Category Archives: defense policy

State Department Insecurity

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The AP headline reads State Department was forced to disable security features to receive messages from Clinton email server.

[E]mails, reviewed by The Associated Press, show that State Department technical staff disabled software on their systems intended to block phishing emails that could deliver dangerous viruses. They were trying urgently to resolve delivery problems with emails sent from Clinton’s private server.

These emails, obtained Judicial Watch pursuant to their FOIA request and enforced by court order because State kept trying to ignore that law’s requirements, occurred in 2010.  This also gives the lie to State’s claims that had those worthies known of Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s private and unsecured email server, on which she was conducting government and classified government business, they would have denied her permission to use it.  State knew.

In fact, Ken LaVolpe, Deputy Director for Security, Technical, and User Services Division in State’s Office of Information Resource Management sent this about disabling much of State’s own security software in a December 2010 email to his minions:

This should trump all other activities[.]

Tom Lawrence, Branch Chief for Technical and Security Teams in the OIRM and a subordinate of LaVolpe’s added

We view this [turning of security features] as a Band-Aid and fear it’s not 100 percent fully effective.

The AP’s headline gives the game away: State was not at all forced to disable any of its security features to troubleshoot problems with Clinton’s unprotected email server.  The Band-Aid was not at all necessary.  State could simply—and should have—cut all connections between the government’s classified networks and Clinton’s unprotected server or better, shut her server down altogether.  But this is the Obama administration’s and Clinton’s attitude toward national security and personal privilege.

Elections have consequences.

Trailing

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The People’s Republic of China now has the fastest supercomputer in the world.  In fact, it has the two fastest.  There’s more to it than this, too, as Horst Simon, Deputy Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, noted:

The fact that every single piece is Chinese-made is huge.

side from minor matters like predicting the weather and the investment markets, these kinds of computers are useful in identifying and solving complex problems involved in design of equipment, weapons, defense weapons, collating intelligence information and making serious predictions based on that information, and on and on and on.

This is an area in which we can’t afford to lag.  Especially to trail our enemies.

Laughingstock

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The Pentagon held a video-teleconference with Russian defense officials Saturday, two days after Russia bombed Pentagon and CIA-backed rebels not once, but twice on Thursday near Syria’s border with Iraq and Jordan.

And especially [emphasis added]

The second wave of strikes occurred after the US military called Russia on an emergency byline established following Russia’s deployment of dozens of fighter jets and attack helicopters to Syria in late 2015.

This is how seriously Russia takes President Barack Obama’s (d) administration.  This is the contempt Vladimir Putin has for this President and for Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her Reset that she wants to extend.  A Reset that is too expensive, indeed.

Elections have consequences.

Obama’s High Dudgeon

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A carefully manufactured one, too.  The Wall Street Journal has an accurate read on President Barack Obama’s (D) constructed ire.

“For a while now the main contribution of some of my friends on the other side of the aisle have made in the fight against ISIL is to criticize this Administration and me for not using the phrase ‘radical Islam,'” Mr Obama said Tuesday, using his preferred acronym for Islamic State.  “That’s the key, they tell us.  We cannot beat ISIL unless we call them ‘radical Islamists.’ What exactly would using this label accomplish?  What exactly would it change?”

Since the President asked, allow us to answer.  …  If the US is under attack, Americans deserve to hear their President say exactly who is attacking us and why.  You cannot effectively wage war, much less gauge an enemy’s strengths, without a clear idea of who you are fighting.

Mr Obama’s refusal to speak of “radical Islam” also betrays his failure to understand the sources of Islamic State’s legitimacy and thus its allure to young Muslim men.  The threat is religious and ideological.

Obama also said this:

Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. … There’s no magic to the phrase of radical Islam.  It’s a political talking point.

And yet, here he is, making it a political talking point.  As well as repeating his lack of understanding of what our enemy is and so preventing himself from constructing a means of destroying it while also preventing Defense from constructing such a means and then acting on it.  As well as repeating his lack of understanding of why it’s important to accurately name our enemy.  The idea of accurately identifying our enemy is not to “make it go away.”  It’s to help in accurately understanding our enemy so we can destroy it.

The term “radical Islam” plainly is extremely important to Obama, too, despite his emotional denial of the importance of it; his seven and a half year refusal to use the term to identify the terrorists demonstrates that.  His steadfast refusal to identify these terrorists, to say who they are, also says far more about his failure to do his duty regarding our nation’s safety, and it says far more about his level of immorality in that failure than it says about any of his critics who decry his failure.

Talk about playing politics with terrorism.  Jeez.

Elections have consequences.

Never Let a Tragedy Go to Waste

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Or a terrorist attack.

The debate over how to stop attacks like the terror massacre in Orlando erupted on the House floor late Monday as Democratic lawmakers loudly criticized House Speaker Paul Ryan (R, WI) and other GOP leaders for taking no action on the nation’s gun laws.

Instead of moving to enhance our nation’s and our citizens’ ability to protect ourselves collectively and individually against terrorist attacks, the Left has chosen to focus on their continued efforts to disarm us all.

More cynically, yet, the Left carefully elides the potential outcomes, the vastly reduced casualty count were at least some of the folks inside the bar armed, or were some of the passersby on the street outside the bar—and present well before the police could arrive—armed.  The one cop who happened to be on the scene could have been critically reinforced immediately, were there an armed populace present.

The disruption underscored the political divide in the wake of the attack, with many Democrats looking to tighten gun laws in response and Republicans looking to crack down on the strain of radical Islam that seemingly motivated the shooter.

Ryan also tried to hold a moment of silence out of respect for the Orlando terrorist victims, and many Democrats chose to walk out of the Chamber rather than honor those victims.  House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) justified the calculated insult to those victims:

…told reporters Democrats have “had enough” of moments of silence after mass shootings when Congress does not act to tighten gun laws.

This isn’t a misplaced set of priorities by the Left.  It’s their focus.  Terrorism, Muslim or otherwise, is not a concern of theirs, and the Orlando mass shooting wasn’t an act of terrorism.  Disarming us is the Left’s priority.  Armed American citizens is where the Left’s fevered fears lie.

Elections have consequences.