RUTHFULLY YOURS

“You may not be in a religious war with me, but I’m in a religious war with you,” recalled former CIA interrogator James Mitchell the views of al-Qaeda (AQ) mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM). Interviewed on December 6 at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) before an audience of about 70, Mitchell provided chilling, essential insight into the jihadist worldview currently threatening the globe.

AEI Resident Fellow Marc A. Thiessen introduced Mitchell as someone who “has spent thousands of hours with Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and other senior al-Qaeda operatives” and “looked directly into the face of evil.” Mitchell concurred that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, considered the leading technical genius behind AQ’s devastating September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, was “devil and diva,” whom Mitchell and other interrogators called “muq” after the Arabic word for brain, muqtar. Comparing him to a Star Wars “Jedi master” recruiting jihadist “Jedi warriors,” Mitchell found him “immensely charming. He reminded me of Yoda,” yet “that is often how evil looks.”

Mitchell recalled that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad “thought he was a Sufi” and “likes to sit there and talk…to tell you about his religion,” yet he appeared to Mitchell as no mere blusterer. Mitchell compared his AEI audience to Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, stating “I haven’t seen this much raw brain power in one place since the last time I sat in his cell with just him.” He “is probably the brightest person I have ever seen in my life, and I have seen some pretty bright people.”

Khalid Sheikh Mohammad’s evil genius came to life in Mitchell’s recounting of his description of his 2002 murder of Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter and jihadist hostage in Pakistan. He remembered that he “had sharp knives. The toughest part was getting through the neck bone.” For him, this killing showed God’s “glory, shows how much his influence is. It’s almost like an act of worship to him.”

While “not attacking all of Islam,” Mitchell saw in Khalid Sheikh Mohammad how “these Islamists, who want to destroy our way of life, have a set of beliefs that make them incredibly dangerous.” For Islamists, “how we’re supposed to live was established 1,400 years ago in the Koran and in the perfect words and deeds” of Islam’s prophet Muhammad. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad considered Islam a “religion of peace. The world will be at peace when sharia law is imposed on the whole world.”

Speaking of jihadists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, Mitchell emphasized the “depth of their belief. I don’t think most Americans understand that they, no kidding, believe what they believe.” Jihadists “really do believe they’re going to end up with 72 spiritual beings that become virgins every time you have sex with them.” “It sounds ridiculous to me,” but “they really do believe they’re going to be treated like rock stars up there.”

Mitchell’s interrogations of another captured AQ jihadist, Abu Zubaydah, revealed that “Al Qaeda dreams of bringing down America with catastrophic attacks, but that’s not particularly practical.” For him, the “real way to bring down America was with low-tech, ‘lone-wolf’ attacks because the target is not our military capabilities. It’s not our buildings. It’s not our roads. It’s the minds of the Americans.” “We don’t have to defeat you. We only have to persist long enough for you to defeat yourself.”

Similarly, Mitchell noted that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad “got fascinated by the Beltway sniper” who killed numerous individuals outside of Washington, DC, in 2002; He “would spend hours to me talking about that” and its “economy of scale.” Accordingly, he fantasized about multiple “single martyrs, shahids, who would go into the American culture and pull off low-tech attacks…with enough of those low-tech attacks, like happened with the Beltway shooter, it would cripple America.” Thus he “bought a gas station in Pakistan so he could figure out how to build a bomb that they could slide down into the gas tanks at gas stations.”

In his enviro-extremism, President Obama is attempting to tie President-elect Trump’s hands by blocking vast swaths of the Arctic Ocean and stretches of the Atlantic from oil and natural-gas drilling. The gambit, announced by the administration on Tuesday, is part of an eleventh-hour wave by which Obama is flooding the regulatory zone: Promulgating so many rules – of the unpopular, hard-left variety that Democrats dare not unveil before Election Days – that he hopes the Trump administration will find it too cumbersome to undo all of them.

The incoming president should not let his predecessor get away with it. Obama’s lawyers apparently believe they’ve found a loophole that could make the anti-drilling ban stick. President Trump, however, will have the power to rescind it, and should do so promptly.

Obama will set an all-time record for pages added to the Federal Register this year. Actually, make that another all-time record, since he will (yet again) be breaking records he has set, and broken, repeatedly over the last eight years. In fact, the Competitive Enterprise Institute notes that on a single day in mid-November, Obama added an unprecedented 572 pages to the Federal Register.

Concededly, counting pages can be an imprecise or even misleading measure of presidential law-making. The Federal Register includes reams of documents besides rules and regulations. Plus, even rules that had the effect of rolling back rules would thicken the rule book. But let’s face it, Washington is rarely in the business of reining in its intrusions. The last eight years have been all about extending them – to the Arctic Ocean and beyond.

Trump will find it easy to cancel rules imposed in the late stages of the incumbent administration. Any rules that have not yet gone into effect can simply be suspended. And rules that have just gone into effect may be undone under the 1996 Congressional Review Act. The CRA empowers Congress, within 60 session-days of a rule’s implementation, to enact a resolution disapproving it. Such a resolution is not subject to Senate filibuster (i.e., it can be passed by a simple majority because the usual requirement of 60 votes to end debate does not apply).

For the most part, the CRA has been an illusory check on executive agencies run wild. A disapproval resolution, like any other congressional act, does not become law unless the president signs it (or unless the president’s veto is overridden). Obviously, a president is not going to sign a resolution that cancels rules promulgated by his own administration in furtherance of his agenda.

Still, the CRA has been successfully invoked once, in 2001. That example mirrors our current transitional circumstances: It happened at the start of the new Bush (43) administration, when Congress voted to revoke a rule implemented toward the end of the Clinton administration.

With Republicans in control of both houses of Congress as well as the White House, it will be possible to enact resolutions of disapproval, as long as it is done quickly. While the GOP margin in the Senate is thin, Republicans have been united in opposition, at least rhetorically, to Obama’s despotic style of governance. Now that they can easily do something about it, expect them to pass, and Trump to sign, resolutions that rescind brand new Obama rules.

These statistics are appalling but correct….The expensive Chardonnay crowd is now flocking to a Potemkin Cuba and gushing about it….They really need to spend a week in jail in Venezuela…..but of course they are idiots and ignorant and I would venture a bet that they never read Robert Conquest….or even heard of him. rsk

Millennials are one of history’s luckiest generations. We were fortunate to be born around the end of the Cold War a quarter century ago, when the tyrannical Communism embodied in the Soviet Union came tumbling down, also knocking socialism down a few pegs along the way. We have grown up in a world where, for the most part, economic and personal freedom are the rule rather than exception.

And apparently we hate it. How else does one explain why so many millennials seem to long to live in government-run economies, or worse?

A Gallup poll in June 2015 found that almost 70% of U.S. millennials would be willing to vote for a socialist presidential candidate. Even more shocking, a poll conducted before this year’s presidential election by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that barely half of millennials believe “Communism was or is a problem.”

The same poll found that a quarter of millennials hold favorable opinions of Vladimir Lenin, while 18% think favorably of Mao Zedong. More than 10% even have positive feelings about Joseph Stalin. Never mind that these men were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions and the impoverishment of hundreds of millions.

These polling numbers are frightening—especially when the Communist-ruled and socialist nations in the world today, from North Korea and Cuba to Venezuela, show so clearly how such systems invariably lead to repression and declining standards of living for their populations.

Part of the problem is that many millennials see these ideologies as represented by Scandinavian countries, an ignorant view fed them by candidate Bernie Sanders, among others. As Harvard and Stanford visiting professor Daniel Schatz (a Swede) wrote in Forbes in February, “Sweden began to reverse its economic model during the 1990s” through privatization and deregulation. Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen was even more unequivocal in a speech earlier this year: “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

Scandinavian economies are in some ways freer than those in the U.S. The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom gives these countries high marks for limited regulatory burdens and for corporate tax rates lower than in the U.S. In many ways it’s easier to start a successful business and take part in economic life in a Scandinavian country than it is in America.