Category: Obama

Iranian refugee camp in Iraq in jeopardy

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is a story I want to bring to your attention, but am not sure what to say about it other than keep an eye on it.   From the Washington Times yesterday.

Trouble is brewing at Camp Ashraf in Iraq, where 3,500 members of the main Iranian opposition group the PMOI – the People’s Mujahideen of Iran – are based.

At Iran’s request, the Iraqi authorities, who took over protection of Ashraf from American troops in January, are now preventing medicine and fuel from reaching the inhabitants. Parts of Ashraf, including a dormitory for several hundred women, have been besieged since mid-March, and unarmed residents have been subjected to violence. Most journalists and Iraqi doctors are not allowed entry – neither are relatives of the PMOI nor women of any nationality.

These draconian measures were put into force by Iraq’s National Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, a key ally of Iran, who says he wants to drive PMOI members out of Iraq. They also come two months after the European Union removed the PMOI from its terrorist list. Britain de-proscribed the group in 2008 after the Court of Appeal found that all the evidence showed it was “perverse” to classify the group as a terrorist organization.

The group remains on the U.S. blacklist, but in 2004 Washington recognized all PMOI members in Ashraf as “protected persons” under the Fourth Geneva Convention, after determining that none of them could be charged with any crime under U.S. law. Under international law, an attempt to forcefully displace the population even inside Iraq would be tantamount to a war crime.

Americans have been protecting this camp and I asked in March if these Iranians are killed when we pull-out of Iraq will Obama be blamed?

Andrew McCarthy says “NO” to AG Holder, mentions Uighers

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Today Andrew McCarthy who spent more than two decades at the Department of Justice and became an expert on terrorism, told Attorney General Eric Holder that he will not help them with Obama’s planned strategy to release Guantanamo Bay prisoners by year’s end.   Writing at National Review Online today, McCarthy says:

I did something today that I’ve never done before. The Department of Justice, which I proudly served for a quarter century as an assistant U.S. attorney and a deputy U.S. marshal, asked me for help, and I declined. Actually, what I declined to do was attend a meeting. My hope is that the dissent I am registering — to the administration’s disastrous policies of releasing trained terrorists and threatening prosecution against government lawyers — will help the department and the Obama administration, even if they don’t want to hear it.

At the start of his term, President Obama directed Attorney General Eric Holder to head up the President’s Detention Policy Task Force to study detention, trial, and other issues relating to alien enemy combatants — though that venerable law-of-war term has been purged in favor of “individuals captured or apprehended in connection with armed conflicts and counterterrorism operations.” The attorney general has assigned lawyers in the department’s Counterterrorism Division to organize the effort. Those lawyers invited me, among other former and current prosecutors experienced in terrorism and national-security matters, to attend a roundtable session next week, to sort through the vexing legal challenges of modern international terrorism.

Read on.

McCarthy makes two important points.  He asks, if he is on the Task Force and makes legal recommendations that are not favorable to the Administration, might he then be in legal jeopardy just as those Bush Administration lawyers may now be over their recommendations on interrogation tactics following 9/11.   

Is it the Delphi Technique?

And, then he points out that Obama has already declared that the Gitmo Detainees will be moved or freed later this year anyway, so why be on a Task Force and be nothing more than a rubber stamp for Obama and Holder.   This is a tried and true strategy of ‘Progressives’,  I know because I have seen it first hand, up close and personal.  The powers that be have already made their decision, but to give it the patina of a bipartisan and comprehensive strategy, they get a variety of people to sit on a task force then lead the task force to a predetermined conclusion.  Everyone walks away thinking they had a hand in the decision.  The strategy was probably developed within the framework of the Dephi Techinque, more details on it here.  Remember Obama has already used the strategy in a couple of meetings.  Good for you, Mr. McCarthy for getting it, and saying, “no!”

Below are excerpts from McCarthy’s letter to Holder today.

Released Gitmo Prisoners have returned to Jihad:

There are differences in these various proposals. But their proponents, and adherents to both the military and civilian justice approaches, have all agreed on at least one thing: Foreign terrorists trained to execute mass-murder attacks cannot simply be released while the war ensues and Americans are still being targeted. We have already released too many jihadists who, as night follows day, have resumed plotting to kill Americans. Indeed, according to recent reports, a released Guantanamo detainee is now leading Taliban combat operations in Afghanistan, where President Obama has just sent additional American forces.

The decision has already been made.  I say let Obama now take ownership.

The Obama campaign smeared Guantanamo Bay as a human rights blight. Consistent with that hyperbolic rhetoric, the President began his administration by promising to close the detention camp within a year. The President did this even though he and you (a) agree Gitmo is a top-flight prison facility, (b) acknowledge that our nation is still at war, and (c) concede that many Gitmo detainees are extremely dangerous terrorists who cannot be tried under civilian court rules. Patently, the commitment to close Guantanamo Bay within a year was made without a plan for what to do with these detainees who cannot be tried. Consequently, the Detention Policy Task Force is not an effort to arrive at the best policy. It is an effort to justify a bad policy that has already been adopted: to wit, the Obama administration policy to release trained terrorists outright if that’s what it takes to close Gitmo by January.

The Uighers are coming to your neighborhood.  What do you think the chances are that they will settle down to life in an American suburb:  mowing the grass, washing the car, walking the dog?  Oh, silly me, leave the dog out.

Obviously, I am powerless to stop the administration from releasing top al Qaeda operatives who planned mass-murder attacks against American cities—like Binyam Mohammed (the accomplice of “Dirty Bomber” Jose Padilla) whom the administration recently transferred to Britain, where he is now at liberty and living on public assistance. I am similarly powerless to stop the administration from admitting into the United States such alien jihadists as the 17 remaining Uighur detainees. According to National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, the Uighurs will apparently live freely, on American taxpayer assistance, despite the facts that they are affiliated with a terrorist organization and have received terrorist paramilitary training. Under federal immigration law (the 2005 REAL ID Act), those facts render them excludable from the United States. The Uighurs’ impending release is thus a remarkable development given the Obama administration’s propensity to deride its predecessor’s purported insensitivity to the rule of law.

If released here, the Chinese Muslims will be given the same rights and privileges as refugees and asylees.    One of the Top Ten volags will get the contract to resettle them, and I bet there will even be competition among the NGO’s for the honor of getting these famous terrorists as “clients.”    They will get a federally subsidized apartment, a case worker to help them find a job, food stamps, health screening, and English lessons among other things.

But beware, don’t let them get a look at any women with bare arms, Michelle included.

All of our posts on the Gitmo guys are here.

NumbersUSA: Obama to push Amnesty this year

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Pushing it fast!  

In his press conference* recognizing his 100th day in office Pres. Barack Obama reaffirmed plans to push amnesty this year. Obama said, “I see the process moving this first year. And I’m going to be moving it as quickly as I can.”

Read about it here at NumbersUSA.    The operating theory is that popular Presidents need to ram as much through in their first year before their popularity fades and that seems to be the principle at work here.   Earlier predictions were that there is no way Obama would be foolish enough to put Amnesty on the table if the economy still stinks, but looks like that concept is now out the window.  

And, heck, you have friends of big business who want to keep labor costs low pushing for an immigration stimulus in the WSJ.

Do you refugee industry folks ever worry that opening up more immigration (which amnesty will surely do) will further hurt your efforts to find employment for refugees?

* A little aside:  Obama is losing audience numbers for his prime time press conferences.  I guess the word is getting out that less people are interested in watching the media swoon and Obama stall, wander and weave.

Write to him: Eric P. Schwartz, Nominee for Assistant Secretary for Population, Refugees and Migration, State Department

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

From the White House website thanks to one of our ever-watchful readers:

Eric P. Schwartz is Executive Director of the Connect U.S. Fund, a foundation/NGO initiative focused on foreign and international affairs, and Visiting Lecturer of Public and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. Between 2005 and 2007, he served as UN Deputy Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery, working to promote coordination, accountability to donors and beneficiaries, and best practices in the recovery effort. Prior to that, he served as lead expert on conflict prevention and reconstruction for the Congressionally mandated Task Force on United Nations Reform, and as a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Between 1993 and 2001, Schwartz served at the National Security Council, ultimately as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and Senior Director for Multilateral and Humanitarian Affairs. For eight years, he was the NSC official responsible for refugee issues, and managed Administration policy responses on the rescue of Kurdish refugees from Northern Iraq, the resettlement of Vietnamese boat people, and safe haven for Haitian refugees and Kosovars. Prior to that, he served at the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, where he was responsible for most of the Committee’s work on Asian refugee issues, including Vietnamese boat people, Laotian refugees and the U.S. immigration issues relating to the transfer of sovereignty in Hong Kong.

We wrote about Mr. Schwartz here a month ago.

Although he is a nominee, I can’t imagine with a PC list of accomplishments like the one above, that he wouldn’t be confirmed.    So, it just occurred to me, now that the Obama Administration has finally selected a leader for PRM, why don’t all of you with problems with the program write directly to him.

Eric P. Schwartz

Assistant Secretary of State, Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration

US Dept. of State

2201 C St. NW

Washington, DC 20520

I know, I know you are saying sending a letter to Washington is the same as sending it down a rat hole, but do it anyway.  I bet he has no clue for instance that Iraqi refugees are so unhappy across the country and are packing up and returning to the Middle East, or that volags have been closed because they neglected refugees, or that Somalis are returning to Africa to join al Shabaab.

Or, here is a good one, tell him how you feel about the Uighers coming to your town, he will be the one responsible for finding them a home.

Let us know if you get a response!

Terrorism expert calls Uighurs terrorists, and they’re coming soon

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Andy McCarthy led the 1995 prosecution of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others for their bombing of the World Trade Center and other planned attacks, and assisted in other prosecutions of terrorists. He is now the head of the Center for Law and Counterrorism at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He knows what he’s talking about when it comes to terrorism. So when he says someone is a terrorist, I take him seriously.  Here’s how he begins his post at National Review’s Corner, The Uighurs Are Coming, the Uighurs Are Coming! :

 Despite being steeped in jihadist ideology, trained in explosives and assassination tactics, and anxious enough to get that way that they high-tailed it from China to Afghanistan to become more lethal terrorists, the Uighur Muslim detainees will be released by the Obama administration into the United States, according to this Los Angeles Times report. After all, the president has promised to close Guantanamo Bay this year, and that promise can’t be fulfilled unless we release the jihadists since many of them can’t be tried.

McCarthy references this report on the Uighurs from Thomas Jocelyn, which leaves no doubt that they are terrorists. He points out that “federal statutory law … makes aliens excludable from the U.S. if they have received terrorist training or been affiliated with a terrorist organization.”

The LA Times’s story reports that four former Uighur prisoners are in Albania and one has moved from there to Sweden. They have been living their peacefully. Maybe those countries easily accommodate people who act like this:

Not long after being granted access to TV [because they are considered nonthreatening prisoners at Gitmo, though they took part in a riot], some of the Uighurs were watching a soccer game. When a woman with bare arms was shown on the screen, one of the group grabbed the television and threw it to the ground, according to the officials.

Yup, just the kind of people we want. And did the officials take away their TV privileges or otherwise punish them? Hah!

Since then, officials at Guantanamo have bolted down the TVs and shown pre-taped programs, editing out any images they thought Uighurs might find offensive.

I suppose the government could assign each Uighur an aide who would remove everything offensive before the Uighur could see it. Would you like one of these guys to move in next door? Let’s hear from some of our apologists for multiculturalism.

See our previous posts on the Uighurs here.

Addendum: Right after I posted the above, I came across this article by Jed Babbin. It begins:

White House lawyers are refusing to accept the findings of an inter-agency committee that the Uighur Chinese Muslims held at Guantanamo Bay are too dangerous to release inside the U.S., according to Pentagon sources familiar with the action.

It continues:

….Reviewing the Uighurs detention, the inter-agency panel found that they weren’t the ignorant, innocent goatherds the White House believed them to be.  The committee determined they were too dangerous to release because they were members of the ETIM terrorist group, the “East Turkistan Islamic Movement,” and because their presence at the al-Queda training camp was no accident.  There is now no ETIM terrorist cell in the United States:  there will be one if these Uighurs are released into the United States.

According to Defense Department sources, the White House legal office has told the inter-agency review group to re-do their findings to come up with the opposite answer.

  But what does reality matter when it comes to what Obama wants?