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July 2016

France Widens Probe of Latest Terrorist Attack but Admits to Mistakes Investigators look for other Islamic State followers who may have been involved in priest’s killing By Matthew Dalton and Inti Landauro

PARIS—French authorities have detained a Syrian refugee and are investigating whether he conspired with Islamist radicals who killed a French priest in a Normandy church this past week, officials said Friday.

Also Friday, authorities placed a 19-year-old under formal investigation on preliminary charges of terrorist conspiracy in the attack. He had been detained on Monday, the day before the priest’s slaying, after authorities discovered a video in the suspect’s home showing one of the two killers, Abdel-Malik Nabil Petitjean, threatening France. Security services were unable to locate Petitjean before he mounted his attack.

Authorities didn’t release any other details about that suspect.

The investigator’s latest moves raise the possibility that other Islamic State followers were involved in the priest’s killing, and renews concerns that the terror group has exploited refugee flows to strike in Europe.

Police found a copy of the Syrian man’s passport at the home of Adel Kermiche, one of the two killers shot dead by police, officials said. But they said it is still unclear if he was involved in the plot. In past attacks, extremists have stolen documents to sneak operatives across borders.

Authorities took the Syrian into custody at a refugee center in Allier, in the center of France, hundreds of miles from the Normandy town where the priest was killed, officials said.

European security officials have been trying to find Islamic State operatives who may have entered Europe amid the hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving from the Middle East. On Sunday, a Syrian asylum-seeker who declared allegiance to the group blew himself up in Ansbach, Germany. Last year, some Islamic State operatives behind the attacks in Paris and Brussels posed as Syrian refugees to slip into Europe.

French Prime Minister Manual Valls admitted missteps in tracking the two Islamic radicals. Kermiche, a 19-year-old Frenchman, had served 10 months in a French prison for twice trying to travel to the battlefields of Syria, but was released in March on condition he wear an electronic monitoring bracelet.

Four months later, Kermiche and Petitjean, another Frenchman, stormed Saint-Etienne-Du-Rouvray, a 16th-century church, and killed the Rev. Jacques Hamel, as the 85-year-old auxiliary priest celebrated Mass.

“It is a failure, we have to recognize that,” said Mr. Valls in an interview with the newspaper Le Monde published Friday.

Days before the Normandy attack, French authorities had received a photo of Petitjean from a foreign intelligence service that warned the man had threatened to carry out an attack on France, according to officials familiar with the investigation. But France failed to make the link between the man in the photo and Petitjean. CONTINUE AT SITE

U.S. GDP Grew a Disappointing 1.2% in Second Quarter Economic growth was well below expectations; cautious business investment offset robust consumer spending By Eric Morath and Jeffrey Sparshott

WASHINGTON—Declining business investment is hobbling an already sluggish U.S. expansion, raising concerns about the economy’s durability as the presidential campaign heads into its final stretch.

Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced across the U.S., grew at a seasonally and inflation adjusted annual rate of just 1.2% in the second quarter, the Commerce Department said Friday, well below the pace economists expected.

Economic growth is now tracking at a 1% rate in 2016—the weakest start to a year since 2011—when combined with a downwardly revised reading for the first quarter. That makes for an annual average rate of 2.1% growth since the end of the recession, the weakest pace of any expansion since at least 1949.

The output figures are in some ways discordant with other gauges of the economy. The unemployment rate stands at 4.9% after a streak of strong job gains, wages have begun to pick up, and home sales hit a post-recession high last month.

Consumer spending also remains strong. Personal consumption, which accounts for more than two-thirds of economic output, expanded at a 4.2% rate in the second quarter, the best gain since late 2014.

On the downside, the third straight quarter of reduced business investment, a large paring back of inventories and declining government spending cut into those gains.

“Consumer spending growth was the sole element of good news” in the latest GDP figures, said Gregory Daco, an economist at Oxford Economics. “Weakness in business investment is an important and lingering growth constraint.”

Strategic Consequences of Erdogan’s Countercoup By:Srdja Trifkovic |

Two weeks after the failed coup and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s subsequent mass purge, three facts seem clear. Turkey has ceased to be a democracy in any conventional sense. The army’s reputation and cohesiveness have suffered a massive blow, with uncertain consequences for its operational effectiveness. Most importantly, Turkey’s foreign policy and regional security strategy will become more difficult to predict and less amenable to Western interests.

The military that has long served as a trusted unifying force for the country is deeply divided, diminished and discredited. Hundreds of its senior officers are under arrest. Almost 1,700 have been dishonorably discharged, including 40 percent of all active-service generals and admirals. That once staunchly Kemalist army, which had been for nine decades one of the key institutions of the Turkish state and society, is gone. It is likely to emerge from the purge as a pliant instrument under Erdogan’s direct control—a hundred reliable colonels have already been promoted to generals—and not a suprapolitical institution accountable to the prime minister’s office as before. This change requires a constitutional amendment, which may well pave the way for the new constitution which would grant Erdogan unprecedented executive powers.

Some operational consequences of the purge are already apparent. James Clapper, the U.S. director of national intelligence, said on Thursday at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado that it is hindering Turkey’s cooperation in the U.S.-led fight against Islamic State. He and head of U.S. Central Command General Joseph Votel said that many Turkish officers who cooperated with the American military in anti-ISIS operations have been removed or jailed. The future of the key Incirlik Air Base, from which the U.S. conducts attacks against Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria, is uncertain. Already last year security concerns caused Air Force commanders to restrict movement of U.S. personnel to a small area surrounding the base. This year the voluntary departure of family and dependents became mandatory. Air attacks were temporarily suspended or reduced following the coup, the base was left without power for almost a week, and its commander was taken off the premises in handcuffs. Of immediate concern was the fact that some 50 B-61 hydrogen bombs are stored in Incirlik’s underground vaults, NATO’s largest nuclear storage facility. Having those 170-kiloton weapons in a volatile region, with many of the trusted officers in Turkey’s military purged or jailed, and Erdogan in full charge in Ankara, presents a security risk. To put it mildly, as former NATO Supreme Allied Commander James Stavridis did in a Foreign Policy article on July 18, “this poses a very dangerous problem”:

Unfortunately, it is likely that the military in the wake of the coup will be laser-focused on internal controversy, endless investigations, and loyalty checks—and simply surviving as an institution. This will have a chilling effect on military readiness and performance. While some operations have resumed at the crucial Incirlik Air Base, cooperation is already frozen across many U.S. and NATO channels.

Joint Sea, Land Drills Conducted by US Marines, IDF Commandos to Counter Islamic Terror Threats

US Marine Corps fighters and Israeli commandos from the navy’s most elite unit conducted a joint exercise simulating a multi-pronged raid on enemy shores, the Hebrew news site Walla reported on Thursday.

According to the report, the point of the exercise – called CAYA Green (for “come as you are when you get the green light”) — was for the Israeli Shayetet 13 commandos to storm the beach clandestinely, under stormy weather conditions, and to secure it for a raid by Marines under fire.

The drill involved the transfer of fighters, jeeps and special equipment from ship to shore — from where the troops were to create maneuver room to move deep into the “enemy zone.”

The joint exercise made use of the amphibious American warship and troop carrier The San Antonio, as well as helicopters and armored vehicles.

A high-ranking Israeli naval officer told Walla that the fighters of Shayetet 13 who participated in the drill “were exposed to the many capabilities of the US {military}, among these, expertise in combat, raids, medical procedures (including surgery), the overtaking of a ship and logistics.”

He added that some of the equipment employed by the American {Marines} is familiar to the Israelis, but some “we’ve only seen in movies.”

Computer Systems Used by Clinton Campaign Are Said to Be Hacked, Apparently by Russians By Eric Lichtblau (NYTimes)

WASHINGTON — Computer systems used by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign were hacked in an attack that appears to have come from Russia’s intelligence services, a federal law enforcement official said on Friday.
The apparent breach, coming after the disclosure last month that the Democratic National Committee’s computer system had been compromised, escalates an international episode in which Clinton campaign officials have suggested that Russia might be trying to sway the outcome of the election.
Mrs. Clinton’s campaign said in a statement that intruders had gained access to an analytics program used by the campaign and maintained by the national committee, but it said that it did not believe that the campaign’s own internal computer systems had been compromised.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the fund-raising arm for House Democrats, also said on Friday that its systems had been hacked. Together, the databases of the national committee and the House organization contain some of the party’s most sensitive communications and voter and financial data.
Meredith Kelly, a spokeswoman for the congressional committee, said that after it discovered the breach, “we immediately took action and engaged with CrowdStrike, a leading forensic investigator, to assist us in addressing this incident.”The attack on the congressional committee’s system appears to have come from an entity known as “Fancy Bear,” which is connected to the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence service, according to an official involved in the forensic investigation.
The same arm of Russia’s intelligence operation was also implicated in the attack on the national committee, in which it gained access to opposition research on Republicans, including the party’s presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump.
“It’s the same adversary,” the official involved in the forensic investigation said. “These are sophisticated actors.”
The F.B.I. said on Friday that it was examining reports of “cyberintrusions involving multiple political entities” but did not identify the targets of the attacks.
The Clinton campaign used the program that was hacked to analyze voter data, but it did not contain voters’ Social Security numbers or credit card information, a campaign aide said. The campaign said it was confident, based on a review by outside experts, that getting into the program would not have allowed the hackers to gain access to the campaign’s internal emails, voice mail messages or other data.

Impeach Her Why the e-mail scandal should bar Hillary from high office. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Friends and Colleagues, some travel over the last couple of weeks left me unable to circulate columns and posts as usual (and some time off meant there were fewer of those anyway). Today I am sending out the latest, including the full version of a feature article about Hillary Clinton written for the print version of National Review, from our August 1 special Democratic Convention issue (which is available online only to subscribers). Links to other columns are below that article. Hope everyone enjoys what’s left of the summer. All the best, Andy
In early July, in a performance as legally baffling as it was politically predictable, Federal Bureau of Investigation director James B. Comey recommended against a felony prosecution of the former secretary of state and certain Democratic presidential nominee. The recommendation was gratuitous: It is the FBI’s function to investigate crimes; the Justice Department alone exercises charging discretion. It is a commonplace for case agents and government prosecutors to consult on both investigative tactics and charging decisions. It is a rarity, though, for the FBI director to get directly involved in, much less make, an indictment decision. That, in effect, is what Comey did. That his recommendation was uncalled for makes it all the more indefensible.

To stick for a moment with the FBI’s actual function, let’s note that its agents performed admirably, particularly in the forensic aspects of the investigation: the examination of Mrs. Clinton’s “homebrew” servers, the painstaking reassembly of millions of bits of data into thousands of e-mails (out of the 30,000 e-mails that Clinton and her phalanx of lawyers and aides had quite intentionally sought to delete and destroy). The FBI thus carried its burden to uncover evidence that can be used to establish the essential elements of crimes defined in federal penal laws. In this instance, according to Director Comey’s unusually transparent and devastating account of what his investigators found, it is simply incontestable that then–secretary of state Clinton (a) mishandled classified information in a manner that was grossly negligent (indeed, Comey called it “extremely careless”) and (b) concealed and destroyed federal records.

Yet Comey claimed not only that no prosecution was warranted but also that no reasonable prosecutor could disagree with this conclusion. The first assertion is flatly wrong; the second is breathtaking, and it evoked aptly spirited dissenting reactions from such iconic former prosecutors as Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who, as U.S. attorney in Manhattan, hired Comey as a young prosecutor in the mid Eighties, and Michael B. Mukasey, the distinguished former federal judge who served as U.S. attorney general in the George W. Bush administration not long after Comey served as deputy attorney general. (Like Comey, whom I have known as a friend and sometime colleague for nearly 30 years, I was hired as an assistant U.S. attorney by Mr. Giuliani.)

When Comey testified before a House committee just two days after rejecting an indictment of Clinton, the flaws in his rationale were painfully apparent. He suggested that “American tradition” and the Constitution forbid criminal prosecution on an offense as serious as mishandling classified information — a felony carrying a potential ten-year prison term — if the required mens rea (state of mind) element of the crime in the relevant statute calls for mere negligence rather than intent to do harm. To the contrary, many state and federal crimes do not require proof of intentional or willful wrongdoing — indeed, virtually every state has long criminalized negligent homicide. Moreover, Comey inaccurately portrayed the gross-negligence offense as if it were an isolated excrescence in federal law; in fact, it is the bottom of a sliding scale of crimes involving national-defense secrets, carefully calibrated by Congress so that the most serious offense — classic espionage involving intended harm to the U.S. — is at the top. Appropriately, the least serious offense of gross negligence involving national-defense secrets is narrowly tailored: It applies not to all Americans but to officials with security clearances who are intimately familiar with rules governing their special obligation to safeguard intelligence.

But in any case, far from being merely negligent, Clinton’s outrageous conduct screams of willfulness. She intentionally set up an unlawful non-government communication system specifically to evade federal disclosure and accountability laws. In her position at the pinnacle of American foreign relations, she had to know it was inevitable that extremely sensitive intelligence matters would be discussed over the system. The hundreds of classified e-mails discovered included 110 (in 52 e-mail chains) sent or received by Clinton herself. Seven of these involved “top secret/special access program” intelligence — the most highly classified secrets in government, concerning deep-cover informants and closely guarded intelligence-collection techniques (meaning: information the revelation of which can get our agents killed and fold up vital national-security operations).

“Any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position,” Comey admonished, “should have known that an unclassified system was no place for” such exchanges. The director further acknowledged that Clinton’s homebrew system was woefully unsecure: It would have been better, though still against the rules, to use Gmail. Top Clinton aides exacerbated these security compromises, Comey recounted, by using unsecure communication systems while they were outside the United States and “in the territory of sophisticated adversaries.” Clinton clearly knew this practice was a major security breach, assuming she read her own memoir Hard Choices, which — though unmentioned by Comey — takes pains to describe the extraordinary communications precautions that must be taken overseas. The director, in fact, said it was almost certain that Clinton’s system had been penetrated by hostile foreign intelligence operatives (the deftness of whose methods prevents apodictic certainty). He further ruefully observed that, under Clinton, “the culture of the State Department in general” was cavalier, compared with that of other government agencies, when it came to safeguarding intelligence.

San Diego police say officer fatally shot, another wounded

Thomson Reuters BRENDAN O’BRIEN, IAN SIMPSON, W SIMON AND BILL TROTT

A San Diego police officer was fatally shot and another was wounded late on Thursday, the police department said on Friday, adding one suspect was taken into custody.

The officers, members of the department’s gang suppression unit, were shot during a traffic stop at about 11 p.m. PDT (0600 GMT) in Southcrest, a neighborhood in southeast San Diego, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported. The officers were taken to hospitals.

“It is with a very sad heart that we announce the death of one of our officers tonight,” the department said on Friday on its Twitter feed.

The second officer underwent surgery and is expected to survive, it said.

The police department said it was searching for suspects in addition to the one in custody.

Leaks, Hacks, and Liberals So now WikiLeaks is bad. by Gabriel Schoenfeld

The facts are by now widely known, if still not nailed down with precision. On Friday, July 22, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, a massive trove of emails purloined from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) by hackers was posted on WikiLeaks, the online bulletin board for leaked information founded by the Australian anarchist Julian Assange. Strong evidence rapidly emerged showing that the hackers were connected to or under the control of Russian intelligence. As the press picked through the mildly juicy revelations, the favoritism of the supposedly neutral DNC toward Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders was put before the world to see.

The result has been a continuing maelstrom. Supporters of Sanders, already agitated for having to swallow the bitter pill of defeat, were inflamed. Backers of Hillary, embarrassed and chagrined, decried the apparent Russian interference in party affairs. It did not take long for the head of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to be unceremoniously purged from her position and for the newly cleansed DNC to issue an apology to Sanders and everyone else it had wronged.

There the story has paused, but it is hardly over. There are grounds to believe that the Clinton Foundation was also hacked and quite possibly Hillary’s vulnerable private server at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., which housed her official emails during her tenure as secretary of state, including the 33,000 or so that she and her lawyers wiped from the memory because they were deemed “personal.”

The worry, of course, is that Russian intelligence has all of these, and that many more damaging disclosures of Clinton shenanigans are yet to come. Donald Trump, startling the world, has called upon the Russian government, if it did hack Hillary’s emails, to release them, with the obvious aim of injuring Hillary’s campaign and boosting his own. If that is indeed what happens, and WikiLeaks blasts new revelations onto the net on the eve of the elections in an October surprise, it could well propel Trump into the White House. That is exactly what Assange, who publicly favors Trump over Clinton, and who claims to have more of her secrets in his quiver, is threatening. The prospect has liberals wringing their hands.

A case in point is Franklin Foer, the former top editor at the New Republic and now a contributing editor at Slate. To Foer, the DNC email scandal is the sum of all his fears. “A foreign government,” he writes, “has hacked a political party’s computers .  .  . stolen documents and timed their release to explode with maximum damage. It is a strike against our civic infrastructure.” It is “trespassing, it’s thievery, it’s a breathtaking transgression of privacy.”

One cannot disagree. But how does this particular data breach, one is left wondering, differ from the leaks that Foer and other liberals routinely celebrate as the stock in trade of American investigative journalism?

Foer has a ready answer: What is especially “galling about the WikiLeaks dump,” he explains, is that it “has blurred the distinction between leaks and hacks.” Hacks, to Foer, are bad, conducted by bad people for bad purposes. The Russian hack, he writes, is the equivalent of Watergate: “To help win an election, the Russians broke into the virtual headquarters of the Democratic Party. The hackers installed the cyber-version of the bugging equipment that Nixon’s goons used—sitting on the DNC computers for a year, eavesdropping on everything, collecting as many scraps as possible.”

Trump’s Unsettling Response to Turkey’s Islamist Tyranny After years of a gradual erosion of the secular state, the Turkish government has been sprinting towards Islamist tyranny since the failed coup attempt. BY Ryan Mauro

After many years of a gradual erosion of the secular state, the Turkish government has been sprinting towards Islamist tyranny since the failed coup attempt. The response of Donald Trump to this new reality is unsettling, to say the least.

He declined to commit a potential Trump administration to opposing the Erdogan government’s crackdown, using the Islamist line that the U.S. lacks the moral authority to criticize other countries’ human rights abuses.

In an interview with the New York Times after the coup failed, Trump said he “give[s] great credit to him [Erdogan] for being able to turn that around” and marveled at the scenes of protestors stopping the involved military personnel. Hillary Clinton opposed the coup while standing by criticism of the Turkish government.

The reporter pointed out to Trump that Erdogan has used the coup as a pretext for a massive crackdown, arresting 50,000 people, removing major elements of the judiciary and suspending thousands of teachers.

Clarion published a stunning accounting of the purge. Now, the regime just shut down another 130 media outlets and kicked out 1,700 members of the military.

Trump did not speak out against these purges and said that opposing the Islamist tyranny in Turkey would not be a part of his administration’s agenda. He did, however, say there “may be a time when we can get much more aggressive on that subject…We’re not in a position to be more aggressive. We have to fix our own mess.”

Taken To Saudi Arabia And Locked in a Cage British-Saudi dual citizen Amina al-Jeffrey was taken to Saudi Arabia by her father after she kissed a boy at 16. She is desperate to return to the UK.

Amina al-Jeffrey was born in Swansea, UK, and taken at age 16 to Saudi Arabia by her father, who disapproved of her Western lifestyle.

Now 21, she is fighting a court battle in the High Court in London against her father to be allowed to return to the UK.

She alleges that her father, Mohammed al-Jeffrey, put “metal bars” on her bedroom and described being a “locked-up girl with a shaved head.”

Still a judge in the High Court, Justice Holman, has asserted, “We have to be careful about asserting the supremacy our cultural standards.”

Holman also said that it is unclear whether or not Britain had jurisdiction in the matter since al-Jeffrey was an adult with dual Saudi and UK citizenship.

Al-Jeffrey said her father hit her, deprived her of water and forced her to urinate in a cup.

Although “metal bars are no longer in her room” according to her lawyers, “she is still locked up in the house” and “not allowed to use the phone or internet.”

“Steps need to be taken to ensure Ms. Jeffery is returned to the UK where her safety can be guaranteed,” the Foreign Office Forced Marriage Unit said in a statement.

“Her treatment has extended to depriving her of food and water, depriving her of toilet facilities, physical assault and control of her ability to marry who she wishes and creating a situation in which she feels compelled to marry as a means of escape,” Henry Setright, a lawyer acting on behalf of al-Jeffrey said in a statement.