2006, GW Bush Spoke About the Coming Caliphate

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Before the Military Officers Association, President GW Bush introduced the word ‘caliphate’ in reference to Osama bin Ladin’s terror plans. It was a clarion call to the immediate future. Already war weary and due to the cost of war and unpredictable conditions with a growing enemy, opponents of the Bush Doctrine on the war on terror were fiercely removing support for continued military aggressions.

In the five years since our nation was attacked, we’ve also learned a great deal about the enemy we face in this war. We’ve learned about them through videos and audio recordings and letters and statements they’ve posted on Web sites. We’ve learned about them from captured enemy documents that the terrorists have never meant for us to see.

Together, these documents and statements have given us clear insight into the mind of our enemies, their ideology, their ambitions and their strategy to defeat us.

BUSH: We know what the terrorists intend to do because they’ve told us. And we need to take their words seriously. So today I’m going to describe in the terrorist’s own words what they believe, what they hope to accomplish, and how they intend to accomplish it.

I’ll discuss how the enemy has adapted in the wake of our sustained offensive against them and the threat posed by different strains of violent Islamic radicalism.

Bush had it right yet who is carrying the baton now as that militant future is here upon the Middle East and the West. I’ll explain the strategy we’re pursuing to protect America by defeating the terrorists on the battlefield and defeating their hateful ideology in the battle of ideas.

The terrorists who attacked us on September the 11th, 2001, are men without conscience, but they’re not madmen. They kill in the name of a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs that are evil but not insane.

These Al Qaida terrorists and those who share their ideology are violent Sunni extremists. They are driven by a radical and perverted vision of Islam that rejects tolerance, crushes all dissent, and justifies the murder of innocent men, women and children in the pursuit of political power.

They hope to establish a violent political utopia across the Middle East, which they call caliphate, where all would be ruled according to their hateful ideology.

Osama bin Laden has called the 9/11 attacks, in his words, “a great step towards the unity of Muslims and establishing the righteous caliphate.”

BUSH: This caliphate would be a totalitarian Islamic empire encompassing all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

We know this because Al Qaida has told us.

About two months ago, the terrorist Zawahiri — he’s Al Qaida’s second in command — declared that Al Qaida intends to impose its rule in every land that was a home for Islam, from Spain to Iraq. He went on to say, “The whole world is an open field for us.”

We know what this radical empire would look like in practice, because we saw how the radicals imposed their ideology on the people of Afghanistan.

Under the rule of the Taliban and Al Qaida, Afghanistan was a totalitarian nightmare, a land where women were imprisoned in their homes, men were beaten for missing prayer meetings, girls could not go to school, and children were forbidden the smallest pleasures, like flying kites.

Religious police roamed the streets, beating and detaining civilians for perceived offenses. Women were publicly whipped. Summary executions were held in Kabul’s soccer stadium in front of cheering mobs. And Afghanistan was turned into a launching pad for horrific attacks against America and other parts of the civilized world, including many Muslim nations.

BUSH: The goal of these Sunni extremists is to remake the entire Muslim world in their radical image. In pursuit of their imperial aims these extremists say there can be no compromise or dialogue with those they call infidels, a category that includes America, the world’s free nations, Jews, and all Muslims who reject their extreme vision of Islam. They reject the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the free world.

Again, here are the words of Osama bin Laden earlier this year: “Death is better than living on this Earth with the unbelievers among us.”

So, going forward to May of 2011, the raid and killing of Osama bin Ladin at his Abbottabad compound in Pakistan, over 1 million documents were seized speaking to exactly the continued terror plans of al Qaeda. Only 17 documents have been released publically, which begs the question why? Barack Obama took the war on terror to a new lie, al Qaeda has been decimated and is on the run. Just in recent weeks, this has proven to be false. Obama’s tame war strategy has led to leaders falling from power, countries being seized by al Qaeda and other sympathetic factions and death and destruction of epic proportions. Not to be ignored either at this time, Iran had and still does major operations in Afghanistan and continues to have the same in Iraq.
Barack Obama and his inner circle was and is so bent on terminating military actions globally, his team chose to keep bin Ladin’s cache of operations from the very teams that needed and demanded it. An example is this: One of bin Ladin’s top commanders, al Rahman, wrote a letter to bin Ladin asking for permission to order the Libya Islamic Fighting Group whose members had just been released from prison to take advantage of the Arab Spring and being terror operations in Libya, Syria and Yemen. Permission was granted by Osama bin Ladin.
The Weekly Standard below spells it out.

The United States had gotten its hands on al Qaeda’s playbook—its recent history, its current operations, its future plans. An interagency team led by the Central Intelligence Agency got the first look at the cache. They performed a hasty scrub—a “triage”—on a small sliver of the document collection, looking for actionable intelligence. According to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, the team produced more than 400 separate reports based on information in the documents.

But it is what happened next that is truly stunning: nothing. The analysis of the materials—the “document exploitation,” in the parlance of intelligence professionals—came to an abrupt stop. According to five senior U.S. intelligence officials, the documents sat largely untouched for months—perhaps as long as a year.

In spring 2012, a year after the raid that killed bin Laden and six months before the 2012 presidential election, the Obama administration launched a concerted campaign to persuade the American people that the long war with al Qaeda was ending. In a speech commemorating the anniversary of the raid, John Brennan , Mr. Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser and later his CIA director, predicted the imminent demise of al Qaeda. The next day, on May 1, 2012, Mr. Obama made a bold claim: “The goal that I set—to defeat al Qaeda and deny it a chance to rebuild—is now within our reach.”

The White House provided 17 handpicked documents to the Combatting Terror Center at the West Point military academy, where a team of analysts reached the conclusion the Obama administration wanted. Bin Laden, they found, had been isolated and relatively powerless, a sad and lonely man sitting atop a crumbling terror network.

It was a reassuring portrayal. It was also wrong. And those responsible for winning the war—as opposed to an election—couldn’t afford to engage in such dangerous self-delusion.

“The leadership down at Central Command wanted to know what were we learning from these documents,” says Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, according to the transcript of an interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier for a coming Fox News Reporting special. “We were still facing a growing al Qaeda threat. And it was not just Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iraq. But we saw it growing in Yemen. We clearly saw it growing still in East Africa.” The threat “wasn’t going away,” he adds, “and we wanted to know: What can we learn from these documents?”

After a pitched bureaucratic battle, a small team of analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency and Centcom was given time-limited, read-only access to the documents. The DIA team began producing analyses reflecting what they were seeing in the documents.

At precisely the time Mr. Obama was campaigning on the imminent death of al Qaeda, those with access to the bin Laden documents were seeing, in bin Laden’s own words, that the opposite was true. Says Lt. Gen. Flynn: “By that time, they probably had grown by about—I’d say close to doubling by that time. And we knew that.”

This wasn’t what the Obama White House wanted to hear. So the administration cut off DIA access to the documents and instructed DIA officials to stop producing analyses based on them.

Even this limited glimpse into the broader set of documents revealed the problems with the administration’s claims about al Qaeda. Bin Laden had clear control of al Qaeda and was intimately involved in day-to-day management. More important, given the dramatic growth of the terror threat in the years since, the documents showed that bin Laden had expansion plans. Lt. Gen. Flynn says bin Laden was giving direction to “members of the wider al Qaeda leadership team, if you will, that went all the way to places like West Africa where we see a problem today with Boko Haram and [al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb], all the way back into the things that were going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Bin Laden advised them on everything from specific operations in Europe to the types of crops his minions should plant in East Africa.

To date, the public has seen only two dozen of the 1.5 million documents captured in Abbottabad. “It’s a thimble-full,” says Derek Harvey, a senior intelligence official who helped lead the DIA analysis of the bin Laden collection.

And while it is impossible to paint a complete picture of al Qaeda based on the small set of documents available to the public, documents we are able to read, including those released last week in a Brooklyn terror trial, reveal stunning new details.

According to one letter, dated July 2010, the brother of Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s current prime minister, sought to strike a peace deal with the jihadists. Bin Laden was informed that Shahbaz Sharif, who was then the chief minister of Punjab, wanted to cut a deal with the Pakistani Taliban, whose leadership was close to bin Laden. The government “was ready to reestablish normal relations as long as [the Pakistani Taliban] do not conduct operations in Punjab,” according to the letter from Atiyah Abd al Rahman, one of bin Laden’s top deputies. Attacks elsewhere in Pakistan were apparently acceptable under the terms of the alleged proposal. Al Qaeda intended to guide the Pakistani Taliban throughout the negotiations. The same letter reveals how al Qaeda and its allies used the threat of terrorist attacks as a negotiating tactic in its talks with the Pakistani military.

The letter also shows that Pakistani intelligence was willing to negotiate with al Qaeda. Al Qaeda “leaked” word to the press that “big, earth shaking operations” were planned in Pakistan, the letter says, but bin Laden’s men and their allies would back off if the Pakistani army eased up on its offensive against the jihadists in the north: “In the aftermath” of the al Qaeda leak, “the intelligence people . . . started reaching out to us through some of the Pakistani ‘jihadist’ groups, the ones they approve of.” One of the Pakistani intelligence service’s emissaries was Fazl-ur-Rahman Khalil, a longtime bin Laden ally who leads the Harakat-ul-Mujahideen. Khalil was an early booster of bin Laden’s war against the West, having signed the al Qaeda master’s infamous 1998 fatwa declaring jihad “against the Jews and the Crusaders.” Another government intermediary was Hamid Gul, the one-time head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

Al Qaeda’s network in Iran is also described in bin Laden’s letters. The Iranian regime held some senior al Qaeda leaders, eventually releasing them. This led to disagreements between the two sides. But the mullahs have also allowed al Qaeda to use Iranian soil as a key transit hub, shuttling fighters and cash to and from South Asia. One letter recounts a plan, devised by Yunis al Mauritani, one of bin Laden’s senior lieutenants, to relocate to Iran. Once there, Mauritani would dispatch terrorists to take part in operations around the world.

Mauritani was tasked by bin Laden with planning Mumbai-style shootings in Europe in 2010. The plot was fortunately thwarted. But all of the terrorists selected to take part transited Iran, according to court proceedings in Germany, taking advantage of the Iranian regime’s agreement with al Qaeda.

During the Arab uprisings in 2011, Obama administration officials argued that al Qaeda had been “sidelined” by the peaceful protests. Just weeks before he was killed, however, bin Laden’s men dispatched operatives to Libya and elsewhere to take advantage of the upheaval. “There has been an active Jihadist Islamic renaissance under way in Eastern Libya (Benghazi, Derna, Bayda and that area) for some time, just waiting for this kind of opportunity,” Atiyah Abd al Rahman wrote in early April 2011. Rahman thought there was much “good” in the so-called Arab Spring. And bin Laden believed that the upheaval presented al Qaeda with “unprecedented opportunities” to spread its radical ideology.

The fight over the bin Laden documents continues. Mr. Harvey, the senior DIA official, believes that the documents should be declassified and released to the public as soon as possible, after taking precautions to avoid compromising sources or methods. Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, inserted language in the 2014 intelligence authorization bill requiring just that.

Making the documents public is long overdue. The information in them is directly relevant to many of the challenges we face today—from a nuclear deal with an Iranian regime that supports al Qaeda to the rise of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; from confidence-building measures meant to please the Afghan Taliban to the trustworthiness of senior Pakistani officials.

Choosing ignorance shouldn’t be an option.

Hillary’s Emails, no Encryption and False Names

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There was also stolen White House furniture and then Wall Street. The makings of a Hollywood movie in the text below:

Is the Mysterious ‘Eric Hoteham’ Actually Longtime Clinton Aide Eric Hothem? 

The name of the mysterious individual who registered the servers for Hillary Clinton’s private email address used at the State Department bears a striking resemblance to a longtime Clinton aide.

Clinton and her top aides in the State Department were using email addresses on a private server registered to the Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, New York, according to Internet records reviewed by the Associated Press.

The customer listed in records registering the Internet address to the Chappaqua home was “Eric Hoteham.” The AP, however, was unable to identify an “Eric Hoteham,” stating that the “name does not appear in public records databases, campaign contribution records, or Internet background searches.”

But the name is similar to that of Eric Hothem, who worked as a staff assistant for Clinton during her time as First Lady.

Hothem was involved in multiple personal matters during his service to Clinton and played a role in the controversy surrounding the pardon given to former President Bill Clinton’s half-brother Roger Clinton.

A congressional investigation into Clinton’s clemency decisions found that as Roger Clinton refused to testify to the committee in March 2001, he received a $15,000 wire transfer from a Citibank account in the care of Hothem.

The name of the account was “E.C. 934(A) c/o Eric Hothem.” Lawyers told the committee that “the account is a personal Citibank account of former President and Senator Clinton” and that the money was a loan for Roger Clinton to obtain legal counsel for the investigation.

The congressional report points out that the “payment occurred at the height of public outcry and investigative activity regarding the pardons and at a time when Roger Clinton was deciding whether to provide testimony.”

According to accounts of the final days of the Clinton administration, Hothem told chief White House usher Gary Walters that multiple items of furniture were “the Clintons’ personal property” even though they were not.

The Clintons would later have to return or pay for more than $100,000 in furnishings stolen from the White House.

Hothem also received a special acknowledgement in Hillary Clinton’s book Living History.

Hothem went to work for Citigroup, then moved to JP Morgan Chase in 2013, according to public disclosure reports accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The documents indicate that Hothem began his financial career in 2002, just a year after his last documented work as an aide to Clinton.

Members of Hothem’s JP Morgan office in Washington, D.C., said on Wednesday that they had “no comment” to any questions regarding Hothem and directed the Washington Free Beacon to the company’s media relations department.

Inquiries made to media relations were not answered by press time. An email sent to an account believed to be Hothem’s was also not returned.

An analysis of Clinton’s personal financial disclosure forms shows she maintained accounts worth millions of dollars at Citibank throughout her years in the Senate. She moved her largest accounts to JP Morgan in 2009.

Her most recent available public financial disclosure in 2012 shows that she holds up to $25 million worth of assets in a JP Morgan account. Hothem did not make the switch to JP Morgan until Clinton was out of federal office in May 2013.

Hothem has maintained ties to Democratic campaigns. His wife, Sue Hothem, has “raised millions of dollars in political contributions,” and helped found a political action committee worth nearly $1 million. She was also the director of development Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive Policy Institute.

The Clinton Foundation did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

***    

Clinton’s E-Mail System Built For Privacy Though Not Security

No Encryption or protections and once the emails are gone…well they ARE gone?

A week before becoming Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton set up a private e-mail system that gave her a high level of control over communications, including the ability to erase messages completely, according to security experts who have examined Internet records.

“You erase it and everything’s gone,” Matt Devost, a security expert who has had his own private e-mail for years. Commercial services like those from Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. retain copies even after users erase them from their in-box.

Although Clinton worked hard to secure the private system, her consultants appear to have set it up with a misconfigured encryption system, something that left it vulnerable to hacking, said Alex McGeorge, head of threat intelligence at Immunity Inc., a Miami Beach-based digital security firm.

The e-mail flap has political significance because Clinton is preparing to announce a bid for the Democratic nomination for president as soon as April. It also reminds voters of allegations of secrecy that surrounded Bill Clinton’s White House. In those years, First Lady Hillary Clinton fought efforts by some White House advisers to turn over information to Whitewater investigators and, later, sought to keep secret records of her task force on health-care reform.

Representative Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican who leads a special committee looking into the events surrounding the 2012 terrorist attack at a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, said he will subpoena Clinton’s e-mails.

“We’re going to use every bit of legal recourse at our disposal,” Gowdy said Wednesday during an interview on CNN.

Private Service

The committee also said Wednesday that it has discovered two e-mail addresses used by Clinton while secretary of state.

Nick Merrill, a Clinton spokesman, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, though he said in a statement Tuesday that her practices followed “both the letter and spirit of the rules.”

Setting up a private e-mail service was once onerous and rare. Now, it’s relatively easy, said Devost, president of FusionX LLC, based in Arlington, Virginia.

“There are tons of disadvantages of not having teams of government people to make sure that mail server isn’t compromised,” McGeorge said. “It’s just inherently less secure.”

Former Florida Governor and likely 2016 Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush and used a personal e-mail while he was governor and has done so since, according to his spokeswoman, Kristy Campbell. He kept a server he owned in his state office and didn’t have a private server at home, Campbell said in a phone interview.

Bush E-Mails

Bush differed from Clinton in that it was known he was using a personal e-mail, his aides had regular access to the server and “his office consistently throughout his term complied with Florida’s public records laws,” Campbell said.

In order to ensure her e-mails were private, Clinton’s system appeared to use a commercial encryption product from Fortinet — a good step, McGeorge said.

However, when McGeorge examined the set-up this week he found it used a default encryption “certificate,” instead of one purchased specifically for Clinton’s service. Encryption certificates are like digital security badges, which websites use to signal to incoming browsers that they are legitimate.

“It’s bewildering to me,” he said. “We should have a much better standard of security for the secretary of state.”

Confirmation Hearing

Clinton’s private e-mail — [email protected] — was on a domain set up Jan. 13, 2009, the same day a Senate committee held her confirmation hearing. She was confirmed and sworn in on Jan. 21 as President Barack Obama’s first Secretary of State.

It’s entirely possible that Clinton had a private e-mail system set up at her home as a way to maintain administrative and legal control over her communications, said Tim “T.K.” Keanini, chief technology officer for network security company Lancope Inc. based in Atlanta.

“What we know is that she cared about that communication channel so much that she went out of her way,” and likely hired an expert to configure it for her, Keanini said in a phone interview.

Even so, there’s no guarantee she had complete control over what happened to the e-mails, Keanini said.

Keanini searched Internet records to determine that the computer server supporting Clinton’s e-mail was located in her hometown of Chappaqua, New York. An exact physical address could not be determined. The Internet Protocol address for the server was registered to a person by the name of Eric Hoteham, according to the records.

Kerry’s E-Mail

Supporters note that e-mails sent to State Department employees would have been retained on the government’s system.

However, the e-mail system was also used by at least some close staff, including Huma Abedin, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff at the State Department.

Clinton has yet to speak publicly about her motivation for setting up the system or what discussions she had with her advisers at the time.

Secretary of State John Kerry is the first in his position to rely primarily on a state.gov e-mail account, Deputy Press Secretary Marie Harf said. Harf said that the State Department has “no indication that Secretary Clinton used her personal e-mail account for anything but unclassified purposes.”

While Clinton didn’t have a classified e-mail system, she had multiple ways of communicating in a classified manner, including assistants printing documents for her, secure phone calls and secure video conferences.

Top Aide

Clinton’s top aide during that period, Cheryl Mills, is a respected scandal-defense lawyer. As a member of the White House counsel’s office, Mills helped guide President Bill Clinton through a series of investigations in the 1990s and won praise for her performance in successfully defending him when the Senate voted not to remove him from office in 1999.

Mills would go on to combine two of the most powerful posts at the State Department — chief of staff and counselor — under Hillary Clinton. In that job, she spoke for Clinton on management matters within the department.

Mills didn’t reply to an e-mail seeking comment.

Not long after resigning as secretary of state, Clinton’s private e-mail service was transferred to a commercial provider, MX Logic, Devost said.

“The timing makes sense,” Devost said. “When she left office and was no longer worried as much about control over her e-mails, she moved to a system that was easier to administer.”

Encrypted Connection

It took less than a day for researchers to find potential problems with the Clinton’s system.

Using a scanning tool called Fierce that he developed, Robert Hansen, a web-application security specialist, found what he said were the addresses for Microsoft Outlook Web access server used by Clinton’s e-mail service, and the virtual private network used to download e-mail over an encrypted connection. If hackers located those links, they could search for weaknesses and intercept traffic, according to security experts.

Using those addresses, McGeorge discovered that the certificate appearing on the site Tuesday appeared to be the factory default for the security appliance, made by Fortinet Inc., running the service.

Those defaults would normally be replaced by a unique certificate purchased for a few hundred dollars. By not taking that step, the system was vulnerable to hacking.

Fortinet Statement

It’s unclear whether the site’s settings were the same before news of the private e-mail account emerged this week.

Fortinet issued a statement saying it wasn’t aware the company’s technologies were used by Clinton.

“If they were, our recommendation is to replace provided self-signed certificates with valid digital certificates for the protected domains,” said Andrea Cousens, a Fortinet spokeswoman.

“It may have fallen in the realm of acceptable risk,” Devost said. “They wanted to make sure that when she was in Egypt all of the traffic from her phone to the mail server was encrypted and that was their priority.”

SCOTUS on Obamacare, Facts

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court was sharply divided Wednesday in the latest challenge to President Barack Obama’s health overhaul, this time over the tax subsidies that make insurance affordable for millions of Americans.

The justices aggressively questioned lawyers on both sides of what Justice Elena Kagan called “this never-ending saga,” the latest politically charged fight over the Affordable Care Act.

Chief Justice John Roberts said almost nothing in nearly 90 minutes of back-and-forth, and Justice Anthony Kennedy’s questions did not make clear how he will come out. Roberts was the decisive vote to uphold the law in 2012.

Otherwise, the same liberal-conservative divide that characterized the earlier case was evident.

Opponents of the law say that only residents of states that set up their own insurance markets can get federal subsidies to help pay their premiums. The administration says the law provides for subsidies in all 50 states.

The liberal justices peppered lawyer Michael Carvin almost from the outset of his argument to limit the subsidies.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the law set up flexibility for states to either set up their own markets or rely on the federal healthcare.gov. Giving subsidies only to people in some states would be “disastrous,” Ginsburg said.

When Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. stepped to the lectern, the liberal justices fell silent, and Justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia took over.

“It may not be the statute Congress intended, but it may be the statute Congress wrote,” Scalia said of the provision in question. The case focuses on four words in the law, “established by the state.” The challengers say those words are clear and conclusive evidence that Congress wanted to limit subsidies to those consumers who get their insurance through a marketplace, or exchange, that was established by a state.

(AP) Members of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association rally…
Full Image

Verrilli argued that the law can only be read more broadly and noted that millions of people would lose health insurance if the court rules against the administration.

Alito wondered if the justices could delay the effect of such a ruling to allow states and perhaps the federal government to act. Scalia said he believes Congress would act.

“This Congress, Your Honor?” Verrilli said to widespread laughter in a packed courtroom that included leading congressional Democrats and Republicans.

Kennedy voted to strike down the health law in 2012, but on Wednesday he asked questions of both sides that made it hard to tell where he might come out this time.

He suggested that challenger Carvin’s argument raised a “serious” constitutional problem affecting the relationship between states and the federal government. On the other hand, he seemed less than convinced by Verrilli’s reading of the law to allow the subsidies nationwide.

Millions of people could be affected by the court’s decision. The justices are trying to determine whether the law makes people in all 50 states eligible for federal tax subsidies to cut the cost of insurance premiums. Or, does it limit tax credits to people who live in states that created their own health insurance marketplaces?

A ruling that limits where subsidies are available would have dramatic consequences because roughly three dozen states opted against their own marketplace, or exchange, and instead rely on the U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s healthcare.gov. Independent studies estimate that 8 million people could lose insurance coverage.

Activists on both sides were in place outside the marble courthouse by 5:30 a.m. Wednesday. Some held placards showing how many people in each state would lose insurance if the court ruled that the law does not allow subsidies everywhere.

Opponents of the Affordable Care Act failed to kill the law in an epic, election-year Supreme Court case in 2012. Chief Justice Roberts joined with the court’s liberal justices and provided the crucial vote to uphold the law in the midst of Obama’s re-election campaign.

The new case, part of a long-running political and legal fight to get rid of the law also known as Obamacare, focuses on the four words “established by the state” in a law that runs more than 900 pages.

The administration counters that the law was written to dramatically reduce the ranks of uninsured, and that it would make no sense to condition subsidies on where people live. The phrase “established by the state,” is what the administration calls a “term of art” that takes in both state- and federally run exchanges. The administration also says the term cannot be read in isolation, and that other parts of the law show that subsidies should be widely available.

Each side in the case argues that the law unambiguously supports only its position. One other option for the court is to declare the law is ambiguous when it comes to subsidies and defer to the Internal Revenue Service’s regulations making tax credits available nationwide.

Partisan and ideological divisions remain stark for a law that passed Congress in 2010 with no Republican votes. Of the judges who have ruled on lawsuits over the subsidies, Democratic appointees have sided with the administration and Republican appointees have been with the challengers.

Roberts was the only justice to essentially cross party lines with his vote in 2012. His fellow conservatives on the court voted to strike down Obamacare in its entirety.

A decision in King v. Burwell, 14-114, is expected by late June.

To understand the case that House has against the Department of Health and Human Services on Obamacare (ACA), in part this is from the lead lawyer, Jonathan Turley representing the House of Representatives:

The case could again put Chief Justice Roberts in the position of saving or dooming the ACA with a court that has been deeply divided over the Act. Roberts appeared to have switched sides soon before the issuance in the individual mandate case — a decision that saved the ACA but also produced a rather convoluted opinion. Now the Administration seems to be trying to influence Roberts with dire predictions about what would occur if he or his colleagues vote against the President. Obviously, the ramifications of a legal interpretation should not influence the Court but clearly some believe it may factor into the analysis.

Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the Health and Human Services secretary, told lawmakers in a letter on Tuesday that millions of Americans would lose their health insurance if the court rules against President Barack Obama’s administration in the case, which is expected to be decided by June. The timing of the letter is rather obvious and the question is whether such heavy-handed moves could backfire. It seems pretty obvious who the letter is really directed toward and Roberts may feel like he is being played as a chump.

Ironically, there is no need for the letter. As I have noted in the past, King and Halbig represent serious threats to the ACA, even though there could be legislative remedies. The problem is that the President has burned every bridge with Congress in continuing to take unilateral actions in violation of the the Separation of Powers (at least in the view of some of us).

In the end, this type of public campaign can irritate and alienate justices before an argument. Whether the President acted constitutionally (and I believe that he did not) should not be a question that turns on how you feel about health care or the ramification of enforcing what you believe is the constitutional mandate.

—

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, ISNA/CAIR

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Check EVERY lawmaker in Washington DC, no one is exempt when it comes to the funds they receive much less the events they attend. But let us take a deeper look at one, Congresswoman, Sheila Jackson-Lee. Jackson-Lee is in the court of the Muslim Brotherhood, a terror organization listed by Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Back as recently as in August of 2012, Congresswoman, Sheila Jackson Lee was a willing speaker at an ISNA event on the topic of ‘Forming a More Perfect Union’. ISNA has a motto: ‘One Nation Under God: Striving for the Common Good’. The Congresswoman was at this large event with 2 other significant Islamists, Nihad Awad, a Palestinian and has proven ties to Hamas, a terror organization listed by the U.S. Treasury Department. Awad is the Executive Director and Founder of Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The second Islamist joined by Congresswoman Jackson-Lee was Suhail Khan. Khan blocked the opposition to the Ground Zero mosque and he facilitated the meeting of the Bush White House and Sami al Arian, now deported for terrorism. Khan also delivered a speech in 1999 full of hostility toward Federal law enforcement and demonstrated sympathy to terror suspects. Khan is also the first born son of Mahboob Khan, a founding father of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.

Then in 2011, Sheila Jackson Lee went on a full blown rant at a hearing held by Congressman Pete King’s committee hearing on terrorism. Moving towards 2013, Congresswoman Jackson-Lee was campaigning to replace Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. Jackson-Lee gained the full support of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Jackson-Lee’s outrageous remarks over the years — including her comment that welfare entitlements are “earned,” and famously asking where she could find photos of our flag planted on Mars — have made her a laughingstock.

Still, the letter asserts, “Rep. Jackson-Lee would serve as an effective DHS secretary because she understands the importance of increasing border security and maintaining homeland security.”

Yes, Jackson-Lee currently serves on a homeland security subcommittee. But she’s never run any organization, certainly not one as big and critical as DHS.

And Jackson-Lee actually voted against the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which created the DHS.

More concerning is Jackson-Lee’s free association with people DHS is supposed to protect us from. She’s in the pocket of Islamist groups who support terrorism.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, she is among the top 10 recipients of Arab-Muslim cash and has helped unindicted terrorist co-conspirators raise cash.

At one annual fundraiser for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, she presented the terror-tied group with a congressional recognition award — even though the FBI has banned the group from outreach meetings.

“How proud I am to have been associated with CAIR’s legislative work,” she said at a 2007 CAIR event. “We need CAIR and we need all of you supporting CAIR.”

That same year, she placed at least one CAIR worker in her office, according to “Muslim Mafia.”

It does not end here, there is more. A Turkish cleric named Fethullah Gulen has been a force when it comes to schools in America, when several have actually been raided by the FBI. Sheila Jackson-Lee has bee up to her chin in the schools too as have many others including some Republicans.

Here in the United States, meanwhile, Gülen’s allies have been stepping up their involvement in U.S. politics, emerging as a force in districts from South Texas to South Brooklyn. Liberal Democrats like Yvette Clarke, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Al Green, and conservative Republicans like Ted Poe and Pete Olson have all benefitted from donors affiliated with Gülen in one way or another.
Leaders in the movement deny that there is any top-down organization of the donations (or, indeed, that the Gülen movement has any organization at all), but the patterns of giving suggest some level of coordination in a community beginning to flex its political muscle. Gülen himself reportedly told followers in 2010 that they could only visit him in the Poconos if they donated to their local congressman, according to the Wall Street Journal, though Gülen has denied the comment.
The donations, taken together, comprise significant totals for some U.S. House members in relatively safe seats. For instance, people connected to the Gülen-inspired charter schools donated $23,000 to Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee in October 2013 — a large sum considering Jackson Lee has raised just more than $130,000 this cycle in individual contributions, according to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission.

The state of Texas is home to Harmony Public Schools, the Gülen-inspired network of charter schools that have inspired some controversy; the Harmony schools, and other Gülen-related educational institutions around the country, have been accused of abusing foreign worker visas and of using taxpayer money to favor Turkish businesses over others. And Houston and its southwest suburbs are a hub for the movement in the U.S. Many Turkish immigrants who live there work for Harmony or for other organizations with ties to the Gülen movement, such as the Texas Gulf Foundation, the Raindrop Foundation, or North American University, a relatively new STEM-focused school that sits on the side of a desolate highway in north Houston. Other Houstonites affiliated with Gülen groups gave to Rep. Henry Cuellar, Rep. Pete Olson, Rep. Ted Poe, Oklahoma Rep. Jim Bridenstine, and others.

Though bundling political donations is common, Gülen-affiliated Houstonites said there was no top-down coordination of the donations.

For instance, Metin Ekren, a Harmony educator who gave $2,000 to Sheila Jackson Lee in 2012 and $1,500 to her in 2013, said that Harmony did not tell its employees to donate. Ekren said he and “friends in the office” discuss such things, but that “usually Sheila Jackson Lee has a kind of donation meeting” and that’s how he had donated. He said he gives to other Democrats as well, though records show he has mostly given to Republicans, including Poe, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker.

Erdal Caglar, Harmony’s chief financial officer, gave $1,500 to Jackson Lee in October 2013 at a fundraiser, he said.

“She has been always a supporter of our schools,” Caglar said. “She has attended all major events that Harmony organized. And she expressed — you know, Harmony’s STEM, and she’s supporting STEM education.”

Don’t go away yet, there is still more.

You see when it comes to events even in Washington DC….lil miss Sheila is there too, along with Congressman Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and Amy Goodman, who runs the operation titled Democracy Now. Democracy Now protested the 2008 Republican National Convention and were detained by police. Not to be omitted, Democracy Now was the recipient of $100 million from George Soros, the Ford Foundation and the Tides Foundation.

 

Muslim Brotherhood Embedded in USA Culture

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Keep in mind that all Muslim Brotherhood front operations in America have ‘non-profit; status with the Internal Revenue Service.

The Betrayal Papers Part I – Under Obama: U.S. Captured by the Muslim Brotherhood, presented a picture of a conspiracy that is manipulating the American government. Part II – In Plain Sight: A National Security “Smoking Gun” named several people in the Obama administration who have documented associations to Muslim Brotherhood front groups and the State of Qatar. This article will explore the deliberate strategy of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Obama administration to cripple the middle class and to steer the American economy, as well as identify, to the extent possible, their role in many Obama scandals.

Primer 

What do Common Core, “comprehensive” immigration reform, and IRS targeting of conservative groups have in common? They are just a few examples of Muslim Brotherhood-connected policy initiatives that are affecting the lives of Americans every day. Under Obama, many new domestic policies, as well as many scandals, can be traced back to, in varying degrees, the Muslim Brotherhood.

To understand why America no longer feels like America – why it seems that the government has its favorites and while others are targeted and even persecuted – it is important to understand two strong influences on the Muslim Brotherhood. The first is historical: the Nazi Party of Hitler’s Germany. The second is more contemporary: the strategy developed by Al Qaeda’s strategic mastermind, Abu Musab al-Suri.

“The Vampire Economy” and Economic Repression

In 1939, German economist Guenter Reimann published a study of the German economy under Hitler. The Vampire Economy described a corrupt, backwards economy that was not based on any economic logic, much less profit seeking, but instead on the politics of the Fuehrer (i.e., Leader), Adolf Hitler.

Like Communism, Nazism was a form of socialism. (The term Nazi is a contraction of the German word Nationalsozialismus, or National Socialism.) Unlike Soviet Communism, which, at least theoretically, depended on shared ownership of capital to direct the economy, in Nazi Germany the shops, farms, and factories remained, nominally, in private hands. Yet the outcome was basically the same in both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany: total control over the economy by the Leader and the Party.

In Germany, the pseudo-legal rationale used by the Nazis was regulation, which was subject to change on a whim. If you stepped outside the regulations, you were punished with fines, political persecution, imprisonment, and possibly shipped off to a concentration camp. Sound familiar?

Yet pervasive corruption in the Third Reich ensured the rules applied differently to those in favor, and to those who opposed the Nazis. Specifically, in such an economy, there are party members in good standing, and there were dissidents. Party members can break rules with impunity, while dissidents face public character assassinations and blacklisting.

This calls to mind Obamacare’s implementation. Certain companies, approximately 1,200 in fact, received waivers from the law. Other businesses were forced to provide health coverage for abortions against the will and conscience of the business owners (though the Supreme Court later overruled this regulation). A similar comparison can be made for the fines and prosecutions unequally levied on banks for violating a myriad of complex and overlapping regulations.

Abu Musab Al-Suri’s Plan to Cripple the American Economy

Although most Americans know the name Osama bin Laden, very few know the name Abu Musab al-Suri. While bin Laden provided the charisma and wealth to found Al Qaeda, al-Suri, one of his top lieutenants, provided valuable strategic advice to the fledgling jihadi network. A member of the Muslim Brotherhood from the time he was a student, al-Suri rose to become a member of the Brotherhood’s military command in 1982.

Al-Suri was a calculating thinker, who recognized that to bring down America (and the West in general) would require something different than mass murders. He urged the targeting of high value targets, such as infrastructure, which would force the United States to incur significant economic costs. As an example of this strategy in practice, Al-Suri was the architect of the 2004 Madrid train bombings. There is a good case to be made that the World Trade Center was long in Al Qaeda’s sights precisely because it was a bastion of capitalism, an important hub of New York City’s communications network, and the home of many prominent companies.

Of course, there’s little sense in physically targeting an economy which has already been knuckled-down under onerous, impossible to keep-up-with regulations issued by Obama’s bureaucracies. Various sectors of the American economy have already been effectively taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood Obama administration, including: healthcare, banking, energy, agriculture (think EPA and FDA), and transportation. Last week, the Obama administration, without the consent of Congress or the people, seized untold new powers to regulate the internet.

Meanwhile, as the government unapologetically intrudes into every aspect of life and business, a case could be made that the middle class is being systematically bankrupted. Financial columnist Charles Ortel has shown that the economy is fundamentally as weak as it has been in a generation. Following the collapse in 2008, the government pumped in trillions of dollars to supposedly stabilize and jumpstart the economy (recall the misnamed “Stimulus”). But as of January 2015, there were fewer core jobs in the private sector economy than ten years earlier. Compounding this economic morass is national debt: in roughly the same period (2005-2014), debt has increased $16.5 trillion, to $58 trillion. Finally, information from 2012 and 2013 (the most recent data available), shows pre-tax incomes decreasing for high, middle, and low income earning households.

Abu Musab al-Suri had a terrorist superstar with Osama bin Laden. However, when it comes to economically knee-capping the American economy, Barack Hussein Obama has proved far more effective than the cave rat, Sheikh bin Laden.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Doha, Qatar – Bipartisan Influence by Muslim Brotherhood

What would be powerful enough to exert this influence over the American economy? What entity could be that pervasive as to reach into big business across the nation?

In February 2010, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce established their first legal Chamber in Doha, Qatar. Qatar, the reader should be reminded, is a prolific financier of terror. Qatar is also home to the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, now an Interpol fugitive. The Chamber represents American business and also has an explicitly political and diplomatic mission. In the words of the Chamber’s Executive Vice President and COO, David Chavern, AmCham Qatar is “another concrete example of positive U.S. Engagement with the Muslim world.”

Among the companies and organizations which are premier sponsors of AmCham Qatar are ExxonMobil, The Boeing Corporation, Carnegie Mellon Qatar, Northwestern University in Qatar, and Fluor. Moreover, the following companies have significant involvement with the State of Qatar: Lockheed Martin, Bloomberg, Bank of America, Miramax, among many more.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with its close ties to Qatar, is by far the largest lobbying spender in Washington ($136.3 million in 2012). Business is a bipartisan pursuit, which means that money from Qatar – which is arguably today’s most prolific financial sponsor of Islamic terror – carries great weight in both Republican and Democrat circles.

Indeed, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham is on the record last year as saying, “I’m going to embrace being a Chamber of Commerce Republican.” He was part of a bipartisan Senate delegation to Qatar this January which also included Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Bob Corker (R-TN), John Barrasso (R-WY), Angus King (I-ME) and Tim Kaine (D-VA).

The Brotherhood’s Connections to Policies and Scandals of the Obama Administration

In June 2012, The Daily Caller reported that the CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations, had attended “hundreds” meetings with the Obama administration. CAIR, it will be recalled, is a Muslim Brotherhood front organization very closely tied to Hamas.

Why so many meetings? What incredible portfolio of business does CAIR have to discuss with an American administration? What follows is a snapshot of various policies and scandals that are linked, often directly, to Muslim Brotherhood individuals, organizations, and their goal of “civilization jihad.”

Militarization of the Department of Homeland Security: While running for President, Obama stated several times that America needed a civilian national security force that matched the might of the U.S. military. Candidate Obama stated in 2008, “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”

To many, this sounded like a call for a militarized federal police force. Given that DHS has been advised by such people as Mohammed Elibiary, Arif Alikhan, Eboo Patel, and Mohamed Magid, who each have documented ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, is it not possible that DHS has been weaponized as a force against the American people by the Islamists?

Domestic Spying and Wiretapping: While journalists at AP and Fox News have been subjects of wiretapping ordered by Eric Holder’s misnamed Department of Justice, the NSA’s dragnet on regular Americans has been revealed to be broader than virtually anyone suspected.

Curiously, the spreadsheets that were leaked detailing the email tracking of Muslim American leaders stop in 2008. CAIR Director Nihad Awad is listed as a target, as is Faisal Gill, a Republican operative who held a top-secret security clearance with the Department of Homeland Security. The spreadsheets were leaked in 2014 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Purge of Military Officers and Christianity: Over the past several years, the U.S. military has been purged of hundreds of high ranking officers. Many of these dedicated military officers were dismissed based on trivial offenses. Occurring simultaneously is a purge of Christianity, indeed even Bibles, from the U.S. military.

 

Anti-Police Protests: In conjunction with the militarization of DHS, state and local law enforcement have been targets of the Obama administration and Eric Holder’s Department of Justice. This anti-police agenda culminated last summer with riots in Ferguson, Missouri and violent protests New York City. Among the most prominent groups involved in these protests was ANSWER, a pro-Palestinian group that had on its original steering committee the Muslim Students Association.

Finally, the NYC cop killer Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley stated on his own Facebook page that he was previously an employee of the (Muslim Brotherhood) Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). At the time of the killing, the president of ISNA was Mohamed Magid, an advisor to Obama, DHS, and the National Security Council.

Immigration and Amnesty: Revealed in a recent editorial, “Between 2010 and 2013, the Obama administration imported almost 300,000 new immigrants from Muslim nations — more immigrants than the U.S. let in from Central America and Mexico combined over that period.” Given the paucity of background and security checks, as well as the high incidence of terrorism from such countries, it is any surprise that the FBI now admits that ISIS is active in all 50 states?

The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), another Muslim Brotherhood front organization operating in the United States, conveniently issued a policy paper in September 2013 calling for “comprehensive immigration reform.”

Moreover, in January the Obama appointed Fatima Noor, a veiled Muslim woman, to the position of “Special Assistant in the Office of the Director for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Department of Homeland Security.” Other than her religion, her credentials are very thin.

It is hardly an exaggeration to state that the administration is taking gradual steps to eliminating the very concept of American citizenship. In fact, a recent White House conference call made it explicit that these new immigrants are not supposed to assimilate into American society, but instead establish their own ethnic communities within the United States. Does this remind anyone of Gaza, or the no-go zones in Europe?

Common Core: Even classroom education has not escaped the tentacles of the Muslim Brotherhood. The connection between Common Core and the international terror group is through, once again, Qatar. The Connect All Schools initiative is a program to promote “One World Education.” It is aligned to Common Core State Standards, and is funded by the Qatar Foundation International (QFI). The director of QFI’s Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics is Tariq Ramadan, grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder, Hassan al-Banna.

According to WND, in 2011 QFI “partnered with the Department of State and the U.S. Department of Education to facilitate matchmaking between classrooms in the U.S. and international schools through … the “Connect All Schools” project.” QFI explains on its own website that the initiative was founded in response to Obama’s infamous 2009 Cairo speech, during which Obama had the Muslim Brotherhood seated in the front row.

Participation of the Qatar Foundation International puts in proper context the ever more prevalent cases of Sharia (i.e. Islamic law) incursions into American schools, such as: girls forced to cover up like devout Muslims on school sponsored trips to mosques; Islamic vocabulary lessons in high school; the teaching of Islamic culture; teaching the five pillars of Islam and “A call to jihad;” and Qatar investing $5 million to teach Arabic in schools.

Finally, any treatment of Common Core would not be complete without mentioning the involvement of another one of Obama’s mentors, domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. Ayers received $49.2 million from Vartan Gregorian, a board member of Qatar Foundation who is also part of Obama’s White House Fellowships Commission. Gregorian is an integral part of Connect All Schools.

IRS Targeting of Conservative and Pro-Israel Groups: The targeting of Obama’s political enemies is reminiscent of the politicized bureaucracies of all tyrannies, from Nazism to Communism and everything in between. Among the persecuted by apparatchik Lois Lerner were: hundreds of conservative groups, Constitutional groups, groups that criticized Obama, 5 pro-Israel groups, and an 83 year old Nazi concentration camp survivor.

As usual, the pattern of targeting conservatives, Israel, and Jews in general is the trend of the Obama administration … and the Muslim Brotherhood. The IRS targeting nearly mirrors DHS’s profiling of “right wing sovereign citizens and extremist groups” as the primary terrorist threat facing the country, which was CAIR approved.

In addition to suppressing political enemies, the IRS has actually enabled the Muslim Brotherhood through Obama’s half-brother, Malik.
In 2011, the IRS granted a 501(c)(3) statuses to two groups connected to Barack Obama’s half-brother, Malik Obama: the Barack H. Obama Foundation (BHOF), and Mama Sarah Obama Foundation (MSOF).

This would not be of particular concern, but for the fact that Malik Obama has documented associations with the Muslim Brotherhood, wanted terrorists, and terrorist organizations. These include Sudan’s Muslim Brotherhood leader Omar al-Bashir, the organizers of the infamous 2010 Gaza Flotilla, and Hamas. In fact, contravening all standard practices, the IRS granted the tax exempt status to BHOF retroactively, after it was learned that Malik was falsely and criminally representing his organization as a charity (which, at the time, it was not). A full report on these activities was produced by the Shoebat Foundation, and can be read here.

The George Soros Connection

In more than one of these instances, the fingerprints of billionaire investor (and breaker of nations and currencies) George Soros can be found. Soros operates a vast network of various “leftist” front organizations. In reality, these organizations are anything but liberal. They regularly attack capitalism, Israel, and fund the subversion of American society. It is not the intention here to dissect Soros’s network and political machinations, but to place him in context in the above scandals.

Combating “Islamophobia”: Soros has “donated” $10,117,186 to the Center for American Progress since 2000. One of the major initiatives of CAP is to combat “sharia hysteria” by the “religious right.”

Ferguson unrest: Soros’s Open Society Institute donated $33 million in one year to various activist groups in Ferguson who were active in the protests and subsequent destruction.

Immigration: Prominent Muslim American immigration lawyer Rabia Chaudry is employed by another Soros-controlled group, the New America Foundation. Previously Chaudry was Media Relations Director of CAIR-CT.

Common Core: A project of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress (CAP), Common Core was conceived under the direction of John Podesta, while he was President of CAP. Podesta is currently Counselor to Obama, and also a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University Law Center. (Note: Georgetown has a campus of their School of Foreign Service in Doha, Qatar. All campus costs are fully covered by a grant of the Qatar Foundation, which also funds aspects of Common Core.)

Net Neutrality Regulation: According to Washington Examiner, Soros funded “net neutrality” groups to the tune of $196 million. Net neutrality was adopted last week by a committee vote of the FCC, and is widely expected to be used to regulate content on the internet and television.

Conclusion

Tyranny, whatever name it’s given, has one recipe. It starts with a base of fear, it’s spiced with terror, and served with sides of persecution and intimidation. The poorer and more desperate the people become, the more readily they’ll meld into the pottage of political domination by their government.

Taken alone, none of these events would be of much concern in a country of 300+ million people. Even the general feeling of depression and oppression by government could be overlooked as a result of global economic conditions, many which are out of the control of even the President of the United States.

But viewed together through the lens of the Muslim Brotherhood’s plan to dominate America and bring her down from within, dismissing them as coincidence would be to ignore a carefully constructed plan. Whether attacks on cops, downright crazy immigration policies, the persecution of American citizens by the IRS, or the takeover of school curricula, there is a rhythm to all of these scandals that jives seamlessly with the song of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Evidence above suggests a bipartisan infection, a betrayal of the American people by the crony establishment in both parties. What will it take before the pundits, politicians, and regular Americans start to demand answers and accountability from the people in their own government who are each day plotting their demise, and will only be content when the American people are destitute and servile?

*This is Part 3 in a 5 Part Series. Click to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.