On Benghazi Subpoena, Hillary Lies and Media Yawns

by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY July 9, 2015 4:48 PM 
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/



Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks to CNN on July 7, 2015.

Commentators are probably right in assessing that Brianna Keilar’s CNN interview with Hillary Clinton was not quite the love-in that many of us anticipated. (See Jim Geraghty’s review of the Clinton interview, here.) Still, you have to mourn the media’s lack of self-respect: as Jim pointed out in Wednesday’s Morning Jolt, Mrs. Clinton blatantly lied when she claimed, “I’ve never had a subpoena” from a congressional committee regarding Benghazi. There was nothing subtle about it. Clinton was totally banking on CNN’s inclination to let her slide. 

Well, they don’t call it the Clinton News Network for nothing. It is the network of Candy Crowley, who in the middle of a presidential candidates’ debate couldn’t restrain herself from inappropriately challenging – and misleadingly correcting – Mitt Romney’s remarks about Benghazi. But somehow, when Benghazi came up in a one-on-one media interview setting, CNN couldn’t bring itself to call Mrs. Clinton on an obvious lie. 

It is well known that Mrs. Clinton was subpoenaed in March by the House select committee investigating the Benghazi Massacre. The matter is indisputable. Plus, it was Keilar who brought up the subject of the subpoena, so one has to assume she did a modicum of research – which is all it would have taken to be ready to challenge Clinton’s false assertion. Yet, in the context of being asked about her destruction of emails from her private server, Clinton was permitted to tell the public she had not been subpoenaed. Thus, without impunity, she was able to frame suspicions that she has willfully obstructed probes of the Benghazi Massacre as outlandish. 

Jim notes that, in March, Chairman Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi committee released a public statement reporting that it had “issued subpoenas for all communications of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton related to Libya.” Moreover, we also know that Benghazi Committee Democrats – apparently thinking it would help Mrs. Clinton(!) – publicly released a March 27 letter from Clinton’s counsel, David Kendall, in which the subpoena is acknowledged and analyzed at length. 

In the letter (which Shannen Coffin discussed here at National Review back in March), Kendall states that the Committee issued a “subpoena duces tecum” – essentially, a subpoena that compels the witness to produce documents. The subpoena demanded production of “documents, for the period January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2012.” Those would be (a) the eight months before the September 11, 2012, Benghazi Massacre, when security at the State Department compound was reduced despite jihadist attacks and an intensified terrorist threat, and (b) the three-and-a-half months after the attack, when the administration misled the public about the nature of the attack and identity of the attackers while trumping up a prosecution against the producer of the Innocence of Muslims video, on which the administration fraudulently blamed the murders of four Americans. 

The documents called for by the subpoena are those “referring or relating to” the following for categories: 

“Libya (including but not limited to Benghazi and Tripoli)”; 

“Weapons located or found in, imported or brought into, and/or exported or removed from Libya”; 

“The attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012 and September 12, 2012”; 

“Statements pertaining to the attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012 and September 12, 2012.” 

There is no question that the subpoena was issued to Mrs. Clinton personally. Kendall says it was “issued by the Benghazi Select Committee to the Hon. Hillary R. Clinton.” Furthermore, by mutual agreement between the committee and the Clinton camp, it was served on Mrs. Clinton, apparently by delivery to her agent for that purpose (probably Mr. Kendall’s firm, but the letter doesn’t say). Kendall is Mrs. Clinton’s personal attorney, and his letter states that the subpoena was “served by agreement on March 4, 2015.” 

Given that Chairman Gowdy is an experienced litigator and he was aware that Mrs. Clinton was represented by counsel, it was consistent with professional ethical rules to arrange delivery of the subpoena – and discuss the subpoena thereafter – with Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer. And, of course, Mrs. Clinton is also a lawyer with congressional committee experience – she is well aware that service of process upon a witness’s agent by consensual arrangement with witness’s lawyer is the legal and factual equivalent of personal service on the witness. 

In addition, it is quite apparent that Kendall could not have written a letter extensively responding to the subpoena requests without first having discussed the subpoena with his client, Mrs. Clinton. 

When Hillary Clinton told CNN, “I’ve never had a subpoena,” she was lying. Since that is what Mrs. Clinton often does, a reporter who fails to challenge her – in an interview for which the reporter had lots of time to prepare, and on a subject the reporter brought up – must be either incompetent or colluding in the lie. Such collusion might be because the reporter supports the candidate, the reporter and her network want to maintain access the candidate, or both. 

I don’t think Ms. Keilar is incompetent.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/420969/benghazi-subpoena-hillary-lies-and-media-yawns-andrew-c-mccarthy?t8KrOJyXHHyMXeb3.01

Today's Tune: Brandon Flowers - Lonely Town

The Stupidity of Sophisticates

By Mark Steyn
http://www.steynonline.com/
July 7, 2015



May 1, 1933 file photo shows German President Paul von Hindenburg, left, and Adolf Hitler, right, in a car during a labor day celebration in Berlin. (photo credit: AP)

Last week, I swung by the Bill Bennett show to chew over the news of the hour. A few minutes before my grand entrance, one of Bill's listeners had taken issue with the idea that these Supreme Court decisions weren't the end and, if you just got on with your life and tended to your garden, things wouldn't be so bad:

Claudine came on and said that's what Germans reckoned in the 1930s: just keep your head down and the storm will pass. How'd that work out?

David Kelsey writes from the University of South Carolina to scoff at that:

In one corner, we have government recognition of marriage contracts between gays. In the other corner, we have Jews, Catholics, gays, their sympathizes [sic] and other undesirables being put in Nazi concentration camps.
One of these things is nothing like the other, unless you're a lunatic. Maybe the reason conservatives keep "losing everything that matters" is because they really can't tell the difference. Which causes increasing numbers of people to recognize them as lunatics.

Since you call me and Claudine "lunatics", allow me to return the compliment and call you an historical illiterate. If "one of these things is nothing like the other", it's because that's never the choice: It's never a question of being Sweden, say, vs being the Islamic State (although, if you're a Jew in Malmö, they're looking a lot less obviously dissimilar than you might think).

All societies exist on a continuum. Neither Claudine nor I said a word about "concentration camps". But you give the strong impression that that's the only fact you know about Nazi Germany: Nazis = concentration camps, right? No wonder you think everything divides neatly into opposing "corners". In the world as lived, there are no neatly defined corners. Things start off in the corners and work their way toward the center of the room.

Claudine and I were talking about Germany in the Thirties - before the concentration camps and the Final Solution, before millions of dead bodies piled up in the gas chambers. So you need to have an imaginative capacity. It's not clear from your email that you do, but give it a go: Imagine being a middle-class German in 1933. No one's talking about exterminating millions of people - I mean, that would be just "lunatic" stuff, wouldn't it? And you belong to a people that regards itself as the most civilized on the planet - with unsurpassed achievements in literature and music and science. You might, if you were so minded, call it Teutonic Exceptionalism. And you're "progressive", too: you pioneered the welfare state under Bismarck, and prototype hate-speech laws under the Weimar republic. And yes, some of the beer-hall crowd are a bit rough, but German Jews are the most assimilated on the planet. The idea that such a society would commit genocide is not just "lunatic", it's literally unimaginable.

So don't even bother trying to imagine that. Instead try to imagine it's early 1933. The National Socialist German Workers Party is the largest party in parliament and thus President von Hindenburg has appointed its leader, Herr Hitler, as Chancellor - not der Führer, just Chancellor, the same position Frau Merkel holds today. And the National Socialist German Workers Party starts enacting its legislative programme, and so a few weeks later the Civil Service Restoration Law is introduced. Under this law, Jews would no longer be allowed to serve as civil servants, teachers or lawyers, the last two being professions in which Jews are very well represented.

But that wily old fox Hindenburg knows a thing or two. So as president he refuses to sign the bill into law unless certain exemptions are made - for those who've been in the civil service since August 1st 1914 (ie, the start of the Great War), and for those who served during the Great War, or had a father or son who died in action. And the practical effect of these amendments is that hardly any Jew in the public service has to lose his job.

And so in April 1933 it would be easy to say, if you were a middle-class German seeking nothing other than a quiet life, that, yes, these National Socialist chappies are a bit uncouth, but the checks and balances are still just about working. What's the worst they can do?

Paul von Hindenburg died the following year, and his amendments were scrapped.

That's Germany's civil service in 1933. What of America's civil service in 2015?

Right now across the land town and county clerks are resigning because they cannot in conscience issue same-sex marriage licenses. In one Tennessee county, the entire clerk's office has resigned. They are observant Christians - which is to say they hold the same view of marriage that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton claimed to until the day before yesterday. But an observant Christian can no longer work in the American civil service, or at least in those branches of it responsible for issuing marriage licenses:

County Clerk Katie Lang cited religious beliefs as her reason for refusing to file the marriage application for Dr. Jim Cato and his partner Joe Stapleton. She did, however, promise that someone in her office would accommodate the couple.

Not good enough. Dr Cato and Mr Stapleton are suing Ms Lang. What else you got?

A Kentucky clerk of court wants the state to issue marriage licenses online so he doesn't have to...
Monday, Davis tried to meet with Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear to ask him to call for a special session of the state legislature so it can pass a law allowing people to purchase marriage licenses online, similar to the process of purchasing a hunting or fishing license.

That's not good enough, either. Who the hell are you to compare a lesbian wedding to a fishing license?

So observant Christians will no longer be able to serve as town or county clerk. Are comparisons really so "lunatic"? The logic of the 1933 Civil Service Restoration Act is that the German public service will be judenrein. The logic of the 2015 Supreme Court decision is that much of the American public service will be christenrein - at least for those who take their Scripture seriously. That doesn't strike me as a small thing - even if one thought it were likely to stop there.

But don't worry, Supreme Arbiter Anthony Kennedy, like President von Hindenburg, has struck a balance:

Finally, it must be emphasized that religions, and those who adhere to religious doctrines, may continue to advocate with utmost, sincere conviction that, by divine precepts, same-sex marriage should not be condoned.

That's a very constrained definition of religious liberty. He's not saying you'll be able to live your faith, but he's willing to permit you to "advocate" for it.

And that's mighty big of him considering that there's not a lot of Churchillian magnanimity-in-victory to be found elsewhere. Big Gay's supporters are already arguing that churches should lose their tax-exempt status, so if you want to "advocate" your hate you can pay full freight to the US Treasury. And a Pennsylvania newspaper announced it would not permit advocates of non-"equal marriage" to do any advocating in its op-ed or letters pages. So you haters can advocate to each other all you want for an hour on Sunday morning, but when you come to work or you pick up a newspaper you better have left that so-called religion of yours in the back seat of your car. The intention is that Christianity is something that gets banished to the fringes - to the corner, as Mr Kelsey would say - but is incompatible with government, media or a successful and rewarding career.

What else were Germans doing in 1933? Well, on April 8th - one day after the passage of the Civil Service Restoration Act - the German Student Union announced the Säuberung - the cleansing, the purification - of German culture. That's book-burning to you and me. The Germans were a far more literate people than we are, so book-burning wouldn't get you very far today, although the cleansers and purifiers of our own time have gone quite a long way on that - to the point where a Los Angeles school teacher is in the fifth month of his suspension for reading his class a passage from Huckleberry Finn. But, as I said, we're not as literate as the Germans and we disseminate thought-crimes by other methods, like telly and movies and stand-up comedy.

So, for example, an ancient TV show called "The Dukes of Hazzard" has vanished from the rerun channels because the principal characters in the course of their adventures occasionally travel by motor vehicle and on the roof of said motor vehicle can be glimpsed a verboten emblem. They haven't yet burned all existing prints of the show, although I wouldn't entirely rule it out: the owner of the actual car is already painting the roof.

Meanwhile, apparently non-"lunatic" persons are discussing across the cable networks whether the motion picture Gone With The Wind should be banned from cinema and television screenings. Oh, don't worry, they won't burn all the prints. If you're a credentialed researcher researching a thesis on racism in 20th century racistly American racist culture, you'll be permitted to go to some vault in Sub-Basement Level 12 of the Smithsonian Museum of the Forbidden and arrange a screening.

Incidentally, you know who else banned Gone With The Wind? The Germans - notwithstanding that Margaret Mitchell's book was a personal favorite of Eva Braun's. Alas, in occupied France Miss Mitchell's French readers identified with the Confederates and cast the Germans as the Yankees. Nevertheless, enlightened American "liberals" are now proposing to ban the same subversive stories the Nazis banned.

What else can we ban? The Washington Post - the establishment newspaper of the capital city of the global superpower - had an op ed yesterday by two professors - one who teaches something called "American Encounters 1492-1865" and another who heads up a "department of gender and race studies". It takes not one but two leading intellectuals to explain toWashington Post readers why it's not just "Dukes of Hazzard" and Gone With The Wind: the young comedienne Amy Schumer is also responsible for those Charleston church burnings. Miss Schumer apparently tells edgy jokes:

I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual.*

I agree that's not as hilarious a joke as a pasty-faced metrosexual eunuch being Chair of the Department of Gender and Race Studies and persuading liberal whites to take out six-figure loans for the privilege of mastering such grueling scholarly disciplines as "post-Katrina hip-hop". But Stacey Patton and David J Leonard go further and argue that Miss Schumer's joke is somehow connected to the fact that "80 percent of Central American girls and women crossing Mexico en route to the United States are raped". So these Hispanic guys, if I follow Prof Patton's and Prof Leonard's logic, are being driven to rape by Amy Schumer's rape jokes. As David Kelsey likes to say, "one of these things is nothing like the other, unless you're a lunatic": The Nazis thought Jewish bankers were responsible for the Great War - that's lunatic. American liberal intellectuals think Amy Schumer is responsible for 80 per cent of Latinas being raped by human traffickers - that's entirely rational.

There is a virus in the American bloodstream right now, frothing away at Miss Schumer, "Dukes of Hazzard", and a million other things none of which is particularly consequential in itself. But the trick of civilizational self-preservation is to spot this stuff when it's just small things and stop it at the itsy-bitsy stage. It's never one thing that is unlike the other, two opposing corners of civilization and barbarism, an express train rocketing from one to the other. It's always a continuum. The gleefulness of the culture warriors - the abandonment of even any pretense to the tolerance of differing views - does not speak well for where we're headed. The left takes the view that, in Kathy Shaidle's words, it's different when we do it. So banningGone With The Wind is bad when Nazis do it but good when progressive liberals do it.

For some of us, that won't do: what matters is the abandonment of first principles - on free speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion and much else - and when that happens you stand against it, because it won't stop there. It never does.

[*Laura Rosen Cohen thinks Amy Schumer isn't apologizing. I'm not so sure.]

“The Cartel” author Don Winslow on the war on drugs: “There is an exit strategy — legalize drugs, and treat them as the social problem that they are”

STEPHEN ADLY GUIRGIS
http://www.salon.com/
June 23, 2015

New York Times bestselling author and Raymond Chandler award recipient Don Winslow has written 17 novels, including “The Kings of Cool,” “Savages,” “The Winter of Frankie Machine” and the highly acclaimed epic “The Power of the Dog.” His sequel to “The Power of the Dog” is out today. “The Cartel,” hailed by James Ellroy as “‘The War and Peace’ of dopewar books,” will join “The Power of the Dog” in whatDeadline reports is a deal for a two-film series on the futility of the drug war that spans 45 years and focuses on two mortal enemies: DEA agent Art Keller, working in Mexico at the dawn of Nixon’s war on drugs, and Adan Barrera, the head of a powerful drug cartel.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis (“Between Riverside and Crazy,” “The Motherf*cker With the Hat,” “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot”) sat down with Winslow to discuss “Cartel,” writing crime novels and the ongoing war on drugs.

Your novel “Power of the Dog” must have been a Herculean undertaking and the critical raves were no doubt well-earned and much deserved.  And now you give us “The Cartel.”  Why tempt fate and write a sequel?  And why should we, as readers, invest in another massive opus on the drug trade?

First, I was reluctant to write “The Cartel.”  It wasn’t so much about tempting fate, it was more that “Dog” represented over five years of my working life and, frankly, wrung me out.  It was tough stuff to research and write.  So when the idea was first brought to me to write a follow-up volume that brought the story to today, I couldn’t get off the phone fast enough.  But as I watched things gets worse and worse in Mexico – far worse than I wrote about in “Dog” — I knew I had to write about it.  I had unfinished business.  Not to be overly dramatic about it, but I almost felt like a deserter from a war.  Immodestly, I thought that I had the background, from “Dog,” to tell this story — to explain to readers what had happened in Mexico, and that I should do it.  It wasn’t an easy decision – it’s a five-year commitment, and it wouldn’t affect just me, but my family and my friends, because I knew if I started, I’d become obsessed.  And that spending many of my days looking at atrocity vid-clips and photos would take a toll on me, and therefore, the people closest to me.  You try to protect them from it, but in the very act of protecting them, you isolate yourself from them.

Why should you read it?  Well, if you read “Dog,” you’ll want to continue the story, which picks up just months after its original leaves off, and features the same main characters.  Together, the two volumes – something like a combined 1,300 pages — make up one fictional history of over 40 years of the War on Drugs.  It’s a huge story – filled with larger-than-life characters, dramatic situations, conflict, treachery, courage, honor – all rich material for a novelist.  It would be incredible if you didn’t know it was drawn from real events.  As Americans, we see the headlines coming out of Mexico, but we rarely get deeper.  I think – I hope – “The Cartel” shows what goes on behind those headlines.  It shows the people, the emotions, the real-life impact of the War on Drugs.  Journalists can give facts, but novelists can tell truth, and that’s what I’ve tried to do with these two novels.

In your new book, “The Cartel,” your DEA agent Art Keller embarks on a 10-year odyssey to take down drug kingpin Adan Barrera — again!  Are there parallels to Keller’s obsessiveness in your own life?  And if so, can you share some of the pluses and minuses of that kind of internal DNA?

Both Keller and I thought we were finished with the War on Drugs after “The Power of the Dog.” We were both wrong.  As I’m sure you know, most writers are obsessed.  I think you have to be to do what we do – to spend years researching a topic and then writing it, always trying to find the answers to the question “Why?”  I guess the pluses of that character trait are obvious – you stick with a project until you finish it, until you have the answers.  The minuses?  Well, tunnel vision, for one.  It’s hard to turn your mind off the project, you think about it every waking hour and dream about it when you’re asleep.  I don’t know about you, but I also have to make an effort to keep that obsessiveness out of other areas of my life.  I’m not always so successful at it.

In “The Cartel,” Keller is tested unendingly and in every manner physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually.  To me, that’s a big part of what makes your novel so compelling and exciting.  That said, do you believe it’s actually possible to  “Face down the devil and not lose one’s soul”?  And what’s the closest you’ve come to winning or losing that fight?  

I’ve often said that “Dog” was more about religion than drugs.  To me, the spine of the story was about a group of people who lose their faith and then try to find a way to live decently in what is basically an indecent world.  Some do, most don’t.  Without that moral compass, they are lost wanderers in a morally bleak and hostile terrain.

I’m not sure about myself in that regard.  When you write a story like this, you sure as hell (pun intended) stare at the devil, on a near daily basis.  You look at so much suffering, violence, sadism and treachery that it’s easy to start seeing only the evil side of humanity.  I was no rookie to violence – in my prior career as an investigator I’d worked murder cases, abuse cases – I saw more of that side of humanity than I ever wanted to.  Not all knowledge is good – you learn things that you’d probably be better off not knowing, see things that would have been better unseen.  It has a hardening effect on you.  I can remember when I was still doing trial work, I was flipping through autopsy photos of a murdered woman with one hand and eating a ham sandwich with the other and I suddenly stopped and wondered what I’d become.  Was I that jaded, hardened, inured to violence?  In that case, you feel pretty close to losing the battle.  You have to make a conscious effort to remember the good things in life – family, friends, people who are out there doing good things.  In all candor, you wrestle with despair when you write books like “Dog” or “The Cartel” because you spend so much of your time dealing with the worst aspects of the human condition.  You start to lose your faith in people, as well. But then you encounter the inspirational – and true – stories of amazing courage, honor and sacrifice in the midst of this horrifically messed up world, and that allows you to face down the devil.

A compelling protagonist is only as badass as the antagonist he or she must go through to get to the other side.  So tell us: Who would you rather have in a foxhole with you — Keller or Barrera?  And why?

You’re absolutely right – Ahab is nothing if the white whale isn’t “great.”  You need the irresistible force and the immoveable object. Each makes the other stronger, more determined.

As for the foxhole: Keller, definitely.  He’d stay in the foxhole with you when things got tough.  While the two characters are equal in power, in no way is there a moral equivalency.  At the end of the day, most gangsters are narcissists – they can see nothing more important than themselves.  They’re often sociopaths, incapable of feeling anyone’s pain but their own.  They believe in nothing bigger than themselves.  Over the course of these two books, Adan has come to believe that his own survival is paramount – that he is the cartel.  Keller – for good or ill – is exactly the opposite.  He believes himself to be insignificant on the scale of things and is almost too devoted to a larger cause, which is the destruction of Adan and his beloved cartel.  Keller is old school – he believes in loyalty, sacrifice, honor.

Given the subject matter of both “The Cartel” and “Power of the Dog,” in your opinion, is there a credible exit strategy for our failed War on Drugs, and if so, what would that process look like — and do you think it will ever happen?

There is an exit strategy: legalize drugs, and treat them as the social problem that they are.  The billions of dollars we would save every year would let us address the root problems behind drug use.  Why don’t we spend more money on treatment instead of imprisonment?  Why don’t we build factories and businesses in the inner cities and give people decent paying jobs?  Why don’t we improve our schools?  We’ll never completely cure addiction (the rates of addiction are remarkably consistent) but we would definitely reduce it.  What is clear is that what we’re doing now isn’t working.  It’s time to try something else.  Will it ever happen?  For the first time, I’m optimistic.  We see marijuana laws changing rapidly, and we see a coalition of right and left talking about judicial reform as it relates to sentencing.  The left is demanding it from a human rights standpoint, the conservatives want to see it for fiscal reasons.  Both are correct, and it’s something they can actually get together on.

I’m a big fan of your surf noir novels.  Your Boone Daniels character and the world he inhabits is such a no-brainer for a great television series.  Any plans to do so?

In some ways, surfing is a perfect metaphor for noir – you see one thing on the surface – the top of the wave – but there’s always something going on beneath that surface, and it’s often dark and murky.  If you’re going to ride the wave, you’d better know what’s going on underneath, or it’s going to take you down with it.  It might anyway.

Regarding a television series, there are serious discussions going on now with some remarkable talent, which are exciting.  But it has to be the right situation with the right people.  What I don’t want to see is “Baywatch” with crimes.  I want something that captures the very real beauty of that world, but also captures the gritty reality beneath it.

I’ve got a confession:  I’m mainly a playwright, but I’ve always harbored the secret desire to write a mystery or crime thriller.  What’s your best advice on my first three steps in the process toward writing something credible that hopefully doesn’t suck?

Well, as long as we’re confessing here – I started my writing life as a playwright.  The theater can celebrate that I switched to crime fiction. Advice for you?  I know your stuff – you couldn’t suck if you worked at it.  But since you asked:

1.  Start with character.  Everything springs from that.  No character, no story.  And the character has to want something.

2.  Remember that “bad guys” don’t think they’re bad.  They always have a point of view.  We can’t stand on the outside and judge it.

3.  Read the genre’s greats – Chandler, Hammett, Macdonald, Leonard, Block, Willeford, Thompson, Ellroy.  They teach us everything we need to know.

You’ve enjoyed tremendous success with your novels both nationally and internationally.  What drives you?  Are you still hungry?  What do you do to keep the fire burning?  

I’m ravenous.  There are just so many great stories I want to tell and not enough time to tell them.  I’m one of those guys who, when he sees a great story, thinks that the entire world needs to hear it.  And to be really honest, I’m ambitious.  I don’t think I’ve written my best book yet, and the thought of writing that book absolutely drives me.  And I know that to do that, I have to keep getting better and better. I’m still learning.

And then there are just those moments, you know.  I remember editing “Dog” with Sonny Mehta, the legendary publisher.  We sat all night at his kitchen table in New York, debating, arguing, sometimes agreeing.  I remember so distinctly walking back to my hotel at dawn through the quiet NYC streets, with only the music of the garbage trucks and the street cleaners, knowing that I had just had one of those once-in-a-lifetime literary experiences – the sort of thing I had dreamed about as a kid – and being so grateful for it.  That kind of thing keeps you going.

I love Oliver Stone stories.  Would you be willing to share one with us that lives up to the hype?

My friend and co-writer Shane Salerno and I took Oliver on a location scout for the film of a book of mine called “Savages.”  It was an uncharacteristically cold and rainy Southern California day, not the setting in which I really wanted to show off Laguna.  We take Oliver to real locations, and at every one, he’s saying stuff like “This doesn’t look like a dope dealer’s house,” “This isn’t what a money launderer’s office would look like.”  And I don’t know what to say because, well, they were.  Shane’s driving, and all day, Oliver is alternately telling him, “Shane, speed up, we have a lot to see,” “Shane, slow down, I can’t see anything.”  Finally, on the Pacific Coast Highway in downtown Laguna Beach, Shane turns 180 in his seat, looks at Oliver and says, “I can speed up.  I can slow down.  I can’t do both at the same time.  Which do you want?!”  I grab the wheel.  Oliver cracks up.  This kind of thing goes on for about eight hours, in the rain, and I’m wondering if a jury would really convict if I shot Oliver.  Later, we’re at a restaurant (a real location), Oliver starts talking about the day he came home from Vietnam, and Shane I realize we’re hearing the origin story of “Platoon.”

Last question:  What keeps you up at night?  And does it find its way into your work?  

It does, because it’s my work that keeps me up at night.  It’s just hard to turn it off.  I lie there and think about characters, about scenes, especially about dialogue – these guys keep yapping and yapping, refining what they say, until it’s a real line.  Or I’ll think about a situation – an event in the book.  Am I writing it from the right character’s point of view, or would it be better seen through another character?  Or I might think of a line I wrote that day and realize that it actually stinks, and then I remind myself to take it out first thing in the morning.

MORE STEPHEN ADLY GUIRGIS.TOPICS: DON WINSLOW, STEPHEN ADLY GUIRGIS, THE CARTEL, POWER OF THE DOG, WAR ON DRUGS, DRUG WAR, NOIR,BOOKS, CRIME NOVELS, ENTERTAINMENT NEWS

The Author of 'The Cartel' on America's Role in Mexico's Brutal and Bloody Drug War

by Kristen Gwynne
http://www.vice.com/
July 6, 2015

Don Winslow's recently released novel The Cartel, a sequel to his 2005 book The Power of the Dog, chronicles the rivalry between a United States DEA agent and the cartel kingpin he is dead-set on taking down. In 600 pages, Winslow examines how the massive profits of drug trafficking allow for high-level corruption, explores the United States's role in the brutal violence plaguing Mexico, and questions the efficacy of a war against cartels determined to defend their power and prosperity by any means necessary.

The book is as gruesome a read as it is insightful, chock-full of research into the organization and tactics of cartels and their (at times) strikingly similar governmental opponents. It is disturbing, and it is based in large part on actual events. VICE spoke with Winslow about what inspired his work on the topic, and why he hopes it will bring attention to what he calls the "American problem" plaguing Mexico.

VICE: What inspired you to start writing about drug war violence in Mexico? Don Winslow: I was six published books into my writing career and there was amassacre—there's no other word for it—of 19 innocent people, men, women, and children, in Baja, California, near where I live. I didn't really start to write a book, I started to try to find out how we got to the point where people were willing to do that.

Now that was 1998, and we think that was a horrible incident, but it pales in comparison to what went on ten years later. The worst things I wrote about in Power of the Dog wouldn't have made the papers in 2011.

You hadn't planned on writing a sequel to Power of the Dog, but this increase in violence changed your mind? That's right. When I finished with Power of the Dog, I thought I'd written about the worst of the worst. It absolutely ground me down and I had no intention of returning to that subject, ever. But as I sat here near the border and watched these events spiral out of control, I asked myself again, why? And I started to do research to try to get answers to those questions, and write out what I learned. The two books together encompass 15 years of the War on Drugs, as seen mostly through the prism of two characters—a DEA agent and a drug lord—locked in this vendetta against each other that began in the 1970s and just keeps going on.

It sounds like drug trafficking in Mexico has undergone some significant changes since your last book. It has changed drastically. First of all, the sheer level of violence is so much bigger, and frankly, the level of sadism is so much greater. We couldn't have imagined it in our worst nightmares, and it is nightmarish, except that it's real—the decapitations, the mass murders—they're real.

Another way things have changed is with the militarization of the war on drugs. Cartels went out and hired their own private armies, a lot of times made-up by ex-special forces, some of whom were trained in the US as anti-drug soldiers. They went over to cartels and the level of lethality, if you will, became so much higher. It started as sort of an arms race—one cartel did it, then another and another, and pretty soon you have thousands of people fighting. And then, when the Mexican government in 2006 decided that they needed to intervene, they could no longer do it with police, a lot of whom had been coopted by cartels, so they sent in the military. Now you had a real war, and it was multi-fronted: cartel against cartel, cartel against military, certain police forces against other police forces.

The cartels also got very sophisticated about communication. They figured out it wasn't enough to win a war on the ground, that they also needed to control the narrative. Their use of propaganda, particularly through social media, was something we had never seen before. It used to be criminals tried to hide what they did, but in this era of Mexico they proclaimed it as a means of intimidation and terrorism, but also recruitment.

Plus, they terrorized and often killed journalists to control the stories in newspapers. After a murder came across a reporter's call radio, cartels would call their cell phones to instruct them on what they could or could not cover—and that's something absolutely new in crime. It's very different than the book that I had written before.

How did you conduct research into the real-life and yet "nightmarish" events on which you based the book? I read a lot of journalism. I talked to people again and again. In this surreal sense, I followed it on the net. You can pull these videos up in five seconds. But what I really tried to do was to put names to the victims. I just felt that I owed them that, so I would cross-reference materials to try to show that these people had lives and families and hopes and fears and dreams like everybody else, and not just to have them be pornography of violence.

In The Cartel, you describe how the military's war on cartels has led to even more bloodshed. Yes. 2006 was the year that Mexico launched its military program against the cartels, and the height of the violence really came around 2012 and 2013. Since the mid-2000s, an estimated 100,000 people [ ed. note: depending on who you ask] were killed. When you go to war with cartels, they fight back, and they are as well-armed in many cases as the Mexican soldiers fighting them.

A major theme in your book is that while Mexican and US governments often celebrate the capture or killing of a cartel kingpin as a victory, the take-down does not necessarily increase peace, but creates a power vacuum. Exactly. All it does is create a multi-billion-dollar job opportunity, and there are always people wiling to take chances to step into that position because the wealth is fantastic. Look at Sinaloa cartel head Joaquin Guzman Loera (aka El Chapo), who was on Forbesmagazine's World's Most Powerful People list in 2012. Chapo was captured last year. Great. But what difference does it make in drugs coming up to the border? None. While it might disrupt things for a few weeks, it will probably cause more violence as people scramble to fill those positions. The bottom line is we've captured drug lord after drug lord—captured or killed—and it makes no difference at all.

Why?The real problem is not Mexico, it's in the US. It's in the market. It's our simultaneous prohibition of drugs and appetite for them that create such high profit margins, and that makes these territories worth fighting over and worth killing for.

And it's a tragedy: 100,000 people killed; 22,000 missing. That makes it one of the bloodiest conflicts in the Western Hemisphere since the American Civil War, and we're largely unaware of it. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that this stage of Mexico's drug conflict coincides exactly with the post 9/11 era, so we've been very focused on terrorists abroad, and for good reason. On the other hand, we need to be more aware of the consequences our actions have on our neighbors, and in Mexico, those consequences have been severe.

You've compared Mexico's cartels to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, and wrote that the United States's anti-terrorism initiatives, which focused on taking down top jihadists, spilled over into drug war tactics. So clearly, you see parallels between the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. Absolutely. While terrorists like al Qaeda and ISIS are ideologically driven, cartels are driven by profit motive, sure. But if you look at what the cartels do—mass murder, torture of the vilest kind, kidnapping, mass rape, enslaving people to work on farms and plantations, sending out threatening videos—if that's not terrorism, I don't know what is.

Plus, we've evolved in our anti-terrorist doctrine form what's called counter-insurgency doctrine to anti-terrorist doctrine. The former involves building relationships with local communities, protecting or defending them from guerrillas. The latter is more simple: to go out and kill and capture terrorists, particularly leaders. And that philosophy in Washington leaked into the way we now approach anti-drug trafficking, so our focus in conjunction with the Mexican government has been to capture and kill drug leaders. The philosophies are similar.

You also say Mexico's military is making the same mistakes US soldiers did in Vietnam. How so? From the beginning, when Nixon first declared the War on Drugs some 44 years ago, we dropped a substance very similar to Agent Orange onto the poppy and marijuana fields in Sinaloa and Durango, and we completely alienated the local community. We forced them into the cartels' hands, and we keep making the same mistake over and over again. The Mexican military has long been waterboarding people with gasoline and soda, which almost sounds amusing unless you're half-drowning with carbonation fizzing in your nose and throat. They've burnt buildings. They've taken young men suspected of being with a cartel back to army bases and tortured them.

That is, of course, just like Vietnam and elsewhere, going to alienate people in these villages. Now the cartels do things that are similar to and even worse than US soldiers did in Vietnam, but the cartels also build hospitals, churches, chapels, and clinics. They hold Mothers' Day and Day of the Children celebrations, giving out gifts. So they gain these heroic sorts of images in a lot of these communities, particularly in the rural areas where they're looked upon like Robin Hoods or heroes. Of course, they're not.

Your book compares the army to cartels, and describes police as "not protecting" but "guarding" cartels. I didn't draw the comparison—the facts are there on the ground. The army has been, in some places, very corrupt. It has seized land from people. It has cooperated with drug traffickers and probably trafficked itself, so the army has formed its own power unit that's really not answerable to anybody, and that's what a cartel does.

Now, it may sound paradoxical, but the drug lords aren't really in the drug business, they're in the territory business, so a lot of top drug lords might never touch drugs their entire career. What they're doing is charging other, lower-level people to run drugs through their territory, and the most valuable territories are border towns near highways that run to major US cities. With that being the case, they have to secure the protection of the local police or army, and that means bribes go very high into the federal government. The federal police in Mexico have reorganized several times to try to route out corruption, but it tends to stick because the money is so extraordinary. They may also be threatened with violence, given no choice but, "Take it, or we'll kill you and your family."

In addition to the United States's drug consumption habits and policy of prohibition, you also talk about immigration policy as a source of profit for cartels. Again, what cartels control is territory, and the most valuable territory is across the border. For the most part, anything that has to cross the border illegally must go through the cartels, whether it's drugs or people. Cartels are increasingly involved in human trafficking because they control smuggling routes. So now undocumented immigrants, unless they're very lucky, have got to hire coyotes organized by cartels and pay them a fee to be smuggled across [the] border. Sometimes these coyotes take their money and just dump them down in the deserts or mountains where they die of exposure. Other times cartels will kidnap family members and demand they mule drugs across the border or have their relatives killed. Sometimes, they do run the drugs, and they kill the family anyway, or force the women into prostitution.

How has marijuana legalization affected cartels' business model? Well, a lot. Two states have [fully] implemented legalized marijuana, while others decriminalize or allow medical marijuana, and the latest reports we get is that the marijuana coming up from Mexico has dropped by more than 30 percent, which takes a huge chunk out of the cartel payroll. With legalization in just two states, we're getting reports that marijuana plantations in Durango and Sinaloa states have stopped planting the crop because there's no money in it. They can't compete with the quality and price of the domestic American market.

That's the good news. The bad news is that, to make up for loss of income, the Sinaloa cartel—which pretty much runs the game at the moment—has lowered the price andincreased the production of black tar heroin now flooding cities in America. Some people look at this and say, "Oh my god, we've legalized marijuana in two states and now we have a heroin epidemic." But what we should be looking at is the fact that we legalized marijuana in a couple states, and the implication is that imports from Mexico are down and dropping. What if we legalized heroin?

So do you think full-on legalization of all drugs is the best solution to stopping this violence? Look, for some problems, there are no great answers. There are only less bad answers. We've been doing the same thing for coming on 45 years and it hasn't worked, and it's time to try something different, and that something must do more than make adjustments to our current policy. I think it has to be a whole new way of thinking, a whole new outlook.

Since writing this book, you've written op-eds about the drug war and even took out an ad in the Washington Post imploring Congress to end the War on Drugs. Do your aspirations with The Cartel go beyond entertainment?Well, I'm a novelist, and my first goal is to write a good, entertaining and interesting book for the reader. That's always my primary responsibility. The ad was something I felt I needed to do—that if it could spark an honest conversation on the Hill, if we're out there challenging these guys in [the] hometown paper to take an honest look, to really try to rethink this, maybe we would get somewhere. I've been researching and writing about this damn thing for 15 years or more and I'd like to see it end. I don't think every writer has a social responsibility, and I just felt that, you know what, you should have some skin in the game, and then go ahead and speak out in ways other than a novel.

MEDIA HIDE FACTS, CALL EVERYONE ELSE A LIAR

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
July 1, 2015

When Donald Trump said something not exuberantly enthusiastic about Mexican immigrants, the media's response was to boycott him. One thing they didn't do was produce any facts showing he was wrong.

Trump said: "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems to us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

The first thing a fact-checker would have noticed is: THE GOVERNMENT WON'T TELL US HOW MANY IMMIGRANTS ARE COMMITTING CRIMES IN AMERICA.

Wouldn't that make any person of average intelligence suspicious? Not our media. They're in on the cover-up.

A curious media might also wonder why any immigrants are committing crimes in America. A nation's immigration policy, like any other government policy, ought to be used to help the people already here -- including the immigrants, incidentally.

It's bad enough that immigrants, both legal and illegal, are accessing government benefits at far above the native rate, but why would any country be taking another country's criminals? We have our own criminals! No one asked for more.

Instead of counting the immigrant stock filling up our prisons, the government issues a series of comical reports claiming to tally immigrant crime. The Department of Justice relies on immigrants' self-reports of their citizenship. The U.S. census simply guesses the immigration status of inmates. The Government Accounting Office conducts its own analysis of Bureau of Prisons data.

In other words, the government hasn't the first idea how many prisoners are legal immigrants, illegal immigrants or anchor babies.

But there are clues! Only about a quarter of California inmates are white, according to a major investigative piece in The Atlantic last year-- and that includes criminals convicted in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, when the vast majority of California's population was either black or white.

Do immigration enthusiasts imagine that more than 75 percent of the recent convicts are African-American? Blacks have high crime rates, but they make up only about 6 percent of California's entire population.

A casual perusal of the "Most Wanted" lists also suggests that the government may not have our best interests in mind when deciding who gets to live in America.

Here is the Los Angeles Police Department's list of "Most Wanted" criminal suspects:

-- Jesse Enrique Monarrez (murder),

-- Cesar Augusto Nistal (child molestation),

-- Jose A. Padilla (murder),

-- Demecio Carlos Perez (murder),

-- Ramon Reyes, (robbery and murder),

-- Victor Vargas (murder),

-- Ruben Villa (murder)

The full "Most Wanted" list doesn't get any better.

There aren't a lot of Mexicans in New York state -- half of all Mexican immigrants in the U.S. live in either Texas or California -- and yet there are more Mexican prisoners in New York than there are inmates from all of Western Europe.

As for the crime of rape specifically, different groups have different criminal proclivities, but no one takes a backseat to Hispanics in terms of sex crimes.

The rate of rape in Mexico is even higher than in India, according to Professor Carlos Javier Echarri Canovas of El Colegio de Mexico. A report from the Inter-American Children's Institute explains that in Latin America, women and children are "seen as objects instead of human beings with rights and freedoms."

All peasant cultures have non-progressive views on women, but Latin America happens to have the peasant culture that's closest to the United States.

The only reason our newspapers aren't chockablock with reports of Latino sexual predators is that they are too busy broadcasting hoax news stories about non-existent gang-rapes by white men: the Duke lacrosse team (Crystal Gail Mangum), University of Virginia fraternity members (Jackie Coakley) and military contractors in Iraq (Jamie Leigh Jones).

In fact, the main way we find out about Hispanic rapists is when the media report on dead or missing girls -- hoping against hope that the case will never be solved or the perp will look like the rapists on "Law and Order." When it turns out to be another Latino rapist, that fact is aggressively suppressed by the media.

New Yorkers were horrified by the case of "Baby Hope," a 4-year-old girl whose raped and murdered body turned up in an Igloo cooler off of the Henry Hudson Parkway in 1991. After a 20-year investigation, the police finally captured her rapist/murderer in 2013. It was her cousin, Conrado Juarez, an illegal alien from Mexico, who disposed of the girl's body with the help of his illegal alien sister.

New York City is the nation's media capital. But only The New York Post reported that the child rapist was a Mexican.

In 2001, the media were fixated on the case of Chandra Levy, a congressional intern who had gone missing. All eyes were on her boss and romantic partner, Democratic congressman Gary Condit. Then it turned out she was assaulted and murdered while jogging in Rock Creek Park by Ingmar Guandique -- an illegal alien from El Salvador.

There was a lot of press when three Cleveland women went missing a decade ago. By the time they escaped in 2013 from the sick sexual pervert who'd been holding them captive, it was too late for the media to ignore the story. The girls hadn't been kidnapped by the Duke lacrosse team, but by Ariel Castro.

Now, get this: While investigating Castro, the police discovered that he wasn't the only Hispanic raping young girls on his block. (All in all, it wasn't a great street for trick-or-treating.)

Castro's erstwhile neighbor, Elias Acevedo, had spent years raping, among many others, his own daughters when they were little girls. The New York Times' entire coverage of that case consisted of a tiny item on page A-18: "Ohio: Life Sentence in Murders and Rapes."

The media knew from the beginning that the monstrous gang-rape and murder of Jennifer Ertman, 14, and Elizabeth Pena, 16, in Houston in 1993 was instigated by Jose Ernesto Medellin, an illegal immigrant from Mexico. But over the next decade, with more than a thousand news stories on that case, the fact that the lead rapist was a Mexican was not mentioned once, according to the Nexis archives.

Only when Medellin's Mexicanness was used to try to overturn his death sentence did American news consumers finally find out he was an illegal alien from Mexico. (After years of wasted judicial resources and taxpayer money being spent on Medellin's appeals, he will now be spending eternity way, way south of the border.)

Who is this media cover-up helping? Not the American girls getting raped. But also not the Latina immigrants who came to the U.S., thinking they were escaping the Latin American rape culture. So as not to hurt the feelings of immigrant rapists, the media are willing to put all girls living here at risk.

No wonder the media is sputtering at Trump. He broke the embargo on unpleasant facts about what our immigration policies are doing to the country.


COPYRIGHT 2015 ANN COULTER