Monday, June 30, 2014

Pro-Amnesty Elites Treat People as 'Commodities'

Exclusive–Sen. Jeff Sessions: Pro-Amnesty Elites Treat People as 'Commodities'

Perhaps no issue better illustrates the current divide between everyday citizens and our political and business elites than the issue of immigration. The latter group draws the financial gains from a generous labor supply without considering the perspective of those on the other side of the ledger: the working people who have to worry about being laid off and replaced with lower-wage workers, about the strain placed on their local hospitals and neighborhood resources, or about cartel violence spilling across the border into their own communities.

For instance, Sheldon Adelson recently wrote that: “The immigrants here illegally need jobs, want to work and are willing to take on jobs that are not appealing to many Americans.” What about Americans who need jobs? Human beings are not commodities. We need to get our own workers off of unemployment and into good-paying jobs that can support their families. That means if a job is hard or strenuous, employers should raise wages and improve working conditions – why shouldn’t Americans who do tough work get paid more for their efforts?
Rupert Murdoch also recently argued for a dramatic expansion of the controversial H1B guest worker program. Murdoch writes that “there is a shortage of qualified American candidates,” to fill jobs in STEM fields like computer services and engineering. But the evidence shows the opposite: the US graduates approximately twice as many STEM-trained students each year as there are STEM jobs to fill. There is a large surplus of unemployed Americans with STEM degrees and yet, per the Economic Policy Institute, “the annual inflow of guestworkers amount to one-third to one-half of all new IT jobs holders.” As Rutgers Professor Hal Salzman poignantly asked, “Average wages in IT today are the same as they were when Bill Clinton was president well over a decade ago…if there is in fact a shortage, why doesn't that reflect in the market? Why don't wages go up?"
The United States has the most generous immigration policy in the world. Each year, the US grants permanent legal admission to an additional 1 million immigrants who will be able to apply for citizenship, along with roughly 700,000 guest workers, 200,000 relatives of guest workers, and 500,000 students. These are overwhelmingly not farm workers as activists falsely suggest, but are instead workers brought in to fill jobs in every sector, occupation and industry throughout the US economy.
Overall, the number of people living in the US who were born in another country has quadrupled since 1970. And yet the Senate immigration bill doubles the rate of future immigration and guest worker admissions.
For too long, the immigration debate has been driven by the needs of politicians, business interests, and immigration activists who fail to appreciate that a nation owes certain obligations to its own citizens.
Consider immigration policy from the viewpoint of a middle-aged unemployed American who has to borrow gas money to drive to a job interview 100 miles away. Imagine how his or her life is affected when the company gives that open job to a temporary guest worker hired from 10,000 miles away. Imagine what any of the 58 million working-age Americans who don’t have jobs might have to say to the lawmakers and activists who claim there is a “labor shortage”.
The phrase “immigration reform” has been thoughtlessly applied to any legislation that combines amnesty with dramatic future increases to our record supply of labor. This is the singular vision championed by President Obama and Congressional Democrats. It therefore falls on the shoulders of Republicans to stand alone as the one party representing the interests of everyday working Americans.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/06/22/Exclusive-Sen-Jeff-Session-Pro-Amnesty-Elites-Treat-People-as-Commodities

The scandal of fiddled global warming data

The scandal of fiddled global warming data

The US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record


A scene from 'The Day After Tomorrow': in reality, officially approved scientists fudge the data
A scene from 'The Day After Tomorrow': in reality, officially approved scientists fudge the data

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.
When I first began examining the global-warming scare, I found nothing more puzzling than the way officially approved scientists kept on being shown to have finagled their data, as in that ludicrous “hockey stick” graph, pretending to prove that the world had suddenly become much hotter than at any time in 1,000 years. Any theory needing to rely so consistently on fudging the evidence, I concluded, must be looked on not as science at all, but as simply a rather alarming case study in the aberrations of group psychology.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/10916086/The-scandal-of-fiddled-global-warming-data.html

Clinton bristled at Benghazi deception

Clinton bristled at Benghazi deception

In his new book, “Blood Feud,” journalist Edward Klein gets inside the dysfunctional, jealous relationship between Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack and Michelle Obama. Here, he explains what happened the night of the Benghazi attack.
By 10 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2012, when Hillary Clinton received a call from President Obama, she was one of the most thoroughly briefed officials in Washington on the unfolding disaster in Benghazi, Libya.
She knew that Ambassador Christopher Stevens and a communications operator were dead, and that the attackers had launched a well-coordinated mortar assault on the CIA annex, which would cost the lives of two more Americans.
She had no doubt that a terrorist attack had been launched against America on the anniversary of 9/11. However, when Hillary picked up the phone and heard Obama’s voice, she learned the president had other ideas in mind. With less than two months before Election Day, he was still boasting that he had al Qaeda on the run.
If the truth about Benghazi became known, it would blow that argument out of the water.
“Hillary was stunned when she heard the president talk about the Benghazi attack,” one of her top legal advisers said in an interview. “Obama wanted her to say that the attack had been a spontaneous demonstration triggered by an obscure video on the Internet that demeaned the Prophet Mohammed.”
Modal Trigger
A protester reacts as the US Consulate in Benghazi is seen in flames during a protest by an armed group in September 2012 that killed US ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens and three others.Photo: Reuters
This adviser continued: “Hillary told Obama, ‘Mr. President, that story isn’t credible. Among other things, it ignores the fact that the attack occurred on 9/11.’ But the president was adamant. He said, ‘Hillary, I need you to put out a State Department release as soon as possible.’”
After her conversation with the president, Hillary called Bill Clinton, who was at his penthouse apartment in the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, and told him what Obama wanted her to do.
“I’m sick about it,” she said, according to the legal adviser, who was filled in on the conversation.
“That story won’t hold up,” Bill said. “I know,” Hillary said. “I told the president that.” “It’s an impossible story,” Bill said. “I can’t believe the president is claiming it wasn’t terrorism. Then again, maybe I can. It looks like Obama isn’t going to allow anyone to say that terrorism has occurred on his watch.”
Hillary’s legal adviser provided further detail: “During their phone call, Bill started playing with various doomsday scenarios, up to and including the idea that Hillary consider resigning as secretary of state over the issue. But both he and Hillary quickly agreed that resigning wasn’t a realistic option.
If her resignation hurt Obama’s chances of winning re-election, her fellow Democrats would never forgive her. Hillary was already thinking of running for president in 2016, and her political future, as well as Obama’s, hung in the balance.”
Modal Trigger
Obama had put Hillary in a corner, and she and Bill didn’t see a way out. And so, shortly after 10 o’clock on the night of September 11, she released an official statement that blamed the Benghazi attack on an “inflammatory (video) posted on the Internet.”
The Benghazi Deception was in full swing.
“Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas” by Edward Klein is out this week from Regnery Publishing.

http://nypost.com/2014/06/22/clinton-bristled-at-benghazi-deception-book/

Sunday, June 29, 2014

Boehner Is Bringing a Whistle to a Gunfight

Boehner Is Bringing a Whistle to a Gunfight A congressional lawsuit is precisely the wrong weapon to combat Obama’s lawlessness. 


House Speaker John Boehner (Win McNamee/Getty)
You wish you could call the police. But the neighbor who is robbing your house at gunpoint isthe police. You are stupefied, so inconceivable does it seem to you that the man sworn to uphold the law could be an outlaw.
Yet, the architects who designed your house not only conceived of that danger, they took precautions. As a result, you not only have your own arsenal of emergency firepower; you’re also in charge of all the ammunition. See, the architects hoped we’d always have good, honorable police, but they didn’t make your life depend on it. They knew the police had to be strong to protect us, but that this very strength could potentially destroy the whole community if the guns and badges ever ended up in corrupt hands. So while hoping for the best, they planned for the worst: The police have to come to you for the bullets if their guns are to be of much use; and you ultimately determine whether they get to keep their badges.
So as the police rob John Boehner’s House, just like they’re robbing every house in the neighborhood, what does he do? Does he grab his gun in self-defense? Does he lock the ammo vault? Does he start yanking the badges of the lawless beat cops and warn police headquarters that the commissioner could be out of a job, too, if things don’t change?

No. Boehner instead decides to call his neighbor, the referee at the town gym. The whole community respects the ref. When we come to his court, he makes all the calls and, win or lose, the players know the game was fair and square. But the ref cannot force the police to follow the rules. And he doesn’t have a gun, just a whistle.
This, in a nutshell, is the theatrical exercise in futility that is House Speaker Boehner’s proposed lawsuit against our rampantly lawless president. Boehner and the Congress hold the tools that could end, or at least dramatically reduce, the administration’s onslaught. Instead, the speaker prefers to bring a whistle to a gunfight. Paralyzed by fear of catcalls from Obama’s slavish media, Boehner eschews the use of his own armaments in favor of turning to the courts — apparently, in hope that a judge will pronounce with stentorian flourish that which is already abundantly obvious to all with eyes to see: The president of the United States is in gross violation of his solemn oath to execute the laws faithfully, usurping congressional power in a systematic assault on the separation of powers that safeguards our liberties.
The speaker will persevere in the lawsuit gambit because his flanks are covered. On his left, Jonathan Turley thinks the suit has a fighting chance to, er . . . well, Professor Turley is not exactly clear on what exactly it would accomplish. But as a devotee of the Left’s preference of a tutelary judiciary over republican self-governance, he’s all for it. And on the speaker’s right, there is George Will.
The estimable Mr. Will last week offered an uncharacteristically feeble take on “Stopping a Lawless President.” He urged what turns out to be the Boehner strategy of bringing a lawsuit that, purportedly, would halt the “institutional derangement driven by unchecked presidential aggrandizement” that Will correctly sees as a “structural distortion threatening constitutional equilibrium.” Despite accurately diagnosing the problem, Will’s column distorts the constitutional equilibrium he undertakes to heal.
Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, the occurrence of the several miracles Will needs on the road to a hoped-for judicial rebuke of the president: The House expeditiously approves the lawsuit; a suit is instantly filed; it is not assigned to one of the hundreds of like-minded progressives Obama has appointed to the bench; that judge ignores the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on standing to sue in order to reach the merits; and the administration notorious for stonewalling Congress and scoffing at judicial setbacks decides to be a cooperative litigant – such that maybe the judge can issue a ruling, oh, sometime before the 2018 midterms. What would this ruling accomplish? According to Will, it would serve as a bold “judicial declaration that Obama has violated the separation of powers.”
Like Mr. Will, I fancy myself an old baseball guy, so let me respectfully point out that when the batter swings and misses, the umpire never screams out “Strike!” It is undeniably apparent to the pitcher, the hitter, and all 50,000 fans in the stands that we have a strike. We do not need a gratuitous certification of that fact from the official.
As I’ve catalogued in Faithless Execution, there is nothing ambiguous about the vast run of President Obama’s lawlessness. We’re not talking about a backdoor curve on the black; these are arrant violations. Indeed, the administration does not deny its illegalities, it rationalizes them — contorting the “prosecutorial discretion” doctrine into a license to ignore and rewrite statutes; employing an attorney general who exhorts state attorneys general to flout laws that contradict Obama pieties; and so on. When a storeowner finds his shelves empty, he and everyone else know he’s been robbed; he doesn’t need a lawyer in a black robe to say, “It is hereby decreed that robbery has occurred.”
More important, as a response to executive lawlessness, a lawsuit is a non sequitur. When a president is running roughshod over the law, it is not the law itself that needs vindication — it is the faithful execution of the law. What makes the law the law is its legislative enactment; it needs no judicial imprimatur to command our compliance. As Jefferson and Lincoln understood, the judicial branch is mainly there for the resolution of private disputes, not political controversies. Congress does not need a court ruling to conclude that its clear statutes have been violated. It did not, in 1974, require an advisory judicial opinion that Richard Nixon had attempted to obstruct justice and abuse the IRS in order to establish that these derelictions had occurred.
The problem we have at the moment is not a lack of certainty about what the law is; the problem is the executive’s refusal to execute the law faithfully. The federal courts are impotent to address that — as several judges who have ruled against the Obama administration over the last six years have learned. Courts have no capacity to enforce their judgments. Law enforcement is a plenary executive power, and thus any court judgment against Obama would have to be enforced by . . . Obama. That is not going to happen.
A judge’s ruling that the president is violating the law would have exactly the same practical effect as Speaker Boehner’s whining that the president is violating the law: none. Neither Mr. Will, nor Speaker Boehner, nor the lawyers on whom they rely offer any answer to this fatal flaw in their lawsuit gambit.
Another fatal flaw is the aforementioned “standing” precedents. In order to be heard in court, a claimant must have legal standing to bring the case — i.e., have a concrete injury caused by a legal wrong as to which the court is the appropriate forum for redress. The Supreme Court thus frowns on lawsuits by legislators alleging that presidential overreach has injured Congress’s institutional power. Such suits do not involve concrete, personal injuries; and, unlike private citizens for whom courts are the only protection against executive lawlessness, Congress has its own superior constitutional weapons for reining the president in: the power to deny funding that the administration needs and the power to impeach wayward executive officials.
In a vain effort to surmount the standing barrier, the lawyers on whom Mr. Will and, it seems clear, Speaker Boehner are relying have prescribed a four-part test that conveniently jibes with both the GOP’s straits (i.e., control of only one house of Congress) and the skewed Will-Boehner take on congressional power. Under the latter, standing requirements would be relaxed if, in Will’s description, “Congress cannot administer political self-help by remedying the presidential action by simply repealing the law [that the president has violated].” Boehner puts it more succinctly: “There is no legislative remedy.”
Sorry, but this is nonsense. Congress absolutely has the “self-help” capacity to remedy presidential malfeasance: It can repeal or amend laws, refuse to fund an executive agency’s illegal enforcement action, or impeach executive officials — from the lowly subordinates who carry out lawless actions up to the president himself. There is no legal impediment stopping Congress from taking these measures; there is a political impediment stopping Boehner. The speaker either does not have the votes necessary to get Congress to act; or he may have them — at least enough of them to pass House bills to defund or impeach, putting Senate Democrats in the unenviable position of defending administration lawlessness — but he is scared to death of being demagogued by the president’s media adjutants. That may be a good reason to find a more effective Speaker. It is not a good reason to undo the Constitution’s standing requirements.
It is worth remembering why we have those requirements, especially in matters that involve political rather than personal injury. The Framers gave us a Constitution for a free people confident in its capacity for political self-governance. Consequently, the great public-policy questions, including those that implicate our governing framework — the separation of powers that prevents tyranny — are supposed to be determined by elected officials who answer directly to the citizens. When those questions are punted to the politically unaccountable courts, we are essentially asking to be ruled by lawyers who cannot be removed from office if they get these questions wrong.
In 1997, several lawmakers tried to sue the Clinton administration because, they claimed, the new line-item veto law usurped Congress’s power to enact and amend law. In Raines v. Byrd, the justices refused to entertain the suit. They noted the “natural urge to proceed directly to the merits of this important dispute and ‘settle’ it for the sake of efficiency and convenience.” But the urge was resisted because, no matter how clear the constitutional violation may have been, the lawmakers were claiming no personal injury, just a deprivation of political power that Congress itself could rectify by appropriate legislative action. Courts, the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist explained, had to heed the limits of their “countermajoritarian” power of judicial review in a democratic society. That power is tolerated only because of
the protection it has afforded the constitutional rights and liberties of individual citizens and minority groups against oppressive or discriminatory government action. It is this role, not some amorphous general supervision of the operations of government, that has maintained public esteem for the federal courts. [Emphasis added.]
It was only the next year that the justices did invalidate the line-item veto (inClinton v. City of New York), precisely because they were presented with a claim from plaintiffs who had been harmed by it, not from federal legislators endowed with their own constitutional means to cut the president down to size.
In unfitting hyperbole, Mr. Will concludes that without judicial intervention against Obama, “the people’s representatives [will have] no recourse short of the extreme and disproportionate ‘self-help’ of impeachment.” Even if it were true that this is the only option, the Framers saw the separation of powers — Will’s “constitutional equilibrium” — to be the guarantor of individual liberty. A systematic executive attack on it, which Will concedes is occurring, is the very reason they included the Impeachment Clause. There is nothing extreme or disproportionate about administering a remedy to the exact disease it was prescribed to cure.
But Will’s assertion is clearly not true. The House can refuse to provide funding streams to, for example, Homeland Security agencies that do not enforce the immigration laws; Justice Department lawsuits that extort sovereign states into adopting Obama pieties; an IRS that shreds the First Amendment (then shreds the evidence that it did so); or an EPA that purports to destroy the coal industry under the guise of “interpreting” (i.e., rewriting) the Clean Air Act. It is nice to hear that Speaker Boehner — finally — says he’s ready to do something about Obama’s lawlessness; but it is hard not to notice that he’s been content to pay for it for years.
Moreover, as I’ve argued in Faithless Execution, the House should not impeach President Obama unless and until the public supports his removal. The goal should be to create a political climate in which executive lawlessness is deeply discouraged; that could be accomplished if some defunding were accompanied by the impeachment of obnoxious subordinate officials who execute the administration’s lawless policies.
It cannot be accomplished by a lawsuit that simply reinforces the president’s assessment that his opposition is unserious.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment, was released by Encounter Books on June 3.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/381453/boehner-bringing-whistle-gunfight-andrew-c-mccarthy

Was the IRS’s War on Conservatives the Result of Legal Ignorance?

Was the IRS’s War on Conservatives the Result of Legal Ignorance?

by John Hinderaker in IRS
Carl Levin is widely, and I think correctly, credited with inspiring the IRS to go after conservative non-profits. But Levin’s initiative may have been attributable (along with partisan animus, obviously) to his own failure to understand the applicable law. This March 2013 New York Times article is revealing. Written by Joe Nocera, it is a paean to Levin’s supposedly wonderful service in the Senate. But note how the article concludes:
Toward the end of my interview with Levin, he let slip a tantalizing tidbit. Sometime in the next few months, the permanent subcommittee plans to call the Internal Revenue Service to task for allowing the political super PACs to be classified as tax-exempt 501(c)(4)s. “Tax-exempt 501(c)(4)s are not supposed to be engaged in politics,” he said. “It is against the law to do so.” Then he added, with a certain undeniable relish, “We’re going to go after them.”
Oh, boy!
Nocera, a Democrat like Levin, salivates at the thought of attacking conservative non-profits. But note that the entire premise of Levin’s approach to the issue is his belief that “tax-exempt 501(c)(4)s are not supposed to be engaged in politics. It is against the law to do so.” This is completely wrong; in fact, coming from a senator, it is a remarkable display of legal ignorance.
This is what the IRS itself says about participation in politics by 501(c)(4) organizations:
[A]n organization exempt under IRC 501(c)(4) may engage in political campaign activities if those activities are not the organization’s primary activity. In contrast, organizations exempt under IRC 501(c)(3) are absolutely prohibited from engaging in political activities (and may, in addition, be subject to tax under IRC 4955 if they make any “political expenditures”). …
In Rev. Rul. 81-95, 1981-1 C.B. 332, the Service considered the effect of engaging in political campaign activities on an IRC 501(c)(4) organization. The organization was primarily engaged in activities designed to promote social welfare. In addition, it conducted activities involving participation and intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to candidates for nomination or election to public office. The ruling concluded that since the organization’s primary activities promoted social welfare, its lawful participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to candidates for public office would not adversely affect its exempt status under IRC 501(c)(4).
So Levin had no idea what he was talking about. (Nor, interestingly, did the New York Times reporter.) Nevertheless, beginning long before 2013, Levin repeatedly cajoled the IRS to attack conservative 501(c)(4)s and try to drive them out of business. The IRS knew what the law was, of course. But the message from the Democratic Party (Barack Obama and others, along with Levin) was, who will rid us of these troublesome conservatives? Lois Lerner and others at the IRS reasonably concluded that they could go ahead and act on their own political biases, and the Democratic Party would have their backs.
Which is what has happened. One of the appalling aspects of John Koskinen’s testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee yesterday was the repeated interjections of Democratic members of the committee, who, in lockstep, denounced the investigation into IRS wrongdoing and apologized to Koskinen for being grilled by Republican committee members. The cover-up continues.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/was-the-irss-war-on-conservatives-the-result-of-legal-ignorance.php#!

The Week’s Climate Embarrassment

The Week’s Climate Embarrassment

by Steven HaywardJune 27, 2014
Tough competition for the most egregious embarrassment of the week for the Climatistas.  But you can add one more thing to The Warmlist’s 883 items caused by global warming climate change: the rise of ISIS in Iraq.  So says Slate.com:
Could there be a connection between climate change and the emerging conflict in Iraq?
The short answer is a qualified yes . . .
You know, I’m really not interested in the long, unqualified answer.  Oh heck, yes I am, especially with this much comedy gold left to mine:
Sure enough, this year has been unusually hot so far in Iraq with the March-April-May season ranking as the warmest on record across much of the country. (Reliable records from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration date back to 1880.) The emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria around the same time may just be an interesting coincidence, but the implications are important enough for us to consider a broader connection.
Hmm, what about radical murderous Islamic ideology?  Could there a “broader connection” there?  Who knows.  Maybe someone should study the matter.  Meanwhile, paging Victor Davis Hanson: you think things are bad in California’s central valley now.  Well just wait: ISIS may be coming there next:
Much of Iraq’s climate is similar to California’s Central Valley, with a long summer dry season and a rainier, more productive winter. That’s helped Iraq serve as the breadbasket of the region for millennia, but no longer. Like Bakersfield, Baghdad is intensely dependent on river water from upstream for irrigation of most of its crops. After decades of war, not nearly as much water is getting through.
So the Warmlist is well on its way to 1,000 things caused by climate change.  When it reaches that milestone, I suggest the UN adopt a new slogan: Climate Change: Now More Uses Than Super Glue.”
But this is only the runner-up for Climate Embarrassment of the Week.  The good folks at the Global Warming Policy Foundation and the NoTricksZone blog bring our attention to a 2007 forecast from Britain’s Met Office that temperatures in 2014 would be 0.3 degrees C warmer than 2004.  The forecast was even published in Science magazine, so, you know, the whole thing was “settled.”  Someone else even found a transcript of the Met Office press conference announcing our forthcoming kilometerstone of doom:
[This is an excerpt from a presentation by Dr. Vicky Pope, at the "Climate Change 07" conference at the Barbican in London, on 5th September, 2007.]
Vicky Pope: By 2014, we’re predicting that we’ll be 0.3 degrees warmer than 2004. Now just to put that into context, the warming over the past century and a half has only been 0.7 degrees, globally – now there have been bigger changes locally, but globally the warming is 0.7 degrees. So 0.3 degrees, over the next ten years, is pretty significant. And half the years after 2009 are predicted to be hotter than 1998, which was the previous record. So again, these are very strong statements about what will happen over the next ten years.
So again, I think this illustrates that, you know, we can already see signs of climate change, but over the next ten years, we are expecting to see quite significant changes occurring.
Someone apparently forgot to tell Mother Nature, since, um, the Met Office’s own data for 2004 – 2014 show a slightcooling of 0.014 degrees C.  Here’s the chart from NoTricksZone:
NoTricks Chart copy
[Observed temperature development as to the MetOffice’s own data HadCRUT4 compared to the claims made in the Smith et al paper. The lower black line shows the linear trend of the observed results. The blue-gray lines show the confidence range of the forecast. The red line shows the linear trend of Smith et al.]

Saturday, June 28, 2014

Hillary would make Nixon look like a saint



While being truly prepared for the office of the president, and having performed well at least in foreign affairs – he opened up relations with China, saved Israel from extinction in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, staved off Soviet expansion, and wound down the Vietnam War – Nixon covered up a CIA-run break-in of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. For that he was nearly impeached and had to leave office in disgrace.

The Watergate scandal ushered in a wave of new laws to try to prevent future presidential and government scandals, and began the long and never-ending erosion of trust in government. Today, 41 years later, after the failed and corrupt presidencies of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and now Barack Hussein Obama in particular, the view of government in general has hit rock bottom.A New York Times poll taken in 2011 – before a slate of Obama’s “phony scandals” hit in a major way, from Obamacare, to Fast and Furious, to IRS-gate, to Benghazi-gate, to Extortion 17-gate, to the mother of all scandals, NSA-gate – showed that over 90 percent of the American people have a deep distrust of government. And, this was heightened among many of us during the recent events at the Bundy Ranch in Nevada, where armed Obama Bureau of Land Management thugs, disguised as government officers, used heavy weaponry, including machine guns, clubs, armored vehicles and drones to try to force the Bundys off their land in a power play likely designed to turn the land over to “friends” of Majority Senate Leader Harry Reid and his Las Vegas attorney son. Fortunately, for the time being, American patriots came to the defense of the Bundys and exercised their Second Amendment rights to have the government stand down. Unfortunately, Cliven Bundy, the ranch’s owner, made some rather ill-thought comments about African-Americans, giving the government apparent license to now threaten prosecution of those citizens who stood their ground in defense of property rights and the use of excessive force.
Ironically, at least in my lifetime, the presidency of Richard Nixon looks good only by default. By the grace of God, our nation has survived the growing list of either government tyranny or incompetency – Presidents Carter, George W. Bush and Obama are the title-holders in this regard – and we are lucky to still at least be hanging by a thread at this point as a country.
Help Larry Klayman with his class-action suit against Obama’s use of the NSA to violate Americans’ rights
Conservatives – and I am one with a large libertarian streak as well – are prone to see doom around every corner. But the present state of the nation is such that one cannot over-exaggerate the peril America now finds itself in – for on the horizon looms the now odds-on favorite to be our next president, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The possible election of the female partner of the Bonnie and Clyde duo of Bill and Hillary Clinton would usher in the death knell of the United States of America. Having fought the Clintons tooth and nail during the 1990s, and having pursued them for their commission of a host of crimes, ranging from Whitewater, to China-gate, to Travel-gate, and Monica Lewinsky-gate to name just a few of the 40 or so of their misdeeds, I speak from experience.
And, why does Hillary have such a good chance of being elected president in 2016? First, she is a woman and would likely get a great percentage of the female vote. And, the Clintons’ ruthless style of politics and intimidation is no match for the hapless Republicans, the gang who can’t shoot straight and are quite good at self-destructing – not to mention the lack of real principles among the ruling Republican establishment, which is more interested in lining the pockets of themselves and the likes of their ally Karl Rove than doing good for the country.
Coming after the failed presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Hussein Obama, a second “Clinton presidency” would be disastrous, not just because they would resume their practice of selling off anything of value for their political expediency – as they did with the Communist Chinese, with pardons, Commerce Department trade missions seats, overnight stays in the White House’s Lincoln Bedroom, judgeships, commissionerships, Cabinet secretary spots and anything else under their control – but because they have no moral compass. For the Clintons, and Bill would undoubtedly be right there at Hillary’s side, anything goes to further their hubris and hungry thirst for power. And, while they are not black Muslim-sympathizers like Obama and his racist comrades, Hillary has a documented certifiable history of taking money from Islamic interests, not just the Communist Chinese. In effect, the entire country would be put up for sale at a Bonnie and Clyde auction to further subjugate the American people to political slavery under their rule.
Yes, by the standards of yesteryear, Richard Nixon is not a crook, and whatever his shortcomings, Tricky Dick at least was not a traitor. Hillary Clinton, following the lead of her corrupt predecessors and her own felonious history and continuing modus operandi (and Benghazi is just one recent example during her tenure as Obama’s secretary of state), would make Nixon look like a saint.
All of this is why We the People must wage our Second American Revolution now, before it is too late, to free the nation and ourselves of the scourge of the likes of the Obamas and Clintons. If we do not do it now, then all is likely to be lost.

http://www.wnd.com/2014/05/hillary-would-make-nixon-look-like-a-saint/

Obama’s pathetic Iraq adviser surge

Obama’s pathetic Iraq adviser surge

by Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post editorial board sees a parallel between the “foreign-policy” disaster that President Obama confronts in Iraq and the one President Bush confronted at the end of 2006:
[Bush] had ordered an invasion of Iraq without a sufficiently large force to occupy the country and without a well-considered plan for its reconstruction. Under his direction, the Iraqi military and government were dismantled with nothing to take their place, and by 2006 the nation was on the verge of a full-blown sectarian war.
As for Obama:
[He] had gambled that the United States could withdraw from Iraq and (by 2016) Afghanistan while staying aloof from the civil war in Syria. The result has been growing turmoil that he can no longer ignore: humanitarian catastrophes in both Syria and Iraq; widening territory under the control of a vicious al-Qaeda offshoot with a goal of sending attackers into the United States; and, once again, a potential bloody disintegration of Iraq.
Bush, the Post reminds us, was up to the challenge he faced:
Without explicitly acknowledging his miscalculations, Mr. Bush changed course. He replaced his defense secretary and his field commanders. He ignored the advice of a bipartisan commission to essentially accept defeat, deciding that U.S. national security would be harmed by Iraq’s fracturing. He ordered a surge of troops and a new strategy that helped restore stability.
Is Obama up to the current challenge? The Post is hopeful. It notes that on Thursday he acknowledged that “it is in our national interests not to see an all-out civil war inside of Iraq” and “in making sure that we don’t have a safe haven that continues to grow for . . . extremist jihadist groups.” The Post also applauds Obama’s “deployment of as many as 300 military advisers.”
I wish I could share the Post’s mild optimism. Unfortunately, when it comes to advancing our interests abroad, Obama’s declarations are, as Hillary Clinton would put it, “just words.” If you don’t believe me, ask the Syrians who took the president’s declaration of a “red line” seriously.
As for the “as many as 300 military advisers,” what does Obama (and the Post) suppose a contingent that paltry can accomplish?
Will 300 advisers change the balance of power between ISIS on the one hand and the Maliki government and the Shiite militias that support it on the other? I don’t see how.
Will they restore the U.S. role as a power broker capable of forcing Maliki to step down or at least significantly reform his government, as Obama argues is necessary? Again, this seems highly unlikely. If there’s a foreign power capable of influencing Iraqi politics, it is now Iran.
Will 300 advisers persuade Sunnis to turn against the jihadists, as our troop surge did in 2007? Of course not. Sunnis were persuaded then because the U.S. jumped into the deep end with them. Under Obama, we’re merely sticking our toes back in the water.
The Post’s editors sense this. They urge Obama “to take care that his judiciousness isn’t overtaken by events, which have repeatedly caught U.S. officials by surprise.”
That’s a polite and not terribly accurate description of what has repeatedly happened on Obama’s watch. Charles Krauthammer is closer to the mark. He sees “abdication,” not “judiciousness,” and notes that the fruits of the abdication were “predictable and predicted.”
Now, it is predictable that if Obama wants to be a player in Iraq, he will have to ante up much more than 300 advisers. The “judiciousness” of that bid is good evidence that Obama, his words notwithstanding, still doesn’t really want to be a player in Iraq.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/obamas-pathetic-iraq-adviser-surge.php#!

Friday, June 27, 2014

Comey’s conundrum

Comey’s conundrum
by Scott Johnson in Holder Justice Department, IRS, Obama Administration Scandals

I urge readers following the IRS scandals to review the sworn testimony of FBI Director James Comey in response to the questions posed to him by Rep. Darrell Issa before the House Judiciary Committee on June 11 (video below). Rep. Issa homed in on the transmission of 1.1 million 501(c)(4) documents in a database submitted to the FBI by ex-IRS official Lois Lerner in 2010. The database (I’ll refer to it here as “the documents”) had been transferred by the IRS onto 21 disks for the FBI and the Department of Justice apparently to initiate a criminal investigation.
John wrote about Comey’s testimony here yesterday (with links to his previous posts on the underlying incident). The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman reported on the disclosure of information regarding the database here. Reps. Issa and Jim Jordan write about it here.
We have only recently learned that the 1.1 million documents transmitted to the FBI included confidential information protected by Internal Revenue Code § 6103. Under section 6103, the transmission of such information to the FBI was illegal. Only days before Comey’s testimony last week, the FBI “returned” the documents at the request of the Department of Justice. (It isn’t clear to me whether the documents were “returned” to the IRS or transferred to the Department of Justice for, ah, safekeeping.) The FBI no longer retains custody of the documents.
The documents had been sitting at the FBI for four years. Issa asked Comey what the FBI had done with the documents. According to Director Comey, an unnamed FBI analyst in the criminal investigation division had only reviewed the documents’ table of contents, apparently prepared by the IRS. That’s it.
Comey’s responses to Issa’s questions appear to be calculated to provide the minimum possible information. Comey is an impressive man, but his curiosity about, and knowledge of, this serious matter appears to be extraordinarily limited and his attitude to the illegal activity of which his agency would/should have had first-hand knowledge (“constructive knowledge,” as lawyers call it) appears (literally) to be a shrug of the shoulders.

Quotable quote (via the Wall Street Journal article on Comey’s testimony by Devlin Barrett): “I can’t imagine that we would be part of some effort to intimidate someone without some lawful purpose.”
What is going on here?
NOTE: John clipped the video above from C-SPAN’s complete, nearly three-hour video of Comey’s testimony, which is posted here.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/comeys-conundrum.php

Bill Henck: Inside the IRS, part 4

Bill Henck: Inside the IRS, part 4

by Scott Johnson in IRS, Obama Administration Scandals
William Henck has worked inside the IRS Office of the Chief Counsel as an attorney for over 26 years. We posted his personal account, including his testimony to a retaliatory audit conducted by the IRS against him, this past February in “Inside the IRS.” We followed up with part 2 in May and part 3 earlier this month.
When we posted the second of Bill’s two items in May, I called and wrote IRS public affairs to ask for any comment the agency might have. None was forthcoming; the agency declined to respond.
This morning we saw the IRS in action with the defiant testimony of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen before the House Ways and Means Committee. The destruction of two-years’ worth of Lois Lerner’s and friends email? The agency’s shoddy document retention practices? The IRS’s untimely disclosure of same? Koskinen presented the picture of defiance. What is going on here? Alluding to the personal and professional experiences recounted in the posts cited above, Bill Henck writes to comment:

As a 26-year veteran of the IRS, I am saddened by Commissioner Koskinen’s refusal to apologize to the House Ways and Means Committee or admit to any mistake or error on the part of the agency. One thing I am not, however, is surprised.
In order to understand the 501(c)(4) scandal or how the IRS operates, people must understand that IRS and chief counsel executives are insulated and unaccountable to anyone. They have not been accountable for a long period of time. This has led to a sense of entitlement and extraordinary levels of arrogance and misconduct. For example, the IRS did not even bother to respond concerning the black liquor situation, where the agency secretly gave away at least $2 billion to taxpayers who did not even think that they were entitled to the money. The manner in which the IRS operates is not about Republicans or Democrats or jokes about conspiracy theories. It is about basic accountability on the part of our government.
Commissioner Koskinen did not apologize for the same reason that the IRS did not apologize for covering up managerial embezzlement, conducting a retaliatory audit against my wife and me, bullying elderly taxpayers, and giving away billions of dollars to taxpayers represented by executives’ cronies. They are simply not accountable. Most people know that the words “I’m sorry” go a long way, but most people are accountable for their actions. With IRS and chief counsel executives, it is always more of the same:-more lies, more threats, more bull—.
I realize these are harsh words and I state them with regret. In the late 1990′s, I spoke out publicly in defense of the IRS against unfair accusations and received a death threat as a result. I’m proud of the vast majority of my colleagues and I hope that they understand why I am speaking out.
It is difficult for an outsider to understand the level of arrogance that infects IRS leadership. Perhaps a personal example will help demonstrate it. A few years ago, I disagreed with the Service’s legal reasoning in a case. Basically, I thought that the taxpayer had a pretty good argument. Needless to say, management retaliated against me. During an hour-long meeting where three managers were teeing off on me, I briefly mentioned that my family had been through a horrific experience where our oldest son, who has Asperger’s Syndrome, was bullied in school and then the school system bullied my family. One of the managers responded by laughing at me, the second manager stated that it was a “personal problem,” and the third manager told me that I was unprofessional for mentioning a personal matter in a business meeting.
Not long thereafter, in 2010, the counsel division I am in had a conference in Chicago. The conference was like a cult of personality. Videos were shown, among other things, of the chief counsel playing the guitar, of executives’ baby pictures, of executives’ faces superimposed on Star Wars and River Dance characters, and of an executive marching around in Civil War garb. Belief in their position within the organization led IRS managers and executives to laugh at a child on the autism spectrum while at roughly the same time showing baby pictures of themselves at a conference.
When an organization and people’s positions within that organization become more important than anything else, people within that organization will inflict gratuitous levels of pain on others. That is where the IRS is right now. To IRS executives, the organization and their positions in it are more important than honor or integrity or even simple human decency. I wish Congress good luck. They are going to need it.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/bill-henck-inside-the-irs-part-4.php

Abdication has a price

Abdication has a price

  Opinion writer
Charles Krauthammer writes a weekly political column that runs on Fridays.
 

Yes, it is true that there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq when George W. Bush took office. But it is equally true that there was essentially no al-Qaeda in Iraq remaining when Barack Obama took office.
Which makes Bush responsible for the terrible costs incurred to defeat the 2003-09 jihadist war engendered by his invasion. We can debate forever whether those costs were worth it, but what is not debatable is Obama’s responsibility for the return of the Islamist insurgency that had been routed by the time he became president.
By 2009, al-Qaeda in Iraq had not just been decimated but humiliated by the U.S. surge and the Anbar Awakening. Here were aggrieved Sunnis, having ferociously fought the Americans who had overthrown 80 years of Sunni hegemony, now reversing allegiance and joining the infidel invader in crushing, indeed extirpating from Iraq, their fellow Sunnis of al-Qaeda.
At the same time, Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki turned the Iraqi army against radical Shiite militias from Basra all the way north to Baghdad.
The result? “A sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq.” That’s not Bush congratulating himself. That’s Obama in December 2011 describing the Iraq we were leaving behind. He called it “an extraordinary achievement.”

Which Obama proceeded to throw away. David Petraeus had won the war. Obama’s one task was to conclude a status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) to solidify the gains. By Obama’s own admission — in the case he’s now making for a status-of-forces agreement with Afghanistan — such agreements are necessary “because after all the sacrifices we’ve made, we want to preserve the gains” achieved by war.
Which is what made his failure to do so in Iraq so disastrous. His excuse was his inability to get immunity for U.S. soldiers. Nonsense. Bush had worked out a compromise in his 2008 SOFA, as we have done with allies everywhere. The real problem was Obama’s determination to “end the war.” He had three years to negotiate a deal and didn’t even begin talks until a few months before the deadline period.
He offered to leave about 3,000 to 5,000 troops, a ridiculous number. U.S. commanders said they needed nearly 20,000. (We have 28,500 in South Korea and 38,000 in Japan to this day.) Such a minuscule contingent would spend all its time just protecting itself. Iraqis know a nonserious offer when they see one. Why bear the domestic political liability of a continued U.S. presence for a mere token?
Moreover, as historian Max Boot has pointed out, Obama insisted on parliamentary ratification, which the Iraqis explained was not just impossible but unnecessary. So Obama ordered a full withdrawal. And with it disappeared U.S. influence in curbing sectarianism, mediating among factions and providing both intelligence and tactical advice to Iraqi forces now operating on their own.
The result was predictable. And predicted. Overnight, Iran and its promotion of Shiite supremacy became the dominant influence in Iraq. The day after the U.S. departure, Maliki ordered the arrest of the Sunni vice president. He cut off funding for the Sons of Iraq, the Sunnis who had fought with us against al-Qaeda. And subsequently so persecuted and alienated Sunnis that they were ready to welcome back al-Qaeda in Iraq — rebranded in its Syrian refuge as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria — as the lesser of two evils. Hence the stunningly swift ISIS capture of Mosul, Tikrit and so much of Sunni Iraq.
But the jihadist revival is the result of a double Obama abdication: creating a vacuum not just in Iraq but in Syria. Obama dithered and speechified during the early days of the Syrian revolution, before the jihadists had arrived, when the secular revolt was systematically advancing on the Damascus regime.
Hezbollah, Iran and Russia helped the regime survive. Meanwhile, a jihadist enclave (including remnants of the once-routed al-Qaeda in Iraq) developed in large swaths of northern and eastern Syria. They thrived on massive outside support while the secular revolutionaries foundered waiting vainly for U.S. help.
Faced with a de facto jihadi state spanning both countries, a surprised Obama now has little choice but to try to re-create overnight, from scratch and in miniature, the kind of U.S. presence — providing intelligence, tactical advice and perhaps even air support — he abjured three years ago
His announcement Thursday that he is sending 300 military advisers is the beginning of that re-creation — a pale substitute for what we long should have had in place but the only option Obama has left himself. The leverage and influence he forfeited with his total withdrawal will be hard to reclaim. But it’s our only chance to keep Iraq out of the hands of the Sunni jihadists of ISIS and the Shiite jihadists of Tehran.
Charles Krauthammer

Thursday, June 26, 2014

New Benghazi Revelation Indicates Iran Behind the Attack

New Benghazi Revelation Indicates Iran Behind the Attack

The U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya burns on Sept.11, 2012 (Photo: © Reuters; inset: Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds Force who has been called the most powerful terrorist operative in the Middle East today, has been named as the mastermind of the plan.
The U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya burns on Sept.11, 2012 (Photo: © Reuters; inset: Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds Force who has been called the most powerful terrorist operative in the Middle East today, has been named as the mastermind of the plan.
by:
Ryan Mauro
A new book released today asserts that the Iranian regime secretly masterminded the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya that left four Americans dead, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
The operation was largely done through Sunni terrorists including the Al Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Sharia
ShariaGlossary Item
A legal framework to regulate public and private aspects of life based upon specific Islamic teachings. Sharia is a strict system which views non-Muslims as second-class citizens, sanctions inequality between men and women and prescribes cruel and unusual punishments for crimes.

militia, whose leader was captured in a secret raid by the U.S. this month.
The book, Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi, is authored by national security expert Kenneth Timmerman, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and executive director of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran.
The thoroughly documented and detailed book relies in part upon Western intelligence sources as well as two Iranian intelligence defectors -- one who formerly oversaw Iranian covert operations in Western Europe and another who was part of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s security detail.
According to the book, Iran decided to kidnap Ambassador Stevens and destroy the CIA annex because the U.S. (through Stevens) was involved in arming rebels in Syria who were fighting Bashar Assad, Iran’s ally. The plan would later change to a kill mission.
Throughout the book, Timmerman reveals information he says he was told FBI did not previously have. The story unfolds as both the CIA and Iranian operatives alternatively intercept and crack each others’ secret communications until finally the U.S. gets played by the Iranians.
Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds Force who has been called the most powerful terrorist operative in the Middle East today, is named as the mastermind of the plan.
The overseer of the specific operation was Ibrahim Mohammed Joudaki, a senior Quds Force officer. Joudaki’s deputy, Khalil Harb, a top Hezbollah operative, was also involved in the operation. Harb managed relations with Sunni militias in Libya and had 50 Quds Force operatives working under him.
Timmerman’s sources state during the civil war in Libya, Iran continually used Arab operatives to recruit over 1,000 Libyans into Sunni militias. NATO’s supreme commander in Europe said “flickers” of intelligence indicated that Hezbollah had become involved with rebel forces only one month after the Libyan civil war started in mid-February, 2011.
John Maguire, a former C.I.A. deputy chief of station in Baghdad, confirmed to Timmerman that the Quds Force operatives in the Benghazi area were the “first-string varsity squad” and “very good at deception operations,” as he had grappled with their operations in Iraq. He recalled how the Iranians would work with Sunni terrorists as a cover, aware that the Western leadership incorrectly rules out the possibility of substantive Shiite-Sunni terrorist collaboration.
On July 30, 2012, a National Security Agency listening post inside the CIA annex at Benghazi picked up a conversation in Farsi between two Quds operatives about the arrival of a hit squad for a forthcoming attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi. American intelligence sources saw the seven Quds Force operatives arrive at the airport, posing as humanitarian workers from the Iranian Red Crescent.
Timmerman’s sources reported that the leader of the team was Revolutionary Guards Deputy Chief of Operations Major-General Mehdi Rabbani. As the C.I.A. tracked Rabbani and his colleagues in Benghazi, they were suddenly kidnapped by unknown militiamen. The media reported that seven Iranian Red Crescent workers had been taken hostage.
But this was no ordinary kidnapping. Dylan Davies, a former British special operator who managed the security detail for the consulate in Benghazi, learned that they were being held at an abandoned military installation and were being treated well.
According to Dark Forces, the Quds operatives in the Benghazi area had cracked the American communications network and discovered that the CIA knew the Red Crescent workers were actually secret operatives. Joudaki and his network then staged the kidnapping of the seven Iranians to protect the security of their mission. (The seven would be “held” until after Sept. 11 so the Quds Force could deny involvement in the attack and Iran could plead that they, too, were the victim of terrorism in Libya.)
After the Iranians found out that the Americans were on to them, the plan was altered. The Quds Force and their Sunni militia allies would not kidnap Ambassador Stevens. They’d kill him.
In August, the Iranian regime began setting up its alibi if it were to be caught in the act. In Dubai, Ali Akbar Velayati, a top advisor to Supreme Leader Khamenei, warned senior Obama Administration advisor Valerie Jarrett that the Quds Force had become “out of control” and sought to kidnap an American diplomat. This line -- that Revolutionary Guards elements had gone “rogue” -- had been peddled for years and appeared frequently in the Western media.
On August 2, militia and extremist activity in the Benghazi area increased to the point that Stevens sent an action request for immediate security increases. Timmerman describes the message as the “diplomatic equivalent of a cry of desperation.”
Three weeks before the September 11 attacks, Harb gave $8-10 million in euros to the Ansar al-Sharia militia. The money was transferred from secret Quds Force accounts based in Malaysia and elsewhere. The Iranians were in the finishing stages of planning the attacks and had even obtained a copy of the CIA annex’s protection plan by bribing a security guard.
In the final days prior to the attack, the Quds Force received a secret fatwa
FatwaGlossary Item
A legal ruling made according to Sharia (Islamic law)

from Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, a senior cleric and advisor to then-Iranian President Ahmadinejad. The fatwa permitted the assassination of Ambassador Stevens.
The last meeting Stevens had the night of the attack was with a Turkish diplomat. Someone on the Turks’ side confirmed to the Iranians that Stevens was present inside the consulate, the final green light for the attack. This supposition is supported by evidence that came to light in April 2014, when the former chief of the Istanbul Police Department Intelligence Unit as well as leaked Turkish documents exposed the high-level penetration of Iran-linked terrorists into the Turkish government.
The attack commenced on September 11. Timmerman and other experts he quotes are positive that the attack, especially the professional use of mortars, shows sophisticated hands behind the assaults.
Dark Forces also points to indications that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood
Muslim BrotherhoodGlossary Item
A worldwide Islamist organization founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna that seeks to implement Sharia-based governance globally.

may have been involved, but reaches no definitive conclusion. It highlights numerous jaw-dropping security lapses, such as the hiring of the “February 17th Brigade” Islamist militia to protect the U.S. mission. The militia’s leadership is linked to Qatar and the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood.
The 2012 attacks on the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi came at a time when Iran was aggressively targeting Israeli and Saudi diplomats and other Western targets. The State Department reported a “clear resurgence” in Iranian terrorist activity. Further, they said that Hezbollah’s “terrorist activity has reached a tempo unseen since the 1990s.”
Dark Forces is rich with interesting details about the Benghazi controversy—before, during and after the attacks. The book’s revelation about Iranian involvement in the attacks is sure to reshape the debate about what happened on September 11, 2012.

Ryan Mauro is the ClarionProject.org’s National Security Analyst, a fellow with the Clarion Project and is frequently interviewed on top-tier TV stations as an expert on counterterrorism and Islamic extremism.