From a long time cruise friend and fellow memo reader regarding Col.Lazar's
comments in previous memo:
": I long to believe each and every word. I Googled him and learned he was a communications officer (a flak ?), made Col. in '85 and that he offers a lot of condolences on funeral home websites to widows of dead Marine officers. A great read, just wish there were more gravitas behind it. China 🇨🇳 taking over Siberia was particularly delicious. Those poor Chinese bachelors. Regardless, I hope Bannon reads it. Cheers. G---"
and
Another response to Col Lazar's and narcissism articles
from a very good friend and fellow memo reader. "Dear Dick,
I thank you for your article by Colonel Lazar. I found it to be one of the most enlightening and common sensible presentations that I've seen or heard in a long time.
P.S. Also enjoyed the article about Narcissism. My view of Trump from the get go. You recall that while I favored any Republican in the White House over any Democrat, Donald was my least favorite Republican. Although in retrospect I must admit that perhaps it is only because Trump was able to break the sound barrier that the Republicans won this election.
With all best regards, S------"
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There are so many Demwits competing for this title it is quite something that Sharpton won. (See 1 below.)
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Californians wanting to secede are growing in number (See 1 below.)
Meanwhile, in Iran, 87 Gays hang tough. (See 2a below.)
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Another response from my lawyer friend and fellow memo reader: "A little broader than that, though. I agree that Trump should not have done what he did. It is a terrible thing for the President to use his bully pulpit for intramural bashing. The judiciary has rights too.
My problem is with Linda. It is great that she is "out there" protecting the constitutional niceties of our order, but where was she when Obama trashed the Constitution? When he said "I have a pen -- and a phone ..." When he hid things from oversight, made administrative agencies take action in violation of the Constitution? When he was so over-the-top that more than 20 times SCOTUS unanimously -- unanimously, with his own Democrat judges agreeing -- held his actions to be unconstitutional? (Cruz collected all the cases.) Where was Linda Klein? I bet I can find statements from the ABA defending actions of Obama that were held by a unanimous Supreme Court to be unconstitutional.
This profession has ceased to be a profession since your father's day. Just like the judiciary, it is comprised of political hacks, who care not a whit for the Rule of Law. R-----"
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Thiessen and CIA interrogation techniques, (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1) Al Sharpton Is Today’s DUMBEST Democrat… So Far!
“One of the DUMBEST Tweets EVER”.
Everyday, another Liberal does a CRAZY thing to reassure us how lucky we are that the sensible American electorate voted for President Trump. Today’s DUMBEST Democrat title goes to none other than Al Sharpton who shared a picture to his Twitter page of him reading a book upside down.
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2)
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2)
California Goes Confederate Threatening secession is far from the only thing that the Golden State has in common with the Old South. By Victor Davis Hanson
Over 60 percent of California voters went for Hillary Clinton — a margin of more than 4 million votes over Donald Trump.
Since Clinton’s defeat, the state seems to have become unhinged over Trump’s unexpected election.
“Calexit” supporters brag that they will have enough signatures to qualify for a ballot measure calling for California’s secession from the United States.
Some California officials have talked of the state not remitting its legally obligated tax dollars to the federal government. They talk of expanding its sanctuary cities into an entire sanctuary state that would nullify federal immigration law.
Californians also now talk about the value of the old Confederate idea of “states’ rights.” They whine that their state gives far too much revenue to Washington and gets too little back.
Residents boast about how their cool culture has little in common with the rest of the U.S. Some Californians claim the state could easily go it alone, divorced from the United States.
Sound a bit familiar?
In December 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union in furor over the election of Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln did not receive 50 percent of the popular vote. He espoused values the state insisted did not reflect its own.
In eerie irony, liberal California is now mirror-imaging the arguments of reactionary South Carolina and other Southern states that vowed to go it alone in 1860 and 1861.
Like California, South Carolina insisted it could nullify federal laws within its state borders.
Like California, South Carolina promised to withhold federal revenues.
Like California, South Carolina and other Confederate states bragged that their unique economies did not need the Union.
They boasted that “King Cotton” had created the wealthiest class in the United States. Silicon Valley now often assumes that Google, Facebook, Apple, and others are near-trillion-dollar companies that are a world unto their own.
Slavery and the extravagant income from cotton warped the Southern economy and culture. A wealthy plantation elite, with its millions of exploited slaves, ensured that there would be virtually no middle, working, or small-business class.
Huge estates were surrounded by the impoverished shacks of servants. Hardscrabble farmers or small businessmen often fled westward to escape the shackles of wealth disparity.
The export-dependent Southern elite demanded unfettered free trade. It offered bitter resistance to Northern protectionism.
South Carolina elites were opposed to federal infrastructure projects such as the building of roads, canals, bridges, and reservoirs, and other such unwelcome “progress.”
Confederates boasted that their antebellum culture was more romantic, natural, pristine, healthy, and moral than was the bustle, grime, and hyper-capitalism of Northern industrialism.
Southern aristocrats believed that they were culturally superior — in terms of music, art and literature — to other Americans.
Of course, this is 2017, not 1860, and California is super-liberal, not an antebellum slave-owning society.
Nonetheless, what is driving California’s current efforts to nullify federal law and the state’s vows to secede from the U.S. are some deeper — and creepy — similarities to the arrogant and blinkered Old South.
California is likewise becoming a winner-take-all society. It hosts the largest numbers of impoverished and the greatest number of rich people of any state in the country. Eager for cheap service labor, California has welcomed in nearly a quarter of the nation’s undocumented immigrants. California has more residents living in poverty than any other state. It is home to one third of all the nation’s welfare recipients.
The income of California’s wealthy seems to make them immune from the effects of the highest basket of sales, income, and gas taxes in the nation. The poor look to subsidies and social services to get by. Over the last 30 years, California’s middle classes have increasingly fled the state.
Gone With the Wind–like wealth disparity in California is shocking to the naked eye. Mostly poor Redwood City looks like it’s on a different planet from tony nearby Atherton or Woodside.
The California elite, wishing to keep the natural environment unchanged, opposes internal improvements and sues to stop pipelines, aqueducts, reservoirs, freeways, and affordable housing for the coastal poor.
California’s crumbling roads and bridges sometimes resemble those of the old rural South. The state’s public schools remain among the nation’s poorest. Private academies are booming for the offspring of the coastal privileged, just as they did among the plantation class of the South.
California, for all its braggadocio, cannot leave the U.S. or continue its states’-rights violations of federal law. It will eventually see that the new president is not its sickness, nor are secession and nullification its cures.
Instead, California is becoming a reactionary two-tier state of masters and serfs whose culture is as peculiar and out of step with the rest of the country as was the antebellum South’s. No wonder the state lashes out at the rest of the nation with threatened updated versions of the Old Confederacy’s secession and nullification.
But such reactionary Confederate obstructionism is still quite an irony given California’s self-righteous liberal preening.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2017 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
In early January, Vincent Tolliver, a candidate for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, wrote in an e-mail to The Hill that fellow candidate Keith Ellison, the first known Muslim to sit in Congress, should not be party chairman because of Islamic attitudes toward gays. “Islamic law is clear on the subject,” wrote Tolliver, “and being gay is a direct violation of it. In some Muslim countries, being gay is a crime punishable by death.” Tolliver added that he was “shocked” that the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group with close ties to the Democratic Party, had been “silent on the issue.” (In fact, the HRC has enthusiastically endorsed Ellison, notwithstanding his past links to Louis Farrakhan and his current involvement with CAIR, the Muslim American Society, and the Islamic Society of North America.)
The DNC was quick to act on Tolliver’s complaint: it promptly removed him from consideration for the party chairmanship. “The Democratic Party welcomes all Americans from all backgrounds,” declared interim chairwoman Donna Brazile (famous for passing debate questions to Hillary and then lying about it). “What we do not welcome is people discriminating against others based on who they are or how they worship.” Brazile, an open lesbian, called Tolliver’s remarks about Islam “disgusting” and stated that because of those comments, he was “no longer a candidate for DNC Chair.”
Brazile’s statement was a timely reminder that on the progressive left, where facts and ethical principles take a back seat to identity politics, Muslims are now the top-ranking victim group, and gays – gay men, anyway – are at the very bottom, below blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, women, transsexuals, disabled Americans, weight-challenged Americans, etc. Never mind that what Tolliver said about Islamic attitudes toward gays is entirely correct: on the progressive left, acknowledging such uncomfortable truths is verboten.
"You had CIA directors in a continuous unbroken stream to 1995 calling
saying, 'Don't do this.'" In addition to objections from the men who led
the agency for a collective 14 years, the President also heard objections
from the agency's covert field operatives. A few weeks earlier, Panetta had arranged for the eight top officials of the Clandestine Service to meet with the President. It was highly unusual for these clandestine officers tovisit the Oval Office, and they used the opportunity to warn the President that releasing the memos would put agency operatives at risk. The President reportedly listened respectfully, and then ignored their advice. With these actions, Barack Obama arguably did more damage to America 's national security in his first 100 days of office than any President in American history.
Iran Human Rights (FEB 3 2017): According to reports compiled by Iran Human Rights, the Iranian authorities hanged 87 people in the month of January 2017, including two juvenile prisoners and six prisoners who were executed in public. Out of the 87 executions, only 19 of them were announced by official Iranian sources. Most of the executions which were carrieed out in Iran in January 2017 were for drug related charges.
According to research conducted by Iran Human Rights, executions tend to significantly increase in the months leading to an election in Iran but significantly decrease or stop a couple weeks before the election. Iran Human Rights is deeply concerned that a new wave of executions have started in Iran and worries that the number of executions will increase following the “Fajr Decade” celebrations.
Iran Human Rights urges the international community, especially European countries, to pay attention to the execution crisis in Iran, and calls on all countries which have diplomatic relations with the Iranian authorities to call on the Iranian authorities to stop executions.
“In the month of January, we witnessed an average of one execution every nine hours, including two juvenile offenders and six public executions. Lack of reactions from the international community to these executions encourages the Iranian authorities to execute even more people in the months leading to the 2017 presidential election,” says Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, spokesperson for Iran Human Rights.
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3) As President George W. Bush's top speech writer, Marc Thiessen [ The Kelly File (now defunct) on FOXNEWS ] was provided unique access to the CIA program used in interrogating top Al Qaeda terrorists, including the mastermind of the 9/11 attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM).
Now, his riveting new book, Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe (Regnery), has been published. Here is an excerpt from Courting Disaster:
"Just before dawn on March 1, 2003, two dozen heavily armed Pakistani tactical assault forces move in and surround a safe house in Rawalpindi. A few hours earlier they had received a text message from an informant inside the house. It read: "I am with KSM."
Bursting in, they find the disheveled mastermind of the 9/11 attacks,
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in his bedroom. He is taken into custody. In the safe house, they find a treasure trove of computers, documents, cell phones and other valuable "pocket litter."
Once in custody, KSM is defiant. He refuses to answer questions, informing his captors that he will tell them everything when he gets to America and sees his lawyer. But KSM is not taken to America to see a lawyer Instead he is taken to a secret CIA "black site" in an undisclosed location.
Upon arrival, KSM finds himself in the complete control of Americans. He does not know where he is, how long he will be there, or what his fate will be. Despite his circumstances, KSM still refuses to talk. He spews contempt at his interrogators, telling them Americans are weak, lack resilience and are unable to do what is necessary to prevent the terrorists from succeeding in their goals. He has trained to resist interrogation. When he is asked for information about future attacks, he tells his questioners scornfully: "Soon, you will know."
It becomes clear he will not reveal the information using traditional interrogation techniques. So he undergoes a series of "enhanced interrogation techniques" approved for use only on the most high-value detainees. The techniques include waterboarding. He begins telling his CIA de-briefers about active al Qaeda plots to launch attacks against the United States and other Western targets. He holds classes for CIA officials, using a chalkboard to draw a picture of al Qaeda's operating structure, financing, communications, and logistics. He identifies al Qaeda travel routes and safe havens and helps intelligence officers make sense of documents and computer records seized in terrorist raids. He identifies voices in intercepted telephone calls, and helps officials understand the meaning of coded terrorist communications. He provides information that helps our intelligence community capture other high-ranking terrorists.
KSM's questioning, and that of other captured terrorists, produces more than 6,000 intelligence reports, which are shared across the intelligence community, as well as with our allies across the world. In one of these reports, KSM describes in detail the revisions he made to his failed 1994-1995 plan known as the "Bojinka plot" to blow up a dozen airplanes carrying some 4,000 passengers over the Pacific Ocean. Years later, an observant CIA officer notices the activities of a cell being followed by British authorities appear to match KSM's description of his plans for a Bojinka-style attack. In an operation that involves unprecedented intelligence cooperation between our countries, British officials proceed to unravel the plot.
On the night of Aug. 9, 2006, they launch a series of raids in a northeast London suburb that lead to the arrest of two dozen al Qaeda terrorist suspects. They find a USB thumb-drive in the pocket of one of the men with security details for Heathrow airport, and information on seven Trans-Atlantic flights that were scheduled to take off within hours of each other:
* United Airlines Flight 931 to San Francisco departing at 2:15 PM
* Air Canada Flight 849 to Toronto departing at 3:00 PM
* Air Canada Flight 865 to Montreal departing at 3:15 PM
* United Airlines Flight 959 to Chicago departing at 3:40 PM
* United Airlines Flight 925 to Washington departing at 4:20 PM
* American Airlines Flight 131 to New York departing at 4:35 PM
* American Airlines Flight 91 to Chicago departing at 4:50 PM
They seize bomb-making equipment and hydrogen peroxide to make liquid explosives. And they find the chilling martyrdom videos the suicide bombers had prepared.
Today, if you asked an average person on the street what they know about the 2006 airlines plot, most would not be able to tell you much. Few Americans are aware of the fact al Qaeda had planned to mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11 with an attack of similar scope and magnitude. And still fewer realize the terrorists' true intentions in this plot were uncovered thanks to critical information obtained through the interrogation of the man who conceived it: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
This is only one of the many attacks stopped with the help of the CIA
interrogation program established by the Bush Administration in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
In addition to helping break up these specific terrorist cells and plots,
CIA questioning provided our intelligence community with an unparalleled body of information about al Qaeda.
CIA questioning provided our intelligence community with an unparalleled body of information about al Qaeda.
Until the program was temporarily suspended in 2006, intelligence officials say, well over half of the information our government had about al Qaeda-how it operates, how it moves money, how it communicates, how it recruits operatives, how it picks targets, how it plans and carries out attacks-came from the interrogation of terrorists in CIA custody.
Former CIA Director George Tenet has declared: "I know this program has saved lives. I know we've disrupted plots. I know this program alone is worth more than what the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the
National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us."
National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us."
Former CIA Director Mike Hayden has said: "The facts of the case are that the use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer. It
really did work." Even Barack Obama's Director of National Intelligence,
Dennis Blair, has acknowledged: "High-value information came from
interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper
understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country."
really did work." Even Barack Obama's Director of National Intelligence,
Dennis Blair, has acknowledged: "High-value information came from
interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper
understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country."
Leon Panetta, Obama's CIA Director, has said: "Important information was gathered from these detainees. It provided information that was acted upon."
John Brennan, Obama's Homeland Security Advisor, when asked in an interview if enhanced-interrogation techniques were necessary to keep America safe, replied: "Would the U. S. be handicapped if the CIA was not, in fact, able to carry out these types of detention and debriefing activities, I would say yes."
On Jan. 22, 2009, President Obama issued Executive Order 13491, closing the CIA program and directing that, henceforth, all interrogations by U. S. personnel must follow the techniques contained in the Army Field Manual.
The morning of the announcement, Mike Hayden was still in his post as CIA Director. He called White House Counsel Greg Craig and told him bluntly: "You didn't ask, but this is the CIA officially non-concurring." The president went ahead anyway, overruling the objections of the agency.
A few months later, on April 16, 2009, President Obama ordered the release of four Justice Department memos that described in detail the techniques used to interrogate KSM and other high-value terrorists. This time, not just Hayden (who was now retired) but five CIA directors - including Obama's own director, Leon Panetta objected. George Tenet called to urge against the memos' release. So did Porter Goss. So did John Deutch. Hayden says:
"You had CIA directors in a continuous unbroken stream to 1995 calling
saying, 'Don't do this.'" In addition to objections from the men who led
the agency for a collective 14 years, the President also heard objections
from the agency's covert field operatives. A few weeks earlier, Panetta had arranged for the eight top officials of the Clandestine Service to meet with the President. It was highly unusual for these clandestine officers tovisit the Oval Office, and they used the opportunity to warn the President that releasing the memos would put agency operatives at risk. The President reportedly listened respectfully, and then ignored their advice. With these actions, Barack Obama arguably did more damage to America 's national security in his first 100 days of office than any President in American history.
But how many people know this?.... only the few that read this email from
beginning to end.
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