RUTHFULLY YOURS

Secretary of defense Jim Mattis seems to always be on the wrong side of every issue.

1. He believes that global warming is a national security threat.

Mattis has long espoused the position that the armed forces, for a host of reasons, need to cut dependence on fossil fuels and explore renewable energy where it makes sense. He had also, as commander of the U.S. Joint Forces Command in 2010, signed off on the Joint Operating Environment, which lists climate change as one of the security threats the military expected to confront over the next 25 years.

Shouldn’t we have a secretary of defense more focused on real national security threats and less on imaginary ones?

2. Mattis believes that the so-called “settlements” in Israel’s Judea and Samaria are an “obstacle to peace” and that Israel could become an “apartheid state.” He shows zero understanding of the fundamental causes or the true nature of the dispute. For the so-called Palestinians, the existence of Israel is an “obstacle to peace.”

3. Mattis resisted a broader air strike on Syria when it was found to be using chemical weapons. Instead, we struck a few empty buildings at night. How do I know they were empty? Did anyone hear reports of a single casualty after the attack? No. Did anyone hear reports of plumes of chemical weapons dispersed by the explosions? No. It was a token effort, designed to do the minimum. You can argue whether or not we should have bombed Syria at all for employing chemical weapons (most of the victims of the Syrian regime have been killed by conventional weapons), but the pinprick kind of attack that Mattis recommended was simply ineffectual.

In an absurd tweet on Wednesday, Lawfare’s executive director suggested that Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) should be replaced as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee:
Susan Hennessey
✔ @Susan_Hennessey

This is a hugely significant story. DOJ and the IC do not trust the HPSCI chair to protect sources and methods that directly risk human lives. Nunes simply cannot continue to serve in the role and Speaker Ryan is wrong to not remove him and appoint a suitable choice like Conaway. https://twitter.com/mkraju/status/994318826404708353 …

That wasn’t even the most moronic tweet in Susan Hennessey’s arsenal. She went on to warn how “the intelligence oversight system is based on trust. Without trust it is irretrievably broken. The [Intelligence Community] and [Department of Justice] don’t trust Nunes and he cannot perform his job functions.” Get that? The Intelligence Community and the Justice department—which have proven to be as political and devious as a Chicago ward boss—are the white hats and Nunes is the black hat.

That is not ignorance on Hennessey’s part: it’s calculated deception.

Fortunately, it’s unlikely that House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) will heed an unreasonable demand from a political partisan tied to the left-leaning Brookings Institution. But it does unveil the latest tactic of the Left (and some on the Right) to discredit and ultimately oust Nunes, the only Republican on Capitol Hill who appears to have his act together when it comes to exposing the players behind the Trump-Russia election collusion scheme.

The Deep State Mob is continuing to squeeze the California congressman after he again threatened to impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for ignoring congressional subpoenas and withholding crucial documents from Congressional investigators. Nunes has minced no words about how the Justice Department and FBI have been “stonewalling” his committee’s investigation for months. And as Nunes inches closer to revealing the stinking core of what is potentially the biggest political corruption scandal in U.S. history, the Deep State Mob is trying to close in on him first.

Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, the laconic Midwesterner with a steel trap mind, dropped a bombshell yesterday with a letter (the full letter appears below – pdf here) to Deputy A.G. Rod Rosenstein (who supervises the Mueller probe) and FBI director Christopher Wray. But in keeping with Grassley’s style, which has so often misled his opponents into overconfidence, you have to read between the lines to see where he is heading. The end point: uncovering the plot to frame General Flynn for lying to the FBI, including likely criminal acts by senior members of the FBI.

Recall that facing financial ruin, and threats to prosecute his son on unrelated charges, General Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, yet James Comey told the Grassley Committee in a briefing:

[T]he FBI agents who interviewed Lt. General Michael Flynn, “saw nothing that led them to believe [he was] lying.” Our own Committee staff’s notes indicate that Mr. Comey said the “agents saw no change in his demeanor or tone that would say he was being untruthful.” Contrary to his public statements during his current book tour denying any memory of those comments, then-Director Comey led us to believe during that briefing that the agents who interviewed Flynn did not believe he intentionally lied about his conversation with the Ambassador and that the Justice Department was unlikely to prosecute him for false statements made in that interview. In the months since then, the Special Counsel obtained a guilty plea from Lt. General Flynn for that precise alleged conduct.

Comey has since changed his tune, in “a Fox News interview in which he denied he ever told lawmakers that he did not believe Michael Flynn lied.”

General Flynn’s sentencing has been delayed repeatedly, as Judge Emmett Sullivan (who replaced Judge Contreras after he was removed from the case) has demanded that all exculpatory evidence be handed over to him.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/did-fbi-have-spy-in-trump-presidential-campaign/The Steele-dossier author told Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson about a ‘human source.’ Something tells me Glenn Simpson did not make a mistake. Something tells me the co-founder of Fusion GPS was dead-on accurate when he testified that Christopher Steele told him the FBI had a “human source” — i.e., a spy — inside the Trump […]

The question of whether torture is immoral does not have quite the yes or no answer that California Senator and posturing Democratic presidential wannabe Kamala Harris implied it had during the questioning of CIA nominee Gina Haspel. Classic torture is the intentional infliction of excruciating pain and permanent injury. Merely pouring water down the nostrils of a terrorist does not meet that classic definition.

And yes, who is doing it matters. Brutalizing an American prisoner of war to get information to be used to kill more Americans is immoral. Making a Khalim Sheik Muhammed think you might actually drown him, which you have absolutely no intention of doing, to save American lives by disclosing future plans and plots is not an immoral purpose.

Extracting needed information by such methods from the likes of a Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the man who decapitated Daniel Pearl before turning passenger jets into manned cruise missiles, is not an immoral choice What about the choices the murderous and soulless Mohammed, who Kamala Harris turned into a victim, forced his genuine victims to make? As far as we know, Sen. Harris, no terrorists were ever forced to choose death by incineration or jumping out of a 100-story building.

One wonders what Harris would recommend if a terrorist planted a nuke set to go off in an hour in Washington, D.C. Would we tell him (or her): “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be held against you. You have the right to an attorney. Now, please, tell us where you planted the nuke.” In that situation few Americans would be unwilling to attach the battery cables to the prisoner’s privates. Sometimes the end does justify the means.