Mexico Security Memo: Challenges to the Knights Templar in Michoacan

Stratfor

The conflict between the Knights Templar and the self-defense groups, also commonly referred to as community police, continues to escalate with violent acts and Knights Templar propaganda in Michoacan state near the border with Jalisco state. The Buenavista Tomatlan and Tepalcatepec municipalities have experienced the quickest increases in violence, extortion and embargos on local industries due to the ongoing conflict between Knights Templar and the self-defense groups.

On May 5, authorities discovered several narcomantas in Apatzingan, which is connected to both aforementioned municipalities by Highway 120 to the east. The messages denounced the self-defense groups, claiming they are associated with Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion, the now-principal rival of the Knights Templar in states such as Jalisco, Michoacan, Guanajuato and Guerrero. Regardless of any validity behind the messages, the focus on connecting the self-defense groups to the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion shows an increasing urgency for the Knights Templar to defend their stronghold state from Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion and the expanding self-defense groups in Mexican communities.

The self-defense groups emerged in Buenavista Tomatlan in February as a response to escalating conflict between the Knights Templar and Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion. Since then, Knights Templar propaganda has shifted its focus from targeting Los Zetas to targeting the self-defense groups. During 2012, Los Zetas were the primary rival for the Knights Templar because they continually threatened Knights Templar routes to the United States through northeastern Mexico. But the conflict with Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion is a more immediate threat to the Knights Templar because of the former's proximity to the Knight's Templar stronghold in Michoacan. Moreover, the appearance of the self-defense groups brought additional challenges for the group.

Hot Spots This Week in Mexico map

In addition to propaganda and violent assaults, the Knights Templar have attempted to impose embargos on the municipalities that host self-defense groups in Michoacan. On April 15, unidentified individuals distributed pamphlets, ostensibly signed by the Knights Templar, in various areas of Apatzingan, Michoacan state. The message on the pamphlets warned vendors in general and some companies in particular to stop delivering goods to Buenavista Tomatlan and Tepalcatepec.

Regardless of the validity of the claims that self-defense groups are colluding with the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion, the groups augment the threat that the neighboring cartel poses to the Knights Templar. Additionally, the self-defense groups' ability to police their respective communities competes with the publicly stated intent of the Knights Templar to provide public services in the communities in which they operate. Should more self-defense groups also countering Knights Templar interests emerge in Michoacan, the cartel could expect to lose some freedom to maneuver in its local criminal enterprises within its stronghold.

It does not appear that the Knights Templar are in immediate danger of losing significant territory. However, it is likely the operations of self-defense groups in Michoacan state have favored the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion in their current conflict with Knights Templar. Because of this, violence in Michoacan state, particularly west of Apatzingan, will likely continue at current levels and could further escalate if more self-defense groups emerge or if existing ones improve in their tactical capabilities.

Read more: Mexico Security Memo: Challenges to the Knights Templar in Michoacan | Stratfor

Mexico Security Memo: Challenges to the Knights Templar in Michoacan
Stratfor

The conflict between the Knights Templar and the self-defense groups, also commonly referred to as community police, continues to escalate with violent acts and Knights Templar propaganda in Michoacan state near the border with Jalisco state. The Buenavista Tomatlan and Tepalcatepec municipalities have experienced the quickest increases in violence, extortion and embargos on local industries due to the ongoing conflict between Knights Templar and the self-defense groups.

On May 5, authorities discovered several narcomantas in Apatzingan, which is connected to both aforementioned municipalities by Highway 120 to the east. The messages denounced the self-defense groups, claiming they are associated with Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion, the now-principal rival of the Knights Templar in states such as Jalisco, Michoacan, Guanajuato and Guerrero. Regardless of any validity behind the messages, the focus on connecting the self-defense groups to the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion shows an increasing urgency for the Knights Templar to defend their stronghold state from Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion and the expanding self-defense groups in Mexican communities.

The self-defense groups emerged in Buenavista Tomatlan in February as a response to escalating conflict between the Knights Templar and Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion. Since then, Knights Templar propaganda has shifted its focus from targeting Los Zetas to targeting the self-defense groups. During 2012, Los Zetas were the primary rival for the Knights Templar because they continually threatened Knights Templar routes to the United States through northeastern Mexico. But the conflict with Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion is a more immediate threat to the Knights Templar because of the former's proximity to the Knight's Templar stronghold in Michoacan. Moreover, the appearance of the self-defense groups brought additional challenges for the group.

Hot Spots This Week in Mexico map

In addition to propaganda and violent assaults, the Knights Templar have attempted to impose embargos on the municipalities that host self-defense groups in Michoacan. On April 15, unidentified individuals distributed pamphlets, ostensibly signed by the Knights Templar, in various areas of Apatzingan, Michoacan state. The message on the pamphlets warned vendors in general and some companies in particular to stop delivering goods to Buenavista Tomatlan and Tepalcatepec.

Regardless of the validity of the claims that self-defense groups are colluding with the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion, the groups augment the threat that the neighboring cartel poses to the Knights Templar. Additionally, the self-defense groups' ability to police their respective communities competes with the publicly stated intent of the Knights Templar to provide public services in the communities in which they operate. Should more self-defense groups also countering Knights Templar interests emerge in Michoacan, the cartel could expect to lose some freedom to maneuver in its local criminal enterprises within its stronghold.

It does not appear that the Knights Templar are in immediate danger of losing significant territory. However, it is likely the operations of self-defense groups in Michoacan state have favored the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion in their current conflict with Knights Templar. Because of this, violence in Michoacan state, particularly west of Apatzingan, will likely continue at current levels and could further escalate if more self-defense groups emerge or if existing ones improve in their tactical capabilities.

Read more: Mexico Security Memo: Challenges to the Knights Templar in Michoacan | Stratfor

BENGHAZI - The U.S. State Department’s deputy chief of mission in Libya fought back tears on Wednesday as he delivered a lengthy account of the nighttime terrorist attacks last year that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
•   Deputy chief of mission for the U.S. in Libya Gregory Hicks testified Wednesday that the anti-Muslim YouTube video initially blamed for the Benghazi attacks was a “non-event” in Libya. Hicks said that it was clear from the beginning that there was an attack on the consulate, not a protest over the video.
•   Hicks told Congress that a U.S. State Department official began criticizing his job performance, and he was ultimately demoted, after he asked why U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice attributed the Benghazi attack to an anti-Muslim Youtube video.
•   Hicks said that at 2 a.m. Benghazi time, he briefed U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Hicks said that during the briefing, he referred to the incident as a terrorist attack, and that at no time was it referred to as anything else.
•   President Obama called Clinton at approximately 10 p.m. on the night of the terrorist attacks on the U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya.
•   That was more than six hours after the attacks started, more than an hour before Tryone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed--and about the time that Clinton first released a statement linking the attacks to “inflammatory material posted on the Internet,” a reference to an anti-Muslim video on YouTube.
•   Eric Nordstrom, the regional security officer at the US Embassy in Tripoli in the months before the Benghazi attack, also said senior State Department officials were aware of security shortcomings, and it was "inexplicable" that their actions were not reviewed more thoroughly.
•   Eric Thompson, the U.S. State Department’s acting deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism, testified that he had urged the deployment of an elite response team—known as the Foreign Emergency Support Team, or FEST—but was rebuffed by the White House.
•   White House spokesman Jay Carney Wednesday blamed the intelligence agencies for the administration’s effort to hide Al Qaeda’s role in the lethal jihadi attack last September on the U.S. diplomatic site in Benghazi, Libya. Asked if White House officials made any changes, Carney claimed that “the only edits were stylistic and non-substantive.”

By JAY SOLOMON, ADAM ENTOUS and JULIAN E. BARNES

WASHINGTON—Israel has warned the U.S. that a Russian deal is imminent to sell advanced ground-to-air missile systems to Syria, weapons that would significantly boost the regime's ability to stave off intervention in its civil war.

(A 2012 photo shows a Russian S-300 surface-to-air missile system during a parade rehearsal near Moscow.)

U.S. officials said on Wednesday that they are analyzing the information Israel provided about the suspected sale of S-300 missile batteries to Syria, but wouldn't comment on whether they believed such a transfer was near.

Russian officials didn't immediately return requests to comment. The Russian Embassy in Washington has said its policy is not to comment on arms sales or transfers between Russia and other countries.

The government of President Bashar al-Assad has been seeking to purchase S-300 missile batteries—which can intercept both manned aircraft and guided missiles—from Moscow going back to the George W. Bush administration, U.S. officials said. Western nations have lobbied President Vladimir Putin's government not to go ahead with the sale. If Syria were to acquire and deploy the systems, it would make any international intervention in Syria far more complicated, according to U.S. and Middle East-based officials.

According to the information the Israelis provided in recent days, Syria has been making payments on a 2010 agreement with Moscow to buy four batteries for $900 million. They cite financial transactions from the Syrian government, including one made this year through Russia's foreign-development bank, known as the VEB.

The package includes six launchers and 144 operational missiles, each with a range of 125 miles, according to the information the Israelis provided. The first shipment could come over the next three months, according to the Israelis' information, and be concluded by the end of the year. Russia is also expected to send two instruction teams to train Syria's military in operating the missile system, the Israelis say.

Russia has been Mr. Assad's most important international backer, outside of Iran, since the conflict in Syria started in March 2011, and supplies Syria with arms, funding and fuel. Russia maintains a naval port in Syria, its only outlet to the Mediterranean. Moscow also has publicly voiced worries that a collapsed Syria could fuel Islamist activities in its restive Caucasus regions.

Secretary of State John Kerry met with Mr. Putin on Tuesday in Moscow. The leaders said they would stage an international conference this month aimed at ending the civil war. U.S. officials couldn't say whether Messrs. Kerry and Putin or their teams discussed the arms sale.

British Prime Minister David Cameron is scheduled to visit Mr. Putin in Russia on Friday. The White House on Wednesday said Mr. Cameron would visit Washington on Monday to discuss issues including Syria's civil war and counterterrorism, plus trade and economic issues, with President Barack Obama.

The Obama administration has argued that Mr. Assad has to leave office as part of a political transition in Damascus. The Kremlin has maintained that he retains a large base of support and should be included in negotiations over a future Syrian government.

Should Mr. Putin's government go ahead with the sale, it would mark a significant escalation in the battle between Moscow and Washington over Syria. U.S. officials said they believe Russian technicians are already helping maintain the existing Syrian air-defense units.

The first air-defense deals between Russia and Syria date back decades. Russia in recent years has stepped up shipments to modernize Syria's targeting systems and make the air defenses mobile, and therefore much more difficult for Israel—and the U.S.—to overcome.

According to a U.S. intelligence assessment, Russia began shipping SA-22 Pantsir-S1 units to Syria in 2008. The system, a combination of surface-to-air missiles and 30mm antiaircraft guns, has a digital targeting system and is mounted on a combat vehicle, making it easy to move. Syria has 36 of the vehicles, according to the assessment.

In 2009, the Russians started upgrading Syria's outdated analog SA-3 surface-to-air missile systems, turning them into the SA-26 Pechora-2M system, which is mobile and digital, equipped with missiles with an operational range of 17 miles, according to the assessment.

The U.S. is particularly worried about another modernized system Moscow provides—the SA-5. With an operational range of 175 miles, SA-5 missiles could take out U.S. planes flying from Cyprus, a key North Atlantic Treaty Organization base that was used during Libya operations and would likely be vital in any Syrian operation.

The U.S. has stealth aircraft and ship-based, precision-guided missiles that could take out key air-defense sites. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has privately told the White House that shutting down the system could require weeks of bombing, putting U.S. fighter pilots in peril and diverting military resources from other priorities.

According to an analysis by the U.S. military's Joint Staff, Syrian air defenses are nearly five times more sophisticated than what existed in Libya before the NATO launched its air campaign there in 2011. Syrian air defenses are about 10 times more sophisticated than the system the U.S. and its allies faced in Serbia.

Write to Jay Solomon at jay.solomon@wsj.com, Adam Entous at adam.entous@wsj.com and Julian E. Barnes at julian.barnes@wsj.com

"Illustrious examples are displayed to our view, that we may imitate as well as admire. Before we can be distinguished by the same honors, we must be distinguished by the same virtues. What are those virtues? They are chiefly the same virtues, which we have already seen to be descriptive of the American character -- the love of liberty, and the love of law. But law and liberty cannot rationally become the objects of our love, unless they first become the objects of our knowledge."
--James Wilson, Of the Study of the Law in the United States

Yes.

The State allocating interest rates according to which sector from which someone comes is certainly economic fascism, but one has to admire the political logic of the sales pitch:

http://occupydemocrats.com/senator-warrens-1st-bill-gov-should-offer-same-loan-rates-to-students-as-big-banks/

This is Stratfor, so of course it is thoughtful.  That said, I found it rather unsatisfying and disappointing.

8 May 2013

For American Foreign Policy, No Good Options
Robert D. Kaplan

One feels sympathy for U.S. President Barack Obama. Whatever he does in Syria, he is doomed. Had he intervened a year ago, as many pundits demanded, he might presently be in the midst of a quagmire with even more pundits angry at him, and with his approval ratings far lower than they are. If he intervenes now, the results might be even worse. Journalists often demand action for action's sake, seemingly unaware that many international problems have no solution, given the limits of U.S. power. The United States can topple regimes; it cannot even modestly remake societies unless, perhaps, it commits itself to the level of time and expense it did in post-war Germany and Japan.
 
Indeed, Obama has onerous calculations: If I intervene, which group do I arm? Am I assured the weapons won't fall into the wrong hands? Am I assured the group or groups I choose to help really are acceptable to the West, and even if they are, will they matter in Damascus in the long run? And, by the way, what if toppling Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad through the establishment of a no-fly zone leads to even more chaos, and therefore results in an even worse human rights situation? Do I really want to own that mess? And even were I to come out of it successfully, do I want to devote my entire second term to Syria? Because that's what getting more deeply involved militarily there might entail.
 
In the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, intervention did not provoke other powers in the region such as Russia, because Russia in the first decade after the Cold War was a weak and chaotic state unable to project its usual historical influence in the Balkans. But intervention in Syria could get the United States into a proxy war with a strengthened Russia and with Iran.
 
In a media-driven world, holding power is truly thankless. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel will have his term in office defined by three things: a withdrawal from Afghanistan, a serious reduction in the defense budget and responses to any overseas emergencies that crop up. There is no good way to accomplish the first two, and the third usually presents the same sort of awful choices the administration now faces in Syria. Secretary of State John Kerry energetically engages in negotiations with Iran and Afghanistan, and with Israel and the Palestinian territories, not because he necessarily wants to, but because he must. Anything less would indicate an abdication of America's responsibility as a great power. And yet the chances of good outcomes in all of those cases are slim.
 
The overarching theme here is that the media assumes American policymakers have significant control over events overseas, whereas in truth they often have very little. The complex, messy realities of ground-level war and politics in Syria, Iran and Afghanistan – short of aerial and naval bombardments or tens of thousands of boots on the ground – are probably not going to be pivotally shaped by American officials.
 
During the Cold War, when chaos was relatively limited and much of the globe was divided up into two ideological camps, it was at least possible to formulate creative diplomatic strategies through the mechanical manipulation of this or that country or group of countries against others. But in a world of weak and fragmented democracies, considerable anarchy and anemic alliance systems, it is much harder to manipulate reality. There is no night watchman. No one is in control, even as the media is more relentless than ever. (Indeed, could one imagine in today's media climate a Henry Kissinger or a James Baker constructively and sternly pressuring Israel as they once did?)
 
A relentless media means policies have little time to mature before they are declared failures. It means there is less secrecy because of so many leaks. And because so much is leaked, government officials themselves have less incentive to be candid, even in private meetings, on account of the assumption that no transcript stays secret forever, whatever the security classification given it. So the quality of discussion inside government deteriorates, even as the public policy climate outside also worsens. In sum, the semi-anarchic, post-Cold War world narrows the space for foreign policy success at the same time that the quality of foreign policy itself wanes.
 
Adding to the dilemma are the really hard problems – the ones that even the most creative diplomacy cannot solve. Every president of either party going back decades has failed on the issue of North Korea. Meanwhile, each administration gets blamed anew for the failure.

In such a climate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ranks as the model diplomat. She often practiced activity for activity's sake, circling the globe nonstop before adoring cameramen while having no real diplomatic accomplishment to her credit, despite a refreshing tendency to speak boldly on occasion. The media approved of her because she was, well, a celebrity. She did promote one useful idea, though: the "pivot" away from the Middle East and toward the Asia-Pacific region. For that and maybe for that alone will she be remembered. The pivot was less a brilliant idea than a natural, organic evolution of policy intent, given the winding down of two Middle Eastern wars and the rising strategic and economic importance of the Pacific. But as noncontroversial as it should have been, the pivot was attacked in the media as being both too weak-kneed (How come we don't have more warships dedicated to Asia?) and too belligerent (against China).
 
So what is an American leader to do in such circumstances? How can one be a statesman in the face of reduced American influence in a semi-anarchic world and in the face of an increasingly demanding media?
 
The answer may be exactly what Obama is doing now in Syria: modestly assisting some of the rebel groups, but essentially avoiding the level of involvement that would make him henceforth responsible for events on the ground. In other words, let Iran get sucked deeper and deeper into the Syrian maelstrom, not the United States. The maintenance cost for Iran in a crumbling Syria will grow, even as Iran enjoys less influence there than it did during the era of a strong al Assad regime. At the same time, intensify the economic and diplomatic aid to Jordan, which, with its relatively small population and small economy, may well be possible to save. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and so forth are all destined to be weak, quasi-chaotic states that the United States cannot put to rights without the kind of gargantuan effort that would undermine its interests elsewhere in the world and at home.
 
It may be -- barring some military attack on the United States or on a treaty ally that plainly justifies a commensurate military response -- that successful administrations will go unloved during their tenures, even while they are granted grudging respect in the years and decades that follow. This has often been the case in American history. But owing to the nature of the media and the nature of the world overseas, it might become increasingly the norm. Remember that President George W. Bush enjoyed high public approval ratings from the very beginning of his presidency, through 9/11 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. But it was the very military actions that he took, popular in the media at the time, that led in his second term to becoming a tragically failed president.

The lesson is this: When it comes to foreign affairs, there is usually no way to get good reviews. But once an American leader internalizes this, he might then begin to craft a strategy that is honorable and will ultimately secure his reputation.

Women Warriors Need Their Own Combat Units
Female-only platoons might be good first step amid worries about unit cohesion.
By BEN LUXENBERG

Writing about the Amazons in "The Iliad," Homer refers to them as antianeirai or "those who fight like men." Legend says they were a tribe of fierce warrior-women who struck fear into the hearts of their enemies and who would not suffer men in their company, let alone trust men to fight alongside them. Is it time for the U.S. military to test that strategy?

As American forces were opened to women in recent decades, a line was drawn in 1994 with a rule barring them from infantry and other combat units. In January, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta formally lifted the rule. He gave the military services three years to seek exemptions if they wanted to keep some positions off-limits to women.

The military has begun researching how best to integrate women into these units. And as with any new initiative, there have been some hiccups. In late March, two female Marine Corps officers failed to complete the Corps' Infantry Officer Course, as did the two pioneering women who last year became the first to attempt the grueling course.

While the branches research the initiative further, many male soldiers and Marines remain vehemently opposed to the integration. Many cite physical and physiological challenges that come with serving in the infantry. Carrying full combat loads, which often exceed 100 pounds, for 16 hours a day for an entire deployment wears down the hardiest men and will do worse damage to women.

Others believe that the presence of women will cause a rift in the traditional male bonding of combat-arms units and damage the cohesion that is a key element in the success of any battlefield unit. Many worry that men will have to pick up the slack if women cannot perform at the same level—or that floundering women will endanger themselves and their comrades.

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Getty Images

Female Marine recruits are disciplined with some unscheduled physical training in the sand pit outside their barracks during boot camp at MCRD Parris Island, South Carolina in February.

Yet the tides of history seem to be turning against these sentiments and the questions of whether women can handle sustained combat operations. The issue is often framed now in terms of patriotism and human rights.

The service branches say that endurance and other standards won't be lowered, and perhaps there will be special training programs to prepare women who wish to become infantry. Yet there may be a better way to bring them into combat units—one that could serve as a test and steppingstone toward tighter integration.

In professional sports and in the Olympics, men and women perform separately. In boot camp and officer-candidate schools—the entry points for all service members—men and women also are separated, with placement into different platoons within the same company.

So why not mirror what society at large and the military already do: put men and women into their own teams, with female infantry platoons on one side and male platoons on the other?

An all-female infantry platoon would not suffer from many of the problems that detractors cite, such as a lack of unit cohesion caused by mixing the sexes. Like the Amazons, female-only platoons could build their own brand of cohesion, which may prove superior to the men's. The arrangement would also avoid putting male soldiers in the position of feeling obliged to compensate for an underperforming female.

While the all-female platoon solution would not compensate for physical and physiological differences and how they affect performance on the battlefield, it would be a good way to test that line of argument. If the female platoons showed that their combat performance equaled that of men, then the separated-platoon arrangement would merely be a step on the road to full integration. If the female platoons underperformed, then the idea of women in the infantry might need to be scrapped or the women-only platoons would be the final compromise, with their deployment based on battlefield needs.

A staged approach rather than rushing headlong into full integration in combat units may be the best approach. Once the right (or privilege) to serve in any military specialty is passed to women, it would be virtually impossible to change course, no matter the consequence or effect on combat effectiveness.

But who knows? Women running toward the sound of the guns may very well prefer fighting alongside other women—and their effectiveness may surprise even the most pessimistic. The Amazons certainly made an impression on the Greeks.

Mr. Luxenberg is a first lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps. His views do not represent those of the Defense Department or the Corps.

Benghazi Truths vs. Washington Politics
Wednesday's hearing turned a light on a previously unnoticed player in the story: Hillary Clinton's chief of staff.
By ELLIOTT ABRAMS

'I was stunned. My jaw dropped," said Gregory Hicks at Wednesday's House hearing on the Benghazi terror attack last fall and its aftermath. Mr. Hicks, deputy chief of mission in Libya under Ambassador Chris Stevens, was referring to the now-famous TV appearances by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice.

Ms. Rice, blanketing the Sunday talk shows the weekend after the murderous assault on the American consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, spoke of spontaneous protests and linked them to a video insulting Islam. But Mr. Hicks said "there was no report from the U.S. Mission in Libya regarding a demonstration," and there were no protests. "The YouTube video was a nonevent in Libya," he added. In the last telephone call that Mr. Hicks received from Stevens, the ambassador said "we're under attack" and then the cell connection dropped.

The hearing deepened the mystery of how Ms. Rice came to say such things. It added a new political wrinkle in the person of Cheryl Mills, whose role was previously unnoticed. Mr. Hicks testified that when a Republican member of the committee, Jason Chaffetz, visited Libya to investigate what had happened, he was instructed that no State Department officer was ever to be alone with the congressman—and that a lawyer was to attend every meeting he had.

When the lawyer was excluded from one meeting with intelligence officers because he lacked the security clearances, Mr. Hicks received a furious call from Ms. Mills, who was then chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. We can be confident that Ms. Mills, who represented Bill Clinton in his impeachment hearings and who was counsel to the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008, was not calling to guarantee due process. She was calling to protect Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Hicks also told the committee that when he asked the acting assistant secretary for the Near East, Beth Jones, why Ms. Rice had spoken about protests and the video, he was curtly told to drop that line of questioning.

Mrs. Clinton's role in this matter remains obscure, in part because the State Department's Accountability Review Board did not interview her, amazingly enough. The review board protected all of the department's higher-ups and blamed career officials down the ladder. The board is now itself under investigation by State's inspector general, and Wednesday's testimony revealed the sore feelings of career officers about the review board's conduct.

It is now widely known that the "annex" in Tripoli was a CIA location, but the whole story of Benghazi makes little sense unless the CIA role in the affair can be clarified. There were very few security officers at the consulate, and this seems like a huge error by the State Department. But is this because the whole Benghazi set-up was mostly a CIA operation?

That could explain as well why the annex was permitted there, though it did not meet minimal State Department security standards. It may explain why State had a presence in dangerous Benghazi at all—as a cover for the intelligence presence. This may not be fodder for an open hearing, but unless we understand the interplay between State and the CIA, we will not have the full story.

The three witnesses—Mr. Hicks and two other State Department officers who work on counterterrorism and security, Mark Thompson and Eric Nordstrom—came across as civil servants of whom Americans can be proud. Mr. Hicks's account of the night of the attack and following morning, and the desperate efforts to save the Americans in Benghazi, were gripping.

The hearing room was silent as he told the tale, for the most part without emotion. He named the Americans on his team who had risked their lives to try and rescue Stevens, and others who had performed so well in the intense crisis that gripped the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli. At 3 a.m. he gave the order to abandon the embassy building because there were Twitter feeds saying an attack was coming, and he told stories like that of the embassy nurse who started "smashing computer hard drives with an ax" to protect classified information.

The hearing also showed the chasm between the culture of career civil servants ready to risk their lives and the vicious political culture of Washington. No doubt politics motivated some of the Republicans, but due to the nature of the hearing they were cast as investigators. Most Democrats appeared far more dedicated to defending Mrs. Clinton and the Obama administration than to finding out exactly what happened, and any criticism of Ms. Rice was rebutted. After all, Chris Stevens is gone but 2016 is just around the corner.

The three witnesses seemed to be visitors from a different reality—different from Rep. Carolyn Maloney and her outrage that anyone could criticize the great Secretary Clinton, or from Cheryl Mills and the anger she expressed at Mr. Hicks for allowing a congressman to escape the presence of the lawyer she had sent.

The Accountability Review Board was also part of that Washington culture, protecting the top levels of the State Department—the secretary and the deputy and under secretaries—and laying blame (and punishment) on the career people below them. This hearing did not ascertain where the buck should stop, but it was a step forward in getting the facts. And it was a reminder that in Washington we should not permit people with political motives to blight the careers of civil servants and blame them for failures of management and policy at the top.

Mr. Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, handled Middle East affairs at the National Security Council from 2001 to 2009

By MARTHA RAYNER

In 2005, I filed a legal action against President George W. Bush on behalf of clients imprisoned without charges or trial at the military prisons of the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base in Cuba. The lawsuit—a habeas corpus petition challenging the lawfulness of imprisonment—was captioned as my clients' names versus President Bush's, who in his role as commander in chief of the U.S. military was my clients' jailer.

In 2009, when Barack Obama became the 44th president, the caption had to change. The case was now against President Obama.

At the time, this felt like a technical necessity of litigation. After all, my clients' harsh detention thousands of miles from their homes, which was designed to avoid the application of the rule of law, was carried out by Mr. Bush. Within days of his first inauguration, Mr. Obama ordered the closure of Guantanamo within one year, so the wrongs of one president were soon to be righted by the next. Barack Obama wasn't my clients' jailer, it was George Bush.

But this is no longer true. President Obama has never owned up to his role as jailer. He has viewed Guantanamo as a problem he did not create or ever support; he inherited the problem, it was thrust upon him. Although Mr. Obama has repeatedly recognized the significant costs of maintaining Guantanamo—the diminishment of U.S. standing in the world, the prison's symbolic value as a recruiting tool for terrorists, and the extraordinary expense and inefficiencies of running the prison—he has never acknowledged Guantanamo as truly his problem and his responsibility.

Mr. Obama's statements at his April 30 press conference displayed this detachment in a particularly troubling and revealing way. First, the president placed responsibility at Congress's door. He inaccurately blamed Congress for the continued existence of the prison, saying "Congress determined they would not let us close it."

This was a reference to the National Defense Authorization Acts of 2011, 2012 and 2013—all of which Mr. Obama signed into law. Although the president is required to make certain security assurances to Congress before transferring men from Guantanamo to other countries, the law does not prohibit him from carrying out such transfers.

Mr. Obama also inaccurately said at the press conference that Congress would not permit him to transfer men even when their transfer was court ordered. The opposite is true. Under the National Defense Authorization Acts, court-ordered releases are exempt from the security assurances otherwise required. Despite his clear authority in this matter, the president cannot seem to accept or acknowledge that he has the power to end indefinite detention without trial.

At the same time that he cast blame on Congress, Mr. Obama distanced himself from responsibility. Referring to the internment of the prisoners, he asked: "Why are we doing this?"—as if it is someone else, not he, who keeps the men at Guantanamo locked up.

In the same vein, Mr. Obama declared, "I'm going to go back to it because I think it is important." His promise to return to the issue of Guantanamo implies that he somehow stepped away from the subject—as if he has played no role in the ever-deeper permanency of this prison. On the contrary, every day Mr. Obama fails to start the transfer process is another day that he affirmatively decides to keep these men locked up.

The courts have made clear that this is Mr. Obama's decision. Three of my five clients were repatriated to their home countries under Mr. Bush's watch; the two who remain have given up on their habeas cases, since the courts have sanctioned indefinite detention without trial and left it to the commander in chief's discretion to determine who should be released and when.

The president's April 30 news conference was an attempt to quell the growing hunger strike at Guantanamo. But his words will drive the men into further desperation. They know it is Mr. Obama who imprisons them. So when the president blames Congress, takes no responsibility for keeping Guantanamo open, and offers tepid claims that he will see what he can do, it means only more of the same for the prisoners.

Mr. Obama must accept that the men held at Guantanamo are his prisoners, not George W. Bush's. As the commander in chief, he and he alone can and must act to end the practice of indefinite imprisonment without a fair trial.

Ms. Rayner is an associate clinical professor of law at Fordham University School of Law.

"What did Haldeman, Erlichman, or Nixon ever do that was any worse than this, perjury, conspiracy, obstruction of justice?" 

I think that reads a tad better now , , ,

Denny:

Any chance of this getting some traction?

Graduates, Your Ambition Is the Problem
Obama's commencement speech at Ohio State on Sunday would have perplexed the Founders.
by ROGER PILON

Civic education in America took a hit on Sunday when President Obama, giving the commencement address at The Ohio State University, chose citizenship as his theme. The country's Founders trusted citizens with "awesome authority," he told the assembled graduates. Really?

Actually, the Founders distrusted us, at least in our collective capacity. That's why they wrote a Constitution that set clear limits on what we, as citizens, could do through government.

Mr. Obama seems never to appreciate that essential point about the American political order. As with his countless speeches that lead ultimately to an expression of the president's belief in the unbounded power of government to do good, he began in Columbus with an insight that we can all pretty much embrace, at least in the abstract. Citizenship, Mr. Obama said, is "the idea at the heart of our founding—that as Americans, we are blessed with God-given and inalienable rights, but with those rights come responsibilities—to ourselves, to one another, and to future generations."

Well enough. But then he took that insight to lengths the Founders would never have imagined. Reading "citizenship" as standing for the many ways we can selflessly "serve our country," the president said that "sometimes, we see it as a virtue from another time—one that's slipping from a society that celebrates individual ambition." And "we sometimes forget the larger bonds we share, as one American family."

Not for nothing did he invoke the family, that elemental social unit in which we truly are responsible to one another and to future generations—by law, by custom, and, ideally, in our hearts. But only metaphorically is America a family, its members bound by tendrils of intimacy and affection. Realistically, the country is a community of individuals and private institutions, including the family, with their own interests, bound not by mutual love but by the political principles that are set forth in the Constitution, a document that secures and celebrates the freedom to pursue those interests, varied as they might be.

Alas, that is not Mr. Obama's vision. "The Founders left us the keys to a system of self-government," he went on, "the tool to do big and important things together that we could not possibly do alone." And what "big and important things" cannot be done except through government? On the president's list are railroads, the electrical grid, highways, education, health care, charity and more. One imagines a historical vision reaching as far back as the New Deal. Americans "chose to do these things together," he added, "because we know this country cannot accomplish great things if we pursue nothing greater than our own individual ambition."

Notice that twice now Mr. Obama has invoked "individual ambition," and not as a virtue. For other targets, he next counseled the graduates against the "voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's the root of all our problems, even as they do their best to gum up the works."

The irony here should not go unnoticed: The opponents that the president disparages are the same folks who tried to save the country from one of the biggest pieces of gum now in the works: Mr. Obama's own health-care insurance program, which today is filling many of its backers with dread as it moves toward full implementation in a matter of months.

None of that darkens Mr. Obama's sunny view of collective effort. What does upset him, still, is the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis: "Too many on Wall Street," he said, "forgot that their obligations don't end with their shareholders." No mention of the Federal Reserve, or Fannie Mae, FNMA +12.20% Freddie Mac, FMCC +12.71% the Community Reinvestment Act, or the many other "big and important things" government undertook before the crisis hit, things that explain the disaster far better than any Wall Street greed. None of that fits in Mr. Obama's morality play. For that matter, neither do the Constitution's checks and balances. When the president laments that "democracy isn't working as well as we know it can," he is not talking about those big, misbegotten public projects but about the Washington gridlock that has frustrated his grander plans.

From George Washington to Calvin Coolidge, presidents sought mostly to administer the laws that enabled citizens to live their own lives, ambitiously or not. It would have been thought impertinent for a president to tell a graduating class that what the country needs is the political will "to harness the ingenuity of your generation, and encourage and inspire the hard work of dedicated citizens . . . to repair the middle class; to give more families a fair shake; to reject a country in which only a lucky few prosper."

A more inspiring message might have urged graduates not to reject their own country, where for two centuries far more than a lucky few have prospered under limited constitutional government—and even more would today if that form of government were restored.

Mr. Pilon is vice president for legal affairs at the Cato Institute and director of Cato's Center for Constitutional Studies.

Bitcoin Startups Begin to Attract Real Cash
Venture Investors Pour in Millions, Adding Credibility to Internet Virtual Currency; Regulation Looms as a Concern
By SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN and SPENCER E. ANTE

Bitcoin startups are beginning to raise sizable investment capital even as industry leaders warn that hackers are abusing the Internet virtual currency for profit.
In the past year, fledgling businesses Coinbase Inc., Coinsetter Inc. and CoinLab Inc. have raised millions of dollars collectively from prominent venture-capital firms and angel investors, adding credibility to a digital currency that isn't backed by a central bank.
 
Coinbase founders Brian Armstrong, left, and Fred Ehrsam. 'We are in land-grab mode,' Mr. Ehrsam says.

Bits and Pieces

Mystery still surrounds Bitcoin, but buzz is growing, despite recent wild swings in the currency's value. Here's a rough timeline of the Bitcoin evolution.
s
 
On Wednesday, Bitcoin, which can be used to make payments over the Internet without transaction fees or involving a financial institution, is expected to win its biggest validation to date with a $5 million investment in San Francisco-based Coinbase led by Twitter Inc. investor Union Square Ventures.

That investment would top last month's more than $2 million put into OpenCoin Inc., another virtual currency startup whose backers include venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

"This is going to be a trigger point," said Union Square managing partner Fred Wilson of the Coinbase investment. "You'll see lot more venture money being poured into this space."

Coinbase operates an online service that allows users to buy Bitcoin, store the virtual currency in a digital wallet and pay merchants for goods or services with it. The company was founded last year by Fred Ehrsam, a 24-year-old former Goldman Sachs GS +0.98% trader, and 30-year-old Brian Armstrong, previously an engineer at short-term rental startup Airbnb.

Bitcoin is attracting attention as a wildly volatile, all-digital currency. How does it work? How are criminals taking advantage of it? How risky an investment is it? In this Bitcoin explainer, WSJ's Jason Bellini has "The Short Answer."

In April, the Coinbase co-founders said the company had about 116,000 members who converted $15 million of real money into Bitcoin, up from $1 million in January. Mr. Ehrsam said its dollar conversions are increasing by about 15% a week, and its user base is growing at a weekly rate of about 12%.

"We are in land-grab mode," said Mr. Ehrsam.

Coinbase profits by charging users a 1% fee to convert dollars to and out of Bitcoin. "We have a pretty clear business model," said Mr. Ehrsam. "It's not like we're eating Ramen every day."

Bitcoin is gaining traction with some small merchants and others who want to reduce costs associated with accepting credit cards, such as content-aggregation site Reddit.com, and OKCupid.com, a dating site owned by IAC/Interactive Inc. IACI +0.20% eBay Inc. EBAY +1.39% Chief Executive John Donahoe last month also said the e-commerce heavyweight is exploring ways to integrate Bitcoin into its PayPal payments network.

Supporters of Bitcoin, which was created in 2009 by a person or group that goes by the name Satoshi Nakamoto, say it offers anonymity and a cheap way to transact business across borders. But critics say Bitcoin faces so many regulatory and technical hurdles it will never mature into a mainstream currency.
Last month, Tokyo-based Mt. Gox Co., the largest online exchange trading Bitcoin, said its services were disabled for approximately four hours by an Internet denial-of-service attack.

"Attackers wait until the price of Bitcoins reaches a certain value, sell, destabilize the exchange, wait for everybody to panic-sell their Bitcoins, wait for the price to drop to a certain amount, then stop the attack and start buying as much as they can," according to the exchange.

Coinbase Nabs $5M in Biggest Funding for Bitcoin Startup

That volatility is one of the concerns about the currency. Bitcoin rose in value from roughly $5 in June 2012 to a high of $266 in April and was down to about $108 on Tuesday, according to Mt. Gox data.

"If I really sat down and thought about writing a financial disclosure statement, I could probably list dozens of risks," said Union Square's Mr. Wilson.

Carol R. Van Cleef, a partner specializing in emerging payments and anti-money-laundering-compliance at Washington, D.C., law firm Patton Boggs LLP, said government financial reporting regulations likely will make it difficult for virtual-currency startups. The Financial Times reported on Monday that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is discussing whether Bitcoin might fall under its regulatory jurisdiction.

Regulation is "going to force some players out of the market," Ms. Van Cleef said. Others, she added, "will bite the bullet and become compliant. But it will be expensive."
That isn't stopping venture investors. Jeremy Liew, a partner with Lightspeed Venture Partners, which has invested in three virtual currency startups including OpenCoin, said he's "incredibly bullish" because it allows for cost-free micro-transactions—such as buying a single candy bar—that would be too small for other electronic payments.
"The appeal of zero transaction costs is really strong and extremely disruptive for a massive industry, the payments industry," he said.

Chi-Hua Chien, a general partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who found the Facebook FB -0.41% investment while previously working at Accel Partners, said his firm is actively exploring investments related to Bitcoin and has already looked at more than two dozen such companies.

Mr. Chien estimates almost 100 companies are operating in the Bitcoin domain, including exchanges, payment processors and Bitcoin ATM machine operators. "It is completely crazy that money is not borderless," he said. "This is super-logical."

Seven minutes with Anderson Cooper:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5elloa4kOc&feature=player_embedded

"It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please. ... Certainly no such universal power was meant to be given them. It [the Constitution] was intended to lace them up straightly within the enumerated powers and those without which, as means, these powers could not be carried into effect."
--Thomas Jefferson, Opinion on a National Bank, 1791

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/05/06/Source-Only-President-Could-Have-Made-Stand-Down-Call-During-Benghazi-Attack

WaPo:  What is known and unknown as of now re the talking points:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/the-benghazi-talking-points-whats-known-and-unknown/2013/05/06/f689ee08-b693-11e2-b94c-b684dda07add_blog.html

Very cogent.

Ten months between betrothal and wedding?   

Celestial Formations   Iyar 27, 5773 • May 7, 2013
By Lazer Gurkow

Artist's conception of the Israelite camp in formation around the Tabernacle at the foot of Mount Sinai

They traveled together, a single mass of two million people moving slowly through the sands. Each tribe precisely positioned, each group in perfect formation, their footprints marking the desert.

At the center of this great mass was the Tabernacle, the holy house of G d. Immediately surrounding the Tabernacle was the tribe of Levi: Moses, Aaron, and their immediate families to the east; the Gershon family to the west; the Kehat family to the south; and the Merari family to the north.

Arrayed around these four families were the remaining twelve tribes of Israel. Three tribes to the east, three to the west, three to the north and three to the south.1
Angelic Entourage

The Midrash relates that G d descended from the heavens at Sinai surrounded by a majestic entourage of 22,000 angels. The entourage, arrayed around the divine presence, was divided into four groups.2

The eastern group was led by the angel Gabriel. The western group was led by the angel Raphael. The northern group was led by the angel Uriel, and the southern group was led by the angel Michael.3

Arrayed around the first circle of angels was yet another circle of angels, also comprised of four groups. This outer circle numbered 600,000 angels.4

Witnessing this majestic array, our ancestors yearned for a similar formation. Being totally encircled by G d’s presence would ensure that their attention would be exclusively focused upon G d. They asked that they be positioned in similar formation when G d’s presence would become manifest in the Tabernacle.5

Request Granted

Thirty days after the Tabernacle was erected, G d commanded Moses to take a census of the Jewish people and to establish their formations in accordance with that of the angels.  To his amazement, Moses found that the census matched the number of angels in G d’s entourage perfectly. There were 22,000 Levites, corresponding to the number of angels in G d’s inner circle, and 600,000 Jews in the other tribes, corresponding to the number of angels in G d’s outer circle.6

When Moses was instructed to establish the tribal formations, he worried that it would lead to friction among the tribes. Which tribe would lead, and which would follow? Who would lead to the east, and who to the west? Moses didn’t relish controversy.

“Don’t worry,” G d told him, “the patriarch Jacob has already arranged it. Before Jacob passed away, he instructed his sons to carry his coffin in the same formation that their children would later use in the desert.

“Judah would lead to the east, followed by Issachar and Zebulun. Reuben would lead to the south, followed by Simon and Gad. Ephraim would lead to the west, followed by Manasseh and Benjamin. Dan would lead to the north, followed by Asher and Naphtali.”7

Tribes and Angels: Might, Kindness, Healing, Light

The tribe of Judah led to the east, corresponding to the angelic camp led by Gabriel. Judah was a symbol of strength and firm discipline, as is Gabriel, the angel of divine strength.  The tribe of Reuben led to the south, corresponding to the angelic camp led by Michael. Reuben was a symbol of kindness; he was the first to rush to Joseph’s rescue. This corresponds to Michael, the angel of divine benevolence.  The tribe of Ephraim led to the west, corresponding to the angelic camp led by Raphael. Generations later, the tribe of Ephraim would prevent Jews from the north of Israel from visiting the Temple in Jerusalem. They never repented for this sin, and were never spiritually healed. They were therefore aligned with Raphael, the angel of divine healing.  The tribe of Dan led to the north, corresponding to the angelic camp led by Uriel. The tribe of Dan actually implemented Ephraim’s ban on the pilgrimage, and denied themselves access to spiritual light. They were therefore aligned with Uriel, the angel of divine light.8

Eleven Months

G d waited eleven full months before granting His children’s wish and agreeing to this celestial formation.9

The Midrash teaches that G d betrothed the Jews at Sinai, and married them on the day that the Tabernacle was erected.10 In ancient times it was customary to wait ten months between betrothal and marriage—and indeed, there was a ten-month interval between the day we received the Ten Commandments and the day the

Tabernacle was erected.11

According to the Talmud, wedding celebrations should last for thirty days;12 and indeed, G d waited one additional month. He wanted to conclude the celebrations and make certain that the bond was complete. Only then, when we were fully committed, our devotion beyond question, did He grant our desire for celestial formations.13

Becoming Angelic

Our ancestors’ request reflected a desire to reach beyond their grasp. To perceive G d’s greatness the way the angels do, and to be affected by G d’s presence the way angels are. They knew that this was beyond them, but this did not prevent them from yearning for it.

G d waited till they reached the pinnacle of their own potential, and then granted their request. In doing so G d made it possible for us, even here today, to reach beyond ourselves and periodically gain a measure of angelic inspiration.14

FOOTNOTES

1.
Numbers 2:1–31 and 3:23–39. See also Rabbeinu Bechayei, Numbers 2:10.
2.
Bamidbar Rabbah 2:3.
3.
Rabbeinu Bechayei, Numbers 2:1–25. See Zohar 2:118b for a slightly different order.
4.
Talmud, Shabbat 88a.
5.
Bamidbar Rabbah 2:3; Keli Yakar, Numbers 2:2.
See also Alshich, Numbers 1:2, who explains that G d deliberately positioned the Levites between the Tabernacle and the tribes. It ensured that that the rays of G dly light emanating from the Tabernacle would not radiate in pure form as it did at Sinai and overwhelm the uninitiated, but be filtered through the prism of the righteous Levites. The Levites, bolstered by their proximity to Moses and Aaron, would learn to tolerate the intensity of the pure rays and pass them on to the other tribes in a dimmer, softer form than the original.
6.
Numbers 1:46 and 2:39. Only the men between the age of twenty and sixty were counted in the general population, as this was a census of battle-worthy men; among the Levites, children from the age of one month and up were also counted. There were in fact 603,550 men; however, the additional three and a half thousand men were not considered in the larger number (see Alshich, Numbers 1:2).
7.
Midrash Tanchuma, Bamidbar 12.
8.
Rabbeinu Bechayei, Numbers 2:1–25. See also Keli Yakar and Nachmanides, Numbers 2:2–3, for alternative explanations.
Gabriel, Michael and Raphael are also the angels who came to visit Abraham and Sarah after Abraham’s circumcision. Raphael came to heal Abraham and to save Abraham’s nephew Lot. Michael came to inform them that a child would soon be born to them, and Gabriel came to destroy the city of Sodom. Each was sent on a mission that corresponded to its character. (See Bereishit Rabbah 50:2.)
9.
The Ten Commandments were given on the sixth of Sivan, and the formations were established on the first of Iyar of the following year.
Many explanations are offered in addition to the one offered in the essay. Ohr Hachayim (Numbers 1:2) argues that G d was waiting for enough children to be born so that the census would match that of His angelic entourage; he brilliantly compares this census to the previous one (Exodus 38:26) and demonstrates an uncanny resemblance between them. Keli Yakar and Alshich suggest that G d wanted to firmly establish His presence in the Tabernacle for at least one month before He acquiesced to the request. Alshich further argues that this was in response to the sin of the Golden Calf. When Moses informed the people that G d had forgiven them, the people immediately set about building the Tabernacle. Upon its completion, G d made His presence manifest in it to demonstrate His forgiveness. After thirty days of such presence, it was time to align the people in the same formation as the angels, to allow for maximum exposure to, and benefit from, the divine presence among them.
10.
Midrash Tanchuma, Ki Tisa 16 and Naso 20; see also Rashi, Numbers 7:1.
11.
Genesis 24:55: “Let the girl stay with us a year or ten [months].” These are the ten months that we allow between betrothal and marriage, so that the bride might adorn herself with the twenty-four adornments mentioned in Isaiah 3:18–24 (Talmud, Ketubot 57b).
12.
Talmud, Ketubot 8a.
13.
Keli Yakar, Numbers 1:1.
14.
Based on Sefat Emet (by Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter of Gur, 1847–1905), Bamidbar 5638.

Free Breakfasts: Another Destructive Progressive Idea
Tuesday, May 07, 2013
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The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced last week that it will discontinue the free school breakfast plan it initiated last year.

Called "Food for Thought," the plan provides school breakfasts to about 200,000 students.

It was funded by the LAUSD and the nonprofit Los Angeles Fund for Public Education, whose goal is to raise the number who participate to about 450,000 students (out of a total of 645,000 in the entire district).

If you go to the fund's website (lafund.org), you are greeted with these messages: "Learn to dream" (in English and in Spanish) and "Imagine your life without limits." These are essentially meaningless messages. But, as we shall see, the fund's breakfast program is not only meaningless; it is quite destructive.

The reasons for the announced cancellation were that the program had drawn rodents and insects into classrooms, and that classroom learning time was being wasted by students eating for long periods in class.

But the rodents, insects and disruption of class learning time are nothing in terms of destructiveness compared to the free breakfast itself.

First, the program was created to solve a problem that does not exist.

It is inconceivable that there are five, let alone 200,000 or the projected 450,000, homes in Los Angeles that cannot afford breakfast for their child. A nutritious breakfast can be had for less than a dollar. For examples, go to WebMD, which lists five "Breakfast Ideas for a Buck."

Second, it both enables and encourages irresponsible, disinterested and incompetent parenting. Given how inexpensive breakfast can be (not to mention the myriad public and private programs that provide food for poor households), any home that cannot provide its child with breakfast demands a visit from child protective services. Any parent who cannot give a child breakfast is not too poor; he or she is too incapable of being, or too irresponsible to be, a competent parent.

Third, even where decent parents are involved, free breakfasts at school weaken the parent-child bond. Hundreds of thousands of parents who are able and happy to provide their child with breakfast have accepted the offer -- because anything free is too enticing for an increasing number of Americans. But what they have done is made the proverbial deal with the devil. They have traded in one of the most fundamental definitions of parenthood -- providing one's children with food -- for a dollar and for a little less work as a parent. As a result, these parents become less of a parent to their children.

And fourth, the free breakfast profoundly weakens young people's character. When you grow up learning to depend on the state, you will almost inevitably -- even understandably -- assume that the state will take care of you. And you will grow up also assuming -- as do Europeans, who give far less charity than Americans for this very reason -- that the state will take care of your fellow citizens, including your own children.

These are the ways in which the left has damaged children and families through free school breakfasts.

But it gets worse. "Canceling" the program does not mean ending it.

Remember, the program is not being canceled because of its destructive effects on students and family life. The reasons it is being canceled are that rodents and insects infest classrooms, and that classroom learning time is wasted while the children stretch out breakfast eating time.

Therefore, the program is being shifted to the schools' cafeterias. The public employee unions, which govern the state of California and the city of Los Angeles, have demanded that the program be shifted from the classroom to the school cafeterias so as to employ more cafeteria workers.

Virtually everything the left touches is either immediately or eventually harmed. The free breakfast program is only one, albeit a particularly dramatic, example.

Why, then, do progressives advocate it? Because it meets three essential characteristics of the left wing: It strengthens the state; it has governmental authority replace parental authority; and perhaps most importantly, it makes progressives feel good about themselves. The overriding concern of the left is not whether a program does good. It is whether it feels good.

U.S. Directly Blames China’s Military for Cyberattacks
By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: May 6, 2013 30 Comments



WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Monday explicitly accused China’s military of mounting attacks on American government computer systems and defense contractors, saying one motive could be to map “military capabilities that could be exploited during a crisis.”


While some recent estimates have more than 90 percent of cyberespionage in the United States originating in China, the accusations relayed in the Pentagon’s annual report to Congress on Chinese military capabilities were remarkable in their directness. Until now the administration avoided directly accusing both the Chinese government and the People’s Liberation Army of using cyberweapons against the United States in a deliberate, government-developed strategy to steal intellectual property and gain strategic advantage.

“In 2012, numerous computer systems around the world, including those owned by the U.S. government, continued to be targeted for intrusions, some of which appear to be attributable directly to the Chinese government and military,” the nearly 100-page report said.

The report, released Monday, described China’s primary goal as stealing industrial technology, but said many intrusions also seemed aimed at obtaining insights into American policy makers’ thinking. It warned that the same information-gathering could easily be used for “building a picture of U.S. network defense networks, logistics, and related military capabilities that could be exploited during a crisis.”

It was unclear why the administration chose the Pentagon report to make assertions that it has long declined to make at the White House. A White House official declined to say at what level the report was cleared. A senior defense official said “this was a thoroughly coordinated report,” but did not elaborate.

On Tuesday,  a spokeswoman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs,  Hua Chunying, criticized the report.

‘‘China has repeatedly said that we resolutely oppose all forms of hacker attacks,’’ she said. ‘‘We’re willing to carry out an even-tempered and constructive dialogue with the U.S. on the issue of Internet security. But we are firmly opposed to any groundless accusations and speculations, since they will only damage the cooperation efforts and atmosphere between the two sides to strengthen dialogue and cooperation.’’

Missing from the Pentagon report was any acknowledgment of the similar abilities being developed in the United States, where billions of dollars are spent each year on cyberdefense and constructing increasingly sophisticated cyberweapons. Recently the director of the National Security Agency, Gen. Keith Alexander, who is also commander of the military’s fast-growing Cyber Command, told Congress that he was creating more than a dozen offensive cyberunits, designed to mount attacks, when necessary, at foreign computer networks.

When the United States mounted its cyberattacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities early in President Obama’s first term, Mr. Obama expressed concern to aides that China and other states might use the American operations to justify their own intrusions.

But the Pentagon report describes something far more sophisticated: A China that has now leapt into the first ranks of offensive cybertechnologies. It is investing in electronic warfare capabilities in an effort to blind American satellites and other space assets, and hopes to use electronic and traditional weapons systems to gradually push the United States military presence into the mid-Pacific nearly 2,000 miles from China’s coast.

The report argues that China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, commissioned last September, is the first of several carriers the country plans to deploy over the next 15 years. It said the carrier would not reach “operational effectiveness” for three or four years, but is already set to operate in the East and South China Seas, the site of China’s territorial disputes with several neighbors, including Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. The report notes a new carrier base under construction in Yuchi.

The report also detailed China’s progress in developing its stealth aircraft, first tested in January 2011.
===============
age 2 of 2)

Three months ago the Obama administration would not officially confirm reports in The New York Times, based in large part on a detailed study by the computer security firm Mandiant, that identified P.L.A. Unit 61398 near Shanghai as the likely source of many of the biggest thefts of data from American companies and some government institutions.


Until Monday, the strongest critique of China came from Thomas E. Donilon, the president’s national security adviser, who said in a speech at the Asia Society in March  that American companies were increasingly concerned about “cyberintrusions emanating from China on an unprecedented scale,” and that “the international community cannot tolerate such activity from any country.” He stopped short of blaming the Chinese government for the espionage.

But government officials said the overall issue of cyberintrusions would move to the center of the United States-China relationship, and it was raised on recent trips to Beijing by Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey.

To bolster its case, the report argues that cyberweapons have become integral to Chinese military strategy. It cites two major public works of military doctrine, “Science of Strategy” and “Science of Campaigns,” saying they identify “information warfare (I.W.) as integral to achieving information superiority and an effective means for countering a stronger foe.” But it notes that neither document “identifies the specific criteria for employing a computer network attack against an adversary,” though they “advocate developing capabilities to compete in this medium.”

It is a critique the Chinese could easily level at the United States, where the Pentagon has declined to describe the conditions under which it would use offensive cyberweapons. The Iran operation was considered a covert action, run by intelligence agencies, though many techniques used to manipulate Iran’s computer controllers would be common to a military program.

The Pentagon report also explicitly states that China’s investments in the United States aim to bolster its own military technology. “China continues to leverage foreign investments, commercial joint ventures, academic exchanges, the experience of repatriated Chinese students and researchers, and state-sponsored industrial and technical espionage to increase the level of technologies and expertise available to support military research, development and acquisition.”

But the report does not address how the Obama administration should deal with that problem in an economically interconnected world where the United States encourages those investments, and its own in China, to create jobs and deepen the relationship between the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 economies. Some experts have argued that the threat from China has been exaggerated. They point out that the Chinese government — unlike, say, Iran or North Korea — has such deep investments in the United States that it cannot afford to mount a crippling cyberstrike on the country.

The report estimates that China’s defense budget is $135 billion to $215 billion, a large range attributable in part to the opaqueness of Chinese budgeting. While the figure is huge in Asia, the top estimate would still be less than a third of what the United States spends every year.

Some of the report’s most interesting elements examine the debate inside China over whether this is a moment for the country to bide its time, focusing on internal challenges, or to directly challenge the United States and other powers in the Pacific.

But it said that “proponents of a more active and assertive Chinese role on the world stage” — a group whose members it did not name — “have suggested that China would be better served by a firm stance in the face of U.S. or other regional pressure.”

"It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good disposition."
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, 1785

http://www.examiner.com/article/report-u-s-ambassador-was-raped-before-he-was-murdered

The president of libya even offered to ferry troops from tripoli to benghazi and was told no thank you - http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/05/05/chaffetz-state-department-officials-fear-retaliation-on-benghazi-more-will-talk/

============================

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty
May 7, 2013

The Benghazi Hearings: This May Be the Week That Defines Obama's Second Term

Dear Republicans on the House Oversight Committee:

Please do not grandstand. Please do not take the time before the television cameras to tell us how outraged you are, even though what you are investigating is, indeed, outrageous. There will be plenty of time for that after the hearing. All day Wednesday, give us the facts, and then more facts, and then more facts.
Just ask the questions of the witnesses. Let them speak and don't cut them off. Do not give the Obama administration any cover to claim that this is a partisan witch hunt from unhinged political opponents. Don't waste time complaining about the media's lack of interest or coverage so far. Just give them — and us — the facts to tell the story, a story that will leave all of us demanding accountability.

Sheryl Attkisson's excellent reporting for CBS gives us a sense of what to expect, with three big issues.

First: Leading up to September 11, why did State Department's keep reducing the amount of security protecting diplomatic staff in Libya, in light of the increasingly dire requests from those in country?

The former deputy chief of mission for the U.S. in Libya, Gregory Hicks, was interviewed by congressional investigators on the House Oversight Committee in April. He told them, "we had already essentially stripped ourselves of our security presence, or our security capability to the bare minimum."

Second: Precisely what happened that night? Was there a time when a rescue could have been authorized, but wasn't? Were any forces told to "stand down" and not attempt a rescue?

From Hicks' interview:

A: So Lieutenant Colonel Gibson, who is the SOCAFRICA commander, his team, you know, they were on their way to the vehicles to go to the airport to get on the C-130 when he got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, you can't go now, you don't have authority to go now. And so they missed the flight. And, of course, this meant that one of the . . .

Q : They didn't miss the flight. They were told not to board the flight.

A: They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it. So, anyway, and yeah. I still remember Colonel Gibson, he said, "I have never been so embarrassed in my life that a State Department officer has bigger balls than somebody in the military." A nice compliment.

Wait, there's more from another witness:

On the night of Sept. 11, as the Obama administration scrambled to respond to the Benghazi terror attacks, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a key aide effectively tried to cut the department's own counterterrorism bureau out of the chain of reporting and decision-making, according to a "whistle-blower" witness from that bureau who will soon testify to the charge before Congress, Fox News has learned.

That witness is Mark I. Thompson, a former Marine and now the deputy coordinator for operations in the agency's counterterrorism bureau. Sources tell Fox News Thompson will level the allegation against Clinton during testimony on Wednesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.

Third: What happened afterward, and was there an effort to lie to the American people about what happened?

Hicks, again:

Greg Hicks: The net impact of what has transpired is the spokesperson of the most powerful country in the world has basically said that the President of Libya is either a liar or doesn't know what he's talking about. The impact of that is immeasurable. Magariaf has just lost face in front of not only his own people, but the world... my jaw hit the floor as I watched this... I've never been as embarrassed in my life, in my career as on that day... I never reported a demonstration; I reported an attack on the consulate. Chris's last report, if you want to say his final report, is, "Greg, we are under attack." ... It is jaw-dropping that - to me that - how that came to be.

Finally, did the previous efforts to investigate this amount to a cover-up?

Jed Babbin:

Last week, we learned that the State Department's Inspector General is investigating the Pickering-Mullen "Accountability Review Board" for, among other things, its failure to investigate and get statements from the Benghazi survivors. Before there were whistleblowers there were survivors, yet the comprehensively misnamed "Accountability Review Board" didn't question them.

Which isn't a surprise. The ARB did what it was paid to do: limit the damage and blame people under Hillary Clinton for the failures of leadership and management. It was, simply, a whitewash. We'll probably wait a long time for the IG to report the facts — 2017 sounds like the right time frame.

In the press conference announcing the report, Adm. Mullen said something that's been bothering me ever since. He said that no military assets could have been deployed in time. In time to do what?

Jed makes a good point here: Just how did the U.S. military and diplomatic folks outside of Benghazi know how long they had to rescue anyone? How did they know how long our guys would be able to hold out, or how long the attack would go on? After the fact, you can calculate that not enough forces could have reached the site in time, but how did they know that as the events were ongoing?

If that means, in Clintonian terms, that they wouldn't have been in time to save Ambassador Chris Stevens, that doesn't mean that they wouldn't have been in time to save the SEALs.

If you parse Mullen's words — as we learned we must when Hillary's hubby was president — he almost certainly meant that the ambassador was killed in the early moments of the attack.

In short, what we don't need is a bold, expectation-setting, agenda-hinting prediction like this:

Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said on his radio show Monday that President Obama "will not fill out his full term" because he was complicit in a "cover-up" surrounding the attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Libya.

"I believe that before it's all over, this president will not fill out his full term," Huckabee said. "I know that puts me on a limb, but this is not minor."

 

Nice work by the officers!!!  The WTF moment was handled decisively.

When even a pravda like CBS starts covering the story, things could get interesting real quickly.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57583014/diplomat-u.s-special-forces-told-you-cant-go-to-benghazi-during-attacks/

Glenn Beck Keynote (NRA Convention, Houston 2013)

Monday, May 6, 2013 at 7:32 AM PDT

Hello Texas! Thank you. It is a real honor to be here tonight.

We’re living in interesting times. I want to start with something I don’t think anybody else at the NRA has ever started with before: a picture of a naked hippie.

That’s actually going to play a role in the talk tonight, but I’ll come back to it in a minute.

The first time I spoke at the NRA, it was in Louisville, Kentucky. They gave me this gun. It was such an amazing honor for me, but it was also one of the most terrifying times in my life.

They were doing a retrospective of Charlton Heston because he had just died. And so this is the Charlton Heston gun. They had a gigantic 25 foot image of him behind me with him holding the gun just like this: “Out of my cold dead hands!”

Then they froze the image behind me and said: “This year we would like to award this rifle to Glenn Beck.”

Wayne leaned in and said: “Glenn, say something!”

So as I walked to the podium, I just thought “Don’t say ‘I hope you didn’t take it out of his cold dead hands, did you?’ Just don’t say that!”
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I have no idea what I said, but I know I didn’t say that!

Charlton Heston’s words were meant to wake people up.
He needed to shock us into realizing who our opponent really was: an out of control growing government under Jimmy Carter.

Today we are in a different place than we were in 1976.
The problem is worse today. It wasn’t just Jimmy Carter, just as it isn’t just this president. It’s not just the Democrats either—it’s the republicans too.

The problem is everywhere.

It’s in our media, churches, educational systems, in our own homes. It is the Progressive ideology, which is antithetical to our Constitutional Republic. They want to fundamentally transform the country.

We used to ask how did this happen? If we’re here to tell the truth then we must accept much of the blame as well, since even our families are imploding.

Our Constitution, our rights, our way of life is at stake.
The Freedom of all mankind is at stake. And because of that, so are our souls.

As I have prepared my remarks over the past few weeks, I wondered what your reaction would be tonight as well as the reaction of the rest of the country.

I am going to take a different approach from what many might expect. Parts of it will be a bit tough, but they have to be said.

I grew up in the small farming town of Mt. Vernon Washington. I have also lived in midtown Manhattan. I have picked raspberries and hunted pheasants on my grandfather’s farm. I have been in the boardrooms of the powerful on Wall Street.

In the end here is what I know: I am blessed to have grown up in America.

I cherish my country and the way I was raised, but I also know we are all unique, and I respect the way you grew up as well.

I understand that many can’t understand me or the what I believe, and I’m okay with that. I don’t understand many in New York, but I appreciate the difference. Until recently, it seemed, we were all okay with our differences and we tended to get along.

We have a tough journey ahead.

This weekend, I believe, is one of the most important moments in history for America and certainly the NRA

It is right for this convention to happen in TX. Because this is where the Alamo happened. It’s where “Draw a line in the sand” came from.

General William Travis knew he had to stand on one side of the line, because it was right for him. He did not hold contempt for others who chose differently. He just said: “Best be goin’…”

If we are going to stand and fight we must love those who choose a different path.

We must also know 4 things:

-What we fight
-Who we fight
-Why we fight and most importantly,
-How we fight.

The media would have you believe that we’re silly, selfish, and think our gun rights and our guns are more important than our own children.

But we believe they are important because of our children.

Where the real rub begins is that the progressive elite believes it can make choices better than we can.

Choices on what we eat, what we drive, what we believe is moral and immoral, how to raise our children, and even if— and how— we can worship our God.

They think we’re wrong so they must regulate us until we comply.
I will not comply.

We, on the other hand, believe that it is they who are in error.

And we are once again ready to live as Americans always have: we agree to disagree. We appreciate our freedoms—or as they would say ‘celebrate the diversity!’—and return to focus on those things that unite us rather than divide us.

There are those who believe in the philosophies of man, whether it’s Marx and Engle or Saul Alinsky’s rules of divide and conquer.
We not only believe those ideas are wrong, we also believe them to be dangerous and evil.

We stand against those who want to close our hearts by absolving us of our own personal responsibilities and duties to each other. Who want to force us to accept a faceless bureaucracy and call it charity. Charity is not something a government forces you to do; charity is something that our belief in God compels us to do.

There are Americans who really think they know better than everyone else. They truly believe they should be put in charge of making choices because their choice will be better than ours.

We think they are arrogant and wrong. America has been calling out for someone to take responsibility. The culture of ‘pass the buck’ is so prevalent that our ‘bucks’ no longer have any value.

Tonight, that era of shame ends now.

And it begins with us. Here we are, millions of Americans and NRA members. And millions more who are home who aren’t NRA members, who aren’t Democrats or Republicans but are willing to stand and declare the ‘buck stops here’

I not only will take responsibility but will cry out for my God given right to own, not only my choices, but my consequences. This is our biggest difference. Not rights, but responsibilities.

A righteous cause must be cemented in the truths of the past, but because the world is dynamic we must build on those truths. Patrick Henry once said, “give me liberty or give me death!” But may I clarify and deepen its meaning?

It is time to say, “Give me responsibility or give me death” for there is no real liberty, no real freedom if one is not allowed to make his/her own choices and then fully accept the responsibility of those choices.

We fight against those who stand against what our founders called nature’s laws. They believe they are qualified to make decisions for the collective.

May I humbly remind them that God himself does not make decisions for the collective? God himself sent His son to help individuals. God himself saves the individual, thus saving the collective.

While we have a responsibility to love, help, and care for one another, in the end, it is each of us taking responsibility as it is the only way to progress as individuals and as a people.

We fight against those who deny the Creator, His power and then have the audacity to grant to themselves the collective power which even God denies himself.

Please hear me clearly: this is not presidents or parties. We wrestle against those powers and principalities, against the rulers of the darkness of this world. We stand against spiritual wickedness in high places. And we fight them with the eternal truths that man once felt were so obvious that they were declared self-evident.

I believe we were all born at this time for a reason. We were born here at this time with a profound responsibility to ensure that the flame of liberty is not snuffed out.

It will be up to the people in this room, and anywhere upon the face of the earth, who carry the understanding and can verbally defend nature’s God and nature’s law.

It is in the hands of those in this room and all with eyes and ears to protect man’s liberties and set this ship right to once again begin the long march toward true freedom.

I find myself in a strange position; I’m the owner of a growing media company. I’m not beholden to any special interest groups or parties. I can’t tell you that I’m afraid to speak the truth, and I will speak the truth.

A couple months ago, I instructed my editors at The Blaze to report on stories where people who used a gun saved the day. We hear all the other stories. About three months ago, right after the Sandy Hook shootings I wanted to find the stories of everyday people who had saved lives with guns. And with very rare exceptions, we’ve had a new story on the front page every day for the last 100 days.

My partner on the radio Pat said to me: “Glenn, have you been looking at The Blaze? Every day there’s a new story about someone who’s stopped a rape or a robbery with a gun! It’s like a new epidemic of good with guns!”

I said, “Pat, there’s no epidemic. I’ve just made a policy that we do actual honest journalism.”

Let me give you a couple of the stories:
On April 4, just one month ago, in Portland Oregon, a woman was attacked around 10pm after she had gotten out of her car.
A man approached her from behind and dragged her backwards by her ponytail.

We know what would have happened next. But this woman had a gun. She pointed it at the man. He fled.

A week earlier, in Youngstown, Ohio, an elderly woman strapped to an oxygen tank was at home, and she saw the shadow of a man lurking outside her window. Then her front door rattled. Then glass broke.

The man was inside her home.

She retrieved her revolver and she called out: “Leave me alone!” “Get out of here!”

But the guy kept coming at her. So she shot him and held him at gun point in her kitchen until police arrived.

Then a few weeks before that, in Dickinson, Texas, there’s a home invasion, and the attackers were sexually assaulting a woman and her daughter. An unspeakable horror.

The woman’s young son was tied up, but broke from his restraints and grabbed the family handgun. Upon seeing the gun, the two men fled from the home.

It happens every day. And the Blaze is the only major media outlet in the country with the guts to report it.

Guns save lives. Guns protect homes and businesses. Guns protect our children.
And only in very rare occasions are they used by madmen to kill our children.

The truth is that guns on so many occasions are the only difference between your mom or sister getting raped and them walking home unmolested. It happens all the time. And it can happen to anyone.

The other side knows this and have counted on a compliant and willing partner in the mainstream media to overlook these stories. They are counting on you not to be able to find these stories.

But what they haven’t counted on are broadcast entities like mine and bloggers like Michelle Malkin, Dana Loesch, Ben Shapiro, and others.

What they didn’t count on or see coming……is you. Your willingness to share these stories To Tweet, Facebook, or even email them to friends.

They are counting on organizations like the NRA and people who have committed to stand to fold out of fear. They’re counting on us to be quiet. They’re counting on our soldiers to come home, sit down and be quiet, to not to have the courage like so many soldiers who come home and tell the truth like Marcus Luttrell and Chris Kyle—nor his sweet wife who will now power-on and pick up the torch.

You see, they don’t know us.

They didn’t foresee the Colorado sheriffs who stood up to Obama’s gun-grabbing measures or the officers who were told “it was in their best interest” to be at the Denver police academy to stand behind the president’s anti-gun measures. Because they answer to a higher power and because they know the truth, they refused to betray the idea of freedom of conscience and the Bill of Rights.

Let me tell you something that the sheriffs knew: it’s never in our “best interests”… to sit down, shut up, and be quiet.
It is always right to stand, always right to speak, and always right to defend the truth.

No matter how high the price, we know that there is a difference between right and wrong, and it is far past time for us to begin declaring it. Never give up. Never give in.

Since when in America is standing up against your own beliefs “your best interests?”

Some of our friends who don’t understand why we make such a big deal out of what is happening don’t understand. They think it’s not about guns. It’s not.

It’s about the right of conscience and the responsibility to keep them secure for future generations.

Progressives want the Second Amendment to be overlooked… but we’re making it clearer: “The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed!”

A man goes out and commits an unspeakable act of horror with a gun. Don’t blame the gun. Don’t blame my gun or your gun or the NRA.

It is not the gun that commits unspeakable acts, it’s the individual.

A gun’s power— for good or for evil— is merely a reflection of the hands that holds it.

I have been looking for gunst hat tell the story and teach the story of the 2nd Amendment.

I want to start with this:

Barbary Powers Rifle

This is a gun that was used the first time we fought Islamic Extremists. Most people don’t even realize that’s what the Barbary Pirates were. It was on the shores of Tripoli.

Why were our marines called leather necks? ‘Leather’ implied you couldn’t be beheaded by the Muslim extremists.

Most people don’t even realize. Thomas Jefferson wrote in his version of the Koran printed by the U.S. government—the Koran in which he warned us about Islam—he didn’t want to have a foreign war, but we were paying 75% of everything that we had over in bribes to the Barbary pirates, so he sent the marines over. This gun was used against the marines.

But this is not a Barbary pirate gun, although it is decorated as one. This was first used in the American Revolution by a British soldier against us. That soldier was killed. The gun was then picked up and used by an American soldier against the British. Then that American died fighting on the shores of Tripoli and was picked up by the Muslim extremists.

So which is this gun? Is it good or is it evil. It is nothing but a gun. A gun is only a reflection of the people that use it.

It is the man, not the gun. People are different but the gun remains the same. When you get past the politics, when you get past the media, and you get to have a conversation with people of any party, any class or when you get to have an honest conversation, people will agree: this is crazy what’s going on…

How do we even protect our kids? Our families? I’m worried that our children aren’t going to have the opportunities that I had.
I’m worried about the kind of country that they are growing up in, which brings us to why we fight.

We have to have that conversation tonight: ‘how do I protect myself and my children and my loved ones? How do they protect themselves?’

We fight because we actually want to fix things.
Our families and our society are sick.

We have become a nation that is numb to the horrors of death unless it serves a political purpose.

Our ambassador is butchered in Benghazi, our military is told to look the other way and leave men to die on the battlefield, and the media fails to report it.

Our media does not report that it is too often safer to walk down the streets of Baghdad than Chicago, and yet the elites call the NRA and its members killers.

We would never discuss the fact that an abortion doctor in Philadelphia literally had jars of baby feet on his desk.
As we look away from the slaughter house and the fact that 41% of all pregnancies in NY end in abortion, our president becomes a champion for the over the counter abortion pill for 15 year olds.

Our society is sick. But while we are struggling on how to fix these things, we also have to beat back the power grabbers and their lies.

We know that the only thing that can stop someone from committing murder or from threatening our life is a law-abiding citizen who has a gun and knows how to use it.

If we’re really interested in solutions. That’s one. Because gun-free zones will do nothing but prevent the good guys from bringing a gun to school.

In the People’s Republic of Cambridge, they actually have a nuclear-free zone. I love that. No nuclear weapons in Cambridge! I feel so much better.

It’s a hate-free zone, too. No HATE!

What could possibly happen? Besides the fact that two of their own citizens plotted mass murder right there in nuclear-free, Kumbaya Cambridge. And you know what, they did it with a weapon of mass destruction.

Yes, believe it or not, that’s what they’ve labeled my grandmother’s summer pastime. This pressure cooker is a weapon of mass destruction.

Have we gone insane? Have we gone insane!

Yes we have.

After the Sandy Hook massacre, the government went in, seized the opportunity, exploited these families, and pushed for more control over our lives. It’s immoral.

Meanwhile they left our communities with “gun-free zones”
And for criminals, all that means is: “zero-opposition zone.”

The American People have the facts on their side. But the American people don’t know the facts.

We have the Constitution on our side. But we don’t know the Constitution anymore.

We have the truth on our side. But how many people can even recognize the truth?

The only way you can control a free people is to lie. The bigger the lie, and the longer you deny reality, the more apt people are to believe it.

Yet, someone will always stand up, and those who seek to control must make an example of them—smear them, isolate them, mock them, destroy them so the truth is no longer relevant. And nobody wants to talk about it any more.
“OK, 2+2 = 5!”

They call us rednecks, right-wing, anti-government and Christians. And people believe them, especially those who never grew up around guns, who are legitimately confused about the NRA and the right to bear arms. These are the people we need to reach out to because they really think the gun is evil. They really believe that we are the ones responsible for killing all those children at Sandy Hook, Aurora, Columbine, and the rest. They have accepted the media lie that the NRA is malicious.

And I don’t blame them. When your kids are being carted out of a classroom with a paper gun, with enough indoctrination, you would too.

It takes a lot of work to get around all of the lies of an out of control government and a media in collusion. And there’s another reason why people believe it. When a society is this sick and you are on overload as a parent, if someone gives you an easy answer, you snap at it because it’s convenient.

It’s easy, and it doesn’t require us to examine our lives or our role as a citizen or parent. Now, only 35% own a gun and that number is decreasing.

So let’s be clear:
Let’s talk about facts. Let’s talk about history. I don’t want you to take my word for any of this—look it up yourself. Do your own homework.

Let’s start by making something abundantly clear, over and over again.

Guns have lifted people out of poverty and over ands over have allowed the oppressed to rise up against tyranny.

Those who seek control ask: “How could you defend the use of guns…how irresponsible…”

“The gun is the most dangerous thing on the planet.”
They say no other country in the world has the problem America has with gun massacres.
“We need to be more like England where the police use batons. The only way to save the lives of our children is to ban assault-weapons and control the people’s right to own a gun.”

Our president said: “If there’s even one thing we can do, one life we can save—don’t we have an obligation to try?”

Let’s start here, Mr. President. I’m gonna explain why that’s wrong. using your logic: Mr. President, you authorized the killings of more than 176 innocent children in Pakistan. These children didn’t do anything. I have to say, these children were just as innocent as the ones who died at Sandy Hook.

Adam Lanza killed 20 children. Your use of drones killed 176 children. I’d say you’re the priority if we use your logic.

Mr. President, “if we want to save innocent children” we need to start by taking that button out of your hand.

It’s not about the drones. It is not about the war. It is not about the guns.

Let me clarify for those in the media: I am not acusing the president of killing children even though the President has accused Wayne La Pierre and the NRA of killing children.

We will not use the tools of Saul Alinsky.
We have read the Rules for Radicals, which starts with “a tip of the hat—to the first radical Lucifer.”

We will not tip our hat to Satan. We will bend our knee to God and let us honestly seek the truth.

We must remain calm and rational. We must hold on to logic.
Because in the heat of battle, people make mistakes out of fear. In the moment of battle, you make irrational decisions b/c you just want it to stop.

If you look at the countries that have banned guns, it’s always because of an emergency.

So let’s fix reason and logic firmly in her seat, question with boldness, and accept the answers that science and facts give us whether they hurt us or help us.

Let’s look at the countries that have rapidly undergone efforts to ban guns:

In every single place that all guns or handguns are banned,
the murder rates go up.

Compared to all other developed nations, the highest murder rates are not in America but in those countries which have the strictest gun control laws.

Should we ban guns and be more like England? Gun-related crimes doubled in England within a decade of guns being banned.
And 4 years after guns are banned, the English Bobby began to carry guns for the first time.

Ban guns, gun deaths double.

Mass killings are becoming an epidemic? No they’re extraordinarily rare.
513 people have been killed in mass killings since 1983.
That’s far too many. But 3,696 people have been killed by lightning in the same 30 years.

There are 30,000 firearms related deaths per year they say.
But what they won’t tell you is that 65% of those, including the one 2 days ago, are suicides.

Most of the remaining 35 % are for self-protection.
Or they are cops in the line of duty.
Once you factor suicide, cops, and protection that murder rate gets cut by over half.

The murder rates are less than half of what they were during the Great Depression. That seems to imply that the more people out of work, the more murders occur. I would bet that the same would be true for suicides—The Blaze verified that the man who shot himself at the Airport Thursday had just been fired.

So maybe you don’t need to ban guns.
If you want to save lives, Mr. President, fix the economy. Create jobs. If you want to reduce violence don’t close gun stores, or increase regulation or buy up all the bullets, remove the tax burden and clear the path for small businesses so that they can create jobs.

Facts matter. They say we have one of the highest murder rates in the world. But if you take out the gun-related deaths in cities like Chicago, Detroit, D.C., or New Orleans—where gun laws are the strictest—America would have one of the lowest murder rates in the world.

When you take out these progressive cities, America goes from the country with the third highest rate to one of the bottom ten.

When someone argues for gun-control, they are either living in self-imposed ignorance or they’re not arguing about guns. Simply control.

For us, tonight and every day forward, we must be about educating ourselves and our families and dedicating our lives to man’s liberty. It must become about the responsibility we keep for ourselves as citizens. And to make sure we give no more of our power to those in government at any level.

But we also understand many of our fellow citizens don’t want to accept more responsibility. That is why New York City has Mayor Bloomberg.

In fact, I’ve come up with a slogan…and this one, New York and Mayor Bloomberg, you will love!

You WILL LOVE NY!

Progressives like Mike Bloomberg know better than you but he also claims he doesn’t have to live under those rules. For instance, he said because of global warming, New York needed a law so you couldn’t leave your car idling—but of course he doesn’t like to get into a hot car so he lets his car idle.
When he got caught he said: “OK what’s fair is fair,” and he instead got an air conditioner that most of use in their apartment in NY, built a special contraption, and put it in his car.

He wants to control every aspect of your life, he wants to control what you drink, what you eat, how you eat, how much you eat.

He even talked recently he doesn’t think he could force everyone in NYC to exercise. Excuse me? You don’t think?

Progressives think they’re different They’re special.
They are the ranchers and we are the cattle.

There are members in congress who are absolutely pro-gun control but think it’s an outrage that YOU should have a gun.
But they carry a gun because they’re different.

Michael Moore is as anti-gun as it gets. His security guards have been arrested twice at an airport for carrying an illegal weapon in New Jersey. You shouldn’t have a gun—but Michael Moore needs one.

Even the first Progressive president, Theodore Roosevelt, had a gun. So don’t tell me the disease of Progressivism doesn’t affect both sides, because the man who started the Progressive movement was a Republican.

Teddy Roosevelt had the ultimate security system.
He had the secret service. He had them at his door, his entry way, all the way to his bedroom, but God forbid someone get past them, he wanted the chance to shoot the attacker before they shot him.

Theodore Roosevelt’s Nightstand Pistol

He had his own gun in the nightstand. Why would this president need a gun?
He’s different, “Because he has people who want to hurt him!” He doesn’t need a wallet, a driver’s license, he doesn’t need to drive because secret service does it. So why would he need to keep a gun?

Hollywood stars have Protective details. Not everyone can afford armed security, Jim Carrey, but everyone should be afforded a chance to survive.

I am sorry to say I don’t trust someone else with my family’s safety. How could anyone believe that the government is best at protecting us when they failed to notice three out of the four Boston bombing suspects overstayed their visas and one of them was deported on national security grounds by one arm of DHS only to be granted reentry by another three weeks later.

But it is more than incompetence. The Second Amendment was written because of our natural rights. And we have the responsibility to throw off the chains of tyranny.

But that sounds old fashioned, doesn’t it? That’s what progressives will tell you, they’ll use that old fashioned thing. They will always tell you: “You know, the founders only had flintlocks and couldn’t see the AR- 15.”

Maybe they couldn’t see the AR-15.
But whether or not they could isn’t what’s important. Why they wrote the words they did is what matters.

And if you don’t like the Constitution, use the constitutional process to change it. The Founders made that possible.
But there is only one way to do it. It’s simple, but not easy. It’s called an Amendment.

The founders were not anti-progress, they were anti-control. They not only expected change, they embraced it but change through the rule of law and the constitution, not around it with an executive order.

The founders, they may not have seen the AR-15.
However, President Obama, Mr. Bloomberg, and Joe Manchin –and Pat Toomey…they were sure the hell smart enough to see you coming.

The founders warned of the “monopoly of violence.”
Because they knew that governments could turn against their people.

And if the government had a monopoly of violence, tyranny would go undefeated. If you don’t believe me… ask the Japanese-Americans who spent the war in internment camps.
If you don’t think our government can do terrible things to its citizens? Explain this:

The Lakota Indians were asleep by the river when the US troops arrived on a freezing December morning. For everyone’s protection, the troops began to enter the tents of the sleeping Indians and confiscate their guns.

One boy, a deaf boy, tried to hold onto his gun. Trying to explain that he had paid a lot for it. In the struggle to hang onto it, the gun discharged.

The US Soldiers stepped back and unloaded on the group of around 300 men, women, and children. 150 were killed, another 51 wounded. Others tried to run to the creek, only to be caught and killed by the soldiers. Without any defense.

The Creek was called “Wounded Knee.” The year was 1890. To emphasize to the press the urgency and necessity of disarming those savage Indians, twenty medals of honor were awarded to the American Soldiers. That’s more than awarded for
D-Day…only four.
Battle of the Bulge…seventeen.
Pearl Harbor…fifteen.

Rifle from Massacre at Wounded Knee

This gun belonged to a member of that tribe.

If you wish to excuse the internment camps or Wounded Knee, ask what gun control meant to the Average African-American of the South in 1850. Or even after they were freed in 1880s.

After the emancipation proclamation, slavery was over, but not really, as we all know it. It’s why Martin Luther King marched. It didn’t end. Why?

The proslavery Democrats in the South tried disarming blacks because it was the last thing that they could do to prevent them truly witnessing freedom. Even after they were declared free and were reading, educating themselves, trying to lift themselves up out of poverty, up from slavery, as Booker T. Washington would say.

The very last attempt to keep them in check was gun control.
If they weren’t allowed to protect themselves, it wouldn’t matter how much knowledge they had. It would all be meaningless in the face of a gun or a midnight raid or a torch or a sword.

You have a right to life. The Democrats were not happy about this at all, and they had the power in the South and they weren’t going to change—war or no war.

The Democrats had the terrorist organization called the “Ku Klux Klan,” which was killing blacks, but not only blacks, any white who supported the integration into the Union as full citizens of any black man or woman. So, the Klan would kill anybody, but they loved to kill blacks, and they really loved to kill who they called “RADICAL REPUBLICANS.” Those were the Republicans who supported racial integration and equality for all.

Our history is so screwed up that they try to make all white people racists.

Both Republicans and blacks ended up on the KKK kill list, and so the Klan went around burning and lynching families, killing them, whites, blacks, just out of sheer hatred. 25% of all the lynchings in America were of white people who had committed to stand and fight for the liberties of all men.

A lot of times, people couldn’t do anything about it because they didn’t have a gun, because their gun was taken away.

Now, if you don’t have a gun, and the Klan comes knocking at your door, how is that freedom, exactly?

You could protect yourself if you have a right to use a gun, have a gun, keep it on you. The left will ask “why do you need more than a couple of bullets or what are you going to hunt with more than 6 rounds?”
If the Klan or the Crips or any of the gangs coming across the border unimpeded come to my neighborhood, I may require more than 6 bullets.

Unfortunately the people who need this more than anything is Americans will not see or hear it. They are those Americans who are trapped in the violence, death, and despair of our inner cities; It’s the death and despair by progressive governments and a collective whose failing schools were designed not to teach about personal responsibility and freedoms.

Teach them their own history so they may join us in the understanding that universal access to firearms is indistinguishable from emancipation.

I ask you: please, do not to take my word for it. Do your own homework.

It’s not about safety, it is about control. At a time in our country’s history when the average twelve year old could go out and buy a gun.
At a time in the 1950s where over 60% of Americans had a gun in their home, some Americans still struggled to feel the true impact of God given rights.

In Alabama in 1956 you needed a permit to carry a gun.
A black preacher who knew his rights and, more importantly, knew history, took his job as a father and his duty to protect his family seriously, and as things heated up he did the right thing—as a law abiding citizen he went to his police station and applied for a permit to carry a gun.
Unfortunately, because he was considered a challenge to the people who were in control of the system the Alabama police told Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King:

We’d like to have someone like you have a gun, but for your own safety, Sir, we just don’t think you should have one.

He was denied his right to carry a gun for his own safety.

Is there anybody within the sound of my voice that believes he was denied a concealed carry because it was in his best interest?

If we’re really concerned and serious about getting guns out of the hands of people who have proven themselves irresponsible and dangerous with guns,
Then we need to tell the truth:

Racists like James Earl Ray killed one.
Disturbed kids like Adam Lanza kill 26,
but our own history shows that
governments kill millions.

Let me come back to the picture of a naked hippie. And just so members of the press don’t get confused….

Early morning in California when a resident called the police to say that he saw a ‘naked hippie’ shooting birds. The California authorities responded by taking his gun away.

Charles Manson Shotgun

It was this gun.
Why am I telling you this story? Because it’s not the gun because the naked hippie went away without his gun but returned as helter skelter, a man known as one of the most brutal mass murders on record: Charles Manson.

He didn’t use a gun, he and his followers used knives.

It’s the intent and the person. It is the individual, not the weapon.

We must admit two things; that weapons will always find their way into the hands of bad people, but guns remain in the hands of good people. This is the beginning of the path to our solution: good people who are willing to stand.

9/11- Walter Reaver’s Revolver

September 11th, 2001. A moment in history that will define this generation. While victims were running away, men, were running into those buildings. Amazing men like young Walter Weaver, a member of the NYPD and an NRA life member. He was last seen in the world trade center trying to rescue people. He was in the lobby trying to free people trapped in an elevator. A servant fighting for the individual’s freedom until the very end.

After the towers fell and the nation mourned, we sifted through the rubble, this is all that was left as a reminder of Walter Weaver. A silent token of liberty.

Walter Weaver, I’m sure wouldn’t want to be called a hero.
He was simply an American.
He was an example of what we all should be—men, who just do the right thing when time calls our name.
When there is an emergency or trouble we are the ones that should run to help. We must be the action on the other end of the 911 call.

I don’t know, but I believe Walter Weaver would tell you that he wasn’t trained to be hero by the police academy.
But he was raised in a culture that taught him about self-sacrifice and to always do the right thing, even when no one else is watching. He had those things long before he wore a uniform.
How many of us can say that.

Good cops, bad cop, it doesn’t mean you take all the badges. It’s the people, not the badge.

As good as the policemen in our country are. When you are in trouble the average Police response rate is 8 minutes; most crimes take less than one.

If a responsible citizen with a gun had been in that movie theater in Colorado, or if members in the audience in that theater were allowed to bring their gun into the theater and not leave them locked in their cars, how many lives would have been saved?

How many of the mourning, children would instead have been able to spend time over breakfast with their mom or dad this morning if someone good was allowed to have a gun?

While our politicians from the local to the federal level have spent us into oblivion, and our public services are being obliterated and our police force is being cut.

I will no longer accept the media falsehood nor reinforce it by calling our brave men and women in blue on our cities and streets first responders. It’s time for America to recognize WE are the first responders.

They are the 2nd responders, we are the first responders.

When there is trouble let us be the first on the scene to help.
Let us be the first responder when someone is sick or hungry or frightened.

Let us be the first to share our bread with the hungry; Let us be the first to open our hearts to the homeless poor; Let us be the first to remove the yoke of injustice.

I don’t know what America will choose. But for me and my family, I choose to stand with courage. I choose to stand with selflessness. I chose to stand with God with Malice toward none and charity to all.

That’s who we are.

Forget what the media says, I know that’s who we are.

Our freedom is under attack. Our liberty and way of life is being legislated out of existence. Our rights are being diminished by a ruling power…an elite class is growing out of control.

We are in a really a precarious position, America. We have a government that is run by radicals actively working against us.

And there are politicians in the Democratic and Republican Parties who don’t fully understand that you’re dealing with a different enemy who is playing for the entire world.

They aren’t just tinkering around the edges anymore.
They are going after America at her very core.

Because they know: if you lose the 2nd Amendment
You lose the 1st, the 4th , the 5th, the 10,th the 14th, the 19th, then all you’ll be left with is the 16th Amendment, the income tax one.

And maybe if you’re lucky…you might still have that one about quartering soldiers.

Charlton Heston already stood in 1976
He drew that line in the sand. I will not give up my weapon. I will not comply. I will stand and fight.

But we must now define what it means to fight and it must allow us to remain true to who we are. Tonight begins a new chapter in the fight for liberty.

One that is about more than just our cold dead hands…it’s about the hearts of good people and the active minds of a free people, the actions of a righteous people.
It’s about who we are. As Americans, proud Americans with a cause greater than ourselves.

I believe it is time not to run from labels – instead embrace those things that will be the only life preserver of any value. Let us declare without shame: Yes- I will cling to my God and my guns.

He is my rock, and they are central to our foundation.

In the coming days I will announce an effort with major partners who know the time of our day.
I hope the NRA will join me on this.

We must begin to teach the American people how to stand for civil rights, with the same vigor and discipline that was taught to Alveda King and those around her by her Uncle Martin. We must learn what it means to passively resist.

Let us resist in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
This is the underground railroad and the lunch counters, and Tiananmen Square. Most God-fearing Americans have always associated things like ‘peace’ activists, sit-ins and resistance with pot smoking, naked hippies. By doing so, we have dismissed their power and their roots.

Because the cultural icon of that decade was the naked hippie we missed the truth, which truly moved us forward.
That free love had nothing to do with freedom and worse, love love should not be confused with sex.

The true and powerful message of the 1960s was that God demands equal justice and equal rights for all of his children. That was the center of MLK movement. And so we must pick up that truth again.

We must not respond in kind by getting angry, by playing dirty,
by calling the Progressives names and striking out .
Because we know who they are, we chose not be like them. Let’s not give them that satisfaction nor the media the story they’ve already written. We are better than that. We are the law abiding, god fearing members of the NRA.
We are Americans. We will be clear, and we will stand, we will march if we have to, but we will not be moved.
Our right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. We will follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, Frederick Douglass, Winston Churchill, Thomas Paine, Dietrich Bonheoffer, Ben-Gurion, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Gandhi, Thomas Jefferson, and MLK.

Hear me now: “We Shall Overcome!”

Let us not talk about cold dead hands, but rather the people who have a cause to use them. It is not the gun, the knife or, as Cain discovered with Able, a rock but the cold heart filled with error and darkness that must be corrected.

So we will use these hands and our warm hearts to lift up, learn, teach, help and heal. We will work together side by side, white, black, Hispanic or native-American. It doesn’t matter because we don’t see those divisions.

WE will work together as Americans not only to preserve our rights, but the rights of our children to be safe, our wives and daughters to not be held at knife or gunpoint by a rapist and our most precious and vulnerable little ones to have the right to survive a simple walk down a city street or, God forbid, survive a day of public education.

It is not our cold dead hands that will win this but as always when it comes to American victories, it is our strong backs, our strong will, and the ability to adapt and learn and our warm hearts filled with love for all mankind that will compel us to defend all men’s right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Churchill said, we shall not falter, we shall not fail. I will tell you if America falls, the entire world falls into darkness, so I will add: we cannot falter, we cannot fail.

We will not be the generations that historians look back to and question. We will not be the generation which loses mankind’s freedom

They will look back to us instead and with awe and inspiration that in our darkest times with the greatest reason for doubt or fear, we rose above it, pushed the darkness back, and held the torch of liberty high once again for all men of the world to see and aspire to.

I am not moving. Because I have the power of the ultimate truth:
Because I am on the side of nature’s law and nature’s god.

Jesus was a man of love, peace, and forgiveness. But make no mistake he was also immovable.

The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. We will fight by strapping on the full armor of God. We will stand firm with the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, the sword of the spirit.

We will fight your tactics of fear, we will fight your darkness.
We will fight your lies and we will counter them with love peace and equal justice for all mankind.

Summary

MARWAN IBRAHIM/AFP/Getty Images

Iraqi protesters in Hawijah on March 1

Deadly clashes that broke out early April 23 between Sunni demonstrators and security forces in northern Iraq illustrate the challenges facing Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as his Shia-dominated government tries to manage Sunni dissent through a combination of force and appeasement. The clashes appear to have been orchestrated by Sunni militant groups, which have been trying to remilitarize the Sunni political and tribal landscape in Iraq. Baghdad's struggle to contain the gradual rise of Sunni militancy will only get more difficult with time.

Analysis

Militants, presumably Sunnis, attacked a checkpoint run by security forces and soldiers near the northern Iraqi town of Hawija, Kirkuk province, on April 19. The Iraqi Defense Ministry said the militants seized weapons from the checkpoint before disappearing into a crowd of Sunni demonstrators that had already assembled in tents as part of a sit-in in Hawija to protest the al-Maliki government's alleged unfair treatment of Sunnis.

Iraqi security forces reportedly warned the protesters to disband before storming the protest area early April 23 to arrest the suspected militants. As Iraqi forces tried to make arrests, they reportedly came under fire from somewhere within the crowd. Reports on casualties vary widely depending on the source, but the Iraqi Defense Ministry has claimed that 20 militants were killed, along with an army officer and two soldiers. Security forces detained 75 people and reportedly seized an assortment of weapons from the protest camp, including machine guns, hand grenades, knives and swords.
A Deliberate Provocation

Several aspects of this incident suggest that the clashes were the work of a Sunni militant faction intent on spurring already disaffected Sunnis to take action against the al-Maliki government. Jihadists have repeatedly attacked Sunni and Shiite targets over the past several months. Some of these maneuvers are meant to intimidate Sunnis and keep them out of the political process -- for example, attacks against poll stations and Sunni politicians. Others, such as attacks on sensitive Shiite religious sites, are meant to encourage the Shia-dominated security apparatus to crack down harder on Sunnis.

These attacks have occurred against a tense political backdrop, as Sunni protests since December 2012 have spread from western Iraq in Anbar and Ninawa provinces to other areas with large Sunni populations in Salah ad Din, Diyala and Baghdad. Sunni militant groups, including local al Qaeda node Islamic State of Iraq, the 1920 Revolution Brigades and the Naqshbandi Army, which includes many former Sunni Baathist officers among its ranks, have publicly endorsed the Sunni protests. These groups hope that the spread and intensification of Sunni dissent against the Shiite government in Baghdad will revive the Sunni insurgency. The Naqshbandi Army is the most active group in the Kirkuk area and has the support of many local tribes. Indirectly aiding their cause, a growing Sunni rebellion in Syria against the Iran-backed Alawite regime has increased the traffic of militants and weapons in the Sunni borderland linking western Iraq and eastern Syria.
Iraq

In the summer of 2012 a new group emerged, modeling itself after the Free Syrian Army and calling itself the Free Iraqi Army. The group reportedly includes former Iraqi Baathist officers and members of the Awakening Council, which previously aligned with the United States against jihadists in Iraq. Though the group still appears to have limited capabilities and geographic reach, the Free Iraqi Army has carried out small-scale attacks on security forces in Mosul and Anbar provinces -- attacks on what the group refers to as "Safavid" checkpoints, a reference to the Persian Empire that reveals the group's perception that Baghdad is run by Iranian foreign agents. The Free Iraqi Army has spoken publicly of its coordination with jihadist groups in Iraq, but it has carefully distinguished itself as an organization fighting on behalf of Iraqi Sunnis who have been sidelined by the Shiite government in Baghdad. Should this group expand its presence on the battlefield in the coming months and draw more members of Iraq's Awakening Council, it will be a clear sign that al-Maliki's efforts to appease segments of Iraq's Sunni landscape are faltering.
The Limits of Appeasement

Fearing the effects of potential collaboration between disaffected former Baathists and jihadists active in the country, al-Maliki has tried to defuse the escalation of Sunni unrest through security crackdowns, direct payments and offers of political appeasement. Most recently, al-Maliki proposed to amend the highly controversial de-Baathification law that aims to bar Saddam Hussein-era officials from serving in the government. The Iraqi Cabinet's proposed amendments would place a time limit on the de-Baathification process, allowing the Justice and Accountability Commission that runs the process to blacklist former Baathists only until the end of 2013. This would theoretically help mitigate future political discrimination against Iraqi Sunnis, particularly during the process of vetting election candidates, but the proposal already faces stiff resistance from Shiites and Kurds in parliament and may end up being an empty gesture.

The Hawija clashes carry special significance. The town is a prime target for jihadists -- a destitute town home to some 40,000 people, the overwhelming majority of them Sunnis who were well cared for during the Saddam era and lost their livelihoods when he fell. Hawija sits on the ethnic and sectarian crossroads of Iraq, just below the Kurdish autonomous region and on the path to Mosul to the north, Kirkuk to the northeast and Salah ad Din to the southwest. Since 2003, Hawija has served as an important haven for Sunni insurgents. The town's proximity to the Kurdistan Regional Government's boundaries may also be of value to the fighters. Kurdish leadership is locked in an escalating dispute with Baghdad over energy rights and Kurdish autonomy that could also turn violent and further undermine the ability of Iraqi security forces to maintain control.
The Challenge for Shiite Leadership

Deep divisions within the Sunni camp have thus far allowed the al-Maliki government to manage the various political and militant manifestations of Sunni opposition to the government while also addressing opposition from the Kurds and from rivals in his own Shiite camp. But the deaths of civilian protesters -- regardless of government claims that only al Qaeda militants and Baath party members were killed -- will reinvigorate Sunni protests against the government, and these protests now are likelier to turn violent.

Already, protesters and Sunni tribal sheikhs from Mosul in Ninawa province and from Fallujah in Anbar province have announced their solidarity with Sunnis in Hawija and have declared their intent to take up arms and drive the Iraqi army out of these areas. Sunni protesters in Salah ad Din province have also threatened to form an army for self-defense. In what may be a similar provocation to the one that instigated the clashes in Hawija, suspected Sunni gunmen reportedly attacked a police checkpoint on the same day in Tikrit, the capital of Salah ad Din province. Kirkuk's governor has meanwhile demanded the withdrawal of the Iraqi army from the province following the Hawija clashes, and curfews have been announced in Mosul, Fallujah and the Muqdadidiya district of Diyala province. With the suspicion that the Hawija clashes could be part of a broader campaign to instigate clashes that result in Sunni civilian deaths, Iraqi security forces are attempting to clamp down in areas with a heavy Sunni population in order to pre-empt attacks and demonstrations.

Neighboring powers such as Saudi Arabia may also have an interest in quietly encouraging these protests in order to further weaken Iran's foothold in Baghdad. While his government has no alternative to security crackdowns as violence escalates, al-Maliki can try to pay off select tribes and attempt to force through his amendments to the de-Baathification law as a form of political appeasement. However, if al-Maliki's political concessions are perceived as insufficient, the coming security crackdowns designed to stamp out Sunni unrest may well end up enflaming it, which is exactly what jihadists hope.

Read more: Provoking Sunni Militancy in Iraq | Stratfor

The Foundation
"Foreign influence is truly the Grecian horse to a republic. We cannot be too careful to exclude its influence." --Alexander Hamilton
Editorial Exegesis
 

"The Boston Marathon bombers hated America, but they loved the American dole. The suspects in the scheme to murder and maim innocent men, women and children were living off the generosity of the American taxpayers they hated. The Boston Herald reports that the 'brains' of the operation, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was on the Massachusetts dole with his wife, Katherine, and their 3-year-old daughter, Zahara. The parents of the Tsarnaev brothers received welfare and the accused brother, Dzhokhar, received benefits when he was a child. Taxpayer generosity to the Tsarnaev family did not end there. The city of Cambridge awarded Dzhokhar a $2,500 scholarship toward his education at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. ... Taxpayers are even paying for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's lawyer. Congress turns now to immigration reform, and the Tsarnaev case raises important issues about the high price of certain public policies under consideration. ... [Republican Sen. Jeff] Sessions observes that the Department of Homeland Security has been ignoring a 100-year-old law that requires that the government consider, before admitting an immigrant, the likelihood that he will become a 'public charge,' who will eventually be permanently dependent on public welfare. Less than 1 percent of visa applications were denied on these grounds in 2011, despite a growing number of undocumented residents who live on food stamps and other welfare programs. The Tsarnaev brothers were granted political asylum because they were Muslims from Chechnya. ... The immigration debate gives Congress a chance to re-evaluate the wisdom of sacrificing Americans for political correctness by sending invitations to prospective citizens in parts of the world where nearly everybody hates America and all it stands for. This phenomenon illustrates the need for vigilance, to make sure immigrants will become productive, prosperous Americans. Sadly, it seems the primary motivation of the president and his party on immigration reform is to create 11 million new Democratic voters with an amnesty, and hang the cost." --The Washington Times

A New Round of Minesweeping Drills in the Persian Gulf
May 2, 2013 | 1400 GMT


Summary

A U.S. Navy minesweeping helicopter in the Persian Gulf

Tensions will likely rise between Washington and Tehran in the coming months as Iran prepares to elect a new president in June. Negotiations over Iran's nuclear program have stalled once again, and Tehran has been escalating its provocative rhetoric concerning its uranium enrichment capabilities. To contain Iran's nuclear ambitions, the United States must demonstrate its military capabilities in the Persian Gulf.

This is why, from May 6 to May 30, the United States will hold a second round of multinational naval exercises in the waters off the Iranian coast in less than a year. Though the United States has little interest in engaging Iran militarily, the Pentagon wants to prove its ability to degrade Iran's most potent deterrent against attack -- its ability to mine and close the Strait of Hormuz -- after the 2012 training operations proved inconclusive.

Analysis

Iran's ability to threaten shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz is indeed a powerful military deterrent. Some 40 percent of seaborne oil and 20 percent of liquefied natural gas pass through the strait, which is just 39 kilometers (24 miles) wide at its narrowest point. Iran's ability to disrupt traffic would raise the cost of intervention for the United States and its allies. Even a very short closure or mining of the strait by Iran would rock global oil markets.

A New Round of Minesweeping Drills in the Persian Gulf

This threat has constrained the United States and forced it to attempt to deal with the Iranian nuclear program through political and economic means, but the Pentagon has still been preparing military backup plans. An integral part of U.S. strategy toward Iran is signaling the United States' willingness to strengthen its allies and act militarily if the need arises. The second round of minesweeping exercises, which come shortly after U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced several weapons deals with allies in the Middle East, are as much about encouraging restraint from Iran as about prudent military contingency planning.
Inconclusive 2012 Exercises

Tensions between Washington and Tehran escalated at the beginning of 2012 following the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, when Iran staged naval exercises in the strait. In response, the United States ramped up its military preparations for possible closure by deploying several mine-hunting assets to the region, including four additional Avenger-class ships, minesweeping helicopters and the USS Ponce, a retrofitted amphibious transport dock that serves as a mother ship for the region. Another round of talks with Tehran that failed to produce a solution led the United States to reinforce sanctions against the country.

A hastily planned, U.S.-led joint naval exercise in the waters around the Arabian Peninsula called the International Mine Countermeasure Exercise 2012 soon followed. Lasting from Sept. 17 to Sept. 27, the training operation involved 33 nations and some 3,000 personnel and was the largest of its kind ever to occur in the region. The exercise was separated into two parts: The first focused on exchanging ideas and familiarizing personnel with new anti-mine technologies at a symposium in Bahrain. The second focused on mine-clearing training and collaboration through several joint maneuvers in the Gulf of Aden, the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf.

For the United States and its allies, the exercises served as a warning to Iran that Washington will not take threats to close the strait lightly, that the Pentagon is adjusting its force posture to be able to mitigate Iran's key deterrent and that the United States can quickly garner international support for military action in the Strait of Hormuz. From a military angle, however, the success of the exercises was questionable. The U.S. Navy said it had accomplished its operational training goals, but it was reported that fewer than half of the 29 simulated mines were found. In an area as sensitive as the Strait of Hormuz, this success rate would fail to soothe international markets or allow shipping traffic to resume at a regular pace.
Goals of the 2013 Exercises

The upcoming joint training operations will take place only eight months after the previous round -- an unusually short interregnum for large international military exercises -- but the need for the drills is strong. Clearing the strait of mines while under threat from anti-ship missiles hidden onshore, mini submarines and swarms of small boats would be complicated. Trying to accomplish such a task with a large international coalition would be even more difficult. With more than 30 countries again participating in the drills, considerable practice and collaboration is necessary.

The drills can also be diplomatically useful in a politically sensitive time for Iran. With traditional diplomatic solutions doing little to curb Iran's nuclear program and upcoming presidential elections in June, the United States and its allies can employ "gunboat diplomacy" in the Persian Gulf.

Adding urgency to the exercises is the fact that many of the U.S. anti-mine assets are aging. This is, in part, because niche capabilities like mine hunting have been largely ignored since the end of the Cold War. The war on terror called for a different form of naval support, so the U.S. Navy spent much of the past decade prioritizing assets and funding for that purpose. The United States is trying to compensate for this problem by developing new assets such as the littoral combat ships equipped for minesweeping, but these are still a few years from deployment.

In the meantime, the United States is relying on stopgap purchases of off-the-shelf minesweeping assets such as SeaFox devices, which arrived in theater after the 2012 drills. But even these assets will take time to incorporate into existing operational systems. Personnel have to be trained for each system, each must be tested in an operational environment and procedures must be formulated to ensure an appropriate fit into the overall mission. Elaborate, relatively realistic drills help accomplish such tasks and provide feedback about how the new systems will affect the mission itself, allowing planners to tweak future assessments. Further, these drills signal to Tehran that the United States is ready to counter any Iranian threats around the Strait of Hormuz.

Read more: A New Round of Minesweeping Drills in the Persian Gulf | Stratfor

The Cuban Spy Network in the U.S. Government
May 2, 2013 | 1246 GMT
Stratfor
By Scott Stewart
Vice President of Analysis

On April 25, the U.S. government announced that it was unsealing an indictment charging Marta Rita Velazquez with conspiracy to commit espionage on behalf of the Cuban government. Velazquez, a former attorney adviser at the U.S. Department of Transportation and a legal officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development, fled the United States for Sweden in 2002 and was indicted in 2004. Velazquez apparently selected Sweden because the country considers espionage to be a political offense, therefore it is not covered under its extradition treaty with the United States. She and her husband also lived in Sweden from 1998 to 2000, so the country was familiar to them.

Though the Velazquez indictment is several years old, it provides a detailed and fascinating account of Cuban espionage activity inside the United States. It also raises some significant implications about the daunting challenges facing American counterintelligence agencies.
The Story

According to the indictment, Velazquez was born in Puerto Rico. She graduated from Princeton University in 1979 with a bachelor's degree in political science and Latin American studies, obtained a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 1982 and then received a master's degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington in 1984. She was hired by the U.S. Department of Transportation in August 1984.

The U.S. government alleges that Velazquez was first recruited by the Cuban intelligence service in 1983 while a student at Johns Hopkins. She reportedly traveled from Washington to Mexico City where she met with a Cuban intelligence officer and was formally recruited as an agent. During her studies at Johns Hopkins, the government claims that Velazquez served as a spotter agent who helped the Cuban intelligence service identify, assess and recruit people who occupied sensitive national security positions or who had the potential to move into such positions in the future.

The indictment asserts that in this role, Velazquez identified and befriended Ana Belen Montes, a fellow student at Johns Hopkins, in 1984. In addition to their Puerto Rican heritage, the two students reportedly shared a strong disdain for the Reagan administration's policy toward Nicaragua's Sandinista regime. Velazquez reportedly told Montes that she had friends (the Cubans) who could help Montes in her desire to help the Nicaraguan people.

During the early 1980s, a left-wing movement developed in many American universities. The movement opposed Reagan's Central American policies, such as opposition to the Sandinistas, support for the Contra rebels and support of the regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala. This movement was perhaps most readily seen in one of its larger and more active organizations, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. The movement radicalized some students who went on to work with Marxist groups in Latin America, such as Christine Lamont, who joined the Salvadoran Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, and Lori Berenson, who moved to Peru to join the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. According to the FBI, the Cuban intelligence service also recruited students like Velazquez and Montes from within this movement.

The indictment alleges that in the fall of 1984, while Montes was working as a clerk at the Department of Justice, Velazquez took her to New York to meet a friend who Velazquez said could provide Montes an opportunity to help the Nicaraguan people. The friend was an intelligence officer assigned to the Cuban mission to the United Nations. The women again traveled to New York together in early 1985 and met the Cuban intelligence officer a second time. He arranged for the two women to secretly travel together to Cuba via Spain.

In March of 1985, Velazquez and Montes traveled to Madrid, Spain, where they were met by a Cuban intelligence officer, who provided them with false passports and other documents. They then used these documents to travel to Prague in what was then Czechoslovakia. Once in Prague they were met by another Cuban intelligence officer who provided them with yet another set of false documents, as well as new sets of clothing. The Cuban officer they met in Prague then traveled with the women to Havana.

Once in Havana, the women reportedly received training in espionage tradecraft subjects, such as operational security and secure communications, including receiving and encrypting high frequency radio transmissions. The women were also allegedly subjected to practice polygraph examinations and taught methods to deceive polygraph operators.

Upon completion of their training, the women then returned to Madrid via Prague using their assumed identities. Once in Madrid they took tourist photographs of each other to support the story that they had been in Spain and then returned to Washington.

Upon returning to Washington, Montes applied for a job at the Defense Intelligence Agency using Velazquez as a character reference. She was hired by the Defense Intelligence Agency as an analyst in September 1985. Montes would excel at the agency and eventually became the Defense Intelligence Agency's most senior Cuba analyst. She served at that agency until the FBI arrested her in September 2001. Montes pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage charges in March 2002 and is currently serving a 25-year sentence.

Velazquez's trip to Havana with Montes occurred after she had been hired by the U.S. Department of Transportation in August 1984 and had been granted a Secret clearance in September 1984. In March 1989, Velazquez took a position as a legal adviser for Central America with the U.S. Agency for International Development. She was a regional legal adviser for the agency in Managua, Nicaragua, from 1990 to 1994, in Washington from 1994 to 1998 and in Guatemala City, Guatemala, from 2000 to 2002.

In June 2002, when it was announced that Montes had pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with the U.S. government, Velazquez resigned from her position at the U.S. Agency for International Development and moved to Sweden, where she remains.
Cuban Intelligence

The Velazquez case, when studied in conjunction with those of Montes and Walter and Gwendolyn Myers, provides a fascinating window into the scope and nature of Cuban intelligence efforts inside the United States. With Velazquez at the U.S. Agency for International Development, Montes at the Defense Intelligence Agency and Myers in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Cubans had incredible coverage of the American government's foreign policy and intelligence community. Even after Montes was arrested and Velazquez fled to Sweden, Myers remained at the State Department until his retirement in 2007.

It is also quite interesting that all three of these cases are linked to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Velazquez and Montes were students in the program in the early 1980s, and Myers taught there until 1977, after receiving a Ph.D. from the school in 1972. He returned to the school following his retirement in 2007 and worked as a professor of European Studies until his arrest in June 2009. The school is a high-profile institution that has a proven track record of placing graduates in the American foreign affairs and intelligence communities -- and of hiring former government personnel to serve as professors. Still, it is not the only program with such a profile, and the Cubans would almost certainly have recruited a promising agent from Georgetown's Walsh School, Harvard's Kennedy School or any other program if provided the opportunity. The fact that there were three high-profile Cuban agents who penetrated the U.S. government and who were all associated with the School of Advanced International Studies would seem to be an incredible coincidence. The FBI is probably still looking for potential agents who Myers could have spotted for recruitment when they studied there from 2007 to 2009.

When considering espionage cases, we often refer to an old Soviet KGB Cold War acronym -- MICE -- to explain the motivations of spies. MICE stands for money, ideology, compromise and ego. Traditionally, money has proved to be the top motivation for Americans arrested for espionage, but as seen in the Velazquez, Montes and Myers cases, the Cubans were very successful in recruiting American agents using ideology. Like the Montes and Myers complaints, there is no indication in the Velazquez complaint that she had ever sought or accepted money from the Cuban intelligence service for her espionage activities. While Velazquez and Montes were both of Puerto Rican descent, Myers' recruitment shows that Cuban intelligence officers did not just confine their recruitment activity to Hispanics.

In addition to the Cuban preference for ideologically motivated agents, this case also shows that the Cuban intelligence service is very patient and is willing to wait years for the agents it recruits to move into sensitive positions within the U.S. government rather than just focus on immediate results. It took several years for Velazquez to get a job with access to Top Secret information. Although it must be recognized that this is often the case with ideologically motivated agents who are commonly recruited while students. It is also clear that Cuban espionage efforts against the United States did not end with the Cold War and continue to this day.   

Perhaps the most disturbing revelation from the Velazquez case for American counterintelligence officials, though, is the fact that Velazquez was not caught due to some operational mistake or intelligence coup. The only reason she was discovered is because of Montes' arrest and confession, which uncovered her activities. This means that her espionage tradecraft was solid for the nearly 18 years that she worked as a Cuban agent within the U.S. government. Furthermore, the background investigations conducted for the security clearances she held with the Department of Transportation and the Agency for International Development did not pick up on her anti-American sentiments -- even the "full field" investigation that would have been conducted prior to her being granted a Top Secret clearance. 

It is not surprising that the background investigations failed to uncover Velazquez's espionage activities. Background investigations often are seen as mundane tasks, and thus are not given high priority -- especially when there are so many other "real" cases to investigate. Furthermore, these investigations are most often done by contract investigators whose bureaucratic bosses emphasize speed over substance, meaning important leads are often ignored because of a case deadline. In fact, contractors who do attempt to dig deep are sometimes accused of trying to milk the system in an effort to acquire more points (the basis upon which contract investigators are paid) by running additional leads and interviewing additional people.

Quite frankly, when it comes to background investigations, the prevalent attitude is to do the minimum work necessary to check off the prerequisite boxes and get the investigation over as quickly -- and as superficially -- as possible. Background investigations have become perfunctory bureaucratic processes that lack the ability to uncover the type of information required to catch a spy who does not want to be caught. 

Velazquez would not have been required to pass a polygraph at the U.S. Agency for International Development like Montes had to at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Nevertheless, the portion of the indictment that discussed the training in deceiving the polygraph that Velazquez and Montes received during their first trip to Cuba underscores the limitation of polygraph examinations -– they only work really well on honest people.

Finally, it is interesting to look at these Cuban cases in light of what they may tell us about the larger challenges facing U.S. counterintelligence officials. If a small, poor nation like Cuba can successfully recruit so many agents and place them in critical positions within the U.S. government for so long, what does this portend about the efforts and successes of larger or richer countries with aggressive intelligence agencies like China, Russia, Israel and India?

Read more: The Cuban Spy Network in the U.S. Government | Stratfor

The Cuban Spy Network in the U.S. Government
May 2, 2013 | 1246 GMT
Stratfor
By Scott Stewart
Vice President of Analysis

On April 25, the U.S. government announced that it was unsealing an indictment charging Marta Rita Velazquez with conspiracy to commit espionage on behalf of the Cuban government. Velazquez, a former attorney adviser at the U.S. Department of Transportation and a legal officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development, fled the United States for Sweden in 2002 and was indicted in 2004. Velazquez apparently selected Sweden because the country considers espionage to be a political offense, therefore it is not covered under its extradition treaty with the United States. She and her husband also lived in Sweden from 1998 to 2000, so the country was familiar to them.

Though the Velazquez indictment is several years old, it provides a detailed and fascinating account of Cuban espionage activity inside the United States. It also raises some significant implications about the daunting challenges facing American counterintelligence agencies.
The Story

According to the indictment, Velazquez was born in Puerto Rico. She graduated from Princeton University in 1979 with a bachelor's degree in political science and Latin American studies, obtained a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 1982 and then received a master's degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington in 1984. She was hired by the U.S. Department of Transportation in August 1984.

The U.S. government alleges that Velazquez was first recruited by the Cuban intelligence service in 1983 while a student at Johns Hopkins. She reportedly traveled from Washington to Mexico City where she met with a Cuban intelligence officer and was formally recruited as an agent. During her studies at Johns Hopkins, the government claims that Velazquez served as a spotter agent who helped the Cuban intelligence service identify, assess and recruit people who occupied sensitive national security positions or who had the potential to move into such positions in the future.

The indictment asserts that in this role, Velazquez identified and befriended Ana Belen Montes, a fellow student at Johns Hopkins, in 1984. In addition to their Puerto Rican heritage, the two students reportedly shared a strong disdain for the Reagan administration's policy toward Nicaragua's Sandinista regime. Velazquez reportedly told Montes that she had friends (the Cubans) who could help Montes in her desire to help the Nicaraguan people.

During the early 1980s, a left-wing movement developed in many American universities. The movement opposed Reagan's Central American policies, such as opposition to the Sandinistas, support for the Contra rebels and support of the regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala. This movement was perhaps most readily seen in one of its larger and more active organizations, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. The movement radicalized some students who went on to work with Marxist groups in Latin America, such as Christine Lamont, who joined the Salvadoran Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, and Lori Berenson, who moved to Peru to join the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. According to the FBI, the Cuban intelligence service also recruited students like Velazquez and Montes from within this movement.

The indictment alleges that in the fall of 1984, while Montes was working as a clerk at the Department of Justice, Velazquez took her to New York to meet a friend who Velazquez said could provide Montes an opportunity to help the Nicaraguan people. The friend was an intelligence officer assigned to the Cuban mission to the United Nations. The women again traveled to New York together in early 1985 and met the Cuban intelligence officer a second time. He arranged for the two women to secretly travel together to Cuba via Spain.

In March of 1985, Velazquez and Montes traveled to Madrid, Spain, where they were met by a Cuban intelligence officer, who provided them with false passports and other documents. They then used these documents to travel to Prague in what was then Czechoslovakia. Once in Prague they were met by another Cuban intelligence officer who provided them with yet another set of false documents, as well as new sets of clothing. The Cuban officer they met in Prague then traveled with the women to Havana.

Once in Havana, the women reportedly received training in espionage tradecraft subjects, such as operational security and secure communications, including receiving and encrypting high frequency radio transmissions. The women were also allegedly subjected to practice polygraph examinations and taught methods to deceive polygraph operators.

Upon completion of their training, the women then returned to Madrid via Prague using their assumed identities. Once in Madrid they took tourist photographs of each other to support the story that they had been in Spain and then returned to Washington.

Upon returning to Washington, Montes applied for a job at the Defense Intelligence Agency using Velazquez as a character reference. She was hired by the Defense Intelligence Agency as an analyst in September 1985. Montes would excel at the agency and eventually became the Defense Intelligence Agency's most senior Cuba analyst. She served at that agency until the FBI arrested her in September 2001. Montes pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage charges in March 2002 and is currently serving a 25-year sentence.

Velazquez's trip to Havana with Montes occurred after she had been hired by the U.S. Department of Transportation in August 1984 and had been granted a Secret clearance in September 1984. In March 1989, Velazquez took a position as a legal adviser for Central America with the U.S. Agency for International Development. She was a regional legal adviser for the agency in Managua, Nicaragua, from 1990 to 1994, in Washington from 1994 to 1998 and in Guatemala City, Guatemala, from 2000 to 2002.

In June 2002, when it was announced that Montes had pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with the U.S. government, Velazquez resigned from her position at the U.S. Agency for International Development and moved to Sweden, where she remains.
Cuban Intelligence

The Velazquez case, when studied in conjunction with those of Montes and Walter and Gwendolyn Myers, provides a fascinating window into the scope and nature of Cuban intelligence efforts inside the United States. With Velazquez at the U.S. Agency for International Development, Montes at the Defense Intelligence Agency and Myers in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Cubans had incredible coverage of the American government's foreign policy and intelligence community. Even after Montes was arrested and Velazquez fled to Sweden, Myers remained at the State Department until his retirement in 2007.

It is also quite interesting that all three of these cases are linked to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Velazquez and Montes were students in the program in the early 1980s, and Myers taught there until 1977, after receiving a Ph.D. from the school in 1972. He returned to the school following his retirement in 2007 and worked as a professor of European Studies until his arrest in June 2009. The school is a high-profile institution that has a proven track record of placing graduates in the American foreign affairs and intelligence communities -- and of hiring former government personnel to serve as professors. Still, it is not the only program with such a profile, and the Cubans would almost certainly have recruited a promising agent from Georgetown's Walsh School, Harvard's Kennedy School or any other program if provided the opportunity. The fact that there were three high-profile Cuban agents who penetrated the U.S. government and who were all associated with the School of Advanced International Studies would seem to be an incredible coincidence. The FBI is probably still looking for potential agents who Myers could have spotted for recruitment when they studied there from 2007 to 2009.

When considering espionage cases, we often refer to an old Soviet KGB Cold War acronym -- MICE -- to explain the motivations of spies. MICE stands for money, ideology, compromise and ego. Traditionally, money has proved to be the top motivation for Americans arrested for espionage, but as seen in the Velazquez, Montes and Myers cases, the Cubans were very successful in recruiting American agents using ideology. Like the Montes and Myers complaints, there is no indication in the Velazquez complaint that she had ever sought or accepted money from the Cuban intelligence service for her espionage activities. While Velazquez and Montes were both of Puerto Rican descent, Myers' recruitment shows that Cuban intelligence officers did not just confine their recruitment activity to Hispanics.

In addition to the Cuban preference for ideologically motivated agents, this case also shows that the Cuban intelligence service is very patient and is willing to wait years for the agents it recruits to move into sensitive positions within the U.S. government rather than just focus on immediate results. It took several years for Velazquez to get a job with access to Top Secret information. Although it must be recognized that this is often the case with ideologically motivated agents who are commonly recruited while students. It is also clear that Cuban espionage efforts against the United States did not end with the Cold War and continue to this day.   

Perhaps the most disturbing revelation from the Velazquez case for American counterintelligence officials, though, is the fact that Velazquez was not caught due to some operational mistake or intelligence coup. The only reason she was discovered is because of Montes' arrest and confession, which uncovered her activities. This means that her espionage tradecraft was solid for the nearly 18 years that she worked as a Cuban agent within the U.S. government. Furthermore, the background investigations conducted for the security clearances she held with the Department of Transportation and the Agency for International Development did not pick up on her anti-American sentiments -- even the "full field" investigation that would have been conducted prior to her being granted a Top Secret clearance. 

It is not surprising that the background investigations failed to uncover Velazquez's espionage activities. Background investigations often are seen as mundane tasks, and thus are not given high priority -- especially when there are so many other "real" cases to investigate. Furthermore, these investigations are most often done by contract investigators whose bureaucratic bosses emphasize speed over substance, meaning important leads are often ignored because of a case deadline. In fact, contractors who do attempt to dig deep are sometimes accused of trying to milk the system in an effort to acquire more points (the basis upon which contract investigators are paid) by running additional leads and interviewing additional people.

Quite frankly, when it comes to background investigations, the prevalent attitude is to do the minimum work necessary to check off the prerequisite boxes and get the investigation over as quickly -- and as superficially -- as possible. Background investigations have become perfunctory bureaucratic processes that lack the ability to uncover the type of information required to catch a spy who does not want to be caught. 

Velazquez would not have been required to pass a polygraph at the U.S. Agency for International Development like Montes had to at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Nevertheless, the portion of the indictment that discussed the training in deceiving the polygraph that Velazquez and Montes received during their first trip to Cuba underscores the limitation of polygraph examinations -– they only work really well on honest people.

Finally, it is interesting to look at these Cuban cases in light of what they may tell us about the larger challenges facing U.S. counterintelligence officials. If a small, poor nation like Cuba can successfully recruit so many agents and place them in critical positions within the U.S. government for so long, what does this portend about the efforts and successes of larger or richer countries with aggressive intelligence agencies like China, Russia, Israel and India?

Read more: The Cuban Spy Network in the U.S. Government | Stratfor

second post of day

Turkey's Geographical Ambition
May 1, 2013 | 0912 GMT
Stratfor

By Robert D. Kaplan and Reva Bhalla

At a time when Europe and other parts of the world are governed by forgettable mediocrities, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's prime minister for a decade now, seethes with ambition. Perhaps the only other leader of a major world nation who emanates such a dynamic force field around him is Russia's Vladimir Putin, with whom the West is also supremely uncomfortable.

Erdogan and Putin are ambitious because they are men who unrepentantly grasp geopolitics. Putin knows that any responsible Russian leader ensures that Russia has buffer zones of some sort in places like Eastern Europe and the Caucasus; Erdogan knows that Turkey must become a substantial power in the Near East in order to give him leverage in Europe. Erdogan's problem is that Turkey's geography between East and West contains as many vulnerabilities as it does benefits. This makes Erdogan at times overreach. But there is a historical and geographical logic to his excesses.

The story begins after World War I.

Because Ottoman Turkey was on the losing side of that war (along with Wilhelmine Germany and Hapsburg Austria), the victorious allies in the Treaty of Sevres of 1920 carved up Turkey and its environs, giving territory and zones of influence to Greece, Armenia, Italy, Britain and France. Turkey's reaction to this humiliation was Kemalism, the philosophy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (the surname "Ataturk" means "Father of the Turks"), the only undefeated Ottoman general, who would lead a military revolt against the new occupying powers and thus create a sovereign Turkish state throughout the Anatolian heartland. Kemalism willingly ceded away the non-Anatolian parts of the Ottoman Empire but compensated by demanding a uniethnic Turkish state within Anatolia itself. Gone were the "Kurds," for example. They would henceforth be known as "Mountain Turks." Gone, in fact, was the entire multicultural edifice of the Ottoman Empire.

Kemalism not only rejected minorities, it rejected the Arabic script of the Turkish language. Ataturk risked higher illiteracy rates to give the language a Latin script. He abolished the Muslim religious courts and discouraged women from wearing the veil and men from wearing fezzes. Ataturk further recast Turks as Europeans (without giving much thought to whether the Europeans would accept them as such), all in an attempt to reorient Turkey away from the now defunct Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and toward Europe.

Kemalism was a call to arms: the martial Turkish reaction to the Treaty of Sevres, to the same degree that Putin's neo-czarism was the authoritarian reaction to Boris Yeltsin's anarchy of 1990s' Russia. For decades the reverence for Ataturk in Turkey went beyond a personality cult: He was more like a stern, benevolent and protective demigod, whose portrait looked down upon every public interior.

The problem was that Ataturk's vision of orienting Turkey so firmly to the West clashed with Turkey's geographic situation, one that straddled both West and East. An adjustment was in order. Turgut Ozal, a religious Turk with Sufi tendencies who was elected prime minister in 1983, provided it.

Ozal's political skill enabled him to gradually wrest control of domestic policy and -- to an impressive degree -- foreign policy away from the staunchly Kemalist Turkish military. Whereas Ataturk and the generations of Turkish officers who followed him thought in terms of a Turkey that was an appendage of Europe, Ozal spoke of a Turkey whose influence stretched from the Aegean to the Great Wall of China. In Ozal's mind, Turkey did not have to choose between East and West. It was geographically enshrined in both and should thus politically embody both worlds. Ozal made Islam publicly respected again in Turkey, even as he enthusiastically supported U.S. President Ronald Reagan during the last phase of the Cold War. By being so pro-American and so adroit in managing the Kemalist establishment, in the West at least Ozal -- more than his predecessors -- was able to get away with being so Islamic.

Ozal used the cultural language of Islam to open the door to an acceptance of the Kurds. Turkey's alienation from Europe following the 1980 military coup d'etat enabled Ozal to develop economic linkages to Turkey's east. He also gradually empowered the devout Muslims of inner Anatolia. Ozal, two decades before Erdogan, saw Turkey as a champion of moderate Islam throughout the Muslim world, defying Ataturk's warning that such a pan-Islamic policy would sap Turkey's strength and expose the Turks to voracious foreign powers. The term neo-Ottomanism was, in fact, first used in the last years of Ozal's rule.

Ozal died abruptly in 1993, ushering in a desultory decade of Turkish politics marked by increasing corruption and ineffectuality on the part of Turkey's sleepy secular elite. The stage was set for Erdogan's Islamic followers to win an outright parliamentary majority in 2002. Whereas Ozal came from the center-right Motherland Party, Erdogan came from the more openly Islamist-trending Justice and Development Party, though Erdogan himself and some of his advisers had moderated their views over the years. Of course, there were many permutations in Islamic political thought and politics in Turkey between Ozal and Erdogan, but one thing stands clear: Both Ozal and Erdogan were like two bookends of the period. In any case, unlike any leader today in Europe or the United States, Erdogan actually had a vision similar to Ozal's, a vision that constituted a further distancing from Kemalism.

Rather than Ataturk's emphasis on the military, Erdogan, like Ozal, has stressed the soft power of cultural and economic connections to recreate in a benign and subtle fashion a version of the Ottoman Empire from North Africa to the Iranian plateau and Central Asia. Remember that in the interpretation of one of the West's greatest scholars of Islam, the late Marshall G. S. Hodgson of the University of Chicago, the Islamic faith was originally a merchants' religion, which united followers from oasis to oasis, allowing for ethical dealing. In Islamic history, authentic religious connections across the Middle East and the Indian Ocean world could -- and did -- lead to wholesome business connections and political patronage. Thus is medievalism altogether relevant to the post-modern world.

Erdogan now realizes that projecting Turkey's moderate Muslim power throughout the Middle East is fraught with frustrating complexities. Indeed, it is unclear that Turkey even has the political and military capacity to actualize such a vision. To wit, Turkey may be trying its best to increase trade with its eastern neighbors, but it still does not come close to Turkey's large trade volumes with Europe, now mired in recession. In the Caucasus and Central Asia, Turkey demands influence based on geographic and linguistic affinity. Yet, Putin's Russia continues to exert significant influence in the Central Asian states and, through its invasion and subsequent political maneuverings in Georgia, has put Azerbaijan in an extremely uncomfortable position. In Mesopotamia, Turkey's influence is simply unequal to that of far more proximate Iran. In Syria, Erdogan and his foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, thought -- incorrectly, it turns out -- that they could effectively mold a moderate Islamist Sunni opposition to replace President Bashar al Assad's Alawite regime. And while Erdogan has gained points throughout the Islamic world for his rousing opposition to Israel, he has learned that this comes at a price: the warming of relations between Israel and both Greece and the Greek part of Cyprus, which now permits Turkey's adversaries in the Eastern Mediterranean to cooperate in the hydrocarbon field.

The root of the problem is partly geographic. Turkey constitutes a bastion of mountains and plateau, inhabiting the half-island of the Anatolian land bridge between the Balkans and the Middle East. It is plainly not integral to a place like Iraq, for example, in the way that Iran is; and its Turkic language no longer enjoys the benefit of the Arabic script, which might give it more cultural leverage elsewhere in the Levant. But most important, Turkey is itself bedeviled by its own Kurdish population, complicating its attempts to exert leverage in neighboring Middle Eastern states.

Turkey's southeast is demographically dominated by ethnic Kurds, who adjoin vast Kurdish regions in Syria, Iraq and Iran. The ongoing breakup of Syria potentially liberates Kurds there to join with radical Kurds in Anatolia in order to undermine Turkey. The de facto breakup of Iraq has forced Turkey to follow a policy of constructive containment with Iraq's Kurdish north, but that has undermined Turkey's leverage in the rest of Iraq -- thus, in turn, undermining Turkey's attempts to influence Iran. Turkey wants to influence the Middle East, but the problem is that it remains too much a part of the Middle East to extricate itself from the region's complexities.

Erdogan knows that he must partially solve the Kurdish problem at home in order to gain further leverage in the region. He has even mentioned aloud the Arabic word, vilayet, associated with the Ottoman Empire. This word denotes a semi-autonomous province -- a concept that might hold the key for an accommodation with local Kurds but could well reignite his own nationalist rivals within Turkey. Thus, his is a big symbolic step that seeks to fundamentally neutralize the very foundation of Kemalism (with its emphasis on a solidly Turkic Anatolia). But given how he has already emasculated the Turkish military -- something few thought possible a decade ago -- one should be careful about underestimating Erdogan. His sheer ambition is something to behold. While Western elites ineffectually sneer at Putin, Erdogan enthusiastically takes notes when the two of them meet.

Read more: Turkey's Geographical Ambition | Stratfor

Monday Morning Outlook
________________________________________
The QE-xcuse To view this article, Click Here
Brian S. Wesbury - Chief Economist
Bob Stein, CFA - Deputy Chief Economist
Date: 5/6/2013

The higher the stock market goes, the more the bears argue that it’s all about easy money from the Federal Reserve. The “QE-xcuse” – says Wall Street is flying high on a wave of new money from Quantitative Easing.
But, this explanation is getting long in the tooth. The S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average both reached all-time record highs last Friday, up 161% and 156%, respectively, from their lows of four years ago.
The last time stocks had such sharp and sustained gains near these levels was in the late 1990s when optimism was rampant. Then, the psychology was the opposite. Stocks were over-valued, but talking heads were unwilling to say anything even remotely negative.
When equity indices were hitting records in 1999, after-tax economy-wide corporate profits were just $600 billion. Last year, in 2012, they were $1.5 trillion. Nonetheless, the Pouting Pundits of Pessimism are pounding the podium and spewing pessimistic pabulum on a daily basis. Every tick higher in stocks seems to create even more anger, cynicism and disbelief.
All the talking heads have to do is say “QE” and it seems every viewer/reader has been trained to understand that, “the stock market is going up because the Fed is buying bonds.” They say the market is riding a “sugar high” of new money.
But, it doesn’t stop there. It gets curious-er and curious-er the deeper we dig into the mindset of these bears. The very same people who argue the rise in stocks is phony-baloney-money-printing are also saying that the economy is about to tank and fall into a double dip recession. And, some are now talking about the rising spectacle of deflation.
This defies logic. How can money boost stocks, but not the economy or inflation? This is a mistake in monetary logic. If money were so easy then the economy, inflation and stocks would be lifted together.
But, the pouting pundits never let logic get in the way of a really scary story. For them, nothing can be good. And if it is good, it’s either phony or a lie. For example, if the unemployment rate comes down, or if jobs are created, they start arguing that the Labor Force Participation Rate is falling or the “real” unemployment rate is really much higher. When the data doesn’t cooperate they accuse the government of being wrong or lying.
We don’t claim to have a lock on the truth. As forecasters we know that we will be wrong on occasion and we don’t expect everything to go our way.
What we attempt to do is provide an explanation that is based on fact and not emotion. We want our forecast based on a consistent model, not piecemeal beliefs based in political ideology.
So, let’s build a story that holds together.
1.   The Fed is easy, but not as easy as many think. The monetary base has grown roughly 25% annualized since QE started, but M2 money supply is up just 6% annualized during that same period. The difference is sitting idly on bank balance sheets as excess reserves.
2.   Government spending and regulation have increased sharply since 2000, but spending has been reduced from 25% of GDP to 22% in the past three years.
3.   The stock market – based on a capitalized profits model – is undervalued by at least 25%.
4.   New technology – the cloud, smartphone, tablet, fracking, 3-D printing, etc. – is boosting productivity, efficiency and profits.
5.   The collapse of 2008/09 was a case of government failure, not market failure. Mark-to-market accounting and TARP were huge mistakes.
We believe new technology is so powerful that it has been able to create new wealth and growth despite the increased size and scope of government. In other words, the Plow Horse recovery is not a case of a “new normal” – where the economy grows slowly after a financial crisis. Instead, new technology is offsetting the cost of government, and the net effect is 2% to 3% real GDP growth.
We also believe the Fed is easy, but not as easy as conventional wisdom believes. This explains two things – why inflation hasn’t surged and also why a recession is not likely. A relatively easy Fed and new technology will continue to boost growth and inflation in the quarters ahead.
Finally, stocks are cheap. They are rising because that’s what cheap things do. We don’t need a QE-xcuse to explain the markets or the economy. Be wary of those who do.

second post of day
=================

 May 5, 2013 | 1511 GMT

According to Lebanon's Hezbollah-affiliated Almayadeen television channel, senior Syrian officials have said the Syrian military has deployed missile batteries aimed at Israel, Israel News reported May 5. The sources also allegedly said Syria is willing to equip the Lebanese resistance with new weaponry of all types. Israel, which maintains its own redlines in the Syrian conflict, has said it will not tolerate transfers of chemical weapons, ballistic missiles, advanced air-defense systems or sophisticated anti-ship missiles to Hezbollah.

Read more: Syria: Military Has Reportedly Deployed Missiles Aimed At Israel | Stratfor


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The latest Israeli airstrikes on Syria were predicated on two key factors. First, the Syrian regime is weakening so much that it cannot control its territory and, by extension, its weapons stockpiles could fall into the hands of non-state actors such as Hezbollah and al Qaeda. Second, Israeli intelligence discovered that a shipment of Iranian-made Fateh-110 short-range tactical ballistic missiles was being delivered to Hezbollah. Logistically it is difficult to prevent advanced weapons systems, particularly chemical agents, from proliferating once a regime has lost control of them, so further preventive strikes can be expected.

For its part, Syria has responded by saying any additional attacks from Israel will incur immediate retaliation. Syrian President Bashar al Assad reportedly sent a message to Washington (via Moscow), in which he authorized the use of ground-to-ground and ground-to-air missiles in the event of such retaliation. However, Syria lacks the military capability to follow through on its threats.

Analysis

Airstrikes on Syrian soil belie the fact that Israel is not taking sides in the Syrian civil war. As far as Israel is concerned, regime loyalists and the various rebel militias both threaten Israeli national security. And in some ways, it is in Israel's interest to prolong the collapse of the al Assad regime and to further the military stalemate: Doing so ensures that the conflict remains confined to Syria as much as possible.

But it is unclear whether Israel can actually achieve this. Even the United States, were it to get involved militarily, could not successfully confine the violence to Syria. Thus the limited airstrikes, which will likely continue as long as deemed necessary, are preventative measures rather than signs of assistance. Any future strikes likewise would be meant to mitigate risks as they appear.

However, any intervention that targets the Syrian regime and its allies has unintended consequences. For example, it enables al Assad and his allies to shape regional perceptions -- namely, that Israel and the rebels are fighting together. This complicates matters for rebels and their affiliate groups, which along with many Arab states have condemned the Israeli airstrikes.

The Syrian regime, Iran and Hezbollah would like to use this situation to their advantage. They believe drawing Israel into the conflict would be a useful way to ease the rebellion's pressure on them. Until these latest Israeli strikes, provoking Israel could also have been seen as too self-serving. But now that Israel has intervened on its own, there is an opportunity to escalate the situation and elicit a deeper Israeli involvement in Syria.

Their reasoning is that it would be difficult for the rebels to fight the Syrian regime if the country were under attack from Israel. But that calculation entails large risks, which would further undermine the already tenuous positions of Syria, Hezbollah and Iran. It is unclear whether the al Assad regime and its allies would be willing to take those risks.  

They would like to see some Sunni jihadist groups operating in Syria begin targeting Israel in an effort to divide the rebels' attention. Whether that will happen remains unclear. But the Israeli strikes have created a situation in which the Syrian civil war, heretofore a regional sectarian struggle, could turn into a wider international conflict.

Read more: Syria: Unintended Consequences of Israeli Airstrikes | Stratfor