Kayla Meller, the American woman held hostage since 2013, has died, apparently, at the hands of her Islamic terrorist captors. I don’t even want to imagine what horrors she must have endured while in captivity or the method used to end her life. It is too horrific to imagine, especially while the images of the Jordanian pilot being burned alive are so fresh in my mind.
We have seen the Jordanian response to the death of their citizen. Jordan immediately executed two Islamic terrorist prisoners and has launched repeated airstrikes against ISIS.
I wonder what the USA response will be to this death of an American. The president has said, “No matter how long it takes, the United States will find and bring to justice the terrorists who are responsible for Kayla’s captivity and death. I can’t help but wonder if he said it going to or coming from the golf course.
Feb 10 2015
Another American hostage dead
Feb 14 2012
Rep. Darrell Issa’s letter to Eric Holder
This post is a summary of the Fast and Furious scandal. We now have this letter from Rep. Darrell Issa to Attorney General Eric Holder.
It’s very hard for me to see how the media can let this slide. Holder should resign. But the media is mostly looking the other way. Imagine if a parallel scandal in a Republican administration happened. The media feeding frenzy would be incredible.
The movie Media Malpractice told the story of how the media essentially acted as an arm of the Obama campaign in the 2008 election. It’s gearing up to do the same in 2012, it seems. Actually, I’m not sure it ever stopped.
In any case, pretending that Eric Holder is an honest man who deserves to stay in office is just par for the course.
Read the letter to Holder from Rep. Issa and draw your own conclusions. Holder is clearly stonewalling, hiding, and using every device of his consider power to keep the truth from coming to light. Will the media finally start giving this the coverage it deserves? Only if it’s embarrassed into it…. which has happened before, for example in the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal, and the case of Dan Rather and cronies reporting fake news about George Bush.
Feb 11 2012
Attorney General Eric Holder’s stonewalling on “Fast and Furious”
I posted this earlier, but it accidentally went to a PAGE instead of a POST. I’m fixing that now.
KUHNER: Obama’s Watergate – Washington Times
A year ago this week, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered. He died protecting his country from brutal Mexican gangsters. Two AK-47 assault rifles were found at his death site. We now know the horrifying truth: Agent Terry was killed by weapons that were part of an illegal Obama administration operation to smuggle arms to the dangerous drug cartels. He was a victim of his own government. This is not only a major scandal; it is a high crime that potentially reaches all the way to the White House, implicating senior officials. It is President Obama’s Watergate.
Operation Fast and Furious was run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and overseen by the Justice Department. It started under the leadership of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. Fast and Furious enabled straw gun purchases from licensed dealers in Arizona, in which more than 2,000 weapons were smuggled to Mexican drug kingpins. ATF claims it was seeking to track the weapons as part of a larger crackdown on the growing violence in the Southwest. Instead, ATF effectively has armed murderous gangs. About 300 Mexicans have been killed by Fast and Furious weapons. More than 1,400 guns remain lost. Agent Terry likely will not be the last U.S. casualty.
Mr. Holder insists he was unaware of what took place until after media reports of the scandal appeared in early 2011. This is false. Such a vast operation only could have occurred with the full knowledge and consent of senior administration officials. Massive gun-running and smuggling is not carried out by low-level ATF bureaucrats unless there is authorization from the top. There is a systematic cover-up.
Congressional Republicans, however, are beginning to shed light on the scandal. Led by Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Rep. Darrell Issa of California, a congressional probe is exposing the Justice Department‘s rampant criminality and deliberate stonewalling. Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer, who heads the department‘s criminal division, helped craft a February letter to Congress that denied ATF had ever walked guns into Mexico. Yet, under pressure from congressional investigators, the department later admitted that Mr. Breuer knew about ATF gun-smuggling as far back as April 2010. In other words, Mr. Breuer has been misleading Congress. He should resign – or be fired.
Instead, Mr. Holder tenaciously insists that Mr. Breuer will keep his job. He needs to keep his friends close and potential witnesses even closer. Another example is former acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson. Internal documents show Mr. Melson directly oversaw Fast and Furious, including monitoring numerous straw purchases of AK-47s. He has admitted to congressional investigators that he, along with high-ranking ATF leaders, reassigned every “manager involved in Fast and Furious” after the scandal surfaced on Capitol Hill and in the press. Mr. Melson said he was ordered by senior Justice officials to be silent regarding the reassignments. Hence, ATF managers who possess intimate and damaging information – especially on the role of the Justice Department – essentially have been promoted to cushy bureaucratic jobs. Their silence has been bought, their complicity swept under the rug. Mr. Melson has been transferred to Justice’s main office, where he serves as a “senior adviser” on forensic science in the department‘s Office of Legal Policy. Rather than being punished, Mr. Melson has been rewarded for his incompetence and criminal negligence.
Mr. Holder and his aides have given misleading, false and contradictory testimony on Capitol Hill. Perjury, obstruction of justice and abuse of power – these are high crimes and misdemeanors. Mr. Holder should be impeached. Like most liberals, he is playing the victim card, claiming Mr. Issa is a modern-day Joseph McCarthy conducting a judicial witch hunt. Regardless of this petty smear, Mr. Holder must be held responsible and accountable – not only for the botched operation, but for his flagrant attempts to deflect blame from the administration.
Mr. Holder is a shameless careerist and a ruthless Beltway operative. For years, his out-of-control Justice Department has violated the fundamental principle of our democracy, the rule of law. He has refused to prosecute members of the New Black Panthers for blatant voter intimidation that took place in the 2008 election. Career Justice lawyers have confessed publicly that Mr. Holder will not pursue cases in which the perpetrators are black and the victims white. States such as Arizona and Alabama are being sued for simply attempting to enforce federal immigration laws. Mr. Holder also opposes voter identification cards, thereby enabling fraud and vote-stealing at the ballot box. What else can we expect from one who, during the Clinton administration, helped pardon notorious tax cheat Marc Rich and Puerto Rican terrorists?
Mr. Holder clearly knew about Fast and Furious and did nothing to stop it. This is because the administration wanted to use the excuse of increased violence on the border and weapons-smuggling into Mexico to justify tighter gun-control legislation. Mr. Holder is fighting ferociously to prevent important internal Justice documents from falling into the hands of congressional investigators. If the full nature of his involvement is discovered, the Obama presidency will be in peril.
Fast and Furious is even worse than Watergate for one simple reason: No one died because of President Nixon’s political dirty tricks and abuse of government power. But Brian Terry is dead; and there are still 1,500 missing guns threatening still more lives.
What did Mr. Obama know? Massive gun-smuggling by the U.S. government into a foreign country does not happen without the explicit knowledge and approval of leading administration officials. It’s too big, too risky and too costly. Mr. Holder may not be protecting just himself and his cronies. Is he protecting the president?
Oct 18 2011
One life for how many?
Here’s a roundup on the release by Israel of more than 1000 terrorists for one kidnapped Israeli soldier who had been held by Hamas for several years.
Sometimes, inhuman as it sounds, the numbers do matter, and you can and should put a price on a single human life, a lesson that I fear Israel is going to learn the hard way, when it pays 100-fold for retrieving a single soldier.
UPDATE: A friend emailed and suggested that the Israeli Defense Force is having trouble filling its ranks, and so the IDF felt that getting this solider back, even at the cost of more terrorist killings of civilians, was worth it to encourage people to serve in the IDF. I don’t know… but thought it an interesting idea to pass along.
Jul 07 2011
Life imitates satire
In yet another case of life imitating satire, we have the US warning of airline plot to implant bombs in people (what a clumsy headline…. sounds like the airlines are implanting bombs in passengers)
The White House said Wednesday there was no danger of an imminent attack on airplanes after reports that terror groups were mulling implanting bombs into the bodies of passengers.
The assurances came after news that the US administration warned airlines that extremist groups were considering surgically implanting explosives into people to try to beat tight airport security measures.
Passengers flying to the United States could now face even tougher screening measures, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration, Nicholas Kimball, told the Los Angeles Times.
“These measures are designed to be unpredictable, so passengers should not expect to see the same activity at every international airport,” Kimball said, adding existing methods could not detect plastic explosives under the skin.
“Measures may include interaction with passengers, in addition to the use of other screening methods such as pat-downs and the use of enhanced tools and technologies.”
I warned about this possibility here around 18 months ago. The salient points:
In the meantime, ever more restrictive airport boarding regulations seem a certainty, and ever more intrusive searches, until we figure out that we have no choice but to identify who is more likely to have evil intent, and give them more scrutiny, because we surely don’t have the resources or the time to give the necessary scrutiny to everyone, including your grandmother in a wheelchair from Peoria, or Trenton, who may choose not to visit you next Christmas due to a distaste for body cavity searches and x-ray glasses (like the ones they used to sell in D.C. Comics, except these will work) in the hands of prurient security types.
Sooner or later, someone is going to figure out how to make high-explosive dentures and hip/knee replacements. While Christian “fundamentalists” will be getting only fluoride treatments, young adult male Islamic fanatics will be lining up to have all their teeth pulled and get dental implants made of enamel coated plastique. I predict an influx of wealthy foreign nationals, of Islamic extraction, into European schools of orthopedic surgery, particularly focusing on lower extremity joint replacements. Our too-faithful recent oral surgery patients, who will not have flossed much, will enter airplanes with a slight limp. It’s tough to recover from double knee/double hip transplants, especially when it hurts to eat.
The other passengers will feel sorry for them, briefly.
Eventually, the only people on airplanes will be strip-searched people with no scars, who just endured body cavity searches and had their stomachs pumped. But they will be very, very safe, wearing their airline-issued flying uniforms. When they land at their destinations, they will report to the changing room/luggage area, where they’ll get their clothing back, which was sent in a transport plane. Cost of a ticket from L.A. to Phoenix? About $1,000.
Coming up next: explosive hair.
There has already been at least one other report of terrorist plans to implant bombs.
We’re moving way past having to look for bombs in your Nikes and Fruits of the Loom.
So what can we do about this? Will we carry the no-profiling policy to such a ludicrous extreme that random strip searches are going to be made to look for recent surgical scars, and then require CT Scans in the indicated area (and if that isn’t revealing, we can always have a team standing by for exploratory surgery, just to be sure…. brought to you by Obamacare, of course)?
Should we just reject anyone with recent surgical scars? That’ll be tough on the envirobabe groupies with recently acquired, uh, enhancements to the gifts of nature. Instead of flying first class to the next climate change seminar so they can mingle with rich Goreaphiles (in search of suitable husband material among the ecopagan intelligentsia, of course), they’ll have to stay home and watch it all on Skype… or worse yet, on Youtube. But hey…. that’s better for the environment anyway. And who knows what the nice Egyptian surgeon with the funny name inserted besides a little silicon… Maybe there’s a reason something felt a bit lumpy (did he show you the photos from his relaxing summer vacation in the mountains of Pakistan?). We’d better keep all well-endowed ladies off the planes, just in case… unless, of course, some self-sacrificing TSA official wants to check them all, one at a time.
I think I have an idea. We can’t profile for ethnicity/nationality/religious background, so says the great Ozbama from behind the curtain (he’s just clandestinely checking up on those TSA officers, his version of Undercover Boss). But here’s what we can do, and indeed there is a tie-in with Obamacare’s plan to computerize all medical records for “efficiency.” Let’s just have everyone fill out a questionaire at the airport on all recent medical procedures. Let’s get a new generation of scanners going that can detect surgical scars. And let’s have computer software that compares the results of the questionaire, the scan, and the complete medical/surgical record that will be online for everyone (obviously, this will give the Obama administration the pretext it needs to extend Obamacare into the entire middle east, parts of Africa, Indonesia, and other Islamic regions. Hope and change.). If there is a scar or a mention of a procedure that isn’t on the “universal medical record” for each individual, we yank the offender out of the queue for “special processing.” Allah alone knows what that might entail. I think I don’t want to know.
I was intrigued by this line from the news report above:
“Measures may include interaction with passengers, in addition to the use of other screening methods such as pat-downs and the use of enhanced tools and technologies.”
“Interaction with passengers,” eh? How will a “pat down” locate a surgically implanted bomb? I’m guessing the terrorists have already done dry runs by inserting passengers with recent surgical work (maybe even something benign implanted internally), just to see how well it works.
“Enhanced tools and technologies”? Hmm…. maybe TSA has developed the tricorder.
Staying home is looking better and better. With Skype, Youtube, Netflix and satellite TV, what else do you need? International travel is over-rated, anyway. You can only tolerate being referred to as the “ugly American” so many times, and everyone knows the world hates America…. that’s why they all want to come here.
May 12 2011
NT Wright: not right about everything
Here is another take on the issue of the Christian response to terrorism, and specifically the killing of bin Laden.
The Flawed Theology of N. T. Wright « Commentary Magazine
One of the world’s leading New Testament scholars, N. T. Wright is a man from whom a great deal can be learned about church history and Christian theology. When he ventures from his specialty into areas he does not know very well—international affairs, for example—Bishop Wright is unfortunately prone to silly statements motivated by a brittle political ideology.
In the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden, Wright criticized the United States for practicing a “form of vigilantism” and providing “ ‘justice’ only of the crudest sort.” America acts as the world’s “undercover policeman,” according to Wright, and he doesn’t much like it. And then he added this:
And what has any of this to do with something most Americans also believe, that the God of ultimate justice and truth was fully and finally revealed in the crucified Jesus of Nazareth, who taught people to love their enemies, and warned that those who take the sword will perish by the sword?
Wright is falling into a common error, which is to assume the Sermon on the Mount was intended to articulate a political philosophy and blueprint for how the state must conduct itself. In plain fact, the moral duties placed on persons are, in important respects, different from those placed on the state. Indeed, within Judaism and Christianity the state has invested in it powers and responsibilities that are different from, and sometimes denied to, persons.
In Romans 13, for example, St. Paul—to whom Wright has devoted several books—makes it clear that human government is divinely sanctioned by God to preserve public order. If the standards of the person are simplistically applied to the practices of the state, it would follow that, because persons are called to “turn the other cheek,” the state must do the same—thereby making the criminal-justice system unworkable and invasions by foreign powers inevitable.
Collapsing the distinction between person and state represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of government, which has granted to it powers of life, death, and coercion denied to individual persons. And these powers can be used to defend innocent lives and establish social order. They can also create the conditions that allow the church to exist, Christians to minister, and good works to be done. For this reason, the callings of soldier, policeman, and president are not merely permissible for Christians, but honorable.
By the logic of Wright’s argument—Jesus told us to love our enemies and those who take up the sword will perish by the sword—we should never retaliate under any circumstances: not against bin Laden, Mugabe, Pol Pot, Saddam, Hirohito, Hitler, or anyone. Proportionate and discriminate force would never be justified. What kind of moral world does Bishop Wright conclude would emerge from his political theology? And would he, who attended Oxford and now teaches at St. Andrews, be willing to live (or to ask his children and grandchildren live) in it?
The Christian response to tyranny is not nearly so simple-minded. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian during the time of Hitler’s rise to power. His American friends helped him escape in 1939, but he believed that he had to return to Germany to stand in solidarity with persecuted Christians there. “I shall have no right . . . to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people,” Bonhoeffer wrote to his friend Reinhold Niebuhr.
Once an avowed pacifist, Bonhoeffer joined an organization that was at the heart of the anti-Hitler resistance, became an advocate for the assassination of the Nazi dictator, and was eventually executed for his role in the plot. The camp doctor who witnessed the execution wrote:
I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer . . . kneeling on the floor praying fervently to his God. I was most deeply moved by the way this unusually lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of the execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the steps to the gallows, brace and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.
Bonhoeffer’s decision reflected “the finest logic of Christian martyrdom,” Niebuhr declared, and belongs “to the modern Acts of the Apostles.”
Quite apart from his obvious valor, Bonhoeffer displayed tremendous integrity, sophistication, and deep understanding when it came to Christian ethics. It would be beneficial for N. T. Wright to reflect upon, and to learn from, Bonhoeffer’s example.
It’s probably dangerous for we mere mortals to criticize the likes of Rev. Wright, with his amazing contributions to New Testament scholarship and the like. But that very erudtion is what prompts me to wonder how such a brilliant person can fail to see the distinction between personal ethics (and a person acting only AS an individual person) and governing necessities. If all the Muslims in Britain decide to organize and burn down every church in the Isles, not to mention every Christian seminary and institution, at what point will Rev. Wright’s disdain for violence in response to violence give way to recognizing the responsibility of governments to protect their citizens?
On another occasion I plan to discuss what seems to be included in the “turn the other cheek” metaphor, and what does not. But it surely is not intended as a charge to renounce all violence, when that’s what is necessary to protect the innocent.
May 01 2011
Narcissism – Thy name is Obama
Osama Bin Laden is dead. And If we are to believe the Narcissist-In-Chief he is the one responsible. What shamelessness!
And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network.
Nov 19 2010
Ever more intrusive, indeed
I know, it’s tacky to quote oneself, but in light of the full body scanners and very personal “patdowns” becoming the norm in airport security, courtesy of TSA, I have to refer back to this from a year or so back:
In the meantime, ever more restrictive airport boarding regulations seem a certainty, and ever more intrusive searches, until we figure out that we have no choice but to identify who is more likely to have evil intent, and give them more scrutiny, because we surely don’t have the resources or the time to give the necessary scrutiny to everyone, including your grandmother in a wheelchair from Peoria, or Trenton, who may choose not to visit you next Christmas due to a distaste for body cavity searches and x-ray glasses (like the ones they used to sell in D.C. Comics, except these will work) in the hands of prurient security types.
The feckless belief that we can solve our security problems by restricting carry-ons and on-board behavior even more than we already have, and by searching everyone even more thoroughly, is yet more “Powerpuff Policy.”
Sooner or later, someone is going to figure out how to make high-explosive dentures and hip/knee replacements. While Christian “fundamentalists” will be getting only fluoride treatments, young adult male Islamic fanatics will be lining up to have all their teeth pulled and get dental implants made of enamel coated plastique. I predict an influx of wealthy foreign nationals, of Islamic extraction, into European schools of orthopedic surgery, particularly focusing on lower extremity joint replacements. Our too-faithful recent oral surgery patients, who will not have flossed much, will enter airplanes with a slight limp. It’s tough to recover from double knee/double hip transplants, especially when it hurts to eat.
The other passengers will feel sorry for them, briefly.
Eventually, the only people on airplanes will be strip-searched people with no scars, who just endured body cavity searches and had their stomachs pumped. But they will be very, very safe, wearing their airline-issued flying uniforms. When they land at their destinations, they will report to the changing room/luggage area, where they’ll get their clothing back, which was sent in a transport plane. Cost of a ticket from L.A. to Phoenix? About $1,000.
Coming up next: explosive hair.
Maybe I’ll just stay home, or drive, at least until the TSA adopts the security approach of El Al.
Sep 11 2010
The war on terror continues, under whatever name
WSVN-TV – Palestinian national arrested in So. Fla. Video at the link.
A Palestinian national has been arrested in South Florida after he was accused to attempting to purchase hundreds of stolen weapons.
On Sept. 1, President Barack Obama met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in order to discuss peace in the Middle East, mainly in the West Bank, where the terrorist group Hamas recently killed two Israeli civilians.
Less than a week later, Abdalaziz Aziz Hamayel, a Palestinian national with deep ties to the West Bank, was arrested and accused of trying to buy a large amount of weapons. According to a criminal complaint against Hamayel, the suspect attempted to purchase 300 weapons, which he knew were stolen, and the weapons were headed to “his people.”
The criminal complaint said, “Hamayel contacted the confidential source to discuss the weapons and explosives he was requesting for purchase…Hamayel specifically requested a quantity of 300 M-16 rifles, 9mm handguns, UZI sub-machine guns, silencers and grenades.”
Hamayel was also interested in buying remote detonation devices, like a cell phone detonator.
The criminal complaint also said Hamayel has a family friend from his village in the West Bank who lives in Miami. Hamayel’s associate informed an undercover investigator that he believed the person who was going to purchase the weapons for Hamayel lives in Coral Gables.
Investigators had been on the case for over a year. On Aug. 29, federal agents busted Hamayel in the US when he boarded a flight that had originated in Amman, Jordan, made its way through Chicago and landed in Miami.
Hamayel was taken into custody when he arrived at Miami International Airport. Hamayel was never able to purchase the weapons.
Authorities are still continuing their investigation.
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