|
Monday, June 16, 2014
U.S. to evacuate substantial number of personnel from Baghdad embassy
The
embassy is going to remain open, however. This is, then, another
equivocal half-measure from Obama. If Sunni jihadists enter Baghdad,
Americans may end up wishing he had evacuated the embassy entirely. As
it is, he is hedging his bets. In any case, even a partial evacuation of
this massively expensive embassy, which was supposed to be the beacon
of the U.S. presence in the New, Prosperous, Stable and Democratic
Middle East, is a poignant symbol instead of the failure of
ill-conceived U.S. misadventure in Iraq, which was based on the
assumption that Islam was a religion of peace — and on no knowledge of
Sharia at all.“U.S. to Evacuate Many Staff Members From Baghdad Embassy,” by Tim Arango and Michael R. Gordon, New York Times, June 15, 2014
ERBIL, Iraq — The American Embassy in Baghdad plans to evacuate a substantial number of its personnel this week in the face of a militant advance that rapidly swept from the north toward the capital, the State Department announced on Sunday.
The embassy, a beige fortress on the banks of the Tigris River within the heavily-secured Green Zone, where Iraqi government buildings are also located, has the largest staff of any United States Embassy.
The exact number of people being evacuated was not clear Sunday. The embassy would remain open, a person familiar with the planning said, and much of its staff of about 5,500 would stay in Baghdad. The American government is expected to call the move a relocation, suggesting that it is a temporary precaution, the person said.
Many staff members who are leaving will be flown to Amman, Jordan, where they will continue their work at the embassy there. Others will be shifted from Baghdad to consulates here in Erbil, in the northern Kurdish region, and in Basra, in the south, which are not now under threat by the militants.
Other Americans in Iraq, particularly contractors working for companies that had been training the Iraqi military on weapons systems purchased from the United States, have already been evacuated from the country….
Obama Quietly Releases 12 Jihad Terrorists From US Military Prison in Afghanistan
Pamela Geller / Atlas Shrugs
First it was the five top Taliban commanders traded for the traitor Bowe Bergdahl. Now this. The traitor in the White House seems determined to endanger Americans by releasing as many jihadis as he can. It’s no wonder that these releases were not publicly announced.
But no worries: the Pakistanis say they’ll monitor these jihadis to make sure they don’t have any “militant ties.” That’s right: the pro-jihad Pakistani government will make sure that everything is fine.
Stay on top of what’s really happening. Follow me on Twitter here. Like me on Facebook here.
“US Quietly Moves Detainees Out Of Secretive Afghanistan Prison,” Reuters, June 13 2014:
(Reuters) – The Obama administration has quietly repatriated a dozen detainees from a small U.S. military prison in Afghanistan, moving a modest step closer toward winding down the United States’ controversial post-9/11 detainee system.
President Barack Obama, in a letter to Congress released on Thursday, informed U.S. lawmakers that about 38 non-Afghan prisoners remained at the Parwan detention center outside of Kabul, down from around 50 a few months ago.
A U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that a Frenchman, a Kuwaiti and 10 Pakistani prisoners were sent back to their respective home countries at the end of May.
The remaining detainees include Yemeni, Tunisian and more Pakistani nationals, and a Russian who the United States is also considering trying in a military or civilian court.
The transfers, which are not publicly disclosed, underscore the challenges the Obama administration faces in shutting down Parwan and the larger U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which has been widely criticized by human rights groups since being populated in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
Many of the detainees have not been charged with a crime, but the release of any military detainees has the potential to intensify the political backlash the Obama administration is facing over its handling of suspected militants captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere since 2001.
White House officials have sought to rebuff criticism of the decision last month to send five senior Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay to Qatar in exchange for Bowe Bergdahl, a U.S. soldier held by Taliban-linked militants in Pakistan.
The Obama administration is slowly moving to transfer some inmates out of Guantanamo Bay, where about 150 inmates remain. Obama has renewed promises to close the prison despite long-standing congressional opposition.
The non-Afghan prisoners at Parwan are the only detainees remaining in U.S. custody in Afghanistan after U.S. officials shifted hundreds of Afghan prisoners to Afghan government custody last year.
In February, U.S. officials were outraged when the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai released 65 of those prisoners, who Washington insisted were dangerous militants requiring at least further investigation.
The U.S. government considers some remaining non-Afghan prisoners at Parwan, like some at Guantanamo, too dangerous to be freed. Some of them have unclear links to the Afghan conflict, including a Yemeni arrested in Bangkok and secretly moved to Afghanistan.
The Parwan detainees’ identities, and the transfer of some of them to other countries in the past, have remained largely a mystery to the public in the United States and Afghanistan.
Last month, the Defense Department provided U.S. lawmakers with a classified report on the identities of the detainees and their alleged militant ties.
Their fate takes on new importance as the end of the U.S. and NATO military mission in Afghanistan approaches. If the two countries can finalize a troop deal, Obama plans to leave just under 10,000 soldiers in Afghanistan after 2014 and withdraw almost all by the end of 2016.
It is unclear under what circumstances the prisoners transferred last month were repatriated.
Pakistani officials have said that returned detainees would be kept under surveillance to make sure they had no militant links. Prisoner advocates say at least some returned detainees were held in secret prisons in Pakistan before being set free.The post Obama Quietly Releases 12 Jihad Terrorists From US Military Prison in Afghanistan appeared first on Pamela Geller, Atlas Shrugs.
Oops.
According to a new piece in the New York Times, hundreds of thousands of people who may not be qualified to receive Obamacare subsidies, are probably receiving them anyway.
According to a new piece in the New York Times, hundreds of thousands of people who may not be qualified to receive Obamacare subsidies, are probably receiving them anyway.
The Obama administration is contacting hundreds of thousands of people with subsidized health insurance to resolve questions about their eligibility, as consumer advocates express concern that many will be required to repay some or all of the subsidies.First off, why doesn't Obamacare require extensive documentation up front to qualify for subsidies (aka taxpayers funding an applicant's insurance)? Second, what do they exactly think is going to happen here? Does the administration really believe all those people are going to back-pay all of the subsidies they've already received? Dream on. Oh, but what's this? If subsidies aren't paid back the administration is going to strip people of their health insurance plans?
Of the eight million people who signed up for private health plans through insurance exchanges under the new health care law, two million reported personal information that differed from data in government records, according to federal officials and Serco, the company hired to resolve such inconsistencies.
The government is asking consumers for additional documents to verify their income, citizenship, immigration status and Social Security numbers, as well as any health coverage that they may have from employers. People who do not provide the information risk losing their subsidized coverage and may have to repay subsidies next April.
“If you don’t send the needed documents,” it says, “you risk losing your marketplace coverage or help you may be receiving to pay for such coverage.”
If the IRS decides to fine people who received subsidies when they were ineligible, it'll only make the law even more unpopular than it already is. Further, Democrats have been telling Republicans they cannot repeal Obamacare because stripping people of their newly obtained marketplace plan would be extreme, yet that's probably going to happen anyway thanks to government incompetency.
Remember when President Obama said Obamacare exchanges would operate as smoothly as Amazon or Travelocity? Good times.
In one of the Obama administration's most shameless weekend news dumps, the IRS claimed on Friday afternoon that a hard drive glitch erased many of Lois Lerner's emails sent between 2009 and 2011. The Associated Press reports that Congressional Republicans are irate over this tardy and dodgy "disclosure," which is sure to catapult the IRS targeting scandal back into the spotlight:
Congressional investigators are fuming over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency's tea party controversy. The IRS said Lois Lerner's computer crashed in 2011, wiping out an untold number of emails that were being sought by congressional investigators. The investigators want to see all of Lerner's emails from 2009 to 2013 as part of their probe into the way agents handled applications for tax-exempt status by tea party and other conservative groups...Congressional investigators have shown that IRS officials in Washington were closely involved in the handling of tea party applications, many of which languished for more than a year without action. But so far, they have not publicly produced evidence that anyone outside the agency directed the targeting or even knew about it. If anyone in the Obama administration outside the agency was involved, investigators were hoping for clues in Lerner's emails.But many of those emails are supposedly "lost" forever because of an alleged technological crash, about which investigators are just now being informed. Thousands of her messages have been recovered -- just not the ones Lerner would have sent to officials outside the IRS:
The IRS said technicians went to great lengths trying to recover data from Lerner's computer in 2011. In emails provided by the IRS, technicians said they sent the computer to a forensic lab run by the agency's criminal investigations unit. But to no avail. The IRS was able to generate 24,000 Lerner emails from the 2009 to 2011 because Lerner had copied in other IRS employees. The agency said it pieced together the emails from the computers of 82 other IRS employees. But an untold number are gone. Camp's office said the missing emails are mainly ones to and from people outside the IRS, "such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, FEC, or Democrat offices."What a remarkable coincidence. Correspondence that could potentially reveal a wider conspiracy to use the enforcement power of the federal government to target, harass and punish conservative groups has been irreversibly "lost," so the agency's compliance with Congressional subpoenas will necessarily be incomplete. Oh, and the time frame just happens to align with the period in which the targeting practices were first initiated. Problem: The current IRS commissioner testified under oath in March that agency emails are "stored in servers." This entire exchange with Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) is worth watching, as John Koskinen serves up excuses for why the IRS has been so slow to turn over requested materials to Congress -- but the key bit begins about 90 seconds in:
Chaffetz: What email system do you use there at the IRS?Based on these answers, those emails should be backed up somewhere on servers, making it utterly implausible that Lerner's so-called computer crash could have permanently deleted any of her messages. Ed Morrissey notes, "the relevant files would be kept on the servers or on backup media, which would have data for the whole organization and not just a single user…[that's] especially true in organizations that require data storage and full retrieval capacity by statute — such as federal agencies like the IRS." The Blaze tracked down an IT expert who's worked for both the government and Microsoft, who lists six reasons why the agency's story defies credibility. He concludes, “I don’t know of any email administrator that doesn’t have at least three ways of getting that mail back...There are at least three ways the government can get those emails.” As a reminder, some of Lerner's not-lost emails indicate that the IRS coordinated with the Justice Department (perhaps illegally) over potential criminal prosecutions of conservative groups and likely shared information with Congressional Democrats, in spite of previous denials. Lerner separately joked (?) about leaving the agency to take a job with President Obama's political organization, causing co-workers to speculate over whether she was serious. What might be lurking in her "disappeared" emails? The IRS says we'll never know, which doesn't sit well with National Journal's Ron Fournier:
Koskinen: What email system do we use?
Chaffetz: Yeah, is it Outlook, or…
Koskinen: Yes, we have actually Microsoft -- or at least I have -- Microsoft Outlook.
Chaffetz: So you go on there, and you want to find all of the items you sent under your name, how long would that take?
Koskinen: Well it'd take awhile because they're not all on my computer. They're all stored somewhere.
[Skipping ahead]
Chaffetz: That's [part] of the brilliance of the email system. You go in and you check the 'sent' box, and the inbox, and you suddenly have all of the emails, correct?
Koskinen: Right. They get taken off and stored in servers…
A sloppy mistake, the government calls it, but you couldn't blame a person for suspecting a cover-up -- the loss of an untold number of emails to and from the central figure in the IRS tea party controversy. And, because the public's trust is a fragile gift that the White House has frittered away in a series of second-term missteps, President Obama needs to act. If the IRS can't find the emails, maybe a special prosecutor can...The White House is stonewalling the IRS investigation. The most benign explanation is that Obama's team is politically expedient and arrogant, which makes them desperate to change the subject, and convinced of their institutional innocence. That's bad enough. But without a fiercely independent investigation, we shouldn't assume the explanation is benign.The White House has sneeringly dismissed the IRS scandal "phony," with the president asserting that the agency is free of even "a smidgen of corruption."
Op-ed:
An enemy from when barbarianism was in fashion
By: Diane Sori
“We have come to you with slaughter.”
An enemy from when barbarianism was in fashion
By: Diane Sori
“We have come to you with slaughter.”
-ISIS' sole declaration of intention to conquer Jordan,
Lebanon, Gaza, Sinai, Jerusalem, Rome, and Spain...and then on to
western Europe and America
As Barack HUSSEIN Obama gives a commencement speech in California, does a fund raiser or two, and of course hits the links, the Middle East is on fire as Sunni insurgents continue gobbling up Iraq city by city.
Sunni insurgents uniting under the banner of ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant/Syria) still tied to al-Qaeda yet independent of them at the same time. ISIS...the most brutal of the brutal...marches forward towards Baghdad with NO one but a group of rag-tag Iraqi civilians trying to stop them. Funded with $429 million looted from Mosul's central bank and from their many acts of extortion and such, donations by wealthy sponsors and ideological sympathizers throughout the Arab world continue to fill their war chest as they infuse their blood-lust with the treasure from the cities they take.
ISIS...once unheard of here in the west...now is in possession of
U.S. made tanks, trucks, Blackhawk helicopters, cargo planes, and
guns...equipment that once belonged to Iraqi security forces who left
all behind when they ran from the very ones who even have al-Qaeda
operatives running in fear of them.
And what is the ultimate goal of ISIS as they steamroll through Iraq...it really is quite simple yet at the same time it's a harbinger of horrific death for all who oppose them as ISIS wants to establish a nation ruled under the strict unbending auspices of sharia law.
Entering Iraq from the northwest...from bloody war-torn Syria...they want to carve out a crescent nation...the crescent being the symbol of islam...and other Sunni rebel groups, furious at Baghdad's refusal to include them in its mainly Shi'ite government, are joining ISIS in the raping and pillaging of a nation...and in the killing of all who oppose them...in the killing of all who oppose islam.
As Barack HUSSEIN Obama gives a commencement speech in California, does a fund raiser or two, and of course hits the links, the Middle East is on fire as Sunni insurgents continue gobbling up Iraq city by city.
Sunni insurgents uniting under the banner of ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant/Syria) still tied to al-Qaeda yet independent of them at the same time. ISIS...the most brutal of the brutal...marches forward towards Baghdad with NO one but a group of rag-tag Iraqi civilians trying to stop them. Funded with $429 million looted from Mosul's central bank and from their many acts of extortion and such, donations by wealthy sponsors and ideological sympathizers throughout the Arab world continue to fill their war chest as they infuse their blood-lust with the treasure from the cities they take.
ISIS...once unheard of here in the west...now is in possession of
U.S. made tanks, trucks, Blackhawk helicopters, cargo planes, and
guns...equipment that once belonged to Iraqi security forces who left
all behind when they ran from the very ones who even have al-Qaeda
operatives running in fear of them.
And what is the ultimate goal of ISIS as they steamroll through Iraq...it really is quite simple yet at the same time it's a harbinger of horrific death for all who oppose them as ISIS wants to establish a nation ruled under the strict unbending auspices of sharia law.
Entering Iraq from the northwest...from bloody war-torn Syria...they want to carve out a crescent nation...the crescent being the symbol of islam...and other Sunni rebel groups, furious at Baghdad's refusal to include them in its mainly Shi'ite government, are joining ISIS in the raping and pillaging of a nation...and in the killing of all who oppose them...in the killing of all who oppose islam.
Sounds quite like Barack HUSSEIN Obama now doesn't it...sounds quite like a man who wants us out of Iraq while we're still on his watch so he can puff up his chest and crow that he ended America's involvement in what he refers to as 'Bush's war'...sounds like a man achieving his goal of geopolitically destabilizing the entire Middle East as he sets up the perfect storm as a prelude to his oh so-wanted islamic takeover of the world.
And as Obama's minions and the media tries to quell the growing firestorm here at home over
both the release of the 'GITMO 5' and the nightmare of ISIS run amok,
good old muslim sympathizer Chuck Hagel ordered the aircraft carrier
USS George H.W. Bush to the Persian Gulf, along with the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea and the
guided-missile destroyer USS Truxtun. Carrying Tomahawk missiles that
could easily reach Iraq, the USS Bush carries fighter jets that could also
reach Iraq in a heartbeat if...and only if...the green light to engage is ever given.
But you know that will NEVER happen as this display of military might is all for show...a photo-op political maneuver of the first degree...for while the war goes on 'over there,' Obama's malicious indifference to our security concerns here at home remains, as it does so also for any US interests remaining in Iraq. Obama had the chance to help keep Iraq even somewhat free by negotiating with al-Maliki to put in place a 'Status of Forces Agreement' that would involve a limited but continued American military presence in a nation on the cusp of being reborn in freedom, but instead chose to announce the date on which he would have America basically turning her back on Iraq and the Iraqi people...letting a floundering new government have its future taken away by the very people they fought to have a future from.
So as those who still live as if in man's barbaric past make gains
by spilling as much blood as they can...as they consolidate their power
in the north to move into and take over the south...the conflicts in
Syria and Iraq have basically become one and the same as the borders
between Middle Eastern counties slowly but surely melt away. And through it all
Barack HUSSEIN Obama limits the use of American fire power...of boots on
the ground...as the lands of civilization's beginnings turns violent
and volatile yet once again.
*********************************************************************************
As
many of you know my RIGHT SIDE PATRIOT partner and friend, Craig
Andresen, is in facebook jail until June 26th, so I have been posting
his articles for him. Please click this link: http://www.thenationalpatriot.com/2014/06/15/for-tea-party-politics-win-social-issues-lose/ to go directly to Craig's
blog 'The National Patriot' to read his newest article.
********************************************
REMINDER!!!
As we
continue to work towards forcing this regime to answer to 'We the People'
for high crimes and misdemeanors, we ask that you SIGN AND SHARE OUR PETITION BY CLICKING HERE... https://www.change.org/petitions/sen-ted-cruz-impeach-and-arrest-barack-hussein-obama-on-the-grounds-of-aiding-and-abetting-the-enemy-as-per-18-u-s-code-2339a All we need is 100,000 signatures to force Obama himself to address our concerns!!!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)