Monthly Archives: June 2014

U.S. Embassy in Ankara Headquarter for ISIS War on Iraq – Hariri Insider

nsnbc.me

Originally posted 6/22/14

Christof Lehmann (nsnbc) : The green light for the use of ISIS brigades to carve up Iraq, widen the Syria conflict into a greater Middle East war and to throw Iran off-balance was given behind closed doors at the Atlantic Council meeting in Turkey, in November 2013, told a source close to Saudi – Lebanese billionaire Saad Hariri, adding that the U.S. Embassy in Ankara is the operation’s headquarter.

Photo:Aydinlik Daily

A “trusted source” close to the Saudi – Lebanese multi-billionaire and former Lebanese P.M. Saad Hariri told on condition of anonymity, that the final green light for the war on Iraq with ISIS or ISIL brigades was given behind closed doors, at the sidelines of the Atlantic Council’s Energy Summit in Istanbul, Turkey, on November 22 – 23, 2013.

The Atlantic Council is one of the most influential U.S. think tanks with regard to U.S. and NATO foreign policy and geopolitics. Atlantic Council President Frederick Kempe stressed the importance of the Energy Summit and the situation in the Middle East before the summit in November, saying:

“We view the current period as a turning point, just like 1918 and 1945. Turkey is in every way a central country, as a creator of regional stability. However much the USA and Turkey can work in unison, that is how effective they will be.”

Dr. Henry Kissinger

The summit was, among others, attended by Turkey’s President Abdullah Gül, U.S. Energy Secretary Ernst Monitz, Atlantic Council President Frederick Kempe, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former U.S. National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft.

It is noteworthy that Scowcroft has long-standing ties to Henry Kissinger and to the Minister of Natural Resources of the Kurdish Administrated Region of Northern Iraq.

“Had Baghdad been more cooperative about the Syrian oil fields at Deir-Ez-Zor in early 2013 and about autonomy for the North [Iraq’s northern, predominantly Kurdish region] they would possibly not have turned against al-Maliki; Or he would have been given more time”, said the Hariri insider during the almost two-hour-long conversation.

In April 2013 the EU lifted its ban on the import of Syrian oil from "rebel held territory to finance the opposition".

In March 2013, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry demanded that Iraq “stops the arms flow to Syria”, while U.S. weapons were flowing to ISIS via Saudi Arabia into Iraq and Jordan.

On Monday, April 22, 2013, 27 of the 28 E.U. foreign ministers agreed to lift the ban on the import of Syrian oil from opposition-held territories to allow the “opposition” to finance part of its campaign.

“ISIS that was supposed to control [the region around] Deir Ez-Zor. [Turkish Energy Minister Taner] Yildiz and [Kurdish] Energy Minister Ashti] Hawrami were to make sure the oil could flow via the Kirkuk – Ceyhan [pipeline];… Ankara put al-Maliki under a lot of pressure about the Kurdish autonomy and oil, too much pressure, too early, if you’d ask me”, the source said. He added that the pressure backfired.

Plotting: Red, by Maj.(r) Agha H.Amin. Blue, by Christof Lehmann

Previous reports confirmed that Baghdad started intercepting weapons and insurgents along the Saudi – Iraqi border, cutting off important supply lines for ISIS brigades around Deir Ez-Zor, and that Al-Maliki began complaining about a Saudi – Qatari-backed attempt to subvert the Iraqi State since late 2012. Noting my remark he replied:

“That is right, but the heavy increase in attacks came in May – June 2013, after al-Maliki ordered the military to al-Anbar “.

A previous article in nsnbc explains how Baghdad’s blockade caused problems in Jordan, because many of the transports of weapons, fighters and munitions had to be rerouted via Jordan.

The Hariri insider added that the oil fields should have been under ISIS control by August 2013, but that the plan failed for two reasons. The UK withdrew its support for the bombing of Syria. That in turn enabled the Syrian army to dislodge both ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusrah from Deir Ez-Zor in August.

“The situation was a disaster because in June Hariri, Yidiz, Hawrami, Scowcroft, and everybody was ready to talk about how to share the oil between the U.S., Turkey and E.U.. The Summit in November should have dealt with a fait accompli”, the Hariri source stressed, adding that Washington put a gun to al-Maliki’s head when he was invited to the White House.

Both the President of the Kurdish region of Iraq, Masoud Barzani and Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki were invited to Washington in early November 2013.

KurdishElection“Certain circles in Washington put a hell of a lot of pressure on Obama to put a gun to al-Maliki’s head”, said the Hariri source, adding that “time was running out and Obama was hesitant”. Asked what he meant with “time was running out” and if he could specify who it was that pushed Obama, he said:

“Barzani was losing his grip in the North (Kurdish Iraq); the election [in September] was a setback. All plans for distributing Iraqi oil via Turkey and for sidelining Baghdad were set between Kirkuk and Ankara in early November…

“Who exactly pressured Obama? I don’t know who delivered the message to Obama. I suspect Kerry had a word. It’s more important from where the message came, Kissinger, Scowcroft, Nuland and the Keagan clan, Stavridis, Petreaus, Riccardione, and the neo-con crowd at the [Atlantic] Council. … As far as I know ´someone` told Obama that he’d better pressure al-Maliki to go along with Kurdish autonomy by November or else. Who exactly ´advised` Obama is not as important as the fact that those people let him know that they would go ahead, with, or without him”.

Asked whether he knew details, how the final green light for the ISIS campaign was given, he said:

” Behind closed doors, in the presence of both Scowcroft, Hariri, and a couple of other people”. To my question “if he could be more specific” he replied “I could; I want to stay alive you know; Riccardione was tasked with the operation that day”.

Noting that a prominent member of Saudi Arabia’s royal family, Prince Abdul Rachman al-Faisal has been named as the one being “in command” of the ISIS brigades, and if he could either confirm or deny, he nodded, adding that “the Prince” is responsible for financing the operation and for part of the command structure, but that the operations headquarter is the U.S. Embassy in Ankara Turkey. “As far as I know, nothing moves without Ambassador Riccardione”, he added.

America’s Covert Re-Invasion of Iraq

Image: ISIS clearly did not materialize spontaneously within Iraq, it has
clearly redeployed from its NATO-sponsored destruction of Syria to
northern Iraq, perhaps in an attempt to justify a NATO incursion and the
creation of a buffer zone straddling Syrian, Iraqi, and even possibly
Iranian territory with the goal of targeting Iran directly with ISIS.  

http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com                                                           Originally posted June 13, 2014 (Tony Cartalucci – LD) – Heavily armed, well funded, and organized as a professional, standing army, the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) swept southward into Iraq from Turkey and northeastern Syria, taking the cities of Mosul and Tikrit, and now threaten the Iraqi capital city of Baghdad itself. The United States was sure to prop up two unfounded narratives – the first being that US intelligence agencies, despite assets in Iraq and above it in the form of surveillance drones, failed to give warning of the invasion, and that ISIS is some sort of self-sustaining terror organization carving out a “state” by “robbing banks” and collecting “donations” on Twitter.

The Wall Street Journal in its report, “Iraqi Drama Catches U.S. Off Guard,” stated:

The quickly unfolding drama prompted a White House meeting Wednesday of top policy makers and military leaders who were caught off guard by the swift collapse of Iraqi security forces, officials acknowledged.

In another WSJ post, “U.S. Secretly Flying Drones Over Iraq,” it claimed:

A senior U.S. official said the intelligence collected under the small [secret US drone] program was shared with Iraqi forces, but added: “It’s not like it did any good.” The rapid territorial gains by the Islamist forces loyal to Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, an al Qaeda offshoot, caught the U.S. by surprise, the officials said.

Image: ISIS has convoys of brand new matching Toyota’s the same
vehicles seen among admittedly NATO-armed terrorists operating
everywhere from Libya to Syria, and now Iraq. It is a synthetic, state-
sponsored regional mercenary expeditionary force.

Despite drone flights collecting intelligence, and a 3-year ongoing CIA program (here, here, and here) all along the Turkish-Syrian border to “monitor” and “arm” “moderate” militants fighting the Syrian government, the US claims it was caught “by surprise.” If drones and CIA operatives operating in ISIS territory weren’t enough to detect the impending invasion, perhaps the CIA should have just picked up a newspaper.

Indeed, the Lebanon Daily Start in March 2014 reported that ISIS openly withdrew its forces from Latakia and Idlib provinces in western Syria, and redeployed them in Syria’s east – along the Syrian-Iraqi border. The article titled, “Al-Qaeda splinter group in Syria leaves two provinces: activists,” stated explicitly that:

On Friday, ISIS – which alienated many rebels by seizing territory and killing rival commanders – finished withdrawing from the Idlib and Latakia provinces and moved its forces toward the eastern Raqqa province and the eastern outskirts of the northern city of Aleppo, activists said.

The question remains, if a Lebanese newspaper knew ISIS was on the move eastward, why didn’t the CIA? The obvious answer is the CIA did know, and is simply feigning ignorance at the expense of their reputation to bait its enemies into suspecting the agency of  incompetency rather than complicity in the horrific terroristic swath ISIS is now carving through northern Iraq.


Described extensively in the full New Eastern Outlook Journal (NEO) report, “NATO’s Terror Hordes in Iraq a Pretext for Syria Invasion,” the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, have funded and armed terrorists operating in Syria for the past 3 years to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars – coincidentally the same amount that ISIS would require to gain primacy among militant groups fighting in Syria and to mobilize forces capable of crossing into Iraq and overwhelming Baghdad’s national defenses.

Image: The most prominent routes into Syria for foreign fighters is depicted, with the inset graph describing the most widely used routes by foreign fighters on their way to Iraq, as determined by West Point’s 2007 Combating Terrorism Center report “Al-Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq” (page 20).  These same networks were then used to invade and attempt to overthrow the Syrian government itself in 2011, with the addition of a more prominent role for Turkey, and today in 2014, to re-invade Iraq once again. 

The NEO report includes links to the US Army’s West Point Countering Terrorism Center reports, “Bombers, Bank Accounts and Bleedout: al-Qa’ida’s Road In and Out of Iraq,” and “Al-Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq,” which detail extensively the terror network used to flood Iraq with foreign terrorists, weapons, and cash to fuel an artificial “sectarian war” during the US occupation, and then turned over to flood Syria with terrorists in the West’s bid to overthrow the government in Damascus.

What’s ISIS Doing in Iraq? 
The NEO report would also post Seymour Hersh’s 2007 article, “The Redirection,” documenting over the course of 9 pages US, Saudi, and Israeli intentions to create and deploy sectarian extremists region-wide to confront Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hersh would note that these “sectarian extremists” were either tied to Al Qaeda, or Al Qaeda itself. The ISIS army moving toward Baghdad is the final manifestation of this conspiracy, a standing army operating with impunity, threatening to topple the Syrian government, purge pro-Iranian forces in Iraq, and even threatening Iran itself by building a bridge from Al Qaeda’s NATO safe havens in Turkey, across northern Iraq, and up to Iran’s borders directly. Labeled “terrorists” by the West, grants the West plausible deniability in its creation, deployment, and across the broad spectrum of atrocities it is now carrying out.

Image: ISIS’s alleged territory spans across both Iraqi and Syrian
territory. If it is able to establish a NATO-backed buffer zone, it will be
able to launch attacks with impunity into Syria, Iraq, and Iran – in a
region-wide sectarian war the West has been engineering for years. 

It is a defacto re-invasion of Iraq by Western interests – but this time without Western forces directly participating – rather a proxy force the West is desperately attempting to disavow any knowledge of or any connection to. However, no other explanation can account for the size and prowess of ISIS beyond state sponsorship. And since ISIS is the clear benefactor of state sponsorship, the question is, which states are sponsoring it? With Iraq, Syria, and Iran along with Lebanese-based Hezbollah locked in armed struggle with ISIS and other Al Qaeda franchises across the region, the only blocs left are NATO and the GCC (Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular).

With the West declaring ISIS fully villainous in an attempt to intervene more directly in northern Iraq and eastern Syria, creating a long desired “buffer zone” within which to harbor, arm, and fund an even larger terrorist expeditionary force, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and others are offered an opportunity to preempt Western involvement and to crush the ISIS – cornering and eliminating NATO-GCC’s expeditionary force while scoring geopolitical points of vanquishing Washington’s latest “villain.” Joint Iraq-Iranian operations in the north and south of ISIS’s locations, and just along Turkey’s borders could envelop and trap ISIS to then be whittled down and destroyed – just as Syria has been doing to NATO’s proxy terrorist forces within its own borders.

Whatever the regional outcome may be, the fact is the West has re-invaded Iraq, with a force as brutal, if not worse than the “shock and awe” doctrine of 2003. Iraq faces another difficult occupation if it cannot summon a response from within, and among its allies abroad, to counter and crush this threat with utmost expediency.

The Chaos In Iraq Is By DESIGN

www.washingtonsblog.com

originally posted 6/26/14

The Real History of the American Strategy for Iraq and the Middle East

Neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz planned regime change in Iraq more than 20 years ago … in 1991.

But the goal wasn’t just regime change (or oil).  The goal was to break up the country, and to do away with the sovereignty of Iraq as a separate nation.

The Guardian noted in 2003:

President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt predicted devastating consequences for the Middle East if Iraq is attacked. “We fear a state of disorder and chaos may prevail in the region,” he said.

***

They are probably still splitting their sides with laughter in the Pentagon. But Mr Mubarak and the [Pentagon] hawks do agree on one thing: war with Iraq could spell disaster for several regimes in the Middle East. Mr Mubarak believes that would be bad. The hawks, though, believe it would be good.

For the hawks, disorder and chaos sweeping through the region would not be an unfortunate side-effect of war with Iraq, but a sign that everything is going according to plan.

***

The “skittles theory” of the Middle East – that one ball aimed at Iraq can knock down several regimes – has been around for some time on the wilder fringes of politics but has come to the fore in the United States on the back of the “war against terrorism”.

Its roots can be traced, at least in part, to a paper published in 1996 by an Israeli thinktank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. Entitled “A clean break: a new strategy for securing the realm”, it was intended as a political blueprint for the incoming government of Binyamin Netanyahu. As the title indicates, it advised the right-wing Mr Netanyahu to make a complete break with the past by adopting a strategy “based on an entirely new intellectual foundation, one that restores strategic initiative and provides the nation the room to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism …”

***

The paper set out a plan by which Israel would “shape its strategic environment”, beginning with the removal of Saddam Hussein and the installation of a Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad.

With Saddam out of the way and Iraq thus brought under Jordanian Hashemite influence, Jordan and Turkey would form an axis along with Israel to weaken and “roll back” Syria. Jordan, it suggested, could also sort out Lebanon by “weaning” the Shia Muslim population away from Syria and Iran, and re-establishing their former ties with the Shia in the new Hashemite kingdom of Iraq. “Israel will not only contain its foes; it will transcend them”, the paper concluded.

***

The leader of the “prominent opinion makers” who wrote it was Richard Perle – now chairman of the Defence Policy Board at the Pentagon.

Also among the eight-person team was Douglas Feith, a neo-conservative lawyer, who now holds one of the top four posts at the Pentagon as under-secretary of policy.

***

Two other opinion-makers in the team were David Wurmser and his wife, Meyrav (see US thinktanks give lessons in foreign policy, August 19). Mrs Wurmser was co-founder of Memri, a Washington-based charity that distributes articles translated from Arabic newspapers portraying Arabs in a bad light. After working with Mr Perle at the American Enterprise Institute, David Wurmser is now at the State Department, as a special assistant to John Bolton, the under-secretary for arms control and international security.

A fifth member of the team was James Colbert, of the Washington-based Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa) – a bastion of neo-conservative hawkery whose advisory board was previously graced by Dick Cheney (now US vice-president), John Bolton and Douglas Feith.

***

With several of the “Clean Break” paper’s authors now holding key positions in Washington, the plan for Israel to “transcend” its foes by reshaping the Middle East looks a good deal more achievable today than it did in 1996. Americans may even be persuaded to give up their lives to achieve it.

(Before assuming prominent roles in the Bush administration, many of the same people – including Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, John Bolton and others – advocated their imperial views during the Clinton administration via their American think tank, the “Project for a New American Century”.)

Thomas Harrington – professor of Iberian Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut – writes:

[While there are some good articles on the chaos in Iraq, none of them] consider whether the chaos now enveloping the region might, in fact, be the desired aim of policy planners in Washington and Tel Aviv.

***

One of the prime goals of every empire is to foment ongoing internecine conflict in the territories whose resources and/or strategic outposts they covet.

***

The most efficient way of sparking such open-ended internecine conflict is to brutally smash the target country’s social matrix and physical infrastructure.

***

Ongoing unrest has the additional perk of justifying the maintenance and expansion of the military machine that feeds the financial and political fortunes of the metropolitan elite.

In short … divide and rule is about as close as it gets to a universal recourse the imperial game and that it is, therefore, as important to bear it in mind today as it was in the times of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, the Spanish Conquistadors and the British Raj.

To those—and I suspect there are still many out there—for whom all this seems too neat or too conspiratorial, I would suggest a careful side-by side reading of:

a) the “Clean Break” manifesto generated by the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS) in 1996

and

b) the “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” paper generated by The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in 2000, a US group with deep personal and institutional links to the aforementioned Israeli think tank, and with the ascension of  George Bush Junior to the White House, to the most exclusive  sanctums of the US foreign policy apparatus.

To read the cold-blooded imperial reasoning in both of these documents—which speak, in the first case, quite openly of the need to destabilize the region so as to reshape Israel’s “strategic environment” and, in the second of the need to dramatically increase the number of US “forward bases” in the region ….

To do so now, after the US’s systematic destruction of Iraq and Libya—two notably oil-rich countries whose delicate ethnic and religious balances were well known to anyone in or out of government with more than passing interest in history—, and after the its carefully calibrated efforts to generate and maintain murderous and civilization-destroying stalemates in Syria and Egypt (something that is easily substantiated despite our media’s deafening silence on the subject), is downright blood-curdling.

And yet, it seems that for even very well-informed analysts, it is beyond the pale to raise the possibility that foreign policy elites in the US and Israel, like all virtually all the ambitious hegemons before them on the world stage, might have quite coldly and consciously fomented open-ended chaos in order to achieve their overlapping strategic objectives in this part of the world.

Antiwar’s Justin Raimondo notes:

Iraq’s fate was sealed from the moment we invaded: it has no future as a unitary state. As I pointed out again and again in the early days of the conflict, Iraq is fated to split apart into at least three separate states: the Shi’ite areas around Baghdad and to the south, the Sunni regions to the northwest, and the Kurdish enclave which was itching for independence since well before the US invasion. This was the War Party’s real if unexpressed goal from the very beginning: the atomization of Iraq, and indeed the entire Middle East. Their goal, in short, was chaos – and that is precisely what we are seeing today.

***

As I put it years ago:

“[T]he actual purpose was to blow the country to smithereens: to atomize it, and crush it, so that it would never rise again.

“When we invaded and occupied Iraq, we didn’t just militarily defeat Iraq’s armed forces – we dismantled their army, and their police force, along with all the other institutions that held the country together. The educational system was destroyed, and not reconstituted. The infrastructure was pulverized, and never restored. Even the physical hallmarks of a civilized society – roads, bridges, electrical plants, water facilities, museums, schools – were bombed out of existence or else left to fall into disrepair. Along with that, the spiritual and psychological infrastructure that enables a society to function – the bonds of trust, allegiance, and custom – was dissolved, leaving Iraqis to fend for themselves in a war of all against all.

“… What we are witnessing in post-Saddam Iraq is the erasure of an entire country. We can say, with confidence: We came, we saw, we atomized.”

Why? This is the question that inevitably arises in the wake of such an analysis: why deliberately destroy an entire country whose people were civilized while our European ancestors were living in trees?

The people who planned, agitated for, and executed this war are the very same people who have advanced Israeli interests – at America’s expense – at every opportunity. In “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” a 1996 document prepared by a gaggle of neocons – Perle, Douglas Feith, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was urged to “break out” of Israel’s alleged stagnation and undertake a campaign of “regime change” across the Middle East, targeting Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and eventually Iran. With the exception of Iran – and that one’s still cooking on the back burner – this is precisely what has occurred. In 2003, in the immediate wake of our Pyrrhic “victory” in Iraq, then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared to a visiting delegation of American members of Congress that these “rogue states” – Iran, Libya, and Syria – would have to be next on the War Party’s target list.

(Indeed.)

And Michel Chossudovsky points out:

The division of Iraq along sectarian-ethnic lines has been on the drawing board of the Pentagon for more than 10 years.

What is envisaged by Washington is the outright suppression of the Baghdad regime and the institutions of the central government, leading to a process of political fracturing and the elimination of Iraq as a country.

This process of political fracturing in Iraq along sectarian lines will inevitably have an impact on Syria, where the US-NATO sponsored terrorists have in large part been defeated.

Destabilization and political fragmentation in Syria is also contemplated: Washington’s intent is no longer to pursue the narrow objective of “regime change” in Damascus. What is contemplated is the break up of both Iraq and Syria along sectarian-ethnic lines.

The formation of the caliphate may be the first step towards a broader conflict in the Middle East, bearing in mind that Iran is supportive of the al-Maliki government and the US ploy may indeed be to encourage the intervention of Iran.

The proposed re-division of both Iraq and Syria is broadly modeled on that of the Federation of Yugoslavia which was split up into seven “independent states” (Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia (FYRM), Slovenia, Montenegro, Kosovo).

According to Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, the re division of Iraq into three separate states is part of a broader process of redrawing the Map of the Middle East.

 

The above map was prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters. It was published in the Armed Forces Journal in June 2006, Peters is a retired colonel of the U.S. National War Academy. (Map Copyright Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters 2006).

Although the map does not officially reflect Pentagon doctrine, it has been used in a training program at NATO’s Defense College for senior military officers”. (See Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a “New Middle East” By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Global Research, November 2006)

Notes: While a senior Bush adviser said that the Iraq war was launched to protect Israel, that is too simplistic an explanation. The architects of foreign policy in both the U.S. and Israel are either literally one and the same – e.g. Richard Perle – or see things identically.

And if you think things are different under the Obama administration, please note that not only are the Neocons back, they never actually left.

DHS solicited “Escort Services for Unaccompanied Alien Children” back in January 2014

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Petraeus: NAFTA Has Replaced the USA

Gen. Petraeus was speaking on the “After America, What?” panel at the Centre for Policy Studies’ Margaret Thatcher Liberty Conference at the Guildhall in the City of London on 6/18/14

———————————————————
www.telegraph.co.uk
15.13 General David Petraeus has answered the question “after America, what?” with a robust defence of America, or “North America” as it’s traditionally known. He said the “highly integrated” forces of Canada, the United States and Mexico would provide the world’s next powerhouse for energy production and scientific advancement.
There are four revolutions that are ongoing at various level in each of the countries but foremost in the United States. The energy revolution is the first of those, which has created the biggest change in geopolitics since the rise of China since 1978.
He explained that the remaining industrial revolutions in IT, manufacturing and life sciences, “as highly integrated as they are, allow you to argue that after America comes North America”.

 

 

July 1987: Rex 84 plan for Martial Law disclosed during Iran Contra hearings

Oliver North Questioned by Rep. Jack Brooks (D-TX),
Rex 84 Exposed During Iran Contra hearings in 1987 (May 5, 1987: Iran-Contra Committee Begins Public Hearings; Oliver North testified on July 7-10)

————————————————————
August 3, 1987 and After: Iran-Contra Hearings Conclude
www.historycommons.org
The Iran-Contra hearings come to an end after over 250 hours of testimony from 28 witnesses. [New York Times, 11/19/1987] The hearings have been unsatisfactory at best, with the committee saying in a final statement, “We may never know with precision or truth why [the Iran-Contra affair] ever happened.” [Aug 3, 1987 – PBS]

 

Rand Paul continues to mislead on immigration

24ahead.com

6/12/14

Yesterday Sen. Rand Paul spoke on a conference call organized by Michael Bloomberg‘s Partnership for a New American Economy and – together with Grover Norquist – promoted comprehensive immigration reform (what most call “amnesty”).

Now, either because he got pushback or to take the sales job to his Tea Parties base, Paul offers a guest editorial at Breitbart News ( peekURL.com/z96LtY3 ). I’ll briefly describe how it’s wrong and how he’s attempting to deceive you. If you’re a Rand Paul supporter, I hope to change your mind.

Paul begins:

I am for immigration reform because I am against allowing 12 million more illegal immigrants into our country. If we do nothing, 12 million more illegal immigrants will come. We must be in favor of reform—smart reform that starts with border security.

Characterizing that position as “amnesty” is simply untrue.

What we have now is a lawless border. Current policy is a beacon for more illegal immigrants. The Obama administration’s lawless executive orders legalizing people who came here illegally will only encourage more illegal immigration – unless we act now with real, strong, verifiable border security.

I am for immigration reform because what we have now is untenable. I voted against the Gang of Eight’s comprehensive immigration reform bill because it did not secure the border first. I will only support reform that has border security first as verifiable and ascertained by Congress, not the president.

My plan will not give the president the authority to simply declare that the border is secure. It will require yearly votes of Congress to ensure the president doesn’t get around the law.

My “Trust but Verify” plan will ensure that our border is secure. Under my plan, national security and border security will move as the first element of any reform and would require annual votes of Congress to establish that the border is truly secure. No other reform could go forward until this happened.

1. The first paragraph is the “we already have defacto amnesty” line popularized by Marco Rubio. Paul’s talking point is deceptive because it assumes we must choose between the current situation and some form of mass legalization. There are other options that Paul is ignoring, such as attrition. If Paul and his colleagues really wanted Obama to enforce immigration laws, they could make it happen. To some extent, Paul’s first paragraph is an extortionist’s threat: give me what I want or things will get worse.

2. For various reasons, the mass legalization Rand Paul wants would encourage more illegal immigration. It would give more power to far-left groups that currently support illegal immigration, such as the American Civil Liberties Union. Paul’s plan wouldn’t punish employers that knowingly hired illegal aliens in the past, it would let them off the hook and encourage them to keep hiring illegal aliens if they can. And, as can be seen currently, weakness on immigration – such as talk of mass legalization – can lead to a mad rush for the borders. Rand Paul’s plan would also reward political corruption, such as those politicians who’ve looked the other way on illegal immigration because of large donations from business groups. Rand Paul’s plan would reward such behavior and encourage more of it.

3. In the second paragraph, Rand Paul plays word games. His plan is what most people would refer to as “amnesty”. But, to avoid confusion, let’s play his game. Let’s not use the shorter “amnesty” but the longer “mass legalization”. Instead of arguing with Rand Paul whether his plan is amnesty or not, let’s just show how his plan will harm the U.S. See reform not amnesty for more on that aspect.

4. There is one group for whom Rand Paul’s plan – and all other immigration “reform” plans so far proposed – are definitively amnesty. As alluded to above, all those businesses that knowingly or not hired illegal aliens will get off the hook. Illegal aliens will be forced to pay some kind of fines (unless those are waived) and will face other “tough” punishment. But, their employers will get a full and complete amnesty for their past hiring of those illegal aliens. In some or many cases those employers knew what was going on but looked the other way, or knowingly accepted fake documents. They won’t face any sort of punishment for that.

5. Rand Paul is in the “secure the border first” crowd: as discussed at the link you have to ask what comes second. In Rand Paul’s case we know: mass legalization of millions of illegal aliens.

6. Whether putting Obama or Congress in charge of declaring the border secure, that’s letting the fox guard the henhouse. Obama, George W Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and previous Congresses brought us to the current situation. Rand Paul certainly isn’t doing all he could to secure the border right now, nor are most other leading politicians. Some of those politicians might be marginally better than Obama on immigration, but generally speaking trusting leading politicians – Democrats or Republicans – on immigration isn’t a wise idea because they’ve shown themselves to be quite corruptible (generally either by racial power in the case of the Democrats or business donations in the case of Republicans).

7. Why is Rand Paul holding “national security and border security” hostage to his mass legalization plan? If he were truly concerned about the security of the U.S., wouldn’t he at least push that separately? Yet, Rand Paul is tying them together: demanding mass legalization as a precondition to securing the border.

Rand Paul then details his high-tech plans for border security, which will include “and yes, surveillance drones”. Then:

My plan takes border security a step further than anybody else in Congress. Under my plan, Congress will vote every year on border security. If Congress votes that the border is not secure, elements of immigration reform will cease to go forward and visa programs will be slowed. If Congress does not think the border is secure after five years, every element of immigration reform will be stopped.

8. See #6 above. Congresses come and go, some will be better on immigration than others. The very people who’ve shown themselves to be corruptible on immigration will be the ones voting on whether to continue aspects of Rand Paul’s plan. His plan will give more power to the people and groups that currently try to undercut border security: the ACLU, the National Council of La Raza, and hundreds more. They’ll use that increased power to make sure that, for instance, politicians weaken some aspects of Rand Paul’s plan to allow certain programs to continue (like DACA) even if the border isn’t judged secure. Rand Paul’s last sentence above is cruelly deceptive: he knows that once his plan is started it’s not going to be stopped. The forces that would oppose stopping it or halting parts of it are too strong and have too much money.

Rand Paul continues:

Our nation is a nation of immigrants. Throughout history, our nation has been flooded with immigrants who have moved here with a flavor for the home country, yet they have assimilated into what we know today as America. That idea, and the American Dream, must be protected and preserved.

Immigrants are drawn to the magnet of free market capitalism here in the United States. Our nation should have open arms to immigrants who want to come her and work hard to make a new life in a free nation. As a libertarian-minded senator, I am attracted to the idea of somebody coming to this country with a couple dollars in his pocket, and then through hard work, make the American Dream a reality.

9. See nation of immigrants and immigration tradition fallacy for a discussion of the hoary talking points uses in the first paragraph above.

10. The people and groups that Rand Paul’s plan will give power to tend to oppose assimilation, such as the NCLR. There is little current external pressure on immigrants to assimilate. Those who try to assimilate immigrants tend to get smeared by the far-left and tend to back down. Rand Paul’s plan would make that worse.

11. The U.S. is a lot more than just the shopping mall/flea market Rand Paul envisions. Some immigrants have opinions on various topics that simply aren’t compatible with fundamental American concepts. We can’t have people coming here just because they want to make money: that’s not what the U.S. is all about.

Rand Paul ends with this:

I do not support amnesty, which is why I don’t support our current system with no border security and a blind eye to the problem.

I support legal, not illegal, immigration. We must embrace immigration and immigrants, and we must recognize that our country has been enriched by those who seek the freedom to make better lives for themselves. However, our current system is broken, and we cannot move towards reform until our border is truly and fully secure.

Rand Paul is still playing word games, still using bogus talking points (system is broken), and still holding border security hostage to his mass legalization plan. He’s also not putting numbers on the (no doubt high) legal immigration he wants.

We could move forward on border security right now. Rand Paul could go on a crusade demanding that Obama enforce immigration laws at the border and at the workplace. Rand Paul could speak out against the various actions Eric Holder and other administration officials have taken to encourage more illegal immigration. Instead, Rand Paul is holding all that hostage to a massive legalization plan that would have massive negative impacts on the U.S.

If you were and still are a Rand Paul supporter, I want to change your mind. Contact me at @24AheadDotCom.

If, on the other hand, you realize how deceptive Rand Paul is and want to oppose his plans, then make the arguments on this page to those who haven’t seen the light. That could take you as little as a few minutes: search Twitter for those who tweet approvingly to @SenRandPaul, and then make the points on this page to them.

“Terroristic” Dress-code Violations and Other Threats to Gun Ownership

By Claire Wolfe, June 7th 2014
JPFO writer contributor, © 2014.

JPFO.ORG

 

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If Thursday’s news reports are accurate, hysterical fear of “terrorism” has just reached a new low. Two dozen middle schoolers were suspended because they commented on or shared a Facebook post urging mass resistance to their school’s dress code. This is the kind of small act of resistance adolescents have indulged in forever — particularly in the heady last week before summer vacation.

Whether they deserve punishment or not is in the eye of the beholder. But according to at least one of the students and one parent, the principle of Cowen (I’m tempted to write “Coward”) Road Middle School in Griffin, Georgia, accused participants in the FB discussion of making “terroristic threats.”

I’ll wait a moment while your eyeballs stop rolling.

Now, you might laugh at the idea of a school official being so diaper-wetting petrified of a conspiracy to commit sartorial infractions that he or she feels terrorized and threatened. The situation is less funny to the honor student who got kicked out of school merely for typing, “I’m in!”

But the situation is really, really, really unfunny when you consider how the growing misuse of the concept of “terrorism” is damaging both the future of freedom and the future of one of freedom’s essential protectors, the right to own and use firearms.

Words have meaning

Wikipedia defines a ” terroristic threat” as: “a declaration of intent to commit a crime of violence against another with the intent of threatening a person, building, facility, or public or private habitat.”

I’ve never heard of anybody violently threatening to wear an outfit, have you? Even with rising fear of kids wearing gang colors or pro-gun tee-shirts, it’s hard to imagine how someone could “violently” wear a skirt or pair of pants.

But it’s still worse. The very concept of “terroristic threat” only entered the U.S. lexicon after 9-11, and that panicked school principle is far from the first to misuse the term and stretch the concept past its limits. Legalmatch.com notes that many states are increasingly redefining all manner of violent criminals as “terrorists.”

The concept of “terrorism” legitimately applies only to “those violent acts that are intended to create fear (terror); are perpetrated for a religious, political, or ideological goal; and deliberately target or disregard the safety of non-combatants (e.g., neutral military personnel or civilians).”

So never mind said school official’s alleged “terror” of defiantly dressed 12 year olds. Even a genuinely violent person shouldn’t be called a terrorist or be said to make “terroristic threats” unless he or she is using or threatening violence against innocents with ideological goals in mind.

But (you may be saying) why should we care if a word is being misused? We live in an age when terrorism — no matter what you call it — is a geniune threat; quit being petty about definitions, Claire!

If you’re saying that, I’ll refer you to Mr. Orwell for discussion on the importance of the meaning of words and the perils of their political abuse.

But if you’re wondering something more along the lines of, “What does all this have to do with guns and gun-rights?” … follow me.

What “terrorist” hysteria has to do with gun rights

There is this abominable piece of legislation that’s been introduced in the U.S. House and Senate repeatedly since at least 2009. Its title is the “Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act” (of 2009, 2011, 2013, etc.). According to the bill’s summary:

Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2013 – Amends the federal criminal code to authorize the Attorney General to deny the transfer of a firearm or the issuance of a firearms or explosives license or permit (or revoke such license or permit) if the Attorney General: (1) determines that the transferee is known (or appropriately suspected) to be engaged in terrorism or has provided material support or resources for terrorism; and (2) has a reasonable belief that the transferee may use a firearm in connection with terrorism. Allows any individual whose firearms or explosives license application has been denied to bring legal action to challenge the denial.

Extends the prohibition against the sale or distribution of firearms or explosives to include individuals whom the Attorney General has determined to be engaged in terrorist activities. Imposes criminal penalties on individuals engaged in terrorist activities who smuggle or knowingly bring firearms into the United States.

Authorizes the Attorney General to withhold information in firearms and explosives license denial revocation lawsuits and from employers if the Attorney General determines that the disclosure of such information would likely compromise national security.

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In other words, if this bill ever became law, one unelected official (currently that paragon of honesty, openness, and fairness, Eric Holder) would unilaterally decide who would be “allowed” to own a firearm. The process would be completely arbitrary, based solely on the AG’s subjective “determination,” and the process could be kept secret based on an equally subjective (and unverifiable) claim of “national security.”

Lucky you, though, you’d still have the right to sue after being denied your other constitutional rights. Maybe after five or six years, half a million dollars in legal expenses, and constant denials of needed information in the name of “national security” you might even win.

Fortunately, so far, this “terroristic threat” of a bill has never made it out of committee. At the same time, it’s not just one of those little “hobby horse” bills that certain lone legislators submit over and over and over again without either hope or co-sponsors. Given the right moment — the most handy crisis — this one could eventually pick up and go somewhere. And that would be a very bad thing.

The bill’s authors have never explained the difference between a “dangerous terrorist” and a harmless terrorist. Perhaps it’s the sort of tee shirts they wear. (Dangerous terrorists in red? Harmless terrorists in blue? It’s quite the mystery.) But the authors and co-sponsors are the heavyweights of authoritarian anti-gunnery. They include: Dianne Feinstein and Charles Schumer (of course) and Sens. Boxer, Gillibrand, Levin, and other usual suspects in the Senate. Signing on to this bill was one of the last legislative acts of Frank Lautenberg before his misspent (but very long and powerful) life ended. In the House, sponsors have included: Charles Rangel, Peter King, Henry Waxman, and others of their ilk.

But okay, maybe this bill will never, ever become law. We can hope. Still, it represents and reflects the very same trend that’s going on at Cowen Road Middle School — crying “terrorism” to justify every overreaction of authority. Not only is the language changing (through political manipulation), but so is the legal landscape of the U.S.

Don’t forget that, according to the FBI businesses should already report you as a suspected “domestic terrorist” if you do such innocuous things as pay with cash, buy MREs, get the same tattoo your friends have, talk about your constitutionally protected rights, or even park in the “wrong” parking space at a hotel or motel.

The Obama administration even cried “terrorism” to cover up a nasty paperwork error.

“Terrorism.” It’s so handy! So convenient!

Don’t think for one minute that this administration — or any other in the future — would hesitate to call all gun owners “terrorists” if it suited their political purposes. Don’t think power-seeking authoritarians would hesitate to declare gun ownership itself a “terroristic threat.” Maybe not this year or next. But when the word “terrorist” can be applied to anyone who challenges power, and that person so labeled can be punished accordingly — then eventually powerful people will use that “wonderful” control tool to fulfill their rapacious aims.

They haven’t succeeded yet, but already there are people in Congress who want to hand exactly that power over to unelected, secretive, gun-hating bureaucrats.