Category Archives: defense policy

What’s Their Plan

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…to fix the underlying problem?

Germany’s vice chancellor [Sigmar Gabriel] said his country could take in 500,000 refugees annually for the next several years….

The Hungarians, at the gate to Europe (remember the Ottoman onslaught that overran Hungary and didn’t stop until Vienna?), understand.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban warned in an interview with Austrian television late Monday that millions of refugees would descend upon the continent if what he called Germany’s “open door” policy continued.

“As long as Europe cannot protect its external borders it makes no sense to discuss the fate of those flowing in,” Orban said.

In what way does anyone in Europe think taking in all comers—however sad their story—will in any way stem the flood? In what way does anyone in Europe think taking in all comers will in any way alleviate the suffering of those who’ve not yet left their home country(s) or, especially, those who cannot leave?

In what way does anyone in Europe think they can absorb the flood without going to the source and correcting the problems there?

Assisting Refugees

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The surge of refugees fleeing Syria and other war-torn regions is putting immense pressure not only on Europe but also the United States, as the Obama administration faces calls to take a more active role in the humanitarian crisis.

We’re supposed to accept 65,000-ish refugees from Syria and “other war-torn regions.” Congressman Michael McCaul (R, TX), House Homeland Security Committee Chairman, is on the right track:

Despite all evidence towards our homeland’s vulnerability to foreign fighters, the administration still plans to resettle Syrian refugees into the United States. America has a proud tradition of welcoming refugees from around the world, but in this special situation the Obama administration’s Syrian refugee plan is very dangerous.

Indeed. Aside from our inability to afford the expense of the flood and our empirically demonstrated inability to properly house large influxes of refugees, too many of these are unvetted and not refugees at all.

Anne Richard, State’s Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, disagrees.

[T]hese cases are the most carefully vetted of any travelers to the United States, and nobody comes in without having a Department of Homeland Security interviewer agree that they are, in fact, bona fide refugees.

Personally vetted by a DHS interviewer. Yeah—unvetted. And that leaves aside the disingenuousness of applying that claim to a flood of 65,000. With fewer thousands of alien families on our southern border that have been cooped up on that border for months, to the point a Federal judge had to order their release (vetted or not, a problem for a separate writing), because DHS couldn’t figure out how to do that on its own.

No. If Europe, and the United States, really gave a rat’s behind about the plight of these refugees, we’d get out of our comfortable ivory towers and work the problem at its origin: the countries from which these refugees are flooding. Otherwise, the flood will continue unabated.

And refugees and those unable to leave will continue to suffer.

What Do They Know?

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Stanley Kurtz has asked a very important question regarding Hillary Clinton’s disingenuous handling of our nation’s secrets on her personal, private email server while she was sitting in the Secretary of State’s chair (or in her airplane seat as she jet-setted around the world on her State Department travels.

…shouldn’t we be paying more attention to the nature and scale of the damage to American national security caused by Hillary’s carelessness with classified information?

Kurtz also quoted from a Daily Beast piece a related aspect:

[S]enior counterintelligence officials are assuming the worst about what the Russians and Chinese know.

That brings me to my point: there’s no need to assume the worst; by inspecting Clinton’s private server—forensically, if needs be, since by her own admission she’s committed the felony of evidence tampering by deleting a potful of emails—we know what the Russians and Chinese (and the Brits, Israelis, Germans, and any script kiddy with an app) know. We don’t have to spend a lot of resources or money guessing at that.

An Excerpt

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…from a VA Office of the Inspector General report.

We substantiated the second allegation that pending ES [Enrollment System] records included entries for individuals reported to be deceased. As of September 2014, more than 307,000 pending ES records, or about 35 percent of all pending records, were for individuals reported as deceased by the Social Security Administration. However, due to data limitations, we could not determine specifically how many pending ES records represent veterans who applied for health care benefits. These conditions occurred because the enrollment program did not effectively define, collect, and manage enrollment data. In addition, VHA lacked adequate procedures to identify date of death information and implement necessary updates to the individual’s status. Unless VHA officials establish effective procedures to identify deceased individuals and accurately update their status, ES will continue to provide unreliable information on the status of applications for veterans seeking enrollment in the VA health care system.

Not only is the VA not trying to take care of our vets—307,000 of them died waiting to get treatment—they’re not even troubling themselves to keep records.

We substantiated the third allegation that employees incorrectly marked unprocessed applications as completed and possibly deleted 10,000 or more transactions from the Workload Reporting and Productivity (WRAP) tool over the past 5 years.

They do, though, go to the effort of covering up their non-performance (I hesitate to say “failure to perform;” that would suggest they’re trying).

And there’s this insulting bit of vapidity from the Under Secretary for Health in response to the IG’s report (the whole letter is at Appendix D of the report at the link. It doesn’t get any better).

We regret the inconvenience and potential hardship place on applicants for health care and we are working hard to restore Veterans’ confidence and trust in VA’s systems and staff. We have and will continue to take timely and appropriate steps to improve our services to ensure we meet the expectations of those whom we have the honor of serving.

Yeah, dying while on the VA’s who gives a patootie wait list is such a potentially inconvenient hardship.

Since the VA doesn’t care, we should honor their lack of interest. Disband the VA, and use the budget dollars that would have gone to the VA in any particular year as vouchers for our veterans which they can find, in that year, their own quality care and decent hospitals.

Clinton’s Emails

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State released 7,000 more of Hilary Clinton’s emails, those…documents…transmitted via her private, unprotected email server. One hundred fifty of them contained classified information.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the emails in question were “subsequently upgraded” to classified. He stressed that none of the emails was considered classified at the time.

This is so utterly disingenuous as to be outright lies. The material in the emails were not “subsequently upgraded” to classified; they were only marked classified after the fact. The material was classified all along.

[S]ome of the information on Clinton’s server was inherently classified. Fox’s analysts cited a memo transmitting information provided by foreign diplomats about Sudan peace talks.

As Shannen Coffin explained, because such information is substantive and comes from foreign diplomats, it is “born classified.”

Information from other sources also is born classified. Recall the first set of emails discovered to be classified (if unmarked as such): they passed along information derived from Talent Keyhole programs.

There are two things about this. All the folks sending, receiving, and reading those emails—TO, FROM, CC, and BCC senders and receivers (and relayers—that’s one reason why the email headers (available only in the electronic copies) are so important), every single one of them—knew or should have known that the material was classified, regardless of their markings. All the folks sending, receiving, or reading those emails should have squawked to the classification authorities of the sender’s office and of State, and to the Security facilities of both offices, about the security violations those emails represented, both by their lack of markings and by their existence on an unclassified, unprotected server.

The other thing is that the mere transmission of such information via unsecured means, or the mere retention of them, however briefly, on unsecured media, is a felony, whether or not the information was properly marked. Everyone in that sequence of transmittal—TO, FROM, CC, and BCC senders and receivers and relayers—who did not so report committed a felony.

Every single one.