RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/christopher-wray-fbi-congressional-testimony-terrorism-isis-aa6a557b?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The U.S. hasn’t suffered a terrorist or jihadist-inspired attack on the U.S. homeland in years, but that blessed respite may not last. That was the message Thursday from FBI director Christopher Wray in testimony to a House subcommittee.

“As I look back over my career in law enforcement, I would be hard-pressed to think of a time where so many threats to our public safety and national security were so elevated all at once,” Mr. Wray told lawmakers. “But that is the case as I sit here today.”

We realize many readers no longer trust the FBI, and some will wonder if Mr. Wray is talking his book to maintain funding after Donald Trump asked Republicans to cut funding. The federal bureaucracy is hardly above such pleading, and that includes law enforcement. Warning about an attack is also a form of political inoculation if there is an attack—though in that case the FBI would still be asked, perhaps rudely, why it didn’t prevent it.

GOP Rep. Mike Garcia of California, a former Navy pilot, made Republican skepticism clear when he told Mr. Wray that “I’ll be honest with you, and this pains me to say this, but I don’t trust you.” This shows how much credibility the FBI has squandered since the Russia collusion fiasco under the James Comey gang.

Yet there’s reason to pay attention to the warning as global disorder spreads. Of increasing concern “is the potential for a coordinated attack here in the homeland, akin to the ISIS-K attack we saw at the Russia concert hall just a couple weeks ago,” Mr. Wray testified. ISIS-K never went away but it now has a sanctuary in Afghanistan from which it planned the Moscow strike and one in January in Iran. European governments have been fortunate to stop others.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-homeland-warning-about-isis-k-centcom-terrorism-isis-a0c36197?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The U.S. homeland hasn’t suffered a terrorist attack from Islamic extremists in years, but that doesn’t mean the threat has gone away, and it may be increasing again. That was the warning Sunday from retired Gen. Frank McKenzie, who was in charge of U.S. forces in Afghanistan during President Biden’s withdrawal.

“We should believe them when they say that. They’re going to try to do it,” Gen. McKenzie told ABC News “This Week.” “I think the threat is growing.”

He said the threat began “to grow as soon as we left Afghanistan, it took pressure off ISIS-K. So I think we should expect further attempts of this nature against the United States as well as our partners and other nations abroad.” ISIS-K is the Afghan-based branch of Islamic State that has taken responsibility for the recent attack on a Moscow concert venue.

President Biden assured the American people when he left Afghanistan that the U.S. would retain an over-the-horizon ability to monitor terrorists there. But Gen. McKenzie said that isn’t true now: “In Afghanistan, we have almost no ability to see into that country and almost no ability to strike into that country.”

Seth Jones, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, made the same point about the lack of U.S. capability to see in Afghanistan on the Journal Editorial Report on Fox News on Saturday.

The Biden Administration doesn’t want to talk about this for obvious political reasons, especially in an election year. All the more so when the porous southern U.S. border could be an avenue for terrorist infiltration. But it doesn’t enhance U.S. safety to hide the truth.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pro-palestinian-group-calls-for-intifada-in-nyc-tells-supporters-to-find-a-target-and-flood-city/

The pro-Palestinian activist group Within Our Lifetime (WOL) plans to hold a “Palestine is Everywhere” event in New York City from March 27 to 30, the organization announced, advertised in a flyer calling for “autonomous action” and “global intifada.”

The flyer, which WOL shared on its X page, directs the group’s supporters to “get a group together,” “find a target,” and “take action to defend Palestine.” WOL is urging its followers to “flood all of New York City” by taking “autonomous actions,” which include “de-occupations, assemblies and gatherings, public testimonies, roving shutdowns, sit-ins and slow downs, painting walls, wheatpastings, & other happenings.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-defense-budget-pentagon-u-s-military-china-russia-israel-ukraine-ba7fd46b?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden opened his State of the Union address last week invoking Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941. This week he rolled out a military budget fit for 1991, the twilight of the Cold War. Will Congress step up to defend the country amid compounding threats?

The President’s $850 billion request for the Pentagon in 2025 is a mere 1% increase over 2024. That’s a cut after inflation, the fourth in a row Mr. Biden has proposed. What’s happened in the past year? Israel was brutally attacked and is now fighting a war for survival. Iranian proxies have fired drones and rockets at U.S. troops in the region more than 100 times, and its terrorists in Yemen have taken a global shipping lane hostage.

Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is a bloody slog that he could still win. North Korea is ratcheting up its belligerence toward South Korea, which the U.S. is bound to defend. China announced recently a 7.2% increase in defense spending. One recent think-tank report estimates Beijing is fielding high-end equipment five to six times faster than the U.S.

Mr. Biden thinks this is an acceptable moment to put American defenses on a diet, and the Administration says it’s merely complying with budget caps negotiated last year with Congress. Yet few priorities escaped the axe.

The U.S. Army will contract, and not because America is relying less on land forces, which are in high demand in Europe and the Middle East. The Army is asking for 442,300 troops, though the Biden Administration requested 485,000 as recently as 2022. The healthier number for the missions required is 500,000. Shrinking the force is no substitute for fixing the underlying problem, which is a struggle to find recruits.

The U.S. Navy will purchase only six ships and retire 10 early, which would shrink the fleet to 287 ships in 2025 from 296 today. Perhaps the most egregious choice is the Administration’s decision to purchase only one Virginia-class attack submarine, instead of a planned two.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/30/at-least-160-attacks-carried-out-against-u-s-forces-in-the-middle-east-since-mid-october/

The attack against American troops in Jordan on Sunday, which took the lives of three soldiers, was the latest in a series of at least 160 terrorist attacks against American forces in the Middle East since October.

As reported by Fox News, U.S. officials revealed the true total number of attacks following the news of Sunday’s attack, which sparked widespread outrage and has led to calls for retaliation against Iran, which backed the proxy group responsible for the attack. It marked the deadliest attack on American forces since 2021.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, finally back from his controversial unannounced absence due to prostate cancer, issued a statement expressing his “outrage and sorrow for the deaths of three brave U.S. troops in Jordan and for the other troops who were wounded,” adding that “we will take all necessary actions to defend the U.S. and our troops.”

The base that was struck in Jordan is referred to as Tower 22, and houses roughly 350 troops who are stationed there primarily for the purpose of wiping out any remnants of the terrorist group ISIS. Most of the personnel on the base were asleep when the drone attacked.

“We are mourning with Americans across the country today who are mourning the deaths of three souls, three service members who lost their lives,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday. “As we all know, yesterday was a very dark day.”

The attack, and particularly Iran’s culpability, represents the latest escalation in tensions in the region, which began on October 7th when the Islamic terrorist group Hamas struck the state of Israel, killing over 1,400 civilians and launching a war between the two that is still ongoing. Elsewhere in the region, the Houthis in Yemen have begun attacking ships in the Red Sea and disrupting global maritime trade.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/president-biden-deterrence-iran-pentagon-three-americans-killed-breonna-moffett-william-rivers-kennedy-sanders-cd4a0357?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The White House released a photo of President Biden in the Situation Room on Monday, portraying him as large and in charge of a response to the murders of three Americans on Sunday. That’s a nice PR image, but does Mr. Biden realize what a corrosive effect his deterrence failures are having on U.S. public and military morale?

The Pentagon on Monday identified the Americans killed in the Sunday drone attack on a U.S base in Jordan: Sgt. William Rivers, Spc. Kennedy Sanders, and Spc. Breonna Moffett. All hailed from Georgia and ranged in age from 23 to 46. They were killed when a drone eluded the base defenses and hit the container unit that serves as base housing.

Iranian proxy forces have attacked U.S. forces 165 times in the Middle East since Oct. 17. At least 80 Americans have been wounded. If this keeps up, more of the public will wonder why any Americans should be based overseas if the Commander in Chief won’t protect them.

Some 66% of voters in a Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute poll late last year said they support maintaining “military bases around the world to deter attacks and respond quickly if something happens.” But Mr. Biden is neither deterring attacks nor responding quickly.

His failure so far to protect U.S. troops may inflame public suspicion that Americans are dying for little discernible reason in the Middle East. It’s a gift to Donald Trump and a growing left-right isolationism that wonders why Americans should be deterring rogue states. This is dangerous as global threats grow worse—from Europe to the Middle East to the Korean peninsula.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/01/what_we_dont_know_about_the_danger_of_dei_in_the_airline_industry_is_scarier_than_what_we_know.html

United Airlines became the subject of derision and mockery recently as a viral video emerged of United’s CEO Scott Kirby proclaiming his company’s potentially disastrous and deadly mission to have half of their future hires be “women or people of color” as part of its corporate quest for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), an ideological cancer that has been eating away at America’s academic, economic, and societal strength for years.

The reasons for the acute public outrage aren’t mysterious.  Millions of Americans fly commercially, and the idea of plummeting 30,000 feet over several minutes in anticipation of you and your family’s death is a frightening enough prospect for most people that the very idea of prioritizing race or gender in selecting pilots and mechanics seems nothing short of insane. 

And in the past weeks, we’ve learned that the door plug of an Alaska Airlines fuselage blew off of the aircraft at 16,000 feet, depressurizing the cabin and creating a scenario so harrowing and nightmarish that one passenger felt compelled to send a presumedly final text: “Mom our plane depressed. We’re in masks. I love you.”

The Boeing 737 Max was the plane involved, which some may remember was grounded after two deadly crashes overseas in 2018 and 2019, which claimed 346 lives in total and were both deemed the result of faulty equipment on the airplane. 

As many Americans are only now discovering as a sidenote to other outrageous DEI news, such as the FAA being decidedly hellbent on taking DEI to its most ludicrous extent by “actively recruiting” people who suffer from “severe intellectual abilities,” Boeing has also long been suicidally devoted to woke DEI initiatives.  They now claim, for example, that they want their employees to “look like America,” but are looking to have 92.5% of interview slates be “diverse,” i.e., non-white males.  This, of course, means that they are quite illegally prioritizing non-white male applicants for employment, and I am very much looking forward to the forthcoming lawsuits on these grounds. (See: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.)