Don’t Cha Just Admire Huma Abedin? Not…

Still waiting on the next presser when it comes to her husband, Anthony. You? He was ‘catfished’ again.

Anthony Weiner caught in new flirty online chat

NYP: First he was Carlos Danger. Now — in yet another sexting scandal — he’s a randy “mongoose.”

Sext fiend Anthony Weiner boasted of his animal prowess — claiming he was “deceptively strong . . . like a mongoose” — and gave his cellphone number to a college student during a flirty, private online chat on a recent trip to Los Angeles, The Post has learned.

But the joke was on the horndog pol, whose wife, Huma Abedin, is a top aide and close confidante of Hillary Clinton.

The target of his online affection was really a dude. More here. **** But back to Huma…

Huma Abedin worked at a radical Muslim journal for a dozen years

Hillary Clinton’s top campaign aide, and the woman who might be the future White House chief of staff to the first female US president, for a decade edited a radical Muslim publication that opposed women’s rights and blamed the US for 9/11.

One of Clinton’s biggest accomplishments listed on her campaign Web site is her support for the UN women’s conference in Bejing in 1995, when she famously declared, “Women’s rights are human rights.” Her speech has emerged as a focal point of her campaign, featured prominently in last month’s Morgan Freeman-narrated convention video introducing her as the Democratic nominee.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (R) and Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin

Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin arrive for a NATO Foreign Minister family photo in front of the Brandenburg Gate in 2011. Photo: Getty Images
     Democratic Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton Campaigns In New York
Hillary Clinton talks with aide Huma Abedin.  Photo: Getty Images
     Hillary Clinton Visits Jackson Diner In Queens, NY
Clinton and Abedin in Queens. Photo: Getty Images
     US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (L) greets people
Hillary Clinton greets people. Huma Abedin is seen at center. Photo: Getty Images

However, soon after that “historic and transformational” 1995 event, as Clinton recently described it, her top aide Huma Abedin published articles in a Saudi journal taking Clinton’s feminist platform apart, piece by piece. At the time, Abedin was assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs working under her mother, who remains editor-in-chief. She was also working in the White House as an intern for then-First Lady Clinton.

Headlined “Women’s Rights are Islamic Rights,” a 1996 article argues that single moms, working moms and gay couples with children should not be recognized as families. It also states that more revealing dress ushered in by women’s liberation “directly translates into unwanted results of sexual promiscuity and irresponsibility and indirectly promote violence against women.” In other words, sexually liberated women are just asking to be raped

“A conjugal family established through a marriage contract between a man and a woman, and extended through procreation is the only definition of family a Muslim can accept,” the author, a Saudi official with the Muslim World League, asserted, while warning of “the dangers of alternative lifestyles.” (Abedin’s journal was founded and funded by the former head of the Muslim World League.)

“Pushing [mothers] out into the open labor market is a clear demonstration of a lack of respect of womanhood and motherhood,” it added.

In a separate January 1996 article, Abedin’s mother — who was the Muslim World League’s delegate to the UN conference — wrote that Clinton and other speakers were advancing a “very aggressive and radically feminist” agenda that was un-Islamic and wrong because it focused on empowering women.

“‘Empowerment’ of women does more harm than benefit the cause of women or their relations with men,” Saleha Mahmood Abedin maintained, while forcefully arguing in favor of Islamic laws that have been roundly criticized for oppressing women.

“By placing women in the ‘care and protection’ of men and by making women responsible for those under her charge,” she argued, “Islamic values generate a sense of compassion in human and family relations.”

“Among all systems of belief, Islam goes the farthest in restoring equality across gender,” she claimed. “Acknowledging the very central role women play in procreation, child-raising and homemaking, Islam places the economic responsibility of supporting the family primarily on the male members.”

She seemed to rationalize domestic abuse as a result of “the stress and frustrations that men encounter in their daily lives.” While denouncing such violence, she didn’t think it did much good to punish men for it.

She added in her 31-page treatise: “More men are victims of domestic violence than women . . . If we see the world through ‘men’s eyes’ we will find them suffering from many hardships and injustices.”

She opposed the UN conference widening the scope of the definition of the family to include “gay and lesbian ‘families.’ ”

Huma Abedin does not apologize for her mother’s views. “My mother was traveling around the world to these international women’s conferences talking about women’s empowerment, and it was normal,” she said in a recent profile in Vogue.

Huma continued to work for her mother’s journal through 2008. She is listed as “assistant editor” on the masthead of the 2002 issue in which her mother suggested the US was doomed to be attacked on 9/11 because of “sanctions” it leveled against Iraq and other “injustices” allegedly heaped on the Muslim world. Here is an excerpt:

“The spiral of violence having continued unabated worldwide, and widely seen to be allowed to continue, was building up intense anger and hostility within the pressure cooker that was kept on a vigorous flame while the lid was weighted down with various kinds of injustices and sanctions . . . It was a time bomb that had to explode and explode it did on September 11, changing in its wake the life and times of the very community and the people it aimed to serve.”

Huma Abedin is Clinton’s longest-serving and, by all accounts, most loyal aide. The devout, Saudi-raised Muslim started working for her in the White House, then followed her to the Senate and later the State Department. She’s now helping run Clinton’s presidential campaign as vice chair and may end up back in the White House.

The contradictions are hard to reconcile. The campaign is not talking, despite repeated requests for interviews.

Until now, these articles which Abedin helped edit and publish have remained under wraps. Perhaps Clinton was unaware she and her mother took such opposing views.

But that’s hard to believe. Her closest adviser served as an editor for that same Saudi propaganda organ for a dozen years. The same one that in 1999 published a book, edited by her mother, that justifies the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation under Islamic law, while claiming “man-made laws have in fact enslaved women.”

And in 2010, Huma Abedin arranged for then-Secretary of State Clinton to speak alongside Abedin’s hijab-wearing mother at an all-girls college in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. According to a transcript of the speech, Clinton said Americans have to do a better job of getting past “the stereotypes and the mischaracterizations” of the oppressed Saudi woman. She also assured the audience of burqa-clad girls that not all American girls go “around in a bikini bathing suit.”

At no point in her long visit there, which included a question-and-answer session, did this so-called champion of women’s rights protest the human-rights violations Saudi women suffer under the Shariah laws that Abedin’s mother actively promotes. Nothing about the laws barring women from driving or traveling anywhere without male “guardians.”

If fighting for women’s rights is one of Clinton’s greatest achievements, why has she retained as her closest adviser a woman who gave voice to harsh Islamist critiques of her Beijing platform?

Paul Sperry is author of  “Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington.”

Private Contractors Left without Escape Plan in Afghanistan

The next Benghazi? State Department leaves contractors in Afghanistan without escape plan

Circa: The concerns are heightened by the fact that many of those civilians doing the security and nation-building work of the U.S. government hold sensitive security clearances, making them an attractive target for the enemy.

And the situation could become even more precarious after the U.S. military in Afghanistan draws down to just 8,400 troops by year’s end.

“It’s not just a political nightmare for somebody, it’s people’s lives at stake,” said Kevin Ofchus, head of Georgia-based firm Host Nations Perspectives Southwest Asia (HNPSWA) that has security contracts in Afghanistan.

The current situation

“The State Department says there’s a lack of infrastructure to support an emergency response after we’ve spent 15 years and billions of dollars on infrastructure,” he added.

Ofchus’s company is a member of the State Department’s Overseas Security Advisory Committee, and it chairs the Crisis Management Advisory Subcommittee in Kabul, which advises companies about security working in hot-zones.

And his sentiments are widely shared by a dozen other federal contractors in theater interviewed by Circa, some of whom would only talk on condition of anonymity because they feared reprisal from Washington.

“I was told ‘don’t bother going to Kabul, grab your weapon and fight your way through until you can reach an aircraft’ or whatever,” said one contractor working in Afghanistan, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“I don’t think any of us count on State Department to have their shit together. I’ve never seen, heard or prepared for any evacuation plan.”

— -Anonymous contractor

So is there a plan?

State Department officials told Circa that there is an evacuation plan, but they could not release any details about it because it was classified.

Mike Warren, a security director for the USAID-backed Mining Investment and Development for Afghanistan Sustainability Project, known as MIDAS, says he believes State has a very remedial plan but it fails on almost every security protocol.

“The Department of State, in close coordination with the Department of Defense, has a crisis response plan for Afghanistan that encompasses civilians and contractors. U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, in close coordination with the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, maintains a classified Non-Combatant Evacuation Operations plan to support the chief of mission,” the department wrote in an email.

“I know the U.S. Embassy was working on a plan, but it’s a shell of what they need,” Warren said in a phone interview from Kabul. “There appears to be a lack of coordinated effort between the U.S. Embassy and the American companies and personnel here in Afghanistan.”

“I know the U.S. Embassy was working on a plan, but it’s a shell of what they need.”

— Mike Warren, security director for MIDAS

Circa obtained a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the State Department and Department of Defense governing the protection and evacuation of U.S. citizens and nationals from threatened areas overseas. The document specifically outlines the duties and requirements of the various agencies.

The Secretary of State “will prepare the plans for the protection and evacuation of all U.S. citizens and nationals and designated other persons abroad, including the Department of Defense (non-combatants).” More terrifying details here from Circa.

*****

In part: Now, as President Obama prepares to hand off combat operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere, to his successor, he’s also bequeathing a way of war that relies on large numbers of guns-for-hire while, at least formally, restricting the number of American “troops” sent overseas. Since 2009, the ratio of contractors to troops in war zones has increased from 1 to 1 to about 3 to 1.

Private military contractors perform tasks once thought to be inherently governmental, such as raising foreign armies, conducting intelligence analysis and trigger-pulling. During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, they constituted about 15 percent of all contractors. But don’t let the numbers fool you. Their failures have an outsized impact on U.S. strategy. When a squad of Blackwater contractors killed 17 civilians at a Bagdad traffic circle in 2007, it provoked a firestorm in Iraq and at home, marking one of the nadirs of that war.

Contractors also encourage mission creep, because contractors don’t count as “boots on the ground.” Congress does not consider them to be troops, and therefore contractors do not count again troop-level caps in places like Iraq. The U.S. government does not track contractor numbers in war zones. As a result, the government can put more people on the ground than it reports to the American people, encouraging mission creep and rendering contractors virtually invisible.

For decades now, the centrality of contracting in American warfare—both on the battlefield and in support of those on the battlefield—has been growing. During World War II, about 10 percent of America’s armed forces were contracted. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that proportion leapt to 50 percent. This big number signals a disturbing trend: the United States has developed a dependency on the private sector to wage war, a strategic vulnerability. Today, America can no longer go to war without the private sector. More here from DefenseOne.

Mass Transfer out of Gitmo: Detainees to UAE

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) – Fifteen prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have been released to the United Arab Emirates in the single largest transfer of detainees during the Obama administration.

The release of 12 Yemeni nationals and three Afghans comes amid a renewed push to whittle down the number of detainees held at the U.S. base in Cuba. The men have been cleared for transfer by U.S. government departments and agencies.

The Pentagon says 61 detainees remain at Guantanamo.

President Barack Obama has been seeking to close the detention center amid opposition from Congress.

Naureen Shah is Amnesty International USA’s director of national security and human rights. She says Monday’s transfers are a “powerful sign that President Obama is serious about closing Guantanamo before he leaves office.”

**** Photo from Miami Herald, click here for more details.

ABC: The latest batch of released prisoners had mostly been held without charge for some 14 years at Guantanamo. They were cleared for release by the Periodic Review Board, comprised of representatives from six U.S. government agencies.

The UAE successfully resettled five detainees transferred there last year, according to the Pentagon.

Lee Wolosky, the State Department’s special envoy for Guantanamo’s closure, said the U.S. was grateful to the United Arab Emirates for accepting the latest group of 15 men and helping pave the way for the detention center’s closure.

“The continued operation of the detention facility weakens our national security by draining resources, damaging our relationships with key allies and partners, and emboldening violent extremists,” Wolosky said.

Obama has been seeking to close the detention center amid opposition from Congress, which has prohibited transferring detainees to the U.S. for any reason. The administration has been working with other countries to resettle detainees who have been cleared for transfer.

According to Amnesty, one of the Afghans released to the UAE alleged that he was “tortured and subjected to other cruel treatment” while in U.S. military custody. The man, identified only as Obaidullah, was captured by U.S. special forces in July 2002 and allegedly admitted to acquiring and planting anti-tank mines to target U.S. and other coalition forces in eastern Afghanistan.

In clearing him for transfer, the review board said he hasn’t expressed any anti-U.S. sentiment or intent to re-engage in militant activities. However, a Pentagon detainee profile also said he provided little information and they had little “insight into his current mindset.”

One of the Yemeni men sent to the UAE was identified as Zahir Umar Hamis bin Hamdun, who traveled to Afghanistan in 1999 and later apparently acted as a weapons and explosives trainer.

A Pentagon profile from September 2015 said he expressed dislike of the U.S., which they identified as “an emotion that probably is motivated more by frustration over his continuing detention than by a commitment to global jihad.”

***** One such detainee profile:

Detainee to UAE

Meanwhile there is Rosneft, Deeper Russian Terror

Primer: From January 2015

Foreign Firm Funding U.S. Green Groups Tied to State-Owned Russian Oil Company

Executives at a Bermudan firm funneling money to U.S. environmentalists run investment funds with Russian tycoons, a shadowy Bermudan company that has funneled tens of millions of dollars to anti-fracking environmentalist groups in the United States is run by executives with deep ties to Russian oil interests and offshore money laundering schemes involving members of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. One of those executives, Nicholas Hoskins, is a director at a hedge fund management firm that has invested heavily in Russian oil and gas. He is also senior counsel at the Bermudan law firm Wakefield Quin and the vice president of a London-based investment firm whose president until recently chaired the board of the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft.In addition to those roles, Hoskins is a director at a company called Klein Ltd. No one knows where that firm’s money comes from. Its only publicly documented activities have been transfers of $23 million to U.S. environmentalist groups that push policies that would hamstring surging American oil and gas production, which has hurt Russia’s energy-reliant economy.

****

Why is this important? Arms trafficking….there is always a darker side including people. Anyone remember the name Viktor Bout?

 Photo: CNN

*****

Notorious Russian arms dealer ‘refused US offer for lighter sentence’

FITSANAKIS: The wife of Viktor Bout, the imprisoned Russian arms dealer dubbed ‘the merchant of death’, said he rejected an offer by his American captors who asked him to testify against a senior Russian government official. Born in Soviet Tajikistan, Bout was a former translator for the Soviet military. After the end of the Cold War, he set up several low-profile international air transport companies and used them to transfer large shipments of weapons that fueled wars in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe. He made millions in the process and acquired international notoriety, which inspired the Hollywood blockbuster Lord of War. But his business ventures ceased in 2008, when he was arrested in Bangkok, Thailand, by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, with the cooperation of the Royal Thai Police. He was eventually extradited to the US and given a 25-year prison term for supplying weapons to the Afghan Taliban, and for trying to sell arms to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Bout is currently serving his sentence at the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center in New York.

In a newspaper interview on Tuesday, Bout’s wife, Alla Bout, said her husband could have gotten away with a considerably lighter sentence had he agreed to testify against a senior Russian government official. Speaking to Moscow-based daily Izvestia, Alla Bout said her husband had been approached by American authorities after being extradited to the United States from Thailand. He was told that US authorities wanted him to testify against Igor Sechin, a powerful Russian government official, whom American prosecutors believed was Bout’s boss. In return for his testimony, US prosecutors allegedly promised a jail sentence that would not exceed two years, as well as political asylum for him and his family following his release from prison. Alla Bout added that her husband’s American lawyers were told by the prosecution that the ‘merchant of death’ “would be able to live in the US comfortably, along with his wife and daughter”, and that his family could stay in America during his trial “under conditions”. Alla Bout claimed she was told this by Bout himself and by members of his American legal team.

From 2008 to 2012, Sechin, who has military background, served as Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister. Today he heads the Board of Directors of Rosneft, a government-owned oil extraction and refinement company, which is considered one of the world’s most powerful business ventures. Many observers see Sechin as the most formidable man in Russia after Russian President Vladimir Putin. He is also believed to be a senior member of the Siloviki, a secretive group of government officials in the Putin government who have prior careers in national security or intelligence. Although Bout and Sechin have never acknowledged having met each other, some investigators of Bout’s weapons-trading activities believe that the two were close allies. It is believed that the two men first met in Angola and Mozambique in the 1980s, where they were stationed while serving in the Soviet military. But the two men deny they knowing each other. According to Alla Bout, Viktor told his American captors that he “never worked for Sechin and did not know him in person”. He therefore turned down the prosecution’s offer and was handed a 25-year sentence. When asked by the Izvestia reporters whether Bout was simply protecting the powerful Russian government official, Alla Bout insisted that the two “have never even met, not once”.

**** Igor Sechin

Forbes: Igor Sechin may be the left hand man to the World’s Most Powerful Man, but that didn’t stop him or his giant oil company, Rosneft, from landing on a U.S. visa and financial sanctions list announced after the Russian military intervention in the Ukraine. “Putin trusts him more than anyone else,” says Russian expert Mark Galeotti of NYU. “And if Putin trusts you, power and wealth always follow.” Suffice it to say that the Kremlin is one of Rosneft’s major stockholders.

 

Two Surviving Family Members of Benghazi Sue Hillary

The lawyer of record in the lawsuit against Hillary Clinton is Larry Klayman, the original founder of Judicial Watch and now with Freedom Watch, Inc., and has been a previous radio guest of The Denise Simon Experience.

It should also be noted that the father of Tyrone Woods is also a lawyer.

The lawsuit document is found here.

 

     

Parents of Two Benghazi Victims File Lawsuit Against Hillary Clinton

Mediaite: Hillary Clinton is being sued by parents of Sean Smith and Tyrone Woods, two of the four men who died in Benghazi in 2012.

The lawsuit alleges that Clinton’s negligence was directly responsible for Smith’s and Woods’ deaths, even saying that terrorists were able to locate them because of “the information that was obtained from Defendant Clinton’s ‘extremely careless’ handling of confidential and classified government information.”

But aside from the wrongful death and negligence charges, they’re also going after Clinton for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

The defamation charge concerns this:

“Defendant Clinton made false and defamatory statements negligently, recklessly, purposefully, and/or intentionally with actual malice… by stating that Plaintiffs were lying about Clinton having told them that the Benghazi Attack was caused by an anti-Muslim YouTube video.”

The lawsuit makes multiple mention of Clinton’s emails as possibly related to Benghazi, including here:

It is highly probable, given Defendant Clinton’s history of reckless handling of classified information, that Defendant Clinton, as Secretary of State, sent and received information about Ambassador Christopher Stevens and thus the U.S. Department of State activities and covert operations that the deceased were a part of in Benghazi, Libya. This information was compromised from the second that it left Defendant Clinton’s private e mail server and easily found its way to foreign powers including, but not limited to Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea.

Both Patricia Smith and Charles Woods have recently spoken out strongly against Clinton, directly blaming her for their sons’ deaths.

You can read the full lawsuit here.