RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-vaccine-mandate-assault-on-the-common-good-opinion/ar-AAOirim

As President Joe Biden launches via executive order a sweeping vaccine mandate for all federal government workers, and now a brand-new initiative for private-sector mandates, the issue has once again risen to the forefront of the national dialogue.

United Airlines, for example, recently became the first U.S. airline to mandate COVID-19 vaccination for all its employees. United Airlines’ mandate takes effect on September 27, and it might augur a broader trend: A poll conducted last month by insurance and advisory firm Willis Towers Watson, for example, suggests that 52 percent of private-sector employers surveyed expect to have a workplace vaccine mandate by the end of 2021. As Biden’s brand-new announcement of a Department of Labor rule for private-sector vaccination requirement now makes clear, that poll was prescient.

Against this backdrop, several Republican-leaning states have advanced laws or executive orders that prohibit private-sector vaccine mandates for employees, customers or in some other respect. That tally is now at least eight states: Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Montana, Texas, South Carolina and South Dakota. The legal mechanics and specifics differ from state to state. But the highest-profile and most mechanically straightforward Republican-led assault on vaccine mandates is the one in my new home state, Florida.

In May, Governor Ron DeSantis, who has emerged as a talismanic figure of sorts for those standing athwart COVID-induced hysteria, signed into law S.B. 2006. The legislation bans private businesses, local governments and schools from issuing vaccine mandates for customers or members of the public. On August 27, Florida’s Department of Health announced that it will enforce S.B. 2006 via $5,000 fines “per individual and separate violation.” That rule will go into effect on September 16, though DeSantis had previously already taken aim at mandatory private-sector vaccinations via executive order even prior to the passage of S.B. 2006.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17748/is-it-puppeteers-or-puppets-in-control-in

Under Biden, America now has a national debt that rivals a Black Hole….. Our southern border remains more a suggestion than a checkpoint. And our allies see a nation that has casually condemned to death untold numbers of Afghans who fervently believed in America until they saw our last C-17 depart Kabul.

What all of this might suggest is that there are individuals in Washington who are wielding enormous power without worrying about what Joe Biden might think or do because whatever they decide, it is Biden who will take the fall. If true, it has the makings of a nightmare situation.

[W]e appear to be trapped by a Washington power elite intent on consigning our future to oblivion. In the end, it will be up to the American electorate to halt this slide as they consider who to send to Congress in the next election cycle.

It must be the best of times and the worst of times for our nation’s enemies.

On one hand they have a President in the White House whose actions are reducing America into some befuddled and diminished world power. On the other hand our foes are trying to figure out, as are all Americans, who is actually in charge in Washington?

Is it a shadow government of consultants, lobbyists, and Obama retreads? Or is it really a president who counts success as getting to the presidential helicopter unassisted? One can envision the intelligence chiefs of our sworn enemies being sternly lectured by their supreme leaders to get to the bottom of it because they can’t believe their good fortune that American leadership has fallen so far so fast. It must be a devious trap.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17736/accountability-for-afghanistan

The disappointing fact is that there is a long and rich list of potential targets. It begins with President Joe “The Buck Stops Here” Biden as the obvious choice. The President bears ultimate responsibility for making the decisions that led to America’s surrender and leaving our citizens behind. The President should be held accountable.

Also, near the top of the list of those who must be held accountable are those individuals who hold Senate-confirmed positions. They were the architects of this disaster: Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. Together, these individuals either counseled the President that they would execute his direction effectively and safely, or they developed and implemented a strategy that they knew would not work. Either scenario would demand that they also be held accountable.

Some may legitimately ask, what about Jake Sullivan, Susan Rice and others? In other attempts to hold people accountable (think recent impeachment actions) the efforts were seen as overreach. The results, partisan bickering and nothing happening.

The alternative is the path we already seem to be heading down, no one being held accountable.

America has just experienced perhaps its greatest foreign policy debacle in modern history by surrendering to the Taliban in Afghanistan. The enemy that the U.S. held accountable for harboring the al-Qaeda terrorist group that attacked us on 9/11 once again governs Afghanistan. The Taliban now holds the keys to whether, how, and when Americans left behind will be returned home safely. The question today is who will be held accountable for this debacle, a debacle in both strategy and execution.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/09/justice-departments-foremost-felony-charge-may-be-on-thin-ice/

More than eight months after the worst attack on Washington since the Civil War, as Joe Biden describes it, not a single American has been charged with sedition or treason related to the alleged “insurrection” on January 6, 2021.

As Ben Boychuk explained in his Thursday essay, despite many harsh warnings insisting  the government would build sedition cases, so far Biden’s Justice Department has failed to live up to its promise.

That’s not to say, of course, that the abusive “Capitol breach” probe hasn’t been a big success for those seeking revenge against Americans who protested Joe Biden’s election. The lives of at least 600 Americans have been destroyed—families torn apart, finances bankrupted, reputations forever tarnished, and dozens held in prison, denied bail, and awaiting trials that won’t begin until next year. 

But the Justice Department’s premier felony charge—obstruction of an official proceeding—is on shaky legal ground, to say the least. It’s a substitute for the sedition cases they cannot prove in court.

Prosecutors have slapped the felony count, which is punishable by up to 20 years in jail, against at least 200 defendants, including mostly misdemeanor cases, in an attempt to turn Trump-supporting trespassers into convicted felons. 

Several defendants, including Jacob Chansely, the so-called QAnon Shaman, and Paul Hodgkins have pleaded guilty to the charge; both will serve prison time even though neither man has a criminal record. (Chansley has been behind bars since January. Judge Royce Lamberth refuses to release Chansley from jail, despite pleas from his attorney that he suffers from mental health issues.)

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/09/joe-biden-marches-through-history-checking-his-watch/

The most solemn and painful duty any president faces is standing silently, head bowed, watching the men and women he sent to war come home in caskets. He sees the terrible cost of war firsthand in those flag-draped coffins and the tears of loved ones there to meet them.

 Last week, Joe Biden tried to fulfill that duty—and stumbled badly. When he should have waited with patient dignity for the caskets to be transferred from the plane, he furtively glanced at his watch. When he spoke to the families, the president brought up the loss of his own son to cancer. Those families wanted to hear only about the bravery and sacrifice of their sons and daughters, husbands and wives, of their heroic service to our nation.

 Surely these were inadvertent blunders. He undoubtedly mentioned his son thinking it would convey to these families that he understood their loss. They heard it differently. They said later it seemed self-referential, tone-deaf, even narcissistic. Likewise, when he glanced at his watch, he probably acted out of habit. When George H. W. Bush did that during a 1992 presidential debate, he was roundly mocked. “Hey, George, do you have someplace more important to be?” His aides wisely removed the watch before the next debate. Biden’s handlers will do the same before the next solemn occasion. 

 When Biden glanced at his watch, his inadvertent message was “I’m busy. How long will this casket ceremony take?” That’s a painfully rude message, however unintentional. The injury to these bereaved families was compounded because their loved ones died during a hurried, botched evacuation ordered by this commander-in-chief, whose bad judgment is becoming the leitmotif of his presidency.

 Grave as the occasion was, cluelessness like Biden’s is a perennial theme of comedy. If the president were a Republican, he would be a rich target, a constant object of ridicule. 

Gerald Ford certainly was during the first year of “Saturday Night Live.” Chevy Chase relentlessly mocked him by tripping over everything in the Oval Office and constantly talking to a stuffed dog. Ford, it should be noted, was probably the most accomplished athlete ever to occupy that office. The mockery came after he stumbled exiting Air Force One. Biden has already tripped entering the plane, a much less complicated task. Few comedians took notice. When George W. Bush stumbled over his words, as he often did, every late-night comic repeatedly mocked him as a moron. He wasn’t. He simply had a word-retrieval problem, a well-known cognitive difficulty that is independent of IQ or education.

https://www.steynonline.com/11669/defeat-and-dishonesty

Denyse O’Leary, whom I always read with great interest in our Comments section, chides me for diagnosing our present woes but not proposing solutions.

That ought to be easy. In Afghanistan what needed to be done is almost as old as man. As Victor David Hanson pointed out to Tucker, “This is the greatest loss of military equipment in the history of warfare by one power.”

He’s right. Because US government is so drunkenly profligate, the numbers sound blah-blah to jaded American ears. But $85-90 billion is larger than the annual military budget for every nation around the world except the US and China. For those partial to the International Jewish Conspiracy theory of history, what America has just given the Taliban is equivalent to 85 per cent of all the military aid Washington has given Israel since 1948. The Taliban now possess more Black Hawk helicopters than almost all America’s allies; they own near to a tenth of all Humvees on the planet. That’s aside from less obvious items, such as over 160,000 radios and over 16,000 night-vision goggles that will come in mighty handy for wiping out the remnants of resistance in the Panjshir Valley.

The “solution” to this is to do what every army has known to do down through the millennia: a retreat means not just preventing your men from falling into the hands of the enemy but also their weapons – including, if necessary, your allies’ weapons. As many readers will know, at the beginning of July 1940, just a week after France threw in the towel and signed its armistice with Germany, the Royal Navy attacked and disabled the French fleet, then the largest and most powerful in Continental Europe.