Chicago Blood

By Heather Mac Donald

http://www.city-journal.org/

From the Autumn issue of City Journal

“The streets are gone,” Chicago police-union boss Dean Angelo told me in August 2016. The night before, a Chicago police officer’s son had been killed in a shooting while sitting on his family’s porch, one of 92 people slain during the city’s worst month for homicides since July 1993. The August victims who actually survived their drive-by assaults included ten-year-old Tavon Tanner, shot while playing in front of his house (the bullet damaged Tavon’s pancreas, intestines, kidney, and spleen and is still painfully lodged between his shoulder and chest, despite several operations); an eight-year-old girl shot in the arm while crossing the street; and two six-year-old girls. At least 15 children under the age of 12 were shot in the first seven months of 2016, including a three-year-old boy who is now paralyzed for life following a Father’s Day drive-by shooting. The elderly are also victims. At noon on September 6, a 71-year-old man watering his lawn was accosted by a teen on a bike who demanded the man’s wallet; when he refused, the teen shot him in the abdomen, and then rifled through his pockets for the wallet before pedaling away.

By early September, homicides in Chicago for 2016 were up 47 percent over the same period of 2015, a year in which crime was already up significantly over 2014; nonfatal shootings were also up 47 percent. On Labor Day, nine people were killed, completing a holiday weekend tally of 13 shooting fatalities and 51 nonfatal shooting victims.

“There is no way out of this shooting spree,” Angelo said. His despair is understandable because Chicago is the country’s most glaring example of what I have called the “Ferguson effect.” Chicago officers have cut back dramatically on proactive policing, under the onslaught of criticism from the Black Lives Matter movement and its political and media enablers. Pedestrian stops in Chicago dropped 82 percent through September 27, 2016, compared with the same period in 2015. The cops are “driving by people on the corners,” Angelo tells me. “They’re not sweeping the corners clean any more.” As a result of this drop in discretionary enforcement, criminals are back in control and black lives are being lost at a rate not seen for decades.

Who can blame the Chicago cops for backing off of discretionary activity? They are responding to political signals being sent by the most powerful segments of society. President Barack Obama takes every opportunity to accuse the nation’s police of lethally profiling blacks and Hispanics. The media, activists, and academics routinely denounce pedestrian stops and public-order enforcement as racially driven oppression intended simply to “control African-American and poor communities,” in the words of Columbia law professor Bernard Harcourt. Never mind that it is the law-abiding residents of high-crime areas who beg the police to clear their corners of large groups of teens and other loiterers. Those residents know through hard experience that such disorderly gatherings often produce shootings. But their voices aren’t heard by anyone, it seems, other than the police.

Further discouraging stop activity in Chicago is a misguided agreement signed in 2015 between the Illinois ACLU and the former police superintendent, mandating that all stop forms filled out by Chicago officers be forwarded for review to the ACLU, an organization not known for its unbiased evaluations of police activity. Also contributing to Chicago de-policing is the backlash from city hall’s mishandling of the unjustified fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald in October 2014.

Chicago cops, like their counterparts in other urban areas in the Black Lives Matter era, now encounter aggressive hostility when they get out of their cars to investigate suspicious behavior. “People are blatantly disrespectful,” Angelo says. “They bait the police.” A few weeks after our conversation, aChicago Tribune reporter filmed a group of teens taunting officers for over an hour during a shooting investigation on the West Side. “F--- the police!” went one chant. “Get the f--- off my block!” came another insult. A black officer was singled out for particular abuse. “You a traitor! You a traitor! You bogus as hell!” one heckler said. “Black lives matter. You a b----,” said another. Someone fired off shots in a nearby alley just for the fun of seeing cops run toward another possible victim. “Run, b----, run!” a shirtless male shouted contemptuously, as the officers took off in a sprint. This chorus of naysayers was actually relatively benign compared with the violent resistance that officers now routinely experience during arrests, but the Tribune at least opened a window into the Black Lives Matter–inspired street reality that the media have heretofore refused to cover.

Two credible threats to assassinate Chicago officers were picked up over the summer: the first was apprehended by the National Gang Intelligence Center and the second by the Chicago PD. Forty officers have been targeted in gun assaults this year through September 15, up 100 percent from the same period in 2015 and 2014.

The media have offered every possible explanation for the anarchy other than the right one. Favorite theories include, as usual, poverty, racism, and lack of government services. Police superintendent Eddie Johnson also invokes “social and economic ills” as causes of the rising violence, but he focuses mostly on the argument that Chicago’s gun felons don’t receive harsh enough sentences. He may have a point, but it is one lost on Illinois’ Legislative Black Caucus, which blocks any effort to impose stricter mandatory minimum sentences on violent felons. (The caucus’s opposition to strengthened gun-crime statutes constitutes a sub-rosa acknowledgment that the vast majority of gun criminals in Chicago are black—80 percent of them, in fact.) Following particularly bloody weekends, Johnson reels off the weapons offenses of recent shooting victims (he focuses on victims because the no-snitch ethic usually prevents the identification of their shooters). Johnson’s litany of gun criminals who are back on the streets in little or no time destroys the favorite conceit among “criminal-justice reform” advocates that a racist system is imposing draconian sentences on harmless sad sacks.

But neither Johnson’s lax gun-sentencing explanation for the Chicago violence surge nor the media’s poverty-and-systemic-injustice explanation gets the timing right. Chicago’s violent crime started rising sharply in 2015 and continued into 2016. Sentencing protocols didn’t weaken in late 2014; gangbangers with guns got the same criminal-justice treatment before violence started rising as after. Nor did poverty or alleged racism worsen after late 2014. What did change was the intensity of antipolice ideology, driven by the Black Lives Matter movement, relentlessly amplified by the press, and echoed by President Obama.

The ideal solution to ending Chicago’s violence would be for more at-risk boys to be raised by both of their parents. Superintendent Johnson has admirably spoken out about family breakdown, the real “root cause” of inner-city violence. “When I go home at night, and I see my neighbors,” Johnson said after the Labor Day carnage, “they’re asking me how come African-Americans won’t step up to the plate and be parents to their children. So all of this fundamentally starts at home.” But until both mothers and fathers start raising their children together, the police will be the only thing standing between the law-abiding residents of high-crime areas and total anarchy. And when the police pull back, under the accusation that proactive enforcement is racist, it is the law-abiding who suffer.

“Where does this end?” Dean Angelo mused as our conversation wound down. “I don’t know. We’re in an unknown environment. We don’t know at what point in time the people in this city and the city council will stand up and say: ‘Enough is enough,’ so that cops again feel that they have the support to be the police again.”

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The War on Cops.

OBAMA AIDS IRANIAN NUCLEAR TERROR

New information exposes old lies about the nuclear deal.

Daniel Greenfield

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

October 6, 2016

Senator Obama opposed naming Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps a terror group even while it was closely involved in organizing attacks against American soldiers in Iraq. Then, as part of his dirty deal with Iran, he secretly sent a fortune in foreign cash on airplanes linked to the IRGC.

And, as another part of the secret ransom deal with Iran, he lifted UN sanctions on Bank Sepah.

The United States has gone after plenty of banks for aiding terror finance, but Bank Sepah is somewhat unique in that it is a financial institution actually owned and operated by Islamic terrorists.

Bank Sepah is an IRGC bank. The IRGC, despite Obama’s denials, is an Islamic terror group with American blood on its hands. It is to Shiite Islam what ISIS is to Sunni Islam. And even the Democrats know it.

After the Khobar Towers bombing, which killed 19 Americans, President Clinton sent a message to the leader of Iran warning that the United States had evidence of IRGC involvement in the attack.

More recently, Secretary of State John Kerry admitted that the IRGC have been “labeled as terrorists” when discussing how the Shiite terror organization will benefit from Obama’s sanctions relief.

Bank Sepah however had been sanctioned for something bigger than terrorism. The scale of bombings it was involved in could make the Khobar Towers attack seem minor. Sepah had been sanctioned for being "involved in nuclear or ballistic missile activities."

Among other activities, it had helped Iran buy ballistic missile technology from North Korea.

Iran’s nuclear weapons program would only be halfway complete if it gets the bomb. It also needs missiles to be able to strike Israel, Europe and eventually America. That’s where North Korea and Bank Sepah come in. Bank Sepah helps keep Iran’s ballistic missile industry viable. By delisting it, Obama aided Iran’s ballistic missile program just as he had earlier aided its nuclear program.

Obama’s holistic approach to the Iranian bomb is to help the terror state assemble the physical components it needs to become a nuclear power. And the truth is hidden within the secret deals.

There are secret deals that Obama made with Iran that we already know about. There are secret deals that we suspect exist. And there are secret deals whose existence we are not even aware of.

Obama rang in Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, by assuring the Rabbis on a conference call that they didn’t need to worry about Iran nuking anyone because “every pathway to a nuclear weapon is now closed off.”

That’s funny because last year he was still claiming that under his deal in 13 years Iran’s breakout time will, “have shrunk almost down to zero.” If every pathway to a nuclear weapon is closed, how could Iran possibly have zero breakout time to make the occasion of the bar mitzvah of his dirty nuclear deal?

And which Obama do you believe? Try neither.

The secret document revealed earlier this year by the AP showed that Iran would be able to get its uranium enrichment in gear after 11 years and more than double its enrichment rate. What happens by the thirteenth year? Then Iran gets a blank check on centrifuges. That’s what Obama really meant.

Then breakout time to the bomb drops from a year to six months. Or even less. Until it hits zero.

But Ernest Moniz, Obama’s sniveling Secretary of Energy, assured the AP that it wouldn’t be a problem because Iran would only be allowed to store 300 kilograms of low-enriched uranium.

He lied.

Even as Obama was assuring the Rabbis of how thoroughly Iran was complying with his deal, new revelations were emerging of how he had helped Iran fake its compliance with the deal.

That’s the sort of thing you go to hell for. But it’s a little too late for Obama to worry about that.

The issue was simple. Obama wanted to lift sanctions on Iran. But Iran was not in compliance with even his mostly worthless agreement. So Obama decided that it was time to help the terror state fake it.

Iran was only allowed to keep 300 kilograms of low-enriched uranium. Obama agreed to upgrade that amount to “unknown quantities”. How much is an “unknown quantity”? Like the rest of Iran’s nuclear program, we don’t know. Low-enriched uranium, even in unknown quantities, doesn’t sound that scary. Except that according to a former U.N. weapons inspector, it can be used to produce highly enriched uranium. And that’s how you go from zero to a mushroom cloud over your city.

And then there are the large hot cells that Iran was allowed to keep running.

Secretary of Energy Moniz didn’t just lie to the AP. Lying to the media is practically an Obama indoor sport. He told the same lie in his testimony to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. Senators were assured that Iran would be allowed to keep "only 300 kilograms of low (3.67 percent) enriched uranium hexafluoride, and will not exceed this level for fifteen years." Iran didn’t have to wait 15 years to exceed that amount. Or even 15 minutes. Obama gave them a pass on it right out of the gate.

But Moniz wasn’t a rogue liar. He was telling the lie that he had been told to tell.

At the Rosh Hashana conference call with the Rabbis, Obama repeated the false claim that Iran had “shipped out 98 percent of its enriched uranium”. He told the lie even though the truth had already come out at the beginning of September. The 98 percent or 300 kilogram limit had been bypassed by him.

No one challenged him or called him out on his lie. And that is the problem.

Obama has lied about the Iran deal from the very beginning. And that’s not about to change.

The fairy godmother of Iran’s enrichment was Hillary Clinton. The “breakthrough” in the negotiations took place when she accepted some Iranian nuclear enrichment. And then it was just a matter of determining how much enrichment would take place officially and how much would take place unofficially that would be officially ignored or covered up by our own government.

That is how we got to the ticking atomic time bomb.

Obama hasn’t just turned a blind eye to Iran’s race to the bomb. He has empowered and enabled all elements of it from its nuclear program to its ballistic missile program. He has ensured that Iran would have the money, the manpower and the resources to become a nuclear power. He directed elements of our intelligence services and military to prevent Israel from striking Iran’s nuclear program. He even aided its core terrorist organization and its ballistic missile program.

This isn’t an error. It’s not cowardice. It’s treason.

A coldly calculated plan to turn Iran into a nuclear power is coming together. On the other end of it lies the horrifying death of millions.

Why would Obama and Hillary do such a horrifying thing? The American scientists and spies who helped the Soviet Union get the bomb believed that they were making the world a better place by limiting our ability to use nuclear weapons. Their treason almost led to the end of human life on earth.

The Iran deal is the second great wave of nuclear treason of the left. And the full truth is yet to be told.

 Tags: Iran, Nuclear, Obama

Still Crazy After All These Years

An ObamaCare October surprise.

JAMES TARANTO

http://www.wsj.com/

October 4, 2016

Bill Clinton in Flint.

CHEYNA ROTH / MPRN

Five weeks before the presidential election, a campaign surrogate is declaring war on ObamaCare, as the Washington Times reports.

“You’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care and then the people are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half,” the surrogate said in Flint, Mich., Monday. “It’s the craziest thing in the world.” Also: “The people that are getting killed in this deal are small businesspeople and individuals who make just a little too much to get any of these subsidies.”

Having said all this, why aren’t Donald Trump ahead by 50 points? you might ask. Maybe because the quote above doesn’t come from one of Trump’s surrogates but from one of Hillary Clinton’s—and not just any surrogate but Bill Clinton, to whom Mrs. Clinton is officially married.

It’s something of an October surprise, and Mr. Clinton isn’t the only unlikely critic of ObamaCare to emerge in recent days. In yesterday’s New York Times, reporter Robert Pear described ObamaCare as a failure while studiously avoiding the F-word: “[President] Obama’s signature domestic achievement will almost certainly have to change to survive.”

Since ObamaCare is not a living organism, the “survival” metaphor obscures more than it illuminates. Just how much change could the law take and still be deemed to have “survived,” as opposed to having been replaced by a new scheme? We’re not sure how to answer that other than purely subjectively. There are more maddening metaphors, too:

Dr. John W. Rowe, who was the chief executive of Aetna from 2000 to 2006 and the president of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York before that, predicted that “the insurance market will stabilize in two or three years.”

“We are not in a death spiral,” Dr. Rowe said. “If this were a patient, I would say that he’s not in intensive care, but he’s still in the hospital and requires careful monitoring.”

But that does not mean the act will heal on its own, said Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of health law and policy at George Washington University.

It doesn’t help that Rowe and Rosenbaum are describing a problem with health-care financing using medical metaphors—though perhaps it’s revealing that the one thing they don’t discuss about the ObamaCare “patient” is whether he has insurance, the proliferation of which, we are supposed to believe, is ObamaCare’s great accomplishment.

But actually ObamaCare does have insurance. “The Obama administration is maneuvering to pay health insurers billions of dollars the government owes under the Affordable Care Act, through a move that could circumvent Congress and help shore up the president’s signature legislative achievement before he leaves office,” the Washington Post reported last week:

Justice Department officials have privately told several health plans suing over the unpaid money that they are eager to negotiate a broad settlement, which could end up offering payments to about 175 health plans selling coverage on ACA marketplaces, according to insurance executives and lawyers familiar with the talks. . . .

The money in question involves one of three strategies to help coax insurers into the marketplaces by promising to cushion them from unexpectedly high expenses for their new customers. This particular strategy, known as “risk corridors,” was for the marketplaces’ first three years, when it was unclear how many people would sign up and how much medical care they would use. . . .

The risk corridors started in 2014. The crunch became apparent last fall, when federal health officials announced that they faced an enormous gap because so many more health plans incurred high expenses for their ACA customers than low ones. For that reason, HHS [the Department of Health and Human Services] made less than $400 million in 2014 risk-corridor payments—just 12.6 percent of $2.9 billion it owed overall.

That is, ObamaCare’s insurance scheme was so badly designed that its reinsurance scheme broke down and the administration is madly searching for tax money it can use to bail out insurance companies—the same insurance companies Obama relentlessly vilified when he was attempting to sell the public on ObamaCare.

In an interview with New York magazine, Obama sounds a familiar theme about Republicans’ failure to cooperate:

[GOP lawmakers made] a calculation based on what turned out to be pretty smart politics but really bad for the country: If they cooperated with me, then that would validate our efforts. If they were able to maintain uniform opposition to whatever I proposed, that would send a signal to the public of gridlock, dysfunction, and that would help them win seats in the midterms. It was that second strategy that they pursued with great discipline. It established the dynamic for not just my presidency but for a much sharper party-line approach to managing both the House and the Senate that I think is going to have consequences for years to come.

Obama himself made a similar calculation, also really bad for the country, though one could argue either way if it was “smart politics.” With Democratic majorities in both congressional chambers, he worked with his party’s leaders to bully through the law despite uniform Republican opposition and public opposition strong enough to elect a GOP senator from Massachusetts, of all places.

Now, as the Hill reported last month, “Democrats are beginning to talk about changing ObamaCare to fix what they acknowledge are growing problems in the law’s insurance marketplaces,” and they “are also expressing hope that Republicans will work with them to make fixes to the law when the new Congress convenes in 2017.”

Which could get interesting. With Obama gone, his veto—and ego—would no longer be a barrier to legislation undoing ObamaCare, or at least its worst aspects. If Trump is elected, one would expect congressional Republicans to take the lead. As for Mrs. Clinton, who knows? She has described herself as a supporter of ObamaCare, but that is probably just another way of saying she’s a supporter of Obama, who is much more popular than she is.

The Times’s Pear reports that many Democrats favor a “public option” (a government-run medical-insurance company) or even “single payer” (a government-run medical-insurance monopoly). But neither of those ideas seems likely to go anywhere in a Republican-controlled House or Senate.

Maybe Mr. Clinton’s anti-ObamaCare musings were meant to signal to Republicans that Mrs. Clinton would be flexible enough to go along with some reforms they would find acceptable. Or maybe Mr. Clinton just wishes Mrs. Clinton were flexible.

Welcome to the Republic of Bananas

BY MICHAEL WALSH

https://pjmedia.com/

October 4, 2016

The Department of Justice has moved to drop the charges filed against Marc Turi (left), who was alleged to have sold arms that were intended for Libyan rebels. The likely reason why is that he threatened to expose former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s actions leading up to the Sept. 11, 2012 Benghazi, Libya terror attacks.

Under the current, entirely corrupt federal government, enormities like this one now occur on a daily basis. Unbelievable:

The Obama administration is moving to dismiss charges against an arms dealer it had accused of selling weapons that were destined for Libyan rebels. Lawyers for the Justice Department on Monday filed a motion in federal court in Phoenix to drop the case against the arms dealer, an American named Marc Turi, whose lawyers also signed the motion. 

The deal averts a trial that threatened to cast additional scrutiny on Hillary Clinton’s private emails as Secretary of State, and to expose reported Central Intelligence Agency attempts to arm rebels fighting Libyan leader Moammar Qadhafi. 

Government lawyers were facing a Wednesday deadline to produce documents to Turi’s legal team, and the trial was officially set to begin on Election Day, although it likely would have been delayed by protracted disputes about classified information in the case.A Turi associate asserted that the government dropped the case because the proceedings could have embarrassed Clinton and President Barack Obama by calling attention to the reported role of their administration in supplying weapons that fell into the hands of Islamic extremist militants. 

“They don’t want this stuff to come out because it will look really bad for Obama and Clinton just before the election,” said the associate.

 Can't have the Democrat candidate for president embarrassed in the run-up to the election now, can we?

Under the deal, Turi admits no guilt in the transactions he participated in, but he agreed to refrain from U.S.-regulated arms dealing for four years. A $200,000 civil penalty will be waived if Turi abides by the agreement. 

Turi was indicted in 2014 on four felony counts: two of arms dealing in violation of the Arms Export Control Act and two of lying to the State Department in official applications. The charges accused Turi of claiming that the weapons involved were destined for Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, when the arms were actually intended to reach Libya. 

Turi’s lawyers argued that the shipments were part of a U.S. government-authorized effort to arm Libyan rebels.

Under Obama, our entire government has become a national disgrace and a criminal conspiracy against the American public. But this is what you get when you elect a nobody back-bencher from the corrupt Illinois state legislature whose candidacy was promoted and abetted by a collection of red-diaper babies and other enemies of the people, and who spent almost no time in national politics before landing in the White House as the quintessential stealth, if not to say Manchurian, candidate.

The idea originally was to have Hillary take her turn in 2008-2016, then thrust Obama upon the real American people, but the Punahou Kid jumped the line. Now an ill, bitter shrew makes her last witch's clutch for power and is using every institution of the government in order to make sure it happens.

This is what evil looks like.

Book Review: ‘Rogue Heroes,’ the Birth of Britain’s Elite Special Forces by Ben Macintyre

MICHIKO KAKUTANI
http://www.nytimes.com/
October 3, 2016



Ben Macintyre’s suspenseful new book, “Rogue Heroes,” about the founding of Britain’s S.A.S. during World War II, reads like a mashup of “The Dirty Dozen” and “The Great Escape,” with a sprinkling of “Ocean’s 11” thrown in for good measure. Like earlier Macintyre books set during that war (“Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies” and “Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory”), this volume features an ensemble of eccentrics, mavericks and malcontents. And, in this case, one visionary, David Stirling, who invented an elite commando unit that would become the prototype for a new kind of modern warfare, and the model for special forces around the world, including the Navy SEALs and the Army’s Delta Force.

In 1941, Mr. Stirling, an aristocratic dilettante who found his calling as a soldier, was recuperating in a Cairo hospital from injuries sustained during an ill-judged parachute jump. Studying a map of North Africa — where British forces were facing off against Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps — it occurred to Mr. Stirling that small groups of highly trained commandos could operate behind German lines, sabotaging aircraft, runways and fuel depots. Looking for men who could extract “the maximum out of surprise and guile,” he sought soldiers who exhibited independence and self-reliance.

“Recruits tended to be unusual to the point of eccentricity,” Mr. Macintyre writes, “people who did not fit easily into the ranks of the regular army, rogues and reprobates with an instinct for covert war and little time for convention, part soldiers and part spies; rogue warriors.”

Mr. Macintyre draws sharp, Dickensian portraits of these men, and he displays his usual gifts here for creating a cinematic narrative that races along, as Mr. Stirling’s crews find themselves in one harrowing situation after another — trudging through blazing desert heat with precious little water or food; desperately trying to elude snipers and ambushes as they rush to blow up German airplanes and supply lines; attempting to extricate themselves from dire predicaments that would test the resourcefulness, never mind stiff upper lip, of James Bond.

Because this history of S.A.S. (Special Air Service) during World War II — based on documents compiled as the “SAS War Diary” and made public in 2011 — is episodic, it lacks the coherence of Mr. Macintyre’s earlier books, which focused on a particular mission or central character. The colorful Mr. Stirling and his co-conspirator in founding S.A.S., Jock Lewes (who was as austere and disciplined as Mr. Stirling was fond of drink and gambling), only intermittently hold center stage, and many of the men they recruit suffer horrific deaths not long after we get to know them. Besides Mr. Lewes and Mr. Stirling, the one team member who remains firmly wedged in our minds is Paddy Mayne,who has a capacity for “devotion on an almost spiritual level” but is also given to terrifying bursts of violence on the battlefield and off.

Mr. Macintyre is masterly in using details to illustrate his heroes’ bravery, élan and dogged perseverance. He makes us feel the “constructive brutality” of the training that recruits endured — marching up to 100 miles through the desert, carrying a full load of equipment and prohibited from taking a drink of water until the trek’s end. He describes men who died — or were horribly injured — during missions and had to be left behind. And he conveys both the heart-stopping horrors of combat — one fight left 21 men dead, 24 wounded, 23 as prisoners — and the plucky, schoolboy spirit that emerged as their default setting.

“Stirling never relaxed his dress code,” Mr. Macintyre writes. “Whether going into battle or unwinding after it, he always wore a tie. The men chatted idly in the heat, using a shared jargon, weighted with euphemism, black humor, and profanity, a private language unintelligible to a stranger: heading into the desert was ‘going up the blue’; a raid was ‘a party’ or ‘jolly’; grumbling was ‘ticking’; sinking into sand was ‘crash diving’ or ‘periscope work.’”

While individual S.A.S. sabotage and reconnaissance missions (in Libya, Egypt, Italy, France and Germany) are evoked with considerable verisimilitude, Mr. Macintyre has difficulty zooming out from his heroes’ story to give a broader understanding of how their operational work fit into the larger canvas of the war. The story of what happened to the S.A.S. at war’s end feels truncated and rushed, as does the story of how it would be resurrected and copied around the world. At the same time, the book never delves into the mind-set of special forces soldiers with the power and immediacy of “No Easy Day” by Mark Owen (a.k.a., Matt Bissonnette, a member of the Navy SEAL Team 6, which took out Osama bin Laden).

What “Rogue Heroes” does do is provide a gripping account of the early days of S.A.S. and some understanding of just how rapidly it revolutionized a form of modern war that has grown ever more important as governments seek to find alternatives to traditional and costly wars of occupation.

Follow Michiko Kakutani on Twitter: @michikokakutani

Rogue Heroes

The History of the SAS, Britain’s Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War

By Ben Macintyre

Illustrated. 380 pages. Crown. $28.

VOTER FRAUD RISING

Illegal interference in the battleground states.

Matthew Vadum

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

October 4, 2016

There is already evidence that voter fraud is being perpetrated in critical battleground states like Virginia and Colorado a month before Election Day.

Voter fraud is commonplace. Completely eliminating it is impossible. The most policymakers can do is create laws and policies that attempt to minimize it.

Voter fraud is unlawful interference with the electoral process in an effort to bring about a desired result. Voter fraud is also called vote fraud, election fraud, and electoral fraud. It refers to fraudulent voting, impersonation, intimidation, perjury, voter registration fraud, forgery, counterfeiting, bribery, destroying already cast ballots, and a multitude of crimes related to the electoral process.

Reasonable people can disagree over how serious a problem voter fraud is in today's America, but the evidence it actually exists cannot be ignored.

This is where people on the Right and Left differ. Conservatives think fighting voter fraud is important; liberals and progressives don’t care — and many of them go further, arguing that voter fraud is an imaginary problem.

News of the illegal voting in Virginia and Colorado comes as Republican candidate Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed in campaign speeches that the system, including the electoral system, is “rigged.”

Trump has been issuing this warning about the election for months. After a series of anti-voter fraud laws were struck down in several states by federal courts, the candidate raised the possibility that people will vote over and over in the election, voting for which is already underway in many states.

"There's a lot of dirty pool played at the election, meaning the election is rigged," Trump said two months ago. "I would not be surprised. The voter ID, they're fighting as hard as you can fight so that they don't have to show voter ID. So, what's the purpose of that?”

People will be able to vote “multiple times,” he said. “How about like 10 times. Why not? If you don't have voter ID [requirements], you can just keep voting and voting and voting."

In fact the Left has made it easy to commit voter fraud. Bill Clinton’s Motor-Voter law of 1993 opened the floodgates to fraud.

Nowadays the Left unfairly influences election outcomes by fighting electoral integrity laws in the courts, often enjoying great success. On Sept. 9, a federal appeals court blocked a proof-of-citizenship requirement on a federal mail voter registration form in Alabama, Georgia, and Kansas. This year alone federal courts have blocked voter ID laws to varying extents in North Carolina, North Dakota, Texas, and Wisconsin.

The danger of the national vote being compromised is real, according to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson who has acknowledged that cyber attackers could engage in massive electronic vote fraud. At least 18 states have asked Johnson’s department for help. The agency says the electoral systems of more than 20 states have been targeted by cyber criminals.

Now Americans are learning that there are at least 1,046 non-citizens on the voter rolls in eight counties in Virginia, according to a new report released jointly by the Virginia Voters Alliance and the Public Interest Legal Foundation. No proof of U.S. citizenship is required in Virginia to register to vote.

“Virginia election officials don’t seem to care that thousands of aliens have corrupted their voter rolls,” by unlawfully registering to vote, J. Christian Adams, the former Department of Justice lawyer who now heads the Public Interest Legal Foundation told Breitbart News. “Even worse than doing nothing about it, they are trying to cover it up,” he said.

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), a longtime Hillary Clinton crony, instructed election officials to ignore inquiries about possible electoral irregularities, Adams says. This summer after the Supreme Court of Virginia threw out McAuliffe’s blanket clemency order, the governor defiantly restored voting rights to 13,000 felons and vowed to take that figure to 200,000.

Just a few illegal votes can affect the outcome of an election. Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring (D) defeated Mark Obenshain (R) in 2013 by just 165 votes out of 2.2 million votes cast.

The thousand-odd non-citizens currently on the rolls, all identified by name in the report, may be the tip of the iceberg. The problem “is most certainly exponentially worse because we have no data regarding aliens on the registration rolls for the other 125 Virginia localities.”

“Even in this small sample, when the voting history of this small sample of alien registrants is examined, nearly 200 verified ballots were cast before they were removed from the rolls,” the report states. “Each one of them is likely a felony.”

And in Harrisonburg, Va., local officials and the FBI are investigating after 18 to 20 potentially fraudulent voter registrations were filed in the names of dead people. Democrat Andrew Spieles reportedly admitted filing the documents.

Recent reports also indicate the dead have been voting in Colorado. There are at least 78 dead people currently registered to vote in the Centennial State.

Obviously, fraudulent and inaccurate voter registrations open the door to fraudulent voting.

A 2012 Pew Center on the States study revealed around 24 million — one out of every eight — U.S. voter registrations are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate. About 2.75 million people are registered to vote in more than one state and more than 1.8 million dead people are still on voter rolls.

Left-wing activists who don't care about voter fraud register millions of voters every election, sometimes with potentially disastrous results. For example, in 2008, ACORN collected more than 1 million voter registrations and 400,000 of those applications "were rejected by election officials for a variety of reasons, including duplicate registrations, incomplete forms, and fraudulent submissions," the New York Times reported at the time.

The infamous left-wing activist group ACORN and at least 54 individuals connected to it have been convicted of voter fraud and related offenses, as I reported in my 2011 book, Subversion Inc.

Voting by illegal aliens and other non-citizens – millions of whom are registered to vote – is widespread, according to a report released two years ago by Jesse Richman and David Earnest, two political science professors at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va.

"We find that some non-citizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and Congressional elections," the professors say, adding that non-citizens favor Democratic candidates over Republican candidates.

"Non-citizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress," the authors write. They estimate that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008, followed by 2.2 percent of non-citizens in 2010.

Indeed, Al Franken (D) triumphed over incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman (R) in Minnesota in 2009 by a mere 312 votes after a protracted, suspicious recount presided over by leftist Secretary of State Mark Ritchie (D). Illegally cast ballots may put Franken over the top.

As Trump suggested, double-voting and triple-voting are distressingly common.

In California's presidential primary this year, "in just three counties, Contra Costa, Alameda and Santa Clara, 194 people voted twice, suggesting the abuse statewide might run into the thousands," the East Bay Times reported.

Earlier this year, Robert Monroe was sent to jail in Wisconsin after being charged with 13 counts of fraud, including multiple voting and voting twice in the 2012 presidential contest.

Pasco Parker, a Tennessee man was discovered to have who voted in the 2012 presidential election three times in three different states — Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee. "It's too easy to vote twice; it comes down to your honor," Jay DeLancy of the North Carolina-based Voting Integrity Project, which caught Parker in the act, told Fox News. DeLancy's group found another 148 cases of suspected double-voting and turned its files over to authorities.

In 2013, Cincinnati community organizer Melowese Richardson was jailed for illegally voting five times in different elections. In 2011, Mississippi NAACP executive Lessadolla Sowers was imprisoned for 10 counts of fraudulently casting absentee ballots.

Voter fraud is easy to commit as video journalist James O’Keefe III, the ACORN slayer, has proven over and over again. The Project Veritas founder had little trouble uncovering fraud and questionable election practices in Colorado, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia.

This summer O’Keefe set out to show that voter impersonation takes place at the polls. He gave the names of four well-known Michiganders including rapper Eminem to election officials and was offered a ballot in all but one case. In 2012 an O’Keefe colleague gave the name of then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in Holder’s own voting precinct in Washington, D.C. and was offered his ballot.

Some on the Left are in denial about voter fraud and many of the rest know the truth but lie anyway. Earlier this year U.S. District Judge Lynn S. Adelman of the Eastern District of Wisconsin, a Bill Clinton appointee, claimed that “virtually no voter impersonation occurs” in Wisconsin and that “no evidence suggests that voter-impersonation fraud will become a problem at any time in the foreseeable future.”

The Left’s voter fraud denial industry, underwritten by radical billionaires like George Soros and the leftist groups he funds such as Center for American Progress, Demos, Media Matters for America, and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, routinely misrepresent the facts about voter fraud and spread propaganda.

If you believe voter fraud exists, you are smeared by these leftists as a racist and a kook.

Which means there are millions of Americans who are about to get smeared by the Left.

 Tags: Democrats, Election, Voter Fraud

Vin, don't go! Scully is as eloquent as ever in his farewell Dodgers broadcast

By Bill Plaschke

http://www.latimes.com/sports/

October 2, 2016

Which Nation is (Still) the Number One Sponsor of Terrorism?

by Peter Huessy
October 3, 2016 at 4:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9041/iran-terrorism-sponsor

The current defense minister in Iran, appointed by President Hassan Rouhani (left), orchestrated the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983 that killed 241 American soldiers. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif (right) complains the al-Nusra Front is a terrorist organization, even as an Iranian al-Qaeda agent was specifically sanctioned by the US Treasury for distributing cash to the organization.

On September 14, the Iranian Foreign Minister wrote in the New York Times that, "coordinated action at the United Nations to cut off the funding for ideologies of hate and extremism" is needed along with "a willingness from the international community to investigate the channels that supply the cash and the arms" to terrorists. He concluded with an appeal to "join hands with the rest of the community of nations to eliminate the scourge of terrorism and violence that threatens us all."

Given that in 2015 alone there were some 11,774 terrorist attacks in 92 countries, killing 28,300 people, one can agree that such action is needed. The irony, of course, is that the US Department of State released its annual report in June on state sponsors of terrorism, and Iran was the gold medalist for the world's number one terrorist nation -- an honor it has held since 1984. Only two other countries were listed as state sponsors of terror: Syria and Sudan.

Having Iran's Foreign Minister call for an end to terrorism is like having Bonnie and Clyde call for law and order.

The report makes clear, along with other available evidence, that much of the terrorism in the world is Iran's handiwork -- especially the terrorism directed at America.

The report emphasized that Iran "remained the foremost state sponsor of terrorism in 2015, providing a range of support, including financial, training, and equipment, to [terror] groups around the world." Iran provided arms and cash to terrorist groups and to nearly 30 Shia terrorist militias in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, especially Hezbollah, as well as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Houthi rebels in Yemen, and Shia militias in Bahrain.

On September 13, 2015, the US Central Command officially reported that Iran is specifically responsible for killing at least 500 American soldiers through the use of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And the current defense minister in Iran, appointed by President Rouhani, orchestrated the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983 that killed 241 American soldiers.

Overall, the State Department report lists 13 "terrorist safe havens" around the world where "terrorists are able to organize, plan, raise funds, communicate, recruit, train, transit and operate." These safe havens include remote areas in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and South America, virtually all of which have seen terrorist related activity by Iran and its IRGC. In just the Americas, this includes, says the Clarion Project, intelligence and terrorist networks in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Columbia, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and Suriname.

The State Department report also lists 58 "Foreign Terrorist Organizations," of which over a dozen are allied with Iran. One Iranian al-Qaeda agent was specifically sanctioned by the US Treasury for distributing cash to the same al-Nusra Front the Iranian Foreign Minister complains is a terrorist organization.

Iran has evidently harbored senior Al Qaeda operatives since 9/11, including facilitating the flow of fighters and funds to al-Qaeda through Iran -- a kind of jihadi pipeline. In the mid-1990s, reported the Clarion Project, Iran negotiated an agreement with Osama Bin Laden to allow al-Qaeda terrorists to freely transit Iran.

And, of course, Tehran's senior leadership financed and facilitated, along with Hezbollah, the training of the 9/11 hijackers that killed nearly three thousand people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. According to a December 2011 decision by Judge George B. Daniels "Iran and Hezbollah materially and directly supported Al Qaeda in the September 11, 2001 attacks."

But 9/11 was not Iran's first terror attack against the United States. The Iranian government also financed the attack on the Pan Am flight that blew up over Scotland in December 1988, and was also responsible for the 1996 terror attacks against Americans at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the 1983 bombings of our Marine barracks and embassy in Lebanon.

A number of American courts, upon hearing the evidence of Iranian government support for terrorism, found Iran guilty of terrorist attacks against the United States and its citizens, culminating in at least $56 billion in damages, which included being found guilty complicity in the 9/11 attacks.

Even more chilling has been Iran's joint missile and technology cooperation with North Korea, making the potential use of weapons of mass destruction against the US a growing possibility.

If any UN action is taken to stop terrorism, it should start with shutting down the number one source of state-sponsored terrorism in the world -- the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Dr. Peter Huessy is President of GeoStrategic Analysis, a defense consulting firm he founded in 1981, and was the senior defense consultant at the National Defense University Foundation for more than 20 years.