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What goes around often comes around. (See 1 below)
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Several years ago Bernie Marcus was the guest speaker at the SIRC's President's Day Fund Raiser. This year it will be Allen West, Feb 15 and next year it will be Elliot Abrams. (See 2 below.)
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Pat Condell on Trump: http://vladtepesblog.com/2015/12/14/pat-condell-on-donald-trump/
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Should The Swiss have to fight a war will their army be cheesey? (See 3 below.)
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Hillarious is trying to pull her own "is, is, is." (See 4 below.)
and
FBI remains relentless. (See 4a below)
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Dick
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1)
| This should be read by every American! |
SHOW THIS TO YOUR GRAND KIDS IN 20 YEARS SO THEY WILL KNOW WHY THEY LIVE UNDER SHARIA LAW...
Why the Marine Hymn Contains the Verse "To the Shores of Tripoli"
This very interesting and a must read piece of our history. It points out where we may be heading.
Most Americans are unaware of the fact that over two hundred years ago the United States had declared war on Islam and Thomas Jefferson led the charge! At the height of the eighteenth century, Muslim pirates (the Barbary Pirates) were the terror of the Mediterranean and a large area of the North Atlantic.They attacked every ship in sight, and held the crews for exorbitant ransoms. Those taken hostage were subjected to barbaric treatment and wrote heart-breaking letters home, begging their government and family members to pay whatever their Mohammedan captors demanded.
These extortionists of the high seas represented the North African Islamic nations of Tripoli, Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers - collectively referred to as the Barbary Coast - and presented a dangerous and unprovoked threat to the new American Republic.
Before the Revolutionary War, U.S. merchant ships had been under the protection of Great Britain. When the U.S. declared its independence and entered into war, the ships of the United States were protected by France. However, once the war was won, America had to protect its own fleets.
Thus, the birth of the U.S. Navy. Beginning in 1784, seventeen years before he would become president, Thomas Jefferson became America 's Minister to France. That same year, the U.S. Congress sought to appease its Muslim adversaries by following in the footsteps of European nations who paid bribes to the Barbary States rather than engaging them in war.
In July of 1785, Algerian pirates captured American ships, and the Dye of Algiers demanded an unheard-of ransom of $60,000. It was a plain and simple case of extortion, and Thomas Jefferson was vehemently opposed to any further payments. Instead, he proposed to Congress the formation of a coalition of allied nations who together could force the Islamic states into peace. A disinterested Congress decided to pay the ransom.
In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met with Tripoli 's ambassador to Great Britain to ask by what right his nation attacked American ships and enslaved American citizens, and why Muslims held so much hostility towards America, a nation with which they had no previous contacts.
The two future presidents reported that Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja had answered that Islam "was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Quran that all nations who would not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussel-man (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise."
Despite this stunning admission of premeditated violence on non-Muslim nations, as well as the objections of many notable American leaders, including George Washington, who warned that caving in was both wrong and would only further embolden the enemy, for the following fifteen years the American government paid the Muslims millions of dollars for the safe passage of American ships or the return of American hostages. The payments in ransom and tribute amounted to over twenty percent of the United States government annual revenues in 1800.
Jefferson was disgusted. Shortly after his being sworn in as the third President of the United States in 1801, the Pasha of Tripoli sent him a note demanding the immediate payment of $225,000 plus $25,000 a year for every year forthcoming. That changed everything.
Jefferson let the Pasha know, in no uncertain terms, what he could do with his demand. The Pasha responded by cutting down the flagpole at the American consulate and declared war on the United States. Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers immediately followed suit. Jefferson, until now, had been against America raising a naval force for anything beyond coastal defense, but, having watched his nation be cowed by Islamic thuggery for long enough, decided that is was finally time to meet force with force.
He dispatched a squadron of frigates to the Mediterranean and taught the Muslim nations of the Barbary Coast a lesson he hoped they would never forget. Congress authorized Jefferson to empower U.S. ships to seize all vessels and goods of the Pasha of Tripoli and to "cause to be done all other acts of precaution or hostility as the state of war would justify".
When Algiers and Tunis, who were both accustomed to American cowardice and acquiescence, saw the newly independent United States had both the will and the right to strike back, they quickly abandoned their allegiance to Tripoli. The war with Tripoli lasted for four more years, and raged up again in 1815. The bravery of the U.S. Marine Corps in these wars led to the line "to the shores of Tripoli" in the Marine Hymn, and they would forever be known as "leathernecks" for the leather collars of their uniforms, designed to prevent their heads from being cut off by the Muslim scimitars when boarding enemy ships.
Islam, and what its Barbary followers justified doing in the name of their prophet and their god, disturbed Jefferson quite deeply.
America had a tradition of religious tolerance. In fact Jefferson, himself, had co-authored the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, but fundamentalist Islam was like no other religion the world had ever seen. A religion based on supremacism, whose holy book not only condoned but mandated violence against unbelievers, was unacceptable to him. His greatest fear was that someday this brand of Islam would return and pose an even greater threat to the United States .
This should concern every American. That Muslims have brought about women-only classes and swimming times at taxpayer-funded universities and public pools; that Christians, Jews, and Hindus have been banned from serving on juries where Muslim defendants are being judged; Piggy banks and Porky Pig tissue dispensers have been banned from workplaces because they offend Islamist sensibilities; ice cream has been discontinued at certain Burger King locations because the picture on the wrapper looks similar to the Arabic script for Allah; public schools are pulling pork from their menus; on and on and on and on.
It's death by a thousand cuts, or inch-by-inch as some refer to it, and most Americans have no idea that this battle is being waged every day across America . By not fighting back, by allowing groups to obfuscate what is really happening, and not insisting that the Islamist's adapt to our own culture, the United States is cutting its own throat with a politically correct knife, and helping to further the Islamist's agenda. Sadly, it appears that today America's leaders would rather be politically correct and bow to 2% of the population than to preserve the American culture of 98% of Americans.
If you have any doubts about the above information, just Google "Thomas Jefferson vs. the Muslim World." https://www.truthorfiction.
They claim to be a peaceful religion. I ask, when have they EVER been peaceful?
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Hillary Clinton and her campaign minions are trying mightily to dismiss the conclusions of the intelligence community inspector general that highly classified Special Access Protocol (SAP) documents were transferred to Clinton’s unsecured private server. The first line of Clinton’s defense is (as usual) that the allegations are 1) nothing new and 2) politically motivated. But beyond this usual rote Clintonian response is the additional claim that the documents were also 1) not so classified when Clinton received them and 2) even if they were classified documents the information they contained was public knowledge anyway, so no harm, no foul.
As to Clinton’s first line of defense, what can one say? You support Hillary and accept her mendacious paranoia as part of the package, or you don’t. That Charles McCollough (the IG) is an Obama appointee confirmed by a Democrat Senate, thus making the charge of that his actions are political even more absurd than usual, matters not to Clintonistas for whom truth and logic are inconveniences.
The first part of Clinton’s second line of defense is of the bend but don’t break variety. Hillary first denied that any classified documents were sent or received over her server. When that proved patently false, she fell back and claimed that such documents were not so marked at the time, so how could she know? That this is not a legal defense under the applicable statutes doesn’t matter to the Clinton gang, it sounds okay, so go with it. At least one email reveals that Hillaryinstructed an aide to delete classified markings on a document and send it on an unsecure machine. But hey, when Hillary actually received it was not marked classified, so she was not lying about that, only breaking the law, and that’s just something that Clintons, from time to time, do.
And finally we get to the real interesting part, the last line of Clinton’s defense, that even if the documents were classified at the highest level, it was all a mistake. The information in the documents -- reportedly about the American drone strike program -- was public knowledge anyway, so whoever classified the documents didn’t know what they were doing.
Now let’s take this position to its logical conclusion, which if applied across the board in the intelligence community or the military, anybody handling a sensitive document could determine on their own whether the document should be classified or not. “Oh sure” an Air Force officer might say “I posted a schematic of a new radar for the F-35 on my personal blog, but I hear the Chinese already have it anyway, so it’s really not classified. Please take off the handcuffs.”
Well in fact, there are several reasons that the documents may have been highly classified regardless of the actual information contained within them. The first and most important is sources and methods. Many years ago I worked as an Intelligence Clerk in what was then called the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (BIR), Department of Soviet Internal Affairs. My job was basically to go through thousands of intelligence cables that came into the office every day, and pick out the few that were relevant to my department’s mission, to discern what was happening in the top echelons of the Soviet government. I looked at a lot of classified stuff, and ended up rejecting and burning about 90% of it. Almost all of the information in those thousands of classified documents was quite mundane. Often stuff you might read in the newspapers -- and in fact newspapers from the Soviet Union and elsewhere were a part of my daily intel trove. The reason why the documents were classified usually had to do with where they came from and how we got them, not what the documents said. Divulging that information could not only endanger sources but lives, and so is quite serious business.
Now the Media Matters article says that at least one of the two documents that were SAP marked did not come from confidential sources or methods, while the other -- well they can’t say so they just sort of mumble that part away. If even one of those documents came from a secure source or method, that is quite consequential, for most people handcuff time.
But let’s assume that neither document originated with confidential sources or methods. Why might the intelligence community still highly classify the documents when the information contained in them about U.S. drone strikes was “public knowledge?” Well, because the U.S. still does not officially acknowledge the drone program, and an official document that does is by its very nature secret. Now Hillary or her supporters might think it is ridiculous that President Obama does not wish to publicly acknowledge this program, but that is really not their decision to make, is it? Hillary worked directly for the president, and if he and his national security team deemed that having some level of deniability for the drone program was important, even if reporters for the New York Times had already figured out that American drones were killing bad guys, then on what authority does Hillary ignore that?
Did Hillary go to the president first and say “Hey Barack, why are we denying this drone program when everybody knows you have a disposition matrix and knock these guys off once in awhile? Let’s declassify the whole thing.” That would have been okay, and then the president could have said yes or no. But Hillary didn’t do that, so far as we know. She and her aides just decided -- after the fact -- that this stuff was not worthy of classification so passing it around on an unsecured private email account was perfectly acceptable.
Now way back when I was at BIR we might have gotten an embassy cable that said something like “Brezhnev and Andropov disagree over Soviet policy in Poland.” That might have been something that a prominent reporter (like the late Joseph Kraft who sometimes quietly stopped by the office to chat with my boss) might have already known. But were he to see the classified cable because I had carelessly left it out on a desk, even assuming that the source and method was benign, he would know that this was something that concerned U.S. diplomats which if reported would be known to the Soviets. And while that might not have been disastrous, it would not be something we’d wish to share. Not to mention I would have been fired and likely sent to jail. Like Hillary should be.
4a)
FBI's Hillary Clinton email investigation not letting up
“I don’t know that there’s any magical cutoff date,” said Ron Hosko, the FBI’s former assistant director of the criminal investigative division and a 30-year veteran of the bureau.
For Democrats, the extended investigation has become a source of some anxiety, with Republicans gleefully raising the prospect of the Democratic presidential front-runner being indicted.
“It does give pause to Democrats who are concerned that there may be another shoe to drop down the road,” said Andrew Smith, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire.
The government has been examining the former secretary of State's private email server since last July, when the inspector general for the intelligence community issued a security referral noting that classified information could have been mishandled.
That referral came months after Clinton acknowledged that she had exclusively used a personal email address housed on a private server during her tenure as secretary.
The scrutiny of her email practices has mounted since then, with more than 1,300 emails that passed through her server found to contain information that has since been classified, some at the highest levels.
The State Department and Clinton’s campaign contend that none of the information in the emails was classified when it was originally sent, and they have portrayed the matter as an interagency dispute.
The FBI and Justice Department have refused to discuss the details of their investigation and declined to comment to The Hill.
Officials have indicated that the bureau is not targeting Clinton specifically, however, but is investigating whether any information on her account was mishandled. Earlier this month, Fox News reported that the FBI had expanded its inquiry to examine how the State Department’s work intersected with the Clinton family foundation.
In December, FBI Director James Comey pledged that the probe would be “competent,” “honest” and “independent.”
“We don't give a rip about politics,” he told a Senate committee.
Yet the FBI is well aware of the high political stakes surrounding the investigation.
“I think the clock ticks louder every day,” said Hosko, who is the president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund. “I’m sure they’re all incredibly sensitive to it.”
President Obama has downplayed Clinton’s email setup, claiming that it was “not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered.”
Multiple former officials, lawmakers and lawyers have said they are confident that Comey, who is a Republican, will not let the presidential campaign influence the FBI’s investigation.
Yet many conservatives worry that even if the bureau comes up with sufficient evidence that Clinton broke the law, the Justice Department will decline to press charges. In response, some have pressed for a special prosecutor to be appointed, or for the FBI to pledge to release whatever evidence it digs up.
So far, Democrats have publicly shrugged of the threat of criminal action by painting it as a partisan attack from Republicans.
Clinton’s top rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), channeled the feelings of Democrats in October when he told Clinton during a debate that “the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.”
But Clinton will have to confront the issue more forcefully if charges are filed.
And should Clinton win the nomination, the topic is sure to be an issue in the general election campaign — even if no indictment is handed down.
A fight over the emails then could weaken Democratic enthusiasm and turn off swing voters, some analysts predicted.
“More likely, it’s going to sour some of those folks in the middle,” said Doug Roscoe, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
“Having to be in the news talking about this investigation takes her off message,” he added.
It might not be Clinton herself who faces the music for any potential crime, however.
The former secretary of State did not appear to send most of the emails now marked classified. Instead, they were largely sent or forwarded to her by aides.
“It’d be a lot harder to make a criminal charge for having received [classified] information," said Bradley Moss, a lawyer who specializes in national security and protection of classified information
“If I’m in Clinton’s campaign, I’m more worried if am Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin or Jake Sullivan than if I’m Hillary Clinton,” Moss said. Mills, Abedin and Sullivan were all top aides of Clinton’s at the State Department. Abedin and Sullivan continue to hold high positions in Clinton’s presidential campaign.
“The sloppiness and the complete fundamental failure to comply with any aspect of operational and informational security is what puts them at risk,” Moss said. “You just can’t do that that many times and not expect to find yourself in trouble.”
Clinton’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment from The Hill.
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