An Old American Male Has Made Socialism
Acceptable!
Can you Imagine an America where the government
seizes all production? If you can you are a
Socialst and also an hapless Idiot!
I can just imagine what "a weekend with Bernie" would be like
and listening to this idiot for four years?
===
Americans, who embrace Bernie, do not understand full Socialism means the seizing of all production by government.
Soft Socialism,however, is what Bernie dolts really mean, because it allows the private sector to still control and own production as long as these enslaved capitalist executives adhere to the rules and regulations of government bureaucracies. Eventually, Bernie lovers will embrace full Socialism because soft Socialism will cripple production. and eventually the "Bernie Suckers" will demand government take it all over because big government has become the dispenser of all goodies and entitlements.
After all, Socialism is preferable to ungoverned capitalistic greed according to Obama, in a speech he gave in 2008.
In essence, the more udders, control and ability to dispense largess the government has the better off we "all" will be according to the "Bernie suckers!" Capiche?
===
Daniel Krauthammer hammers Trump and questions whether he understands what makes America Exceptional. (See 1 below.)
====
A French General underestimated his adversary and now Dien Bien Phu is in the history books.
We also underestimated that same general, Vo Nguyen Giap, and we lost The Viet Nam War. We were ably assisted in this loss by a President who wanted body counts for political reasons, meddled too much and directed the war from the White House. Furthermore, we lost our will to win because the war went on for too long, needless casualties mounted, Johnson would not bomb the north, flood the area by destroying the dikes and dams and starve the North Vietnamese and Walter Cronkite and Jane Fonda made their own tragic and misguided contributions.
The former said we could not win when we were within weeks of defeating the Viet Cong according to Gen. Giap by his own admission and Jane Fonda gave comfort to the enemy allowing Giap to conclude America had lost our desire.
The same is happening with ISIS and a president who knows more than anyone else and only seeks advice from those who know even less, namely Valerie Jarrett.
Incompetents surround themselves with stooges because it enlarges their already out sized egos. In Obama's case he has no desire to win, he simply wants to get through his last months and leave the mess he inherited and made far worse to the next poor soul who cannot possibly do much worse but neither will be free to do much better because the next president will be crippled by our deficit, our weakened military posture, our adversaries who have been strengthened by the "Go Passes" extended them by Obama and the fact that our weak, disallusioned and confused allies have lost faith in America's will and leadership.
ISIS, unlike the Viet Nam, is not mounting a war where they gather in one place to assault and win through attrition. ISIS' attrition game is hit and run, disperse and use social media technology to recruit among the world's Islamic radicals and disaffected who exist in growing numbers.
Defeating ISIS, even if possible, will take a different strategy, a committed president willing to leave the job to professionals, accept the heat for the time it will take, the political discontent which will mount as losses occur and the negative press and media folk's daily drip, drip, drip of despair.
Does anyone in their right mind believe this is doable in today's PC Society? Does anyone believe any among the five candidates have what it takes? We know Hilllarious has proven she cannot. Bernie does not want to engage, Kasich is an unknown quantity. Cruz and Trump talk a good game but talk is cheap and always plentiful. That is what politicians do for a living.
Perhaps if we had a brilliant and proven military person in The Oval Office, I might feel more confident but then the downside of them not being a politician and the press and media continuing their discordant role would still be there eroding and undercutting.
I admit to being the pessimist in the crowd and I would like to be otherwise but I see little on the horizon to change my mind considering the 5 and I am not referring to The FOX TV program
which, frankly, I find vapid.
And if ISIS is not enough we still have an emboldened Iran, Russia and N. Korea waiting in the wings and do not forget Cuba and our soft geographic underbelly which Islamist radicals are actively penetrating and I have yet to mention that meddlesome dragon called China.
Ah! but you say, we have France, Belgium and Greece on our side! How comforting! (See 2, 2a and 2b below.)
Maybe the best we can hope for is Cash and this song: https://m.facebook.com/story.
===
Tonight I heard more of Bret Baier's interview with three former Obama Secretaries of Defense.
They were unmerciful in describing Obama's utter incompetence and lack of experience.
They minced no words and made mince meat of him .
They portrayed him as totally out of his element, untrustworthy of his military advisors, always thinking they were out to entrap him and his staff members were often engaged in harassing senior level military in the field and questioning their judgement. One Secretary said if he had done that Rumsfeld and Powell would have handed him his head.
The youth of this nation are all excited about Bernie. God help us. The first thing any good president should do is raise the voting age.
===
Mauldin on wealth divide and the danger from shrinking market liquidity due to government regulations, excessive interference etc. (See 3 below.)
===
Dick
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1) Without Exceptionalism
Trump doesn't know what makes America great.
‘Americans and Europeans alike sometimes forget how unique is the United States of America," Margaret Thatcher said. "No other nation has been built upon an idea—the idea of liberty." This is the essence of American exceptionalism. The American identity and national bond are based not just on a common history or culture or language but, more important, on a set of common ideals and principles, as embodied in the Declaration of Independence: the equality of all individuals, the inviolability of human rights, and the dependence of government's legitimacy on the consent of the governed.
How do these ideas fit into Donald Trump's vision of American greatness? He promises to "make America great again." But where in his declarations can we find the language of the American creed? Think about it. In all his stump speeches, tweets, and debate performances, how many times have you heard him utter the words liberty, freedom, democracy, Constitution, Founding Fathers, rights, ideals,equality, opportunity? Has he ever quoted the giants of our political pantheon—Lincoln or Jefferson, FDR or Reagan? Unlike every other candidate, Republican and Democratic, in this race and in races past, he completely ignores the ideas at the heart of the American experiment.
Instead, he repeats words like winning, great, huge, beat, kill, deals, successful, rich. He quotes himself and his own books. The central idea at the heart of Trumpism is the idea of winning. And winning, by his definition, means beating a loser. Right now, he says, we're losing to China and Mexico and Japan and all the rest. But he'll change that. He'll reverse the flow of money from foreigners and illegal immigrants back into the pockets of hardworking Americans. Trump's world is a zero-sum game, and Trump's America will start winning again only when everyone else starts losing.
This simplistic thinking defies logic and basic economics. But it does appeal to a certain sense of American nationalism: that "we" as a collective need to rally around a strong leader who will make us once again richer and more powerful than everyone else. Why? Because we're us and they're them. This kind of nationalism, however, is completely unexceptional. The leaders of literally any other country on earth could—and often do—say the same thing to their people and appeal to the same nationalistic sentiments. There is nothing uniquely American about what Trump espouses. There is no American ideal or philosophy providing a moral reason for this national mission to "win."
What has been unique in American political discourse for 240 years is that our ideals have given a higher purpose to our common mission to govern ourselves at home and champion our values abroad. Americans, Jefferson wrote, are "trusted with the destinies of this solitary republic of the world, the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom and self-government, from hence it is to be lighted up in other regions of the earth, if other regions of the earth shall ever become susceptible of its benign influence." It fills me with pride to belong to the one country in history to have built its foundation and forged its bonds of citizenship on these magnificent ideals. It has given me a deep love for my country—a patriotism I feel in my bones.
Many foreigners find this somewhat mystifying, if not unsettling. My European friends in particular are often shocked when they come to America and see how often and fervently we wave the flag, sing the national anthem, and celebrate our military. They recoil and ask how I can partake in such naked displays of nationalism. In their countries, comparable shows of national sentiment are often linked to racism, xenophobia, militarism, and chauvinism. And not without reason: The history of Europe and much of the world is replete with countless tragic examples of political leaders whipping their countrymen into a nationalistic fury to start wars, crush individual rights, oppress minorities, and even commit genocide.
But America is different, I explain, unique in that our national identity is based on ideas. Without a shared belief in liberty, democracy, and equal opportunity, we would cease to be Americans in any meaningful sense. Our patriotic displays express a shared pride and dedication to those ideals far beyond any brittle bond of race, ethnicity, or narrow sense of nationality.
Donald Trump is chipping away at that truth, reducing American patriotism to an ugly and tawdry nationalism bereft of true American values. He denounces and dismisses allies who share those values—peaceful democracies like Japan, South Korea, Germany, and other NATO members—but compliments and quotes dictators like Vladimir Putin and Mussolini, who dismantled democracies and invaded their neighbors. A core tenet of his foreign policy is to demand our allies give us more money in exchange for our protection. He seems to view the role of the United States and its military in the world not as FDR's "arsenal of democracy," but rather a mercenary force with little higher mission than to reclaim every penny of its cost from other nations.
Donald Trump is chipping away at that truth, reducing American patriotism to an ugly and tawdry nationalism bereft of true American values. He denounces and dismisses allies who share those values—peaceful democracies like Japan, South Korea, Germany, and other NATO members—but compliments and quotes dictators like Vladimir Putin and Mussolini, who dismantled democracies and invaded their neighbors. A core tenet of his foreign policy is to demand our allies give us more money in exchange for our protection. He seems to view the role of the United States and its military in the world not as FDR's "arsenal of democracy," but rather a mercenary force with little higher mission than to reclaim every penny of its cost from other nations.
In the domestic arena, he demonstrates disdain for our most dearly held freedoms, threatening to "open up libel laws" to sue newspapers that write negative stories about him, joking about killing reporters, and calling them "such lying, disgusting people." He regularly whips his crowds into frenzies of anger and violence completely anathema to the democratic spirit, encouraging them to "knock the crap out of" protesters and have them "carried out on a stretcher." When one of his supporters did assault a protester at a North Carolina rally and followed it up by declaring that next time, "we might have to kill him," Trump praised the man, saying "he obviously loves his country." That Trump confuses such hatred for patriotism is telling. And that this hatred is often directed toward protesters who are members of racial and ethnic minorities—at rallies where Trump's nationalistic rhetoric flirts all too closely with nativist and racist sentiments—makes these episodes even more disturbing. When he leads his crowds in angry jeers of "USA! USA! USA!" to cheer on this vitriolic behavior, he inverts in the most awful way what that chant should mean.
"Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism," George Orwell advised, for "no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit." Donald Trump, having lived a life devoted to his own enrichment and empowerment at the cost of everyone around him, seeks to become our president by extending that personal philosophy of selfishness to a national level. He has declared, "I'm very greedy. I'm a greedy person. . . . I've always been greedy," and that now "I want to be greedy for our country. . . . I want to be so greedy for our country." Is that who we want to be? No longer Lincoln's "last best hope of earth," no longer Reagan's "shining city on a hill," but Trump's nation of greed?
Trump's vision will not make America great. On the contrary, it will make us utterly ordinary among the nations of the world. This is a time for choosing. We must choose to remember who we are and protect what makes us exceptional.
Daniel Krauthammer is a consultant in Los Angeles. He holds a master's degree in financial economics from the University of Oxford.
==============================================================2) Vietnam's Agincourt
The fierce jungle battle that brought down an empire.
Dien Bien Phu is not a battle that looms large in American consciousness. That’s hardly surprising, since almost no Americans took part. (The exception was two dozen CIA contractor pilots who delivered supplies to the doomed French garrison.) But for Vietnam, as a recent visit to that small town in the country's northwest reveals, it is the equivalent of Agincourt, Gettysburg, Stalingrad, Gallipoli—a battle that defined a nation.
For 55 days in the spring of 1954, the Vietminh, as the nationalist-Communist independence movement led by Ho Chi Minh was known, besieged the French troops who had built up a seemingly impregnable fortress near the Laotian border. The French-Indochina War may have been primarily a guerrilla war, but the battle of Dien Bien Phu was a siege straight out of World War I. Today, you can wander around some of the remaining French fortifications—concrete bunkers linked by concrete trenches, all of them dug into the gently rolling floor of a valley 11 miles long and 3 miles wide. Here, more than 15,000 defenders—French troops all, but many of North African or Vietnamese origin—were supplied by air from Hanoi, 180 miles away across thick jungle.
General Vo Nguyen Giap, a self-taught soldier and one of the military geniuses of the 20th century, positioned some 50,000 assault troops backed by 50,000 support personnel, on the slopes around Dien Bien Phu. The French expected Giap to rise to the bait—that mass of colonial troops sitting in the middle of nowhere, just waiting to be attacked—and they were sure that they would be able to blast the Vietminh forces, once assembled, with their superior airpower and heavy artillery. But Giap frustrated their plans with an improbable feat of logistics: He managed to move more than 200 artillery pieces supplied by China, through the jungle, using tens of thousands of men to drag them by hand up the hills around Dien Bien Phu, where they were carefully camouflaged in bunkers invisible from above.
Giap himself took up residence in those hills, with his staff and Chinese advisers. Today you can wander through his simple command post, a thatched-roof hut with only enough room for a mat to sleep on. Next door is a concrete bunker dug into the mountain, where Giap could escape if French airplanes or troops found him—which they did not. The Vietminh commander survived, like his men, on rice and a bit of fish or meat, while the French troops below enjoyed multicourse banquets washed down with wine and brandy and spent their free hours visiting mobile bordellos flown in for their pleasure.
The fun ended on March 13, 1954, almost exactly 62 years before I arrived in Dien Bien Phu, when the hidden Vietminh artillery opened up on the French garrison. "Shells rained down on us without stopping like a hailstorm on a fall evening," wrote a sergeant in the Foreign Legion. "Bunker after bunker, trench after trench, collapsed, burying under them men and weapons."
Things only got worse. The Vietminh quickly closed the exposed French airstrip, making it impossible to evacuate the growing number of wounded who overflowed the aid stations. A French doctor likened "their slow, gentle groans" to "a song full of sadness." The defenders could only be reinforced and resupplied by parachute, and even this proved hazardous, with the Vietminh's antiaircraft guns shooting down 48 French aircraft.
Meanwhile the Vietminh infantry relentlessly pressed assault after assault on the French strongpoints, all of which carried women's names: Dominique, Eliane, Huguette, Claudine, and so forth. (Rumor had it they were named after mistresses of the French commander, Brig. Gen. Christian de Castries, a dashing cavalryman who said he wanted nothing more out of life than "a horse to ride, an enemy to kill, and a woman in bed.") The French fought valiantly, especially the elite paratroopers and legionnaires, but they were overwhelmed by the human-wave attacks. Eventually, in the words of historian Martin Windrow, "one-legged soldiers [were] manning machine guns in the blockhouses, being fed ammunition by one-armed and one-eyed comrades."
The white flag finally went up on May 7. It was the worst defeat ever suffered by a European colonial power at the hands of its subjects—a defeat that ended not only the French empire in Indochina but the entire era of Western imperialism.
Seen from the vantage point of 2016, it all seems slightly baffling. What military commander in his right mind would willingly cede the high ground to the enemy? Yet that is what General Henri-Eugène Navarre, the senior French commander in Indochina, did when he launched Operation Castor, as the occupation of Dien Bien Phu was known. The only explanation for this folly—one of the greatest mistakes in military history—is sheer hubris: Navarre had nothing but contempt for his enemies, "Asiatics" who seemed tiny and backward to the heirs of Napoleon and Louis XIV. Navarre did not count on the steely courage and determination that the Vietminh would display—or their willingness to suffer staggering casualties to drive out their colonial masters. The Vietminh lost as many as 25,000 troops in the siege of Dien Bien Phu, while the French lost more than 10,000 men.
It is little wonder, then, that this glorious victory is celebrated in so many monuments scattered around Dien Bien Phu. Everywhere one looks, one finds massive stone representations of heroic Vietnamese fighters and peasants toiling together for the independence of their nation. (What one does not find are decent hotels or restaurants—Dien Bien Phu remains an impoverished, isolated place with few foreign visitors and almost no Americans.)
The Vietnamese are right to be proud of their achievement even if this hagiography necessarily leaves out a few messy details. Like the fact that many of the French soldiers died after being captured. More than 10,000 French troops surrendered on May 7, 1954. Four months later, at the conclusion of a peace treaty in Geneva, fewer than 4,000 were still alive to be released. The rest had perished in a hellish captivity that recalled the Japanese mistreatment of Allied POWs in World War II. There is no mention of the suffering of these surrendered soldiers, just as there is no mention of the heroism many of them displayed in a losing cause.
Another fact omitted: The Vietminh were fighting not just for independence from France—a goal universally popular in Vietnam—but also to impose a Communist dictatorship—a goal considerably less popular. So unpopular, in fact, that Ho Chi Minh and his successors never dared hold a halfway honest election to legitimate their rule.
To this day, the Communist regime in Hanoi, although pursuing capitalist reforms, remains leery of democracy. Two dozen non-Communist candidates risk harassment and even arrest for having the temerity to run for seats in May's elections for the rubber-stamp National Assembly. As in Iran, so in Vietnam: The regime reserves the right to "vet" candidates for office and forbids those who openly challenge it from running.
Any way you look at it, the consequences of Dien Bien Phu were mixed: This military victory led to a divided nation and another 20 years of costly war by North Vietnam against the South Vietnamese and their American protectors. Contrary to Communist mythology, propagated at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as the Museum of American War Atrocities), it was the North that was the aggressor, not the United States. South Vietnam was an independent nation that had little desire to be conquered by Hanoi, not an American "puppet" that welcomed Communist "liberation." The final Communist victory in 1975 led hundreds of thousands of "boat people" to flee and imposed a Stalinist tyranny that only began to loosen its hold in the 1990s when Chinese-style reforms were implemented.
Today Saigon, as Ho Chi Minh City is still generally called, is a bustling mega-city overflowing with cafés and consumer goods, new office buildings and new businesses, cars and motor scooters, and Vietnam is a budding ally of the United States. (The two countries are united by mutual fear of China.) It is a tragedy that history took such a long detour to arrive at this destination, and that even today Vietnam has a long way to go before it achieves the kind of freedom and prosperity enjoyed by countries such as South Korea and Taiwan that under American protection resisted communism.
Yet none of this detracts from the superhuman self-sacrifice of the heroes of Dien Bien Phu—the men who defeated an empire. One suspects that even if non-Communists eventually take power in Hanoi and allow genuinely free elections, they will continue to revere the fighters who secured one of the most important and least likely military victories of the 20th century.
Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, and the author of Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present Day (Liveright, 2013)
By Efraim Inbar
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: It is misplaced to view ISIS as posing an independent serious strategic challenge. While ISIS has ignited immense passion among many young and frustrated Muslims all over the world, on its own ISIS is capable of only limited damage. The suggestions that ISIS may constitute a bigger threat to Israel than Iran are ridiculous.
ISIS, a radical Islamist group, has killed thousands of people since it declared an Islamic caliphate in June 2014, with the city of Raqqa as its de facto capital. It captured tremendous international attention by swiftly conquering large swaths of land and by releasing gruesome pictures of beheadings and other means of executions. In Israel, concern is increasing as ISIS nears Israeli borders.
Yet, several analyses of the threat ISIS poses to Israel seem to be unnecessary alarmist. ISIS is primarily successful where there is a political void. Although the offensives in Syria and Iraq showed the Islamic State’s tactical capabilities, they were directed against failed states with weakened militaries. When and where ISIS has met well organized opposition by non-state entities, such as that posed by Kurdish militias, the group’s performance has been less convincing.
The attack on an Egyptian town in the Sinai Peninsula conducted by the local ISIS branch with several hundred fighters – an item well covered in the Israeli media – is not an exception to this assessment. ISIS has shown tactical ability in employing large numbers of militiamen in an area where, for several years, the Egyptian army has encountered problems in enforcing state sovereignty.
Nevertheless, the Egyptian army eventually succeeded in repelling the attack and in killing hundreds of attackers. A determined Egyptian regime put up a good fight against the terrorists in Sinai. Despite the fact that the Egyptian army is not well-trained in scenarios posed by groups like ISIS, and despite the army’s preoccupation with the delta region (– the threat in Sinai is considered peripheral), the Egyptian army is still likely to be successful in containing the ISIS challenge.
The difference between a real army and the forces in Syria and Iraq that ISIS has encountered should be recognized. Generally, non-state actors are less dangerous than states. Only states can develop nuclear weapons. Non-state actors usually do not possess airplanes, heavy artillery and tanks that can cause great damage. Since they are Iranian proxies, Hizballah and Hamas are not an exception to this rule because they have been endowed with destructive capabilities, such as missiles, by a state. Moreover, they have secured almost exclusive control over a piece of territory.
Similarly, the success of ISIS is partly the result of the role played by Turkey. Ankara allows overseas volunteers to flock to ISIS training camps in Iraq. The same Turkish route is used by foreign experts that operate the oil infrastructure captured by ISIS. It is Turkish territory that is used to resupply ISIS and to treat their wounded. It is money from Gulf States that subsidizes ISIS activities. Even the recent Turkish formal agreement to join the coalition against ISIS does not change much as Ankara’s primary targets are the Kurds and evidence shows that ISIS still receives Turkish limited support.
This means that is misplaced to view ISIS as posing an independent serious strategic challenge. It is true that ISIS has ignited immense passion among many young and frustrated Muslims all over the world and the Caliphate idea has a great appeal among the believers, but the relevant question is: What can ISIS do without outside support? ISIS on its own is capable of only limited damage. The magnitude of the threat has been greatly exaggerated, while the states that help it need to be treated adequately.
The American administration has good reasons to inflate the threat from ISIS. It is using the grand threat of ISIS to legitimize Iran as a “responsible” actor (that will, supposedly, fight ISIS) in Middle East affairs. This has been part of the Obama administration’s rationale for its nuclear deal with Iran.
ISIS might eventually carve an area of control along Israel’s borders, particularly on the Golan where the Syrian state is disintegrating. In a worst case analysis, Syria could yet become another “Hamastan.” But it is important to note that Israel has been successful in containing the Hamas in Gaza. In fact, Israel HAS refrained from a more muscular response to Hamas only because it has an interest in perpetuating the divide between the Hamas in Gaza and the PA in the West Bank. Such restraint would not apply to a future ISIS entity. Indeed, due to a less global support for ISIS than for Gazans, Israel’s freedom of action against ISIS is obviously much greater.
Jordan, an important buffer state and strategic partner with Israel, also has the military capability to withstand an ISIS onslaught. Its security services probably can also manage for the time being the radical Islamist threat from within.
Suggestions that ISIS may constitute a bigger threat to Israel than Iran are ridiculous. The Israeli army and the ISIS militia are in different leagues. As long as ISIS behaves in a most unconventional bestial way, many in the world will be happy to see Israel doing the dirty work on their behalf, dealing ISIS blow after blow, if the opportunity and necessity arises.
Efraim Inbar, a professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University, is director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He also is a Shillman/Ginsburg fellow at the Middle East Forum. This fall, he is the Israel Institute Visiting Professor at Boston University. ..
It has taken nearly ten years, but the real story of Iran’s direct, material involvement in the 9/11 conspiracy is finally coming to light. And it’s being revealed not by the U.S. government or by Congressional investigators but by private attorneys representing families of the 9/11 victims in U.S. District Court.
Just one week before the 9/11 Commission sent its final report to the printers in July 2004, diligent staffers discovered a six-page classified National Security Agency analysis summarizing what the U.S. intelligence community had learned about Iran’s assistance to the 9/11 hijackers.
They happened upon the document by chance. It had been tucked away at the bottom of the last box in the last stack of classified documents they were reviewing. But it was so explosive that several Commissioners pushed hard to make sure the information it contained was included in the final report, despite intense push back from the intelligence community.
The page and a half section that made the final cut (see pages 240-241) details repeated trips to Iran by 8-10 of the “muscle” hijackers between October 2000 and February 2001. Flying in from Saudi Arabia, Damascus, and Beirut, the future hijackers were accompanied by “senior Hezbollah operatives” who were in fact agents of the Iranian regime.
The information was so explosive that the CIA lobbied hard to get it expunged from the final report, in part because they had detected some of the movements as they were occurring but failed to appreciate their import. “They saw them as travel through Iran, not travel to Iran,” a senior 9/11 Commission staffer told me at the time.
By the time the staffers had read into the 75 source documents on a Sunday morning out at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, MD, the Commission was pushing up against the end of its mandate and could not do any additional work. The information was so serious and had such clear geopolitical import that it “requires further investigation by the U.S. government,” they concluded. Many of the Commissions and senior staff who were aware of the document find assumed someone else would pick up the ball.
But as attorney Thomas Mellon, Jr. and his colleagues representing Fiona Havlish and other 9/11 widows and family members discovered, no such investigation was ever carried out. Not even the Congressional intelligence committees would go near the subject, despite direct appeals from the Havlish plaintiffs and a review of many of the original still-classified documents cited in the report.
I was engaged by the Havlish attorneys in 2004 to carry out the investigation the 9/11 Commission report called on the U.S. government to handle. We had no governmental authority, hardly any budget, and no access to classified intelligence or intelligence assets. But what we found and made public starting this May is enough to hang a fish. Put simply:
• The Islamic Republic of Iran helped design the 9/11 plot;
• provided intelligence support to identify and train the operatives who carried it out;
• allowed the future hijackers to evade U.S. and Pakistani surveillance on key trips to Afghanistan where they received the final order of mission from Osama bin Laden, by escorting them through Iranian borders without passport stamps;
• evacuated hundreds of top al Qaeda operatives from Afghanistan to Iran after the 9/11 just as U.S. forces launched their offensive;
• provided safe haven and continued financial support to al Qaeda cadres for years after 9/11;
• allowed al Qaeda to use Iran as an operational base for additional terror attacks, in particular the May 2003 bombings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Key elements of our proofs are in bullet points at the end of this article. For those wishing a more detailed account, here is a partially-redacted affidavit I provided to the Court that traces the Islamic Republic of Iran’s relationship al Qaeda back to the early 1990s.
Panic at CIA
As the Havlish case was getting closer to making its information public last year, certain old guard elements within the CIA went into a panic mode, apparently worried that their failure to act on indicators and warnings in 2000 and 2001 would come to light and ruin their post-Agency careers. I can now reveal that they made several attempts to suborn two of the Havlish witnesses who were located overseas.
In the first attempt, in August 2010, an individual presenting himself as a CIA official, told our witness that the Agency wanted to “break” the Havlish litigation against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and considered the witness’s testimony to be crucial to the lawsuit’s success.
He asked the witness to publicly recant his testimony, in exchange for which the CIA official promised to provide him with fresh passports for himself and his family under new identities, as well as a job and two year’s salary guarantee.
The second attempt, in December 2010, was even more audacious. This time, another individual claiming to be a CIA official showed a different witness confidential documents that clearly had been stolen from the legal consortium, then took him into a U.S. embassy and grilled him for five hours.
The stolen documents included internal Havlish memos, PowerPoint presentations, and an excerpt from the videotaped testimony of one of the witnesses. None of these documents had ever been made public nor were they in possession of the witnesses themselves. Havlish took great care to protect these documents out of concern for the security of our witnesses. The CIA officer then asked that the witness retract his testimony and offered him a substantial monetary payment in exchange.
After I reported those attempts at witness tampering to a Congressional oversight committee, they ceased.
In the past six months the intelligence community, under new leadership, has begun to take a hard look at what it actually knew about Iran and al Qaeda prior to the 9/11 attacks. From what I’ve been hearing, what they’re finding is coming as a big shock to a lot of people, especially those who bought into the conventional wisdom that the Shiite fundamentalist regime in Iran would never cooperate with Sunni extremists such as al Qaeda (or Hamas, for that matter).
Recent events in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the U.S. military has publicly cited Iran for providing weapons, money, and military training to the Taliban and other insurgent groups to kill Americans, has helped to change the mindset. So have the announcements over the past two years by the Department of Treasury that Iran is arming and training al Qaeda and the Taliban. Most recently, Treasury designated a group of al Qaeda financiers they revealed were operating out of Iran.
But the big question remains: now that we can begin to appreciate the extent of Iran’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks – and in the ongoing attacks that are killing Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan – what are we going to do about it?
Stay tuned.
Kenneth R. Timmerman is president and CEO of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran, and returns to FPM with this essay. His latest book, St. Peter’s Bones, explores the origins of Islam and the persecuted church in Iraq. He was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media prize for Investigative Journalism in February 2011.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
3)Thrivers and Strugglers: A Growing Economic Divide
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
3)Thrivers and Strugglers: A Growing Economic Divide
By John Mauldin
I am on yet another plane and reading an analysis of the growing wealth and income divide. The data in this week’s Outside the Box is fascinating – but sobering. I can kind of go along with some of the author’s ideas, but the Progressive cheerleader thing is a little disconcerting. That being said, the data squares with other work I have seen. The wealth and income divide is not 1%-99% but more like 25-75...
This essay is by Ray Boshara, who is senior adviser and director of the Center for Household Financial Stability at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The center conducts research on family balance sheets and how they matter for strengthening families and the economy.
The whole them versus us theme, which is infecting the current political conversation, needs to be a little bit better grounded in the actual data. I probably should visit this theme in a letter soon.
In the meantime, I really enjoyed getting to spend the time with Art Cashin the other evening. Jeff Saut of Raymond James fame showed up, as did a few other friends. One hedge fund trader friend (Murat Koprulu) steered the conversation away from some amazing and really funny stories to a more sobering conversation. He has started asking some of the floor traders how concerned they are about the shrinking of liquidity in the bond and equity markets. Art began to talk to us about how the demise of the floor traders, known as specialists, has really begun to shrink liquidity. Murat was specifically asking about what would happen in another crisis-type event. In the “old days” a specialist more or less had to make a market in a stock if he wanted to keep his job. It was in his best interest to find a market price. The NYSE floor is a shell of what it was when I first went there 15 years ago. They’ve taken to cramming more and more people into one area of the floor so that it looks like there’s activity on TV.
What is gone is the specialist trading desk that used to make markets in hundreds of individual issues. High-frequency trading has given us the illusion of liquidity and volume but is actually destroying liquidity. The problem is that the HFT firms can disappear in a microsecond, which is why we see more and more flash crashes in various issues. In the bond market, the regulatory burden imposed upon banks and their bond portfolios by Dodd-Frank, which has caused the banks to no longer maintain large inventories of bonds, is giving rise to a potential lack of liquidity that is even more daunting than in the stock market.
I am reading more and more expressions of concern by very sober analysts (not the usual doom and gloom types) who are very worried that the next crisis will be much larger than it should be because of a lack of liquidity. This is not the type of liquidity that the Fed can cure with an injection of a few trillion dollars. This is buyers disappearing. The conversation with Art, Murat, and friends brought an otherwise fun few hours to a rather sobering end...
Your needing a 32-hour day analyst,
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
No comments:
Post a Comment