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Kerry Confirms: Foggy Bottom Created Secure Email Account for Hillary, Which Went Unused By Debra Heine

Posted By on February 24th, 2016

During his appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today, Secretary of State John Kerry confirmed that a secure email account had been set up for Hillary Clinton when she became secretary of state, but that she neglected to use it. What’s more, he was unable to answer a question regarding any actions that may have been taken by the intelligence community to mitigate the damage her unsecured server did to our national security. Via The Daily Caller:

During one part of an at-times intense exchange, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson read from a letter from Julia Frifield, who serves as State Department assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs.

“Secretary Clinton did not use a classified email account at the State Department. An account was set up on ClassNet on her calendar, but it was not used,” Frifield wrote in response to a Sept. 21, 2015 letter from the committee asking for information about Clinton’s use of an account equipped to handle classified information.

ClassNet refers to the State Department workstations that are designed to allow employees to view classified information.

Clinton opted instead to harbor classified information on her own personal, unsecure email account, which was hosted on her private “home-brew” server at her home in Chappaqua, New York.
More than 1,7o0 emails that Hillary Clinton sent or received have been determined to contain some level of classified material. At least 22 email chains have been deemed to be the highest level of “top secret,” which is described by members of the intel community to be “the crown jewels” of the United States government because if the information is compromised, national security can be seriously damaged, and people’s lives put in danger.

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Can We Stop the Rubio-Cruz Mutually Assured Destruction? By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on February 24th, 2016

“Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are sharp, appealing candidates. Are they wise enough to know that neither can win without the backing of the other’s core supporters, and that destroying those supporters’ preferred candidate is not the way to get it? There are not enough committed conservatives in the country for Cruz to win without broadening his appeal. And Rubio cannot win without conservatives, who like Cruz and who are very suspicious of Rubio. No one expects the two senators to stop competing with each other, but the pair needs to home in on Trump’s progressive, incoherent record. They also need to project the uplifting aspects of their candidacies. If, instead, the fratricide continues, some of their disaffected supporters will opt out of the process entirely while others gravitate to Trump, who will waltz to the nomination. And then the Democrats will waltz to victory in November.”

Rick Tyler, the now-former Cruz campaign spokesman, is a good guy who, by his own admission, exercised very poor judgment in publicizing what turned out to be a false story about Marco Rubio.

The story, which contorted an incident caught on video, sounded kooky from the start: Rubio, while encountering Ted Cruz’s father and a Cruz staffer reading the Bible in a hotel lobby, purportedly said, “Got a good book there, not many answers in it.” Rubio is, by all accounts, a devout Christian and he has spoken eloquently about his faith during the campaign; if there were a report of his having made a statement so contradictory of his nature, it should have been quadruple-checked before anyone decided to go public with it. And even if verified, it would have been more sensible to think the remark a poor attempt at humor than a reflection of Rubio’s beliefs, so far better to ignore it as one of those dumb things exhausted people say in a tense situation.

But of course, Rubio did not say what Tyler reported; he said the opposite: “All the answers” are in the Bible.

As many have observed, this incident does not occur in a vacuum. I am a Cruz supporter, so it is perhaps no surprise that I think the two others that have gotten attention are much ado about nothing.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

America’s Deadly Embrace by Peter Huessy

Posted By on February 24th, 2016

Stephen Kinzer’s 2008 book All the Shah’s Men traces the roots of today’s Middle East terror to when the United States and Great Britain engineered the return of the Shah of Iran to power in Iran in a 1953 “coup.”

The Iranian mullah leadership have embraced Kinzer’s view and repeatedly describe America as “The Great Arrogance.”

And since the mullahs seized power in 1979, the Iran “terror masters” have been the primary terror threat to the U.S., murdering thousands of Americans in Beirut, Lockerbie, Khobar Towers, the African Embassies, the World Trade Center on 9-11, and in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Iran is an Islamic revolutionary power seeking to expand its writ by terror. Obviously, the set of standards of international behavior established by the western powers upon the end of World War 2 stand in the way of Iran’s ambitions thus their anger at the U.S. and the West for such “great arrogance.”

It is not a coincidence that from 1945 through the end of the Cold War, the rise in prosperity around the world, along with the parallel spread of free and relatively democratic nations, was in historical terms breathtaking.

Especially as the West was simultaneously defending against the Soviet empire and its terrorist accomplices – from cross border invasions as on the Korean peninsula; to guerilla wars in Vietnam, Angola and Nicaragua; to terrorism from FARC, the FMLN, the Sandinistas, the Castro and Kim regimes in Cuba and North Korea, respectively, as well as from Iran and Syria and its ally Hezbollah.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Incredible: Up to 90,000 dangerous illegals set free By Rick Moran

Posted By on February 24th, 2016

Here’s another example of Obama’s failed immigration policy threatening the public. Statistics from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) show that almost 90,000 illegal aliens considered a threat are not deported and eventually are released.

Washington Examiner:

Internal ICE figures show that in fiscal 2015, the agency encountered 152,393 illegal immigrants labeled a criminal threat, mostly in jails, but charged 64,116. About another 88,000 were not processed for deportation, according to the Center for Immigration Studies’ Jessica Vaughan.

The numbers are even worse for those who ICE asks local police and sheriffs to detain but never collect.

Under Obama’s recently announced Priority Enforcement Program, officials work with local police to arrest and deport criminal immigrants. In reality, that amounts to a phone call from ICE requesting local authorities hold the suspect for 48 hours after they’re set to be freed.

But several sheriffs from around the country say that just 35-40 percent of those held are ever seized by ICE, even after they’ve been released.

Richard W. Stanek, sheriff of Hennepin County in Minneapolis, said he had 75 illegals ICE wanted, but the agency only picked up about 35 percent. “And these are people that they want,” he told theWashington Examiner.

Susan Benton, sheriff of Florida’s Highlands County, said “mine would be much much lower.” Worse, she added, many are seized and sent to a federal facility in Miami and immediately released and return to her county.

It’s become a huge issue for local police. Benton said she wants to help ICE and hold illegal immigrants longer, but can’t legally. Often the result is more crime from the suspect and questions about why her department’s jail frees them.

A big reason why ICE doesn’t deport these criminal aliens is that the immigration courts are swamped:

Kang has been in America long enough to raise two sons and run a family-owned doughnut shop in Irving. After years of worrying, he thinks he’s about to find out his fate. Things look promising.

But Sims sets a merit hearing for Dec. 6, 2017.

BOOKS Comments turned off

University president celebrates ‘inclusiveness’ by excluding conservative speaker By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on February 24th, 2016

William Covino, president of California State University Los Angeles, has canceled a planned speech by Breitbart editor-at-large and conservative brainiac Ben Shaprio three days before it was to take place. All in the name of inclusiveness, bringing to mind the notorious Vietnam War statement, “We had to destroy the village to save it.”

In doing so, he has set the stage for what could be a major confrontation, as the speech’s sponsor, Young Americans for Freedom, has vowed to proceed with the speech, titled “When diversity becomes a problem,” regardless of the loss of the sanction by Covino. Will the university president attempt to silence the speech?

The rationale for Covino’s action is ridiculous on its face.

In an email to the Young America’s Foundation chapter at CSULA, university president William Covino wrote, “After careful consideration, I have decided that it will be best for our campus community if we reschedule Ben Shapiro’s appearance for a later date, so that we can arrange for him to appear as part of a group of speakers with differing viewpoints on diversity. Such an event will better represent our university’s dedication to the free exchange of ideas and the value of considering multiple viewpoints.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Islamist Turkey is Imploding By Alex Alexiev

Posted By on February 24th, 2016

In the past two weeks a number of events have taken place in Turkey that, taken together, indicate that this erstwhile U.S. ally is spinning dangerously out of control with neither Ankara nor Washington and its European allies having the slightest clue of what to do. It started several days ago with the Turkish artillery targeting the Kurdish YPG military units n Syria, a key U.S. ally against ISIS, as they made progress in taking over formerly terrorist-occupied terrain north of Aleppo. This was followed by Turkey enabling thousands of jihadists entering Turkish territory from Syria with all of their weapons and exiting back into Syria from a different border crossing to join the battle against the anti-Assad forces. As if to show on whose side Ankara really is, a local news agency provided pictures of trucks loaded with Turkish ammunition delivered to these very people. It may be recalled that for publishing similar pictures of supplies to Syrian jihadists by the Turkish Intelligence Organization (MIT), in January 2014, two prominent journalists were accused of “treason and espionage” and are facing the prospect of life in prison. In yet another proof of Turkish collusion with ISIS terrorists, wiretaps of phone conversations between Turkish military and ISIS commanders have just been made public that show close cooperation.

The problem that Turkey and its Islamist leadership are now facing is something that has been known for a long time, but is no longer credibly deniable. Under Erdogan, Turkey has never been interested in fighting ISIS, Al-Nusra, and other Sunni terrorists. On the contrary, it has assisted them in every way possible for at least the last three years. Washington under Obama preferred to look the other way, but the latest events have faced it with a stark choice — either defeat ISIS and limit growing Russian influence in alliance with the Syrian Kurds, or continue to put up with Erdogan’s duplicitous Islamist agenda and lose the last shreds of credibility it has left in the region. With the leader of the Turkish parliamentary opposition, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, now openly calling for the leaders of the AKP to be tried for “aiding and abetting terrorist organizations,” it is high time for Washington to reconsider its failing policies.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Is it Espionage? By Mark A. Hewitt

Posted By on February 24th, 2016

The latest batch of Hillary’s classified emails now totals over 1,700. Her decision to exclusively conduct official business on a separate remote and unsecure email server has placed the men and women of the Intelligence Community (IC) in turmoil. Members of the IC would never be allowed such “permissions” and it is an abuse of authority to purposefully circumvent classified information safeguards.

Within the IC there exists (at least) two systems, one classified system and an unclassified system. The Non-classified Internet Protocol (IP) Router Network (abbreviated as NIPRNet) is a private IP network used to exchange unclassified information. The Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) is a system of interconnected computer networks used by the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of State to transmit classified information (up to and including information classified SECRET).

In a letter to the chairmen of the Senate intelligence and foreign affairs committees, the intelligence community’s inspector general, said that he has received sworn declarations that cover “several dozen emails containing classified information determined by the IC element to be at the CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET and TOP SECRET/SAP information.”

The rules for the management of Special Access Programs is in a category unto itself. SAP’s are so sensitive that even people who have security clearances giving them access to Top Secret/Sensitive Compartment Information (TS/SCI), an enormously high security clearance level, cannot have accesses to a SAP unless they receive a special indoctrination into the SAP based on an operational “must know” that exceeds all other “need to know” standards.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Roger Franklin A Logie-Worthy Performance

Posted By on February 24th, 2016

Why it is that such a small segment of the population — just two-and-a-bit per cent by Ms Ismail’s Q&A reckoning — requires so many apologists is a question the ABC long ago concluded is best not considered.
Telegenic Muslim women never lack for invitations to go before the ABC’s cameras and put a happy face on their religion, not least when one or other bloody outrage demands a very special brand of cultural contextualizing. Q&A newcomer Raihan Ismail can look forward to many more close-ups
Zaky Mallah shot his bolt last year and Perth academic Anne Aly must have been pumping out po-mo piffle about terrorism as “the new theatre” or somesuch, so Q&A on Monday night had to find another presentable Muslim to fill the sane, sincere and smooth-cheeked seat. We all know the shtick: Islamic mischief has nothing to do with Islam … you can’t bomb an ideology … and, inevitably, Islamophobia! Islamophobia! Islamophobia! Fortunately, Minaret Central Casting sent over ANU’s Raihan Ismail, who played the evening’s tame Muslima with competence and assurance. Actually, she was better than good and quite fetching to boot. Susan Carland, watch your back.

That Q&A refuses to expand diversity with an odd Buddhist, Mormon or a Wiccan is a pity but no real mystery. Those creeds’ adherents don’t demand constant attention to their grievances or grow immediately and explosively tetchy at perceived slights and insults, nor do many of their children conclude that gunning down innocents is just the shot – literally – to advance the spiritual side of things. Islam is a religion that needs smiley faces on its talking heads and Ms Ismail exemplified both of those required attributes. With Anne Aly, now a federal Labor candidate, and Carland, who is also Mrs Waleed Aly, forever in the running, competition for the spotlight is already fierce and bound to grow more intense. Factor in as well that the ranks of those eager to explore hijab’d hermaneutics include Ruby Hamad and Miriam Veiszadeh, plus variously veiled others, and the simple truth is that there are more microphone-ready Muslimas than available TV spots to accommodate them.

Until the next shooting or knife attack, when it will be all hands on deck to remind us that Islam is the religion of peace, the ABC and SBS are obliged to put a ceiling on the number of seats available to otherness. Neither broadcaster, for example, would dream of inviting an Islamic spokesperson to discuss the right of crossdressing schoolboys’ to hang out in girls’ lavatories. Much better to assault the imagined homophobia of Middle Australia than embarrass representatives of a religion whose more ardent acolytes delight in throwing homosexuals off tall buildings.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Flew Fighter Jets to Disputed South China Sea Island, U.S. Officials Say Latest deployment cited as fresh evidence of Beijing’s efforts to militarize the region to support maritime claims By Gordon Lubold and Chun Han Wong

Posted By on February 24th, 2016

U.S. officials said China recently sent fighter jets to a disputed South China Sea island at the center of an escalating spat over who is to blame for the “militarization” of the region.

News of China’s latest deployment of fighter jets to Woody Island, part of the Paracel Islands chain, comes amid bilateral tensions over Beijing’s recent placement of air-defense missiles on the same island and while Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was visiting Washington.

U.S. officials cited the latest aircraft deployment as fresh evidence of Beijing’s efforts to militarize the South China Sea to bolster its maritime claims. Chinese officials have defended their activities in the area as defensive and legitimate, and blamed Washington for fueling regional tensions.

The recent fighter-jet deployment “is not a surprise and has been going on for the last few years,” said Capt. Darryn James, a spokesman for U.S. Pacific Command. “But it is still part of a disturbing trend of China’s militarization of the South China Sea.”

The fighters include the advanced J-11, a Chinese variant of the Russian-made Su-27, and the indigenously designed JH-7 fighter-bomber, according to Capt. James. He didn’t elaborate on when and how many aircraft were sent to Woody Island. READ MORE AT SITE

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Guantanamo at Bay Americans won’t close a terror prison when the terror threat is rising.

Posted By on February 24th, 2016

“The great political irony is that Mr. Obama is the main cause of his own Guantanamo failure. If he hadn’t let Islamic State rise in Syria and Iraq, if he hadn’t let Libya become another terror incubator, and if he hadn’t let al Qaeda make a comeback via multiple local franchises, the American people might feel more relaxed about closing the terror prison. As the tide of war keeps rising, Americans know they need it.”

The day after he was first sworn in, President Obama issued an executive order declaring that he would shut down the terrorist detention camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba “no later than 1 year from the date of this order.” That was January 2009 in one of his first acts as President. Congress has since used its power of the purse to frustrate the President’s effort. So on Tuesday he said he’s going to try again in one of his last acts as President.

It’s not going to happen—at least not if Mr. Obama follows the law. Polls show the American people oppose closing Gitmo by about two to one, politicians in both parties oppose closing it, and the past seven years have taught that the camp plays an important role in keeping America safe.

One reason is because Americans have figured out that the alternative is bringing these terrorists to the mainland. It’s easy to call for Gitmo’s closure in the abstract. It’s harder to explain to voters why Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other killers may soon move into a prison near you.

No doubt this explains why the Pentagon plan submitted to Congress on Tuesday is so vague on details—especially the names of the “appropriate site[s] in the continental United States” where the detainees would be sent. One likely destination would be the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, which explains why Democratic Senator Michael Bennet rejects Mr. Obama’s plan.

The great political irony is that Mr. Obama is the main cause of his own Guantanamo failure. If he hadn’t let Islamic State rise in Syria and Iraq, if he hadn’t let Libya become another terror incubator, and if he hadn’t let al Qaeda make a comeback via multiple local franchises, the American people might feel more relaxed about closing the terror prison. As the tide of war keeps rising, Americans know they need it. READ MORE AT SITE