Category Archives: defense policy

Works for Me

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The baby sister and de facto chief of staff to northern Korea’s MFWIC, Baby Kim, Kim Yo Jong doesn’t like that citizens of the Republic of Korea keep sending anti-northern Korea missives into the DMZ and on across into the gangland.

[Kim Yo Jong] warned that it would end a 2018 inter-Korean military agreement if the South fails to stop defectors and activists from sending anti-Pyongyang leaflets into the demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating the two countries.
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Kim Yo Jong also said the North could permanently shut a liaison office with the South and an inter-Korean industrial park in the border town of Kaesong….

She also says that the agreement was hardly of any value.

She’s right on that last. It is a useless, virtue-signaling setup that the RoK, in retrospect mistakenly, agreed.

The dissolution of the agreement would create no loss at all for the people of the RoK; Baby Kim’s Baby Sister ought not let the door hit her in the fannie on the way out.

America’s Problem

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…according to Walter Russell Mead, in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed. He suggested that the world will only wait out the Trump administration, and that the next administration, Trump’s or Biden’s, will face a world grown unresponsive to American leadership, not believing that American society is capable of the role any further.

He closed his piece with this:

Whatever happens in the election, the US administration next year will face a problem even more daunting than the intellectual challenge of crafting a national strategy for an increasingly dangerous time. It will have to convince the world that this time, America really means what its president says.

This overstates the case, and it perpetuates a myth that has suffused too many administrations for far too long.

We don’t have to convince the world of anything, nor should we be defining ourselves in terms of other nations’ approval/disapproval of us. We have only to do what’s best for the United States—which will include ad hoc purpose-designed coalitions, but very few hard treaties.

Putting our nation first—which is not putting our nation alone, as a mendacious press and today’s crop of Progressive-Democrats claim—simplifies Mr Mead’s problem.

Europe Objects

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The US will allow to expire/revoke sanction waivers associated with the failed Iran nuclear weapons development Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action treaty. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, the nations whose businesses will be most affected, are unhappy. The projects in which these nations’ companies are engaged, they claim,

serve the nonproliferation interests of all and provide the international community with assurances of the exclusively peaceful and safe nature of Iranian nuclear activities[.]

What these nations must answer, though, which they’ve been at pains to not answer since the 2015 agreement’s inception, is the manner in which Iran’s nuclear “activities” are peaceful and safe when the Iranian government has said all along that Israel must be destroyed—and its nuclear weapons program would provide significant weaponry for that goal.

What these nations must answer, and which they’ve also been at pains to avoid, is how peaceful and safe Iran’s nuclear weapons program will be after the JCPOA expires in a few short years, and all fetters disappear.

Limit FISA Surveillance?

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Certainly, the process is beset with vast, and serious, problems.

Mr [DoJ Inspector General] Horowitz’s staff reviewed a sample from a recent five-year period, October 2014 to September 2019, during which the eight FBI field offices applied for more than 700 surveillance warrants on US persons. Each of the reviewed files contained errors, inconsistencies and omissions. After reviewing the report, the FISA court’s Chief Judge James E Boasberg issued a rare public order. He told the government to undertake steps to ensure the accuracy of FISA applications. Yet inaccuracy isn’t the only problem. The use of FISA against a US citizen presents a fundamental threat to civil liberties. It essentially suspends the Constitution.

The problems, though, aren’t limited to FBI misbehaviors, the FBI being the proximate target of Boasberg’s order. The existence of these errors and the long-time existence of this sort of error each and together demonstrate that men of government, when able to exercise their power in the darkness of secrecy, cannot be trusted to stay true to the straight and narrow, to the strictures of integrity.

After FISA was enacted in 1978, FBI Director William Webster set the standards for its use.

And those standards have been violated.

Over the years FISA has been amended to allow for the surveillance of Americans. But there were safeguards.

Even with that legislative drift, the evolving safeguards have been violated.

It’s enough.

Limiting FISA surveillance must begin with eliminating the Star Chamber that is the FISA Court. That court is lawless enough already, as its ready and unquestioning acceptance of false warrant applications demonstrates. Its secret proceedings, along with that history, lend no credibility to the premise that, were its approvals limited by statute to foreign nationals, that it would honor those limits any more than have the men coming before it with applications to spy on American citizens foreign nationals who happen to be corresponding with American citizens.

Nor has that secret court ever been necessary, even did it behave properly. It exists to facilitate secret surveillances supported by secret warrants. Our Article III courts, and our State courts, have long been checked out on sealing—keeping secret—warrants, and subpoenas, until it comes time actually to serve them. Our courts, and our States’ state-level and local police departments, have long been checked out on conducting quiet surveillance—while under the careful eye of our public courts and of us citizens of the United States and of the State wherein [we] reside.

The existence of this Star Chamber is at the heart of the suspension of our Constitution about which Baker wrote at the link.

An Expansionist Germany

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Not military expansion, but a more insidious one: legal expansion.

The German government must come up with a new law regulating its secret services, after the country’s highest court [Federal Constitutional Court] ruled that the current practice of monitoring telecommunications of foreign citizens at will violates constitutionally-enshrined press freedoms and the privacy of communications.

And:

The key legal question was whether foreign nationals in other countries were covered by Germany’s constitution….

Why, yes, yes they are. Because German sovereignty reaches deep inside other nations’ borders, other nations’ legal and political jurisdictions, overrides those nations’ own sovereignty. Germany’s laws not only apply outside German borders, they apply inside other nations’ borders.

The Court’s judges’ hearts may have been in the right place, but this sets an ugly precedent regarding the allegedly inherent superiority of German sovereignty.