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November 2015

How Obama Unilaterally Chilled Surveillance An executive order that encourages a risk-averse approach to intelligence.By David R. Shedd

How dangerous: Just as the U.S. faces the most diverse threats in its history, the American intelligence community is forced to operate under some of the most restrictive and bureaucratically ambiguous intelligence-gathering policies since its inception more than 60 years ago.

Nothing reflects these self-imposed restrictions better than Presidential Policy Directive 28. President Obama signed PPD-28 nearly two years ago in a knee-jerk reaction to the release of classified intelligence information by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and the data-collection methods revealed by the theft.

Among its many flaws, PPD-28 requires that, when collecting intelligence on foreign threats, U.S. operatives “must take into account (that) all persons should be treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their nationality or wherever they may reside and that all persons have legitimate privacy interests.” This feel-good provision puts a serious crimp in foreign signals-intelligence collection.

The ambiguous language also naïvely extends to non-Americans unnecessary and undefined “privacy” rights. In what way does this make the U.S. safer?

Our Precarious Defenses in Europe There are fewer American soldiers protecting the Continent than there are New York City cops by Robert H. Scales

For an old Cold Warrior the scene on a bright October afternoon was surreal: America’s Second Cavalry Regiment crossing a Romanian river on a Soviet-built tactical bridge assembled by the Romanian Army, while overhead Vietnam-era MiG 21s carried out mock attacks, with German-made antiaircraft guns manned by Romanian crews simulating the destruction of the intruding MiGs.

The symbolism of the river crossing brought home to me the precarious condition of the U.S. military presence in Europe. American armor crossed on Romanian bridges because the Army has no tactical bridging in Europe. Romanian antiaircraft guns at the crossing sites highlighted the fact that our Army has no mid- and low-level antiaircraft weapons to protect America’s ground forces in Europe.

The Second Cavalry’s lightly armored Stryker vehicles that crossed on Romanian bridges worked well in Afghanistan against the Taliban. But they would turn into burning coffins when confronting Russian tanks. Numbers tell an even more frightening story: At 30,000, there are fewer American soldiers protecting Western Europe, a piece of the planet that produces 46% of global GDP, than there are cops in New York City.

Arabic graffiti found on Easyjet, Vueling planes in France

PARIS (AFP) –

French police and airport authorities said Saturday graffiti, much of it in Arabic, had been found sprayed on four aircraft belonging to British carrier Easyjet and a plane from Spanish airline Vueling at two airports.

Three of the jets had been defaced at Lyon airport in eastern France with two others sprayed at the Paris hub of Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle, police said.

A police source added authorities believed the graffiti had been painted on prior to the jets’ arrival in France, but that the issue posed questions about airport security.

The words “Allah Akbar” were found to have been scrawled on a fuel tank hatch of one Easyjet plane at Charles de Gaulle airport on Tuesday, a day after the aircraft arrived from Budapest, an airport source said, adding it was scrubbed off before the next passengers embarked.

The Jihadist Challenge To The Nation State Amichai Magen

“Five years since the launch of the Arab Spring, between five and seven million people live under the yoke of the Islamic State in parts of Iraq, Syria and Libya, a further two million under the rule of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Gaza, and a total of at least another million are under Insag control in Lebanon, Sinai and parts of the Sahel region — all in all between eight and ten million human beings, in what is already the world’s least politically stable region. Whatever the fate of one Insag or another may be, the phenomenon is here to stay. Should they continue their territorial gains and entrenchment among the local populations, they will inculcate millions of children in various forms of militant jihadism, gradually acquire more state-like military and financial assets, and increasingly transform the nature of international terrorism and challenge the state-based international order itself.”

When the Arab Spring erupted five years ago, observers of the Arab world asked themselves mostly what kind of state governments would emerge from the popular revolts and anti-regime uprisings sweeping large parts of the Middle East and North Africa.

Some, like the late Fouad Ajami, read the unrest as the birth pangs of a region-wide struggle towards modernity. A long-silenced Arab world was finally clamouring to be heard, eager to find its place in the modern, possibly even democratic, order of nations. Others, like Khaled Abu Toameh, were less sanguine. Looking at the balance of power between liberals and Islamists in key Arab states, they warned that the Arab Spring was the mother of all misnomers, and that a harsh Islamist Winter was coming. Viewed through their prism, the electoral victories of the AKP in Turkey in 2002 and Hamas in Gaza in 2006 were the early precursors to a tsunami of Muslim Brotherhood wins in Tunisia, Egypt and beyond. Those “old” Arab autocrats — statist, socialist, secular, and sclerotic — who would prove unable to effectively co-opt or suppress the Islamists, would face wholesale replacement at the hands of a new breed of assertive Islamist dictatorships.

Once the Islamists actually came to power in Tunisia (2011) and Egypt (2012), the question “what kind of state governments will emerge in the Middle East?” morphed and acquired new meanings. Would the Islamists seek to monopolise their grip on state, society and the markets, or would they tolerate spheres of autonomy for the old guard and other opposition groups? Would the Achayun (Brothers) of Tunisia and Egypt follow the Turkish model of incremental, largely non-violent Islamisation of society and (at least for the time being) the preservation of democracy, or would they quickly turn towards the more coercive methods of forced Islamisation favored in Iran and Gaza? Did the fact that only Arab “republics”, not monarchies, collapsed in the regional earthquake, point to some genuine monarchical stability-advantage — and therefore portend well for regime durability in Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia — or is this a statistical fluke that is bound to be corrected sooner or later? And in the international sphere, would the untested new Islamist leaders (most importantly Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi) accept the existing rules of the game — honouring previous agreements with the United States and Israel — or veer towards some truculent new “Islamist foreign policy” whose features were not yet defined?

‘Anti-Extremists’ Who Equate Israel With IS: John Ware

“Your values are our values,” intoned a sombre British Prime Minister in solidarité with the people of France on the morning after the bloodbath in Paris last month. Maybe, but until recently the two countries have taken a markedly different approach to trying to prevent such massacres, the second in Paris this year.

The Paris attacks mark the latest in a series of increasingly successful strikes by French jihadists since 2012. Less sensitive to Muslim sentiment than Britain, the French have sought to counter jihadi terrorism with more draconian legislation than us, while expecting the country’s almost 5 million Muslims to assert the robustly secular values of la République française.

The Cameron government, by contrast, has taken a more interventionist approach when it comes to Britain’s “precious” progressive values. Permanent agitation by Islamists to inject ever more of their version of Islam into public life, overpowering more mainstream Muslim voices, means tolerance, freedom of speech, free religion, free thinking, democracy, and gender and sexual equality can no longer be taken for granted.

Even as the IS slaughterers in France were strapping on their suicide belts, that same night on this side of the Channel British values were being dismissed as “junk” at a debate about Islam at the Corn Exchange in Bedford. “Every single one of these speakers is a caliphate-advocating Islamist,” commented Maajid Nawaz, the co-founder and chairman of the counter-terrorism think-tank Quilliam.

Beyond Obama: Advice To The Next President Bret Stephens

How shall we rate the state of the world? Take a look around — from Islamic State atrocities in Sinai and Paris, to the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan, to China’s efforts to control the South China Sea, to Russia’s intervention in Syria, to the stabbing intifada in Israel.
You might be reminded of the classic exchange in Woody Allen’s movie Play It Again, Sam. The scene takes place in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Allen spots an exotic-looking brunette staring intently at an abstract painting. Plucking up his courage, he sidles up to her and asks: “That’s quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn’t it. What does it say to you?”

In an accented, bored-sounding voice, she answers: “It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of man forced to live in a barren godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror and degradation forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd cosmos.”
“What are you doing Saturday night?” Allen asks.

“Committing suicide.”

“How about Friday night?”

So there we are. How do we move forward? Let me begin by offering a few thoughts on how we got here. And then allow me to play National Security Adviser to the next president and offer some ideas for how best to conduct US future foreign policy.

GERALD WALPIN: ON THE SUPREME COURT AND THE CONSTITUTION

FOR A GREAT GUIDE TO THE SUPREMES AND THE CONSTITUTION….READ:

The Supreme Court vs. The Constitution:By Gerald Walpin

They’re on a “rampage,” writes Gerald Walpin, one of the country’s top litigators, in his astonishing new book, The Supreme Court Vs. The Constitution.

And it takes just five of them to lay waste to the rights of 300 million Americans.

A mostly bare majority of justices of the United States Supreme Court, the only judicial body enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, have spent recent decades reversing, revoking and rescinding the fundamental guarantees of that sacred document to the people of America.

They’ve freed thousands of murderers, rewritten sound and time-tested laws, crippled religious liberty, enabled the spread of pornography and immorality. They have ignored the letter and spirit of the Constitution and its amendments in grabbing power that rightfully belongs to the Executive and Legislative branches, the states − and, ultimately, the people.

Gerald Walpin, who prosecuted criminals and pursued crooked bureaucrats as a federal Inspector General nominated by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, and, many years before, as a top prosecutor for the Department Of Justice in New York, dramatically sets out the deliberate push by a bare majority of Supreme Court justices to usurp the role of our country’s elected lawmakers and executives.

The justices time and again seize the rightful authority of those we elect to represent us, and with unchallengeable arrogance undermine the “inalienable rights” that long have made the United States the world’s brightest beacon of freedom, democracy, and personal security.

Why Judicial Supremacy Isn’t Compatible with Constitutional Supremacy From the September 21, 2015, issue of NR By Ramesh Ponnuru

A pro-choice voter in New Hampshire had a question for John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, who was making the rounds as a presidential candidate: Would he “respect” Roe v. Wade even though he is a pro-lifer? Kasich answered, “Obviously, it’s the law of the land now, and we live with the law of the land.”

Whether he knew it or not, Kasich had wandered into a debate over the courts, one in which some of the other presidential candidates are also participants. Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, has denounced “judicial tyranny.” When five justices ruled that the Constitution requires governments to recognize same-sex marriage, he scoffed that the Supreme Court was not “the Supreme Being.”

It’s an often-heated debate. Huckabee’s side says that the courts have established a “judicial supremacy” at odds with the actual constitutional design; the other side says that people like Huckabee are threatening the rule of law. Both sides have some reasonable points, and both could profit from conducting the debate at a lower level of abstraction.

The Constitution Is Clear: Congress Should Legislate, Not the Administrative State By George Will —

As the administrative state distorts America’s constitutional architecture, Clarence Thomas becomes America’s indispensable constitutionalist. Now in his 25th year on the Supreme Court, he is urging the judicial branch to limit the legislative branch’s practice of delegating its power to the executive branch.

In four opinions in 112 days between March 9 and June 29, Thomas indicted the increasing incoherence of the Court’s separation-of-powers jurisprudence. This subject is central to today’s argument between constitutionalists and progressives. The former favor and the latter oppose holding Congress to its responsibilities and restricting executive discretion.

“The Constitution,” Thomas notes, “does not vest the federal government with an undifferentiated ‘governmental power.’” It vests three distinguishable types of power in three different branches. The Court, Thomas says, has the “judicial duty” to enforce the Vesting Clauses as absolute and exclusive by policing the branches’ boundaries.

Republicans Must Save the Cities If Rahm Emanuel is the best the Democrats have . . . By Kevin D. Williamson

A Chicago police officer has been charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager who was wielding a knife and who had PCP in his system. Chicago authorities apparently went to some trouble to sweep the case under the rug: A $5 million settlement to his family already had been approved; the officer wasn’t charged until nearly a year after the fact; a police-camera video of the shooting was suppressed for more than a year, until an FOIA lawsuit forced its release.

Chicago is a city under impeccably progressive governance. Its mayor is Rahm Emanuel, former right hand to President Barack Obama. So in response to the shooting of a young black hooligan by a police officer in one of the nation’s most corrupt cities and the dodgy handling of that by the city’s Democratic mayor, we have a thousand protesters harassing shoppers and blocking retailers’ entrances down on the Magnificent Mile, wherein is found Neiman Marcus and Cartier.

It takes a special kind of nose to detect the connection between Cartier shoppers, police shootings of young black criminals elsewhere in Chicago, and the municipal maladministration of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, but such a nose has the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who can sniff out a payday with the reliability of a French hog hunting truffles. Our friends in the community-organizing racket — whether from Chicago’s South Side or the campus of Yale — are a remarkably consistent bunch: Whatever the real or perceived social problem, the answer is the same: Write a very large check that eventually will make its way into the pockets of such people and organizations as those that organize these protests.