12/28/15

In From The Cold And Out Again… How The CIA Was Duped And Their Double Agent Failure

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

InFromTheCold

Bill Gertz at the Washington Free Beacon has written a fascinating piece on the CIA being fooled by scores of double agents who pledged their loyalty to the agency, but instead reported back to the communists during the Cold War right on up into the present day. As I have said for years… the Cold War never ended, it shifted. Now Benjamin B. Fischer, the CIA’s former chief historian, analyst and operations officer, is verifying what I have long said. That is cold comfort, I assure you.

The duping of the CIA included at least 100 fake recruits in East Germany, Cuba and Russia. For decades, these double agents supplied false intelligence to senior U.S. policymakers that ranged all the way to the presidency. And it’s still happening. Fischer writes, “During the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency bucked the law of averages by recruiting double agents on an industrial scale; it was hoodwinked not a few but many times.” Is anyone surprised by this? Trevor Loudon and I have both said for years that the agencies and our governmental leaders couldn’t pass a background check to clean a toilet. It was true then and it is true today. These double agents weren’t thoroughly vetted. They were hurriedly turned and because of sloppiness, we invited the enemy into the midst of our intelligence agencies. It’s mind boggling. In an article last week, Fischer stated, “The result was a massive but largely ignored intelligence failure.” How’s that for national security? Feeling warm and fuzzy yet?

Fischer wrote in the International Journal of Intelligence that this wreaked havoc within the agency. I’ll bet. What’s worse is that the CIA dismissed the infiltration by communists and the disinformation as insignificant. No one, including congressional oversight committees, pushed for reform in the agency when this was uncovered either. Their vetting processes still suck and they aren’t listening to the likes of Fischer. The man was a career CIA officer. He joined in 1973 and worked in the Soviet affairs division during the Cold War. He sued the CIA in 1996, charging he was mistreated for criticizing the agency for mishandling the 1994 case of CIA officer Aldrich Ames, a counterintelligence official, who was unmasked as a long time KGB plant. It was a case of blaming the messenger instead of the spy. This was during the Clinton Administration, so it does not come as a surprise.

From Bill Gertz:

Critics have charged the agency with harboring an aversion to counterintelligence — the practice of countering foreign spies and the vetting of the legitimacy of both agents and career officers. Beginning in the 1970s, many in the CIA criticized counter-spying, which often involved questioning the loyalties of intelligence personnel, as “sickthink.”

The agency’s ability to discern false agents turned deadly in 2009 when a Jordanian recruit pretending to work for [the] CIA killed a group of seven CIA officers and contractors in a suicide bombing at a camp in Afghanistan.

Double agents are foreign nationals recruited by a spy service that are secretly loyal to another spy agency. They are used to feed[ing] false disinformation for intelligence and policy purposes and to extract secrets while pretending to be loyal agents.

Double agents are different than foreign penetration agents, or moles, who spy from within agencies while posing as career intelligence officers.

Lord only knows how many moles we have within our agencies.

Predictably, the first major double agent failure was in Cuba. The Cubans are notorious for using a variety of traps for agents from honey traps to straight up blackmail. Cuban intelligence officer Florentino Aspillaga revealed a massive failure when he defected to the CIA in 1987. No less than four dozen recruits over 40 years had been secretly working for communist Cuba while on the dole of the CIA. They easily supplied disinformation to the CIA, endangering agents and scuttled operations left and right. This is the same government – Castro’s government – that Obama just reinstated relations with. Now, instead of being made fools by the communists, we just crawl into bed with them. It’s the other definition of coming in from the cold. Then came the revelation on Cuban state television which confirmed the existence of 27 fake CIA agents. You would think that would have set off alarms in the agency and caused them to adjust their vetting procedures. But you’d be wrong. Instead, the intelligence failure was covered up by congressional intelligence committees. You see, the enemies within go way back. We willingly let the enemy in our doors and let them set up shop in our intelligence agencies and abroad. Is it any wonder we now have a Marxist in power who colludes with communist dictators and tyrants, as well as Islamists?

In East Germany, all the recruited CIA agents working there were found to be double agents working secretly for the Ministry of State Security spy service, also known as the Stasi. All. Of. Them. Noodle that for a moment. According to Stasi officers, they failed at placing agents in the CIA. But there wasn’t a single CIA op on their turf that they weren’t able to detect using double agents and counterespionage operations. Fischer said the controlled East German assets “rendered U.S. intelligence deaf, dumb and blind.”

Markus Wolf was an East German spymaster. He wrote in the late 1980’s: “We were in the enviable position of knowing that not a single CIA agent had worked in East Germany without having been turned into a double agent or working for us from the start.” Wolf brashly claimed that, “On our orders they were all delivering carefully selected information and disinformation to the Americans.” He tagged a CIA officer working in West Germany and then dispatched double agents for him to recruit. Nifty.

Evidently this double agent snafu spanned move than 20 years and I contend, it is still occurring. Fischer said that former intelligence officials such as Bobby Ray Inman, who was a CIA director, confirmed the intelligence failure as did former CIA Director Robert Gates. He came right out and said that the CIA was “duped by double agents in Cuba and East Germany.” Wolf had complete control from 1961 to 1989 on the intelligence that the CIA garnered from the communists there. He played us.

And then there was the Russian double agent screw-up. The last one took place after the Soviet Union collapse in 1991. This came to light after the 1994 arrest of CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames, who spied for the Ruskies from the 1980’s until he was caught. He actively assisted the KGB and made fools of the CIA by exposing all Soviet and Eastern European intelligence operations. The Russians passed a mixture of false and accurate data through a series of double agents. Ames’ operation began in 1986 and went on until 1993.

While that was going on, the KGB sent a false defector to the CIA named Aleksandr Zhomov. He easily hoodwinked the CIA into thinking he could give them information on how the KGB had unmasked and arrested almost all CIA recruited agents during the mid-1980’s. We paid this plant an estimated $1 million. The whole front played out by Zhomov was to protect Ames from being discovered.

More from Bill Gertz:

In 1995, the CIA admitted that for eight years since 1986, it produced highly classified intelligence reports derived from “bogus” and “tainted” sources, including 35 reports that were based on data from double agents, and 60 reports compiled using sources that were suspected of being controlled by Moscow.

The false information reached the highest levels of government, including three presidents — Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.

The CIA’s inspector general urged reprimands for several senior CIA officers and directors William H. Webster, Robert M. Gates, and R. James Woolsey.

The three former directors claimed they should not be blamed for the compromises because they were unaware of them.

Fischer said the CIA defended its recruitment of bogus agents by asserting that even while controlled the doubles provided some good intelligence.

Are you beginning to see why I say you cannot trust the Russians or the Cubans? And you can’t trust those who form alliances with them such as Barack Obama. The CIA has been broken for some time. There are good people there even now. But the bureaucratic policies in place are strangling them and keeping them from doing competent work. To survive as a nation, we must have spies and we must have verifiable and trustworthy intelligence. Otherwise, we become sitting ducks for our enemies. You’d think we would have learned that by now, but some of these people are so stupid, they have reached rock-bottom and have started to dig.

One of the problems for the CIA concerning their Soviet operations was that they could not recruit agents to work for the agency. They had to take walk-ins and volunteers. They compounded this by not vetting them thoroughly. It was a prime opportunity for moles and double agents to infiltrate and they did. It’s bad enough this was taking place during the “Cold War,” but it is still going on. That’s unforgivable.

It gets worse… the CIA knew these agents were fraudulent and they allowed the division in charge of Soviet affairs to cover up the loss of all its bona fide agents. No one was held accountable either. No real inquiry was conducted.

“Mitigating the dismay at the total corruption — moral, intellectual, and political — of the agency is my surprise that a man in Fischer’s position saw the reality so very clearly and so reports it,” said Angelo Codevilla, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and professor emeritus of International Relations at Boston University.

Kenneth E. deGraffenreid, a former senior White House intelligence official during the Reagan administration, said Fischer and other former intelligence officials have revealed that large-scale communist intelligence service operations to undermine the CIA show “the story of Soviet-era espionage operations that we’ve understood to this point is probably deeply flawed.” Ya think? Many of us have been screaming this for years. They should read Trevor Loudon, Diana West, Cliff Kincaid and James Simpson’s works.

“What we thought was true from the Cold War spy wars was largely wrong, and that says that the counterintelligence model we had was wrong,” said deGraffenreid. “And therefore because we’ve not corrected that problem we’re in bad shape to deal with the current challenges posed by terrorists and spies from Iran, Russia, China and others.”

Bill Gertz should be applauded for bringing this travesty to light and exposing it. He’s done incredible work here.

Take it from the CIA themselves: “Intelligence officers have a saying that the only thing worse than knowing there is a mole in your organization is finding the mole.” The same goes for leadership. How can we defend our country if we can’t even police our own intelligence agencies? And it goes far beyond them as well. All our government agencies and the federal government itself are infiltrated with communists and Islamists… from NASA, to our universities, to our military, to the seats of power in Congress… the U.S. is facing an existential problematic threat from within. The CIA is not the only one that has been duped here. The whole nation has been by Barack Obama and his comrades.

11/17/15

Diana West: After Paris

The Right Planet

By: Diana West
DianaWest.net

"At the Cafe" by Edgar Degas (c) The Fitzwilliam Museum; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

Some thoughts.

Fourteen years after 9/11, the civilized world has finally become unified, working as one in response to global jihad by … lighting up landmarks in the colors of the latest victim-state.

This is not an effective response.

Nor are public displays of grief, including candles, teddy bears, flowers. Nor is embarking on another pointless war in the Middle East (Syria). One clear lesson of the past decade is that tying the fate of the United States of America to the fortunes of warring Islamic primitives, one indistinguishable from the next, is no way to protect the United States or the wider West.

Today’s update on doings in Syria (hat tip Andrew Bostom) offers an object lesson on “indistinguishable.”

Israel National News reports:

The leader of a jihadist Syrian rebel faction that had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group (ISIS) was killed Sunday in a suicide attack by rival jihadists, a monitoring group said.

Some details:

“Abu Ali al-Baridi, head of Al-Yarmuk Martyrs Brigade and nicknamed ‘The Uncle’, was killed in a suicide attack by Al-Nusra Front,” Al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said….Baridi’s faction pledged allegiance to ISIS in 2014 and operated in the south of the country, Abdel Rahman said.

To recap: The head of the Al-Yarmuk Brigade, which pledged allegiance to ISIS in 2014, was killed by Al Nusra, which pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda in 2013.

Meanwhile, in 2012, the Al-Yarmukis were our boys, genuine Syrian “rebels,” presumably having pledged allegiance to the Free Syrian Army. This may seem like a lot of pledging allegiances, but with jihad and sharia for all.

Any American “boots on the ground” in response should be on the US border. If, God forbid, a soldier is killed there, at least he died for his country.

The fact is, the first line of defense in this war is our border — all of our borders, from the nation-states of Europe, struggling to break free from the socialism- and diversity-enforcing EU behemoth, to these United States of America, struggling to break from the socialism- and diversity-enforcing White House behemoth. These borders — these sovereign states — are all (an exception is Hungary) undefended by governments in thrall to global imperatives, not responsibility for their own citizens or their own laws. It is first and foremost at these borders that the main mechanism of societal destruction is being activated by massive, lawless population shifts from the Third World, the Islamic world.

They are destroying Western societies by making them non-Western. Fighting jihad gangs in the Middle East does nothing to stop this destruction underway at home.

Meanwhile, Islamic society is whitewashed by pretending the dangers it poses to Western societies are non-Islamic (the Left with talk of “extremism”), or so outside the Islamic norm as to render Islam itself beyond debate, beyond concern (the Right with talk of “Islamism”).

Take a recent essay on Paris by Andrew C. McCarthy.

“Allahu Akbar!” cried the jihadists as they killed innocent after French innocent. The commentators told us it means “God is great.” But it doesn’t. It means “Allah is greater!” It is a comparative, a cry of combative aggression: “Our God is mightier than yours.” It is central to a construction of Islam, mainstream in the Middle East, that sees itself at war with the West. It is what animates our enemies.

We are supposed to believe that “a construction of Islam, mainstream in the Middle East,” is what animates our enemies — not Islam.

Is that so?

If this were ten, five, three years ago, I might ask what Koran, sunnas, and hadiths that this “construction of Islam” is based upon? I might break out the poll data that demonstrates strong Muslim affinity for sharia the world over. I might point to a 2013 study of 9,000 Muslims in six European countries which found that 65 percent say that religious rules are more important that the laws of the country in which they live.

But is there a point? Fourteen years after 9/11, Islam is spectrum-wide defended in the public square even as it destroys the public square, while the threat to the public square is usually identitied as coming from Europe’s so-called “far right.”

But never fear. Memorial light displays are ready anywhere, anytime.

08/5/15

Robert Conquest (1917-2015)

By: Diana West

Robert Conquest has died at age 98. He was a gigantic hero of truth and the voiceless.

On a professional note that is also personal, Robert Conquest’s tremendous body of work — and, I would add, the consternation and controversy his work engendered amid the “intelligentsia”  — has been and will remain a guiding inspiration.

In many ways, American Betrayal is itself a paean to Conquest.

Some relevant passages from the book follow.

p. 94

British historian Robert Conquest is one such magnificent exception. Conquest’s special branch of Soviet history might well be called Soviet exterminationism—a new “ism,” perhaps, but one that fittingly encapsulates the history of mass murder Conquest has immersed himself in, cataloging and analyzing the boggling scale of murder and tragedy deliberately wrought by the Communist regime in Russia. His macabre exercise began, most notably, with his history of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, The Great Terror. The book came out in 1968, a time when no other historians were even acknowledging the existence of this hulking wound of a subject, a time when, amazingly, Joseph E. Davies’s twenty-seven-year-old pro-Stalin tract, Mission to Moscow, was still the first and last word on the subject. Noting the Conquest book’s uniqueness in 1968, Andrew and Mitrokhin called it “a sign of the difficulty encountered by many Western historians in interpreting the Terror” (emphasis added).45 When Conquest finally marshaled the available research and put a number on the horror— twenty million killed during the Stalin period—it was as though the historian had additionally become a cold-case criminologist and, further, by implication, a hanging judge. As crunched by columnist Joseph Alsop, commenting in 1970 on a particularly callous review of the Conquest book and its themes, those twenty million souls killed by the regime represented one-eighth of the entire Russian population “of that period, in peacetime and without provoking a whisper of protest.”46

How could that be? Without understanding the extent of Communist pen- etration into the decision-and-opinion-making echelons of the West—and, as important, into the decision-and-opinion-making minds of the West—the question is baffling, a mystery without clues, a historical brick wall. From our vantage point, blanks and all, it is almost impossible to comprehend how it could have been that our relatives and forebears, apparently sentient, apparently decent Americans, could have looked on in neutral silence as the Soviet state, year after year, starved and brutalized and enslaved millions of its own people to death—news of which did indeed spread throughout the West despite Soviet censorship and prevarication, although it remained outside consensus.47 Dalton Trumbo, as we’ve seen, took pride in the silence on the Hollywood front. He’s hailed as a martyr of idealism. Historians, as we’ve seen, looked the other way, strenuously, to protect their precious “basic symmetry.” They remain figures of respect and authority. How—and when—did these and other inversions of logic and morality, common sense and common decency, begin to take place?

pp. 100-101

On his real-life return to the USSR, [journalist] Eugene Lyons would see and eventually understand. He writes of finding the familiar old mind games, the sifting techniques, no longer effective on his return. “With every week after my return I came to feel more ashamed of my mealy-mouthed caution while at home,” he writes. “Deep under those excuses I had made for myself, I now was forced to admit, had been the subconscious desire to remain persona grata with the masters, retain my job. I was protecting my status as a ‘friendly’ correspondent. And at that I had just about crawled under the line.”60

There Lyons was to stay at least long enough to participate in a seminal event in Soviet crime and Western turpitude: what Robert Conquest would much later identify as the very first successful implementation of the “Big Lie”—the concerted assault on truth to form world opinion, in this original case, to deny the regime-engineered Famine in the Ukraine. It was a Faustian turning point.

Conquest writes:

On the face of it, this [deception] might appear to have been an impossible un- dertaking. A great number of true accounts reached Western Europe and America, some of them from impeccable Western eyewitnesses . . .

But Stalin had a profound understanding of the possibilities of what Hitler approvingly calls the Big Lie. He knew that even though the truth may be read- ily available, the deceiver need not give up. He saw that flat denial on the one hand, and the injection into the pool of information of a corpus of positive false- hood on the other, were sufficient to confuse the issue for the passively in- structed foreign audience, and to induce acceptance of the Stalinist version by those actively seeking to be deceived.

Flat denial plus a corpus of positive falsehood: Sounds like another black hole of antiknowledge, another corroding attack on the basis of the Enlightenment itself. Conquest describes this concerted effort to deceive the world about the truth of the state-engineered famine, Stalin’s brutal war on the peasantry, as “the first major instance of the exercise of this technique of influencing world opinion.”61

This instance, then, was a seminal moment in the history of the world. The seminal moment, perhaps, of the twentieth century, a moment in which history itself, always subject to lies and colorations, became susceptible to something truly new under the sun: totalitarianism; more specifically, the totalitarian in- novation of disinformation, later expanded, bureaucratized and, in effect, wea- ponized, by KGB-directed armies of dezinformatsiya agents.

pp. 104-108

More than three decades later, in 1968, when Robert Conquest came along with his testimonies, his figures, and his footnotes attesting to the colossal horror of the Soviet regime, first regarding the Moscow show trials, and then, in 1985, with his testimonies, his figures, and his footnotes attesting to the Terror Famine in the Ukraine, there was no need to meet in a hotel room with a Soviet censor and work out a conspiracy of denial and drink to it with vodka. Nor was there consciousness of such a need. The legacy of denial had become so powerful in the interim as to have become imperceptible and stunningly effective. “The main lesson seems to be that the Communist ideology provided the moti- vation for an unprecedented massacre of men, women and children,” Conquest wrote, but class was incapable of learning.70

“People accepted his facts, but they didn’t accept his conclusions,” British writer Neal Ascherson said to the British newspaper The Guardian in 2003, perfectly crystallizing the intelligentsia’s permanent reaction to Conquest.71 This facts-sans-implications formulation is key. It sounds so reasonable. Come, come, dear boy; no one is rejecting your facts, just your conclusions. There may indeed be extreme “food shortages,” but widespread mortality is due to diseases associated with “malnutrition,” not famine. Facts, yes. Conclusions, no. However, such facts are conclusions because they are crimes. Soviet exterminationism is Soviet exterminationism (emphasis on Soviet), just as Nazi genocide is Nazi genocide (emphasis on Nazi). Reject the conclusion and the facts, the crimes, become meaningless. Indeed, such facts demand judgment, just as such crimes demand a verdict. As Conquest put it:

The historian, registering the facts beyond doubt, and in their context, cannot but also judge. Die Weltgeschischte ist das Weltgericht—World History is the World’s Court of Judgment: Schiller’s dictum may seem too grandiose today. Yet the establishment of the facts certainly includes the establishment of responsibility.72

The Left tried to drive a wedge between the facts as Conquest marshaled them and the conclusions as he drew them, making efforts to taint both due to his evident “dislike” of purges, terror, and death camps—or, as Eugene Lyons might have put it ironically, his middle-class liberal “hang-overs of prejudice” against dictatorship, mass slaughter, and the crushing of the human spirit. Conquest writes:

It was believed that a “Cold Warrior” became opposed to the Soviet system be- cause of some irrational predisposition . . . The idea seems to be that if one can show that opposition to the Soviet threat was in part based on dislike of Soviet actualities and intentions—that is, “emotions”—then the opposition cannot have been objective. But, of course, the Soviet system was indeed disliked, even detested, because of its record and intentions.73

What Conquest’s detractors dismissed as “emotions”—namely, “dislike of Soviet actualities and intentions” (including twenty million killed by Stalin)— was in fact a historian’s verdict of responsibility regarding such crimes. Visceral feelings aside, it is a judgment based on evidence, logic, and moral analysis. These are the same underpinnings of any rational investigation into Nazi “ac- tualities and intentions” and subsequent finding of their detestable nature. No one would pause over the following slight reworking of a Conquest line quoted above: “The main lesson seems to be that the Nazi ideology provided the motivation for an unprecedented massacre of men, women and children”— but insert “Communist ideology” into the sentence and boy, look out.

“No one could deal with this,” he writes of his Great Terror research, “or other themes I wrote of later, unless judgmental as well as inquisitive; and those who denied the negative characteristics of Soviet Communism were deficient in judgment and in curiosity—gaps in the teeth and blinkers on the eyes.”74

To be able to “deal with” the evil of Communist extermination history, then, as Conquest writes, is to be judgmental as well as inquisitive. This suggests a continuum between such fruits of curiosity and academic labor—the repugnant facts of Communist extermination history—and our judgment of them. The gap-toothed and blinkered ones, however, set out to interrupt this continuum, to sunder these facts from their conclusions, to explode the whole logical exercise that begins in facts and ends in conclusions into senseless fragments—to decontextualize it (and everything else while they’re at it). Yes, the Nazi system killed six million people (fact), and yes, the Nazi system was evil (conclusion); and yes, the Soviet system killed twenty million people (fact), but how dare that “cowboy” Ronald Reagan call the Soviet Union the “evil empire”?

Like postmodernism itself, this massive inconsistency on Nazism and Communism doesn’t make a shred of sense. If making sense were the goal, the phrase “evil empire” would have been a trite truism, a hoary cliché long before Ronald Reagan uttered the words, which, like the most potent incantation, drove tribes of intelligentsia the Western world over into fits of mass hysteria and rage—against evil Reagan, not the empire. If the words today no longer conjure the same teeth-gnashing indictment of Old West simplicity they once did, they still manage to strike a spark or two of faux outrage. Also, the quotation marks of irony have yet to fall away.

I went back to the original Reagan speech recently, realizing I’d never heard or read any more of it than that signature phrase. Reagan was addressing evangelical Christians at a time when the so-called nuclear freeze, which we now know to have been a colossal Soviet influence operation,75 was under debate in Congress and Reagan was proposing to deploy Pershing missiles in Europe. Two weeks later, he would announce his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which, even as it became the obsession that would drive the final Soviet dicta- tors to exhaust the Communist system in their futile efforts to compete, was endlessly caricatured in Western media as a “cowboy’s” comic-book ray gun of choice straight from Star Wars—no doubt a Soviet-encouraged moniker.

The speech is surprisingly mild. I was surprised to learn that by the time Reagan gets around to mentioning the “evil empire,” he was not inveighing against the USSR directly but rather against the creed of moral equivalence, at the time the very definition of intellectual chic. It’s hard to convey the intensity of the drumbeat for moral equivalence in those days. It was background noise and op-ed commentary, the premise of debate (“Resolved: There is no moral difference between the world policies of the United States and the Soviet Union,” Oxford Union debate, February 23, 1984) and the endings of movies (Three Days of the Condor [1975], Apocalypse Now [1979], Reds [1981]). The era Reagan was trying to end was one of entrenched belief in “ambiguities” between capitalism and Communism, between liberty and tyranny. It was too much for one man to do, even Ronald Reagan.

“We’re all the same, you know, that’s the joke,” East German agent Fiedler remarks to British agent Leamas in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, le Carré’s stunningly successful 1963 novel that instituted the le Carré brand. This joke was an old story by the 1980s, the conventional wisdom, the Establishment point of view. It still is. By 2008, le Carré was confiding to The Sunday Times of London, over fragrant, amber-colored glasses of Calvados, as the waves crashed at the foot of the cliffs below the author’s Cornwall home, that he had himself been tempted to defect to the Soviet Union.76

“Well, I wasn’t tempted ideologically,” he reasserts, in case there should be any doubt, “but when you spy intensively and you get closer and closer to the border . . . it seems such a small step to jump . . . and, you know, find out the rest” [ellipses in original].

The rest about the twenty million killed? Heavens, no. The Times explains:

This is maybe less surprising than at first it seemed: we are in true le Carré territory, nuanced and complex, where the spying is sometimes an end in itself and where there is rarely an easy, Manichaean split between the good guys and the bad guys. Defecting was a temptation the writer resisted, to our good fortune [em- phasis added].

To each our own. What is remarkable here is less the “news” about le Carré than the ease with which the reporter absorbs this point of moral cretinhood, conveying the author’s view as a beguilingly piquant eccentricity even as it skirts the charnel houses the man found himself fascinated and not repelled by. Such enthusiasm would not have greeted a thriller writer who expressed a temptation to “jump . . . and, you know, find out the rest” about, say, the Third Reich.

If an unhealthy attraction to the Soviet Union was still respectable as re- cently as 2008, imagine how outrageous the phrase “evil empire” sounded twenty-five years earlier. This is what Reagan actually said:

In your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunder- standing and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.77

Reagan’s exhortation to face “the facts of history” was a broad challenge, his reference to “the aggressive impulses of an evil empire” an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment. The cataclysmic histories of Ukraine, Finland, Bessarabia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Korea, East Germany, Vietnam, China, Cuba, Angola, and on and on were not the shining raiment becoming an empire of peace. Reagan was challenging us to acknowledge the implications of this fact, to fight the paralysis of “moral equivalence,” and see not two bullies in a playground, as the East-West struggle was repetitiously framed, but one aggressor seeking to impose a totalitarian system over as much of the world as possible. Good and Evil. Reagan may have had to struggle to explain this to the West, but the Soviets, as Robert Conquest reminds us, looking back from the vantage point of 2005, were never unclear, morally or otherwise, about their intentions:

The Soviet Union, right up to the eve of its collapse, was committed to the con- cept of an unappeasable conflict with the Western world and to the doctrine that this could only be resolved by what Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko de- scribed, as officially as one can imagine (in his 1975 book The Foreign Policy of the Soviet Union) as world revolution: “The Communist Party of the Soviet Union subordinates all its theoretical and practical activity in the sphere of foreign relations to the task of strengthening the positions of socialism, and the interests of further developing and deepening the world revolutionary process.”78

As Conquest added, “one could hardly be franker.”

And he is gone from us now. A permanent loss. R.I.P.

06/19/15

Obama-linked Extremist Group Publishes “HIT LIST” of Anti-Sharia Females in the U.S.

Doug Ross @ Journal

By Judicial Watch

The Obama-tied leftist group that helped a gunman commit an act of terrorism against a conservative organization has assembled a starter kit for Islamists to attack American women who refuse to comply with Sharia law, the authoritarian doctrine that inspires Islamists and their jihadism.

It’s the summer special from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an extremist nonprofit that lists conservative organizations that disagree with it on social issues on a catalogue of “hate groups.” A few years ago a gunman received a 25-year prison sentence for carrying out the politically-motivated shooting of the Family Research Council (FRC) headquarters after admitting that he learned about the FRC from the SPLC “hate map.” Prosecutors called it an act of terrorism and recommended a 45-year sentence.

Now the SPLC, which has conducted diversity training for the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ), is targeting female bloggers, activists and television personalities who refuse to comply with Sharia law which is rooted in the Quran. The European Court on Human rights has repeatedly ruled that Sharia is “incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy” yet politically-connected radical Muslim groups—such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR)—keep pushing to implement it in the United States and the movement has gained steam.

Among those resisting this effort publicly are the high-profile women being targeted by the SPLC. Some of them are colleagues or friends of Judicial Watch and now they must fear for their safety simply for practicing their rights under the U.S. Constitution. The new hate list is titled Women Against Islam/The Dirty Dozen and includes illustrations and detailed information on all the women, who are branded “the core of the anti-Muslim radical right.” The new SPLC hate brochure further targets them by claiming that they’re “a dozen of the most hardline anti-Muslim women activists in America.”

Political activist and commentator Pamela Geller is branded the “country’s most flamboyant and visible Muslim-basher” for, among other things “smearing and demonizing Muslims.” Blogger Ann Barnhardt is identified as one of the “most extreme Muslim-bashers in the United States” and radio talk-show host Laura Ingram made the list for saying that hundreds of millions of Muslims were delighted that 12 people were massacred by Islamic terrorists in the Paris headquarters of a satirical magazine. Former CIA agent Clare Lopez, who runs a Washington D.C. think-tank focusing on national security issues, made the list for saying that the Muslim Brotherhood has “infiltrated and suborned the U.S. government to actively assist…the mission of its grand jihad.”

Others appearing on the anti-Sharia docket include television personality and former judge and prosecutor Jeanine Pirro, former chairwoman of the Texas Republican Party Cathie Adams, talk-show host Sandy Rios of the American Family Association, syndicated columnist Diana West, attorney and columnist Debbie Schlussel, blogger Cathy Hinners, ACT! for America founder Brigitte Gabriel and conservative writer and TV personality Ann Coulter. Among her biggest offenses, according to the SPLC, is proclaiming that “not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims—at least all terrorists capable of assembling a murderous plot against America.”

Incredibly, the SPLC is one of a number of leftist special interest groups that has colluded with the DOJ since Obama moved into the White House. A few years ago JW uncovered government records that show the DOJ Civil Rights and Tax divisions engaged in questionable behavior while negotiating for SPLC co-founder Morris Dees to appear as the featured speaker at a 2012 “Diversity Training Event.” JW pursued the records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to determine what influence the SPLC’s branding of hate groups has had on government agencies.

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03/25/15

The Enemy of My Enemy Really Is My Enemy

The Right Planet

By: Diana West
DianaWest.net

Watch the video or read the transcript (below) — both courtesy MEMRI — and tell me who is our friend here: the suspected-ISIS Sunni bomber or the Shiite Houthi victims?

Can’t find a friend? That’s because Benyamin Netanyahu is right: The enemy of my enemy really is not my friend but my enemy.

Preacher: Our belief in Allah will increase after today. We will triumph over their deceit and their arrogance. Allah is with us…

Worshippers: Death to America.

Death to Israel.

Curse upon the Jews.

Victory to Islam.

Allah Akbar.

Death to America.

Death to Israel.

Curse upon the Jews.

Victory to…

An arrow on-screen points to a man walking through the crowd, a bomb goes off and worshippers cry out

[…]

Related:

From TRP:

“The nations fall into the pitfalls they have dug for others; the trap they set has snapped on them.”  —Psalm 9:15 (NLB)

02/16/15

“Defeat Jihad Summit” – Diana West Summary – Videos

Diana West
Hat Tip: Dick Manasseri

Editor’s Note – From the Center for Security Policy, headed by Frank Gaffney, the following summary identified what the Defeat Jihad Summit was designed to accomplish, this followed by notes taken by one attendee, Diana West:

Today, an extraordinary gathering of freedom-fighters in what might best be described as the War for the Free World convened in Washington, D.C.3348068130

Their purpose was to anticipate and rebut the thesis of President Obama’s “Countering Violent Extremism Summit” next week – namely, that the United States faces hostile forces whose identity, motivations and capabilities are defined by an opaque euphemism: violent extremism.

The “Defeat Jihad Summit” was sponsored by the Center for Security Policy and brought together present and former, domestic and foreign political leaders, senior military officers, national security professionals and other experts on Islamic supremacism and its guiding doctrine, shariah.

Please read the notes here and then go their site and view the videos of the speakers and more. Videos for Senator Ted Cruz. Governor Bobby Jindal, Speaker Newt Gingrich, General Jerry Boykin and a list of many others are on that link.

Notes from a Defeat Jihad Summit

By Diana West – “Death of the Grown-Up

Diana West

Earlier this week, I participated in the Center for Security Policy’s Defeat Jihad Summit.

I find that the several hours of speeches and discussion have distilled into some salient recollections and comments.

1) There remains a chasm between American “messaging” and that of some of our European friends who were invited to speak, including the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, who contributed a taped message, and Lars Hedegaard, who addressed the conference via Skype from Denmark.

American participants in the main demand, even a little truculently, that we now, finally, break the bonds of “political correctness” and speak frankly about “radical Islam,” “Islamism,” “ideas of ISIS,” etc.

Wilders, whose Party for Freedom is No. 1 in the Dutch polls, and Dispatch International editor Hedegaard both speak, and have always spoken about “Islam” — pure and very simple.

Indeed, Wilders has encapsulated everything you need to know about Islam and the West thus: “The more Islam there is in a society, the less freedom there is.”

Not “Islamism.”

This difference is more than semantic. wilders

The primary mechanism of control that Islam exerts over people is Islamic slander law, Islamic blasphemy law. This is the institutional means by which Islam protects itself against criticism, even objective facts about Islam that might be construed critically.

The penalty is death. Not for nothing did Yusef Qaradawi state that Islam wouldn’t even exist without the death penalty for “apostasy.”

We have seen innumerable instances, particularly since the 1989 publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, where Muslims have executed, or tried to execute this death sentence even against non-Muslims, from Europe to Japan, in efforts to extend the rule of Islam.

When American lawmakers, generals and security experts omit “Islam” from their debates and war councils, focusing instead on what they have dubbed “radical Islam,” “Islamism” and the like, they are succombing to this same control mechanism.

They are protecting Islam. They are themselves sheltering Islam against the cold light of analysis. By extension, they are also preventing their own Western societies from devising means of defense against Islamization. They are accepting and carrying out what is probably the most important Islamic law.

There is concrete danger in this. Unless we can come to an understanding that it is the teachings of Islam — not the teachings of some peculiar strain called “Islamism,” or of an organization such as the Muslim Brotherhood or ISIS — that directly undermine our constitutional liberties, we cannnot protect our way of life from these teachings, whose popularity grows with the increasing Islamic demographic.

This is what the advanced Islamization of Europe shows us. A nominally sensible US immigration policy would immediately halt Islamic immigration to prevent a sharia-demographic from gaining more critical mass in the USA, democratically.

Then again, we don’t have a national border, much less a sensible immigration policy. That means many of these questions are moot.

2) Still, it bears noting: The Left has responded to the current cycle of Islamic jihad — a recurring blight on civilization, as Andrew Bostom’s Legacy of Jihad amply documents — by inventing a foe called “violent extremism.”

The Right, scoffing at this euphemism, “pinpoints” the threat of “radical Islamism.”Bostom

What is the difference? Ultimately, I see none. Both terms protect Islam.

Warning against the dangers of “radical Islam” implies that there exists some “normal Islam” that is completely compatible, perhaps even interchangeable, with Christianity and Judaism.

Indeed, this ongoing effort to normalize Islam is equally as dangerous as the institutional efforts that long ago “normalized” Communism.

This officially began when FDR “normalized” relations with the wholly abnormal Soviet regime in 1933, a morally odious event whose horrific repercussions are treated at length in American Betrayal.

Just as it required endless apologetics (lies) to maintain the fiction of “normal” Communism, so, too, does it require endless apologetics (lies) to maintain the fiction of “normal” or “moderate” Islam.

According to all of Islam’s authoritative texts, according to the example of Islam’s prophet, this “moderate” creed does not Islamically exist.

To turn the notion around, as Lars recently reminded me, when the brave and splendid ex-Muslim Wafa Sultan was asked several years ago to distinguish between “Islam” vs. “Islamism” at a Copenhagen conference, she brought the airy theory back to earth by asking: Based on your definition of Islamism, was Mohammed a Muslim or an “Islamist”?

3) This brings me to The Best Line of the summit, which was spoken by Nonie Darwish: “Islamism is Islam and Islam is Islamism.”

4) The Spirit of ’76 Award goes to retired Admiral James “Ace” Lyons who inquired of guest speaker and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich whether there was any movement in the Congress to censure Obama or initiate impeachment hearings. The consensus on this burning, patriotic question is, no, expediently speaking, there is not nor will there be such a movement.

As per the entire US elite’s corruption and complicity in Soviet crime outlined in American Betrayal, it seems we have arrived at the point where Obama’s political judge and jury — our elected representatives in the Congress — is surely complicit in his crimes against the Constitution, as well as with his identity fraud on the American people.

5) The Most Profound New Thought of the summit came from brave and splendid ex-Muslim Nonie Darwish (who, bonus, I met for the first time here).

Nonie conveyed her understanding, having grown up in Egypt the privileged daughter of an Egyptian shahid (martyr), that terrorism, the threat of terrorism is a feature of Islamic life at all levels: inside the family, in the public square, and everywhere in between.

I’m paraphrasing, but what came through her talk was the idea that Muslim “moderates” in Islamic society (which I am taking to mean human beings who do not have the seeds of violence within them) have come to take Islamic terrorism/violence/coercion as a given.

This means that they have come to accept such terrorism/violence/coercion as normal. Her great fear is that Americans, too, are coming to accept such Islamic violence as normal — that we, in a sense, are taking on the role of such Muslim moderates. This is, if it can be imagined, an even darker iteration of dhimmitude.

6) Speaking of ex-Muslims, I made a comment about the role of the apostate in the great ideological battles of our time. Today, it is the ex-Muslims who offer special insight into totalitarianism of the Islamic kind.

Many of my American colleagues, however, still prefer to lean on guidance from Muslim “moderates” — despite the fact, referenced above, that Islam’s own sacred texts, including the example of Islam’s prophet, support no such “moderation.”51yHDd+p4NL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_

As they wish, they may await, or even themselves lead an Islamic reformation, but this in no way protects free speech or preserves public safety in our country now — especially when there are indicators that an alarming level of support for curbing and even criminalizing free speech about Islam exists among American Muslims — punitive measures, again, that find support in Islam’s texts.

In the 20th-century-battle against totalitarian Communism, anti-Communists did not embrace “moderate Communists.” Rather, they embraced ex-Communists who understood the totalitarian teachings and practices of Communism in Moscow’s gangster-quest for global dominance — a “caliphate” a la Lenin & Marx.

It was mainly the Left and Center  — the anti-anti-Communist Left and Center — that made common cause with “moderate Communists,” i.e., Social Democrats, Communist apologists, also Soviet agents among others, engendering meaningless treaties, defeats and loss.

Even more pernicious, though, was the resulting “postmodern” rot across the political spectrum, which tells me, as I argue in American Betrayal, that the West lost the “struggle of ideas” in the “Cold War.”

This spectral shift is interesting in and of itself. I see its patterns repeat in the past decade of military disaster in which it was US military strategy to ignore the teachings of Islam and instead lean on perceived Muslim moderates, or just bank on a hoped-for emergence of Muslim moderation, in the Islamic nations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Terrible defeats ensued.

As former FBI special agent John Guandolo pointed out at the summit, we’ve tried this type of thing for 15 years and it doesn’t work.

Nor does it make sense — logically, doctrinally, strategically. But then neither does seizing on  “radical Islamism” and other terms of art that exclude and thus protect Islam.

The Moral of this summit: You can’t protect Islam and defeat jihad at the same time.