RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17737/cyberwar-flipping-switches

President Thomas Jefferson’s decision to fight the Barbary pirates was not without its detractors. Many Americans, including John Adams, believed it was better policy to pay the tribute. It was cheaper than the loss of trade.

Sanctions and other punitive measures should address Russia’s refusal to sign onto the so-called Budapest Convention, a pact that obliges signatories to prevent cyber-crimes that are conducted within their borders. European Union nations and the United States are all signatories. Russia has resisted doing so, even as cyber-crime traced to the Russian mafia and other “advanced persistent threat” actors is repeatedly traced to its soil.

An article from the February 2015 issue of Brigham Young University Law Review argues persuasively that “Russia has an obligation to monitor and prevent trans-boundary cybercrime under the standard of due diligence.” But Russia will not, because the cyber-hackers advance Vladimir Putin’s goal of creating havoc and depressing the morale of the countries he targets.

The cat-and-mouse games played every day between cyber-crooks and cyber-cops cannot be ended by one daring raid. But as the stakes of the crimes rise with the world’s reliance on connected systems to operate more and more physical infrastructure, the urgent need to shove the pirates off the deck before they can burn the ship grows more pressing.

Discussing Russian hacking capabilities in a video discussion for the Heritage Foundation recently, Prof. Scott Jasper of the Naval Postgraduate School recalled a hack in 2018 in which the attackers succeeded in penetrating electrical power companies in the U.S., as they did in Ukraine

“We had evidence from CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) that Russian actors had penetrated up to 20 to 24 utilities by compromising vendors that had trusted relationships,” Jasper said. “They had taken control to the point where they could have thrown switches. They did this in Ukraine and flipped the switches of substations. So, this is a real threat.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/10/why-you-cant-watch-the-abc-miniseries-the-path-to-9-11/

On September 6, 2006, the ABC television network aired “The Path to 9/11,” a three-hour documentary, written and produced by Cyrus Nowrasteh and directed by David Cunningham, which covered the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against our country. The program broke with other accounts of the causes of the 9/11 attacks— including by the 9/11 Commission—by casting substantial blame for the attacks on the incompetent foreign policy of the Clinton Administration. 

This program aired only once. A DVD was produced but can no longer be purchased on Amazon.com. The reason? Former Clinton officials and their allies put heavy pressure on the Walt Disney Company—which owns ABC—to censor and suppress the film because it went against their false narrative absolving Clinton’s policies for contributing to the 9/11 attacks and instead putting the blame on the Bush Administration.

What’s stunning about this story today is how similar it is to the denials and outright lies about the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan by Biden officials, and the mainstream media’s willingness to change the subject away from a major foreign policy failure by a Democratic president.

“The Path to 9/11” was tough on both the Bush and Clinton Administrations for not doing enough to prevent the 9/11 attacks.

Some experts criticized Bush’s pre-9/11 counterterrorism policies and criticized him for not acting on intelligence reports in the summer of 2001, warning that “spectacular” terrorist attacks by al Qaeda could soon occur. Although I believe there was some validity to this criticism, the 9/11 Commission noted that U.S. officials were inundated with terrorist threats reports in 2001 concerning almost everywhere the United States had interests, including at home. Most of these reports never amounted to anything. In addition, I believe it was unfair to blame principally the Bush Administration for failing to stop the 9/11 attacks since it had been in office only nine months on September 11, 2001. 

On the other hand, there is strong evidence that eight years of foreign policy incompetence by the Clinton Administration set the stage for the 9/11 attacks, including bureaucratic bungling, failure to take action against al Qaeda, and President Clinton being distracted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal and impeachment.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/so_nevertrumps_are_you_happy_now_with_biden.html

Five years ago, the Trump base could not understand the NeverTrump Republicans who were willing to have the horrible Hillary Clinton in the White House, not the Trump they loathed.  Thank G-d, that did not come to pass.

But today — there is a curious silence in the NeverTrump camp now that they have succeeded in getting the loathed Trump out of the White House…for Biden.  Does anyone hear a Bret Stephens, a William Kristol — even Liz Cheney, whooping and hollering in gleeful jubilation that with President Biden in the White House, the Oval Office is Trump-rein? 

I don’t hear these faux Republican malcontents praising Biden to the heavens — Biden, who probably can’t distinguish COVID-19 from the common cold, Biden, who is a serial liar and likely a sociopath, Biden, whose idea of policy is reverse whatever Trump did (but not necessarily on Afghanistan).  Consider, too, for all the slurs, lies, and contumely hurled at Mr. Trump, no one ever suggested that someone was sending him instructions — except of course the base lie that Putin was his puppet master.  The anti-Trump calumnies included the phony assertion that President Trump was mentally challenged, not fit to be president.  But that was sheer propaganda, indulged in by the NeverTrump Republicans, happily joining the rabid, radical left, with both groups terminally beset by Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Does one hear of Biden Derangement Syndrome?  Fact is, if we were to hear of this malady, the sole person afflicted would be Biden himself.

The truth is that while the NeverTrump crowd still belch fire and brimstone at the thought of a re-elected President Trump come 2024, we don’t hear them crowing about how much better off the country is now that Biden has defeated him.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/the_democrats_funding_islamist_terrorists.html

At 8:45 A.M. on September 11, I was on the phone with the editor at the European Wall Street Journal. We were discussing the op-ed about financing terrorism I had written for the paper, which was to run the next day. The TV’s regular morning chatter in the background suddenly changed, and an anxious voice announced that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. We hung up and I rushed to my window, which has a clear view of downtown Manhattan and the World Trade Center. At first, I saw smoke rising in the distance; before long a thick, black cloud had engulfed the Twin Towers. Later the sky turned black, and the buildings disappeared altogether. I called the editor back—it was still possible to get a connection to Europe—and after describing the horrors outside my window, I suggested a new lead for the op-ed; I knew instinctively that this was no accident, but a terror attack.

This is how my op-ed titled Evil’s Unwitting Helper appeared on the morning of September 12, 2001. I wrote that “terrorism does not happen in a political vacuum. The policies pursued by Western nations impact directly on both the means available to terrorists and the motivations driving their evil agendas. It is imperative that we assess what has gone wrong and begin to set those policies right.”

This is when the idea for writing my book: Funding Evil, How Terrorism is Financed – and How to Stop It, which demanded to stop those who make terrorists’ activities possible—the paymasters, so that horror like September 11 never happen again.

It took some time for the U.S. government to confirm that al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist organizations have been raising money through charitable organizations, fundraisers in mosques, illegal and sometimes legal businesses, from used-cars sales to honey manufacturing to mining, to drug-trafficking, arms, and people smuggling, to mention but a few. They often are also the beneficiaries of states that provide money, arms, training camps, and safe haven. Since radical Islamists terrorists’ goal is to harm America, in 2001, the idea that any U.S. administration would fund such groups seemed preposterous.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/09/13/counter-terrorism-since-9-11/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Criminals or combatants?

The debacle in Afghanistan returns the United States to our pre-9/11 threat environment. In fact, the threats are arguably worse. It would be an overstatement, though, to conclude that we are back to the state of vulnerability that obtained on September 10, 2001. Our counter-terrorism is markedly superior today. That is cause for guarded optimism but not overconfidence. In many ways, it is a reflection of how bad things were prior to 9/11. While national security has dramatically improved since then, there is serious backsliding.

Let’s be precise about why we undertook the effort that has now unspooled into a disaster. When American armed forces were dispatched to Afghanistan in October 2001, the essential mission was threefold. The oft-forgotten first part was to shift the U.S. counter-terrorism paradigm from a law-enforcement model to a war footing.

Second, and most obvious, was to rout al-Qaeda, which had conducted the 9/11 atrocities. From the terror network’s hub, particularly in the Afghan–Pakistani border region (though it had strongholds throughout the country), al-Qaeda orchestrated the attacks in which nearly 3,000 Americans were killed. In nearly simultaneous suicide-hijacking strikes, a total of 19 trained jihadists destroyed the iconic World Trade Center and badly damaged a section of the Pentagon; another plane they’d seized, Flight 93, crash-landed near Shanksville, Pa., thanks to the extraordinary valor of the doomed passengers and crew, rather than plowing into the U.S. Capitol or the White House as jihadists are believed to have intended.

The third mission, the most enduring and thus the most difficult, was to ensure that the terror network was denied sanctuary and state sponsorship, which in Afghanistan had evolved into active military alliance with a like-minded regime, the Taliban.

The 9/11 operation had not been a one-off. Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda’s emir, had established the organization in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s. After a humiliated Red Army withdrew in 1989 (with the USSR’s collapse imminent), bin Laden took the jihad global, targeting the United States — the “head of the snake,” as we were branded by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the bin Laden mentor and jihadist firebrand I prosecuted in the mid 1990s after the cell he’d established bombed the Twin Towers and plotted (unsuccessfully) simultaneous attacks on New York City landmarks. For a time in the early Nineties, al-Qaeda relocated to Sudan. By 1996, though, it had been enticed back to Afghanistan after that country’s takeover by the Taliban — a sharia-supremacist faction that had been forged by Islamist elements in the Pakistani regime as a geopolitical weapon to control its Afghan neighbor while countering rival India. In the five ensuing years, al-Qaeda constantly conspired to attack American targets, occasionally with horrific success: In 1998, the jihadists bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing over 200; and in 2000, they nearly sank a naval destroyer, the USS Cole, killing 17 American sailors.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/10/bidens-vaccine-mandate-has-nothing-to-do-with-fighting-covid/

As soon as President Joe Biden announced his plan for a widespread vaccine mandate to fight COVID-19, protests erupted. And rightly so. But the real reason Biden chose now to announce it is so he could claim credit for what is already happening with COVID.

In what is almost certainly a vast overreach of his executive authority, Biden declared that he’d develop “an emergency rule to require all employers with 100 or more employees, that together employ over 80 million workers, to ensure their work forces are fully vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week.”

Of course, this mandate will raise constitutional challenges. Which is no doubt what Biden wants.

After all, if such a move is constitutional – and there are no shortage of “experts” who say that it is – then God help us all. Because that would open the door to federal intervention into our daily lives on an unprecedented scale. All that would be needed is to declare something, anything an “emergency.”

It’s no accident, for example, that the left now calls it a “climate emergency” instead of “global warming.” Why not use that to mandate that Americans working at large companies ditch their gas-powered cars? Biden could declare racism an “emergency” and force any business with 100 or more employees to conduct critical race theory courses.

But there’s another reason Biden is pushing this mandate now.

From the case data, it would appear as though the current outbreak has already peaked. Look at the chart below. The curve has “flattened,” and the seven-day moving average is now on the downtrend.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-partisan-punch-at-west-point-annapolis-military-academies-boards-11631302741?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The White House this week told Trump appointees to resign or be fired from boards overseeing military service academies, and that is President Biden’s right. But the Biden Administration denies that the military has been compromised by politics even as the President now indulges in acts of petty partisanship in military education.

The Biden Administration asked for resignations from more than a dozen members of the boards of visitors at the U.S. Naval Academy, Air Force Academy and West Point. The boards are roughly akin to the trustees at a college. Members are chosen by the President, Vice President, the Speaker of the House or congressional committees. The President’s nominees serve three-year terms.

The Biden Administration is selling this as removing Trump loyalists installed in sinecures. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said this week that she’d “let others evaluate” whether Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer, asked to leave boards for the Air Force and Naval Academies, respectively, were “qualified, or not political, to serve on these boards.” Mr. Spicer has spent 20 years in the Navy reserves and has a master’s degree from the Naval War College.

But this isn’t merely about replacing a few controversial nominees. The tell is that the White House also booted retired Gens. H.R. McMaster and Jack Keane from the West Point board. Both were eminently qualified Army general officers who influenced President Trump in productive directions. Gen. Keane was a leading architect of the 2007 surge that saved the day in Iraq.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-vaccine-command-osha-mandate-employers-11631311326?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

How far President Biden has come from his campaign and inaugural pledges to unify the country and defeat Covid-19. On Thursday he blamed his fellow Americans and political opponents for the surge of Covid this summer, and he ordered them to be vaccinated or risk losing their jobs.

President Biden says a new OSHA rule will require 80 million workers to get vaccinated or else be tested weekly for Covid-19. What law gives him that power, and could it create a backlash?Read Transcript

“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us,” he declared in a deeply polarizing speech laying out his orders from the White House. Take that, unvaccinated Americans. You’re costing him. So now he’s sticking it to you.

There were some useful notes in his speech. Mr. Biden is directing the feds to surge healthcare workers, testing and monoclonal antibody treatments to hot spots. Excellent. He’s also ordering federal workers and those employed at contractors to get vaccinated. That’s his prerogative. The federal government doesn’t want its employees getting sick any more than private businesses do.

But his national mandate on business is needless overkill in a free country. He’s forcing all private employers with more than 100 workers—two-thirds of the workforce—to require vaccinations or weekly testing. The non-compliant can be dunned $14,000 per violation.

Many large businesses already require vaccinations or regular testing, and some have offered workers financial incentives to get inoculated. A few have been more forceful. Yet many businesses have been reluctant to mandate shots because they respect individual conscience or worry some employees will quit. Workers have been hard to hire amid the incentives Democrats have created not to work. Mr. Biden thinks that’s not his problem.