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https://pjmedia.com/news-and-p
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Palestinian murderers continue at their sick activities:
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Israel prevents massive terrorist attack; bomb caught before detonation
The terror cell was busted and its plans thwarted on December 14, with those involved being interrogated in recent weeks.
The Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) announced on Monday that it had prevented a massive terrorist bombing attack slated to occur within Israel. In the statement, the security agency said that it arrested a variety of terror suspects in the West Bank and uncovered a number of operatives in the Gaza Strip.
The terror cell, the the clandestine agency said, was busted and its plans thwarted on December 14, with those involved undergoing interrogations in recent weeks. The agency said that the bomb had been built, was ready for use and was seized before it could be detonated.
The suspects arrested were part of the West Bank's "Resistance Committees" and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, with influence and planning from Gaza terrorist operatives. The bomb was similar to the one that was used in the attack on a bus stop in Jerusalem last month that killed two Israelis.
There were multiple rounds of breakthroughs in the case, with several waves of arrests, including uncovering operatives, their handlers and explosive materials designated for a bombing within Israel, said the Shin Bet.
Who was involved in the plot?
Leading terrorists involved in the plot included Ahmad Fathi Omar Hjaj from Jabalya in Gaza, a known explosives expert, as well as Maha Ladawi of Netzirat, who helped create the infrastructure needed to carry out the plot.
Additional Gazans from Rafah who were involved included: Jihad Ahmad, Tzabari Muhammad Tzabari Aram and Iman Yusef Halil Zakut.
Besides intelligence work revealing the identities of these Gazans who were involved, the Shin Bet arrested West Bank terror operatives, including Yunis Uda from al-Ras village near Tulkarm, Khaled Marei from Bala village near Tulkarm, Ahmad Taher Jaradaat of Jenin and Kis al-Shaiv from Kabatia.
The Shin Bet said, "the actions which were carried out and which thwarted the planned attacks are part of a continuous campaign which the Shin Bet, the IDF and the police have been undertaking together to prevent terror in Israel using a diverse range of tools and tactics."
Further, the agency flagged the deep involvement of Gazan operatives in directing the West Bank terrorists, saying that it holds Hamas responsible for the planned terror attack.
The IDF and Israeli intelligence have been in an almost constant fight with terrorists in the West Bank since March, with periods of calm in-between repeated waves of terror.
2022 has been one of the deadliest periods in years in terms of both the number of West Bank Palestinians and Israelis killed.
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Putin’s Disastrous Obsession With the Past
By Robert Pawlicki
National leaders can change lives for good or bad. Never more so than authoritarians. Vladimir Putin stands out in this assessment — a dictator who continues to harm his country disastrously.
Experts have clearly shown that Russia’s prime minister is obsessed, some might say pathologically, with the past. He often has described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
His hero is Peter the Great, credited with transforming a declining country into a feared world power. With such a mindset and authoritarian power, Putin is devoted to expanding Russia’s borders to what he considers his country’s geographic empire of yesteryear.
Putin came to power in 2000, a time of great economic distress. An unknown bureaucrat until his surprising selection by Boris Yeltsin, Putin transformed Russia’s moribund economy, averaging 7 percent growth during his first term. It appeared that Russia might join nations that have leaped into the modern world.
That optimism was supported by impressions that belied what was to come. President George W. Bush found Putin a straight shooter, famously reporting he had “looked in Putin’s soul and found him trustworthy.” A fanatical adherent of a Russian form of judo, Putin generated feelings of respect for others. He spoke to Bush as a family man.
The hopeful signs were soon overshadowed by Putin’s dark side, reminiscent of his 17 years as a KGB operative. In his 20-plus years in power, Russian troops entered Georgia, where 20 percent of the country is under Russian military occupation. Putin’s forces incorporated Crimea in 2014. Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, and a full-scale invasion began in February 2021. This brief account does not detail Russia’s military influence in the Middle East and Putin’s other expansionist efforts.
A surveillance organization, The Alliance for Securing Democracy, reported that
“Russia has meddled in the affairs of at least 27 European and North American countries since 2004 with interference that ranges from cyberattacks to disinformation campaigns.”
The early financial hopes for Russian citizens have dimmed. Economic growth has been vastly unequal. Plutocrats gather great wealth, and many Russians live financially vulnerable lives.
On the 2022 world’s happiness index, a broad snapshot of how people feel about their life, Russia ranked 80th, in the bottom half of nations assessed, neighboring such African countries as Libya and the Ivory Coast. The United States ranked 16th by comparison, even during our current period of partisan politics.
For all of Putin’s arrogance and bluster regarding Russia being a world power, his country languishes in the lower half of nations. Take away Russia’s nuclear arsenal and its permanent membership in the U.N. Security Council, and Russia would receive little attention on the world stage.
It didn’t have to be that way. Russia’s resources could have taken it along a different path.
Russia’s resources go far beyond oil and gas. It has major deposits of metals, minerals and timber in its vast expanse of land. Climate change will be a disaster for the planet. Russia may be one of the few winners, along with Canada.
Already one of the world’s leaders in food exports, Russia may gain vast new acreage as the climate warms. It ranks No. 3 in arable land supplies, a ranking that is likely to rise given the large swatch of land under permafrost, land to become arable soon. The same climate transformation will open new means of food transport from its northern border.
Russia has discussed the value of diversification beyond oil and gas for decades but has failed to alter its short-term focus on fossil fuel wealth. Perhaps Putin’s focus on Russia as a world power played a role in that decision.
Over time, authoritarian leaders destroy institutions. Great leaders build institutions and move forward.
The friendly, respectful Putin is a thing of the past, replaced by his dark and aggressive side. His people and his country will pay an enormous price for his decisions. Instead of creating a land of opportunity, he has tarnished the potential to become a dynamic country. What a shame. What a tragedy for the Russian citizens and the world.
Robert Pawlicki is a retired psychologist and a frequent contributor to the Savannah (Ga.) Morning News. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.
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What the Jan. 6 Committee Report Misses
The Editorial Board
But the report shouldn’t pass into history without noting what the evidence reveals that the media largely ignores. To wit, the failure of Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election shows that U.S. democratic institutions, and their checks and balances, held up well. Despite today’s partisan polarization, Mr. Trump’s effort had no chance to succeed because it was opposed by nearly all Republicans in positions of authority.
Mr. Trump’s allies in his effort included relatively few White House staff, some second-raters at the Justice Department, crony-cranks like Roger Stone (who took the Fifth Amendment before the committee), a few Members of Congress without influence, some backbench state legislators, and dubious legal advisers like John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani. Talk about a crew of banana Republicans.
Now consider those who opposed the Trump effort, or examined his claims of election fraud and rejected them. They included: His own White House counsel and legal staff; Attorney General William Barr and other leaders at the Justice Department; his entire Cabinet; senior military officials; most GOP state legislators; GOP governors and secretaries of state; all but a handful of GOP Senators; federal judges appointed by Mr. Trump; and, most famously, his own Vice President Mike Pence.
The Jan. 6 committee acknowledges this GOP opposition in its effort to show that Mr. Trump knew his fraud claims about the election were false. But the committee suggests that the President’s attempt to overturn the election was a close-run thing. It wasn’t. The opposition by Members of Mr. Trump’s own Administration, and his own party, was too broad and deep to have had any chance.
Even if Mr. Pence had tried to delay or reject the electoral votes, he could not have succeeded. There wasn’t enough support in the contested state legislatures to overturn the popular vote count. And even if enough states had done so to deny Joe Biden 270 electoral votes, Speaker Nancy Pelosi would not have reconvened the Congress to count them. The Supreme Court would have eventually intervened, and our guess is that it would have ruled 9-0 against Mr. Trump.
None of this absolves Mr. Trump for his actions, but it does underscore the strength of U.S. democracy and the dedication to it by most elected and appointed officials. It also shows the value of having had men of principle like Messrs. Pence and Barr willing to take on the duty of working in the Trump Administration.
They were criticized as Trump-enablers when they made decisions the left didn’t like. But those decisions were made based on the policy merits and the law. And when it mattered most, when Mr. Trump sought to overturn an election, the country was lucky to have had these men and others like them in office. It’s a shame the Jan. 6 committee and the press won’t give them the credit they deserve.
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“It may make a difference to all eternity whether we do right or wrong today.”
By Salena Zito
First I want to thank each and every one of you who have been faithful readers of the reporting I do across the country, from those places, those middle of somewhere‘s that are often overlooked by our culture, by the influential and by the powerful; I value each of you as a reader not for my sake but for the sake of the people whose stories I am honored to be able to tell.
Whether it is 1600 feet down in a coal mine, or in a down on its knees city neighborhood long forgotten by elected officials, or at a barber shop that has served as the center of the community for generations.
These are my last three stories for 2022 I hope you enjoy them I think they are each very meaningful in very different ways and important in this time a reflection at the end of the year.
Again I deeply appreciate you as a reader, if so inclined please encourage friends and family to sign up as I always say it’s free it’s fun and it’s not fattening.
A new generation of Catholics discovers Latin Mass 60 years after it was abolished: https://nypost.com/2022/12/24/a-new-generation-of-catholics-is-discovering-latin-mass/
The empty place setting at the table:https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/patriotism-unity/the-empty-place-setting-at-the-table
For the Quips, winning is great. But losing teaches lessons to last a lifetime:
ALIQUIPPA, Pa. — There is a quote etched on the front of my son’s former elementary school: “It may make a difference to all eternity whether we do right or wrong today.”
Those words were written over 150 years ago by theologian James Freeman Clarke, a fearless New Hampshire native who advocated for the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage and prison reform. I have always marveled at the wisdom in those words, still some 30 years after I first read them when walking my 6-year-old into his first day of school.
Doing and saying the right thing has enormous impact. It is the greatest gift you can give to anyone you come into contact with, and they will pass on that good turn, on and on, as Freeman Clarke said, impacting lives into perpetuity.
Michael Warfield — Coach Mike Warfield to those who follow Aliquippa High School football — is a man who did the right thing two weeks ago when his undefeated team sat on the bench with heads down, some players in tears, as the final seconds ticked off the state championship clock. He told them to get off of the bench and handle their defeat with dignity.
“You a man when you win, you a man when you lose,” Mr. Warfield said to his team in that moment.
He then walked to the middle of the field with a broad smile and tipped his hat to the Bishop McDevitt team that had defeated his kids — the same team the Quips defeated last year for the state championship. He then told Post-Gazette reporter Mike White that he was in pretty good spirits because he recognized his team had lost to a worthy opponent.
“That is a pretty good team,” Coach Warfield said. “The kids did the best they could. We ain’t making no excuses. We ain’t bringing nothing other than we got to give them credit. . . . I tip my hat to the coach, and to his staff, and his players: They set a goal. It is a great thing to see young people come together collectively and work towards that goal and they did it today.”
In that moment, Mr. Warfield said and did something that his players — once the sting of losing fades — will likely never forget. He showed them how to lose with grace.
He hopes they will take that with them into whatever they do in life, not just in sports.
Mr. Warfield said what he wanted his players to hear from him — what he wanted them to understand — is that the other team earned that win, and that they should respect that effort: “They set goals, and they wanted to rematch and beat us, and they put their heads down and they worked towards it.”
“Nothing was given to them. They couldn’t buy it. They had to work for it — and that’s a lesson, even though it cost us a win,” he said. “But it’s a great story for [Aliquippa], which is a great story in general for any kid, that ‘Okay, they beat us this year, but we are going to work hard towards beating them next year.’ And they did it. So, I was happy for them. At the same time, I was a little disappointed for our kids,” he said.
“There is so much in athletics, especially high school athletics, I don’t like at times, because it divides us so much and it separates us so much — just based off on the colors that we wear — and causes us not to come together collectively, which we should,” he said.
If you are not a fan of football or think what Mr. Warfield did is trivial, think about it more deeply: He is coaching a legendary football program, one that has included giants like Mike Ditka, one that has punched above its weight long after the foundations of this Beaver County city crumbled after LTV Steel closed for good in 1984.
Outside of a handful of churches, what holds this city together is the football team: People schedule their Fridays around whether or not the team is playing at home. Quips football is the one of the few things that makes people here feel as though they are part of something bigger than themselves.
On the day the team left for the state championship, elementary school students, parents, community members, former players and first responders all lined up to cheer them on — holding up homemade signs — as the bus rolled out of town.
Once upon a time, Aliquippa had a lot more to celebrate. Until the 1970s, it was a bustling city of 20,000, where half the town worked at the steel mill and the other half worked in the small businesses on Franklin Avenue that supported the steel industry.
Today it is fair to say that Franklin Avenue has seen better days. The city’s population is 9,000 — 39% Black and 58% white — with many living below the poverty line. The school district’s enrollment is nearly 80% Black.
Mr. Warfield said despite the losses, it is also a city filled with people who refuse to give up hope.
He played for the Quips — at quarterback no less — 30 years ago — and went on to play in college and then in Germany. He earned a degree in sociology, came back to the area and began his career in law enforcement. He began as a state trooper in 1993, working on turnpike patrol until 1999, before joining to the state police Bureau of Drug Law Enforcement in Belle Vernon, where he covered five counties in southwestern Pennsylvania investigating violent drug trafficking gangs.
When he took the job as head football coach in 2018 — the first Black coach to guide the winningest program in western Pennsylvania — he said he walked into a locker room that was in decay and a stadium where half the stands had been condemned.
“I knew when I took this job it was to teach these young men not just to do their best on the field, but to also to live their young lives with intention, with purpose — not just when we win, but also when we lose,” he said.
Mr. Warfield says he knows that things could have gone very differently had he not had people in his life who taught him there were consequences for every decision he made: people like his mother, who also taught him about leading a purpose-driven life.
“I grew up in Aliquippa with my mother — a single mom. We lived in the Linmar Terrace projects all of my life, didn’t leave until I got on the state police when I was 24,” he said.
Mr. Warfield said he saw how hard his mother worked to make sure he had a roof over his head and food on the table. It was an example of sacrifice and grit that taught him early on that it would crush her if he made any bad moves with his school work or in his free time.
“I think my initial motivation as a teenager growing up was not to disrespect my mom. I never wanted no one to go to my mama and say, ‘Mike is out there in the streets,’” he said. His mother still calls Aliquippa home.
“I tell you what,” Warfield said. “I’m still a young head coach too, so there’s a lot of things I have to learn and do better, but I learned more in losing than I had in winning, and that’s what I was trying to express to the kids after we lost the state championship. . . . Maybe you don’t understand it now at your age, but you’re going to look back on this loss and learn more from that loss than any championship you ever win.”+++++++++++++++++++++++++++What Will the FBI Not Do?Victor Davis Hanson
Who watches the watchers?
The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech.
“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement. “As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”
Almost all of the FBI communique is untrue, except the phrase about the bureau’s “engagements which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries.”
Future disclosures will no doubt reveal similar FBI subcontracting with other social media concerns of Silicon Valley to stifle free expression and news deemed problematic to the FBI’s agenda.
The FBI did not merely engage in “correspondence” with Twitter to protect the company and its “customers.” Instead, it effectively hired Twitter to suppress the free expression of some of its users, as well as news stories deemed unhelpful to the Biden campaign and administration—to the degree that the bureau’s requests sometimes even exceeded those of Twitter’s own left-wing censors.
The FBI did not wish to help Twitter “to protect themselves [sic],” given the bureau’s Twitter liaisons were often surprised at the FBI’s bold requests to suppress the expression of those who had not violated Twitter’s own admittedly biased “terms of service” and “community standards.”
The FBI and its helpers on the Left now reboot the same boilerplate about “conspiracy theorists” and “misinformation” smears used against anyone who rejected the FBI-fed Russian collusion hoax and the bureau’s peddling of the “Russian disinformation” lie to suppress accurate pre-election news about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The FBI is now, tragically, in freefall. The public is at the point, first, of asking what improper or illegal behavior will the bureau not pursue, and what, if anything, must be done to reform or save a once great but now discredited agency.
Consider the last four directors, the public faces of the FBI for the last 22 years. Ex-director Robert Mueller testified before Congress that he simply would not or could not talk about the fraudulent Steele dossier. He claimed that it was not the catalyst for his special counsel investigation of Donald Trump’s alleged ties with the Russians when, of course, it was.
Mueller also testified that he was “not familiar” with Fusion GPS, although Glenn Simpson’s opposition research firm subsidized the dossier through various cutouts that led back to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. And the skullduggery in the FBI-subsidized dossier helped force the appointment of Mueller himself.
While under congressional oath, Mueller’s successor James Comey on some 245 occasions claimed that he “could not remember,” “could not recall,” or “did not know” when asked simple questions fundamental to his own involvement with the Russian collusion hoax.
Comey, remember, memorialized a confidential conversation with President Trump on an FBI device and then used a third party to leak it to the New York Times. In his own words, the purpose was to force a special counsel appointment. The gambit worked, and his friend and predecessor Robert Mueller got the job. Twenty months and $40 million later, Mueller’s investigation tore the country apart but could find no evidence that Trump, as Steele alleged, colluded with the Russians to throw the 2016 election.
Comey also seems to have reassured the president that he was not the target of an ongoing FBI investigation, when in fact, Trump was.
Comey was never indicted for either misleading or lying to a congressional committee or leaking a document variously considered either confidential or classified.
While under oath, his interim successor, Andrew McCabe, on a number of occasions flat-out lied to federal investigators. Or as the office of the inspector general put it:
As detailed in this report, the OIG found that then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions in connection with describing his role in connection with a disclosure to the WSJ, and that this conduct violated FBI Offense Codes 2.5 and 2.6. The OIG also concluded that McCabe’s disclosure of the existence of an ongoing investigation in the manner described in this report violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.
McCabe purportedly believed Trump was working with the Russians as a veritable spy—a false accusation based entirely on the FBI’s paid, incoherent prevaricator Christopher Steele. And so, McCabe discussed with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein methods to have the president’s conversations wiretapped via a Rosenstein-worn stealthy recording device, presumably without a warrant.
Note the FBI ruined the lives of General Michael Flynn and Carter Page with false allegations of criminal conduct or untruthful testimonies. Under current director Christopher Wray, the FBI has surveilled parents at school boards meetings—on the prompt of the National School Boards Association, whose president wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland alleging that bothersome parents upset over critical race indoctrination groups were supposedly violence-prone and veritable terrorists.
Under Wray, the FBI staged the psychodramatic Mar-a-Lago raid on an ex-president’s home. The FBI likely leaked the post facto myths that the seized documents contained “nuclear codes” or “nuclear secrets.”
Under Wray, the FBI perfected the performance-art, humiliating public arrests of former White House officials or Biden Administration opponents, whether it was the nocturnal rousting of Project Veritas muckraker James O’Keefe in his underwear or the arrest—with leg restraints=—of former White House advisor Peter Navarro at Reagan National Airport for misdemeanor contempt of Congress charge or the detention of Trump election lawyer John Eastman at a restaurant with his family and the confiscation of his phone. Neither O’Keefe nor Eastman has yet been charged with any serious crimes.
The FBI arguably interfered in two presidential elections, and a presidential transition, and possibly determinatively so. In 2016, James Comey announced that his investigation had found that Hillary Clinton had improperly if not illegally used her private email server to conduct official State Department business, some of it confidential and classified, and likely intercepted by foreign governments. All that was a clear violation of federal statutes. Comey next, quite improperly as a combined FBI investigator and a de facto federal prosecutor, deduced that such violations did not merit prosecution.
Around the same time, the FBI had hired as a source the foreign national and political opposition hitman Christopher Steele. It helped Steele to spread among the media his fraudulent dossier and used its unverified and false contents to win FISA warrants against U.S. citizens on the bogus charges of colluding with the Russians to throw the election to Donald Trump. By the FBI’s own admission, it would not have obtained warrants to surveil Trump campaign associates without the use of Steele’s dossier, which it also admittedly either knew was a fraud or could not corroborate.
Again, such allegations in the dossier were false and, apparently, the FBI soon knew they were bogus since one of its own lawyers—the now-convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith—found it necessary also to alter a court-submitted document to feign incriminatory information.
The FBI, on the prompt of lame-duck members of the Obama Justice Department, during a presidential transition, set up an entrapment ambush of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. It was an effort to lure Flynn into admitting to a violation of the Logan Act, a 223-year old-law that has led to only two indictments and zero convictions.
During the 2020 election, the FBI suppressed knowledge of its possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Early on, the bureau knew that the computer and its contents were authentic and yet kept its contents suppressed.
Moreover, the FBI sought to contract out Twitter (at roughly $3.5 million) as a veritable subsidiarity to suppress social media traffic about the laptop and speech the bureau deemed improper.
Again, although the FBI knew the laptop in its possession was likely genuine, it still sought to use Twitter employees to suppress pre-election mention of that reality. At the same time, bureau officials remained mum when 51 former “intelligence officials” misled the country by claiming that the laptop had all the hallmarks of “Russian disinformation.” Polls later revealed that had the public known the truth about the laptop, a significant number likely would have voted differently—perhaps enough to change the outcome of the election.
The media, Twitter, Facebook, and former intelligence operatives were all following the FBI’s own preliminary warning bulletin that “Foreign Actors and Cybercriminals Likely to Spread Disinformation Regarding 2020 Election Results”—even as the bureau knew the laptop in its possession was most certainly not Russian disinformation. And, of course, the FBI had helped spread the Russian collusion hoax in 2016.
In addition, the FBI-issued phones of agent Peter Strzok and attorney Lisa Page, along with members of Robert Mueller’s special counsel “dream team”—all under subpoena—had their data mysteriously wiped clean, purportedly “by accident.”
Apparently, the paramours Strzok and Page, in particular, had much more to hide, given how earlier they had frequently expressed their venom toward candidate Donald Trump. Strzok boasted to Page that the FBI in general, and Andrew McCabe in particular, had an “insurance policy” means of denying Trump the presidency:
I want to believe the path you threw out in Andy’s office—that there’s no way he gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take the risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.
When some of their embarrassing texts emerged, both were dismissed by the special counsel. But Mueller carefully did so by staggering Strozk and Pages’ departures and not immediately releasing the reasons for their firings or reassignments.
To this day, the public has no idea what the FBI was doing on January 6, how many FBI informants and agents were among the rioters, and to what degree they knew in advance of the protests. The New York Times reporter most acquainted with the January 6 riot, Matthew Rosenberg, dismissed the buffoonish violence as “no big deal” and scoffed, “They were making this an organized thing that it wasn’t.”
“There were a ton of FBI informants among the people who attacked the Capitol,” Rosenberg noted. We have never been told anything about that “ton”—a topic of zero interest to the January 6 select committee.
What are the people to do about a federal law enforcement agency whose directors either repeatedly lie under oath, or mislead, or do not cooperate with congressional overseers? What should we do with a bureau that alters court documents, deceives the court with information the FBI had good reason to know was false and leaks records of confidential presidential conversations to the media to prompt the appointment of a special prosecutor? What should be done with a government agency that pays social media corporations to warp the dissemination of the news and suppress free expression and communications? Or an agency that hires a foreign national to gather dirt on a presidential candidate and plots to ensure that there is “no way” a presidential candidate “gets elected” and destroys subpoenaed evidence?
What, if anything, should the people do about a once-respected law enforcement agency that repeatedly smears its critics, most recently as “conspiracy theorists”?
The current FBI leadership under Christopher Wray, in the tradition of recent FBI directors, has stonewalled congressional overseers about FBI activity during the Trump and Biden administrations. In “Après moi, le déluge” fashion, the bureau acts as if it assumes the next Republican administration in office will remove the current hierarchy. And thus, it assumes for now, not cooperating with Republican investigations while Democrats hold control of the Senate and White House for a brief while longer ensures exemption.
Wray, most recently, cut short his Senate testimony on the pretext of an unspecified engagement, which turned out to be flying out on the FBI Gulfstream jet to his vacation home.
Yet the bureau’s lack of candor, contrition, and cooperation has only further alienated the public, especially traditional and conservative America, characteristically the chief source of support for the FBI.
There have been all sorts of remedies proposed for the bureau.
The three reforms most commonly suggested include: 1) simply dissolve the FBI in the belief that its concentration of power in Washington has become uncontrollable and is increasingly put to partisan service, including but not limited to the warping of U.S. presidential elections; 2) move the FBI headquarters out of the Washington D.C. nexus, preferably in the age of Zoom to a more convenient and central location in the United States, perhaps an urban site such as Salt Lake City, Denver, Kansas City, or Oklahoma City; or 3) break-up and decentralize the FBI and redistribute its various divisions to different departments to ensure that the power of its $11 billion budget and 35,000 employees are no longer aggregated and put in service of particular political agendas.
The next two years are dangerous times for the FBI—and the country. The House will soon likely begin investigations of the agency’s improper behavior. Yet, simultaneously, the Biden Justice Department will escalate its use of the bureau as a partisan investigative service for political purposes.
The FBI’s former embattled, high-ranking administrators who have been fired or forced to leave the agency—Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Peter Strzok, James Baker, Lisa Page, and others—will continue to appear on the cable news stations and social media to inveigh against critics of the FBI, despite being all deeply involved in the Russia-collusion hoax.
Merrick Garland will continue to order the FBI to hound perceived enemies through surveillance and performance art arrests. And the people will only grow more convinced the bureau has become Stasi-like and cannot be reformed but must be broken up—even as in extremis a defiant and unapologetic FBI will, as its latest communique shows, attack its critics.
We are left with the dilemma of Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchers?++++++++++++++++++++The Jan. 6 Committee's Referral Is UnconstitutionalBy Alan Dershowitz
The Jan. 6 Committee has voted to refer former President Donald Trump to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. This referral violates both the letter and spirit of the Constitution for at least two reasons.
First, Article 1 of the Constitution grants Congress "all legislative powers" and only "legislative powers." Under our system of separation of powers, the power to prosecute lies exclusively with the executive branch through the justice department. Congress has no authority to refer specific individuals for prosecution. It is beyond the scope of its constitutional authority.
Second, Congress is specifically denied the power to pass any "bill of attainder."
Prior to America's independence, the British parliament enacted such bills that prosecuted named individuals. Our Constitution prohibited Congress from prosecuting named individuals. The power of Congress is limited to passing laws of general application that can be applied to specific individuals only by the justice department and a grand jury. A congressional committee officially voting to refer a named individual for prosecution violates the spirit of the explicit prohibition against congressional bills of attainder.
There is one possible exception to this separation of powers limitation on naming individuals. Section 5 of the 14th Amendment gives Congress the power "to enforce, by appropriate legislation" the provisions of that amendment, which include the disqualification from holding federal office anyone who "has engaged in insurrection or rebellion" against the United States or "given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof." Section 3 gives it the power to "remove such disability" by a two-thirds vote of each house. This is a very limited power intended to apply to southern rebels during the Civil War, as evidenced by the specific reference to "the loss or emancipation of any slave" in section 5. But, even if it were deemed applicable to the events of Jan. 6, 2021, the recent referral was not made pursuant to that amendment. Indeed, it was not made pursuant to any provision of the Constitution, because there is none that would authorize it.
The Justice Department will politely accept the referral and then place it in a file that is round and sits on the floor. A special prosecutor has already been appointed and is conducting a thorough and hopefully objective investigation. The Justice Department really doesn't need a referral from Congress, nor should it pay any attention to it.
The Committee itself was composed of both Democrat and Republican kangaroos. The two "Republicans" were selected by Democrats. The Republicans originally appointed by the Republican minority leader were vetoed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi in violation of the traditions of the House of Representatives. The Republicans then refused to choose two other members, so the Democrats selected them. They served only as cover for the one-sided investigation, report and referrals. The Committee's proceedings were more like a show trial—complete with slickly presented videos—than a serious legislative hearing in aid of passing laws. It was reminiscent of a Democratic version of Republican McCarthyism back in the 1950s, where citizens were named and put on blacklists.
The so-called Jan. 6 Committee was the culmination of the "Get Trump" efforts that ignored Constitutional constraints and the rule of law. It may not be the last word, however, since there is always the possibility that the special prosecutor may indict. If he does, it won't be because of the congressional referral, it will be because the justice department's investigation independently produced compelling evidence of criminal conduct. It will also be, hopefully, because experienced prosecutors made prosecutorial decisions based on justice department standards, priorities, and the exercise of discretion, not based on partisan advantage.
Charging a presidential candidate with a crime is as serious as it gets, especially if he is running against the incumbent who controls the justice department. If not done properly and objectively, it is the stuff of banana republics. As one South American dictator once put it: "for my friends everything; for my enemies the law!"
The ill-advised congressional referral will make it more difficult to prosecute Trump without it appearing partisan. The committee report and referrals will taint the special prosecutor's decision in the mind of many who will believe, even erroneously, that is was influenced by the corrupt committee process.
This is a good lesson on the centrality of our separation of powers to our system of governance. It is an important reminder of why congressional committees should stay out of prosecutorial decisions and criminal referrals.+++++++++++++++++++++Trained To Kill: Iranian Mullahs' Militia GroupBy Majid Rafizadeh
The Iranian regime's mercenary paramilitary group, the Basij, consists of millions of members, and they are killing protesters with full impunity. Pictured: Basij commanders and forces attend a speech by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in honor of "National Basij Week," on November 23, 2016. (Image source: khamenei.ir)
While the European Union is busy appeasing the ruling mullahs of Iran who are delivering weapons to Russia with which to kill Ukrainians, and while the United Nations is turning a blind eye to the massive crimes against humanity committed in Iran, neither the UN nor a single European country has yet to hold accountable the Iranian regime's mercenary paramilitary group, the Basij. It consists of millions of members and they are killing protesters with full impunity.
The theocratic establishment has been rocked with continuing anti-regime protests for four months now, and the Iranian authorities appear to be resorting to every possible mode of repression to suppress the demonstrators. These violent methods include shooting at protesters, injuring and killing people, executing protesters, thousands of arrests, physical and mental torture, sexual violence, and the rape of minors.
The Basij, a leading force committing crimes against humanity, acts freely throughout Iran. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) granted the Basij extensive powers that allowed its members to act as religious and moral police, enforce the regime's revolutionary laws, monitor people's daily activities, suppress anti-regime protests, operate in foreign countries, organize religious events throughout Iran, and recruit and train child soldiers for the IRGC. Basij centers can be seen in almost every city, town, school and university campus across Iran. In return, the Basij has significantly empowered and emboldened the Iran's Islamist regime. As the US Treasury Department pointed out:
"In addition to its involvement in violent crackdowns and serious human rights abuses in Iran, the Basij recruits and trains fighters... including Iranian children, who then deploy to Syria to support the brutal Assad regime."
The Basij have played a critical role in attacking demonstrators and those who dare to criticize the Islamic Republic and its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Many videos on social media show plainclothes agents shooting and beating up protesters.
That members of the Basij appear in plainclothes makes it extremely difficult for people to identify them before being attacked. Iran International news agency reported:
"According to Rouydad24 news website in Tehran, when people produce evidence that they were beaten or arrested by plainclothes individuals or even when videos of plainclothes officers arresting, beating or shooting at protesters emerge, the government always claims that they were 'rogue elements.'
"As long as all law enforcement officers in Iran do not wear uniforms, the government can always get away with criminal acts committed by them. Since 1999, when plainclothes officers violently suppressed a student uprising in Tehran killing several students, some regime insiders have been trying to convince the security forces to issue uniforms to all law enforcers, to no avail. Security forces are under the command of Iran's ruler Ali Khamenei who needs the plainclothes agents to save the regime from the people."
The ruling mullahs claim that the Basij is a voluntary group, but its members are paid. In fact, the regime designates a large budget to the group every year. The Basij has become an important player in both the private and public sectors, and is reportedly one the largest investors in the Iran Stock Exchange. Those who join the group are given financial and non-monetary incentives, such as easier entry to universities, obtaining bank loans, grants and getting employment.
While Iran's theocratic establishment denies that Basij are involved in the regime's crackdown, a member of Basij surprisingly revealed to France 24 International in a rare interview that
"In our unit, we have shotguns, tear gas, batons, paintball guns and stun guns. We had a few hours of introduction and training on "non-combat" weapons like these.... I try not to hit protesters... The others in my unit aim at people to hit them, to hit them in the chest or head, to kill them. And if you kill someone, you won't get in trouble. So hotheads or officers who do not care shoot at people's heads. That can be deadly. We have some Kalashnikovs in our arsenal too, but we have not used them yet. Kalashnikovs are now being used by IRGC members and the police. As far as I know, the Basij arsenal is the same in all the big cities. As Basij, we have not yet been ordered to use Kalashnikovs, but our unit used them in 2019. We will use Kalashnikovs again when the orders come."
Instead of preaching about human rights, the United Nations and the European Union urgently need to impose severe sanctions and cut the flow of funds to the regime and IRGC's paramilitary and mercenary group to induce them to stop.
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a business strategist and advisor, Harvard-educated scholar, political scientist, board member of Harvard International Review, and president of the International American Council on the Middle East. He has authored several books on Islam and US Foreign Policy. He can be reached at Dr.Rafizadeh@Post.Harvard.Edu+++++++++++++++++++++++++Another defeat?+++
Prelude to Appeasement? Beware of Comparing a Russian Deal on Ukraine With the Armistice in Korea.
Such a deal in Ukraine would more likely lead to the kind of defeat we were dealt in Vietnam.
President Zelensky addresses a joint meeting of Congress December 21, 2022. Should Zelensky agree to permanently losing Crimea, which the Russians took over in 2014?
A columnist for the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman, is advancing the notion of a Korea-style outcome for Ukraine. His argument is “the Korean war never formally ended” but closed in an armistice that “stopped the fighting” and “essentially froze the conflict.” Why not something like that for Ukraine?
Take it from one who has covered Korea for 50 years: Comparisons between the possible outcome in Ukraine and the ending of the Korean War are misplaced. The Korean War truce did not freeze the conflict. It stopped it totally, leaving the Republic of Korea, South Korea, supported by American and United Nations forces, in charge below a demilitarized zone that’s held for nearly seven decades.
The armistice showed the North Koreans and Chinese had gotten nowhere in a conflict in which about four million people had died, the majority civilians. South Korea, in the face of North Korean attempts at infiltration, terrorism, and chicanery, has grown into the world’s ninth wealthiest nation. North Korea, under dynastic rule, exists in poverty while terrorizing its people and brandishing nukes and missiles.
So why do we hear suggestions that a Korea-style armistice could provide an example for Ukraine? Mr. Rachman belittles what he says are conservative fears of another “Munich” — and leftist fears of a replay of “Vietnam.” Might the denouement in Ukraine resemble the 1973 Paris peace that was supposed to end Vietnam? And what about the Munich agreement of 1938?
Both those deals led to humiliation and disaster. In Vietnam, the North Vietnamese overran South Vietnam, defeating the Saigon regime in April 1975 after the Americans pulled out, refused air support and stopped shipping supplies. Post-Munich, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, proclaimed “peace in our time,” before Hitler took over Czechoslovakia and the world plunged into war.
Back to the Korean War analogy: The Republic of Korea, i.e., South Korea, by the end of the war had several hundred thousand troops. The Americans had about 300,000 in the country, a thousand times the number of American military advisers who were there when the North Koreans invaded in June 1950. American air power had pulverized just about every North Korean city and town.
Comparisons between President Zelensky and Winston Churchill are well and good, but no American or Western European troops are in Ukraine, and no foreign power is providing air support. President Biden believes pumping in unbelievable billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware will do the job, but Patriot missiles are no guarantee against Russia’s missiles and warplanes.
Nor can we be certain who controls what. Should Ukraine cede the southeastern region, long since taken over by Russian troops, just as the Korean War truce stopped the fighting on the line dividing North and South? Should Zelensky agree to permanently losing Crimea, which the Russians took over in 2014?
Or might a “demilitarized zone” similar to that in Korea forever stop the Russians from crossing the line into regions held by Ukraine forces, bereft of air support from America and its NATO allies? Ukraine is the largest country geographically in Europe after Russia, whose leaders ruled it periodically from tsarist times to the Soviet era. Ukraine has fewer than 200,000 troops and an air force made up of old Russian planes.
There’s no valid comparison between the Korean War armistice and a similar armistice for Ukraine. The Korean War truce has been unbelievably successful. It’s fashionable for people to say the Korean War still is not over, since there’s no peace treaty, but South Korea, allied with America, is incredibly prosperous and at peace. The Korean War armistice has worked far better than many a treaty.
A similar deal for Ukraine would more closely resemble the Paris peace in Vietnam that ceded large portions of the South to the invading North Vietnamese. Or, worse yet, it might be comparable to the Munich agreement that yielded the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany, leaving Czechoslovakia exposed and defenseless.
Ukraine under such a deal, like South Vietnam and Czechoslovakia, would be the loser. Ukraine has to go on holding the Russians at bay, praying the Americans won’t desert them in a deal that the Russians would see as a prelude to victory.++++++++++++++++++I posted this some 5 memos ago. It is a video by Porter Stansberry:
+++
This is causing a lot of controversy…
It’s a new documentary called The Two Men Destroying America.
And a lot of powerful people would rather this exposé never saw the light of day. Chances are, they’ll attempt to have it scrubbed from existence.
That’s because it tells the true (and terrifying) story of how two men from New York have engineered a reset of not just your personal wealth, but the entire US economic system."Mayor Pete" SPOTTED - A Disgraceful Revelation!
What Will the FBI Not Do?
Victor Davis Hanson
Who watches the watchers?
The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech.
“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement. “As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”
Almost all of the FBI communique is untrue, except the phrase about the bureau’s “engagements which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries.”
Future disclosures will no doubt reveal similar FBI subcontracting with other social media concerns of Silicon Valley to stifle free expression and news deemed problematic to the FBI’s agenda.
The FBI did not merely engage in “correspondence” with Twitter to protect the company and its “customers.” Instead, it effectively hired Twitter to suppress the free expression of some of its users, as well as news stories deemed unhelpful to the Biden campaign and administration—to the degree that the bureau’s requests sometimes even exceeded those of Twitter’s own left-wing censors.
The FBI did not wish to help Twitter “to protect themselves [sic],” given the bureau’s Twitter liaisons were often surprised at the FBI’s bold requests to suppress the expression of those who had not violated Twitter’s own admittedly biased “terms of service” and “community standards.”
The FBI and its helpers on the Left now reboot the same boilerplate about “conspiracy theorists” and “misinformation” smears used against anyone who rejected the FBI-fed Russian collusion hoax and the bureau’s peddling of the “Russian disinformation” lie to suppress accurate pre-election news about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The FBI is now, tragically, in freefall. The public is at the point, first, of asking what improper or illegal behavior will the bureau not pursue, and what, if anything, must be done to reform or save a once great but now discredited agency.
Consider the last four directors, the public faces of the FBI for the last 22 years. Ex-director Robert Mueller testified before Congress that he simply would not or could not talk about the fraudulent Steele dossier. He claimed that it was not the catalyst for his special counsel investigation of Donald Trump’s alleged ties with the Russians when, of course, it was.
Mueller also testified that he was “not familiar” with Fusion GPS, although Glenn Simpson’s opposition research firm subsidized the dossier through various cutouts that led back to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. And the skullduggery in the FBI-subsidized dossier helped force the appointment of Mueller himself.
While under congressional oath, Mueller’s successor James Comey on some 245 occasions claimed that he “could not remember,” “could not recall,” or “did not know” when asked simple questions fundamental to his own involvement with the Russian collusion hoax.
Comey, remember, memorialized a confidential conversation with President Trump on an FBI device and then used a third party to leak it to the New York Times. In his own words, the purpose was to force a special counsel appointment. The gambit worked, and his friend and predecessor Robert Mueller got the job. Twenty months and $40 million later, Mueller’s investigation tore the country apart but could find no evidence that Trump, as Steele alleged, colluded with the Russians to throw the 2016 election.
Comey also seems to have reassured the president that he was not the target of an ongoing FBI investigation, when in fact, Trump was.
Comey was never indicted for either misleading or lying to a congressional committee or leaking a document variously considered either confidential or classified.
While under oath, his interim successor, Andrew McCabe, on a number of occasions flat-out lied to federal investigators. Or as the office of the inspector general put it:
As detailed in this report, the OIG found that then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions in connection with describing his role in connection with a disclosure to the WSJ, and that this conduct violated FBI Offense Codes 2.5 and 2.6. The OIG also concluded that McCabe’s disclosure of the existence of an ongoing investigation in the manner described in this report violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.
McCabe purportedly believed Trump was working with the Russians as a veritable spy—a false accusation based entirely on the FBI’s paid, incoherent prevaricator Christopher Steele. And so, McCabe discussed with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein methods to have the president’s conversations wiretapped via a Rosenstein-worn stealthy recording device, presumably without a warrant.
Note the FBI ruined the lives of General Michael Flynn and Carter Page with false allegations of criminal conduct or untruthful testimonies. Under current director Christopher Wray, the FBI has surveilled parents at school boards meetings—on the prompt of the National School Boards Association, whose president wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland alleging that bothersome parents upset over critical race indoctrination groups were supposedly violence-prone and veritable terrorists.
Under Wray, the FBI staged the psychodramatic Mar-a-Lago raid on an ex-president’s home. The FBI likely leaked the post facto myths that the seized documents contained “nuclear codes” or “nuclear secrets.”
Under Wray, the FBI perfected the performance-art, humiliating public arrests of former White House officials or Biden Administration opponents, whether it was the nocturnal rousting of Project Veritas muckraker James O’Keefe in his underwear or the arrest—with leg restraints=—of former White House advisor Peter Navarro at Reagan National Airport for misdemeanor contempt of Congress charge or the detention of Trump election lawyer John Eastman at a restaurant with his family and the confiscation of his phone. Neither O’Keefe nor Eastman has yet been charged with any serious crimes.
The FBI arguably interfered in two presidential elections, and a presidential transition, and possibly determinatively so. In 2016, James Comey announced that his investigation had found that Hillary Clinton had improperly if not illegally used her private email server to conduct official State Department business, some of it confidential and classified, and likely intercepted by foreign governments. All that was a clear violation of federal statutes. Comey next, quite improperly as a combined FBI investigator and a de facto federal prosecutor, deduced that such violations did not merit prosecution.
Around the same time, the FBI had hired as a source the foreign national and political opposition hitman Christopher Steele. It helped Steele to spread among the media his fraudulent dossier and used its unverified and false contents to win FISA warrants against U.S. citizens on the bogus charges of colluding with the Russians to throw the election to Donald Trump. By the FBI’s own admission, it would not have obtained warrants to surveil Trump campaign associates without the use of Steele’s dossier, which it also admittedly either knew was a fraud or could not corroborate.
Again, such allegations in the dossier were false and, apparently, the FBI soon knew they were bogus since one of its own lawyers—the now-convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith—found it necessary also to alter a court-submitted document to feign incriminatory information.
The FBI, on the prompt of lame-duck members of the Obama Justice Department, during a presidential transition, set up an entrapment ambush of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. It was an effort to lure Flynn into admitting to a violation of the Logan Act, a 223-year old-law that has led to only two indictments and zero convictions.
During the 2020 election, the FBI suppressed knowledge of its possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Early on, the bureau knew that the computer and its contents were authentic and yet kept its contents suppressed.
Moreover, the FBI sought to contract out Twitter (at roughly $3.5 million) as a veritable subsidiarity to suppress social media traffic about the laptop and speech the bureau deemed improper.
Again, although the FBI knew the laptop in its possession was likely genuine, it still sought to use Twitter employees to suppress pre-election mention of that reality. At the same time, bureau officials remained mum when 51 former “intelligence officials” misled the country by claiming that the laptop had all the hallmarks of “Russian disinformation.” Polls later revealed that had the public known the truth about the laptop, a significant number likely would have voted differently—perhaps enough to change the outcome of the election.
The media, Twitter, Facebook, and former intelligence operatives were all following the FBI’s own preliminary warning bulletin that “Foreign Actors and Cybercriminals Likely to Spread Disinformation Regarding 2020 Election Results”—even as the bureau knew the laptop in its possession was most certainly not Russian disinformation. And, of course, the FBI had helped spread the Russian collusion hoax in 2016.
In addition, the FBI-issued phones of agent Peter Strzok and attorney Lisa Page, along with members of Robert Mueller’s special counsel “dream team”—all under subpoena—had their data mysteriously wiped clean, purportedly “by accident.”
Apparently, the paramours Strzok and Page, in particular, had much more to hide, given how earlier they had frequently expressed their venom toward candidate Donald Trump. Strzok boasted to Page that the FBI in general, and Andrew McCabe in particular, had an “insurance policy” means of denying Trump the presidency:
I want to believe the path you threw out in Andy’s office—that there’s no way he gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take the risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.
When some of their embarrassing texts emerged, both were dismissed by the special counsel. But Mueller carefully did so by staggering Strozk and Pages’ departures and not immediately releasing the reasons for their firings or reassignments.
To this day, the public has no idea what the FBI was doing on January 6, how many FBI informants and agents were among the rioters, and to what degree they knew in advance of the protests. The New York Times reporter most acquainted with the January 6 riot, Matthew Rosenberg, dismissed the buffoonish violence as “no big deal” and scoffed, “They were making this an organized thing that it wasn’t.”
“There were a ton of FBI informants among the people who attacked the Capitol,” Rosenberg noted. We have never been told anything about that “ton”—a topic of zero interest to the January 6 select committee.
What are the people to do about a federal law enforcement agency whose directors either repeatedly lie under oath, or mislead, or do not cooperate with congressional overseers? What should we do with a bureau that alters court documents, deceives the court with information the FBI had good reason to know was false and leaks records of confidential presidential conversations to the media to prompt the appointment of a special prosecutor? What should be done with a government agency that pays social media corporations to warp the dissemination of the news and suppress free expression and communications? Or an agency that hires a foreign national to gather dirt on a presidential candidate and plots to ensure that there is “no way” a presidential candidate “gets elected” and destroys subpoenaed evidence?
What, if anything, should the people do about a once-respected law enforcement agency that repeatedly smears its critics, most recently as “conspiracy theorists”?
The current FBI leadership under Christopher Wray, in the tradition of recent FBI directors, has stonewalled congressional overseers about FBI activity during the Trump and Biden administrations. In “Après moi, le déluge” fashion, the bureau acts as if it assumes the next Republican administration in office will remove the current hierarchy. And thus, it assumes for now, not cooperating with Republican investigations while Democrats hold control of the Senate and White House for a brief while longer ensures exemption.
Wray, most recently, cut short his Senate testimony on the pretext of an unspecified engagement, which turned out to be flying out on the FBI Gulfstream jet to his vacation home.
Yet the bureau’s lack of candor, contrition, and cooperation has only further alienated the public, especially traditional and conservative America, characteristically the chief source of support for the FBI.
There have been all sorts of remedies proposed for the bureau.
The three reforms most commonly suggested include: 1) simply dissolve the FBI in the belief that its concentration of power in Washington has become uncontrollable and is increasingly put to partisan service, including but not limited to the warping of U.S. presidential elections; 2) move the FBI headquarters out of the Washington D.C. nexus, preferably in the age of Zoom to a more convenient and central location in the United States, perhaps an urban site such as Salt Lake City, Denver, Kansas City, or Oklahoma City; or 3) break-up and decentralize the FBI and redistribute its various divisions to different departments to ensure that the power of its $11 billion budget and 35,000 employees are no longer aggregated and put in service of particular political agendas.
The next two years are dangerous times for the FBI—and the country. The House will soon likely begin investigations of the agency’s improper behavior. Yet, simultaneously, the Biden Justice Department will escalate its use of the bureau as a partisan investigative service for political purposes.
The FBI’s former embattled, high-ranking administrators who have been fired or forced to leave the agency—Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Peter Strzok, James Baker, Lisa Page, and others—will continue to appear on the cable news stations and social media to inveigh against critics of the FBI, despite being all deeply involved in the Russia-collusion hoax.
Merrick Garland will continue to order the FBI to hound perceived enemies through surveillance and performance art arrests. And the people will only grow more convinced the bureau has become Stasi-like and cannot be reformed but must be broken up—even as in extremis a defiant and unapologetic FBI will, as its latest communique shows, attack its critics.
We are left with the dilemma of Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchers?
++++++++++++++++++++
The Jan. 6 Committee's Referral Is Unconstitutional
By Alan Dershowitz
The Jan. 6 Committee has voted to refer former President Donald Trump to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. This referral violates both the letter and spirit of the Constitution for at least two reasons.
First, Article 1 of the Constitution grants Congress "all legislative powers" and only "legislative powers." Under our system of separation of powers, the power to prosecute lies exclusively with the executive branch through the justice department. Congress has no authority to refer specific individuals for prosecution. It is beyond the scope of its constitutional authority.
Second, Congress is specifically denied the power to pass any "bill of attainder."
Prior to America's independence, the British parliament enacted such bills that prosecuted named individuals. Our Constitution prohibited Congress from prosecuting named individuals. The power of Congress is limited to passing laws of general application that can be applied to specific individuals only by the justice department and a grand jury. A congressional committee officially voting to refer a named individual for prosecution violates the spirit of the explicit prohibition against congressional bills of attainder.
There is one possible exception to this separation of powers limitation on naming individuals. Section 5 of the 14th Amendment gives Congress the power "to enforce, by appropriate legislation" the provisions of that amendment, which include the disqualification from holding federal office anyone who "has engaged in insurrection or rebellion" against the United States or "given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof." Section 3 gives it the power to "remove such disability" by a two-thirds vote of each house. This is a very limited power intended to apply to southern rebels during the Civil War, as evidenced by the specific reference to "the loss or emancipation of any slave" in section 5. But, even if it were deemed applicable to the events of Jan. 6, 2021, the recent referral was not made pursuant to that amendment. Indeed, it was not made pursuant to any provision of the Constitution, because there is none that would authorize it.
The Justice Department will politely accept the referral and then place it in a file that is round and sits on the floor. A special prosecutor has already been appointed and is conducting a thorough and hopefully objective investigation. The Justice Department really doesn't need a referral from Congress, nor should it pay any attention to it.
The Committee itself was composed of both Democrat and Republican kangaroos. The two "Republicans" were selected by Democrats. The Republicans originally appointed by the Republican minority leader were vetoed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi in violation of the traditions of the House of Representatives. The Republicans then refused to choose two other members, so the Democrats selected them. They served only as cover for the one-sided investigation, report and referrals. The Committee's proceedings were more like a show trial—complete with slickly presented videos—than a serious legislative hearing in aid of passing laws. It was reminiscent of a Democratic version of Republican McCarthyism back in the 1950s, where citizens were named and put on blacklists.
The so-called Jan. 6 Committee was the culmination of the "Get Trump" efforts that ignored Constitutional constraints and the rule of law. It may not be the last word, however, since there is always the possibility that the special prosecutor may indict. If he does, it won't be because of the congressional referral, it will be because the justice department's investigation independently produced compelling evidence of criminal conduct. It will also be, hopefully, because experienced prosecutors made prosecutorial decisions based on justice department standards, priorities, and the exercise of discretion, not based on partisan advantage.
Charging a presidential candidate with a crime is as serious as it gets, especially if he is running against the incumbent who controls the justice department. If not done properly and objectively, it is the stuff of banana republics. As one South American dictator once put it: "for my friends everything; for my enemies the law!"
The ill-advised congressional referral will make it more difficult to prosecute Trump without it appearing partisan. The committee report and referrals will taint the special prosecutor's decision in the mind of many who will believe, even erroneously, that is was influenced by the corrupt committee process.
This is a good lesson on the centrality of our separation of powers to our system of governance. It is an important reminder of why congressional committees should stay out of prosecutorial decisions and criminal referrals.
+++++++++++++++++++++
Trained To Kill: Iranian Mullahs' Militia Group
By Majid Rafizadeh
The Iranian regime's mercenary paramilitary group, the Basij, consists of millions of members, and they are killing protesters with full impunity. Pictured: Basij commanders and forces attend a speech by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in honor of "National Basij Week," on November 23, 2016. (Image source: khamenei.ir)
While the European Union is busy appeasing the ruling mullahs of Iran who are delivering weapons to Russia with which to kill Ukrainians, and while the United Nations is turning a blind eye to the massive crimes against humanity committed in Iran, neither the UN nor a single European country has yet to hold accountable the Iranian regime's mercenary paramilitary group, the Basij. It consists of millions of members and they are killing protesters with full impunity.
The theocratic establishment has been rocked with continuing anti-regime protests for four months now, and the Iranian authorities appear to be resorting to every possible mode of repression to suppress the demonstrators. These violent methods include shooting at protesters, injuring and killing people, executing protesters, thousands of arrests, physical and mental torture, sexual violence, and the rape of minors.
The Basij, a leading force committing crimes against humanity, acts freely throughout Iran. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) granted the Basij extensive powers that allowed its members to act as religious and moral police, enforce the regime's revolutionary laws, monitor people's daily activities, suppress anti-regime protests, operate in foreign countries, organize religious events throughout Iran, and recruit and train child soldiers for the IRGC. Basij centers can be seen in almost every city, town, school and university campus across Iran. In return, the Basij has significantly empowered and emboldened the Iran's Islamist regime. As the US Treasury Department pointed out:
"In addition to its involvement in violent crackdowns and serious human rights abuses in Iran, the Basij recruits and trains fighters... including Iranian children, who then deploy to Syria to support the brutal Assad regime."
The Basij have played a critical role in attacking demonstrators and those who dare to criticize the Islamic Republic and its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Many videos on social media show plainclothes agents shooting and beating up protesters.
That members of the Basij appear in plainclothes makes it extremely difficult for people to identify them before being attacked. Iran International news agency reported:
"According to Rouydad24 news website in Tehran, when people produce evidence that they were beaten or arrested by plainclothes individuals or even when videos of plainclothes officers arresting, beating or shooting at protesters emerge, the government always claims that they were 'rogue elements.'
"As long as all law enforcement officers in Iran do not wear uniforms, the government can always get away with criminal acts committed by them. Since 1999, when plainclothes officers violently suppressed a student uprising in Tehran killing several students, some regime insiders have been trying to convince the security forces to issue uniforms to all law enforcers, to no avail. Security forces are under the command of Iran's ruler Ali Khamenei who needs the plainclothes agents to save the regime from the people."
The ruling mullahs claim that the Basij is a voluntary group, but its members are paid. In fact, the regime designates a large budget to the group every year. The Basij has become an important player in both the private and public sectors, and is reportedly one the largest investors in the Iran Stock Exchange. Those who join the group are given financial and non-monetary incentives, such as easier entry to universities, obtaining bank loans, grants and getting employment.
While Iran's theocratic establishment denies that Basij are involved in the regime's crackdown, a member of Basij surprisingly revealed to France 24 International in a rare interview that
"In our unit, we have shotguns, tear gas, batons, paintball guns and stun guns. We had a few hours of introduction and training on "non-combat" weapons like these.... I try not to hit protesters... The others in my unit aim at people to hit them, to hit them in the chest or head, to kill them. And if you kill someone, you won't get in trouble. So hotheads or officers who do not care shoot at people's heads. That can be deadly. We have some Kalashnikovs in our arsenal too, but we have not used them yet. Kalashnikovs are now being used by IRGC members and the police. As far as I know, the Basij arsenal is the same in all the big cities. As Basij, we have not yet been ordered to use Kalashnikovs, but our unit used them in 2019. We will use Kalashnikovs again when the orders come."
Instead of preaching about human rights, the United Nations and the European Union urgently need to impose severe sanctions and cut the flow of funds to the regime and IRGC's paramilitary and mercenary group to induce them to stop.
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a business strategist and advisor, Harvard-educated scholar, political scientist, board member of Harvard International Review, and president of the International American Council on the Middle East. He has authored several books on Islam and US Foreign Policy. He can be reached at Dr.Rafizadeh@Post.Harvard.Edu
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
Another defeat?
+++
Prelude to Appeasement? Beware of Comparing a Russian Deal on Ukraine With the Armistice in Korea.
Such a deal in Ukraine would more likely lead to the kind of defeat we were dealt in Vietnam.
President Zelensky addresses a joint meeting of Congress December 21, 2022. Should Zelensky agree to permanently losing Crimea, which the Russians took over in 2014?
A columnist for the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman, is advancing the notion of a Korea-style outcome for Ukraine. His argument is “the Korean war never formally ended” but closed in an armistice that “stopped the fighting” and “essentially froze the conflict.” Why not something like that for Ukraine?
Take it from one who has covered Korea for 50 years: Comparisons between the possible outcome in Ukraine and the ending of the Korean War are misplaced. The Korean War truce did not freeze the conflict. It stopped it totally, leaving the Republic of Korea, South Korea, supported by American and United Nations forces, in charge below a demilitarized zone that’s held for nearly seven decades.
The armistice showed the North Koreans and Chinese had gotten nowhere in a conflict in which about four million people had died, the majority civilians. South Korea, in the face of North Korean attempts at infiltration, terrorism, and chicanery, has grown into the world’s ninth wealthiest nation. North Korea, under dynastic rule, exists in poverty while terrorizing its people and brandishing nukes and missiles.
So why do we hear suggestions that a Korea-style armistice could provide an example for Ukraine? Mr. Rachman belittles what he says are conservative fears of another “Munich” — and leftist fears of a replay of “Vietnam.” Might the denouement in Ukraine resemble the 1973 Paris peace that was supposed to end Vietnam? And what about the Munich agreement of 1938?
Both those deals led to humiliation and disaster. In Vietnam, the North Vietnamese overran South Vietnam, defeating the Saigon regime in April 1975 after the Americans pulled out, refused air support and stopped shipping supplies. Post-Munich, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, proclaimed “peace in our time,” before Hitler took over Czechoslovakia and the world plunged into war.
Back to the Korean War analogy: The Republic of Korea, i.e., South Korea, by the end of the war had several hundred thousand troops. The Americans had about 300,000 in the country, a thousand times the number of American military advisers who were there when the North Koreans invaded in June 1950. American air power had pulverized just about every North Korean city and town.
Comparisons between President Zelensky and Winston Churchill are well and good, but no American or Western European troops are in Ukraine, and no foreign power is providing air support. President Biden believes pumping in unbelievable billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware will do the job, but Patriot missiles are no guarantee against Russia’s missiles and warplanes.
Nor can we be certain who controls what. Should Ukraine cede the southeastern region, long since taken over by Russian troops, just as the Korean War truce stopped the fighting on the line dividing North and South? Should Zelensky agree to permanently losing Crimea, which the Russians took over in 2014?
Or might a “demilitarized zone” similar to that in Korea forever stop the Russians from crossing the line into regions held by Ukraine forces, bereft of air support from America and its NATO allies? Ukraine is the largest country geographically in Europe after Russia, whose leaders ruled it periodically from tsarist times to the Soviet era. Ukraine has fewer than 200,000 troops and an air force made up of old Russian planes.
There’s no valid comparison between the Korean War armistice and a similar armistice for Ukraine. The Korean War truce has been unbelievably successful. It’s fashionable for people to say the Korean War still is not over, since there’s no peace treaty, but South Korea, allied with America, is incredibly prosperous and at peace. The Korean War armistice has worked far better than many a treaty.
A similar deal for Ukraine would more closely resemble the Paris peace in Vietnam that ceded large portions of the South to the invading North Vietnamese. Or, worse yet, it might be comparable to the Munich agreement that yielded the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany, leaving Czechoslovakia exposed and defenseless.
Ukraine under such a deal, like South Vietnam and Czechoslovakia, would be the loser. Ukraine has to go on holding the Russians at bay, praying the Americans won’t desert them in a deal that the Russians would see as a prelude to victory.
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