Traitor

Posted on June 11, 2013 by lburt

By Arnold Ahlert:

Edward Snowden, 29, a former CIA technical assistant and current employee of military contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, went to the Guardian and the Washington Post newspapers and spilled national security secrets that he had promised not to divulge. U.S. Ambassador John Bolton puts that effort in the proper perspective:

Number one, this man is a liar. He took an oath to keep the secrets that were shared with him so he could do his job. He said said he would not disclose them, and he lied. Number two, he lied because he thinks he’s smarter and has a higher morality than the rest of us. This guy thinks he has a higher morality, that he can see clearer than other 299-million 999-thousand 999 of us, and therefore he can do what he wants. I say that is the worst form of treason.

Those who consider Snowden a “hero” might want to consider two other realities as well. First, he clearly violated the Espionage Act. If he isn’t punished for doing so, then the act is utterly toothless. Second, contrast his behavior with that of Benghazi witness Gregory Hicks. Hicks endured the crucible of appearing before Congress and giving testimony about possible State Department improprieties that could ruin him. He didn’t run to a newspaper, then run to Hong Kong and then vanish.

Or possibly defect.

Former CIA case officer Bob Baer told CNN that intelligence officials were speculating that Snowden may be part of a Chinese espionage case. “On the face of it, it looks like [Hong Kong] is under some sort of Chinese control, especially with the president meeting the premier today,” Baer said. “You have to ask what’s going on. China is not a friendly country and every aspect of that country is controlled. So why Hong Kong? Why didn’t he go to Sweden? Or, if he really wanted to make a statement, he should have done it on Capitol Hill.”

Baer also noted the convenient timing of Snowden’s revelation. It followed a weekend summit between Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping, during which the issue of cyber security remained unresolved. “It almost seems to me that this was a pointed affront to the United States on the day the president is meeting the Chinese leader,” Baer speculated, “telling us, listen, quit complaining about espionage and getting on the Internet and our hacking. You are doing the same thing.”

Unfortunately, in the wake of this obviously egregious security breach and possible Chinese meddling, a number of Republicans are more interested in bringing the hammer down on Obama than on Snowden. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has been on the fore of this wrongheaded approach. ”I’m going to be asking all the Internet providers and all of the phone companies: ask your customers to join me in a class action lawsuit,” he told Fox News’ Chris Wallace. “If we get ten million Americans saying we don’t want our phone records looked at, then maybe someone will wake up and something will change in Washington.”

Other Republicans are equally misguided. They have joined Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), signing a letter to the FBI and NSA impugning the programs. Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), who has adopted the libertarian outlook of former Rep. Ron Paul, explained their rationale. “You’ll find a lot of names [on the letter] of people who were recently elected,” Amash said. “We’re not tied to the Bush administration’s policies, which were also wrong.”

In reality, the controversy surrounding the NSA necessitates a serious discussion, apart from both the media-driven hysteria and the partisan politics that inform much of it. There is little question our nation still faces the kind of threat manifested on 9/11. There is no question one of the federal government’s primary functions is to provide for the national defense. Yet as Andrew McCarthy explained at National Review Online, there are two “inseparable issues” that must be reconciled in the process: the government’s seemingly limitless ability to gather information — and how much trust Americans should place in government officials to do it within the confines of the rule of law.

As revealed respectively by the Guardian and the Washington Post via Snowden, the government has been collecting “metadata” from phone companies and Internet servers in order to detect patterns that may reveal burgeoning threats against the nation, which might otherwise go unnoticed. This metadata does not include content, and thus, it does not fall under the auspices of Fourth Amendment protection.

Obama’s Global Makeover

Posted on December 6, 2012 by lburt

Center for Security Policy

By Frank Gaffney, Jr.

In an impromptu conversation with Joe the Plumber during the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama famously and unintentionally acknowledged his support for redistributing the nation’s wealth. And he has been hard at it ever since.

Mr. Obama has yet to cop, however,to another, arguably even more radical agenda: redistributing the nation’s power. We are, nonetheless, beginning to witness the poisonous fruits of his efforts to enhance the relative might of America¹s adversaries while degrading our own. Call it Obama’ s global makeover.

The most obvious example is in the Middle East, where each day brings fresh evidence of how the Obama administration’s disastrous policy of embracing Islamists is transforming and destabilizing the region. Of particular concern is the Muslim Brotherhood’s accelerating domination of the Egyptian government, which is turning the Arab world¹s most populous nation, one that sits astride the strategic Suez Canal and wields a formidable, American-supplied arsenal, into a shariah-adherent, Islamic supremacist state. This is a formula for mass repression in Egypt, war in the Mideast and increased jihadist terror elsewhere.

Less obvious, but potentially even more problematic, is the effect of the Obama-facilitated redistribution of power on Communist China. The Chinese have not been fooled by the President’s putative strategy of ‘pivoting’ to Asia. They understand that his administration is eviscerating American military power a process that will become even more draconian (and perhaps substantially irreversible) as a result of Mr. Obama¹s determination to impose the so-called sequestration round of half-a-trillion dollars more in cuts on a Pentagon already reeling from early $800 billion in previously approved reductions.

As one wag put it, the PRC views us more of a pirouetting paper-tiger than a formidable foe, whose pivot represents a meaningful trategic redeployment.

The ominous repercussions of such a perception are already beginning to manifest themselves:

Last week, police in the Chinese province of Hainan Island announced that they would stop, board, search and possibly seize vessels hey deemed to be ³illegally² plying areas of the South China Sea that Beijing has declared to be its sovereign territory. That could apply to as much as half the world’s oil tanker traffic that passes through those waters. Some observers believe this may be a feint, designed to test American responses and resolve. If so, the U.S. response has been negligible and the Chinese can only be further emboldened by our irresolution to stand up to their aggressive behavior.

It can hardly be an accident that China has begun throwing its weight around in other ways, as well. As David Goldman wrote in the Asia Times on November 27th under the nom de plume Spengler: “It is symptomatic of the national condition of the United States that the worst humiliation ever suffered by it as a nation, and by a U.S. president personally, passed almost without comment last week. I refer to the November 20 announcement at a summit meeting in Phnom Penh that 15 Asian nations, comprising half the world’s population, would form a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership excluding the United States.

We were not accidently barred from this new grouping. Rather, Goldman reports, Obama triedto use the summit to promote a U.S.-sponsored “Trans-Pacific Partnership” that would exclude China. He not only failed.

The ASEAN nations plus India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand actually agreed to form instead a new club with China in, and the United States out. Spengler attributes this poke in the eye to a cold calculation by the Pacific rim types that the United States is no longer the region’s dominant economic power. That may be.

But whether it is a recalibration rooted in changing financial and trade relations or a sense that China is emerging as the new hegemon in their part of the world, the result is the same: Dynamics in Asia that are unlikely to prove conducive to our economy or security.

Then, there is President Obama’s rash effort to rid the world of nuclear weapons, starting with ours. A State Department advisory committee made up of rabid disarmers has just issued a recommendation that the United States make still further, deep reductions in its nuclear stockpile, through negotiated agreements with Russia, if possible, and unilaterally if Vladimir Putin will not go along. This panel like the Obama administration that is expected to embrace its recommendations seems indifferent to the growing evidence that China may have substantially more deployed nuclear weapons than we do. And, unlike ours, theirs are on modern launch vehicles, many of which appear to be hidden in 3,000 miles of hardened tunnels. Meanwhile, Team Obama is ensuring that there will be no modernization of the U.S. arsenal and that its weapons, and the industrial complex vital to their future deterrent value and readiness, will continue to atrophy.

President Obama is redistributing power, all right, and is thereby giving the globe a strategic makeover. Think of it as his “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” by diminishing its power and upgrading that of its enemies.

Does any one actually think this is going to have any effect other than emboldening those who wish us ill, even as we reduce our capacity to deter and, if necessary, to defeat them?

International Religious Freedom Report: Time to Back Up Tough Talk with Tough Actions

Posted on August 1, 2012 by lburt

By John G. Malcolm:

Yesterday, the State Department issued its 2011 International Religious Freedom Report, which represents the culmination of an annual review the State Department must undertake pursuant to the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 (IRFA). However, other than exhorting countries that are egregious violators of religious liberties (as defined in IRFA) to stop doing bad things, the report appears to be short on specific recommendations designed to improve the situations in those countries.

IRFA affirmed America’s commitment to religious freedom as enshrined in our Constitution and in various international instruments, such as Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which provides:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

At the release of the report, Suzan Johnson Cook, the U.S. Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, stated:

Freedom of religion is not just an American right but the right of all people. It goes hand in hand with freedom of expression, freedom of speech and assembly, and when religious freedom is restricted, all these rights are at risk. And for this reason, religious freedom is often the bellwether for other human rights. It’s the canary in the coal mine.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a serious and sobering speech later in the day at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in which she noted that “[m]ore than a billion people live under governments that systematically suppress religious freedom.” She stated that the report “sends a signal to the worst offenders that the world is watching.” Unfortunately, if “what’s past is prologue,” to quote Shakespeare, there is reason to believe that insufficient action will be taken by President Obama to undergird the Secretary’s inspiring words.

IRFA requires the President, who has delegated this authority to the Secretary of State, to designate as “countries of particular concern” (CPCs) those countries whose governments have engaged in or tolerated “particularly severe violations of religious freedom,” which are defined in Section 3(11) of the Act as ones that are systematic, ongoing, and egregious, including acts such as torture, prolonged detention without charges, disappearances, or other flagrant denials of the right to life, liberty, or the security of persons. After a country is designated a CPC, the President is required by law to conduct an annual review, no later than September 1 of each year, and to take one or more of the actions specified in the IRFA.

Section 405 of the IRFA provides the President with an array of options to consider including demarches; private or public condemnation; the denial, delay or cancellation of scientific or cultural exchanges; the cancellation of a state visit; the withdrawal or limitation of humanitarian or security assistance; the restriction of credit or loans from United States and multilateral organizations; the denial of licenses to export goods or technologies; a prohibition against the U.S. government entering into any agreement to procure goods or services from that country; or “any other action authorized by law” so long as it “is commensurate in effect to the action substituted.”

Although IRFA provides that the “President shall seek to take all appropriate and feasible actions authorized by law to obtain the cessation of violations,” the President retains the authority to invoke a waiver of sanctions against a CPC if, in his judgment, circumstances warrant it.

Unfortunately, although IRFA envisions an annual review by the President of the State Department’s CPC recommendations, yesterday’s report did not contain any, citing instead CPC recommendations that were made by the State Department in August 2011. The eight countries that were designated as CPCs by the State Department in August 2011 were Burma, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), Eritrea, Iran, the People’s Republic of China, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Uzbekistan. These are the same eight countries that have been designated as CPCs since January 2009, and many have been on the list for far longer than that.

Although the IRFA is ambiguous as to whether a new designation is required, it is seems strange that, as part of an annual review, the State Department did not proffer an updated list. Equally strange is that the State Department did not offer any explanations as to why it rejected many of the recommendations of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an independent, bipartisan federal government commission, that recommended CPC designation for several other countries in its 2012 Annual Report.

Specifically, USCIRF, where I used to serve as General Counsel, recommended that Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, and Vietnam be designated as CPCs and provided detailed information to support those recommendations, along with specific policy recommendations to remediate the problems in those and other countries. IRFA provides that the Secretary of State must take “into consideration the recommendations of the Commission.” While this does not mean, of course, that the Secretary must or even should adopt all of the Commission’s recommendations, it is somewhat surprising that the International Religious Freedom Report doesn’t address—even in passing—these seeming discrepancies in views toward the appropriate designation of these additional eight countries.

And what actions have been taken against the eight countries that the State Department did designate as CPCs? Well, in the case of Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan, the answer is none, since the President has waived the imposition of sanctions supposedly to further the purposes of the IRFA, although it is hard to see how. With respect to the other countries, sanctions have been imposed, some of them quite severe. However, unfortunately, even with respect to these countries, the sanctions that have been imposed have been under other statutes for other violations of law. While this practice of “double-hatting” is permissible under the IRFA, it sends the wrong signal that our government cares more about other violations of law than it does about egregious violations of religious liberty, and it also provides little incentive for CPCs to ameliorate those violations and improve the human rights of people living within their borders.

Religious freedom has often been given short shrift at Foggy Bottom. Indeed, the U.S. Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom is one of the few Ambassadors who does not report directly to the Secretary of State, reporting instead to the Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. Let us hope that the President will take sufficient action under the IRFA to attempt to address the suffering that many people of faith endure at the hands of egregious violators of religious liberties abroad.