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November 2016

David Singer: Obama’s Islamic State Policy Uncorks Shiite Genie in Iraq

Mosul has well and truly blown up in his face with the news that the Iran funded Shiite Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) have now joined in the attack.

Secretary of Defense Ash Carter certainly did not anticipate this development when announcing Obama’s decision:

“The United States and the rest of the international coalition stand ready to support Iraqi Security Forces, Peshmerga fighters and the people of Iraq in the difficult fight ahead.”

Neither did Operation Inherent Resolve Commander Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend who stated:

“But to be clear, the thousands of ground combat forces who will liberate Mosul are all Iraqis”

The involvement of 15000 Shiite PMU militiamen – designated by the Iraqi Government as “an independent military formation” – could aggravate already existing sectarian divisions in Iraq.

This could eventually lead to a Shiite land grab of territory liberated by the PMU.

The retention of land conquered by the Peshmerga forces is also a realistic possibility.

Iraq as a distinct and separate territorial unit could be in real danger of being carved up.

Obama must be reeling after further reading on that:

“Ahmed al-Assadi, a spokesman for the Iraq-sanctioned paramilitary known as Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), said on Saturday that they will fight alongside Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s forces in Syria after finishing their battle against ISIS in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, Al Arabiya News Channel reported”

Obama’s inability to remove Assad from power in Syria during the last five years has been a spectacular presidential policy failure.

Documented: Obama’s “Traditional Muslim Bias” against Christians by Raymond Ibrahim

Those Arabs from nations with large Christian populations or with Christian names failed the Obama team’s “religious tests.”

The Obama government’s bias against Mideast Christians closely resembles the traditional bias Christian minorities experience at the hands of Muslim governments.

When inviting scores of Muslim representatives, the State Department has been called out at least twice for denying visas to solitary Christian representatives.

When a few persecuted Iraqi Christians crossed the border into the U.S., they were thrown in prison for months and then sent back to the countries persecuting them, possibly to be enslaved, raped, or murdered.

When the Nigerian government waged an offensive against Boko Haram — another Islamic group that regularly slaughters and rapes Christians and burn their churches — and killed some of its terrorists, John Kerry fumed and called for the “human rights” of the jihadis.

It is against Islamic law to side with “infidels” against Muslims.

Almost a year ago, U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama called the suggestion that the U.S. give preference to Christian refugees over Muslim refugees “shameful.” “That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion,” he added loftily.

Erdogan’s Neo-Ottoman Plans by Burak Bekdil

“Let us see how your Islamist friend [Erdogan] behaves after crushing the secular establishment.” — The author to a friend, 2004.

To insist on the borders Turkey accepted in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne “is the greatest injustice to be done to the country and to the nation.” — Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, October 19, 2016.

Erdogan’s newfound claims seem to refer not only to wish to regain hegemony to the west (Greece) but also about the south (Syria) and the southeast (Iraq). Turkey evidently wishes to be part of an Iraqi- and Kurdish-led offensive against Mosul, controlled since 2014 by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Sipping his ouzo at a café in Athens on a warm afternoon in 2004, a Greek diplomat friend smiled and said:

“You are wrong about Erdogan. He will reform Turkey’s democratic culture, align it with the European Union, strengthen its ties with NATO and pursue a pro-peace policy in this part of the world. Meanwhile he will crush the secular army establishment and Turkey will no longer be a threat to any of its neighbors.”

I said: “Let us see how your Islamist friend [Erdogan] behaves after crushing the secular establishment.”

Twelve years later, I still enjoy our peaceful ouzo sessions with the same Greek friend. But things do not look equally peaceful between Turkey and its neighbors, including Greece.

Speaking at a public rally on October 22, President Erdogan said that “We did not accept our borders voluntarily.” He went on to say, “At the time [when the current borders were drawn] we may have agreed to it but the real mistake is to surrender to that sacrifice.” What does all that mean?

FBI Leaks: Clinton Foundation Probe a ‘Very High Priority,’ Will Likely Lead to an Indictment By Debra Heine

Two sources with “intimate knowledge” of the FBI’s investigations into the Clinton emails and Clinton Foundation leaked new information about both of the probes to Fox News Wednesday. The sources say that the latter investigation has been going on for more than a year and is being led by the white-collar crime division of the FBI. They also say that the Clinton Foundation “pay to play” probe has taken a “very high priority,” and the FBI has re-interviewed multiple individuals involved in the case. The sources told Special Report’s Bret Baier that their investigation will likely to lead to an indictment.

Additionally, Baier reported that according to Fox News’ sources, Clinton’s private email server had been breached by at least five foreign intelligence hackers. FBI Director James Comey said in July that he could not say definitively whether her server had been breached.

Via Fox News:

Even before the WikiLeaks dumps of alleged emails linked to the Clinton campaign, FBI agents had collected a great deal of evidence, law enforcement sources tell Fox News.

“There is an avalanche of new information coming in every day,” one source told Fox News, who added some of the new information is coming from the WikiLeaks documents and new emails.

FBI agents are “actively and aggressively pursuing this case,” and will be going back and interviewing the same people again, some for the third time, sources said.

Agents are also going through what Clinton and top aides have said in previous interviews and the FBI 302, documents agents use to report interviews they conduct, to make sure notes line up, according to sources.

Fox News reports that the re-opened email investigation is being run by the national security division of the FBI and that they are combing through former NY congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop. According to the sources, they’ve found emails that came from Hillary Clinton’s private email server that appear to be new. It is not yet known if the emails contain classified information, but that will be known soon.

As for those questionable immunity deals with Clinton’s top aides including Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, Fox reports that the laptops that were supposed to be destroyed as part of those deals, have not been destroyed and are now in fact currently in the FBI field office in Washington, D.C., “being exploited.”

The source told Fox News that if a subject at any point lies during the investigation, the immunity deal is “null and void.”

On The Kelly File Wednesday night, host Megyn Kelly asked former NY mayor Rudy Giuliani why all this is coming out now.

Trump Derangement Syndrome, Schoenfeld Edition By Roger Kimball

One of the most repellent aspects of the 2016 presidential election has been a phenomenon that has its home in leftwing tactics but that has now emerged on the Right in addition to the Left. More precisely, it has revolved around the adoption by precincts of the #NeverTrump Right of tactics usually associated with the Left. The main feature of that tactic deploys a twofold effort at character assassination. The first step is the transformation of political disagreement into a species of heresy. The second step involves the thundering repudiation of the newly minted heretics, who are to be caricatured or demonized, and reminded that they must seek absolution or forgiveness for their apostasy.

A case in point is the New York Daily News column published two days ago by the erstwhile conservative, now Hillary Clinton supporter and #NeverTrump crusader, Gabriel Schoenfeld. “Expose Trump’s enablers,” the headline began, “How many people who should know better are making it easier for him to lie to the American people.”

Exhibit A in that roster of people “who should know better” is your humble correspondent, R. Kimball. In fact, I am the only Exhibit. My heresy is to have decided, rather late in the day, to support Donald Trump for president. Over the last couple of months, Schoenfeld has emitted several needling tweets taking me and others to task for that support. On September 17, for example, he tweeted that I, Victor Davis Hanson, and Charles Kesler were “backing a birther, a bigot, an enemy of the Constitution.” On October 1, I received a solo message: “impeccable timing for your endorsement of the lunatic, just as he implodes.” Then on October 17 we read that “If @RogerKimball, our Ezra Pound, had been born in Italy in, say, 1885, he would be singing Mussolini’s praises.” Note how the perceived pulse of the campaign affects Schoenfeld’s invective: when Trump is thought to be clearly losing, ridicule ensues; when Trump is on the upswing, paranoia and derangement follow.

Perhaps this is the place to mention that Schoenfeld and I, as he notes in his Daily News column, are acquaintances. “Encounter Press,” he writes, “published my first book.” Well, that’s nearly right. The publisher he has in mind is called Encounter Books, not Encounter Press. I should perhaps note for the record that I was not involved with Encounter when The Return of Anti-Semitism, the book to which he alludes, was published.

William Safire justified: Hillary Clinton is a congenital liar By Russ Vaughn

In a notorious 1996 New York Times essay, pundit William Safire famously said this of Hillary Clinton:

Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady – a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation – is a congenital liar.

Drip by drip, like Whitewater torture, the case is being made that she is compelled to mislead, and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit.

Could anyone who has followed her political activities since make any sensible rebuttal to Safire’s observation? As many of her critics have noted, Hillary Clinton will lie when she’d be far better served by the truth. Now here we are just days away from an election that could put this woman into the most powerful political position in the world, and apparently she’s still at it.

Conservative site, 100% Fed Up, is reporting this (emphasis added):

Campaigning in Florida on Tuesday, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton claimed that she was in New York City on 9/11, when terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center. She made her claim while discussing terrorism and the threat posed by ISIS.”I know what happened not far from here at Pulse night club in Orlando,” she said. “I was in New York City on 9/11 as one of the two senators. I will defeat ISIS. I will protect America.”

Except that she wasn’t in New York City on 9/11; she was at her home in Washington, D.C. on the morning of that day of infamy and did not get to New York until the next day. Proof of her silly, useless lie is available from her own campaign media operation, the Clinton News Network, which in a 15-year commemoration of 9/11 featuring Clinton said this:

When news broke of the first plane ripping through the north tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, Clinton had just left her house in Washington, D.C., and was on her way to the Senate. By the time she reached Capitol Hill, evacuations were already underway.

Good grief! The woman is running for the nation’s highest office, and mere days before the election, she gratuitously lies to a crowd of supporters? Even the most naive political beginner would know that you don’t publicly lie about something that can be so easily checked. Had Hillary not been lying for so long, as Safire documents, we might attribute such a gaffe to the various head injuries she’s sustained or as a mental manifestation of the Parkinson’s disease some physicians suspect her to have. But no, her previous history all the way back to pre-Safire argues persuasively that this is one of those people whom many of us have met, and most of us have heard of, a person who simply can’t sort out truth from lies in her own mind and her own mouth. She will, in clear fact, lie when the truth would be to her advantage, as in Florida Tuesday.

Hillary Clinton is, quite clearly, a congenital liar. But here’s the sobering thought to take away from this: if she can’t separate truth from lies, is she also incapable of distinguishing between honest and dishonest behavior? Her behavior as secretary of state would seem to indicate the answer is no, she can’t.

And I ask you again today, folks: is this the kind of person we want leading our America?

The Tragic Life of Kathy Shelton By Ronald Kolb and Steve Cunningham

In June of 2014, the Washington Free Beacon came upon an audiotape of then first lady of Arkansas Hillary Clinton from the 1980’s discussing with journalist Roy Reed a legal case she had been involved with in 1975. She had been the defense attorney for Thomas Alfred Taylor, who at age 41 had been accused of raping a 12 year-old girl in May of that year.

On the audio, Hillary, in an affected southern drawl, could be heard laughing at several inappropriate times. “He took a lie detector test,” she said. “I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs (laughs).” Then Hillary spoke about a section of Taylor’s underwear that was now missing where authorities had done a DNA match from what was found on the 12-year old while in the hospital. Hillary told Reed that she had flown to Brooklyn to receive an expert legal opinion in the case, and later told Washington County (Arkansas) Prosecutor Mahlon Gibson that “this guy’s ready to come from New York to prevent a miscarriage of justice (laughs).”

The tape concluded with Reed asking Hillary how the case turned out. “Oh, he plea bargained! Got him off for time served in the county jail, he’d been in the county jail about two months.”

The Free Beacon also found legal filings from the case, where Hillary had made accusations about the rape victim. In July, Hillary had asked for a psychiatric examination of the 12-year old and then filed an affidavit, essentially tarnishing the victim, saying that she was “emotionally unstable.” Hillary also added that she “had a tendency to seek out older men to engage in fantasizing.”

Her attacks in the affidavit continued. “I have been informed that she has in the past made false accusations about persons, claiming that they had attacked her body.” Hillary added that children from broken homes are “prone to such behavior.”

Taylor was initially indicted for rape, where he could have received a life sentence, but Hillary was successful at “pleading down” the case to illegal fondling of a minor. Taylor was sentenced to five years in prison, with four years suspended. He was to serve 12 months in the Washington County jail in Fayetteville, with two months suspended for the time he had already served. But the outcome would end up being something far shorter.

After the tape was made public two years ago, the Free Beacon tracked the victim down, but she refused to speak to the reporter, Alana Goodman. Daily Beast reporter Josh Rogin contacted her next, and he wrote an article about her terrifying experience. She also made an audio recording, and her name and image were deliberately not included. After hearing the tape, the victim, now in her 50’s, said about Hillary, “You lied on me…I realize the truth now, the heart of what you’ve done to me. And you’re supposed to be for women?”

Every cable network picked up the story and many major websites also did at the time. Hillary finally addressed the issue saying that “in our system you have an obligation, and once I was appointed I fulfilled that obligation.” Nothing more was reported until May of this year, when Rogin told CNN, “T here’s never been any evidence presented by anyone to substantiate the allegations that Hillary Clinton made in that affidavit.”

Michael Copeman President Hillary’s First Year

Our resident soothsayer has examined the entrails of the US presidential campaign, now in its final days, and laid out his prophecies. While some might seem highly unlikely, there can be no doubt the Clinton Foundation’s coffers will swell mightily.
Barring the FBI’s various and ongoing investigations, the US seems likely to elect its first female President next week. What do deplorable basket-case right-wingers have to look forward to, should Republican contender Donald Trump’s last-minute firming in the polls prove stillborn? Let’s peer into the crystal ball.

January’s inaugural speech will begin with the sound of tinkling as the glass ceiling finally shatters and disintegrates, showering the assembled glitterati with extra sparkle. Ms Clinton will likely say she will strive to be a President for all Americans, especially transgender Islamists and anyone else who contributes generously to the Clinton Foundation.

By February she will be back in her snowy hometown of Chicago to lay a foundation stone for the city’s new desalination plant, which the Windy City doesn’t actually need as it is located on the shores of Lake Michigan. But that doesn’t mean much in Cook County, where public works projects and budgets have always been regarded as the treasury of the connected. Why, even grandmas get in on the act!

In March, Hillary hits Laredo, on the Mexican border, to open her fast-track, solar-powered mass immigration travelator, installed across the Rio Grande to safely bring in ten of thousands of new Americans per hour. “As racist imperialists stole Texas in the first place, the day has come never again to vex a Mex.” The new arrivals will be added to the electoral rolls without delay, especially in congressional districts now occupied by Republicans.

In early April, she will personally greet walkers in the Million Grandma March in Washington. Hubby Bill will welcome many of the assembled grannies with warm and enthusiastic hugs — mostly, but not exclusively, of the non-staining variety.

Come May, Hillary will be in Nevada to pull the plug on the no-longer-mighty mighty Hoover Dam. As she presses the button to demolish the dam wall, Hillary asks “Who are we to stop this mighty river from doing as Gaia intended?” Later that day, in order to re-assure Las Vegas residents that their city will still light the night with its neon incandesence now that the hydro power is no more, she opens the nation’s first urine-powered turbine.

In June, Hillary visits US troops as they leave Germany to make way for the new Islamist peace-keeping force. “Ich bin eine halal Frankfurter!” she says to thunderous applause. Mysteriously large sums, denominated in Gulf State petro dollars, pour into the Clinton Foundation’s coffers. The only down note comes when she regrets daughter Chelsea will be unable to attend New Year’s revelries at Cologne Station, but nevertheless wishes all participants the very best for that celebration of multicultural enrichment.

Cops and Islamists A federal judge makes it harder for the NYPD to deal with terror.

“With this ruling, Judge Haight contributes to the slander of one of the world’s most professional police forces and encourages anti-cop activists to escalate their demands—all while making it more difficult to keep New Yorkers safe from attack.”

This week a federal judge fed the myth of a New York City police department bent on violating the rights of innocent Muslims by unlawfully spying on them.

Senior District Judge Charles Haight did so in an extraordinary ruling rejecting a settlement that Mayor Bill de Blasio had reached with liberal activists and Muslim groups. Though the settlement was good enough for the progressives, somehow it wasn’t for Judge Haight. He’s ordered them to return with an agreement that would give the court and a civilian appointee more authority over how police operate.

Never mind that the judge’s decision is mostly based on a politicized inspector general’s report that never found evidence of the widespread spying on innocent Muslims that was alleged. Or that most of the “violations” in this same report had to do with timetables and deadlines, not spying. The judge nonetheless ruled the cops were guilty of “near-systemic violations” of the so-called Handschu guidelines—which date from a 1985 settlement approved by Judge Haight in a class-action suit originally involving the Black Panthers and Communists.

Lost in this legal fog is the truth that the program at issue was never about Muslim “surveillance.” This was about the police gathering intelligence that would help them identify places and neighborhoods where a terrorist might seek a job, a meal or a place to crash. Such information would have come in handy if, say, the Tsarnaev brothers, after bombing the 2013 Boston Marathon, had made their way to New York City to bomb Times Square as they’d planned.

It speaks to the real agenda that one of the activist demands included in the earlier settlement was that the NYPD would purge from its website a 2007 report called “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat.” The activists claimed the report was being used to justify discriminatory surveillance on Muslims. CONTINUE AT SITE

Secret Recordings Fueled FBI Feud in Clinton Probe Agents thought they had enough material to merit aggressively pursuing investigation into Clinton Foundation By Devlin Barrett and Christopher M. Matthews

Secret recordings of a suspect talking about the Clinton Foundation fueled an internal battle between FBI agents who wanted to pursue the case and corruption prosecutors who viewed the statements as worthless hearsay, people familiar with the matter said.

Agents, using informants and recordings from unrelated corruption investigations, thought they had found enough material to merit aggressively pursuing the investigation into the foundation that started in summer 2015 based on claims made in a book by a conservative author called “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” these people said.

The account of the case and resulting dispute comes from interviews with officials at multiple agencies.
Starting in February and continuing today, investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and public-corruption prosecutors became increasingly frustrated with each other, as often happens within and between departments. At the center of the tension stood the U.S. attorney for Brooklyn, Robert Capers, who some at the FBI came to view as exacerbating the problems by telling each side what it wanted to hear, these people said. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Capers declined to comment.

The roots of the dispute lie in a disagreement over the strength of the case, these people said, which broadly centered on whether Clinton Foundation contributors received favorable treatment from the State Department under Hillary Clinton.

Senior officials in the Justice Department and the FBI didn’t think much of the evidence, while investigators believed they had promising leads their bosses wouldn’t let them pursue, they said.

These details on the probe are emerging amid the continuing furor surrounding FBI Director James Comey’s disclosure to Congress that new emails had emerged that could be relevant to a separate, previously closed FBI investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s email arrangement while she was secretary of state.

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama took the unusual step of criticizing the FBI when asked about Mr. Comey’s disclosure of the emails. CONTINUE AT SITE