me in loud environments like sound stages and concert venues. She could be saying something like 'anybody who wears a kilt is a fag' or 'Ceremonies like this are such a drag' of course.
My point is that The Obamas have a very different take on what our flag and our traditions mean than most Americans, and that's been evident for quite some time.
They, you know, hang out in certain circles where this is pretty much a natural way to behave.
So it would certainly not be out of character for our First Lady to say something disparaging like this, which is why the White House has mostly kept her selectively muzzled or away on high -priced vacations for the past three years. I don't know what she said, but the body language, the head shaking and the eye rolling definitely reinforce that whatever she had to say it probably wasn't something the Obama campaign wants to have surface.
A mere decade after 3,000 Americans were murdered in the worst attack on our soil in history, 9/11 has become a minor commemoration, something like Flag Day, an occasion for politicians to make a few speeches. In another decade, it may not even be that much.
Among those politicians is the mayor of the city where 9/11 actually occurred, Mayor Bloomberg, and it's worth listening to what he had to say about excluding clergy and the firemen and police who first confronted the horror on that grim, dark day from the ceremony:
Putting aside his ignorance of the Constitution, it's strange indeed to hear someone who champions building a mega-mosque virtually on the site of Ground Zero and helped ram it through the zoning board talk about how having clergy to commemorate 9/11 is somehow inappropriate. Especially when that mosque is essentially being funded by the same people that funded the 9/11 attacks, with an imam in charge who says the US was an 'accessory' to the atrocity perpetrated on our soil and who wants to implement sharia law in our Republic.
And it's even stranger to hear him talk about there being no room to accommodate the firemen and police. As I recall, there was plenty of room for them on the same site ten years ago...and a number of them never left.
It's somehow symbolic that ten years later Ground Zero is still a building site, deeply mired in New York City's bureaucracy. It remains unfinished business, just like the war it precipitated.
Because that's the core of the matter. We responded, but our response was incomplete, which is exactly why we're still fighting this war a decade later.
It started when President Bush first addressed Congress and the nation after 9/11.
The American people were ready to be led to war as a united country to take retribution on the enemies who perpetrated 9/11, and their friends pulling the strings back home in the Middle East.
Unfortunately, some of those same people were long time friends and business partners of the Bush family and their friends, which made things awkward - to say the least.
So instead of actually naming our enemies and their ideology - Islamist fascism - the president announced that America was now involved in a war on 'terror', that we should all calm down, that the creed of our enemies meant peace, that the goal of this war was `safety and security' rather than victory, and that everything would be all right if we would just go shopping.
Since then, virtually every part of the war was fought in half measures. President Bush said to Congress a week or so after 9/11 : "We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime."
That should have been our guiding principle in winning this war. But instead, that standard was applied so selectively as to be almost meaningless in terms of victory.
It meant that we were willing to send an army to landlocked Afghanistan to fight the Taliban when they refused to turn their backs on al-Qaeda, but it meant we had to spend billions to bribe Pakistan and ignore their harboring of our enemies and the Islamist terrorist groups there.
It meant spending billions on security but not securing our borders or taking measures to deal with Islamist Muslim Brotherhood fronts here at home.
It meant invading Iraq, (which was about protecting the Saudis anyway) but ignoring countries like Syria and Saudi Arabia who were allowing funding, training and transit of al-Qaeda fighters to kill our men there. And it meant doing almost nothing about Iran allowing al-Qaeda fighters to transit their borders or arming and training the Shi'ite militias fighting our troops.
And most of all, it meant was appeasing Islam at all costs.
Both the Bush and Obama Administrations somehow got the idea that by concealing whom and what we we were actually fighting, there was a public relations battle to be won in the Muslim world.
We were fighting al-Qaeda, 'extremists', 'terrorists', 'radicals', what have you. Anything except what we were really fighting, the ideology of Islamist fascism.
Over the past decade Americans have been sent a barely concealed message that somehow 9/11 was our fault because we were somehow unaccepting and insufficiently subservient to the issues and concerns of Islam.
Appeasement became the order of the day.
That meant Muslim Brotherhood front groups like CAIR being embraced by our government as legitimate players and spokespersons for America's Muslims, the nation enduring a virtual media self-flagellation over Guantanamo and Abu Ghreib, US ambassadors being appointed to the anti-Semitic and Islamist Organization of Islamic Councils 'to listen and to learn', and our troops in the field being saddled with unrealistic rules of engagement that actually endangered their lives.
It meant 'engaging' with countries like Iran and Syria while they committed blatant acts of war and terrorism against us, and indulging in the fiction that what really caused our problems with the Muslim world was American support for Israel and the lack of a 'Palestine'.
It meant talking fervently about 'Arab Democracy' and the problem of 'Islamophobia' while ignoring the Muslim world's anti-semitism, bigotry and and misogyny. It meant spending millions on Iraqi democracy while allowing that 'democratic' government we put in place to conduct a jihad on Christians and homosexuals on our watch.
It meant turning a blind eye to the real perpetrators, the nations that fund, harbor and nurture jihad against the West. It meant not even allowing them to be sued in court for monetary damages. Or even prosecuting some of our enemies who have been taken in battle after killing our warriors.
It meant threatening a Navy SEAL team with courtmartials for carrying out a dangerous mission to apprehend the terrorist who murdered five civilian contractors in Fallujah and mutilated their corpses, but allowing someone like Major Nidal to stay in the Army and advance through the ranks until he decided to carry out his own personal jihad that morning in Fort Hood.
In short, it meant fighting a war by half measures and deceiving ourselves.
From the beginning, we've been told that `this is a new kind of war' without borders or real enemies. But anyone who is paying any attention at all knows exactly where the support network of jihad is located. And exactly where to find our enemies. As Mark Steyn once memorably put it, they are hiding in plain sight.
But we have allowed ourselves to be lulled into not seeing, and even told that seeing the truth for what it is somehow shameful.
And so we remain America Agonistes, embattled but not defeated. Because no one can defeat us except ourselves.
Americans don't like wasteful wars of defensive attrition with no end in sight, and they historically have a limited tolerance for being lied to. On this 9/11, when political apes like Mayor Bloomberg posture and preen and the current occupant of the White House repeats smarmy platitudes and avoids the truth because of his own mindset and prejudices, I get a real sense that the time of lies and misdirection is coming to an end. Because there is no other choice, and America is not a suicidal country. And because unfortunately, appeasement never leads to peace. Only victory does that.
As I write this, I have no doubt that we will remember it and act on it, although it may be that circumstances force us to remember it. History is never kind to those with unfinished business.
One of my clearest memories of 9/11 happened in the evening. After letting all of the day's horror sink in, I walked outside to get some air and look at the sky, an old habit of mine. Up above was a crescent moon with stars nearby...the living picture of Islam ascendent.
It's something I've never forgotten.
The moon, like all else on this earth goes in phases. I sense the beginning of a new phase.
There's an interesting federal lawsuit that's been filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan by family members of the victims of 9/11.
It alleges that Iran had foreknowledge of the attacks, materially assisted al-Qaeda and the 9/11 hijackers and was complicit in the attacks.
This is by no means new material. Even the 9/11 commission said in its report that there was "strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of Al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were future 9/11 hijackers." There's more than just strong evidence that Iran allowed members of al-Qaeda into Iran after we invaded their stronghold in Afghanistan, which is how so many of them got to Iraq so easily via Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran.
The 9/11 commission urged further investigation at the time, but neither the Bush Administration or the Obama Administration has seen fit to follow up.
Representing eight law firms from across the United States, the attorneys and their team of investigators have turned up some convincing evidence, including the testimony of two defectors from the Islamic regime's intelligence service as well as from members of the 9/11 commission and US intelligence agents and terrorism experts
The attorneys in the case claim to have taken sworn testimony former Iranian intelligence operatives describing the direct participation of top government officials of Iran in the planning of, and preparation for, the 9/11 attacks. These witnesses also describe the roles of top Iranian officials in assisting al Qaeda leadership and operatives to escape from Afghanistan after the U.S.-led invasion in the wake of 9/11.Iran then provided safe haven and support for these al Qaeda members inside Iran.
"There is an I-Spy aspect to all this," Dennis Pantazis, a partner at Wiggins Childs said. "But the information the defectors provided is direct and their documentation is direct."
"The big picture in a case like this is knowledge," he said. "We can't change history and we can't prosecute anyone, all we can do with a civil suit is reveal truth and knowledge."
According to the filing, Iran facilitated travel for the al-Qaeda members by directing border guards not to impede their ingress into Iran or to stamp their passports. If that's true ( and it likely is) Iran had foreknowledge of the attacks. And given that Iran has been in a state of war with America since 1979, it would hardly be out of character.
Another piece of the puzzle is our old friend, the late and unlamented Imad Mugniyeh.
Mugniyeh was one of the superstars of jihad. He was a Lebanese Shi'ite who started his career as a member of Yasser Arafat's Force 17 back when the PLO was trying to put together its own little reichlet there, and later became a founding member of Hezbollah.
He masterminded the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that killed 63 people and the truck-bomb attacks in Beirut that took the lives of 242 U.S. Marines and 58 French troops and personally tortured to death CIA agent William Buckley, recording the proceeds on video and sending it to the CIA HQ in Langley. He also made the FBI's most wanted list for ordering the murder of US Navy diver Robert Stethem during the June 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847.
Mugniyeh later joined al Qaeda as one of Osama bin-Laden's chiefs of operations while maintaining his connections with Hezbollah, the Palestinians and Iran, and was unique in that he was a trusted link between all the parties.
According to the lawsuit, Mugniyeh was the direct liaison between al-Qaeda and Iran,something that's entirely plausible given that he performed the same role in other operations like the Karina-A arms shipment the Israelis hijacked, which involved Iranian arms sent to Arafat via Hezbollah with a Palestinian crew.
There were already some tentative links to Mughniyeh by the 9/11 Commission, which cited evidence that "a senior Hezbollah operative visited Saudi Arabia to coordinate activities there" and that this senior Hezbollah operative and his associate were on the same flights as several of the future hijackers who were traveling to and from Iran between October 2000 and February 2001.
The lawsuit says it has what it describes as 'compelling evidence' in the testimony of the Iranian defectors that the senior Hezbollah operative described was Imad Mughniyeh.
Iran is not bothering to mount a defense and neither are the Iranian officials named in the suit. The plan will likely be to get a judgment and then pursue Iranian assets overseas in foreign courts that honor US judgments.
What other fall out happens from this will likely depend on how compelling a case the plaintiffs make. Establishing Iranian complicity in the 9/11 attacks will likely lead to a resurgence of the question some of us have been asking for a long time - exactly why did we go after Saddam Hussein and ignore the real threat in Iran?
