ATF and Gun Control

They’re not capable of letting this go.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on Thursday raised new concerns about surplus military ammo used in popular AR-15 rifles and pistols just days after pulling back on a proposal to ban the ammo because it could threaten police safety.

In a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, ATF Director B Todd Jones said all types of the 5.56 military-style ammo used by shooters pose a threat to police as more people buy the AR-15-style pistols.

So is the ammunition for any firearm a threat. So are knives. So are hammers.

Since the ATF doesn’t understand government’s role in our lives, or its own role in government, maybe it’s time ATF funding was reduced. A lot.

After all, recall that it was the ATF that sold guns to Mexican drug cartels.

Clinton’s Emails

Ex-First Lady, one-time Senator, and woman who once sat in the Secretary of State’s chair had a press conference.

QUESTION: How could the public be assured that when you deleted emails that were personal in nature, that you didn’t also delete emails that were professional, but possibly unflattering?

And what do you think about this Republican idea of having an independent third party come in and examine your emails?

CLINTON: Well first of all, you have to ask that question to every single federal employee, because the way the system works, the federal employee, the individual, whether they have one device, two devices, three devices, how many addresses, they make the decision.

So, even if you have a work-related device with a work-related .gov account, you choose what goes on that.

In the first place, Madam, no, we don’t have to ask every single federal employee; we are, though, asking you. In the second place, even if every single federal employee made that error of judgment, it wouldn’t excuse yours. I notice, too, that you didn’t answer the question about how the public can be sure you didn’t also delete….

Nor is it lost on any of us that you ignored the second part of that question, too. Should we conclude, then, that you don’t want an independent evaluation?

Then there’s the apparent evidence tampering and the apparent violation of the Federal Records Act:

QUESTION: Did you or any of your aides delete any government-related emails from your personal account? And what lengths are you willing to go to to prove that you didn’t?

Some people, including supporters of yours, have suggested having an independent arbiter look at your server, for instance.

CLINTON: … I have no doubt that we have done exactly what we should have done. When the search was conducted, we were asking that any email be identified and preserved that could potentially be federal records, and that’s exactly what we did.

[T]he process produced over 30,000 you know, work emails, and I think that we have more than met the requests from the State Department. The server contains personal communications from my husband and me, and I believe I have met all of my responsibilities and the server will remain private….

It’s a much longer-winded obfuscatory answer; I’ve excerpted here. But notice: she never did get around to answering the question of deletion and how anyone would know. She did, though, say that the server she used to conduct government business will remain private, and she was clear that she and her people were the ones who determined the work relevance of what she kept and what she deleted. She also continued to elide the question of an independent evaluator’s judgment.

Finally, a small aside: 30,000 work emails works out to about 20 emails per day over her four-year tour—an unbelievably small amount of email traffic for a SecState.

Keep this in mind during the Primary Season, and if she passes through it, in the fall of 2016.

Rule By Law—Spying Edition

The People’s Republic of China is on the verge of enacting a law that would make legal corporate spying by the PRC government. Of course, the Chinese are couching this as a wholly innocent effort at countering terrorism.

The draft law requires both foreign and domestic telecommunications and Internet service providers to create backdoors in their systems to give Chinese authorities surveillance access, hand over copies of their encryption codes and assist government agencies with decryption when asked, among other provisions. Also, companies would be required to store Chinese users’ data on servers in the Chinese mainland; otherwise, they wouldn’t be allowed to operate in the country.

This sort of thing really should make it impossible for any honest company to do business in the PRC or with a PRC business. They should accept the Chinese offer of not “be[ing] allowed to operate in the country.” The financial gains to be had on the mainland—particularly with the money repatriation restrictions the PRC already has in place—can’t be worth this surrender of control over a legitimate business to the PRC government.

The Mosul Campaign

A couple of things.

Regarding the well-publicized upcoming Mosul, Iraq, campaign (remember the ability of WWI allied general staffs to predict German army movements by reading Berlin newspaper society pages? President Barack Obama plainly does not), a carefully unnamed “military official” had this to say:

When we feel that the Iraqi forces are ready to go and win decisively, we will go and advise the Iraqis to begin the operation.

Hmm….

Keep some things in mind for a broader context of this official’s remark. These are the same Iraqi forces that failed so miserably against the Iranian army. These are the same Iraqi forces that failed so miserably against the American military, twice. These are the same Iraqi forces that failed so miserably when the Daesh ran all over them just a few months ago. These are Iraqi forces.

Update: As prelude to the upcoming Mosul campaign (and from which all the publicity may have been intended to distract as well as to show “initiative”) a 30,000-strong mixed Iraqi, Kurdish, militia, and Iranian force began an assault on Tikrit, which some 1,500-2,000 Daesh terrorists are holding, over last weekend.

This force is made up of Peshmerga, Sunni and Shia militia units, and units from Iran’s Quds forces.  Some Iraqi army units are along, too, to lend a government imprimatur to the operation.

As happened the last time the Iraqi army tried to take Tikrit, the offensive has stalled short of the city’s suburbs, having run into mines on the roads and other key approaches: Daesh emplaced IEDs.  The move now is to attempt to surround the city; Quds leadership is guiding the eastern part of the operation.

Mulling Things Over

The US military is considering a months-long campaign of airstrikes to squeeze Islamic State fighters in Mosul before inserting Iraqi ground forces to retake the city, officials said Friday.

The on-the-ground fight to retake Mosul isn’t likely to start until the fall at the earliest, after an intensified air campaign to target Islamic State leaders and cut off supply lines in and around the city, the officials said.

The emerging plan is at odds with a briefing by a US military’s Central Command official in February in which he said the US and Iraq were looking at starting a campaign to liberate Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, by April or May.

Why is the Obama administration kicking such things around in public, particularly in front of the Daesh terrorists? What does Obama think he’s accomplishing with this?