Jun 12, 2014 | Politics
From US spy agencies heard Benghazi attackers using State Dept. cell phones to call terrorist leaders | Fox News:
The terrorists who attacked the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 used cell phones, seized from State Department personnel during the attacks, and U.S. spy agencies overheard them contacting more senior terrorist leaders to report on the success of the operation, multiple sources confirmed to Fox News.The disclosure is important because it adds to the body of evidence establishing that senior U.S. officials in the Obama administration knew early on that Benghazi was a terrorist attack, and not a spontaneous protest over an anti-Islam video that had gone awry, as the administration claimed for several weeks after the attacks.Eric Stahl, who recently retired as a major in the U.S. Air Force, served as commander and pilot of the C-17 aircraft that was used to transport the corpses of the four casualties from the Benghazi attacks – then-U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, information officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods – as well as the assault’s survivors from Tripoli to the safety of an American military base in Ramstein, Germany.In an exclusive interview on Fox News’ “Special Report,” Stahl said members of a CIA-trained Global Response Staff who raced to the scene of the attacks were “confused” by the administration’s repeated implication of the video as a trigger for the attacks, because “they knew during the attack…who was doing the attacking.” Asked how, Stahl told anchor Bret Baier: “Right after they left the consulate in Benghazi and went to the [CIA] safehouse, they were getting reports that cell phones, consulate cell phones, were being used to make calls to the attackers' higher ups.”[...]Stahl also contended that given his crew’s alert status and location, they could have reached Benghazi in time to have played a role in rescuing the victims of the assault, and ferrying them to safety in Germany, had they been asked to do so. “We were on a 45-day deployment to Ramstein air base,” he told Fox News. “And we were there basically to pick up priority missions, last-minute missions that needed to be accomplished.”“You would've thought that we would have had a little bit more of an alert posture on 9/11,” Stahl added. “A hurried-up timeline probably would take us [an] hour-and-a-half to get off the ground and three hours and fifteen minutes to get down there. So we could've gone down there and gotten them easily.”
Jun 3, 2014 | Politics
Daniel Ellsberg: Snowden would not get a fair trial – and Kerry is wrong | Comment is free | theguardian.com
As Snowden told Brian Williams on NBC later that night and Snowden's lawyer told me the next morning, he would have no chance whatsoever to come home and make his case – in public or in court.Snowden would come back home to a jail cell – and not just an ordinary cell-block but isolation in solitary confinement, not just for months like Chelsea Manning but for the rest of his sentence, and probably the rest of his life. His legal adviser, Ben Wizner, told me that he estimates Snowden's chance of being allowed out on bail as zero. (I was out on bond, speaking against the Vietnam war, the whole 23 months I was under indictment).More importantly, the current state of whistleblowing prosecutions under the Espionage Act makes a truly fair trial wholly unavailable to an American who has exposed classified wrongdoing. Legal scholars have strongly argued that the US supreme court – which has never yet addressed the constitutionality of applying the Espionage Act to leaks to the American public – should find the use of it overbroad and unconstitutional in the absence of a public interest defense. The Espionage Act, as applied to whistleblowers, violates the First Amendment, is what they're saying.[...]
John Kerry's challenge to Snowden to return and face trial is either disingenuous or simply ignorant that current prosecutions under the Espionage Act allow no distinction whatever between a patriotic whistleblower and a spy. Either way, nothing excuses Kerry's slanderous and despicable characterizations of a young man who, in my opinion, has done more than anyone in or out of government in this century to demonstrate his patriotism, moral courage and loyalty to the oath of office the three of us swore: to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Jun 3, 2014 | Politics
Today’s letters: My life, my choice how to end it | National Post
Absolutely yes — because the only proper function of government is to protect individual rights, and one’s right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness logically implies the right to end one’s own life if one no longer wants to live, or else freely contract someone to do so (assuming one is an adult when such a right would kick in). The religious enemies of individual rights believe one’s life belongs to a mystical entity and thus one should endure unbearable pain until this entity allegedly decides when one’s life should end, which is irrational and immoral. -- Glenn Woiceshyn, Calgary.
May 31, 2014 | Philosophy, Politics
by Michael HurdShould courts excuse Muslim men who beat up their wives on account of freedom of religious practices and beliefs? Do religious and cultural “sensitivity” count more than individual rights?It seems incredible that we even must consider such questions, but the indiscriminate, unthinking tolerance of our times has brought us here.Consider this most recent news headline:
NYC Muslim Beats Wife to Death, Lawyer says Beating Women is “Customary” in his Culture.The story reports:
A Pakistani immigrant beat his wife to death in their Brooklyn home after she made the mistake of cooking him lentils for dinner instead of the hearty meal of goat meat that he craved, according to court papers.
Noor Hussain, 75, was so outraged over the vegetarian fare that he pummeled his wife, Nazar Hussain, 66, with a stick until she was a “bloody mess,” according to prosecutors and court papers.
Defense attorney Julie Clark admitted Hussain beat his wife — but argued that he is guilty of only manslaughter because he didn’t intend to kill her. In Pakistan, Clark said, beating one’s wife is customary.
“He comes from a culture where he thinks this is appropriate conduct, where he can hit his wife,” Clark said in her opening statements at the Brooklyn Supreme Court bench trial. “He culturally believed he had the right to hit his wife and discipline his wife.” [Source: Daniel Greenfield, FrontPageMag.com 5-23-14]This is what happens when you erase the concepts “right,” “wrong” and objective from your conceptual vocabulary.If it’s true that there’s no such thing as right or wrong, then we have no standard for making a law in the first place. You cannot protect people’s “rights” unless you first establish — and choose to stand by — some concept of “right” (and “wrong”) in the first place.The defense attorney in this case is saying, “There’s no legitimate or objective basis for claiming this man’s religion or cultural tradition is any better or worse than any other.” If his religion says it’s OK to beat up his wife, rape her, hold her hostage, or anything else he feels like doing — well, who are we to judge otherwise? And if his religion teaches this is OK, then we have to change the law because it’s his religion. So we’ll have a double standard for people who practice this irrational religion in favor of those who do not. Oops — we’re not supposed to call one’s religion (at least not a politically correct one, such as Islam) “irrational,” because that’s rude, mean and judgmental.By the way, what does it mean to “culturally believe” something as opposed to merely “believe” it? Are we so divorced from responsibility for the content of our own minds, thoughts and emotions that we can now claim (at least if we’re Muslim) that our culture (i.e. millions of other people) literally do our thinking for us?Sooner or later, rotten ideas come home to roost. Subjectivists in psychology and its parent field, philosophy, have made this claim for decades: What’s true for you isn’t true for me. They’re not just talking about legitimate options and preferences; they’re talking about everything. Physical abuse, rape, torture, initiation of violence? Well, if that’s all you know, or if that’s how you were raised, it’s an excuse for whatever you do.According to this ideological view: The fact that each of us has our own mind proves that there’s no one reality, no provably correct right or wrong, not in any context. Here you have it, now playing out in courts we’re counting on to protect us from brute force initiated by others.You can laugh at philosophy as well as psychology, and claim these fields have no relevance to your daily life. But conclusions in these areas have life or death meaning for what government will do or not do to you; or permit done to you.Oddly silent in all this are the feminists and other opponents of domestic violence against women. Will Hillary Clinton come out against this? Not if it offends Muslims. Will our current president, Barack Obama? This man loves Islam. This is the man who once said, “America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”Seriously, Barack? Try living for five minutes under Sharia (Islamic) law, and see how much overlap you will find between that and America.OK, you’ve got your cultural sensitivity. You’ve got your diversity for its own sake, and you’ve got the emotional sense that, “I’m compassionate, I don’t judge anybody else ever, not for any reason. Now people can like me. Look at what a sensitive, gentle and completely non-judgmental human being I am.” It has been my observation that people who claim to uphold these views don’t necessarily mean them, but badly want to be seen as meaning them. A tiny number of intellectuals and judicial officials actually do hold these incredibly insane viewpoints, and they’re paving the way to death and destruction throughout the free world, so long as the rest of us remain silent and/or stupid.You can’t have your justice and eat it too. You can’t claim that Sharia law — the Muslim approach to “justice” which upholds such atrocities as this Brooklyn defense — is morally equivalent to, or “overlaps” the American, individual rights-based approach to justice. In areas of differing principles, you have to choose one, or the other, but not both.So what’s your choice?
