Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • More F&F weapons found at crime scenes

    The Washington Times reports that more rifles that were shipped to the cartels in Mexico from US gun shops under the watchful Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have turned up at crime scenes in Mexico;

    Fox News reported that the guns were tracked down and recovered. Justice Department documents described the weapons as WASR-10 .762 caliber Romanian rifles. The three weapons were tracked back to a gun store located in Glendale, Ariz., Fox News said.

    It’s not yet clear exactly where the guns were found, or what crimes they were used to commit. But the Department of Justice papers did indicate that two of the weapons had been bought by a man named Uriel Patino.

    I think the author meant to report that rifles were WASR-10-762 7.62mm rifles. A .762 caliber rifle sounds attractive since it would fire a bullet half-again as big as a .50 caliber and I’d probably be the first in line to buy one, but it doesn’t exist as far as I know.

    But, it’s good to see that the BATFE had a back-up plan to recover the smuggled weapons at crime scenes. I was worried about that.

  • Obama signs bill for vets at airport screening

    The Associated Press reports that the President signed into law yesterday the Helping Heroes Fly Act that is intended to ease TSA airport screening for disabled and wounded veterans;

    [Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, an Iraq war veteran who sponsored the bill] says the law ensures troops can return to life at home as quickly and seamlessly as possible. She says veterans deserve dignified screening processes that respect their service and sacrifices.

    You can read the bill at the link above, but don’t expect everything to change overnight. The bill just directs DoD and the VA to “develop and implement a process to support and facilitate the ease of travel and to the extent possible provide expedited passenger screening services for severely injured or disabled members of the Armed Forces and severely injured or disabled veterans through passenger screening.” Knowing the speed at which those two agencies work, I wouldn’t expect much in the near future, although it is a step in the right direction.

  • The Holder-Hasan Disconnect

    Recently, Attorney General Eric Holder, our nation’s highest legal authority, failed to attend a conference of all the nations’ highest authorities on terrorism. Indeed, a list of the attendees includes everyone who is someone in the War on Terror – except, quite glaringly, the commander-in-chief, the attorney general, and that gray eminence behind the scrim, Valerie Jarrett.

    Of course, if the administration truly believes that terrorism is criminal in nature rather than terroristic warfare – in other words, that Islamic terrorism should be adjudicated in domestic courts as criminal violations of U.S. statutes rather than treated as aggressive acts of war directed against the American people – who better to chair such a high-level conference on terrorism than the very person who sits at the pinnacle of our federal prosecutorial system?

    It truly is not difficult to find motive in these political machinations: plausible deniability leaps first to mind. If I’m not there, I can’t be blamed for any negative consequences of this forum.

    Second observation: We, who wield the executive power in this administration, won’t have to account for our previous comments that al-Qaeda is on the run in the face of this week’s submissive folding of the American flag from the entryways of embassies throughout the Middle East.

    The supposedly defeated al-Qaeda supposedly roared a threat of imminent danger and destruction, and the Obama/Kerry State Department rolled on its back, assuming the universal position of submission. That word, submission, is highly significant to Islamic terrorists.

    Now think about that in light of the highest-profile terrorist event extant in this country: the trial at Fort Hood, Texas of the terrorist killer, Nidal Hasan, an Army doctor, who, while proclaiming his allegiance to Allah, gunned down 43 American soldiers and/or their family members, killing fourteen. The Obama administration had to reluctantly yield prosecution to the system of military justice because the perpetrator was a serving officer and therefore fully under the judicial authority of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. However, the shamefully politically correct governance of the Army, under the mouse-meek leadership of a four-star general whose name rightly resembles dumpster, has chosen to follow the Obama administration’s determination that an Islamic militant, shouting, “Allahu Akbar” as he gunned down the innocent and unaware, constitutes workplace violence rather than the Islamic terrorism it truly was.

    From the perp himself:

    Hasan, a Muslim American, does not deny being the gunman. In a brief opening statement today at his trial, which opened at the fort where his shooting spree took place, he declared: “The evidence will clearly show that I am the shooter.”

    Hasan called himself a “mujahedeen,” or a Muslim holy warrior. “We mujahedeen are imperfect soldiers trying to form a perfect religion. I apologize for any mistakes I made in this endeavor,” he said.

    So, as the trial begins, Nidal Hasan, legally representing himself at the proceedings at Fort Hood, describes himself as a mujahedeen, a soldier, admitting that he was, in fact, the shooter. He clearly believes himself to be a soldier in Allah’s vanguard and his murderous actions as the religiously justifiable slaughter of the enemies of Islam. To my way of thinking, that clearly renders laughable, although tragically so, the Obama administration’s claim that this deadly event was “workplace violence,” a designation that, while covering the administration’s politically correct ass, also deprives the victims and survivors of this tragedy of those federal benefits due them as victims of an act of war.

    One can only find it ironic that our federal government, on the eve of the opening of the military trial of America’s most visible and confessed Islamic terrorist, convenes a plenum of the highest order in Washington, D.C. to discuss Islamic threats to our society, and the ultimate authorities on how those threats are to be dealt with, both militarily and judicially, our commander-in-chief and our attorney general, are busy playing golf or pursuing other such imperatives. Were this not merely an action of workplace violence, but rather an act of Islamic terrorism, as the accused is so clearly confessing to, Barack Obama and, especially, Eric Holder, might be viewed as AWOL. That’s “absent without leave” for you civilians.

    In the increasingly Alice in Wonderland world that the Obama administration has become, we are faced with the reality of federal law enforcement being unwilling to accept the at-trial self-characterization of a Muslim terrorist that he is, in fact, exactly that: a Muslim terrorist, eagerly killing Americans in an overt and deliberate act of war. Hasan is the happy warrior, readily confessing to the sacred motives of his murderous massacre. But according to our federal justice department and our commander-in-chief, it’s “Nope, what the hell does he know? It was nothing more than an act of workplace violence.”

    And that, folks, is the Holder-Hasan Disconnect, leaving us to conclude that it has no longer become a question of just how stupid the Obama administration thinks the American people are and how much of their politically correct BS they can make us swallow. Rather, the question has become:

    “Just how stupid is the Obama administration?”

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • “Crazy pants” defensive policy

    I guess I’m not the only person who wondered about the overly-broad defensive measures that the Obama Administration took last week when they were quaking in their boots over the “decimated” al Qaeda and their plans for attacking American interests overseas and specifically in the Arab Crescent. McClatchy reports the reactions of some experts;

    Take this sampling of reactions from prominent al-Qaida observers:

    “It’s crazy-pants — you can quote me,” said Will McCants, a former State Department adviser on government extremism who this month joins the Brookings Saban Center as the director of its project on U.S. relations with the Islamic world.

    “We just showed our hand, so now they’re obviously going to change their position on when and where” to attack, said Nada Bakos, a former CIA analyst who was part of the team that hunted Osama bin Laden for years.

    “It’s not completely random, but most people are, like, ‘What?’ ” said Aaron Zelin, who researches militants for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and blogs about them at Jihadology.net

    “I’m not going to argue that it’s not willy-nilly, but it’s hard for me to come down too critical because I simply don’t know their reasoning,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counterterrorism specialist at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington research institute.

    In the absence of specifics about what the Obama administration refers to as a “specific threat,” seasoned analysts were reluctant to comment because there’s so little insight into the government’s decision-making. Instead, a mix of speculation and conspiracy theory fills the void.

    I think if I was taking protective measures for my embassies, I wouldn’t insure that it leads every single news program for over a week now. That kind of tips your hand. I guess they figure that being this cautious and being this vocal about it makes up for their failures in the Benghazi fiasco.

  • Obama snubs Putin over Snowden

    Chief Tango and Ex-PH2 send us links to the news that Obama plans to skip his one-on-one meeting with Vlad the Putin ahead of the G20 meeting next month.

    Authorities in Moscow last week granted temporary asylum to Snowden, who is wanted by U.S. authorities for leaking classified intelligence information to newspapers.

    That decision infuriated Washington. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called on the U.S. “to fundamentally rethink our relationship with Putin’s Russia.”

    In a statement Wednesday, the White House noted cooperation in some areas, such as policies toward Afghanistan and Iran, but said Moscow’s decision to help Snowden was “disappointing.”

    I thought about this real hard, but I decided that whether Obama went to the meeting or skipped it, I was going to call him a “pussy” so he really couldn’t win either way. I think that’s the way most of the Right saw this – a “no-win” for Obama. But mostly only because his foreign policy team headed by John Kerry couldn’t convince Putin to turn over Eddie Snowden. So yeah, I really blame Kerry, but Obama gets the “pussy” label because he picked that buffoon Kerry as his Secretary of State, probably just to make Hillary Clinton look good.

    So instead of going to Moscow, Obama will go to Stockholm, because I guess Sweden hasn’t done anything to embarrass this administration yet. From the Washington Post (Amazon Post?);

    “Sweden is a close friend and partner to the United States,” Carney said in a statement. “Sweden plays a key leadership role on the international stage, including in opening new trade and investment opportunities through the U.S.-EU Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, advancing clean technologies, and promoting environmental sustainability.”

    Besides, there are more Muslims in Sweden, anyway, it’ll feel more like home to the President. I’m sure John Kerry can piss them off before he gets there without even half-trying.

  • US taxpayers funding the insurgency in Afghanistan

    The Christian Science Monitor reports that building projects in Afghanistan, designed to prop up the government there after our withdrawal in 2014 and funded by the US taxpayers, the few of us who are left, are seemingly stuffing money in the pockets of the Taliban, the Haqqani Network and al Qaeda;

    It turned out that while Centcom head Gen. James N. Mattis barred the 20 entities from doing business with the US military since they were, in his determination, “actively supporting an insurgency,” other branches of the sprawling US spending effort in Afghanistan weren’t being informed of his decisions. This includes, most importantly, USAID and the State Department. [Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR)] thought it best for the rest of the US Afghanistan effort to be brought into the loop.

    […]

    A continuing problem is the Army’s refusal to act on SIGAR’s recommendations to suspend or debar individuals who are supporters of the insurgency, including the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and al-Qaeda. The Army suspension and debarment official has taken the position that suspension or debarment of such individuals and entities would be a violation of their due process rights if based on classified information or if based on findings by the Department of Commerce which placed them on the Entities List. SIGAR has referred 43 such cases to the Army, and all have been rejected, despite detailed supporting information demonstrating that these individuals and entities are providing material support to the insurgency in Afghanistan. In other words, they may be enemies of the United States, but that is not enough to keep them from getting government contracts.

    Maybe we can offer them upgraded weapons systems and some training to go along with the new equipment. Historians are going to have a field day when they finally get around to writing about US failures in this war.

  • Hold-out Holder

    Yesterday Rick Moran posted a piece decrying the absence of our prez from a highest level gathering of all of America’s top government experts on combatting terror. While all these top echelon executives, cabinet secretaries, departmental directors, military leaders, etc., were gathered on a Saturday in the nation’s capital to discuss the purportedly most serious security threat to America and her diplomatic picket lines in the Middle East since 9/11, our disengaged supreme leader apparently thought his golf game more deserving of his attention than a seriously lethal (as defined by his own agencies) threat to American interests. Thus our counter-terror first team met without the team’s leader, the only person with the lawful authority to act on any determinations of that team.

    However, that is not the issue I found to be so curious about this gathering of counter-terror mandarins. Rather, I was struck by one particular absence on that list of attendees, that of our attorney general, Eric Holder. In an administration that has declared unequivocally that terrorism directed against American citizens and properties is not an act of war but rather criminal activity to be adjudicated in courts of law by juries of peers, it strikes me as incredibly remiss that in such a high level anti-terrorist conclave, the nation’s ultimate legal authority was not present.

    Think about that: we are informed that America is facing the most serious terror threat since 9/11 and yet it is not apparently severe enough to require the attendance of the two most critical players, the commander-in-chief and the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. What smells like a Detroit dumpster about this scenario?

    Everything…

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • Embassy closings because of “decimated” al Qaeda

    Fox News reports that a score of US embassies were closed this weekend and the closures are expected to last through next weekend because of a high rate of “chatter” among suspected and known terrorists;

    Florida Republican Rep. Tom Rooney, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told Fox News that U.S. intelligence agents detected a “very specific” threat and suggested they have known about it for at least several weeks.

    He was among several congressional lawmakers Sunday who said the threat was gleaned from so-called “chatter” from phone lines, computer outlets, websites and other communication outlets.

    Rooney also said the information is not what intelligence committee members “see on our regular briefings.”

    While I appreciate the need to protect our State Department employees, and I also understand the difficulty in making sense out of “chatter”, I’m not sure a broad and well-publicized closure out of fear is necessarily doing us any good in the eyes of the world. If terrorism is a process by which a smaller entity elicits a broad reaction for a larger entity, it appears that the “decimated” al Qaeda has won this round.

    How would I have reacted if I was the executive personage? I’m not sure. But I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have broadcast to the world for 72 consecutive hours that I was ordering employees into hiding from a nebulous threat. If nothing else, this reaction to threats have proven the ineffectiveness of the zombie-ninja-robot strategy of this administration.