Tag Archives: U. S. State Department

Slowing Down A Major Part Of The Money Laundering In Washington

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Some of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) spending cuts are actually happening.

On Friday, Yahoo News reported:

A federal appeals court on Wednesday lifted an injunction that required the U.S. State Department to continue making foreign aid payments, handing a victory to President Donald Trump.

In a 2-1 decision, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said a lower court erred by ordering the Trump administration to restore foreign assistance payments previously approved by Congress.

Trump imposed a 90-day pause on all foreign aid on January 20, the same day he was inaugurated for a second term in the White House. His executive order was followed by aggressive moves to gut USAID, the main U.S. foreign aid agency, including by placing much of its staff on leave and exploring bringing the formerly independent agency under the State Department.

Two nonprofit groups that receive federal funding, AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and Journalism Development Network, brought litigation alleging Trump’s funding freeze was unlawful.

U.S. District Judge Amir Ali, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, ordered the Trump administration to pay nearly $2 billion in outstanding aid to its humanitarian partners worldwide.

Writing for the two-judge majority, Circuit Judge Karen Henderson said the nonprofit groups “lack a cause of action to press their claims” and therefore failed to satisfy the requirements for an injunction.

The article concludes:

A spokesperson for the Office of Management and Budget, the White House’s budget office, said the ruling stops “radical left dark money groups” from “maliciously interfering with the president’s ability to spend responsibly and to administer foreign aid in a lawful manner in alignment with his America First policies.”

The problem with foreign aid is that it does not always get to the people it was intended for or to the places it was supposed to go. In many cases, America has built palaces for dictators while the people in their country starved. In a country ruled by a tyrant, it is very difficult to get foreign aid money to the people who need it.

A Small Sliver Of Our Budget Problems

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This is basically the equivalent of someone stealing the change from your loose change jar, but it is still indicative of the lack of accountability in our government.

On May 4th, Just the News reported the following:

A former State Department senior budget analyst embezzled more than $650,000 from the agency over a two-year time period, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C. said.

Levita Almuete Ferrer, 64, of Montgomery Village, Maryland, pled guilty to embezzling the money between March 2022 and April 2024 while working in the department’s Office of the Chief of Protocol.

“She issued 60 checks payable to herself and three checks payable to another individual with whom she had a personal relationship. She printed and signed each check and then deposited all 63 checks, which totaled $657,347.50, into her personal checking and savings accounts,” the Justice Department said in a news release.

It is disturbing that she seemingly made no effort to hide her crime–that is pretty blatant embezzlement. Even though it was over a two-year period, that amount of money flowing out to a personal account should have been noticed. Do routine audits happen in government agencies? If they don’t, they should. This dishonesty should have easily been picked up by a good auditor.

The Death Of USAID

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On Monday, PJ Media posted an article about the death of USAID. The death of USAID may not actually be official, but its money is being taken away.

The article reports:

Whatever USAID was or wasn’t meant to be when President John F. Kennedy created the program by executive order in 1961, it effectively is no more.

Wall Street Mav reported on Sunday that the White House intends to “eliminate roughly $60 billion in foreign aid spending and terminate 92% of grants issued by the US Agency for International Development (USAID).”

“The figures were included in a State Department memo detailing the results of a 90-day review of US foreign aid ordered by President Trump,” which identified “nearly 15,000 grants and targeted almost 10,000 for elimination — the majority of which were issued by USAID.”

Before you get too upset over the humanitarian aid that may be cut, you might want to look at where the money has actually gone in the past.

The article notes:

Of the $4 billion earmarked for Haiti, almost half of it never went much farther than the D.C. beltway. More than half went to “other.” About 2% went to Haitian firms. Six houses were built.

There’s a case to be made that charitable people like us should help feed the hungry and provide disaster relief to those who can’t afford it. But USAID ain’t it.

The article also notes:

Back in 1988, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) helped establish the East-West Management Institute (EWMI). Exactly how isn’t well understood, so I asked both Grok and ChatGPT to look into it for me. Neither LLM was able to come up with much but they both described the relationship as “opaque.”

Fine, whatever — Soros can do what he wants with his money. Except that over the last decade or two, EWMI received an estimated $270 million in tax money, largely through USAID, with another $90 million on tap. What does EWMI do with your money? That’s none of your business. Your tax dollars go — or rather, went — to a Soros organization that does what Soros wants. You just get to pay

Giving money to billionaires to thwart the popular will in this country hardly sounds like “international development” to me. Unless, that is, you’re talking about the postmodern version of “international Communism.”

Somehow I don’t expect to see any of this reported in the mainstream media.

Rearranging The Deck Chairs On The Titanic

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The State Department is not doing very well right now–Saudi Arabia is no longer supporting the petrodollar, Mexico is not helping control the border, North Korea, China and Iran are all ramping up their threatening remarks. American diplomacy is not what it once was. So what is the State Department worrying about?

On Wednesday, Gizmodo reported the following:

The font style used in the U.S. State Department is changing, prompting complaints from employees who find the change to be an inconvenience. Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent an email to the state department, headlined “The Times (New Roman) are a-Changin,” ala Bob Dylan, saying they will be changing the font for high-level internal documents to the larger sans-serif font, Calibri, from Times New Roman, which has been used for more than two decades.

Blinken said the department’s domestic and international offices have until February 6 to “adopt Calibri as the standard font for all requested papers,” the email said according to the Washington Post.

Someone making a comment suggested Comic Sans. That would be appropriate.

While We Weren’t Paying Attention…

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While most Americans have been watching the political theater at home, the Biden administration has been continuing negotiations on an Iran deal supposedly to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

On Thursday, The Patriot Daily Wire reported:

Mossad Director David Barnea called the new nuclear deal negotiated between Iran and the West “a strategic disaster” that is “very bad for Israel” on Thursday, The Times of Israel reported.

Barnea emphasized that the emerging deal, mainly resulting from talks between Iran and the United States, is “ultimately built on lies” as he implored international leaders not to rush into signing on.

The Israeli intelligence leader said of the possibility that Iran obtains nuclear weapons that Mossad “is preparing and knows how to remove that threat.”

“If we don’t take action, Israel will be in danger,” he added.

Barnea’s strong statement comes as the U.S. and Iran inch close to implementing a form of the original Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) passed under former U.S. President Barack Obama.

European Union Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell recently said that the U.S. could respond as soon as this week to a final draft proposal that would restore a form of the 2015 JCPOA accord.

“I hope that this response allows us to end the negotiations,” Borrell declared. “That’s my hope, but I cannot assure you that this will happen.”

U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price signaled similar optimism to the E.U. on Monday but acknowledged that “there are still some outstanding issues that must be resolved.”

Israel is our strongest and most loyal ally in the Middle East. They are also the best informed as to what is actually going on with Iran’s nuclear program. It is well-known that Iran is the major fund source for terrorism around the world. A nuclear deal that gives them billions of dollars will help fund that terrorism as well as help fund their nuclear research. Any deal with Iran will probably be broken by Iran secretly or openly, and we will find out about it when they announce that they have a nuclear bomb and a delivery system or when they demonstrate that bomb by destroying Israel.

There are two principles that need to be considered when negotiating with Iran, which is a Muslim caliphate. The first is taqiyya, which essentially means that it is okay to lie to advance the cause of Islam. Remember that the goal of Iran is to recreate the former caliphate that was the Ottoman Empire. The second is hudna. Basically hudna is a cease fire called by an Islamic entity to give that entity time to rearm or gain some advantage. Both of these principles are in play in our current negotiations with Iran.
Our State Department is either ignorant of these principles or is choosing to ignore them. Neither should be acceptable to Americans.

 

 

Quote Of The Week

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The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago was a disgrace, but I wonder if the Biden administration (yes, I think they all knew it was going to happen) thought about how the raid would play around the world.

Breitbart reported the following on Tuesday:

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele criticized the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) raid on former U.S. President Donald Trump’s personal residence at Mar-A-Lago on Monday in a statement posted by Bukele’s official Twitter account, the Spanish news agency Agencia EFE reported.

This is the tweet:

I think that is a very good question.

The article at Breitbart reports:

Bukele’s administration (2019-present) maintained friendly diplomatic relations with that of Trump during his presidency (2017-2021), Agencia EFE recalled on Monday, writing:

The Government of President Bukele was close to the Administration of former President Trump and the Salvadoran president maintained a close relationship with his ambassador -at the time- in Salvadoran territory, Ronald Johnson.

However, El Salvador’s relationship with the United States changed with the arrival of President Joe Biden and is currently tense due to some decisions made by Bukele that have been criticized by the Biden Administration.

The article concludes:

The U.S. State Department released a list on May 17, 2021, that labeled 17 Central American politicians, including current and former members of Bukele’s administration, as “corrupt.” The action seemingly prompted El Salvador’s congress to ratify a 2019 cooperation agreement with China — one of Washington’s top foes — the next day. El Salvador’s Congress ratified an economic cooperation agreement with Beijing on May 18, 2021, that was originally signed in 2019. The deal called for China’s government to invest $62 million in various infrastructure projects across El Salvador, including a water purification plant.

Bukele and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro both issued public statements in support of U.S. podcaster Joe Rogan on February 2. The two leaders expressed hope that Rogan would continue fighting for “freedom of the press” and “freedom of speech,” respectively, in America amid increased scrutiny of his podcasts from establishment media outlets.

And those are only some of the diplomatic accomplishments of the Biden administration.

This Should Be Called Treason

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On Friday, Gregg Jarrett reported that during the Trump administration as President Trump was attempting to negotiate with Iran, former officials of the Obama administration “engaged in a secret meeting with Iran.”

The article reports:

A group of senior Obama administration officials met with Iran in 2018 as “part of an effort to undermine the Trump administration’s diplomatic push to isolate the hardline regime, according to an internal State Department document” reports The Washington Free Beacon.

“The document is the firmest proof to date that Obama-era officials were engaged in back-channel efforts to keep negotiations with Iran alive” writes The Beacon. The memo states then-President Trump and his administration were working to increase economic pressure on Iran in 2018, but the delegation of U.S. former ambassadors held a secret, “off-the-record” meeting with former Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif at his residence in New York City.

The seven-page memo was assembled during the meeting with Zarif, during which Zarif claimed that Trump’s policies have fomented anti-U.S. fervor in Iran and pointed to the popularity of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) leader Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated by Trump two years later in a drone strike.

“I was as popular as Soleimani, but now I am at 47 percent and his is up,” Zarif said, according to the memo. “He is closer to 80 percent. People of Iran once preferred engagement, now opted for resistance as the only reality. That is what the polls are telling us now and it is the reality of the region.”

The article quotes The Washington Free Beacon:

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was not aware of these meetings while leading the State Department, said the memo corroborates reports from the time about Kerry’s efforts to salvage the 2015 nuclear deal through back-channel powwows with Iranian officials.

“This memo reflects even more than we already knew about former State Department officials continuing on as if they were still in office,” said Pompeo, who is now senior counsel for global affairs at the ACLJ. “Trying, at every turn, to work with the foreign minister for a terrorist regime, Iran, to undermine the very sanctions put in place by America. It’s worse than not knowing when to get off stage. Actively seeking to protect the terrible deal they struck, these former officials—two years after Obama left office—were signaling that Iran should stand firm against America.”

Everyone involved should be tried for treason.

Sharia Law In America

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There are many aspects of Sharia Law that are different from American Constitutional law. One of the more obvious is the conflict between the concept of free speech and the penalty for blasphemy. On Tuesday, The American Thinker posted an article about a bill that was recently passed in the U.S. House of Representatives that will move America in the direction of Sharia Law.

Congress.gov (you have to go to the site and put in the bill number as the specific link expires) describes HR 5665 as follows:

Passed House (12/14/2021)

Combating International Islamophobia Act

This bill establishes within the Department of State the Office to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia and addresses related issues.

The office shall monitor and combat acts of Islamophobia and Islamophobic incitement in foreign countries. The bill establishes the position of Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Islamophobia, who shall head the office.

The bill also requires certain existing annual reports to Congress about human rights and religious freedom in foreign countries to include information about Islamophobia, such as information about (1) acts of physical violence or harassment of Muslim people, (2) instances of propaganda in government and nongovernment media that attempt to justify or promote hatred or incite violence against Muslim people, and (3) actions taken by a country’s government to respond to such acts. The office shall coordinate and assist in preparing these portions of the reports.

No funds made available pursuant to the bill may be used to promote or endorse a boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement ideology (i.e., economic measures against Israel or Israel-related individuals or organizations) or used to promote or endorse a Muslim ban.

It is no surprise that the bill is sponsored by Ilhan Omar.

The American Thinker reports:

The actual text of the bill not only seeks to eradicate blasphemy against Islam around the world – and solely against Islam at that – but even requires the federal government to reorganize some portions of the State Department along the lines of an Islamic religious institution which will be responsible for interpreting the Quran.  For example, the text of the bill mandates that “[t]he Secretary of State shall establish within the Department of State an Office” and the “purpose” of the office is described as “[m]onitoring and combating acts of Islamophobia and Islamophobic incitement that occur in foreign countries.”  That is, the State Department is required to create an office that is a cross between George Orwell’s Big Brother and the Taliban.

The word ‘combat’ in the text of the law is problematic but fits in perfectly with the concept of waging violent jihad against the countries deemed to have committed blasphemy against Islam.  Almost every dictionary defines the word primarily as an action pertaining to war.  While the internet firm Google’s dictionary defines ‘combat’ as “fighting between armed forces,” Cambridge Dictionary defines the word as “a fight, especially during a war.”  According to Collins Dictionary, “combat is fighting that takes place in a war.”  This is no hyperbole as the State Department has a long history of supporting Islamic terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS.  Former Assistant Secretary of State, Robin Raphel, ran her office as though it were an outpost of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and she lost her security clearance when she was investigated for counterintelligence activities.  Little wonder then that Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, used the term “Rogue State Department” and President Donald Trump described the State Department as the “Deep State Department.”

This law is not consistent with our Constitution.

A Puzzling Move

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On Saturday, The American Spectator reported that last month Secretary of State Antony Blinken removed Nigeria from the State Department’s list of countries hostile to religious freedom. In April, the U.S. government’s own Commission on International Religious Freedom had urged Secretary of State Blinken to keep Nigeria on the list.

The articled reports:

In 2020, the Trump administration designated Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC) on religious freedom. In a letter, the Family Research Council and host of other organizations committed to religious freedom have asked Biden: “How can it be, less than a year after that significant designation, that Nigeria’s CPC designation has been dropped without a public explanation?”

The groups note in the letter that anti-Christian persecution in the country has grown even more intense since 2020: “The ongoing violence, killing, and displacement against Christians and others have only increased. In fact, during 2021, massacres happen almost nightly, while by day, young boys are killed in the fields. Pregnant women are brutally dismembered, their babies mutilated before their eyes. And now, an entire church congregation has been abducted and held captive.”

Armed Islamic terrorists and radicals “have become even more brazen, torching entire villages and farms, ambushing, and killing innocent people in gory, unspeakable ways,” they write. “Mass killings—the kind that used to be sporadic—are now a national emergency. Catholic News Agency reported in July, ‘an estimated 3,462 Christians have been killed in Nigeria in the first 200 days of 2021, according to a new study. This equates to 17 Christians being murdered every day in Africa’s most populous country.”

The article concludes:

Biden has declared the promotion of transgenderism abroad a “priority” of American foreign policy. That apparently stands at the apex of his hierarchy of rights.  “[The State] Department has committed to increasing U.S. engagement on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI+) human rights issues abroad,” says Blinken. “As we do so, we work with partners around the world who bring to bear expertise on their unique challenges and innovative solutions. We recognize that, through these partnerships, we will be able to build a safer, more inclusive global society for all LGBTQI+ persons.”

This is what preoccupied Blinken in the months preceding the collapse of Afghanistan. Then after it fell, he told Congress that he was “focused on” the plight of the “LGBTQI+ in Afghanistan” under the Taliban.

Talk about an “unbalanced” agenda. Blinken can strain at the gnat and swallow the camel. As he trivializes human rights abuses, monstrous ones are occurring in a country that he claims is no longer a foe of religious freedom. Never mind that an organization called Genocide Watch says “Nigeria has become a killing field of defenseless Christians.” The group says that “between 11,500 and 12,000 Christians have been massacred since June 2015 when the Buhari Government of Nigeria came to power. These statistics are based on careful records kept by church groups that include the names of victims and dates of their murders.”

That Biden can overlook this while prattling on about the supposed glories of transgenderism and chastising Russia for its insufficient enlightenment (Blinken said that Biden rebuked Putin at their summer meeting for not supporting the LGBTQ agenda) reveals much about this administration’s bankrupt agenda. Only a president that prizes religious freedom at home will care about its loss abroad.

I believe that our President has mixed up his priorities.

Sowing The Seeds Of War In The Middle East

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The Biden administration has drastically changed President Trump’s Middle East policies. President Trump worked to form alliances between Arab countries and Israel. Those alliances were based partially on economic gains for the countries involved, but those alliances were also based on a mutual fear and distrust of Iran. Iran is the major funding source of terrorism in that region and around the world. The Biden administration has chosen to undo a lot of the good work done by the Trump administration.

CBN News posted an article today about the shift in policy.

The article reports:

Relations between the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) and the Biden administration have shifted dramatically from the former administration of President Donald Trump.

Palestinian leaders hope to make the most of this new relationship and Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh wants the world to know he’s satisfied so far with what he’s hearing from Washington.  

“Our relationship with the new American administration has been going very well based on the promises that were made by the Biden administration,” Shtayyeh told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday.

Just for the record, when the Palestinian Authority Prime Minister is happy with the direction things are going, chances are you are going in the wrong direction.

The article continues:

Shtayyeh said those specific promises include restoring funding to the UN agency devoted to Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), opposing Israeli construction in Judea and Samaria – what’s also referred to as the West Bank, and maintaining the status quo in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount, which only permits Muslims to pray at the holy site.

A State Department official told CBN News that senior U.S. officials have been consistent in their private discussions with P.A. officials and their public comments “on all of these issues.”

“Regarding assistance, the United States is currently providing about $450 million in assistance to the Palestinian people—all of it consistent with United States law,” the official said, adding that “we intend to provide an additional $75 million in development and economic assistance in the West Bank and Gaza over the next year.”  

The official also said the State Department has “made clear both privately and publicly” that it supports maintaining the status quo on Temple Mount and that “it is critical for Israel and the Palestinian Authority to refrain from unilateral steps that exacerbate tensions and undercut efforts to advance a negotiated two-state solution. This certainly includes settlement activity.”

Let’s look at some of the direction of these changes in American policy. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has not been a neutral player in disputes between Israel and her Arab neighbors. (article here). Funding the Palestinian Authority means funding terrorism (article here). Preventing Jews from praying on the Temple Mount (the status quo) is also not a move that creates peace or trust. Teaching young children in Gaza to become martyrs to reclaim Jerusalem and drive the Jews into the sea is also not a recipe for peace (article here).

At some point the Biden administration and those who support the idea of a two-state solution in the Middle East will realize how unrealistic that idea is. The ‘Palestinians’ do not want a two-state solution–their leaders have turned down the offer numerous times. The ‘Palestinians’ want a one-state solution where they drive the Jews in Israel into the sea. That is really sad when you consider that Israel is a democracy that allows Arabs full rights within their country. The Arabs in Israel have more freedom and a higher standard of living than anywhere else in the Middle East. You would think that the Arabs  would be trying to emulate Israel instead of trying to destroy it.

 

Watch The Spin

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Chances are if you are reading this post and occasionally follow this website, you lost faith in the mainstream media long ago. That’s not news. However, one of my favorite websites, The Conservative Treehouse, has an uncanny ability to predict the next media spin. I think they have done it again.

Yesterday The Conservative Treehouse posted an article about the next war the military-industrial complex is planning to get America involved in.

The article reports:

First things first, the Taliban, ISIS, al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, ISIS-k, are all factions of the same ‘authentic Islam’ ideology under the umbrella of the Muslim Brotherhood.  The U.S. and Western media, as well as the State Department and Intelligence Branch of the U.S. government, like to create false distinctions when it fits their need.  However, the groups are aligned – not adversarial, unless there is a geographic contest for power in a specific place.  That’s essentially the only time they are in conflict.

The ‘extremist’ (by our standard) factions, under the political cover of the Muslim Brotherhood, are united in their dislike of The United States, most of Europe and ‘The West‘ writ large.  They hate our filthy money and the politics that comes with it.

The two U.S. internal groups attempting to avoid accountability for the mess in Afghanistan break out to: (1) State Dept, CIA, Intelligence community; -vs- (2) WH, Pentagon and NatSec Council. Currently the State Department and Intelligence Community are winning the blame game. The White House and Pentagon are being identified by most Americans as responsible for the mess.

This duality of the State Dept (olive branch) -vs- Pentagon (arrows) is the internal dynamic depicted on the presidential seal. However, when the internal mechanisms are trying to save their institutional credibility; and those internal motives are based on trying to retain corrupt systems for affluence and influence; the modern battle is distinctly different.

U.S. money needs to flow somewhere in order for those who skim and direct the cash to have a cover for the business model created by the flow itself. The State Dept., CIA and Intelligence Community wants to send money to Afghanistan so they can position their friends and family to benefit from the business end of the process.

As a result of the State Department winning the blame game, they are now in a great position to flip the narrative and position the Taliban to need financial assistance. However, before they can pull off that shift, they need to change the public impression of the Taliban. After all, the U.S. has been calling the Taliban terrorists for decades….

… Insert ISIS-k!

The magical mythical ISIS-k becomes the new enemy allowing the “Good Taliban” shift.   The Taliban go from being terrorists, to being U.S. allies in the fight against ISIS-k.  See how that works?

By shifting this dynamic the U.S. State Department, CIA and Intelligence Community do not need to take apart their business model. Remember, the U.S. Senate is aligned in this group. The Senate supports the Dept of State and Intelligence Branch of government, writ large. This is also a mutually beneficial financial arrangement for the Senate members, their staff, their families, and the various NGOs that operate as beneficiaries of the support system.

If Americans continue to elect Congressmen who support this, then we deserve what we get. The time has come to elect Congressmen who will not waste American lives on foreign adventures that recklessly spend American lives and taxpayers’ money.

This Is Not Reassuring

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Yesterday WND posted an article about the Afghan refugees we are screening in Qatar.

The article reports:

Among the evacuees from Kabul are as many as 100 Afghans who are on intelligence agency terrorist watch lists, including one with potential ties to ISIS, a U.S. official warned Tuesday.

The Afghans, who have been flown to Qatar, are candidates for entry to the United States through Special Immigration Visas (SIV).

The U.S. official told Defense One that at least 100 have been flagged as possible matches to intelligence agency watch lists by the Defense Department’s Automated Biometric Identification System.

A State Department spokesman told DailyMail.com that all SIV applicants are being screened before they are allowed entry into the United States.

The article notes:

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby assured reporters Monday that the Afghans allowed into the United States are undergoing “robust screening.”

However, as Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer argues, the British also have “robust screening.” But a report Tuesday by Sky News illustrates “the unavoidable difficulties involved in this process.”

The British broadcaster reported “a person from Afghanistan on the UK’s no-fly list has been flown into Birmingham as part of the British evacuation operation in a potential security breach.”

We know from experience that the leaders of terrorists groups are not stupid. Why wouldn’t they exploit the chaos in Afghanistan and the chaos at America’s southern border to bring terrorists into America? Our current President has put the lives of all Americans in danger with his domestic and foreign policies.

Whose Idea Was This?

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Just when you thought things couldn’t get any more bizarre, they do. Yesterday The New York Post posted as article about the reversal of a ridiculous decision made by the Biden administration.

The article reports:

The State Department was forced to scrap a widely excoriated plan to bill US citizens $2,000 or more for their evacuation flights from Kabul.

The hefty price tag drew social media outrage Thursday after it gained public notice.

“In these unique circumstances, we have no intention of seeking any reimbursement from those fleeing Afghanistan,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement provided to The Post.

The cost was publicly posted to a State Department website on Saturday but went largely unnoticed before it was highlighted by Politico’s military-focused newsletter Thursday.

An unnamed State Department spokesman initially stood by the charge, telling Politico that “U.S. law requires that evacuation assistance to private U.S. citizens or third country nationals be provided ‘on a reimbursable basis to the maximum extent practicable.’”

You messed up by removing the military before you got the civilians our of harms way and now you want the civilians to pay for your mistake??!!

The article continues:

The State Department’s Overseas Security Advisory Council said in an Aug. 14 advisory, “U.S. lawful permanent residents may submit a repatriation assistance request, and their request will be considered depending on availability.”

The advisory says, “Repatriation flights are not free, and passengers will be required to sign a promissory loan agreement and may not be eligible to renew their U.S. passports until the loan is repaid. The cost may be $2,000USD or more per person.”

Some civilian flights remain available out of Afghanistan. For example, Air India has pledged to continue operations so long as the Kabul airport is open. One-way direct tickets to Delhi are available for Sunday for $147.

Unbelievable.

The article concludes:

French and British troops are venturing into the Taliban-controlled Afghan capital to escort their citizens to safety. The US military is not doing so for Americans.

That is disgraceful.

When Politics Interferes With Science

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Yesterday The U.K. Daily Mail posted an article about the search for the origins of the coronavirus. It seems as if not everyone wanted to uncover the truth.

The article reports:

Career staffers at the State Department ‘warned’ officials not to investigate the possibility that COVID-19 leaked from a Wuhan lab, fearing it would expose U.S. funding for gain-of-function research there, according to a new report.

Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance raised the concern in a memo reported by Vanity Fair on Thursday. 

DiNanno wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, ‘warned’ leaders ‘not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19’ because it would ‘open a can of worms’ if it continued. 

In one State Department meeting, officials say colleagues explicitly told them not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s (WIV) gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to the U.S. taxpayer funds that were supporting the work.

The article continues:

It’s unclear exactly much U.S. government funding was going to the WIV, but at least some of it was being routed through a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance.

By 2018, EcoHealth Alliance was pulling in up to $15 million a year in grant money from an array of federal agencies, including the Defense Department, Homeland Security, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to tax filings.

EcoHealth Alliance and its founder Peter Daszak have been working with Shi Zhengli, the WIV virologist known as the ‘bat lady’, for more than 15 years. 

British-born Daszak, 55, is the president of EcoHealth Alliance — and in the early days of the pandemic, he was key in establishing the veneer of a ‘scientific consensus’ that the lab-leak origin was impossible.

Daszak not only signed but spearheaded a letter signed by 27 scientists rejecting the lab leak hypothesis, which was published on February 19, 2020 in the medical journal The Lancet.

Leaked emails later revealed that he encouraged colleagues who do gain-of-function research on coronaviruses not to sign the letter, in order to obscure the connection.

The letter declared that the scientists had ‘no competing interests’ — but it seems clear that Daszak did, as a lab leak origin would likely derail his entire field, but an animal origin would justify his life’s work.  

I don’t know whether or not knowing the origin of the coronavirus would have been helpful in finding a cure or a vaccine, but it bothers me that we have people in our government working against the interests of American citizens.

 

Disappointing, But Not Surprising

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There has always been a lot of conversation about the money in politics. Generally speaking, that conversation has centered around campaign donations, but in recent years there has been another aspect of money in politics that needs some serious scrutiny. Basically it has to do with how middle class Americans become millionaires after a few terms in Congress. Congressmen make less than $200,000 a year, so even if you had no expenses at all it would take you five  years to become a millionaire. Many do it through selling influence through donations to their ‘charitable organizations’ where the only charity goes to themselves. Others do it through insider trading. Some do it by getting exorbitant speaking fees from companies of countries that coincidentally have matters before the legislative or executive branches of our government. You can find examples of all of these activities in recent history with very little research. Recently, we had another example of questionable campaign donations.

Yesterday Fox News reported the following:

President Biden and his allies raked in campaign cash from a top Russia lobbyist in 2020, just months before his administration’s decision to scrap sanctions on a controversial firm building a Russian oil pipeline to Germany.

Richard Burt, a managing partner at McLarty Associates and a former U.S. ambassador to Germany during the Reagan administration, ponied up $4,000 for Joe Biden in October 2020 and dropped another $10,000 in the lefty-aligned political action committee Unite The County in March 2020, FEC records show.

In addition to violating Biden’s own campaign pledge not to take lobbyist cash, the money from Burt is particularly noteworthy as he is currently directly engaged in lobbying activities for Nord Stream 2 AG.

“When Richard Burt donated to Biden Victory Fund, he failed to acknowledge that he was a registered foreign agent and was therefore ineligible to contribute,” a Democratic National Committee spokesman told The Post. “Because Burt also listed a different employer than on his [Foreign Agents Registration Act] registration, he was not flagged during our vetting process.”

The DNC said it returned the cash on Thursday after The Post’s inquiry.

The Switzerland-based Nord Stream 2 — controlled by an ex-East German stasi officer and close ally of Vladimir Putin — is currently engaging in sanctionable activity, according to the State Department. Team Biden raised eyebrows, however, after declining to enforce sanctions, citing U.S. national interests, Axios reported.

Critics worry the project will allow Russia dangerous influence over European energy supplies and increase their overall political leverage on the continent.

Somehow I am not convinced that the cash was fully returned rather than simply funneled somewhere else. Unfortunately this would have gone unchecked but for the efforts of the reporter at The New York Post who wrote the article.

This Might Be The Reason Government Investigations Take So Long

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It’s hard to get the job done when the person you are investigating won’t talk to you! The following video posted at YouTube is of State Department Inspector General Steve Linick testifying before the House Oversight Committee on July 7th, 2016, in which he revealed Hillary Clinton refused an interview request related to her email investigation.

This is part of the testimony as posted at The Gateway Pundit today:

Chaffetz: Were you able to interview Hillary Clinton?

Linick: we were not.

Chaffetz: Why not?

Linick: Well, we asked to interview secretary Clinton. We interviewed all of the secretaries. We looked at five Secretaries of State going back to Madeleine Albright and her, through counsel, she declined to meet with us.

Chaffetz: Did she indicate a reason why she would refuse to meet with the inspector general?

Linick: Her counsel informed our staff that she had — that all of the information about the e-mail was on the FAQ she published by her campaign.

The article at The Gateway Pundit further reports:

Howard Krongard, the State Department Inspector General from April 2005 to January 2008, told Fox News last May that Clinton did not follow standard practices in respect to private email usage.

“Certainly to my knowledge at least, Secretary Rice did not have a personal server. I certainly never either sent an email to one or received an email from one,” Krongard told Fox News

“I would have been stunned had I been asked to send an email to her at a personal server, private address. I would have declined to do so on security grounds and if she had sent one to me, I probably would have started an investigation,” added Krongard.

From what I have seen, I suspect that the emails are the least of Hillary Clinton’s worries about the Inspector General’s report. It is very obvious that laws were broken in Ms. Clinton‘s handling of classified information. It is also very obvious that an ordinary citizen would be in jail for similar crimes. I don’t necessarily wish Ms. Clinton jail time, but it would be nice to see her admit that she broke the law. If her email account was used to funnel money to the Clinton Foundation in return for political favors, she should be heavily fined and forced to return the money.

The Inspector General’s report is due out in January. It should be very interesting.

Politics Before National Security

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The decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals did not uphold the law. This is the law as it is written:

The Executive Order issued by President Trump did not stop immigration from the seven countries listed–it put a 90-day pause in effect on refugees from these countries. The idea was to allow time for us to find a way to vet them so as to ensure the safety of Americans. The Executive Order also included a 120-day pause in admitting refugees. Again, this would give us time to examine our policies so that we could improve our procedures. Most of what the news is reporting on this Executive Order is simply not true. It is my hope that another Executive Order regarding refugees will be written more carefully and will stand.

However, there is more to the story. On Thursday, The Washington Times reported the following:

The State Department has more than doubled the rate of refugees from Iraq, Syria and other suspect countries in the week since a federal judge’s reprieve, in what analysts said appears to be a push to admit as many people as possible before another court puts the program back on ice.

A staggering 77 percent of the 1,100 refugees let in since Judge James L. Robart’s Feb. 3 order have been from the seven suspect countries. Nearly a third are from Syria alone — a country that President Trump has ordered be banned altogether from the refugee program. Another 21 percent are from Iraq. By contrast, in the two weeks before Judge Robart’s order, just 9 percent of refugees were from Syria and 6 percent were from Iraq.

“There’s no doubt in my mind they would be doing whatever they could to get people in before something changes because, from their perspective, their motivation is to resettle these folks. It would not be the first time that State Department officials have prioritized facilitating someone’s entry to the United States over security concerns,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies.

This is an example of the need to fire the majority of employees left over from the previous administration.

There are some things we need to remember in this discussion. Vetting of refugees from these countries is very difficult–in some cases we are dealing with failed states that cannot check records, and in other cases we are dealing with states that promote terrorism. ISIS has already stated that it is including terrorists with the refugees. Do we need to import terrorists? We also need to remember who ISIS is–they are the Sunni Baathists who were in charge of Iraq under Saddam Hussein. They were ruthless in ruling Iraq, and they are ruthless as ISIS. We really do not want to allow them into America.

What we are seeing is the Washington establishment trying to destroy an outsider who is a threat to their power. We need to understand that as we view the events around us. The Ninth Circuit and (unfortunately) the State Department are not concerned with the safety or security of Americans–they are concerned only with their political views and their power. Our Founding Fathers would be appalled.

 

A President Who Does Not Follow The Constitution Impacts Other Countries–Not Only America

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Today’s Wall Street Journal featured a very good article entitled, “Why We’re Suing Obama Over Keystone.” The article was written by Kristine Kelkus, an executive vice president and general counsel at TransCanada. I strongly suggest you follow the link above and read the entire article, but I am including a few excerpts from the article that illustrate how damaging an out-of-control President has been to our country and our neighbors.

The article reports:

For 65 years, TransCanada has built oil and gas pipelines in North America. It’s a job the company is good at, and one we much prefer to building lengthy legal filings that could take several years to resolve. Still, when TransCanada in 2008 walked its application for a presidential permit into the U.S. State Department, the company was prepared for an extensive evidentiary process—albeit one that has traditionally been straightforward.

Until the Keystone XL pipeline, no U.S. administration had prohibited the cross-border construction of a major oil pipeline. And within the past decade, U.S. regulators approved two very similar, large cross-border pipelines that transport exactly the same type of oil that the Keystone XL pipeline would have carried from the same region in Alberta, Canada, to the U.S.

TransCanada already operates the initial Keystone pipeline, which was approved in 2008. And in 2009 the State Department under Secretary Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama permitted Enbridge, a direct competitor to TransCanada, to build another. Each of these permit reviews took about two years.

…But environmental activists made rejection of the project a litmus test of the president’s climate-change credentials. The State Department’s official Record of Decision reasoned that permitting the pipeline to proceed would “undermine U.S. climate leadership” because “the understanding of the international community”—contrary to the administration’s own findings—was that the pipeline would increase greenhouse-gas emissions. Permitting construction would “undercut the credibility and influence of the United States” in negotiating with other countries, including at the coming Paris climate conference.

In other words, the pipeline and its benefits were sacrificed to increase the president’s negotiating leverage with other countries.

My first reaction to this article was to wonder who runs Enbridge, if campaign contributions were involved, and if Berkshire Hathaway owns the railway that was carrying the oil before the Enbridge pipeline was built (see here).

The article further concludes:

The administration’s actions harm business and public interests that extend far beyond a particular pipeline. The decision calls into question the entire process for cross-border facility approvals. It strongly suggests that investing in the U.S. is subject to a level of “sovereign risk” usually associated with far less developed economies.

Unless they are remedied in court or arbitration, the Keystone decision and the political expediency underlying it will also encourage future administrations to conclude that they, too, can disregard the most basic legal requirements.

We need a President who puts the interests of all Americans above the interests of special interest groups and major contributors.

The Lies Begin To Add Up

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Hillary Clinton and her husband, Bill, have never had a strong reputation for honesty, but sometimes it is a good idea to remind ourselves why they have such a miserable rating in that area. Last week The Hill posted an article by A. B. Stoddard about Hillary Clinton’s rather distant relationship with the concept of truth.

The article notes:

In the new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, even though Clinton beats most GOP candidates, Sanders performs better against them, and she loses independents in every match-up. Her numbers on honesty and trustworthiness, according to Qiunnipiac, are 36 percent to 60 percent — worse than for any candidate in either party.

It is a sad reflection of the values of American voters that a candidate who has such a low rating on honesty and trustworthiness is leading the fight for the presidential nomination of the Democratic party.

The article goes on to list some of Hillary Clinton’s more recent lies:

Clinton said she was transparent, yet her emails were under congressional subpoena for years while she kept her private server a secret. 

Clinton said she used one device at State for convenience, but she in fact used several. 

She said her email server was destroyed, but it was not. 

She said she handed over all work emails to the State Department, but then congressional investigators turned up others. 

She said she responded to a routine records request from the State Department and turned over her emails when several other secretaries of State did, but State officials were asking for her emails in response to Freedom of Information Act requests and congressional investigations months before that.

Clinton said the State Department affirmed that 90 percent of her work email was captured on the State.gov accounts of other employees — a statistic department officials conceded, after she repeated it under oath in her Benghazi Committee testimony, they know nothing about. 

Clinton claimed in March “there is no classified material,” yet indeed there was. 

Clinton has repeated numerous times that the arrangement was “allowed,” though no one in the administration has ever said they approved her server. So Democrats — like Republicans — assume she is making a misleading statement about her own unorthodox decision to do something no Cabinet secretary had ever before done.

When asked on NBC’s “Meet The Press” whether she deleted any emails to hide information from future investigations, Clinton said the idea “never crossed my mind.”

America is a representative republic. We elect our leaders. We get the leaders we deserve. If that is the degree of honesty that we expect from our President, we are in serious trouble.

 

The Problems With Our Media Are Nothing New

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There is an article in the Jewish World Review today dealing with the problem of bias in the American media. I strongly suggest that you follow the link and read the entire article, but there were a few things in the article that jumped out at me.

The article reminds us of some historic media bias:

It is the MSM who ties McCarthy with what Joseph Welch said to him in the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 misquoting him as saying, “Have you no shame?” In actually he said. “Have you no sense of decency?” But what really angered Mr. Welch was McCarthy had the audacity to say: ” But in view of Mr. Welch’s request that the information be given once we know of anyone who might be performing any work for the Communist Party, I think we should tell him that he has in his law firm a young man named Fisher whom he recommended, incidentally, to do the work on this Committee, who has been, for a number of years, a member of an organization which is named, oh, years and years ago, as the legal bulwark of the Communist Party, an organization which always springs to the defense of anyone who dares to expose Communists.”

In this case Joe McCarthy was the truth teller and had to be destroyed. So too, was Whittaker Chambers, editor of Time magazine, and a former communist spy who warned of the infiltration of communists in the Washington elite and one of the persons he named was Alger Hiss. He was involved in the establishment of the United Nations both as a U.S. State Department and U.N. official. In February 1945, as a member of the U.S. delegation headed by Stettinius, Hiss attended the Yalta Conference, where the Big Three, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill, The communist spy was this close to FDR at this important conference and no one bothered to vet him because the media was probably covering for him.

One wonders if the fate of eastern Europe might have been different if the media had chosen to tell the truth. One wonders how many eastern Europeans might have had longer, happier lives. The truth matters.

The article also reminds us:

While the MSM is following Goebel’s propaganda rules, we must remember what he also said about the antidote:

“The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

The future of our country depends on the truth and it is nowhere to be seen in a lying, stinking media.

Strong words, but unfortunately, true.

 

A Department Of Misinformation

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The United States State Department has become a department of misinformation. As reported at red flag news, this is one of their recent statements (Marie Harf was appointed Deputy Spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State in June 2013.):

MATTHEWS: How do we stop this? I don’t see it. I see the Shia militias coming out of Baghdad who are all Shia. The Sunnis hate them. The Sunnis are loyal to ISIS rather than going in with the Shia. You’ve got the Kurds, the Jordanian air force and now the Egyptian air force. But i don’t see any — If i were ISIS, I wouldn’t be afraid right now. I can figure there is no existential threat to these people. They can keep finding places where they can hold executions and putting the camera work together, getting their props ready and killing people for show. And nothing we do right now seems to be directed at stopping this.

HARF: Well, I think there’s a few stages here. Right now what we’re doing is trying to take their leaders and their fighters off the battlefield in Iraq and Syria. That’s really where they flourish.

MATTHEWS: Are we killing enough of them?

HARF: We’re killing a lot of them and we’re going to keep killing more of them. So are the Egyptians, so are the Jordanians. They’re in this fight with us. But we cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war. We need in the medium to longer term to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs, whether —

MATTHEWS: We’re not going to be able to stop that in our lifetime or fifty lifetimes. There’s always going to be poor people. There’s always going to be poor muslims, and as long as there are poor Muslims, the trumpet’s blowing and they’ll join. We can’t stop that, can we?

HARF: We can work with countries around the world to help improve their governance. We can help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people…

Note to Ms. Harf–the 9/11 hijackers were not poor. Osama bin Laden was not poor, Yasser Arafat was not poor. This is not about economics, it is about being trained to hate. In the Gaza Strip, children are graduating from kindergarten in camo clothes carrying wooden guns, and saying that they want to kill Jews. This is the problem. If all of the Arab countries disarmed, there would be peace in the Middle East. If Israel disarmed, there would be no Israel. That tells you all you need to know.

 

 

Can American Aid Buy Peace ?

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Today’s Wall Street Journal is reporting that the American State Department is working out a deal with the new Egyptian government to give them $1 billion in debt relief. Aside from the fact that America faces its own debt problems, what in the world are we supporting? This is obviously an effort by the State Department to encourage Egypt to keep the peace treaty it signed with Israel that returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. Unfortunately, that peace is danger due to the actions of the new Egyptian government.

On August 6, the Los Angeles Times reported that Islamic militants have increased their presence in the Sinai Peninsula since the revolution in Egypt. We need to understand the the new government of Egypt will align itself with Iran and is fundamentally opposed to the existence of Israel.

The article in the Wall Street Journal reports:

But the election in June of Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood-backed president, Mohammed Morsi, has called the strength of the old alliance into question. Mr. Morsi selected Beijing last week for his first official trip outside the Middle East, followed by a trip to Iran—moves some observers saw as a deliberate snub to Egypt’s traditional Western backers.

The arrival of an Islamist government followed by political upheaval and disconcerting moves on the international stage fueled questions over the reliability of Mr. Morsi as a U.S. ally. But his efforts at internal stability and his public criticism of Syria’s regime while visiting Tehran last week, which angered his hosts, have helped balance U.S. views of the new Egyptian leader.

At the present moment, America is dealing with record budget deficits and facing drastic cuts to our military. I realize that I am only an ordinary citizen, but it makes absolutely no sense to me to give $1 billion to a country that is in the process of aligning itself with countries that do not wish us well.

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America’s Continued Lack Of Support For Israel

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The Obama administration seems to be blind to the dangers that face Israel as Iran goes nuclear and as Iran arms Israel’s neighbors. The New York Post posted an article today about the Obama administration’s latest blindness in dealing with Iran and terrorism.

The article reports:

Team Obama rightly blamed Iran after its proxy Hezbollah apparently blew up a bus in a terrorist operation that killed five Israelis. Then it went off the rails.

“This was tit for tat,” a State Department official told The New York Times, implying that the bombing was retaliation for Israeli assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists.

So it’s okay to kill innocent Israeli civilians because Israel is trying to protect the world from your nuclear program by killing some of the scientists involved?

The article concludes:

Make no mistake: Israel is fully justified in targeting the Iranian nuclear program. The world — and particularly the Arabs of the Middle East — owe it a great debt for doing so most aggressively.

But nothing excuses or explains Iran’s murder of innocents, and the Obama administration should stop doing what amounts to PR work for the ayatollahs.

That’s unacceptable.

I think I would like to ask the State Department to explain their position.U