There is no "Arab world" consensus that the Israel-Palestinian question is the central Middle East issue

Great Zev Chafets piece at Bloomberg today about how, in an age in which Iran poses a dire threat to the entire world, Israel is not the crux on which Middle East stability and security hinges.

He contrasts the recent announcement that the US will make good on the 1995 act passed by the US Congress declaring Jerusalem as the Israeli capital with the policies of the two most notorious anti-Israel US presidents, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama:

Neither of those former presidents actually came out and said that Israel was the cause of all the Middle East’s problems. But they both based their regional diplomacy on the assumption.

In 2006, while promoting a book that likened Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians with South African apartheid, Carter opened a window on his real thoughts. "The heart and mind of every Muslim is affected by whether or not the Israel-Palestine issue is dealt with fairly,” he told an interviewer. He added that the U.S. is hated by "former close friends" such as Egypt and Jordan, "because we won’t do anything about the Palestinian plight."

This is what the American-Israeli scholar Martin Kramer calls “linkage” -- the myopic tendency to see Israel as a wrench in the wheel of America’s Arab policy. In that interview, Carter even called it the "linkage fact." But, to be fair, the concept didn’t originate with him.

In the mid-1940s, an on-balance pretty good Democrat president, Harry Truman, demonstrated far more vision and understanding of an overarching West than his State Department:

 This is what the American-Israeli scholar Martin Kramer calls “linkage” -- the myopic tendency to see Israel as a wrench in the wheel of America’s Arab policy. In that interview, Carter even called it the "linkage fact." But, to be fair, the concept didn’t originate with him.

It goes back at least to the end of World War II. In 1945, the State Department sent newly inaugurated President Harry Truman a memo warning of “continual tenseness in the situation in the Near East largely as a result of the Palestine question.” State’s recommendation was to avoid Zionist activists and think about America’s long-term interests.

Truman (like Trump) had a low opinion of expert advice. In 1947, he ordered a reluctant U.S. ambassador vote “yes” in the United Nations General Assembly on the creation of the Jewish state. The contrary assessment among the diplomats Truman derided as the “striped pants boys” was, I think it is fair to say, misguided.  

More recently, we see that much of the "Arab world" actually has had a "meh" response to the Jerusalem announcement:

When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey called an emergency summit of the Organization of Islamic States to protest Trump’s Jerusalem decision, more than half of the invited heads of state and prime ministers didn’t bother to show up.

And then there is the approach of the Most Equal Comrade. As we've learned in the last few days, the MEC's administration apparently was letting Iranian proxy Hezbollah run cocaine into the United States, because it was more important to the MEC - and his State Department - to get a worthless "deal" in Iran's nuclear program. That kind of emphasis on appeasement of a mortal enemy was on full display in his answer to a question about the Israel-Palestinian issue:

In an appearance with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he was asked if reining in Iran’s nuclear ambitions was a necessary precursor to reviving the peace process. “If there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way,” he replied. “To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians -- between the Palestinians and the Israelis -- then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with a potential Iranian threat.”

With the recent Jerusalem announcement, and the presence of Nikki Haley, who has, over the course of this year proven to be a national treasure, America seems to finally be getting its head on straight regarding what actual problems are in the Mideast, and what phenomena aren't really such a being deal.

 

 

How badly did Barack Obama want to appease our mortal enemy?

The patty-cake with Iran JCPOA entered into by the P5+1, under the leadership of Secretary Global-Test and Wendy Sherman of the post-American State Department, is perhaps the most reckless agreement ever signed by this nation. It's now so firmly entrenched that there's no way to undo all the business deals entered into by companies in P5+1 countries. But one day, sooner not later, Iran is going to pose as big a threat as North Korea currently poses.

But so hot were Global-Test, Sherman, and the Most Equal Comrade to get it inked - and declare if official, even though it should have been a treaty and thereby been ratified by Congress - that it began upping our danger level even before it was a done deal:

Before Barack Obama decided to pursue the nuclear deal with Iran, the DEA had a major operation called Project Cassandra. This operation had identified Hezbollah as a major supplier of cocaine to the US and other countries, along with its usual terrorist activities on behalf of its sponsors in Tehran. The DEA and FBI had built criminal cases against major players in Hezbollah’s drug and arms networks, succeeding in getting sealed indictments and finding witnesses for prosecution.

And then the Obama administration stepped in to drain it of all resources, just to protect its deal with Iran:

One Obama-era Treasury official, Katherine Bauer, in little-noticed written testimony presented last February to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, acknowledged that “under the Obama administration … these [Hezbollah-related] investigations were tamped down for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.”

As a result, some Hezbollah operatives were not pursued via arrests, indictments, or Treasury designations that would have blocked their access to U.S. financial markets, according to Bauer, a career Treasury official, who served briefly in its Office of Terrorist Financing as a senior policy adviser for Iran before leaving in late 2015. And other “Hezbollah facilitators” arrested in France, Colombia, Lithuania have not been extradited — or indicted — in the U.S., she wrote. …

Asher, for one, said Obama administration officials expressed concerns to him about alienating Tehran before, during and after the Iran nuclear deal negotiations. This was, he said, part of an effort to “defang, defund and undermine the investigations that were involving Iran and Hezbollah,” he said.

“The closer we got to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went away,” Asher said. “So much of the capability, whether it was special operations, whether it was law enforcement, whether it was [Treasury] designations — even the capacity, the personnel assigned to this mission — it was assiduously drained, almost to the last drop, by the end of the Obama administration.”

Cassandra turned out to be an ironic code name for the operation. In Greek mythology, Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam of Troy, was doomed to utter accurate prophecies that went unbelieved by all who heard them.

This years-long effort to identify Hezbollah’s drug and arms operations and to find their financial resources ended up going the way of Cassandra’s prophecies, too — being utterly ignored despite their truth. (In fact, the project name derived specifically, if indirectly, from this myth.)
Not all of these cases involved international operations, either. The DEA and FBI found Hezbollah operations in the US, and yet the Department of Justice refused to prosecute the cases:

In Philadelphia, the FBI-led task force had spent two years bolstering its case claiming that Safieddine had overseen an effort to purchase 1,200 military-grade assault rifles bound for Lebanon, with the help of Kelly and the special narcoterrorism prosecutors in New York.

Now, they had two key eyewitnesses. One would identify Safieddine as the Hezbollah official sitting behind a smoked-glass barricade who approved the assault weapons deal. And an agent and prosecutor had flown to a remote Asian hotel and spent four days persuading another eyewitness to testify about Safieddine’s role in an even bigger weapons and drugs conspiracy, multiple former law enforcement officials confirmed to POLITICO.

Convinced they had a strong case, the New York prosecutors sent a formal prosecution request to senior Justice Department lawyers in Washington, as required in such high-profile cases. The Justice Department rejected it, and the FBI and DEA agents were never told why, those former officials said.

According to Meyer’s sources, Hezbollah has a lot of tentacles in the US, including in rental car companies on the legal side, and a booming cocaine smuggling and distribution business on the illegal side. It should have been easy to pursue those cases in US courts. And yet the Obama administration wanted nothing to do with cutting off Hezbollah’s economic underpinnings in the US, even while listing them as a terrorist organization. 

This is scurrilous in the extreme. So mad with the desire to have a legacy as visionary usherers-in of a golden era of international harmony were these preening narcissists that they let Iran's worldwide jihad network prosper and expand.

Much of the damage the previous administration did to post-America is now being reversed, but this is one genie it will be daunting at best to put back in the bottle.

Will any of these people ever be held to account?

The North Korean conundrum doesn't exist in a vacuum

Matthew R.J. Brodsky, a senior fellow at the Security Studies Group and senior Middle East analyst at Wikistrat, writing at NRO, details the connections between the Hermit Kingdom and Iran and Syria:

Last week, Reuters revealed the existence of a confidential U.N. report claiming that two North Korean shipments bound for the government agency in charge of Syria’s chemical weapons were intercepted in the past six months.

Put in its proper context, the news of the shipments, both of which violated existing international sanctions, is further evidence of North Korea’s nefarious role in spreading weapons of mass destruction and missile technology to other rogue regimes across the globe. The U.N. report highlights the extent to which North Korea has been a principal strategic partner to Iran and Syria for decades. Understood correctly, it should have major implications not only for how the U.S. handles the saber-rattling regime of Kim Jong-un but for how the Trump administration chooses to approach Iran today.

Pulling a single thread reveals the tangled web of relations between Pyongyang, Tehran, and Damascus. Take, for instance, the 2007 Israeli raid that destroyed Syria’s covert nuclear reactor. North Korean scientists provided the technology and material for that reactor, which, according to former CIA director Michael Hayden, was “an exact copy” of a North Korean reactor. “The Koreans were the only ones to build these reactors since they purloined the designs from the British in the 1960s,” Hayden recalled. Ten North Koreans who “had been helping with the construction” of the Syrian reactor were killed in the Israeli strike, according to media reports at the time.

In 1991, then-Syrian president Hafez al-Assad made a military-acquisition alliance with North Korea, which allowed him to purchase missiles from the North, and gave him access to the expertise needed to produce more-advanced weapons domestically. North Korea also helped the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center construct a missile complex in Aleppo used for fitting chemical weapons on Scud missiles in the early 1990s. A quarter century later, it turns out the two recently intercepted North Korean shipments were headed for the same Syrian agency.

He makes clear the supremely dangerous folly of the whole process of patty-cake whereby the JCPOA was foisted on the world:

The watershed year between the two states came in 2012, as President Obama was concluding his disastrous nuclear deal with Tehran. According to detailed analysis published in February by Israel’s BESA Center, since reaching their cooperation agreement, North Korea and Iran have been working on “miniaturizing a nuclear implosion device in order to fit its dimensions and weight to the specifications of the Shahab-3 re-entry vehicle.” The authors of that analysis went on to conclude that, “the nuclear and ballistic interfaces between the two countries” are “long-lasting, unique, and intriguing,” and that North Korea is ready and able to clandestinely assist Iran in circumventing the nuclear deal, while Iran is likely helping North Korea upgrade its own strategic capacities.

The Parchin Connection

It should set off alarm bells that North Korea and Iran have been working together to overcome some of the remaining challenges that prevent Pyongyang from targeting the U.S. homeland with nuclear warheads — namely, the warhead-miniaturization process and the perfection of its long-range ballistic missiles. But it should set off sirens that some of that work has been carried out at Parchin, the Iranian facility that Tehran insists is a military site and keeps off limits to international inspections.

Parchin should be familiar. When Obama administration officials were cooking up their nuclear deal with Iran, they repeatedly promised that critically important “anytime, anywhere” inspections would have to be part of the agreement. What happened instead was that they folded like a tablecloth, as they did on every declared red-line issue crucial to verifying Iran’s past nuclear-related military activity. In 2015, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei personally and repeatedly rejected any access to what he called military sites, including Parchin. So Team Obama came up with a secret side agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which would allow Iran to inspect its own site and provide its own soil samples.

Anyone could have guessed what would happen next.

Yup. A new report from the Institute for Science and International Security has revealed Mn-made uranium on samples taken by the IAEA.

Something the US has not done - at least very well - so far is present a unified policy for dealing with rogue regimes with nuclear ambitions.

The world's bad guys are in touch with each other and cannot be dealt with in piecemeal fashion.

Rex Tillerson may not be an outright appeaser like his immediate predecessors, but he sure lacks clarity

Has anyone else noticed that the public pronouncements of the president and his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson aren't always in sync?

That in itself is a bit confusing and unsettling, but what amplifies the unsettled feeling is that neither one of them seem to fully grasp the dynamics of the particular foreign-policy situations they address.


Last week, I wrote a post entitled "Afghanistan Policy Under Trump - Initial Thoughts." I'm glad I titled it thusly. I've had some time to further consider aspects of what I wrote, particularly this point:

There is validity to the argument that goes, "We've been at this longer than we've ever been at any other war, and we're still facing the same basic problem. Doesn't that tell us that our basic approach is not getting us desired results?" But, given that Afghanistan is about as failed a state as there can be, the argument that bad actors rush into power vacuums holds greater sway, it seems to me.

Andrew McCarthy, writing at NRO, has a piece this morning that, taken as a whole, invites us to not be overly compelled by the bad-actors-rushing-into-power-vacuums argument. His main point is that because the Taliban's basic strategy has always been to outlast the West and because, as McCarthy points out . . .

So virulently anti-American is their totalitarian ideology that the Taliban are making common cause with their Shiite counterparts in Iran to persevere in their jihad against American forces . . . 

that there will be no decisive US / West victory over them.

But McCarthy makes a number of important subsidiary points along the way that launched my train of thought about the Tillerson - Trump divergence.

There's this:

By the time the secretary was done tinkering with the president’s “plan for victory,” one couldn’t be sure if the Taliban was an enemy, a terrorist organization, or a “peace partner.” Indeed, not content to leave pathetic enough alone, Tillerson contemplated “political legitimacy” for the mullahs, proclaiming that the Trump administration “stand[s] ready to support peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban without precondition.” You read that right: without precondition — not even the condition that they abandon their alliance with al-Qaeda (you know, the reason we went to Afghanistan in the first place). As the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes observed, this is “the same kind of diplomatic tail-chasing that was a priority of the Obama administration’s failed approach.” 

The band’s got new players. The pitch is a bit higher. But the song remains the same. 

Ultimately, Tillerson elaborated, “it is going to be up to the Afghan government and the representatives of the Taliban to work through a reconciliation process.” Sound familiar? Yeah . . . just like Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, during an April 2016 trip to Kabul, expressing “support for the government of Afghanistan’s efforts to end the conflict in Afghanistan through a peace and reconciliation process with the Taliban.”

A little later in the piece, he spells out what is glaringly wrong with Tillerson's take:

To be fair, there are no good answers about what to do in that awful country. But it is hard to imagine a worse answer than trying to reconcile the Taliban to the regime.

He concludes that  . . .

We should not inch up our forces in Afghanistan. We should strip down to the minimum assets needed to carry out and support counterterrorism strikes. And we should have as little to do with this region as our vital interests allow.

What I want to come back to, though, is Tillerson's role in this. His tone regarding Afghanistan is disturbingly similar to that he's taken with North Korea:

Tillerson, speaking at the State Department press briefing, stressed that the US was not seeking regime change or looking to send its military "north of the 38th parallel" that divides North and South Korea. But he emphasized that the danger posed by Pyongyang, which test fired two intercontinental ballistic missiles in July, was unacceptable. 

"We do not seek regime change. We do not seek an accelerated reunification of the peninsula. We do not seek an excuse to send our military north of the 38th parallel," Tillerson said during a surprise visit to the agency's briefing room on Tuesday. 

"We are not your enemy, we are not your threat, but you are presenting an unacceptable threat to us and we have to respond," Tillerson said, speaking to North Korea directly. "We would like to sit and have a dialogue about the future." 

Mr. Secretary, it seems to me that  North Korea has already determined that we are its enemy. And that's not just a matter of differing viewpoints or easy-to-dismiss bluster characteristic of rogue regime. When a nation-state makes such a bold claim about another nation-state, attention must be paid.

We do seek regime change and reunification, or at least we ought to. Does Tillerson understand this? And if so, isn't he concerned that, if things develop certain way going forward, he may come to look like a liar?

We are, after all, currently involved in drills with South Korea that involve decapitation-of-top-leadership scenarios.

When Tillerson assumed his post, there was much talk about how he would root out the State Department's entrenched bureaucracy and bring clarity and consistency to its mission.

That hasn't happened.

On the administration re-certifyig that Iran is in compliance with the JCPOA

Just came across two views on this that, while they have in common the core understanding that the agreement is bad and should never have been drafted and signed, come to different conclusions as to whether we are stuck with it.

John Bolton says there is no reason for these quarterly recertifications:

Certification is an unforced error because the applicable statute (the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, or “INARA”) requires neither certifying Iranian compliance nor certifying Iranian noncompliance. Paula DeSutter and I previously explained that INARA requires merely that the Secretary of State (to whom President Obama delegated the task) “determine…whether [he] is able to certify” compliance (emphasis added). The secretary can satisfy the statute simply by “determining” that he is not prepared for now to certify compliance and that U.S. policy is under review.

This is a policy of true neutrality while the review continues. Certifying compliance is far from neutral. Indeed, it risks damaging American credibility should a decision subsequently be made to abrogate the deal.

He addresses the partner-in-good-faith issue by stating forthrightly what America's priority ought to be:

Within the Trump administration, JCPOA supporters contend that rejecting the deal would harm the United States by calling into question our commitment to international agreements generally. There is ominous talk of America “not living up to its word.”

This is nonsense. The president’s primary obligation is to keep American citizens safe from foreign threats. Should President George W. Bush have kept the United States in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, rather than withdraw to allow the creation of a limited national missile-defense shield to protect against rogue-state nuclear attacks? Was Washington’s “commitment” to the ABM Treaty more important than protecting innocent civilians from nuclear attacks by the ayatollahs or North Korea’s Kim family dictatorship?

Similarly, President Bush directed that we unsign the treaty creating the International Criminal Court because we had no intention of ever becoming a party. Was he also wrong to extricate American service members and intelligence personnel — not to mention ordinary citizens — from the risk of arbitrary, unjustified and politically motivated ICC detention and prosecution?

Of course, the answer is “no.” The president would be derelict in his duty if he failed to put the interests of U.S. citizens first, rather than worrying about “the international community” developing a case of the vapors. The Trump administration itself has already shown the courage of its convictions by withdrawing from the Paris climate accords. Compared to that, abrogating the JCPOA is a one-inch putt. 

Strieff at Red State says that determining an inability to certify is a de facto acknowledgement of Iranian compliance:

The rub is that under the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) it is left to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to vet Iranian compliance and, absent a negative report, the administration has to either abrogate the agreement arbitrarily or it has to begrudgingly recertify Iran as being in compliance.

Now, the US is free to impose more sanctions on Iran due to its ongoing provable hostile moves, and strieff notes several that are in the works.

But the best he can muster in terms of arguing that we can't just pull out altogether is to say that we'd take "a major diplomatic hit."

I think Bolton effectively rebuts this case. When US interests, most urgently its national security, are at stake, we can hardly be concerned with "'the international community' developing a case of the vapors."

One for the good-move side of the ledger

There's nobody who shouldn't be able to cheer this:

Six teenage girls from Afghanistan had been chosen to compete in the first ever FIRST Global Challenge, held in Washington, D.C. The inaugural competition gives teams from around the world the opportunity to show off the robots they've created. Yet, the U.S. State Department denied the Afghan girls team visas – twice. As such, the girls were planning to instead participate in the contest via Skype.

Learning of the predicament, President Trump sought out National Security Council officials to act on the contestants' behalf. Those officials then contacted Homeland Security, which approved the girls entry via the “parole” system that allows visitors to stay in the U.S. for 10 days.

“The State Department worked incredibly well with the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that this case was reviewed and handled appropriately,” Dina Powell, Trump's deputy national security adviser for strategy, said in a statement. “We could not be prouder of this delegation of young women who are also scientists — they represent the best of the Afghan people and embody the promise that their aspirations can be fulfilled. They are future leaders of Afghanistan and strong ambassadors for their country.” 

The all-girls team dominated the science and technology competition in Afghanistan – an impressive feat in a country where 66 percent of girls ages 12 to 15 are out of school, reports Human Rights Watch. The organization provided more stunning statistics.

In a country where only 37 percent of adolescent girls and 19 percent of adult women are literate, donor countries should be sweeping these girls up to see how their achievement can be replicated – not slamming the door in their faces.

Now, that's the America we like to see. (And the Afghanistan we like to see!) You go, girls!

Post-America's new Caribbean buddy: up to its eyeballs in spying on us

The Left's new-found indignation about what Russia is up to - most prominently manifested by the Most Equal Comrade's expulsion of 21 diplomats - doesn't extend to such a focus on post-America's newest partner in patty-cake, Cuba.

Quite the contrary. For Cuba, diplomacy equals spying:

 . . . in a rare hiccup of honesty (or ghastly error) CNN itself admits to some very important Cuba-sponsored unpleasantness, about which most Americans remain ignorant. “The Most Dangerous U.S. Spy You’ve Never Heard of,” is how they titled a special on this Castro-sponsored spy named Ana Belen Montes (16 years after her arrest.)

In brief: the spy’s name is Ana Belen Montes, known as "Castro’s Queen Jewel" in the intelligence community. In 2002 she was convicted of the same crimes as Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and today she serves a 25-year sentence in Federal prison. Only a plea bargain spared her from sizzling in the electric chair like the Rosenbergs.

Significantly, Ana Belen Montes was arrested on September 21st 2001. That’s exactly ten days after Al Qaeda demolished the Twin Towers. By then she had been uncovered for a while, but, as is customary in such cases, was being monitored to see if her activities would reveal others within her spy network. That monitoring was scheduled to continue for much longer, but her access to U.S. intelligence secrets unrelated to Cuba (mid-east, for instance) demanded she be shut down—and quickly.

Interestingly, just days after the 9-11 terror attack, Castro’s KGB-founded and mentored intelligence mounted a major deception operation attempting to trip-up our investigation into the terrorist culprits:

“In the six months after the 9/11 attacks,” ran the Miami Herald investigative report, “up to 20 Cubans walked into U.S. embassies around the world and offered information on terrorism threats. Eventually, all were deemed to be Cuban intelligence agents and collaborators, purveying fabricated information. Two Cuba experts said spies sent by Cuba to the United States were part of a permanent intelligence program to mislead, misinform and identify U.S. spies.”

"Montes passed some of our most sensitive information about Cuba back to Havana" revealed then Undersecretary for International Security, John Bolton.

Shortly after Montes’ conviction a Cuban spy named Gustavo Machin, who worked under diplomatic cover in Washington D.C. (and thus enjoyed “diplomatic immunity”) along with 14 of his KGB-trained Cuban colleagues, were all booted from the U.S. for serving as accomplices to super-spy Ana Belen Montes.

Now, thanks to Obama’s “normalization” with the Castro-Family-Crime-and-Terror-Sponsoring Syndicate (commonly and grotesquely mislabeled as “Cuba” by the media and Obama State Dept.) Gustavo Machin is a regular visitor and main operative in the newly-opened Cuban embassy in Washington D.C.!

And it's not just Machin:

"All Cuban personnel now working in the (U.S) Interests Section (in Havana) work for Cuban State Security,” revealed high-ranking Cuban intelligence defector Pedro Riera Escalante last year. “All housing for (U.S.) officials may have microphones and other devices installed.”

"Virtually every member of Cuba's U.N mission is an intelligence agent," revealed Alcibiades Hidalgo, who defected to the U.S. in 2002 after serving as Raul Castro's Chief of Staff and himself as Cuba's ambassador to the U.N. 

But it was more important for the MEC to stoke his ego and convince himself that he had left some kind of grand legacy of unicorns and rainbows that it was to see to actual US security.

There is no front, no aspect of American life, that has not been gravely harmed by this outgoing regime.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The world-stage fruits of planned decline

How far post-America has fallen from the issuing of red lines:

Serious discussions are being held over an approaching end to the bloody civil war in Syria. Russia, Turkey and Iran will be participating. The U.S., however, was not invited. 

Our exclusion, former UN Ambassador John Bolton told radio host Hugh Hewitt on Wednesday, is "really remarkable" and is a result of the Obama administration's weak foreign policy, which has diminished our international clout.

"It's a sign of the times," Bolton said. "It is a precise reflection of the diminution of American influence under the Obama administration." 

The State Department, however, is insisting their absence is nothing out of the ordinary.

“It wasn’t about being kicked out of the party,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said. “There have always been multilateral discussions about Syria that we haven’t been a party to and this is another one. I totally understand that.” 

Kirby said the administration would welcome any better outcome in Syria – whether or not they’re part of the discussion.

The U.S., he said, is still going to be a leader in this effort. 

Well, the Most Equal Comrade told us in his last press conference as dictator of post-America that his rule has been a series of foreign-policy successes.

When Madame BleachBit says she can't recall something . . .

 . . . you can be sure she's lying.

Today's exhibit:

This is just another lie from a compulsive liar, lying about her national security-endangering email scandal for which nobody has been held accountable -- to the reported chagrin of the career FBI agents and DOJ lawyers who worked the case.  Via the Washington Examiner, here we go again:

Responding to a set of questions under oath last week, Clinton said through her lawyer that she did not recall discussing her server with Bryan Pagliano, the IT aide whose immunity deal was the first to emerge publicly from the year-long FBI probe. "Secretary Clinton states that she does not recall having communications with Bryan Pagliano concerning or relating to the management, preservation, deletion, or destruction of any emails in her clintonemail.com email account," Clinton testified through her lawyer, David Kendall, after raising objections to the question. But emails provided to conservative-leaning Judicial Watch through the Freedom of Information Act show Clinton included Pagliano in discussions about her Blackberry, iPad and server when her network experienced problems in 2012..."Let me take a look at the server to see if it offers any insight," Pagliano wrote in an email to Clinton after she complained to him and Cooper of the "troubles" plaguing her Blackberry. The new records were among the roughly 15,000 emails FBI agents turned over to the State Department at the conclusion of their investigation.

Her testimony was that she "does not recall" ever communicating with Bryan Pagliano, the IT tech who set up and operated her bootleg, unsecure, improperserver.  That doesn't pass the smell test on its face.  She never communicated with the guy who was running this scheme for her?  Buying that story requires a "willful suspension of disbelief," as Clinton once said in a nasty partisan confrontation with David Petraeus (approximately 1,000 official emails with whom her team wrongfully deleted and withheld from the State Department, about which Clinton then lied).  Beyond the smell test, these newly-released emails identify at least one instance in which Clinton personally emailed Pagliano, seeking assistance when her system was on the fritz (relatedly, you may remember that during a separate bout of server technical difficulties, the State Department actually disabled its official system's virtual defenses in order to try to accommodate her issue).  Sec. Clinton reached out to Pagliano for help, and he replied that he was working on the issue.  Does anyonebelieve this was the only time the two interacted?  It's a safe bet that she can't recall that either.  Meanwhile, experts are casting doubts on former State Department official Patrick Kennedy's tale about why he was in touch with an FBI official about email classifications, which he insists was not a quid pro quo offer:

A top former Justice Department privacy officer on Wednesday called it “extremely unlikely” that a senior U.S. diplomat would normally discuss the nuances of classification levels of one of Hillary Clinton’s emails about Benghazi with the deputy assistant director of the FBI’s international operations bureau. Patrick Kennedy, the State Department’s under secretary of management, was accused this week of offering a possible quid pro quo with the FBI in May 2015 to regarding the classification of an email about the 2012 attack on a diplomatic compound in northern Libya. In exchange for keeping the email unclassified, FBI documents released this week suggested, the State Department would agree to host more FBI agents in Iraq...the Justice Department’s former information and privacy director, Dan Metcalfe, on Wednesday said it was “extremely unlikely” that the Kennedy would seek advice on this particular classification issue from now-retired FBI agent Brian McCauley, who at the time was the bureau’s deputy assistant director for international operations. Instead, Metcalfe suggested, Kennedy likely called [McCauley] knowing the FBI wanted more agents in Iraq, but had been stymied in the past.

In other words, Kennedy's attempted machinations were basically exactly that they looked like: A political effort to protect Hillary Clinton, via mutual backscratching.  Nice try, Patrick -- who seems to feature prominently in Hillary scandals with curious frequency.

She hasn't even succeeded the Most Equal Comrade as dictator of post-America yet, and already there's not one impartial entity in the post-American government.

They smell weakness - today's edition

If their buzzing of our planes, the annexation of Crimea, the savage bombing campaign it is currently waging in Syria, and the sale of anti-aircraft batteries to Iran weren't enough to convince you of a sea change in Russia's official attitude toward post-America, perhaps the message state-connected Russians are putting forth on social media will prove the tipping point:

White House press secretary Josh Earnest is used to being a political target — but not a military one. 

Moscow’s Embassy in Washington tweeted an image Wednesday juxtaposing a photo of an anti-aircraft missile system alongside — and pointed at — the White House spokesman’s face.

Speaking to reporters later that day, Earnest laughed off the tweet. “I have no idea what message they were trying to send,” he said. But the tweet's text was clear enough: It was a warning to the U.S. about its military role in Syria. “Russia will take every defensive measure necessary to protect its personnel,” it read in part.

The bellicose tweet was just the latest example of an increasingly snarky, sarcastic and even personal, Russian tone toward the U.S. “The negative pivot by Russia is palpable,” said Obama’s former ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul. Yet Kerry and President Barack Obama continue to pursue dialogue with Moscow, convinced that the only thing worse than talking through the escalating insults is not talking at all.

Even as Earnest fielded questions about the menacing tweet, the State Department’s top Russia official, Victoria Nuland, was in Moscow to discuss Ukraine. And Secretary of State John Kerry was on the phone Wednesday with his Russian counterpart, discussing Syria two days after the U.S. declared an end to formal talks with Russia aimed at establishing a cease-fire there. 

“Engagement continues,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner conceded Wednesday, insisting, to the confusion of State Department reporters, that Kerry’s informal talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are distinct from the defunct Syria cease-fire talks.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova  knows how to leave a mark:

last month, after Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, pleaded at the United Nations for the lives of civilians in besieged Aleppo, Syria, Zakharova responded with a sarcastic invitation for the American to join her on an expenses-paid trip to the country.

“Don’t be frightened. Nobody will lay a finger on you in my presence,” Zahkarova wrote on Facebook. “Unless, of course, your guys don’t again ‘mistakenly’ strike the wrong target.”

“Russia’s Zakharova Viciously Mocks America’s U.N. Ambassador,” cheered a Sputnik headline.

Behind closed doors, Obama officials say, Russian diplomats take a more sober tone. Kerry’s constant interaction with Lavrov, with whom he sometimes speaks several times a week, are “professional,” said a senior State Department official. “That doesn't mean things don’t get heated now and then, but I’ve never seen either of them let it get personal.” 

The official added that the U.S. strives not to respond in kind to Russia’s taunts. “We work very hard to be straightforward. No snark. No sarcasm. Nothing shrill. It’s beneath us, and, frankly, beneath the seriousness of the issues to fall into that sort of behavior,” said one senior State Department official.

Of course, Secretary Global-Test is in full gosh-darn-it-this-is-unhelpful mode.

This is a deep, deep level of damage and danger.

If the ostensible objective is for the world's great powers to have common aims, what's up with the S-300 system in Syria?

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air looks at not only the speciousness of the Russian claim that this move is a routine security precaution, but also at post-America's gosh-dang-it why-do-you-have-to-go-and-be-counter-productive response:

Russia admitted today that it had installed a new S-300 air defense system in Syria, a story first reported yesterday, but denied it had any other purpose than Russia’s own defenses. The move comes as diplomatic relations between Washington and Moscow near collapse, and appears to be intended as a message from Vladimir Putin to Barack Obama:

The Russian Defence Ministry said on Tuesday it had deployed an S-300 missile system to its Tartus naval base in Syria.

“The missile battery is intended to ensure the safety of the naval base … It is unclear why the deployment of the S-300 caused such alarm among our Western partners,” the ministry said in a statement.

State-owned TASS offered a more detailed apologia for the deployment of the S-300, including a claim that it’s not actually a new move, nor the most advanced system it’s placed:

“Let me remind you that S-300 is an exceptionally defensive system and it poses no threat to anybody. Moreover, a ship-born equivalent of that system – called Fort was present in the region before. The Black Sea Fleet’s guided missile cruiser The Moskva is armed with it,” Konashenkov said.

Russia last year moved to Syria its newest air defense system S-400. As Russian President Vladimir Putin said in the middle of last March, S-400 systems and short-range systems Pantsir would remain on permanent combat duty in Syria.

Well, maybe. Both the S-300 and S-400 systems operate as surface-to-air defenses against traditional air attacks, but perhaps more pointedly both also operate as anti-ballistic missile defense systems. Recall that Russia objected so strenuously to those systems in eastern Europe that the Obama administration backed out of a deal with Poland and Czechia to install our own there as part of a strategy to contain Iran. Adding more components to their existing capability in Syria isn’t just a business-as-usual event, and makes our retreat in 2009 look even more foolish in retrospect.

Moreover, what threat prompted this defense? Ostensibly, the Russians are fighting Syrian rebels, militias without air forces or any ballistic missile capability. Clearly they’re not worried about the rebels achieving air supremacy in the area around Tartus. It’s meant as a message to the US, and it presents a new threat to our aircraft and the anti-ISIS coalition’s aircraft flying sorties in the region. However, the stationary S-300 probably presents less of a threat to the eastern sorties, as its range is generally limited to 200 km less, than the mobile S-400, with a range of 400 km. The introduction of the latter system was more provocative than the fixed-range installation of the S-300 is, all factors considered. Still, the message is clear to the US — stay out of western Syria and don’t mess with Bashar Assad.

So much for Hillary Clinton’s reset button, eh? John Kerry ripped Russia earlier today for its reliance on projections of power rather than diplomacy, and their support of Assad’s criminal regime . . . 

And he goes on to remind us that the Most Equal Comrade snarkily said to Mitt Romney in one of the 2012 debates, "The 1980s called. They want their foreign policy back."

This is the kind of clown show that is supposed to keep you safe in your bed at night.

Reset much?

Our overlords sure are wizzes at diplomacy. Post-America's relations with other major world powers get more unicorns and rainbows all the time:

Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended a deal with the United States on Monday on the disposal of weapons-grade plutonium because of "unfriendly" acts by Washington.

In a decree, Putin accused the U.S. of creating "a threat to strategic stability" and Russia said the U.S. failed "to ensure the implementation of its obligations to utilize surplus weapons-grade plutonium," Reuters reported.

The two countries are currently at odds over the Ukraine, where Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, and the five-year conflict in Syria, according to Reuters.

Putin said in the decree that Russia had to take "urgent measures to defend the security of the Russian Federation," the BBC reported.
Under the 2000 agreement, the U.S. and Russia is expected to get rid of 34 metric tons of plutonium by burning it in reactors, according to the BBC. The deal came into effect in 2010 and was signed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

"For quite a long time, Russia had been implementing it (the agreement) unilaterally," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday.

"Now, taking into account this tension (in relations) in general ... the Russian side considers it impossible for the current state of things to last any longer," Preskov said, according to Reuters.

That's why we pay the likes of Global-Test and Madame BleachBit the big bucks.

The failure of yet another of Secretary Global-Test's "agreements"

The latest accord attempting to calm the situation is Syria is not going well:

US President Barack Obama will huddle with top national security aides -- including his secretaries of state and defense -- Friday, amid deep unease over a tenuous Syria ceasefire deal.

Barely a week since the United States and Russia agreed to halt bombing and let humanitarian aid into Aleppo, shaky implementation looks set to dominate a meeting ostensibly about countering the Islamic State group.

The deal has somewhat quieted the bombs over Syria's second city, but aid convoys have not been allowed to reach the roughly 250,000 civilians besieged by government forces.

Washington and Moscow are already trading blame over who is responsible.

"Right now, the trucks that could bring them lifesaving assistance are idling on the wrong side of the border," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Thursday.

"That's the direct responsibility of the Assad regime and their benefactors in Moscow."

A Russian military spokesman earlier slammed the United States for what he called "rhetorical fog" intended "to hide the fact that it is not fulfilling its part of the obligations."

Only the Syrian army is observing the ceasefire, he said, pointing the finger at US-backed rebel groups.

Since US Secretary of State John Kerry agreed the deal with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov after marathon talks in Geneva, Obama has increasingly been forced to referee disputes within his own administration about the agreement.

Some within the Pentagon have expressed deep skepticism that Russia will live up to its side of the bargain and believe Kerry is being led down an alley.

Russia, critics say, has repeatedly used talks to blunt criticism of its support of Assad, sow doubt among US allies on the ground and buy time for Syrian forces to improve their position.

The post-American State Department is utterly worthless.

Gotta love that post-American State Department

Ya got yer "appropriate vetting":

Gulmurod Khalimov, the new ISIS military commander whom the U.S. just days ago announced a $3 million bounty for, was trained by the State Department in an anti-terror program as recently as 2014 while serving in the security service of Tajikistan.

He replaces former ISIS commander Tarkhan Batirashvili, aka Umar al-Shishani, who was also trained by the United States as part of the Georgian army and who ISIS claimed was killed fighting in Iraq this past July.

The State Department confirmed Khalimov's U.S.-provided training to CNN in May 2015:

"From 2003-2014 Colonel Khalimov participated in five counterterrorism training courses in the United States and in Tajikistan, through the Department of State's Diplomatic Security/Anti-Terrorism Assistance program," said spokeswoman Pooja Jhunjhunwala.

The program is intended to train candidates from participating countries in the latest counterterrorism tactics, so they can fight the very kind of militants that Khalimov has now joined.

A State Department official said Khalimov was trained in crisis response, tactical management of special events, tactical leadership training and related issues.

Unironically, the State Department spokeswoman said that Khalimov had been appropriately vetted:
At that time, Khalimov appeared in a video threatening the United States:

"All appropriate Leahy vetting was undertaken in advance of this training," said spokeswoman Jhunjhunwala.

"Listen, you American pigs: I've been to America three times. I saw how you train soldiers to kill Muslims," he says.

Then, he threatens, "we will find your towns, we will come to your homes, and we will kill you." 

Your tax dollars at work.

The giant "Please kill us off" sign that Western civilization wears around its neck

So keen on a legacy of ushering in an era of unicorns and rainbows were Secretary Global-Test, Wendy Sherman, and the other P5+1 pointy-heads that they let this happen in the final days of patty-cake leading up to the "agreement":

The United States and its negotiating partners agreed "in secret" to allow Iran to evade some restrictions in last year's landmark nuclear agreement in order to meet the deadline for it to start getting relief from economic sanctions, according to a report reviewed by Reuters.

The report is to be published on Thursday by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said the think tank’s president David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector and co-author of the report. It is based on information provided by several officials of governments involved in the negotiations, who Albright declined to identify.

Reuters could not independently verify the report's assertions.

"The exemptions or loopholes are happening in secret, and it appears that they favor Iran," Albright said. 

Among the exemptions were two that allowed Iran to exceed the deal's limits on how much low-enriched uranium (LEU) it can keep in its nuclear facilities, the report said. LEU can be purified into highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium.

The exemptions, the report said, were approved by the joint commission the deal created to oversee implementation of the accord. The commission is comprised of the United States and its negotiating partners -- called the P5+1 -- and Iran.

One senior "knowledgeable" official was cited by the report as saying that if the joint commission had not acted to create these exemptions, some of Iran’s nuclear facilities would not have been in compliance with the deal by Jan. 16, the deadline for the beginning of the lifting of sanctions.

But what can you expect from a pathetic clown who in recent days has said this?

Secretary of State John Kerry suggested the media should stop covering terrorism so much in a press conference in Bangladesh, saying the media would “do us all a service” by intentionally not reporting the news.

“Perhaps the media would do us all a service if they didn’t cover it quite as much,” Kerry said, after lamenting how easy it is to terrorize people. “People wouldn’t know what’s going on.”

The suggestion plays into the Obama administration’s oft-repeated talking point that responding to the Islamic State in full force actually plays right into their narrative and only helps the group recruit more jihadis for their global war. President Barack Obama’s strategy is to instead downplay and “degrade” the group by ignoring it as much as possible and taking a significantly measured military approach.

But Kerry’s suggestion the news media intentionally keep people in the dark seems to be a new tactic.

Because the pen for the cattle-masses should be kept as dark as possible. Keep the "agreement" exemptions secret. Don't report on ISIS attacks.

The portion of our taxes paying this chunk of dog vomit's salary should be refunded to us and he should resign yet this morning.