Category Archives: War Commentary

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

The House Subpoenas For Brennan, Power, And Rice

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What do they mean?

As I have previously explained, the CIA, NSA, and FBI are the investigative components of the 17-component “community” of intelligence agencies. It is those three agencies that collect raw intelligence and that make decisions about what identities should be unmasked. Those decisions are reflected in the content of the polished intelligence reports that are generated from the raw intelligence.

Under the rules that apply to foreign-intelligence-collection, there is a presumption against revealing the names of American citizens. But there are significant loopholes: The names may be unmasked if intelligence officials determine that knowing the identity of an American is necessary in order to understand and exploit the intelligence value of the information collected.

Thus, as I’ve also outlined, it is unlikely that any single instance of unmasking would be found to be a violation of law — and, indeed, it would not violate any penal statute (it would violate court-ordered “minimization” procedures). Nevertheless, were a pattern of unmasking established, divorced from any proper foreign-intelligence purpose, that would be a profound abuse of power in the nature of a “high crime and misdemeanor” — the Constitution’s predicate for impeachment.

Which is a moot point, since they’re now out of office. But as I’ve often said, the Obama administration boldly got away with things that Nixon could only dream of.

[Update a while later]

Mark Levin to Congress: Investigate Obama’s “silent coup” against Trump.

And more thoughts from the Journal‘s editors:

Ms. Power’s job was diplomacy. Unmaskings are supposed to be rare, and if the mere ambassador to the U.N. could demand them, what privacy protection was the Obama White House really offering U.S. citizens? The House subpoenas should provide fascinating details about how often Ms. Power and her mates requested unmaskings, on which Trump officials, and with what justification. The public deserves to know given that unmasked details have been leaked to the press in violation of the law and privacy.

Meantime, we learned from Circa News last week of a declassified document from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which excoriated the National Security Agency for an “institutional lack of candor.” The court explained that Obama officials had often violated U.S. privacy protections while looking at foreign intelligence but did not disclose these incidents until the waning days of Mr. Obama’s tenure.

So they spied, and lied.

[Late-morning update]

Andrew McCarthy is on fire today: The real collusion:

There is abundant cause for concern that the Obama administration tore down the wall between the missions of law-enforcement and foreign-intelligence, on one side, and partisan politics, on the other. The White House and its politicized security services wanted Hillary Clinton to become president, and they do not want to let Donald Trump be president.

There’s a collusion story here, but it’s got nothing to do with Russia.

Can we expand Mueller’s charter to look into that?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

After Manchester

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Brendan O’Neill says it’s time for anger:

The post-terror cultivation of passivity speaks to a profound crisis of – and fear of – the active citizen. It diminishes us as citizens to reduce us to hashtaggers and candle-holders in the wake of serious, disorientating acts of violence against our society. It decommissions the hard thinking and deep feeling citizens ought to pursue after terror attacks. Indeed, in some ways this official post-terror narrative is the unwitting cousin of the terror attack itself. Where terrorism pursues a war of attrition against our social fabric, seeking to rip away bit by bit our confidence and openness and sense of ourselves as free citizens, officialdom and the media diminish our individuality and our social role, through instructing us on what we may feel and think and say about national atrocities and discouraging us from taking responsibility for confronting these atrocities and the ideological and violent rot behind them. The terrorist seeks to weaken our resolve, the powers-that-be want to sedate our emotions, retire our anger, reduce us to wet-eyed performers in their post-terror play. It’s a dual assault on the individual and society.

Civilizations are destroyed not from without, but rot from within.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

OPEC

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Here’s your feel-good story of the day: The cartel lost $76B last year due to U.S. fracking.

I’m old enough to remember when Barack Obama told us we couldn’t drill our way out of the energy crisis. Oil reserves continue to climbe every year, as they have for decades.

[Update a few minutes later]

Sort of related: Three reasons natural gas prices may be headed higher.

We just put in a soaking tub in our renovated bath, and now our 40-gallon water heater isn’t quite up to the job. I’d been thinking about putting in an instant heater in the bath, but there’s no gas line to it, and at California prices, the electric bill would be a killer. I could replace it with an instant-gas heater, but I’m starting to think maybe just get a bigger tank, given that it’s almost thirty years old.

[Update a while later]

OPEC is dead.

It’s been a feature of my life for forty-five years. It’s not quite as big a victory as ending the Cold War, but good riddance.

Business, Economics, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Low-Cost Launch

The military could have it in the next half decade, but it’s going to have to work at it:

Miller argued that taking advantage of the current opportunities is going to require leadership from an organization that doesn’t exist yet in the Pentagon.

“We need an organization that’s not totally there,” he said. “We need an organization that has the right culture to understand private industry and partner with them. It needs to have the right authorities…It needs to have the right leadership and vision to go exercise this plan. We did not find any existing organization that has all the right qualities now, so we recommended creating a purpose-built organization to go execute this strategy.”

Schilling said the study was “not an indictment in any way shape or form” of the work of the Air Force’s Operationally Responsive Space Office in New Mexico.

He has to say that, but in fact it is. ORS has been pretty blinkered in its thinking. Of course, it’s not like it’s ever had a huge budget to work with.

[Update a few minutes later]

Funding to defend space systems will be in the next budget:

“Our fundamental challenge is we have to deal with space as an increasingly challenged domain,” he said at a Washington Space Business Roundtable panel discussion in Arlington, Virginia, on national security space priorities in the Trump administration. The problem is that the current systems were not built to withstand attacks, he added.

“What you will see in the budget is measured steps across the enterprise on how we address mission assurance,” he said, without going into details on how much will be proposed.

They will be “measured steps” and the work will take many several budget cycles, beyond the current future year defense program, which projects funding out for five years.

“It took us a long time to build the existing system. It is going to take a significant amount of time to transform it into the mission-assured system that is required in the future,” he said.

Yes. And the sooner they start the better. This is long overdue.

Economics, Education, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Communism

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Commemorating (but not celebrating) a century of it:

It would be simplistic to blame all of these events on ideology. We live in an imperfect world and those imperfections have been unequally distributed. No conceivable government of Russia, or China, or Venezuela would have left no citizens impoverished or oppressed. Nonetheless, a hundred years of communism has presented us with an intimidating record of catastrophe, in a moral, political, and economic sense. Time and again, ambition has exceeded potential. Time and again, coercion has encouraged conflict. Time and again, violence has perpetuated itself. Time and again, absolute power has hardened into tyranny.

These disasters were concealed, excused and exacerbated by Western apologists and traitors. Walter Duranty of the New York Times lied to America about the scale of the Soviet famine. Intellectuals from George Bernard Shaw to Jean Paul Sartre to Eric Hobsbawm rationalised atrocities. Spies in British and American institutions betrayed military and intelligence secrets. As Europe reeled from the horrors of world war, and as the West endured the austerity of the depression, the impulse towards radicalism was understandable. But as the reality of communism was exposed even dull-minded apologists ran out of excuses.

A recent article in the New York Times offers a nostalgic account of growing up as a communist. Its author implies that the reality of Stalinism was made clear by Kruschev in 1956. But two decades earlier, Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge had exposed widespread starvation in the Soviet Union. The show trials had been reported across America and Europe. The Madden Committee had revealed the truth of Katyn. Orwell had published Animal Farm, and Koestler Darkness at Noon. By 1956, ignorance was abominable.

And it should be even more so today, but it has a sick appeal to something in human nature.

[Update a few minutes later]

I wish this were less related: The Cruelty Of Blue. As goes Puerto Rico, so will go many Democrat-run cities on the mainland.