RUTHFULLY YOURS

Who knew that the Obama administration had a penchant for black humor? Earlier this year, in February, President Obama told Bill O’Reilly during an interview on Fox News that there was “not even a smidgen of corruption” in the IRS scandal involving the targeting of conservative nonprofit groups. In July 2103, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew foreshadowed his boss’s nonchalance by insisting that there was “no evidence” that any political appointee had been involved in the scandal.

Now we may know why. After months of delay in responding to congressional inquiries, the IRS now claims that, for the period of January 2009 to April 2011, all e-mails between Lois Lerner — the IRS official at the center of the scandal — and anyone outside the IRS were wiped out by a “computer crash.” As House Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp wrote in a statement, this loss means that “we are conveniently left to believe that Lois Lerner acted alone.” After all, there isn’t a “smidgen” of e-mail evidence to suggest otherwise.

A growing number of computer professionals are stepping forward to say that none of this makes sense. Norman Cillo, a former program manager at Microsoft, told The Blaze: “I don’t know of any e-mail administrator [who] doesn’t have at least three ways of getting that mail back. It’s either on the disks or it’s on a TAPE backup someplace on an archive server.” Bruce Webster, an IT expert with 30 years of experience consulting with dozens of private companies, seconds this opinion: “It would take a catastrophic mechanical failure for Lerner’s drive to suffer actual physical damage, but in any case, the FBI should be able to recover something. And the FBI and the Justice Department know it.”

In March of this year, John Koskinen, the new IRS commissioner, testified before Congress that all the e-mails of IRS employees are “stored in servers.” The agency’s own manual specifies that it “provides for backup and recovery of records to protect against information loss or corruption.” The reason is simple. It is well known in legal and IT circles that failure to preserve e-mails can lead to a court ruling of “spoliation of evidence.” That means a judge or jury is then instructed to treat deletions as if they were deliberate destruction of incriminating evidence.

* As her husband’s official media glorifies kidnapping of Israeli boys with anti-Semitic cartoons, Abbas’ wife convalesces in top Tel Aviv hospital in “apartheid Israel”

* U.S. and EU-funded Fatah posts cartoon mocking kidnapped teens as rats (picture link below)

* A special chocolate wrapper to glorify child abduction, with the faces of the boys mocked on them (picture link below)

* No “Bring back out boys” photo tweeted yet by Michelle Obama, regarding the kidnapped Israeli schoolboys

* Human Rights Watch head Roth struggles to condemn kidnapping of Jewish teenagers – and also appears to “understand” ISIS in Iraq

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On Thursday night three Israeli teenage boys were kidnapped in Judea (part of the West Bank) and have not been seen since. Although Israel has been riveted on the story, it hasn’t gotten much play in the international media, overshadowed by the events in Iraq and by the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament in Brazil.

Also tending to diminish interest is the fact that the three kidnap victims are identified as “settlers,” a heavily stigmatized group that much of the West does not regard as having human rights in any case. Actually, only one of the three lived in a community over the 1949 armistice lines. All three, however, were religious Jews and were attending a yeshiva in Judea, which, unfortunately, is not the way to gain world sympathy.

Israelis are also well aware that a headline such as “Settlers Kidnap 3 Palestinians” would kick up much more of a storm.

Israel is also having trouble getting world governments interested in the fact that the kidnapping, as confirmed by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, was carried out by Hamas. It was just two weeks ago that the new Fatah-Hamas unity government was sworn in. Jerusalem was dismayed when the Obama administration announced it was ready to “work with” the new government. The European Union and the United Nations, of course, fell all over themselves in welcoming it.

Jerusalem warned at the time that the new “unity,” however tenuous, would likely give terror a boost. With Hamas already ruling Gaza, “unity” would give it greater inroads in the West Bank. The new arrangement would also make Hamas anxious to show the Palestinian masses that it had not gone soft and not given up “resistance” to Israel.

Last Wednesday 88 senators informed President Obama that they shared Israel’s view, expressing “grave concern” over Hamas’s inclusion in the government, noting that it “has openly called for Israel’s destruction,” and warning that “these troubling developments…have undermined congressional support for U.S. assistance to the Palestinians.”

The upshot was that the U.S. could find itself funding an explicitly terrorist government.

Many of us declared the Arab Spring dead and buried. But the Arab Spring really came in two phases.

The first phase was the political destabilization of formerly stable Arab countries by liberals and Islamists. The second phase was an armed conflict by Islamists to take over entire countries.

These phases overlapped in some cases and the second phase has been underway for a while already. In Libya and Syria the first phase of the Arab Spring became the second phase. When protests didn’t work, the Islamists turned to force. When elections didn’t work for them in Libya, they turned to force for a second time. The Benghazi attack was arguably a collateral effect of Islamist attempts to take over Libya after a poor election performance that same summer.

Advocates of the Arab Spring promised that political Islam would lead to an end to Islamic terrorism, but armed Jihad and political Jihad are two phases of the same Islamic struggle. Now the shift to the second phase is complete. The real beneficiaries of the Arab Spring were always going to be those who had the most guns and cared the least about dying in battle. And that was always going to be Al Qaeda.

Libya and Syria’s civil wars had a ripple effect as weapons were seized and recruits assembled. The lessons of the Afghan wars should have made it clear that the Jihadists involved in those conflicts would not simply go home and live normal lives once the fighting was concluded.

Instead they would find other wars to fight.

The War on Terror was fed by veterans of those wars. So were a dozen more minor Jihadist conflicts that don’t normally make the news. Those conflicts produced their own veterans and spread the war around.

The Arab Spring was supposed to use “moderate” political Islamists to thwart “extremist” terrorists, but that was never going to happen. There is no such thing as a moderate Islamist. There are only Islamic activists more focused on one phase of the conflict. Like the distinction between the political and armed branches of terrorist groups, these distinctions are tactical. They are not ideological.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Andrew C. McCarthy, a policy fellow at the National Review Institute, a contributing editor at National Review, and a columnist for PJ Media. He was a top federal prosecutor involved in some of the most significant cases in recent history. Decorated with the Justice Department’s highest honors, he retired from government in 2003, after helping launch the 9/11 investigation. He is one of America’s most persuasive voices on national security issues and author of the bestsellers Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad and The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. He is the author of the new book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

FP: Andrew C. McCarthy, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

McCarthy: Jamie, it’s a pleasure to speak with you again.

FP: Let’s begin with what inspired you to write this book.

McCarthy: Presidential lawlessness and derelictions of duty. I guess that, in light of my background, it’s not surprising that I’m intrigued by how our Constitution deals with modern challenges—or, more accurately, modern iterations of eternal challenges like abuse of power. President Obama’s lawlessness is unprecedented in its scope, starkness, and purpose to undermine the separation-of-powers. The Framers rightly believed the latter was the key to safeguarding liberty—preventing the accumulation of too much power, and especially the joining of executive and legislative powers, in a single set of hands. Because they so worried about the specter of executive lawlessness and overreach, they gave Congress tools to address it decisively. But there are really only two of them: the power of the purse and impeachment.

So I wrote the book to say, “Look, presidential lawlessness is a significant threat to our liberties and to our aspiration to be a Republic under the rule of law. The system gives us weapons to combat it. If we don’t use them, that is a political choice that can be made, but let’s make it with our eyes open because it has serious consequences. I means we will no longer be the same kind of country.”

FP: What exactly are “high crimes and misdemeanors” and can you give a few brief examples of how has Obama committed them?

Masada—for many, the name evokes the image of a cliff rising dramatically above an austere desert landscape. The name is famously associated with the Masada siege, the final stand between the Jewish rebels and the relentless Roman army at the end of the First Jewish Revolt in 73/74 C.E. Trapped in the desert fortress-palace Herod built in the previous century, the rebels chose—as Jewish historian Josephus tells us—to commit mass suicide rather than be captured and enslaved by the Romans.

This final scene in the siege of Masada has been celebrated and immortalized as an act of heroic resistance on the part of the Jewish rebels. But what do we know about the Roman siege itself? In “The Masada Siege—From the Roman Viewpoint” in the July/August 2014 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Gwyn Davies examines the assault from the Roman perspective.

After the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., the Romans turned their attention to stamping out the last of the rebels holding out at the fortresses of Herodium and Machaerus as well as in the “Forest of Jardes” (which has not yet been identified). The last remaining site occupied by the Jewish rebels was at Herod’s desert fortress-palace on the cliff-top of Masada.

Led by Roman general Flavius Silva, the Legio X Fretensis—a veteran military unit—began the siege operation against the rebels in 72 or 73 C.E.

Second Front Opens in the Sunni-Shia War

The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) organization swept into the city of Mosul in western Iraq last week. No one has any right to be surprised. ‬

ISIL has held a large swath of western Iraq since January – including the city of Fallujah. The organization was clearly planning a larger scale offensive action into Iraq. ‬

In January it had carried out a strategic withdrawal from large swaths of Idleb and Aleppo provinces in Syria. This was intended to consolidate its lines in northern Syria, so as to move fighters out toward Iraq. ISIL controls a contiguous bloc of territory stretching from western Iraq up through eastern and northern Syria to the Turkish border. ‬

Its “Islamic State” is already an existing, if precarious fact, no longer a mere aspiration. So, like a state at war, it moves its forces to the front where they are most needed‬.

The rapid collapse of Nouri al-Maliki’s garrison in Mosul in the face of the ISIL assault should also come as no surprise. These forces are hollow. ‬

Saddam Hussein maintained a huge army by coercion. Shirkers and deserters could expect to be executed. But Maliki’s army consists of poorly paid conscripts and often corrupt officers. The Shia among them in Mosul saw no reason to fight and die for what seemed to them to be Sunni, alien territory. Sunni officers among the garrison, meanwhile, may well have been working with ISIL itself or with one of the other Sunni Islamist or nationalist formations fighting alongside them. ‬

So what will happen now? The pattern of developing events is already clear, and much may be learned from the experience of Syria. ‬

Leon Trotsky probably did not quite write the legendary aphorism that “you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” But whoever did, you get the point that no nation can always pick and choose when it wishes to be left alone.

Barack Obama, however, never quite realized that truth, and so just declared [1] that “the world is less violent than it has ever been.” He must have meant less violent in the sense that the bad guys are winning and as they do, the violence wanes — sort of like Europe around March 1941, when all was relatively quiet under the new continental Reich.

One of Obama’s talking points in the 2012 campaign included a boast that he had “ended” the war in Iraq by bringing home every U.S. soldier that had been left to ensure the relative quiet and stability after the successful Petraeus surge. In the world of Obama, a war can be declared ended because he said so, given that no Americans were any longer directly involved. (Remind the ghosts of the recently beheaded in now al Qaeda-held Mosul that the war ended there in 2011.)

Iraq is in flames, as is “lead from behind” Libya, as is “red line” Syria, and as are those places where an al Qaeda “on the run” has migrated. Had Obama been commander in chief in 1940, he would have assured us that the wars in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and France were “over” — as they were in a sense for those who lost them, but as they were not for those next in line.

Of course, the Maliki government owns most of the blame [2] for the spreading destruction of Iraq. Its retrograde exclusion of Sunnis from meaningful government helped to offer a fertile landscape to a resurgent al Qaeda. Now in extremis he seeks U.S. help. But Maliki’s pathetic past chauvinistic posturing over the status of forces agreement made it easy for Obama to pull out. (Hint to former U.S. clients: never horse-trade with Barack Obama over a needed U.S. military presence by threatening to eject all Americans; he will gladly call your bluff and leave every time.)

What, then, happened to Joe Biden’s boast [3] that Iraq “could be one of the great achievements of this administration”? Biden said this after the successful Bush-Petraeus surge (that he had opposed and declared a failure [4]) had ensured a relatively quiet country when Obama assumed office.

With her husband, Sylvia presided over a small realm in Borneo, returning at times to London society and writing candid memoirs of her life.

One of the stranger corners of the British Empire was Sarawak, a stretch of land on the island of Borneo in southeast Asia. In 1841, the Sultan of Brunei had handed Sarawak over to Sir James Brooke, a British adventurer who had helped the sultan put down an insurrection. Brooke declared himself and his ruling descendants rajahs, the only Europeans thus titled; hence their sobriquet, the “White Rajahs of Sarawak.” By 1911, when Brooke’s grandson Charles Vyner Brooke, the latest ruler of Sarawak, married the aristocratic Englishwoman Sylvia Brett, these potentates and their wives possessed the title of “Highness.” It had been bestowed by the British crown, which looked after Sarawak as a protectorate.

Sylvia was officially the royal consort—the “ranee” (or rajah’s wife)—but she became the most notable figure in the dynasty thanks to the life she lived and the books she wrote about it. When the critic Anatole Broyard reviewed “Queen of the Headhunters” (1970), the final volume of her florid and candid autobiography, published a year before her death, he compared it to the novels of Evelyn Waugh, adding: “Even Mr. Waugh could not have imagined a life like hers, which resembled an antique fairy tale in a modern translation.”

Intelligence failures” – fundamental mistakes in evaluating a geopolitical situation – are not rare among state intelligence organizations. They are unfortunately common enough and have cost the lives of millions.

They are a reflection of what after all is a human endeavor with all its frailties. A technician’s intercept of a Japanese naval signal, in the infancy of radar, is ignored with disastrous consequences on Dec. 7. Failing to check a driver’s license more carefully when he is stopped for speeding fails to nab a 9/11 plotter. Placing the briefcase loaded with a bomb a few feet too far fails to kill Hitler costing more thousands of lives.

Such failures are only marginally reduced by the introduction of all the new techniques of the digital revolution since the opportunity for error is so great in these complex situations involving individual peculiarities as well as the presumed overriding political considerations.

Yet there are larger intelligence “failures”, those that result from a fundamental misunderstanding of a much larger cultural environment, whether it be the whole frame of reference of an opponent or constructing a seemingly logical scenario without all the facts. A case of the latter, for example: in 1937 Washington almost went to war with Japan over “The Panay Incident”, sinking of an American ship of the Yangtze Patrol thought to be an expression of Tokyo’s militarist aggression but actually the result of the smuggling activities of a corrupt Japanese admiral. That, of course, did not preclude the outbreak of that war a few years later.

Washington’s surprise and shock at the most recent events in Iraq are the quintessential example of the former, in this instance an inability to judge events in the context of the Muslim world.

For whatever reason, Pres. Barrack Obama and his national security team – despite the extraordinary credentials in Arabic studies of CIA Director John O. Brennan – are bent on misinterpreting the Islamic world. On that basis, Obama’s attempt to reach out for a new relationship with Arab and Islamic countries, expressed in his 2009 Istanbul and Cairo speeches, has come to naught. Instead, that simplistic outreach has further confused issues.