Israel And Obama's Political War - Caroline Glick

by Caroline Glick

Obama's spying and subversion operation extended to more than just Trump

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post. 

Eli Lake from Bloomberg set off a firestorm in the US this week with his revelation on Monday that in the last six months of the Obama administration, Susan Rice, former president Barack Obama’s national security adviser, requested that the US intelligence community enable her to use foreign intelligence collection as a means of gathering information about Donald Trump’s advisers.

According to Lake’s story, during the course of the US presidential campaign, and with steadily rising intensity after President Donald Trump won the November 2016 election, Rice used her access to intercepted communications of foreign intelligence targets to gather information on Trump’s advisers. Some of those reports were then leaked, injuriously, to the media in violation of US criminal statute.

Whereas in the normal course of events, the identities of American citizens whose conversations with foreigners are intercepted by the US intelligence community are shielded, in the final months of the Obama administration, Rice repeatedly – on “dozens of occasions” – asked that the identities of Americans who conversed with foreigners be exposed.

The Americans in question were Trump’s advisers.

Lake’s scoop both confirmed and expanded House Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes’s charges from two weeks ago against the Obama White House. Nunes said that he had seen evidence that the Obama administration collected information on incoming Trump administration officials that had no intelligence value. In other words, Nunes alleged that the data gathering was not for national security purposes.

This week’s discovery that Rice played a central role in the intelligence collection regarding Trump’s advisers brings Nunes’s allegations that the outgoing Obama administration conducted surveillance of the Trump team to the highest reaches of the administration. Now that Rice has been exposed, it is impossible to claim that in the event such surveillance occurred, it did not reflect the Obama administration’s concerted policy.

With the exceptions of Obama and his top adviser and confidante Valerie Jarrett, Rice was the top official in the White House.

Lake’s story and subsequent stories have obvious implications for the public’s assessment of Trump’s March 4 allegation on Twitter that Obama spied on him. But the Rice story is equally, if not more, important for what it teaches us about Obama’s mode of governing.

The Rice story strengthens the assessment that for eight years, Obama and his associates weaponized the federal government to wage a political war against their domestic political opponents in a manner that is simply unprecedented.

On Wednesday, Lee Smith noted in Tablet online magazine that the Obama administration’s apparent exploitation of intelligence reports to harm the Trump team was not the first time that the Obama administration acted in this manner.

As Smith recalled, in December 2015 The Wall Street Journal reported that during the domestic political battle surrounding the nuclear deal the Obama administration struck with the Iranian regime, the administration used intelligence intercepts of conversations of Israeli officials to spy on its domestic opponents inside the pro-Israel community and on Capitol Hill.

In the latest iteration of the Obama White House’s abuse of intelligence data, administration officials collected and leaked information about members of the incoming Trump administration to undermine its ability to chart a new course in foreign affairs.

The Obama administration’s campaign against the incoming Trump administration was wildly successful.

Due to their efforts, Trump’s national security adviser Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Mike Flynn was forced to resign in a cloud of controversy just three weeks after Trump took office.

Revelations by Lake and others exposed that Flynn was targeted in the Obama White House’s abuse of intelligence. The administration used its intelligence intercepts and unmasking of Flynn to cultivate the sense – with no evidence – that Flynn was a Russian plant.

On January 12, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius published that Flynn had spoken numerous times to Russia’s US Ambassador Sergei Kislyak after Obama levied sanctions on Russia on December 26.

Ignatius reported that in their conversations the subject of those sanctions arose, but that Flynn made no policy determination regarding how the Trump administration would view the sanctions upon entering office.

In other words, Flynn did nothing wrong. He did his job.

But immediately after the story was published, Flynn was tarred and feathered as a Russian agent. He entered office with Trump on January 20, but was declared “controversial,” “embattled” and “compromised” from his first day in office.

The innuendos followed Flynn like a cloud until he was forced to resign, less than three weeks after entering the White House.

Regardless of whether or not Flynn did anything wrong – and no evidence has been proffered to suggest that he did anything wrong – his loss was a severe blow to the Trump administration. In one fell swoop, the Obama administration’s weaponization of foreign intelligence intercepts had brought down the national security adviser.

This brings us to 2015, and the fight in Washington and throughout the US about Obama’s nuclear deal with Tehran. In the 2015 operation, the White House allegedly used intercepted communications between US citizens and Israeli diplomats and between Israeli diplomats in Washington and Jerusalem to defame opponents of the nuclear deal. Lawmakers and private citizens were repeatedly subjected to condemnations in the media where unnamed administration sources questioned their loyalty, alleged that they were serving the interests of a foreign power against the US, and that in the case of lawmakers, they were bought and paid for by rich Jewish donors.

Speaking to Smith, a pro-Israel activist who had participated in the battle against the nuclear deal explained how the White House operation worked.

“At some point, the administration weaponized the NSA’s [National Security Agency’s] legitimate monitoring of communications of foreign officials to stay one step ahead of domestic political opponents....

“We began to notice that the White House was responding immediately, sometimes within 24 hours, to specific conversations we were having. At first, we thought it was a coincidence being amplified by our paranoia. After a while, it simply became our working assumption that we were being spied on.”

Weaponizing intelligence reports was only one way that the Obama administration abused its power to weaken, silence and criminalize its domestic opponents.

Weaponizing the IRS was another way.

And just as Obama’s IRS was used to hound conservative groups that opposed Obama’s domestic agenda, so it was used to discriminate against pro-Israel groups that opposed Obama’s Middle East policies.

The most well-known case of such abuse was the IRS’s failure to approve the request for nonprofit status submitted by Z Street, a pro-Israel educational organization.

After being told by the IRS that its application for nonprofit status was being subjected to “special scrutiny” due to its Israel-centric agenda, and the fact that it advocated views that “contradict those of the administration,” Z Street sued the IRS for viewpoint discrimination.

The IRS attempted to get the case dismissed, but a panel of three irate federal judges rejected its request.

After slow rolling its response to the lawsuit, ahead of Obama’s departure from office, the IRS suddenly approved Z Street’s request for nonprofit status, seven years after it was first requested.

At the same time, the IRS continued to refuse to provide Z Street with the documents that informed its decision to discriminate against it. And it refused to explain how its decision to discriminate against US citizens in its tax policies on the basis of their political opposition to the administration’s policies was legal.

There are several aspects of the story of Obama’s abuse of power, and the fact that Israel and its US allies were key targets of that abuse, that are important beyond the domestic discourse in the US.

First, the Obama administration’s abuse of foreign intelligence to wage political warfare against pro-Israel activists and lawmakers who support Israel during the Iran battle tells us that the Obama administration viewed supporters of a strong US-Israel alliance as its political enemies. This is remarkable.

Moreover, the fact that Z Street and other US nonprofit groups that espouse positions on Israel at odds to the Obama administration’s views were specifically targeted for discrimination by the IRS indicates that the Obama administration’s political war against US support for Israel was all-encompassing. It wasn’t limited to the realm of foreign policy. It related as well to the ability to Americans to educate their fellow citizens on the need for a robust partnership with a strong Israel.

The second thing that we learn from our deepening understanding of the Obama administration’s apparent weaponization of the federal bureaucracy as a means to defeat and undermine its political opponents is that apparently, Obama’s top aides deliberately acted to undermine Trump’s ability to govern. This is particularly apparent in everything related to foreign policy.

As Adam Kredo from The Washington Free Beacon has documented, in its last months, the Obama administration ensured that the National Security Council’s budget would be depleted, in order to deny the Trump administration the ability to hire new staffers. It hired political appointees into the civil service and then burrowed them in the National Security Council and other key government departments, to undermine and discredit the Trump administration from within.

For instance, in its waning days, the State Department extended Yael Lempert’s tenure at the National Security Council for two years. Lempert is a foreign service officer notorious for her rabid opposition to Israel.

In another example, last July, Obama moved Sahar Nowrouzzadeh from his National Security Council, where Nowrouzzadeh served as Iran director, to the State Department, where he is now in charge of policy planning on Iran and the Persian Gulf.

As professional foreign service officers, both Lempert and Nowrouzzadeh are essentially impossible to fire or move.

In an interview with PBS following Nunes’s revelations, Susan Rice falsely denied that the Obama White House had “unmasked” incoming Trump administration personnel whose conversations with foreigners were intercepted by the intelligence community.

After denying the charges, Rice was asked her view of Trump’s foreign policy so far. Rice responded derisively.

She noted that despite Trump’s criticism of the Obama administration’s lackadaisical and stalled campaign against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the policy the Trump administration is enacting against ISIS on the ground is essentially the same policy that the Obama administration implemented, “as it should be,” she added, with a smirk.

In reality, if indeed Trump is implementing Obama’s ISIS policy, his failure to enact a new policy there, and indeed, the perceived chaos and disarray of his foreign policy across the board, is not a function of Trump’s incompetence or of the inexperience of his advisers. To the extent that Trump has failed to date to enact a clear foreign policy, this week’s disclosures strengthen the sense that his failure owes primarily to the deliberate subversion of his administration by his predecessor.

Caroline Glick is the Director of the David Horowitz Freedom Center's Israel Security Project and the Senior Contributing Editor of The Jerusalem Post. For more information on Ms. Glick's work, visit carolineglick.com.

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266367/israel-and-obamas-political-war-caroline-glick

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The Case Against Legalizing Unknown Millions of Illegal Aliens - Michael Cutler

by Michael Cutler

A supposed "solution" that would be catastrophic for America

At least as far back as the administration of Jimmy Carter, the immigration debate has been waged by globalists who have, over time, succeeded in hijacking the language and terminology applied to immigration.

Consider that Jimmy Carter: Orignator of the Orwellian term "undocumented immigrant," understood that by removing the term “alien” from discussions about immigration he could, over time, subvert the debate by confounding the public’s understanding about the entire immigration issue.

Carter insisted that INS employees immediately stop using the term “illegal alien” to describe aliens who were illegally present in the United States but refer to them as being “undocumented aliens.”

Today many politicians and journalists claim that illegal aliens who run America’s borders, thereby evading the inspections process conducted at ports of entry, have entered the United States “undocumented.”

In actuality, aliens who evade the inspections process enter the United States without inspection.  This creates a huge threat to national security and public safety, after all, Entry Without Inspection = Entry Without Vetting. 

Additionally, aliens who enter the United States through ports of entry but then go on to violate the terms of their admission, depending on the category of visa they used to enter the United States, certainly are not making “undocumented” entries.

However, to the globalists and immigration anarchists, these facts are merely speed bumps that need to be overcome so that they can craft their false narrative.

One of America’s most cherished symbols is the Statue of Liberty that is equated with America’s rich and diverse immigrant heritage.  Over time his strategy of altering the terminology succeeded in convincing huge numbers of Americans that anyone who would interfere with the flow of “immigrants” into the United States was acting against America’s culture and traditions.

The media was quick to jump on the bandwagon and identified to immigration anarchists who oppose secure borders and effective immigration law enforcement as being “Pro-Immigrant” while branding advocates for effective immigration law enforcement as “Anti-Immigrant.”

Of course if honest and accurate nomenclature was used the two sides should be referred as as “Immigration Anarchists” vs “Pro “Immigration Law Enforcement.”

However the agenda is to eradicate America’s borders which, to the globalists, are impediment to their wealth and political power.

Not being content to alter the language of the debate, the immigration anarchists have concocted a false narrative about the nature of illegal aliens and the way that the immigration crisis can be fixed since, they claim, “The immigration system is broken.”

We can find adherents to this madness in both political parties, however, the Democrats are clearly leading the charge.

Of course, in reality, what has traditionally been “broken” is the lack of resources and political will to enforce our immigration laws from within the interior of the United States.  President Trump is certainly sending a clear message that this situation will be finally remedied by hiring many more ICE agents and Immigration Judges and taking the gloves off the agents by stating that there will no longer be any category of illegal aliens who may not be arrested, as was the Obama administration’s policies.

But I am compelled to address an issue that is of great concern.

While many journalists and politicians have agreed that aliens who have serious criminal convictions should be deported, but insist that since the millions of illegal aliens who are present in the United States cannot all be arrested, it is reasonable to provide them with lawful status, especially if they are working and paying taxes.

Of course our immigration laws are not about aliens paying taxes and not only are illegal aliens prohibited from working but aliens admitted under certain categories of visas are also prohibited from working.  This is about protecting the jobs and wages of American workers.

This sort of “reasoning” is never applied to any other area of law enforcement whether we consider the law enforcement response to drunk driving, texting while driving, tax fraud or other crimes.  Yet this supposed solution, is no solution at all, just a thinly veiled effort to meet the demands of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Immigration Lawyers’ Association and a laundry list of industries and special interest groups who make monumental campaign contributions seeking to get “the best government money can buy.”

Additionally, the true number of illegal aliens is unknown and unknowable but the media and many “think tanks” claim that there are between 11 million and 12 million such illegal aliens present in the United States.  

During the Reagan administration it was estimated that the Amnesty of 1986 would get roughly one million such aliens “out of the shadows.”  That amnesty eventually enabled more than 3.5 million aliens to acquire lawful status.

In 2007 the CBO estimated that there were 12 million illegal aliens present in the United States.

Given those factors and others, it is likely that any massive amnesty program would likely provide tens of millions of illegal aliens with lawful status.

The numbers would be so huge that there would be no way to interview these aliens and no way to conduct any field investigations of these millions of aliens who evaded the United States surreptitiously without inspection.

What is not understood by most folks is that an adjudications officer can approve and application in mere minutes but would require days or weeks to deny an applications since it must be expected that when an application is denied the alien will, through his/her attorney, file an appeal of that denial.  Therefore before and application for legalization is denied the adjudicator would likely require an investigator conduct a field investigation and the subsequent denial would have to be reviewed by a government attorney to make certain it meets minimal standards to withstand any legal challenges.

Consequently, it is likely that well over 90% of these applications will be approved.  

Since no field investigations could be conducted, there would be no way to determine who many of these aliens actually are.  There would be no way to ascertain when these aliens actually entered the United States.

It would be simple matter for aliens to claim to have entered the United States prior to whatever cutoff date would be established to meet the statutory requirement.  As more and more aliens succeed in gaming the system more and more aliens will be encouraged to enter the United States and make similar false claims about entry data and other pertinent facts, thereby creating a vicious cycle of fraud.

The 9/11 Commission found that immigration fraud played a major role in the ability of terrorists to enter the United States and embed themselves.

This was my focus in my article, Reflections on 9/11's Vulnerabilities.

Most terrorists have not had criminal histories. 

Terrorists, not unlike spies and other “Sleeper” agents seek to maintain a low profile. 

Indeed, it is believed that at least four of the 9/11 hijackers had been encountered by police officers for motor vehicle violations.  The police officers simply treated their motor vehicle violations as routine matters and permitted them to go on their way.

On January 9, 2002 BBC reported, Hijacker 'pulled over by police' as did CNN,  
Another hijacker was stopped for traffic violation.

Clearly aliens who have serious criminals histories or established involvement in gang or other criminal activities should be deported.

I would also strongly recommend that illegal aliens who frequent places of criminality such as brothels or locations associated with the drug trade should be arrested and deported (removed) in an effort to combat these criminal enterprises.

So-called “collateral” arrests are essential to imbue the immigration law enforcement program with integrity so that aliens understand that we are serious about our immigration laws.

This helps to deter aliens from entering the United States illegally.

Additionally, under the law enforcement principle known as “randomness” by arresting illegal aliens during the course of routine field work, it is to be expected that ICE agents will stumble across serious crimes and intelligence concerning major criminal organizations and even potentially uncover terrorists and aliens who support terrorism.  

My very first assigned fraud investigation, as a brand new agent in 1976, led me to uncover a terror plot in Israel that was, thankfully averted.  The investigation began with a young man from Israel who attempted entry in the United States with and altered visa.

No one expected this mundane and routine assignment to trigger a major international investigation.

Finally, aliens who are provided with lawful status are entitled, under our immigration laws, to immediately petition to have their spouses and all of their minor children to be admitted into the United States.

Families in Third World Countries tend to have many children.  It is entirely possible that a massive amnesty program would enable more minor aliens to be granted visas than the number of illegal aliens who would be granted lawful status.

The impact of admitting tens of millions of children who would immediately be enrolled in school systems across the United States would be devastating to already beleaguered school districts across the United States.   

President Trump’s immigration policies are already having the desired impact of deterring illegal immigration as reported by the Border Patrol.  It is important that he stay the course he has wisely plotted, America and Americans will benefit from his courageous leadership.


Michael Cutler is a retired Senior Special Agent of the former INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) whose career spanned some 30 years. He served as an Immigration Inspector, Immigration Adjudications Officer and spent 26 years as an agent who rotated through all of the squads within the Investigations Branch. For half of his career he was assigned to the Drug Task Force. He has testified before well over a dozen congressional hearings, provided testimony to the 9/11 Commission as well as state legislative hearings around the United States and at trials where immigration is at issue. He hosts his radio show, “The Michael Cutler Hour,” on Friday evenings on BlogTalk Radio. His personal website is http://michaelcutler.net/.

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266376/case-against-legalizing-unknown-millions-illegal-michael-cutler

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Rephidim, Amalek then: Bir Gafgafa, ISIS now - debkaFile

by debkaFile

Rephidim now serves another Egyptian President, Abdul-Fatteh El-Sisi, for his life-and-death struggle with the Islamic State’s Sinai affiliate.

They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarreled with Moses, and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” The Lord said to Moses, take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord. Then Amalek came and fought with Israel at Rephidim.  Whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed; and whenever he lowered his hand, Amalek prevailed. And Joshua defeated Amalek and his people with the sword. (Exodus 17)

About 3,200 years later, Moses would not have recognized Rephidim. In 1967 it was called Bir Gafgafa and was the site of the Egyptian Air Force’s biggest air facility in Sinai, known as “Egyptian Air Force Base 244.”

From there, Egyptian ruler Gemal Abdul Nasser declared that year: “If Rabin wants war, let’s go!”

And so when the Israeli Air Force preemptively wiped out Nasser’s air force on the ground at the outset of the Six-Day war, Bir Gafgafa was hit first. Rephidim was next transformed into Baha 3, the main Israeli Air Force operations base in Sinai during the War of Attribution and the Yom Kippur war. It was supported 8 kilometers away by a radar and electronic warfare station.

But then, Rephidim aka Bir Gafgafa stepped back into history in its next reincarnation as the very first base from which Israeli withdrew in late 1979 after Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David peace accords, Israel’s first peace pact with an Arab nation.

Another 37 years went by and in 2017 Rephidim now serves another Egyptian President, Abdul-Fatteh El-Sisi, for his life-and-death struggle with the Islamic State’s Sinai affiliate.

The Egyptian Air Force is in the course of transforming the small air field there into the largest air base in Egypt, this time with Israel’s concurrence. The base is being tailored to serve a wide variety of warplanes, attack helicopters and UAVs, with long runways, hangars and storage depots for bombs, missiles and fuel.

The Egyptian have built an enormous hangar 70x57meters for housing long-range Wing Loong UAVs purchased from China, which are 9 meters long with a 14-meter wing spread. The Wing Loongs are also being deployed at the Uthman Air base in the Western Desert just 68km from the Libyan border.

The huge base will also have a large civilian passenger terminal at its northeastern end to serve the large army contingents deployed in Sinai. Today the 2^nd and 3^rd Armies are waging war against terror in Sinai supported by Border Guard units which are undertaking special training in anti-terror warfare.

Rephidim is today hemmed in by packs of the new Amalek, the Ansar Beit al-Maqdis which has pledged loyalty to the Islamic State and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi El-Sisi and is battling Egypt under his direction. The base is accessible only by air or convoys escorted by armored vehicles.  

But El-Sisi has big plans for defeating them, debkafile’s military sources report. Bir Gafgafa’s mission is to provide the Egyptian forces fighting in Sinai with a shield, as well as securing the Suez, one of the world’s most important waterways, against ISIS attack.

It will also serve as a hub for coordinating air operations over Sinai and the Libyan border. It is vitally important to prevent the jihadist networks based in ungoverned Libya and the lawless heartland of the Sinai Peninsula from reaching Egypt’s main cities.

The importance of this mission was demonstrated this week. On April 9, President El-Sisi reported that three gangs of terrorists had infiltrated the country from Libya and sent two suicide bombers to blow up two Coptic churches celebrating Palm Sunday, taking the lives of 45 people and injuring 150.

The jihadist menace points more than one way. The next day, Israel closed the Taba crossing into Egyptian Sinai to Israeli holidaymakers bound for the beach resorts, after its security services had received intelligence of an imminent ISIS death-cum-abduction attack afoot for the 10,000 Israeli trippers.


debkaFile

Source: http://debka.com/article/26005/Rephidim-Amalek-then-Bir-Gafgafa-ISIS-now

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Swamp Diving: The EPA's Secret Human Experiment Regime - John Dunn and Steve Milloy

by John Dunn and Steve Milloy 

The U.S. EPA was sponsoring and paying for illegal and unethical experiments exposing human subjects, even children, to small particle air pollution at high levels.

The authors have written numerous essays since 2010 for American Thinker on California's Environmental Protection Agency (Cal EPA)'s and the U.S. EPA's scientific misconduct related to air pollution human effects science, and more recently on the discovery that the U.S. EPA was sponsoring and paying for illegal and unethical experiments exposing human subjects, even children, to small particle air pollution at high levels. Small particles originate from natural and man-made sources, such as dust, smoke, and engine and industrial emissions. The U.S. EPA claims that small particles are toxic and lethal and cause cancer. 

The EPA position on small particle air pollution

The issue of small particle air pollution human effects was discussed in a House of Representatives hearing in September 2011 by the U.S. EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson. In a colloquy with Representative Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Ms. Jackson stated, "Particulate matter causes premature death. It's directly causal to dying sooner than you should."

Markey asked, "How would you compare [the benefits of reducing airborne PM2.5] to the fight against cancer?"

Ms. Jackson replied, "Yeah, I was briefed not long ago. If we could reduce particulate matter to healthy levels, it would have the same impact as finding a cure for cancer in our country."

Markey: "Can you say that sentence one more time?"

Jackson: "Yes sir. If – um – we could reduce particulate matter to levels that are healthy, we could have identical impacts to finding a cure for cancer." (Author note: Cancer kills a half-million Americans a year – 25 percent of all deaths in the U.S. annually).

The claim stated above by Ms. Jackson is the basis for the EPA's war on coal, fossil fuels, and internal combustion engines. All other criteria air pollutants are minimal concerns for the EPA. Surely small particles are a very toxic and lethal thing, as bad as cancer. Right? 

EPA is discovered doing human experiments

The same month as Ms. Jackson's testimony, Milloy discovered a report in Environmental Health Perspectives, a journal published online and in hard copy by the National Institutes of Health, that reported an experiment on a 57-year-old lady subjected to small particle air pollution much higher than the EPA says is safe, in a chamber at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine EPA laboratory for human research. A stunned Milloy showed the journal report to Dunn. So little had come of the decade of human experiments before that Milloy and Dunn had not known of the EPA human exposure experiments project that was at least illegal and unethical, possibly a crime against humanity. Humans are not guinea pigs. 

The Nuremberg Code; the Helsinki Accords; the Belmont Report; and U.S. common law, statutes, and regulations, to include state laws and the Federal Code "Common Rule" and EPA rule 1000.17, all prohibit human experimentation that might cause harm to the subjects. Human risk can be considered only for the researchers themselves in circumstances where the research is essential and vital. The civil or criminal offense of human experimentation that risks harm to the subjects would be either exposure to harm or the fear of harm by infliction of mental distress if subjects found out that the public position of the EPA is that small particles are toxic and lethal and cause cancer. Which lie to believe? That is the twist – you can't make these things up.

In 2011 and 2012, Milloy and Dunn wrote letters to the EPA, the NIH journal editor who published the article, the EPA inspector general, and the federal Office for Scientific Integrity. They wrote to all the physicians in Congress, all the deans of the ten domestic medical schools doing human experiments, and state medical boards in North Carolina and Michigan, all attempting to stop the human experiments.

The authors have written about the EPA project of research that exposed human beings of all ages, even children, to that same small particle air pollution to see if they could cause some harm. EPA sponsorship of these studies at ten domestic and six foreign medical schools was admitted under oath by an EPA official, Wayne Cascio, M.D., and it is unethical and illegal. Senior EPA research scientist Robert Devlin, Ph.D. admitted in a sworn affidavit that the EPA epidemiology was unreliable, the reason for human experiments. 

EPA hires the National Academy of Science

The EPA, in response to a congressional inquiry and negative inspector general report, engaged and paid the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) contract subdivision, the National Research Council (NRC), to provide a whitewash investigation. The NAS National Research Council Investigative Committee was convened in secret without notice and without contacting Milloy and Dunn, the complaining parties, or the congressional committee that had demanded an inspector general report that had gone badly for the EPA.

The closeted investigation continued with closed meetings attended only by NRC staff, committee members, and the EPA. The docket by a year, June of 2016, had 50 documents, all submitted by the EPA or its allies. In May of 2016, a congressional aide ran across information about the existence of the committee and informed Milloy. Milloy demanded a hearing and allowance for submissions in June of 2016, which was granted by NRC officials. Milloy found that 13 out of 19 members of the committee were significant grantees of EPA, amounting to tens of millions of dollars received, with the most extreme example being Charles Driscoll, discussed here.

On August 11, 2016, an internet audio conference of the National Research Council Panel on EPA-sponsored human exposure experiments titled "Assessing Toxicological Risks to Human Subjects Used in Controlled Exposure Studies of Environmental Pollutants" was held, with two hours of testimony heard and submissions critical of the EPA human exposure experimentation. After that, nothing was heard from the committee. 

The committee published its news release and a 150-plus-page report on March 28, 2017, ignoring the testimony and submissions of witnesses Milloy, Dunn, Young, Enstrom, and Donnay. The report exonerated the EPA human experiments on the theory that small particles are not toxic or lethal or carcinogenic acutely – that is, they do not have any acute toxic effects, but rather just long-term deleterious effects. They said that, knowing that the EPA asserts short-term acute death effects and justifies its regulations on the basis of Ms. Jackson's claim – that small particles kill people and kill them acutely. 

The problem for the NRC committee is that they are trying to create cover for the EPA by misstating the EPA position on toxicity and lethality of small particles. That is clear from this quote from the National Academy of Sciences Report press release:

To assess the level of safety provided by study protocols and the likelihood of participants experiencing any serious health effects with long-term consequences, the committee reviewed eight recent CHIE studies. The committee concluded that the societal benefits of CHIE studies are greater than the risks posed to the participants in the eight studies considered, which are unlikely to be large enough to be of concern. EPA applies a broad set of health-evaluation criteria when selecting participants to determine that there is no reason to believe that their participation in the study will lead to an adverse health response. The health status of subjects is monitored shortly before, during, and immediately after the exposure studies and usually again about 24 hours later.

The NAS report is self-destructive, obfuscatory, contradictory gobbledygook.

The NAS report is so filled with errors, omissions, misstatements, misdirection, and general dishonesty that it would take days if not weeks to fully critique. The NAS compromised its integrity to cover for the EPA, confirming Eisenhower's warning about the government-research complex that can produce science fraud and misconduct for a political agenda. Scaremongering is important for justifying government growth and overreach. After all, the aim of practical politics is to create scares so the populace will be anxious and clamor to be led to safety by government experts (paraphrasing H.L. Mencken).

If the EPA can continue to do these experiments, then it must not be true that any exposure to PM2.5 can kill within hours or days, or even weeks. It must have only a "chronic" long-term effect that the NRC committee fails to define. That destroys the basis for the EPA air pollution regulatory regime that has burdened society for three decades and more and is based on scientific misconduct. 

Who will reimburse society for the costs and burdens of this scam? How about all those coal miners without jobs and the companies that had to spend millions to comply with regulations chasing a phantom small particle air pollution menace that was claimed to kill hundreds of thousands annually in the U.S.?

The movie Creature from the Black Lagoon, featuring the gill man, was scary, but corrupt researchers and politicians at the EPA-NAS-D.C. swamp are just despicable. 

A comprehensive and informative narrative of the EPA wars and the EPA misconduct and what to do about it is found in Milloy's sixth and most recent book, Scare Pollution (Bench Press 2016). 

Dunn's long battle with the EPA on scientific integrity is told here. 


Steve Milloy MHS (Biostats Johns Hopkins), J.D., LLM. John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D. is an emergency physician and inactive lawyer.

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/04/swamp_diving_the_epas_secret_human_experiment_regime.html


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Berkeley Hates Free Speech - David Horowitz

by David Horowitz

The totalitarian acts of a cowardly university days before my scheduled appearance.

Reprinted from dailycaller.com.

The University of California Berkeley has an unearned reputation as the “home of the Free Speech movement,” a reference to the 1964 campaign by that name, which was really about the right to conduct political recruitment for leftist causes on the campus proper. Free speech was obviously already a right guaranteed by the First Amendment and California law. This history came immediately to mind when I received an invitation from College Republicans to speak on campus April 12. The subject of my lecture would be my book, Big Agenda President Trump’s Plan to Save America,” not likely to be a popular subject among Berkeley’s student activists.

Two months previously, a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos had to be canceled when anarchists staged a riot, injuring several bystanders and causing $100,000 in property damage. Campus police were present but did nothing to prevent or stop it. Although my visibility on campuses is considerably lower than Milo’s, I did wonder how the UC police department was going to deal with the safety issues surrounding my event.

Sixteen years before, I had spoken at Berkeley during a controversy I triggered over reparations for slavery. I had taken the position that reparations to be paid 137 years after the fact to people who had never been slaves by people who had never been slave owners was divisive, unjust and even racist. The left reacted, predictably, by calling me racist. Since I knew there was likely to be trouble, I asked the chancellor to introduce me, thinking that his authority would help to give the event an academic demeanor. Instead he provided 30 armed guards, some wearing flak jackets, to watch over the proceedings. A team of them accompanied me to the bathroom prior to my speech and kicked open the stall doors, lest some assailant be hiding behind them. It was disgraceful, I thought, that a university couldn’t – or more accurately wouldn’t – discipline its radicals so that civility could prevail and a reasonable intellectual discourse take place on its campus. Nonetheless, the event went off peacefully, which told me that UC Berkeley had the firepower necessary to intimidate and dissuade the violent. That is, if it chose to do so.

Evidently, sixteen years later, it no longer does. Days before my scheduled appearance, my student hosts informed me that the university was insisting the event be held at 1PM, a time when afternoon classes were just starting and few students were likely to attend, instead of 4PM as they had originally asked. Moreover, the university was not going to make a space available on the actual campus, but at a site ten or twenty blocks away.

In other words, they were going to solve the violence against free speech problem by removing the free speech as far as possible from the community eye. Placing the burden on the victims of campus bigotry and violence outraged me. I put in a call to the office of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, intending to protest the arrangement and see if I could get a more reasonable solution. This led to a phone call with Vice Chancellor Stephen Sutton and Captain Alex Yao of the UC police department. I pointed out that the students’ original request was for speaking time during daylight hours, which wouldn’t incur the same problems as Milo’s evening event did. I knew that they had an army of campus police at their disposal, and said that if they had used it during the Milo ruckus, they could have arrested the perpetrators and avoided the damages, and also the problem that my event now posed. Finally, I pointed out that they already had a serious public relations problem. People outside the university bubble appreciated the irony of the “home of the free speech movement” being so obviously hostile to free speech. Moreover, this had financial repercussions they probably did not want to ignore. I knew of at least one donor who had been planning to make a major gift to Berkeley but decided to withdraw the offer after witnessing the university’s capitulation to the Milo rioters.

My arguments were in vain. The Vice Chancellor assured me that the decision to place restrictions on the event had been made at the highest levels of the university. Then police captain Yao chimed in, and with great urgency said, “You can advertise the event but you must not give advance notice of its location.” I almost fell out of my chair when he said this. “In other words,” I replied, you are willing to allow a conservative speaker to come to campus – well, to an off-campus location – provided no one knows where it is. Free speech is okay with the university if we just hide it?”

Not everybody has drunk the progressive Kool-Aid offered by UC administrators. Consequently, on Wednesday April 12, when I appear at the off-campus location, the actual campus will find itself plastered with posters bearing the hashtag: “Berkeley hates free speech.”

David Horowitz  [For Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov's essay on David Horowitz's life and work, click here.]
David Horowitz is the author of Big Agenda: President Trump's Plan to Save America, now in its eighth week on The New York Times’ best-seller list.
Horowitz was one of the founders of the New Left in the 1960s and an editor of its largest magazine, Ramparts. He is the author, with Peter Collier, of three best selling dynastic biographies: The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976); The Kennedys: An American Dream (1984); and The Fords: An American Epic (1987). Looking back in anger at their days in the New Left, he and Collier wrote Destructive Generation (1989), a chronicle of their second thoughts about the 60s that has been compared to Whittaker Chambers’ Witness and other classic works documenting a break from totalitarianism. Horowitz examined this subject more closely in Radical Son (1996), a memoir tracing his odyssey from “red-diaper baby” to conservative activist that George Gilder described as “the first great autobiography of his generation.”

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266383/berkeley-hates-free-speech-david-horowitz

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China moves 150,000 troops to border with North Korea - Rick Moran

by Rick Moran

The reason for the troop movement, according to South Korean news sources, is to handle the flood of refugees if the US attacked North Korea.

The ripple effect from President Trump's missile attack on Syria has reached the Korean peninsula with China reportedly deploying 150,000 troops to their border with North Korea.

The reason for the troop movement, according to South Korean news sources, is to handle the flood of refugees if the US attacked North Korea. 

The US strike on Syria has unsettled America's enemies who have come to the conclusion that President Trump is no President Obama and will not hesitate to take action to defend what he perceives as American security.

Daily Mail:

The troops have been dispatched to handle North Korean refugees and 'unforeseen circumstances', such as the prospect of preemptive attacks on North Korea, the news agency said.
Meanwhile, the US Navy has moved the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier strike group from Singapore to North Korea after the country conducted more missile testing.

It is not likely that the troop movement is in response to the decision to send the carrier strike group toward the Korean peninsula, which was just announced yesterday. The troop movements are a contingency in case tens of thousands of North Korean refugees look to escape a military action by the US.

Speculation of an imminent nuclear test is brewing as the North marks major anniversaries including the 105th birthday of its founding leader on Saturday - sometimes celebrated with a demonstration of military might.
Wu Dawei, China's Special Representative for Korean Peninsula Affairs, met with his South Korean counterpart on Monday to discuss the nuclear issue.
The talks come shortly after Trump hosted Chinese leader Xi Jinping for a summit at which he pressed Pyongyang's key ally to do more to curb the North's nuclear ambitions.
'(We) are prepared to chart our own course if this is something China is just unable to coordinate with us,' US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said after the summit.
He added however that Beijing had indicated a willingness to act on the issue.
'We need to allow them time to take actions,' Tillerson said, adding that Washington had no intention of attempting to remove the regime of Kim Jong-Un.
The meeting between Xi and Trump came on the heels of yet another missile test by the North, which fired a medium-range ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan on Wednesday.
The US Navy strike group Carl Vinson cancelled a planned trip to Australia this weekend, heading toward the Korean peninsula instead, in a move that will raise tensions in the region.

Twice before this century, China has had to deal with a flood of refugees from North Korea. But that was related to famines that broke out as a result of the North Korean government impoverishing its citizens by devoting a huge percentage of its resources to its nuclear and ICBM programs. Best estimates are that 200-300,000 North Korean refugees are currently in China. Needless to say, the Chinese would like to prevent the arrival of any more.

Since a US invasion of the North is extremely unlikely, the Chinese troop deployment should be seen as a pragmatic response to a potentially catastrophic humanitarian situation. Whether the prospect of more refugees will spur the Chinese to put more pressure on North Korea with regards to their nuclear program remains to be seen.


Rick Moran

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/04/china_moves_150000_troops_to_border_with_north_korea.html

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Iran envoy to Jordan summoned after Tehran calls king's statement 'foolish and irresponsible' - Yasser Okbi

by Yasser Okbi/Maariv Hashavua

The Jordanian Foreign Ministry said it "strongly protests" Tehran's remarks about the monarch, and reminded the Islamic Republic to respect the "good neighborly relations with Arab states."

Jordan's King Abdullah speaks at the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, February 12, 2016. (photo credit:REUTERS)

The Jordanian Foreign Ministry on Monday demanded that Iran's ambassador to Amman explain comments attributed to the Islamic Republic's Foreign Ministry after a spokesperson described a statement from King Abdullah II of Jordan as "foolish and irresponsible."

In an interview published by The Washington Post on April 6, Abdullah said that Iran has created "strategic problems" in the Middle East, while noting that Tehran is attempting to "forge a geographic link between...Iraq, Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon."

This spreading influence, Abduallah said, was bringing Israel and Arab states closer together who see Iran as a threat, creating a real "opportunity" for better relations between neighbors in the region.

"But the problem that is [standing] between the Arabs and the Israelis is the Palestinians," the monarch added.

"The whole point of our peace initiative is for us to be the guarantors of Israel’s security," Abdullah posited. "If we can solve the Palestinian problem, then this is a new era of stability in our area, where Israelis are truly a part of the neighborhood."

The king also said that Iran's Revolutionary Guards were in Syria and 70 kilometers away from the Jordanian border, adding that the kingdom would not tolerate Iranian advancement towards its territory.

Following The Washington Post interview, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi said Saturday that "the foolish and irresponsible statements by the king of Jordan indicate ignorance and a superficial understanding of the developments taking place in the region."

In response, the Jordanian Foreign Ministry said it "strongly protests" Tehran's remarks about the monarch, and reminded the Islamic Republic to respect the "good neighborly relations with Arab states."

"Iran's statements are a failed attempt to divert the kingdom's attention from its role in regional stability and security, including the war on terror, and its role in preventing [dialogue on] Arab issues and the suffering of Arab peoples," the Jordanian Foreign Ministry added.  


Yasser Okbi/Maariv Hashavua

Source: http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Iran-envoy-to-Jordan-summoned-after-Tehran-calls-kings-statement-stupid-and-irresponsible-486716

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Yemenite Seder night - Lisa Samin

by Lisa Samin

The Jews of Yemen celebrate Passover with their own set of customs.

A Yemenite Habbani family celebrates Passover in Tel Aviv.. (photo credit:ZOLTAN KLUGER/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS) 

Growing up in a secular home on Long Island, New York, our Passover Seder was a large family gathering that consisted of good food and sweet Manischewitz wine. There was the Passover silver taken out only for this holiday, the symbolic Seder plate and each person reading a passage at the beginning of the Haggada until everyone got hungry.

As a result, when I became more religious, made aliya and married a Yemenite Israeli, I thought that the Seder we celebrated with my husband’s extended family was the norm of a traditional Seder. Only in speaking with our non-Yemenite guests did I realize that a Yemenite Seder had quite a few different customs.

For example, there is no Seder plate, as the entire table is the Seder plate. Green lettuce, scallions, celery and radishes are arranged beautifully on the table itself, in the order of the Seder plate, with small bowls of the meat, eggs and haroset placed between the greens.
The haroset is called “doukah,” which is ancient and appeared once in the Talmud Yerushalmi (Pessahim 10-c), as is written: “Why is it called doukah, because she grinds (dochah) it with him.”

My in-laws always made the doukah together. They would sit on low stools and grind the ingredients in a gold-colored mortar and pestle that was similar to the one they had in Yemen. This was a ritual that was passed down to the children and grandchildren, including my own children.

Why the grinding? Because the doukah is a rich blend of dates, raisins, almonds, pecans and sweet wine, seasoned with lots of cinnamon, cardamom and cloves. The consistency, as the children were told when they were little, was like the soft cement the Jews used when they were slaves in Egypt. No apples or walnuts were to be found.

In contrast to the custom prevalent among Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, who recite a blessing over two and a half matzot, Yemenite Jews recite the blessing over one and a half matzot, on the Seder night and all the other nights of Passover. According to Zemach Keissar from Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Hebrew Language, Maimonides (Hilchot Hametz Umatza, 8-6) specifies: “He takes two sheets [of matza], places the halved one within the whole one and recites the blessing “Hamotzi lehem min ha’aretz” (Who brings forth bread from the earth).

The matza has a soft, almost pitalike consistency and is made in an open clay oven called a tabun. In Yemen, the matza was made fresh every day in the tabun. There was no store-bought matza.

There is a famous story of an emissary from Israel who visited the Yemenite community in the early 1800s and would not eat the matza because he thought it was too thick.

However, the head of the community proved to him that this matza was the actual way that matza should be made. The order of the four questions is also slightly different.

And in addition to the traditional four questions, one of the children recites “Ma cha bar,” a lengthy monologue in Arabic that summarizes in a very humorous and easy to understand way the Exodus from Egypt. The child holds an egg while saying this, and everyone at the table corrects the Arabic pronunciation in good spirit. The original reason for this was so that the women and children, who did not speak Hebrew in Yemen, would understand the story of the Exodus.

After Ma cha bar, the leader of the Seder takes the afikoman, which is wrapped in a tallit, slings it over his shoulder and tells everyone that he is walking to Jerusalem.

This is to remind the children of the way the Jews left Egypt. The leader leaves the house for a few minutes, and it is customary for the children to run after the leader and tell him to come back and continue the story of the Seder.

The traditional Seder food is Yemenite soup, made with chicken or meat, potatoes, onions and rice that is meticulously cleaned so there is absolutely no doubt that it is kosher for Pesach. The matza is broken into small pieces, the soup is poured over this, and it is called “phatoot.”

The Yemenites eat this as a meal every day of Passover. My children ate this for years; but now that they are older, they have decided to add more variety to the Passover menu.

Although “Had Gadya” was not sung in Yemen, many families have added it to their Seder in Israel, although my husband’s family sings it with a Yemenite melody. When the Seder comes to a close, well after midnight, it ends with the singing of The Song of Songs, Shir Hashirim.

There is another custom that I remember from my late mother-inlaw, although I am not sure it is Yemenite. After the children fell asleep, she would put walnuts under their pillows. When they found them in the morning, she would tell them with a smile, “This is your present from Eliyahu Hanavi.”


Lisa Samin

Source: http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Yemenite-Seder-night-486563

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