That Kabul Dissent Cable will be at the Center of Campaign Ads

After months and months of the State Department blocking the release of the dissent cable, finally a few in the House got access. Getting access was so bad that legislation was about to be introduced to force the issue after several subpoenas.

People climb atop a plane click here for a photo gallery/credits courtesy of The Guardian

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., is slamming the Afghanistan dissent cable to which Secretary of State Antony Blinken allowed congressional access Tuesday as “embarrassing” and saying that it debunks the Biden administration’s narrative that it was caught off guard by the country’s swift collapse in 2021.

Issa, who serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Fox News Digital that he was the first committee member to view the dissent channel cable from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and Washington’s response.

The State Department’s “dissent channel” allows for contrary views to be expressed by officials. The document, signed by 23 staffers and diplomats, warned about the possibility of a rapid Taliban advance as the U.S. left the country, which President Joe Biden and other top officials downplayed at the time.

“What we saw was their prediction, with great accuracy, of exactly what was going to happen and what the outcome would be if they did not change their directions,” the congressman said. “We saw a response from the office of the State Department saying, ‘We hear you, and we agree, basically, we don’t take it lightly.’ And then, obviously, we know what they did and didn’t do, which was totally insufficient for the warning that was given.”

“They redacted the specific names, but we now know that many of them were senior executive surrogates, meaning people that are paid at the highest level in the State Department,” he continued. “They knew and understood that there was no way that the Afghan military was going to defend successfully. They did not disagree with that, and as a result, they knew that Kabul would fall within weeks, that the Taliban would do what they have done, which is to continue to kill and persecute individuals, and they allowed it to happen.”

Issa said the cable also revealed that “there was no expectation by the State Department that there would be sustainability” in the region and knew that the billions of dollars of U.S. military equipment that was left behind was going to fall into the Taliban’s hands.

Issa said the cable went out on July 13, 2021, the response came back a week later on July 20, and Kabul officially fell weeks later on Aug. 15.

“Every prediction came through, including the quick collapse of the Afghan army,” he said.

Issa said his next course of action is trying to get the document declassified so that the families of the 13 U.S. service members who were killed during the chaotic withdrawal can get to the bottom of what happened.

“Redacting only a portion of a portion of a sentence takes this from a secret document to a confidential document, and confidential, quite frankly, in this case is even inappropriate,” he said.

“This is classified because it’s embarrassing,” he added. “There’s absolutely no reason the American people shouldn’t see it, and I will not rest until they do.”

“The bottom line is nothing ends here,” added Issa’s communications director, Jonathan Wilcox.

“This obliterates the administration’s big lie on Afghanistan – that this could not have been foretold, nobody could have seen this coming, nothing could have done to prevent it,” he said.

“We know it was received. We know it wasn’t followed,” he continued. “Their personnel on the ground saw this, reported it, warned them and were ignored.”

In a statement to Fox News Digital, the State Department accused Republicans of distorting the truth.

“We strongly disagree with the characterizations from some Members of Congress on the contents of the Afghanistan dissent cable,” a spokesperson said. “As Secretary Blinken previously stated in public testimony before Congress, the cable did not suggest the Afghan government and security forces were going to collapse prior to our departure. As the Secretary also said publicly, the Department agreed with the concerns raised in the cable, and in fact, a number of the recommendations the cable made were already in motion. The Secretary personally read and oversaw a response to the dissent cable, and its contents were factored into his thinking.”

“Taking the step of allowing Members of Congress to view the cable, despite the risk that it compromises the purpose of the Dissent Channel, was an extraordinary accommodation and it’s disappointing some Members are choosing to distort the content of the confidential cable,” the spokesperson added.

The State Department referred Fox News Digital to Blinken’s testimony in September 2021 referring to the cable. Continue to read here including the number of times that subpoenas were issued.

China Warning to America, Prepare to Live off the Land

It is a major cyber attack discovered by Microsoft. It was discovered while we were all watching that ‘silly spy balloon’ as Biden called it. The attack is called Volt Typhoon, so be on notice America. The Biden White House has said nothing….

Microsoft has uncovered stealthy and targeted malicious activity focused on post-compromise credential access and network system discovery aimed at critical infrastructure organizations in the United States. The attack is carried out by Volt Typhoon, a state-sponsored actor based in China that typically focuses on espionage and information gathering. Microsoft assesses with moderate confidence that this Volt Typhoon campaign is pursuing development of capabilities that could disrupt critical communications infrastructure between the United States and Asia region during future crises.

Volt Typhoon has been active since mid-2021 and has targeted critical infrastructure organizations in Guam and elsewhere in the United States. In this campaign, the affected organizations span the communications, manufacturing, utility, transportation, construction, maritime, government, information technology, and education sectors. Observed behavior suggests that the threat actor intends to perform espionage and maintain access without being detected for as long as possible.

To achieve their objective, the threat actor puts strong emphasis on stealth in this campaign, relying almost exclusively on living-off-the-land techniques and hands-on-keyboard activity. They issue commands via the command line to (1) collect data, including credentials from local and network systems, (2) put the data into an archive file to stage it for exfiltration, and then (3) use the stolen valid credentials to maintain persistence.

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Dark Reading in part published the following:

China-sponsored threat actors have managed to establish persistent access within telecom networks and other critical infrastructure targets in the US, with the observed purpose of espionage — and, potentially, the ability down the line to disrupt communications in the event of military conflict in the South China Sea and broader Pacific.

The first signs of compromise emerged in telecom networks in Guam, according to a New York Times report ahead of the findings being released. The National Security Agency discovered those intrusions around the same time that the Chinese spy balloon was making headlines for entering US airspace, according to the report. It then enlisted Microsoft to further investigate, eventually uncovering a widespread web of compromises across multiple sectors, with a particular focus on air, communications, maritime, and land transportation targets.

A Shadow Goal? Laying Groundwork for Disruption

The discovery of the activity is playing out against the backdrop of the US’ frosty relations with Beijing; the two superpowers have stalled in their diplomacy since the shooting down of the balloon, and has worsened amidst fears that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could spur China to do the same in Taiwan.

In the event of a military crisis, a destructive cyberattack on US critical infrastructure could disrupt communications and hamper the country’s ability to come to Taiwan’s aid, the Times report pointed out. Or, according to John Hultquist, chief analyst at Mandiant Intelligence – Google Cloud, a disruptive attack could be used as a proxy for kinetic action.

“These operations are aggressive and potentially dangerous, but they don’t necessarily indicate attacks are looming,” he said in an emailed statement. “A far more reliable indicator for [a] destructive and disruptive cyberattack is a deteriorating geopolitical situation. A destructive and disruptive cyberattack is not just a wartime scenario either. This capability may be used by states looking for alternatives to armed conflict.”

Andersen Air Force Base in Yigo, Guam Anderson Air Foce Base/source

Dubbing such preparations “contingency intrusions,” he added that China is certainly not alone in conducting them — although notably, China-backed APTs are typically far more focused on cyber espionage than destruction.

“Over the last decade, Russia has targeted a variety of critical infrastructure sectors in operations that we do not believe were designed for immediate effect,” Hultquist noted. “Chinese cyber threat actors are unique among their peers in that they have not regularly resorted to destructive and disruptive cyberattacks. As a result, their capability is quite opaque.”

An Observed Focus on Stealth & Spying

To achieve initial access, Volt Typhoon compromises Internet-facing Fortinet FortiGuard devices, a popular target for cyberattackers of all stripes (Microsoft is still examining how they’re being breached in this case). Once inside the box, the APT uses the device’s privileges to extract credentials from Active Directory account and authenticate to other devices on the network. Read more here. 

Migrants in America Causing Collapse of Law Enforcement

These sanctuary governors and mayors are arguing the wrong point. It is not so much about where to house these people and re-shipping them to other locations, but rather the scandal should be to tell the entire illegal immigrant operation that there is nothing in America to come to that is better than what they left. Consider just how much money these people spend to come here and the deadly traveling just to get beyond our borders. Are these people coming to anything better in the long term than what they left? Do they really want to work in slaughter houses, work farms in disgusting living conditions? Do they really want to be trafficked in the sex trade industry?

Ah, but read on to see a Chicago police station and consider how it is in expensive hotels across the country where we have no idea of their names, ages or even their history, no visas, no passports and no documents at all. How can law enforcement even begin to deal with this considering all the other existing crime across the country….

A huge hat tip to Rebecca Brannon!

New footage shows a Chicago police station filled with mattresses and dozens of illegal migrants, as the city struggles to house the hundreds of border crossers arriving there each day.

Officials in Chicago have said they cannot afford to rent hotel rooms for the more than 8,000 migrants who have arrived in their city and have pushed for more federal funds to cover costs.

Due to the lack of available shelters, some migrants have turned to police stations for a safe place to sleep.

The migrant-housing crisis in Chicago follows last week’s end to the Trump-era COVID-19 border restriction known as Title 42, which allowed U.S. authorities to send migrants back to Mexico without giving them a chance to seek asylum.

Tens of thousands of people hurried to cross the border illegally into the U.S. before President Joe Biden implemented a strict new asylum policy to replace Title 42.

In the shocking footage posted by photojournalist Rebecca Brannon, dozens and dozens of migrants are seen sitting on and around mattresses in a Chicago police station.

Brannon reported that many of the migrants have slept and eaten on the floors, which has placed a strain on the law enforcement officers whose day-to-day jobs have been made more difficult by their presence.

Small children were seen running around and an alley sits full of trash produced by the migrants.

Chicago already has a serious violent crime problem, with its new influx of migrants likely to further strain budgets desperately-needed to try and make the city safer.

More than 8,000 migrants have arrived in Chicago since August, which is when southern states started to bus asylum seekers north. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sent migrants to the Democrat-led cities to help ease the burden on border towns.

‘To provide much-needed relief to our overrun border communities, Texas began busing migrants to sanctuary cities such as your ‘Welcoming City,’ along with Washington, DC, New York City, and Philadelphia, with more to come. Until Biden secures the border to stop the inflow of mass migration, Texas will continue this necessary program,’ Abbott noted in a letter earlier this month.

Migrants been sent to cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia and New York. Migrants have also arrived in Washington, DC, with buses stopping outside the home of Vice President Kamala Harris.

Despite the Chicago’s obvious overcrowding issue, new Mayor Brandon Johnson, a progressive Democrat who assumed office Monday, said in his inauguration speech that in Chicago, ‘there’s enough room for everyone.’

Johnson’s affirmed commitment to welcoming migrants to Chicago follows his predecessor – Lori Lightfoot’s decision to declare a state of emergency earlier this month, calling migrant arrivals a ‘humanitarian crisis’ and pushing for increased federal aid.

Chicago officials have said they expect a $53 million shortfall without additional aid because of the cost from housing migrants.

‘We’re in May, and we haven’t received any funding from FEMA,’ Chicago budget director Susie Park recently told the City Council, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. ‘The need is great. A lot of requests are coming in. New York is probably asking for $1 billion. There is a lot of need.’

The Durham Report has Several Omissions However

The first glaring omission is the media. Outside of Fox News and a minute or so with Jake Tapper, nothing was mentioned by the legacy media including print media. One has to wonder if the Clinton Foundation or the Brookings Institute actually paid key media to advocate the whole operation from it’s inception. Will there ever be an apology or retraction not just to Donald Trump but to those whose lives were turned upside down including General Flynn, Paul Manafort, Michael Cavuto and countless others. Furthermore, every person in this country suffered through years of the hoax …..THE BIGGEST LIE of all in our history. We are a divided country, never to be restored as proven by the rebuttals of Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and Hillary herself.

To be sure, while all sources including the Durham report having Hillary ‘approving’ the Clinton plan, you can bet she did not concoct it from the start….she merely approved it. So, the Durham report leaves out the real genesis of the hoax. Consider those that Durham did not interview in his investigation, Hillary, Comey, Strzok, Lisa Page, Susan Rice, McCabe, John Podesta and many others that were likely the players of the whole plan from the start. Did Durham obtain the various types of communcation from those people or others such as Barack Obama, Loretta Lynch, Joe Biden, Susan Rice, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell or Harry Reid? Nah…

What about Stafan Halper or Joseph Misfud? What about Robert Mueller and his team and their alleged documents?

Meanwhile, everyone one of those people should have their security clearances stripped. Every willing accomplice should be forced to pay at least the legal fees of those victims of this hoax such as Carter Page. Let the civil suits begin.

Now on to the 7th floor of the FBI. It has not been reformed at all as Director Christopher Wray has stated given those ‘missteps’ he referred to. Consider the investigations going on now including the Hunter laptop and the targets of churches and parents trying to sustain a good education for their children in public schools.

The names mentioned above gave little if any consideration to the permanent damage to the country as all of them were self-serving to advocate for Hillary to be president. Sadly, would her presidency actually be any different than Biden’s presidency? No.

The reputation of our country has forever been tarnished globally. Consider that media across the globe has reported on all these travesties and scandals for years and years. China, Russia, Brazil, Iran and others have postured and planned for a post America world while we figure out still what happened, the consequences and if there is a restoration in the near term.

There are corrupt leaders across the globe and corrupt countries as well, is there anything now that separates us as a nation from that? Yes, only decent and informed American citizens that get in the game and commit to break the American oligarchs of which there are many.

While the Durham report is 300 plus pages, of which you can read here, it is prudent to at least skim the report for context and details that support the assertions above.

This report will likely have zero legal consequences but it will further explain the width and depth of the deep state of which continues to hardly be understood by voters.

Do we really understand the war against the deep state?

 

 

WH/Susan Rice is well Aware of Child Labor Violations/Immigrants

Yes, THAT Susan Rice, the hateful video/Benghazi lady that works at the Biden White House. Furthermore, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Beccera does nothing when it comes to sponsors that immigrant children are released to. And then there is the Department of Labor….silence…

But this is nothing new as it began under the Obama administration. After an internet search, several outlets reported much that same that the Obama administration actually did separate children from parents or when just children came across the border they were placed into sponsors’ care and trafficked into the sex slave industry or into agricultural operations under all the same conditions described by the recent New York Times investigation. Yes, imagine the New York Times actually doing on investigation on this scandal…yes….after a long read, there is much the NYT’s left out but it is a start, at least.

As a primer, the Department of Labor is responsible for child labor law enforcement which does include limited exemptions. These immigrant children are actually slave labor working in conditions and overnight shifts that violate the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Related stories: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-child-workers-exploitation.html

https://www.axios.com/2023/03/01/american-child-labor

So, what did the New York Times investigation offer? Titled –>

Read the full NYT’s investigation here.

The White House and federal agencies were repeatedly alerted to signs of children at risk. The warnings were ignored or missed.

In the spring of 2021, Linda Brandmiller was working at an arena in San Antonio that had been converted into an emergency shelter for migrant children. Thousands of boys were sleeping on cots as the Biden administration grappled with a record number of minors crossing into the United States without their parents.

Ms. Brandmiller’s job was to help vet sponsors, and she had been trained to look for possible trafficking. In her first week, two cases jumped out: One man told her he was sponsoring three boys to employ them at his construction company. Another, who lived in Florida, was trying to sponsor two children who would have to work off the cost of bringing them north.

She immediately contacted supervisors working with the Department of Health and Human Services, the federal agency responsible for these children. “This is urgent,” she wrote in an email reviewed by The New York Times.

But within days, she noticed that one of the children was set to be released to the man in Florida. She wrote another email, this time asking for a supervisor’s “immediate attention” and adding that the government had already sent a 14-year-old boy to the same sponsor.

Ms. Brandmiller also emailed the shelter’s manager. A few days later, her building access was revoked during her lunch break. She said she was never told why she had been fired.

Over the past two years, more than 250,000 migrant children have come alone to the United States. Thousands of children have ended up in punishing jobs across the country — working overnight in slaughterhouses, replacing roofs, operating machinery in factories — all in violation of child labor laws, a recent Times investigation showed. After the article’s publication in February, the White House announced policy changes and a crackdown on companies that hire children.

Inside the White House, Ms. Rice was at the center of the migrant children crisis. As she pressed to move children out of shelters more quickly, clues began to emerge about what was happening to them once they left.

In the summer of 2021, near the height of the crush at the border, H.H.S. managers wrote a memo detailing their worry about increasing reports that children were working alongside their sponsors, a sign of possible labor trafficking. Ms. Rice’s team received the memo, and Ms. Rice was also told what it said, according to two people familiar with the conversations.

Andrew J. Bates, White House deputy press secretary, disputed that, saying Ms. Rice “did not see the memo and was not made aware of its contents.”

Around the same time, Ms. Rice’s team was told about concerns over a large group of children who had been released to one city in Alabama, according to six current and former staff members. The situation was the subject of frequent updates as H.H.S. sent case managers to the city to check on children, and coordinated with the Labor Department and Homeland Security Investigations to look into whether they were working in poultry plants. The full article is found here.