Secure Freedom Radio » Foreign Policy

August 4, 201- Beth Galinsky, Jim Hanson & Rep. Frank Wolf

admin — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:28:30 +0000

Today on Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney, Beth Galinsky, one of the leaders in the fight against the Ground Zero Mosque will be speaking about yesterday’s setback including the Bloomberg statement and the Landmarks Commission decision. Show regular Jim Hanson of Black 5 will be joining the show to speak about the very public plans to end combat missions in Iraq and the Wikileaks scandal. Finally, Congressman Wolf will be joining Frank for a conversation about the decline in the focus on human rights by the Obama administration.

Monologue:

Some thoughts about a very important setback dealt to Barak Cbama’s efforts to win quick ratification in the United States Senate of his new START treaty. This is a treaty that we’ve talked about many times at Secure Freedom Radio, is deeply flawed, it should not be ratified, it should not impose on us the various problems that it will entail. Making reductions, deep reductions in our remaining strategic nuclear forces, imposing restrictions on the conventional forces we need to be able to promptly strike targets around the world. Giving the Russians a new veto over our missile defenses, which is something we thought was totally behind us and is completely inconsistent with our national security needs. And on and on. But what happened yesterday, when Senator John Kerry, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was obliged to postpone for at least 5 weeks until mid-September the vote in his foreign relations committee on this treaty?

This I think has implications not just for the treaty which I think is in trouble, I have a piece in BigPeace.com on the subject that I recommend to you, but I think the treaty is in trouble, but more to the point the president’s strategy or ambition to as he puts it, to rid the world of nuclear weapons, is also in trouble. And thank G-d. What happened is that Senator Kerry is trying to push forward on this treaty, the president and his team is trying to push forward on this treaty and they ran into some real obstacles. Because Senators are quite properly concerned on a number of different scores. For example they have indicated that they wanted to make sure they have hundreds of questions for the record that they have put foreword are fully responded to by the administration. It hasn’t happened yet. They have indicated that they believe there needs to be more balance in the testimony of witnesses before the Senate. Senator Kerry believes that the record is sufficiently complete, he’s had two witnesses that believe the treaty is defective, and 10 times that number who assure him and his colleagues that all is well and they should just go ahead and rubberstamp the treaty. Well there does need to be more balance, its misleading to members of the Senate to convey this sense that all is well. Other Senators, actually 41 of them have written saying to the president there needs to be a modernization program if we are going to support this treaty. Why? Because we have allowed the armed forces, the nuclear component of the armed forces to atrophy in this country and this is for decades. This is not simply an indictment of the Obama administration, though I think it is compounding the danger that is represented. But there has been either malign or benign neglect of our nuclear forces going back for years, to the point where now we have on average weapons in that nuclear deterrent of ours, that are 30 years old or older. We have on average weapons that are15 years beyond their design life, and not one of them has been tested. And the only way that really fully validates that they still work, namely underground detonations, in over 18 years.

Now you put all of this together and you realize when Senators talk about modernization they can’t simply be talking about fixing up some obsolescent facilities that are part of the nuclear weapons infrastructure, complexes they call it, many of which date back to the Manhattan Project, if you can believe it. Many of which are falling down around years of our workers n those vital facilities. But they also, these Senators when they talk about modernization must also be talking about modernizing the deterrent itself. The president has said that since we are not going to get rid of these weapons as much as he wants to in his lifetime as long as we need them they are going to be safe, they are going to be affective. He does not say they are going to be reliable, but they have to be all of those things. They have to be in short, a competent deterrent in a world that’s getting more dangerous by the day. Senator Kerry couldn’t get this blown through the Senate, or through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee event, he is now going to have 5 weeks to try to put Humpty Dumpty together.

We’ll see if he can. In the meantime, we’re going to be doing everything we can here, at Secure Freedom Radio, BigPeace.com and everywhere else to ensure that the American people understand the truth of what’s going on here. Not just the defects of this new treaty, the new START treaty, but the defects of this administration’s pursuit of a very dangerous idea, denuclearizing not the world, but our country because it’s the only one that it can actually disarm. And doing so at a time when the world is actually becoming much more dangerous and our deterrent much, much more important, and needless to say, so is our missile defense capability. So, for all of these reasons, we will keep you informed about this debate. We hope to engage you in this debate. We’d love to hear from you, with your thoughts about it on Secure Freedom Radio dot com and the Frank Gaffney Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Thursday, January 7, 2010 – Jeremy Rabkin, Daniel Pipes, Rep. Pete Hoekstra

admin — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 05:12:58 +0000

Frank starts the show commending today’s editorial by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, What Does the Detroit Bomber Know? A case of national security malpractice, as Team Obama disregards the intelligence value of the “alleged” bomber in favor of dangling a plea deal in front of him. Dr. Jeremy Rabkin, Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law, looks into his crystal ball on the topic of international law. He explodes the myths so cherished throughout the Excutive Branch today, including the International Criminal Court. Eminent scholar Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum on the ‘theater of the absurd’ coming to an airport near you. Finally, joining Frank is Rep. Pete Hoekstra to talk about a whole host of issues.

Monologue- January 7, 2010

I want to draw a little bit from a marvelous op-ed article in today’s Wall Street Journal by former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey-among other distinctions, Michael Mukasey was the presiding judge, federal district court judge in the trial of the Blind Sheik prosecuted successfullyI’m fairly proud to say by our friend and colleague Andy McCarthy.

Michael Muksaey writes today in the Wall Street Journal about all of this, the postmortems of this,the reviews- by the way, Dana Milbank, a man for whom I don’t have a whole lot of truck, wrote quite an excoriating piece about the endless reviews, seemingly the only thing the Administration under Barack Obama does is review. And the reviews that are now coming to ahead we’re going to hear more shortly about. The one that has been done in the past few days in the wake of the Christmas bombing attempt on Northwest 253, but that’s the subject of General Mukasey’s brilliant essay and I just want to read from it if you will indulge me because it’s so well-written and so thoughtful and so much on point.

Partway through the Judge says, “The president acknowledged that the plot had been hatched in Yemen, but not without adding the misleading statement that Yemen faces ‘crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies.’ That Yemenis have to cope with ‘crushing poverty’ is irrelevant here. Abdulmutallab [the perpetrator] is the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker. Other jihadists, including the physician who blew himself up and killed seven CIA agents in Afghanistan last week, and indeed the millionaire Osama bin Laden, prove that poverty does not beget terrorists. “Deadly insurgencies” is a half-truth, which omits the fact that the Yemeni government itself has supported al Qaeda and continues to harbor at least two people—Jamal Ahmed Mohammed Ali al-Badawi and Fahad Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso—involved in the bombing of the USS Cole.”

Judge Mukasey goes on to point out that, the one of the things that’s quite troubling about the Administration’s approach to Abdulmutallab’s handling after he was taken into custody, when the bomb he was trying desperately to detonate did not go off and he was supressed by passengers and members of the crew of the aircraft and then brought into Federal Custody when they landed, is the following point: ”Even as the initial spin was in progress, Abdulmutallab was chattering like a magpie to his FBI captors about having been trained by al Qaeda and about there being more where he came from [that is to say, more terrorists from where he came from].Braggadocio aside, he was certainly aware of who had prepared the potentially deadly mix that was sewn in his underwear, who had trained him, where the training had taken place, whether there was in fact a South Asian man described by two other passengers who helped him talk his way on to the plane, and a good deal more. Such facts are valuable but evanescent intelligence. The location of people—and with it our ability to find and neutralize them—is subject to rapid change.

Had Abdulmutallab been turned over immediately to interrogators intent on gathering intelligence, valuable facts could have been gathered and perhaps acted upon. ” And then he goes on to say, ”[it is no comfort to be told] as we were, by the senior intelligence adviser [namely, John Brennan] he of the “no smoking gun”—that we can learn facts from Abdulmutallab as part of a plea bargaining process in connection with his prosecution [now before the civil courts]…Whatever that official thinks he knows about the plea bargaining process, he certainly should know that the kind of facts that Abdulmutallab might be expected to know have a shelf life that is a lot shorter than the plea bargaining process, assuming such a process ever gets started.”

In other words, the kind of information this guy was prepared to share and was sharing until we allowed him to lawyer up, at which point of course he was told to stop talking to these federal officials, could really constitute the loss of vital security information. The Judge points out he could’ve been held in military brig and interrogated before the decision was ultimately made as to how to dispose of his case. This is a matter in other words, where if you wanted to shut the guy up- and I’m not saying that what the Administration wanted to do- but if that’s what you did want to shut him up this is what precisely what you would’ve done ! Thereby, perhaps lost at least this evanescent (as the judge calls it) intelligence upon which we migt have e acted to save American lives.

The Judge concludes, “What the gaffes, the almost comically strained avoidance of such direct terms as “war” and “Islamist terrorism,” and the failure to think of Abdulmutallab as a potential source of intelligence rather than simply as a criminal defendant seem to reflect is that some in the executive branch are focused more on not sounding like their predecessors than they are on finding and neutralizing people who believe it is their religious duty to kill us. That’s too bad, because the Constitution vests “the executive power”—not some of it, all of it—in the president. He, and those acting at his direction, are responsible for protecting us. There is much to worry about if they think that the principal challenge of the day is detecting bombs at the airport rather than actively searching out, finding and neutralizing terrorists before they get there.”

Well those are the views of General Michael Mukasey, Attorney General of the United States under President Bush. I very strongly associate myself with those views and I suspect most commonsensical Americans including those of you who have the common sense to listen to Secure Freedom Radio probably do as well. The question is: what does the President of the United States think about this? And is he prepared to take this kind of advice and ensure that rather than being politically correct or simply even perhaps obtuse about the nature of the threat we face and prosecuting it effectively, he is instead going to continue to do what he’s been doing of late. I pray that will not be the case. We’ll be following it closely here at Secure Freedom Radio. Those are my views, let me know yours. Securefreedomradio.org or .com and Frank Gaffney twitter or facebook accounts, whatever your way of doing so.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010 – Gordon Chang, Diana West

admin — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:07:17 +0000

Frank and Gordon put out a serious information download on China’s role in supporting the Iranian nuclear program. Then, Diana West poses to Frank some serious reasons why we should be watching Iraq much more closely. This is a hot show with serious intel. Get the podcast now!

Monologue- January 6, 2010

First, I want to give you my personal take on President Obama’s address to the nation that he made shortly after we spoke with him yesterday. He talked in a combination of sober terms about the challenges we face- as he puts it, “the challenge of utmost urgency confronts us as we deal with Al-Qaeda and its extremist allies.” He adopted some of the bravura of the commander-in-chief as he promised to thwart the plans of those “extremists” -as he insists on calling them- pledging “to disrupt, dismantle and defeat their networks once and for all.”

He then proceeded to drill a little bit down on the problem that took place on Christmas Day when we very narrowly lost 300 or so of our colleagues, comrades, countrymen on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, and heavens knows how many more on the ground had Al-Qaeda and its perpetrator had their way by detonating this explosive device concealed in his underwear, with debris flying everywhere on perhaps quite populated areas on the ground below. The President assures that he is going to find out why the system failed in a potentially disastrous way- that he was going to correct that failure and by gum he is going to prevent such attacks in the future.

I don’t mean to quibble about this, I think those are all the right sorts of things to be saying. I found troubling the demeaning way he dealt with his subordinates. It’s one thing to be disappointed, even furious, at those who are supposed to be protecting us. It’s a fine line to walk, though when you need them- you need their help and I’m not sure all the statements in the world about how supportive he is of them, particularly as we heard last week when seven members of the Central Intelligence Agency team apparently were murdered by a suicide bomber in Khost in Afghanistan. But then he spoke quite eloquently about what these people are doing for others, and he did a little bit yesterday as well but he certainly made it clear what went on in this case was not acceptable and he will not tolerate.

I would feel better about this if the President were evincing any interest in correcting the underlying problem. You know, he’s spending a lot of time on health care these days- too much in my way of thinking, and not with very good effect in my view. But he is presumably acquainted by virtue of this deep familiarity with our health care system with the difference between trying to treat a lethal disease- one that will kill the patient, in this case many patients, unless it is dealt with in a manner that addresses the root causes, not simply the symptoms.

And I see no evidence that the President is going to the root cause- which is you heard me say before, and you will hear me say again, I believe is that the people that we are having wage war against us believe God compells them to destroy us, or at least to force us into submission pursuit to what they call Sharia. That missing ingredient in this problem which we’ve talked with Steve Coughlin and Robert Spencer and so many others here at Secure Freedom Radio denies us the ability to develop- let alone execute a strategy for defeating people who have this ideological purpose and this determination to triumph. So that’s what’s missing here.

The last piece I wanted to touch on is the President did speak about Guantanamo Bay and the prospect of sending detainees now held there from Yemen back home, and we’re gonna play a clip of this because I want you to hear the defensiveness in his voice and the continuing failure to appreciate that he’s actually signalling weakness, not strength in this sort of action. [PLAYS CLIP] So you don’t need to worry folks- he’s not gonna let these people out unless we’re absolutely protected and yet then he goes on to say, both some good news and some bad news and we’ll go to it. [PLAYS CLIP]

We’re going to close it no matter what he keeps saying. I take some heart from the fact that as recently as the weekend his counterterrorism “czar” John Brennan was saying that they were going to send these prisoners back to Yemen, no matter what. Maybe not- and maybe we won’t be closing Guantanamo Bay, at least I hope so. If Congress has its way, and if they’ve heard from you-that probably won’t be possible. We ought to make sure and I hope you will- do everything in your power while your members of Congress, your legislative representatives here in Washington are back home with you, this month-what remains of it, to tell them: do not allow the President to close Guantanamo Bay, to send these detainees anyplace where they will in fact threaten our security.

Now let me conclude with this thought: I’m often told that we’re not going to get this bit right about Sharia, let alone putting the country on a war footing to deal with our enemies properly and effectively until we have been attacked in a massive and even catastrophic way again- I always pray that wouldn’t be necessary and maybe this narrowly averted attack over the skies of Detroit allows us an opportunity to avoid having to suffer yet again such a painful experience before doing something about the problem. But there’s nothing in the President’s remarks that suggest he’s getting it and his pronouncements about how he’s not going to put up with this and he will assist on accountability and so on, do not suggest he is willing to grapple with the metal yet.

In this absence of this, we need a Team B as we’ve talked about before- we need a second opinion. I would call on Leon Panetta, the Director of Central Intelligence, to do what his predecessor, George Herbert Walker Bush did 30-odd years ago: get outside experts in, and get them with the proper skepticism- we don’t want just yes men, we want people who believe as I do that there’s a piece of the puzzle that’s missing and we need to address it. Get them in there, give them the data, help them tell the President what he needs to really know to fix the systemic problems that threaten us all.

Well that’s my take on it. Love to hear yours. Secure Freedom.org or Frank Gaffney facebook and twitter accounts.

Henninger on ‘Dumbing Democracy Down’

admin — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:08:43 +0000

In the Wall Street Jornal the other day, Daniel Henninger had a brilliant piece on Obama’s recent trip abroad.