05/15/15

War Games and Life’s Lessons

Going through Facebook this morning I glanced at a photo taken of a friend, Ryan Scott Welch, as he posed during a war games exercise. My thoughts turned back to that time when I was in the Army.

My MOS was as a Military Policeman; but a lot of the training was geared toward general Infantry situations.

After months of training we were tested on a combat course designed to challenge nearly every thing we were supposed to have learned. It was a long time ago and some of the details escape my memory; however, we went out in teams of four or five men and had to navigate our way through hostile territory. There were trip wires to avoid, holes to get around, bad guys hiding in bushes, snipers in trees and all manner of traps that, had they been ‘real’, could get you sent home in a body bag.

I’m proud to say our team made it through the arduous course without a hitch, having neutralized all attempts to kill us off.

An officer greeted us at the end of the war games course and congratulated each member of the team for having done a good job. He explained that we’d need to go through a debriefing, a chance to critique and improve the course for future training opportunities as he pointed us in the direction that led to the debriefing tables.

About five or six yards down the path, while we were still congratulating ourselves, we accidentally snagged a trip line. A loud blast knocked us to the ground as a booby trap exploded.

My first thought, one which seemed appropriate at the time, “Man, that’s just not right. We already finished the course” It should be noted the language used may have been less than Church Standard; but you get the idea. I don’t think any of us could hear for a several minutes as the blast effect lingered.

After letting us regain our bearings we were given some valuable information, something we hadn’t considered. He made sure he had eye contact with us, a long meaningful few moments before saying, “Men, you just got a free pass. That could have been the last sound you heard in this life. Remember…”, holding us riveted with his eyes, “until you’re out of the Army and home sleeping in your own bed; never relax or let down your guard. The moment you do you’re dead. You are always a target”

That lesson applies to everyone, at least in a general setting.

While going about this probationary state, mortality, as given by our Creator, there will be many challenges to… I was going to say, getting out alive; but that really isn’t applicable, now is it?

We are to endure to the end and return home, having followed the commandments and having served with honor. Our Father in Heaven knows the challenges we face; so does the Adversary. Never relax or let down your guard.

This article has been cross posted to The Moral Liberal, a publication whose banner reads, “Defending The Judeo-Christian Ethic, Limited Government, & The American Constitution”.

05/15/15

Here Comes Worship of the Earth!

By: Cliff Kincaid
America’s Survival

America, a national Catholic weekly magazine published by Jesuits in the United States, has just published an article about the Pope headlined “The Planetary Pope.” “There is good reason for conjecture that climate change will stand as a ‘sign of the times,’ complete with strong ethical imperatives, in the forthcoming encyclical” from the Pope, the magazine says.

We know where this is heading, and it isn’t pretty. We have just posted a sensational interview with Dr. Peter Jones on the New Age movement. It’s called “Here comes Worship of the Earth!”

Dr. Peter Jones, one of the world’s foremost experts on paganism and the occult, says the Christian faith is under assault by a “one-ism” movement that is leading to worship of the earth. Dr. Jones discusses how international Marxism and global Islam could merge into this movement and help lead to the decline, even destruction, of traditional Christianity, which is based on a philosophy of “two-ism” — the idea of a transcendent God who is apart from humanity and his creation, and who has determined the nature of humanity, in terms of male and female. Dr. Jones also discusses the resignation of Pope Benedict under mysterious circumstances. “I was not convinced it was because of health reasons,” he says.

05/15/15

Only one presidential candidate besides Hillary Clinton appears in the bombshell ‘Clinton Cash’ — in a very sordid episode

By: Benjamin Weingartin
TheBlaze

Peter Schweizer’s “Clinton Cash” links Bill and Hillary Clinton through their work at the Clinton Foundation and State Department to all manner of unsavory characters, including authoritarian leaders, African warlords and businessmen with dubious backgrounds, in addition to more respectable Clinton political operatives and supporters who in Schweizer’s writing paid the Clintons and enriched themselves by way of projects supported by the Clintons.

One Clinton-linked transaction however implicates another figure: presumed 2016 GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush listens to a speaker before giving his keynote address at the National Summit on Education Reform in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 20, 2014. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

In a chapter titled “Disaster Capitalism,” Schweizer explores the dealings of the Clinton Foundation — in league with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — in Haiti following the devastating January 2010 earthquake that claimed the lives of approximately 230,000 people.

In the wake of the disaster, the Clintons immersed themselves in the relief effort, helping procure and allocate funds towards activities such as cleaning debris, fixing roads, and arranging deals for things like building telecommunications infrastructure and constructing homes, with varying degrees of success but almost universal financial rewards for those connected in one way or another with the Clintons.

It is in the area of home construction where former Florida Governor Jeb Bush appears.

Clinton supporter and former Democratic presidential candidate General Wesley Clark traveled to Port-au-Prince Haiti in the wake of the earthquake to lobby Haitian president René Préval for a home-building contract for a south Florida company in which Clark was a board member called Innovida.

One of Clark’s colleagues on the Innovida board was Jeb Bush.

What would happen to Innovida serves as a microcosm of what Schweizer dubs the “Clinton Blur” between philanthropy, politics and business.

As Schweizer tells it:

[Wesley] Clark was a big cheerleader for the company [Innovida]. “It can do more for housing in Haiti, better and faster, than any other technology out there,” he said. Innovida’s ties to the Clintons ran even deeper than Clark. According to the South Florida Business Journal, Innovida’s CEO Claudio Osorio was a “big fundraiser” for the Hillary 2008 campaign and had contributed to CGI.

Innovida had little track record of actually building homes. Yet the company saw its project fast-tracked by the Haitain government and the State Department. Innovida received a $10 million loan from the US government to build five hundred houses in Haiti.

Sadly, the houses were never built. In 2012 Osorio was indicted and convicted of financial fraud. Prosecutors would later accuse Osorio, who drove a Maserati and lived in a Miami Beach mansion, of using the money intended for relief victims to “repay investors and for his and his co-conspirators personal benefit and to further the fraud scheme.” He was ultimately sentenced to twelve years in jail. Innovida collapsed.

Of Bush’s involvement with Innovida, Jim Geraghty at National Review wrote in a January 2015 post:

The Washington Post put an article about Jeb Bush’s ties to InnoVida on page A1 on Monday. The article was careful to state that “there is no evidence that Bush had any knowledge of the fraud.” The law-enforcement cases against the company mentioned Bush only in passing, describing him as out of the loop, basically a prop used to enhance the company’s stature. A 2012 Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit against the company, Osorio, and company CFO Craig Toll said that “to add an air of legitimacy to InnoVida, Osorio recruited a high-profile board of directors for InnoVida that included a former governor of Florida.”

Osorio’s lawyer, Humberto Dominguez, told the Post that “Bush had nothing to do with the scheme” and that Bush had been brought in only for his business connections. One of the company’s investors, Christopher Korge, told the paper that he was “impressed with Bush’s response” once serious questions of Osorio’s dishonesty were brought to his attention. According to a legal statement in U.S. bankruptcy court, Bush, on September 19, 2010, “severed all ties” to InnoVida, “expressing concerns over Debtors’ governance and urging the Debtors to adopt more professional transparent business practices, including obtaining audits by a national accounting firm.” This was about nine months after the company received the OPIC loan [a $3.3 million U.S. government loan to build and operate a panel-manufacturing facility in Haiti].

Geraghty continues:

Still, Bush’s relationship with the company was relatively long and lucrative. According to the bankruptcy-court filing, from December 5, 2007, to September 16, 2010, InnoVida and Miami Worldwide Partners, an entity affiliated with the Osorios, collectively disbursed $468,901.71 in payments and expenses to Jeb Bush & Associates, the former governor’s consulting firm. In March 2013, Jeb Bush & Associates paid $270,000.00 to Soneet R. Kapila, the trustee attempting to return money to InnoVida investors who were defrauded. Bush’s firm admitted no wrongdoing, and asserted that it merely “provided services in good faith for reasonably equivalent value.”

… The legal documents paint a picture of Bush remaining out of the loop on all of the fraudulent activities of Osorio and the company, asking questions about the lack of audited financial documents, and then cutting ties when his questions weren’t answered adequately and investors raised questions about Osorio’s honesty.

But obliviousness to a business partner’s crimes isn’t a great look for an aspiring president. And it’s painfully easy to picture a future Republican rival, the DNC, or American Bridge PAC running an attack ad against Bush with the entirely accurate statement that “Jeb Bush spent years on the corporate board of a company that took government money and promised to help Haitian earthquake victims . . . and then turned around and spent it on themselves.”

Particularly relevant in context of “Clinton Cash” is how Geraghty concludes his post:

… [T]he idea of Osorio causing headaches for a potential GOP presidential candidate is ironic, in light of the fact that he and his wife were high-level Democratic-party fundraisers. The pair had hosted fundraisers for both Clintons and both Obamas, and in fact lamented to the Wall Street Journal that they had a bad experience at the 2008 Democratic National Convention:

Amarilis Osorio and her husband, Claudio, a Miami Beach, Fla., entrepreneur, decided at the last minute to attend the convention. The couple held a fund-raiser at their house earlier this month with Sen. Obama’s wife, Michelle, and raised $400,000. “We had to fly commercial — a private jet was too expensive,” said Ms. Osorio. “And our hotel room is dreadful.”

In 2013, the Clinton Foundation returned a $22,000 donation from Osorio.

Worthy of note is the fact that the Clintons and Bushes have developed a close rapport since Bill Clinton left office, as detailed in Daniel Halper’s “Clinton Inc.”

Peter Schweizer has indicated that he is currently probing Jeb Bush’s finances as part of his next project.

Note: The links to the books in this post will give you an option to elect to donate a percentage of the proceeds from the sale to a charity of your choice. Mercury One, the charity founded by TheBlaze’s Glenn Beck, is one of the options. Donations to Mercury One go towards efforts such as disaster relief, support for education, support for Israel and support for veterans and our military. You can read more about Amazon Smile and Mercury One here.

05/15/15

Mark Levin: George Stephanopoulos and his donations to Clinton Foundation; The conflict of interest

05/15/15

My Daughter Married a Woman

By: Lloyd Marcus

All of a sudden, it is pedal-to-the-metal, full-speed-ahead, no-holds-barred promotion of homosexuality everywhere you turn. It is as if someone said, okay, now is the time to launch our all out assault on traditional principles and values; while crushing all opposition.

I can not even enjoy a non-political Saturday watching do-it-yourself home improvement TV channels without almost every show aggressively promoting homosexuality. Homosexuals are only slightly over 2% of the population. http://bit.ly/1IGFmMf And yet, their representation on TV shows is dramatically disproportionate to their numbers. Clearly, the networks have become political activists promoting the homosexual agenda.

My wife can not watch her bridal gown and pregnancy TV shows without the producers featuring same sex couples. We protest by changing the channel.

What really frosts me and is super scary is the Left’s ever-increasing strong-arm tactics, forcing us to agree with their sin. I thought, good grief, next they will be teaching our kids, “Great Lesbians in History.” Then, I thought, oh my gosh, they are already doing that celebrating Gay Pride Month beginning in elementary school. http://bit.ly/1E4rJzV

Think about that folks. Regardless of your religious beliefs or opinion, the Left has said screw you, we’re teaching your child that homosexuality is a good thing and something they should explore. Period.

Leftists (Democrats) are passing legislation to make it illegal to assist anyone unhappy with their sexual attractions to change. http://bit.ly/1zWo104 Isn’t that outrageous? While portraying themselves as victims who claim to only seek tolerance, Leftists are insidiously working to have their government enforcers arrest pastors, counselors and parents who help their sexually confused kids.

Folks, we are talking Sodom and Gomorrah all over again; homosexuality aggressively forced upon us.

http://bit.ly/1dZjMHm Before you call me crazy, consider this. For 200 years marriage was defined as between one man and one woman. Today, such thinking is considered nutty, extreme and hateful in the mainstream media, numerous political and social circles. Opposing their so-called “mainstream” consensus on this issue will cost you your livelihood and even jail-time. http://bit.ly/1zIila5

My Christian minister dad called me to say that a family member gave him a heads up that my daughter’s wedding pictures are posted on Facebook. My daughter married a woman. She wanted me to attend the wedding. I explained that while I love her and am fond of her partner, my faith does not allow me to bless their union by attending their wedding.

Her mom and I divorced when she was around 7 years old. My daughter and I were estranged until five years ago. I cherish our new found relationship. So, I was happy when my daughter said she loves me and understands my reason for not attending her wedding.

At 87 with over 50 years as a pastor, Dad remains as cool and wise as ever. He adamantly advised me to shower my daughter and her partner with love. Dad said as Christians, love is our greatest weapon.

Now do not get me wrong. Far too many Christians today believe “love” means co-signing sin; passively allowing the Left’s relentless implementation of their anti-God agenda to go unchallenged. That is not what Dad meant, nor is it his definition of “loving them.” He suggests that I behave according to Romans 12:9 “Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.”

I will not be manipulated by the Left’s absurd claim that loving parenting means rubber-stamping all of your child’s life choices. When I received my daughter’s wedding invitation in the mail, Dad advised me not to attend and explain why to my daughter. Dad was confident that she would understand.

In response to my daughter’s wedding pictures on Facebook, my millennial nephew and nieces congratulated her. Despite their Christian upbringing, liberal public school indoctrination and mainstream media have shaped their opinions.

Before ending our phone call (I’m in Florida, Dad is in Maryland), Dad instructed me to read Exodus 20: 1-6 and Deuteronomy 5: 1-10. These scriptures promise that if you are faithful and love God, He will bless your family for generations. Praise God. That was Dad’s way of comforting and assuring me that God has everything under control.

I do not pray for God to turn my daughter straight. I pray that she and her partner will come to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Meanwhile, without approving their lifestyle, I will love them both to death.

Lloyd Marcus, The Unhyphenated American
Chairman, Conservative Campaign Committee

05/15/15

Vatican Facilitates Russia’s Designs on the Middle East

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Pope Francis has formally recognized a Palestinian state, even though it does not exist. While the media have noted that the Vatican’s curious action has created some controversy, there has been little discussion of whether “Palestinians” actually do exist, where the modern-day concept of a “State of Palestine” came from, and which major power benefits from the creation of a nation under the control of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the Middle East.

American-Israeli political commentator and journalist Sha’i ben-Tekoa told Accuracy in Media, “Starting with Chapter 2:1 of the Pope’s own Holy Writ, Christian Scripture refers to Judea 42 times, Samaria 11 times, never to ‘Palestine,’ ‘Palestinians’ or the ‘West Bank.’ The Arabs in Judea and Samaria meet not one of the international legal requirements for statehood.”

He is referring to Matthew 2:1, which refers to Jesus being born in Bethlehem in Judea.

Many commentators, with little or no access to major U.S. media, argue with justification that the Arabs in Judea and Samaria are squatters, with no legal right to even be there.

“Most of the so-called ‘Palestinians’ are in fact interlopers and squatters from Syria—and other places—mostly in the 1920s and 1930s who simply took possession of pieces of land in Israel,” says commentator Rockwell Lazareth. William Mayer, editor and publisher of PipeLineNews.com, says “the so-called Palestinians” are in fact “Arab colonial squatters” who have been used to wage war against Israel.

Commenting further on the Vatican’s recognition of a so-called Palestinian state, Ben-Tekoa tells AIM, “This business of recognizing a phantom state for a phantom nation that screws the Jews is an outrage. It is this generation’s version of Jew-hatred. The Pope should lead, not follow the enemies of Israel.”

Ben-Tekoa’s book, Phantom Nation: Inventing the ‘Palestinians’ as the Obstacle to Peace, argues that “Palestinians” are an “invented” people whose purpose is to serve as the means through which the destruction of Israel and the Jews will ultimately be achieved.

If so, the fingerprints of the old Soviet Union and today’s Russia are all over the plan.

In his scholarly paper, “Soviet Russia, Creator of the PLO and Inventor of the Palestinian People,” Wallace Edward Brand documents how the term “Palestinian People” was concocted by the “Soviet disinformation masters” in 1964 when they created the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO.

Soon, the United Nations adopted the cause. Dr. Harris Schoenberg’s 1989 book, A Mandate for Terror: The United Nations and the PLO, describes how the world body came to endorse and embrace the terrorism campaign of the PLO. The UN General Assembly voted in 2012 to recognize Palestine as a non-member state, giving it the same status as the Vatican. The only countries voting against this initiative were Canada, Czech Republic, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Panama, and the United States.

Earlier this year, the International Criminal Court (ICC) accepted “Palestine” as a State Party to the Rome Statute, the ICC’s founding treaty. The court’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, is currently probing alleged Israeli war crimes during last summer’s war in Gaza with the Hamas terrorist group.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the chairman of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, who is scheduled to meet with Pope Francis on May 16, is widely considered to be a key Russian asset in the Middle East.

Abbas speaks fluent Russian as a result of his KGB training at the KGB’s Patrice Lumumba University, where he wrote a report claiming that there was no Holocaust, and that the Jews who were murdered during World War II were actually killed by Zionists working with the Nazis. It is now called the People’s Friendship University.

Former KGB officers and intelligence analysts say that the PLO’s long-time chairman, Yasser Arafat, was an also an agent of the Soviet intelligence service.

The links between various Arab and Islamic terrorist groups and the Russians are said to continue. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking defector from the former Soviet bloc, says KGB dissident Alexander Litvinenko, who was living in London, was assassinated by the KGB in 2006 because he spilled the beans on how Soviet intelligence spawned Islamic terrorism and even trained al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri.

Marius Laurinavius, Senior Policy Analyst in the Policy Analysis and Research Division of the Eastern Europe Studies Center, argues in his paper, “Do traces of KGB, FSB and GRU lead to Islamic State?,” that it is impossible to understand the rise of the Islamic state without paying attention to the links between the Russian secret services and Arab/Muslim terrorists, including in the Russian region of Chechnya.

Nevertheless, it seems that the PLO has been successful in its campaign, as even the United States government, first under President George W. Bush and now under President Barack Obama, has accepted a so-called “two-state solution” of Israel and a Palestinian state.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in 2009 that he was prepared to recognize a “demilitarized” Palestinian state of some kind, subject to security conditions and their recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. However, a document outlining the approach of Netanyahu’s new coalition government did not include any intention of establishing a Palestinian state.

The publication Foreign Policy says Obama has decided to review the “diplomatic protection” it has offered Israel in the United Nations against anti-Israel resolutions as a way to pressure the Jewish state, and that “There is a growing movement at the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution outlining a roadmap for future peace talks.” Such a “roadmap” would force Israel to accept a Russian-influenced Palestinian state.

The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council are China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, has already announced that Russia will back a resolution calling for a Palestinian state.

With the Vatican endorsing statehood for Palestine, the Russians, working with Obama, may see their chance to put more pressure on Israel.

This will likely work out to the benefit of Russia and its Palestinian agents, not the United States or Israel.

In his 1971 book, Red Star Over Bethlehem: Russia Drives for the Middle East, former diplomatic envoy Ira Hirschman argued that the Soviet Union voted in the U.N. to establish the state of Israel in 1947, only to oust “the last vestiges of British power in the land-bridge area linking Europe, Africa, and Asia,” and that its strategic objective has been to make possible the long-awaited dream of Catherine the Great to establish Russian warm-water ports in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

05/15/15

The Council Has Spoken!! Our Watcher’s Council Results – 05/15/15

The Watcher’s Council

The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast and the results are in for this week’s Watcher’s Council match-up.

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Those whom do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. – George Santayana

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism. – Franklin Delano Roosevelt

This week’s winning essay, The Right Planet’s Which ‘Ism’ Will We Choose?, is about creeping totalitarianism, with a comparison with how its taken over in the past to events today. Here’s a slice:

Godwin’s Law … it goes a little something like this:

“… [I]f an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler or Nazism….”

Undoubtedly, there is a certain amount of truth in Godwin’s adage. Since World War II, there probably has not been a U.S. president who hasn’t been directly compared to Adolf Hitler, at some point or another. As a matter of fact, it didn’t take me very long to dig up Hitler memes and analogies for a number of U.S. president via a Google search.

Often times such direct comparisons of U.S. presidents to Hitler are grossly hyperbolic at best, and utterly unconscionable at worst. Despite the fact how one may feel about current and past presidents, equating them on the same level with one of the worst monsters in human history does indeed minimize the terrible suffering of those who fell under the tyrannical and brutal reign of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

Adolf Hitler and his henchmen have come to represent the epitome of evil, and rightly so. Nazism has become the benchmark used to measure all things evil. The question for me is not whether a current president is on equal par with Adolf Hitler. I don’t happen to believe any U.S. president, present or past, is as guilty of murderous and ruthless fanaticism as Adolf Hitler—on that point, let me be clear. My point is that Hitler and his notorious Third Reich provides the ultimate yardstick by which we can measure how far a government or nation is marching down the road toward total state control and merciless dictatorship. The mere act of using the Nazis as a measuring stick is not equating the thing being measured as being necessarily one and the same. Instead, the question for me is whether the U.S.A. is moving away from fascism or toward it. If we examine the rise and fall of Hitler’s Third Reich from a historical perspective, how does it compare to what we see going on today? This is a valid exercise—and a necessary one, in my opinion.

Perhaps someone who experienced the oppression and horrors of Nazism is better able to illustrate my points. I’ll just throw in a few of modern-day examples for consideration as well.

Kitty Werthmann, 87, survived World War II. She was an Austrian citizen and lived under Nazi rule throughout the war. A few years back she spoke to an American audience about her experiences during the war, and how the current political climate in this country greatly concerns her. She strongly feels the need to warn Americans about the horrors of socialism.

In her opening comments (see video above), Kitty Werthmann points out how Western media often times portrays Hitler’s annexation of Austria with Germany in 1938 (Anschluss) as an armed invasion, replete with troops and tanks. Without a doubt, German troops did indeed move into Austria at the time. But what is often overlooked, according to Werthmann, is the fact that the Austrian people overwhelmingly elected Adolf Hitler by ninety-eight percent of the vote—by means of the ballot box. How could this happen? What would lead Austria—a predominately Christian nation—to elect a monster like Adolf Hitler?

In the late 30s, Austria was in a very deep depression, with thirty percent unemployment, and twenty-five percent inflation. Austrian banks were charging twenty-five percent interest on loans. Businesses and farmers were going broke. Austrians could not afford to pay their taxes. Unions were calling for strikes; and factories were being closed down. Worse yet, the financial chaos was leading to riots in the cities. Entire blocks were burned down. Austrian police were ill-equipped to stop the ongoing destruction, according to Kitty Werthmann.

As Austria descended into despair, the Austrian people looked to their neighbor in the north, Germany, and saw full employment and a high-standard of living. As Kitty Werthmann puts it (emphasis added), “Hitler did not act like a monster; he did not speak like a monster; he spoke like an American politician.”

The Austrian people petitioned their government for a plebiscite (an election) to merge Nazi Germany with Austria. Besides—despite what Barack Obama might believe (cf. sarcasm)—the Austrians didn’t speak “Austrian”; they spoke German. The Austrians and Germans had a common heritage.

What is particularly chilling about Kitty Werthmann’s recollections, are the disturbing similarities of the policies implemented by the Nazis in Austria to the current policies and initiatives being instituted and promoted right here in the United States today.

For example, one of the first policies implemented by the Nazis in Austria was a National I.D. Austrians could not board a train or bus without showing their National I.D. card.

Following 9/11, the U.S. federal government “began to look at ways to increase security surrounding state identification cards and driver’s licenses,” allegedly “in an attempt to prevent further terrorism and/or unlawful entry into and out of the country.”