Did the west "consult" with Algeria before it decided to change the regime in Libya, only to create a haven for terrorists and export weapons to Mali and now Algeria?

Here is how tough gun control works in New York City:

This week, while the guys McCain and the Obama administration aligned us with in Libya (and would like to align us with in Syria) were busy taking Americans and other foreigners hostage in Algeria, in addition to using Qaddafi’s arsenal to fight the French in Mali, McCain was working his magic in Cairo.

McCain’s Mideast Blunders

By Andrew C. McCarthy

January 19, 2013 4:00 A.M.          NRO

I wonder if the jihadists of eastern Libya are still “heroes” to John McCain. That’s what he called them — “my heroes” — after he changed on a dime from chummy Qaddafi tent guest to rabid Qaddafi scourge.

See, the senator and his allies in the Obama-Clinton State Department had a brilliant notion: The reason the “rebels” of eastern Libya hated America so much had nothing to do with their totalitarian, incorrigibly anti-Western ideology. No, no: The problem was that we sided with Qaddafi, giving the dictator — at the insistence of, well, McCain and the State Department — foreign aid, military assistance, and international legitimacy. If we just threw Qaddafi under the bus, the rebels would surely become our grand democratic allies.

This, of course, was a much more sophisticated theory than you’d get from lunatics like Michele Bachmann. Sit down for this, because I know it’s hard to believe anyone could spout such nutter stuff, but Bachmann actually opposed U.S. intervention in Libya. She claimed — stop cackling! — that many of McCain’s heroes might actually be jihadists ideologically hostile to the U.S. and linked to groups such as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the terror enterprise’s North African franchise. She even thought — yeah, I know, crazy — that if Qaddafi were deposed, the heroes would get their hands on his arsenal, ship a lot of it to AQIM havens in places such as Mali and Algeria, and maybe even turn rebel strongholds such as Benghazi into death traps for Americans.

Good thing we listened to McCain, no?

This week, while the guys the senator and the Obama administration aligned us with in Libya (and would like to align us with in Syria) were busy taking Americans and other foreigners hostage in Algeria, in addition to using Qaddafi’s arsenal to fight the French in Mali, McCain was working his magic in Cairo.

An unfortunate hiccup: McCain and his entourage, including fellow Libya hawk Lindsey Graham, showed up on President Mohamed Morsi’s doorstep just as it was revealed that Morsi, while a top Muslim Brotherhood official in 2010, had inveighed against Jews, calling them “blood-suckers” and “the descendants of apes and pigs” and claiming it was incumbent on Egyptians to “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred” toward them.

Thank goodness Morsi was able to explain to McCain that his remarks had been “taken out of context.” I mean, you can see how that could happen, right? You’re making a few benign remarks about perpetuating hatred for enemies you describe as subhuman and all of a sudden they’re calling you an anti-Semite. Why, next thing you know, they’ll be saying Morsi could be an Islamic supremacist who is hellbent on imposing a sharia constitution on Egypt when he’s not otherwise rolling out the red carpet for Hamas and demanding the release of the Blind Sheikh!

Not to worry: McCain & Co. have promised to go to bat for Egypt’s swell president. Sure, he has imposed a sharia constitution just as crazies like Michele Bachmann predicted the Muslim Brotherhood would do if it took power. That would be the same sharia that, less than two years ago, McCain condemned as “anti-democratic — at least as far as women are concerned.” Back then, McCain was warning that the Brotherhood had to be kept out of the government if there was to be any hope for democracy in Egypt. After all, he explained, the Brothers “have been involved with other terrorist organizations.”

Now, however, McCain says he will push for American taxpayers to fork up another $480 million for Morsi. Or, to be accurate, borrow another $480 million. You see, the United States is already so deep in the red that a $16.3 trillion debt ceiling is not high enough. In fact, we’re such a basket case that our debt-service and “entitlement” payments alone put us in a quarter-trillion-dollar deficit hole even before we borrow and print another trillion-plus for such ancillary expenses as the Defense Department, the Obama family’s vacations, and the $80-odd million that funds “democratization” programs at McCain’s International Republican Institute. But hey, no problem — what’s another $480 million on top of the $2 billion–plus the Obama administration has already extended to Morsi’s regime . . . to say nothing of the sizable U.S. taxpayer chunk of the $4.8 billion IMF loan the Brotherhood government is also about to get its mitts on?

Naturally, “extremist” conservatives like Michele Bachmann are wet blankets when it comes to this gravy train, too. Get this: She thinks that when you get to the point where you have to borrow in order to pay the interest on the loans you already can’t pay off, somebody needs to cut off your credit line — not inflate it by another two or three trill. Even more daft: She thinks that if you subsidize an organization, like the Brotherhood, that promotes sharia and Hamas, you’re apt to get more sharia and more terrorism.

But look, that’s the kind of passé thinking we’ve come to expect from Bachmann. She’s the one, you may recall, who had the audacity to argue last year that it might not be a good idea for the secretary of state to keep as a key staffer a woman who worked for several years with a notorious al-Qaeda financial backer whose “charity” is formally designated as a terrorist organization — indeed, worked with him at a sharia-promotional journal he founded and in charge of which he put her parents, Muslim Brotherhood operatives (the surviving one of whom runs an Islamist organization, the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child, that is part of an umbrella entity called the Union for Good — a designated terrorist organization run by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the notorious Muslim Brotherhood jurist).

Congresswoman Bachmann was acting on the obviously irrational belief that Muslim Brotherhood influences in our government might lead to pro-Islamist policies detrimental to American security and interests — as if the State Department might tell pro-American Egyptian military rulers that they should stand down so the Brotherhood could take over; as if the Obama administration might order that information about Islamist ideology be purged from the materials used to train our intelligence agents; as if the Brotherhood, even as it counted its American aid dollars, would impose sharia, prosecute its detractors, and green-light the persecution of minority Christians.

Such insane, Islamophobic scaremongering! Insane enough that McCain, between praising his Islamist “heroes” and championing ever more funding for Islamist Egypt, made certain to lambaste Bachmann on the floor of the Senate over her concerns about Brotherhood infiltration of our government – leading other influential Republicans to follow suit. And now, aping that display, People for the American Way — “PAW,” the outfit created by a hard-left Hollywood icon to smear Robert Bork and derail his Supreme Court nomination — is campaigning to have Bachmann booted from the House Intelligence Committee.

There is a war on over the course of American foreign policy and the security of the United States. The Left has aligned with the Brotherhood — some naïvely relying on the fiction that the Brothers are not the enemy vanguard, others seeing the Brothers as comrades in the quest for a utopian, post-American future. In opposition, the GOP can either continue looking to McCain for leadership or rally behind Bachmann the way the Left always circles the wagons around its stalwarts.

Anyone want to bet me on which way the Republicans will go?

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which was published by Encounter Books.

The chickens that came home to roost in Libya are now affecting Algeria and Mali

Since Sandy Hook, 250,000 Americans have joined the NRA

TPMMUCKRAKER

In an email sent to National Rifle Association members on Thursday, the head of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) warned that politicians in Washington D.C. were “closing in fast on your Right to Keep and Bear Arms.”

“President Barack Obama and anti-gun politicians are on an all-out crusade to pass new laws that would: BAN tens of millions of rifles, shotguns and handguns…make it more difficult, expensive, and in some cases, ILLEGAL for you to purchase ammunition…and even FORCE you to register your firearms with the federal government,” NRA-ILA Executive Director Chris Cox wrote in the email. “Some are even talking about a mandatory gun confiscation and ‘buyback’ program - where you would be forced to hand over your guns in exchange for a government check!”

The NRA-ILA is the lobbying arm of the NRA. Cox’s email came a day after President Obama announced 23 executive actions he plans to take to reduce gun violence in response to the massacre in Newtown, Conn. last month. Neither confiscation nor buybacks were on Obama’s list, nor were they part of the sweeping legislative proposals the President made on the subject.

“[T]he fact is, despite their statements, the main goal of the gun banners in Congress is not to make schools safer, but to ban your guns and abolish every last sacred right you have under the Second Amendment..until they reduce your freedom to ashes,” Cox wrote.

The email was also a fundraising pitch. It warned that President Obama “recently pledged to raise $20 million to ram his gun ban agenda through Congress,” and reminded members that the President has “plenty of rich, gun-hating friends in Hollywood, along with anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who will shower him with the money he needs to strip you of your gun rights.”

“So please, whatever you can afford to give NRA-ILA right now, I need you to do it,” Cox wrote. “Whether it’s as little as $10, or as much as $150 or more, every single dollar will go toward winning this once-in-a-generation battle to save our Second Amendment freedom. AND EVERY SINGLE DOLLAR YOU GIVE TODAY COUNTS!”

Read the full text of the email here:

There are political fires raging across Capitol Hill right now and they’re closing in fast on your Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

President Barack Obama and anti-gun politicians are on an all-out crusade to pass new laws that would: BAN tens of millions of rifles, shotguns and handguns…make it more difficult, expensive, and in some cases, ILLEGAL for you to purchase ammunition…and even FORCE you to register your firearms with the federal government.

Some are even talking about a mandatory gun confiscation and “buyback” program - where you would be forced to hand over your guns in exchange for a government check!

NONE of this would have the slightest impact on making our children, our homes, or our communities safer. And that’s sad, because now more than ever, we need our elected officials to take serious steps toward improving public safety… particularly in our nation’s schools.

But the fact is, despite their statements, the main goal of the gun banners in Congress is not to make schools safer, but to ban your guns and abolish every last sacred right you have under the Second Amendment..until they reduce your freedom to ashes.

Your NRA-ILA is fighting every hour of every day to hold the line, but there is no way we can win without your full and active participation RIGHT NOW.

President Barack Obama recently pledged to raise $20 million to ram his gun ban agenda through Congress. And Obama’s got plenty of rich, gun-hating friends in Hollywood, along with anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who will shower him with the money he needs to strip you of your gun rights.

I don’t have friends like that. I’ve got something much better…YOU. You know what’s at stake. You love your freedom and your country, and I know you’re willing to STAND AND FIGHT to save both of them.

So please, whatever you can afford to give NRA-ILA right now, I need you to do it.

Whether it’s as little as $10, or as much as $150 or more, every single dollar will go toward winning this once-in-a-generation battle to save our Second Amendment freedom. AND EVERY SINGLE DOLLAR YOU GIVE TODAY COUNTS!

Your contributions to NRA-ILA support our fight on your behalf in the halls of Congress and across the country. Your contributions are the lifeblood of our legislative and legal initiatives, research, educational pieces, press activities, and all of our pro-gun advertising and grassroots activism.

There is no other way to put it: Our strength comes from you. Our ability to win comes from you. That’s why I’m asking you to help save our Second Amendment by making NRA-ILA stronger than ever before.

Thank you for everything you do to support NRA-ILA and defend freedom.

Please help as soon as you can.

Sincerely,

Chris

SEE ANYTHING WRONG WITH THIS AD?

The rapid increase in sting operations under the Obama administration is directly attributable to some 2008 amendments to the FBI's guidelines, which authorized the use of informants without requiring any factual predicate of wrongdoing. The FBI has also used these dubious tactics against aged anti-government militiamen and misfit anarchists, so it there's more than Muslims in the crosshairs: Without reforming the FBI guidelines, anyone holding unorthodox views or challenging government policies could be similarly targeted.

Manufacturing Terrorists 

Inside the FBI's terror sting operations.

Michael German | January 15, 2013  REASON

Imagine a country in which the government pays convicted con artists and criminals to scour minority religious communities for disgruntled, financially desperate, or mentally ill patsies who can be talked into joining fake terror plots, even if only for money. Imagine that the country's government then busts its patsies with great fanfare to justify ever-increasing authority and ever-increasing funding. According to journalist Trevor Aaronson's The Terror Factory, this isn't the premise for a Kafka novel; it's reality in the post-9/11 United States.

The Terror Factory is a well-researched and fast-paced exposé of the dubious tactics the FBI has used in targeting Muslim Americans with sting operations since 2001. The book updates and expands upon Aaronson's award-winning 2011 Mother Jones cover story, "The Informants." Most readers have likely heard about several alleged conspiracies to attack skyscrapers, synagogues, or subway stations, involving either individuals that the FBI calls "lone wolves" or small cells a credulous press tagged with such sinister appellations as the "Newburgh 4" or the "Liberty City 7." Many of these frightening plots were almost entirely concocted and engineered by the FBI itself, using corrupt agents provocateurs who often posed a far more serious criminal threat than the dim-witted saps the investigations targeted.

Drawing on court records and on interviews with the defendants, their lawyers, their families, and the FBI officials and prosecutors who oversaw the investigations, Aaronson portrays an agency that has adopted an "any means necessary" approach to its terrorism prevention efforts, regardless of whether there are real terrorists being caught. To the FBI, this imperative justifies recruiting informants with extensive criminal records, including convictions for fraud, violent crimes, and even child molestation, that in an earlier era would have disqualified them except in the most extraordinary circumstances.

In addition to providing leniency, if not forgiveness, for heinous crimes, the FBI pays these informants tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, creating a perverse incentive for them to ensnare dupes into terror plots. Aaronson quotes an FBI official defending this practice: "To catch the devil you have to go to hell."

Such an analysis might make sense when police leverage one criminal to gain information about more serious criminal conspiracies—in other words, to catch a real "devil." But Aaronson's research reveals that the targets in most of these sting operations clearly pose little real threat. They may have a history of angry anti-government rhetoric, but they take no steps toward terrorist acts until they receive encouragement and resources from government agents.

Aaronson takes pains to avoid portraying those caught in the stings as completely innocent of malice. But he demonstrates that they almost universally lack violent criminal histories or connections to real terrorist groups. Most importantly, while they may have talked about committing violent acts, they rarely had weapons of their own and lacked the financial means to acquire them. Yet the government provides them with military hardware that would cost thousands of dollars and would be extremely difficult for even sophisticated criminal organizations to obtain, only to bust them in a staged finale.

This aspect of Aaronson's narrative is most troubling to me, as a former FBI agent who worked undercover in domestic terrorism investigations before 9/11. My concern is partly that the artificially inflated scope of the threat in these cases appears to be specifically designed to overwhelm judges, jurors, and the general public, who might otherwise view these methods as illegal entrapment. Indeed, the judge in a case in which an informant offered a seemingly reluctant James Cromitie $250,000 to participate in his plot, severely criticized the investigation, stating: "Only the government could have made a terrorist out of Mr. Cromitie, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope." Yet she let the jury's conviction stand and sentenced Cromitie to 25 years in prison. Of 150 defendants charged in these schemes, Aaronson documents only two acquittals. The majority plead guilty to mitigate draconian penalties. Law enforcement has no business staging theatrical productions that intentionally exaggerate the seriousness of a defendant's criminal conduct.

More unsettling is the flawed reasoning that drives the use of these methods. FBI agents have been inundated with bigoted training materials that falsely portray Arabs and Muslims as inherently violent. The FBI has also embraced an unfounded theory of "radicalization" that alleges a direct progression from adopting certain beliefs, or expressing opposition to U.S. policies, to becoming a terrorist. With such a skewed and biased view of the American Muslim community, the FBI's strategy of "preemption, prevention, and disruption" results in abusive surveillance, targeting, and exploitation of innocent people simply for exercising their First Amendment rights.

One area where Aaronson is off the mark, however, is in failing to recognize these tactics are neither new to the FBI nor exclusively used against Muslims. The FBI's earliest documented use of agents provocateurs was revealed during congressional investigations of labor "radicals," pacifists, and socialists in 1918. And the Church Committee's investigation of the FBI's COINTELPRO investigations revealed covert operations that targeted groups for First Amendment–protected activities from the 1950s through the 1970s.

In both cases, reform of these practices was implemented by restricting FBI intelligence activities and requiring a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity before initiating investigations. Conversely, the rapid increase in sting operations under the Obama administration is directly attributable to some 2008 amendments to the FBI's guidelines, which authorized the use of informants without requiring any factual predicate of wrongdoing.

The FBI has also used these dubious tactics against aged anti-government militiamen and misfit anarchists, so it there's more than Muslims in the crosshairs: Without reforming the FBI guidelines, anyone holding unorthodox views or challenging government policies could be similarly targeted.

Michael German is a former FBI agent who currently works for the American Civil Liberties Union. These opinions are his own.

Nearly 61 million voters have gotten to know Obama’s mix of soaring rhetoric and bureaucratic reality, messianic claims and crushing mandates, cultish iconography and lawless actions, grand hopes and bland changes. And they have decided they want more of it.

Beware Obama’s Big Ideas

The president and his fans say the best is yet to come. That can’t be good.

Tim Cavanaugh from the February 2013 issue of Reason

The way President Barack Obama’s acolytes are calling for bold action in his second term, you’d think he had been some kind of prudent Calvin Coolidge in his first. 

“A strategic second term would begin by identifying a list of necessary and achievable goals, and then pursuing them with the unyielding manipulative skill of a Lyndon Johnson,” Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote after Obama’s decisive victory over hapless challenger Mitt Romney in November. “Think big. Take risks. Get it done.”

“Take this second chance to get it right on housing,” wrote Tracy Van Slyke, director of something called the New Bottom Line, at The Huffington Post, “and use your mandate to help the millions of underwater homeowners across this country.” Atlantic Associate Editor Matthew O’Brien didn’t even wait for the election results to come in, calling on the president in October to unveil a bold second-term agenda that would embrace the “vision thing” by resurrecting his deep-sixed American Jobs Act. 

Given that Obama won re-election largely by not talking about his record, it’s probably not surprising that so many people don’t seem to have noticed what happened from 2009 through 2012. To recap, Obama rammed through a massive overhaul of medical care in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare. He piled another $830 billion or so onto the national debt with his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a.k.a. the stimulus. He also managed to push total debt over $16 trillion. 

When the Affordable Care Act’s most radical component, the requirement that every American be forced to purchase health insurance, came up for Supreme Court review, the president’s bumbling attorneys lucked into a tortured decision in their favor, and the law was upheld by a 5-to-4 margin. Capitalizing on (though not actually solving) the financial crisis that helped him gain office, Obama in 2010 signed the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, bringing a massive new cudgel to the financial industry (which had hardly been free of Washington oversight and protection prior to that) and creating a federal “consumer” agency whose scope is still not well understood. 

Unfazed by a public rebuke in the 2010 midterm elections, Obama continued his mission through a daunting new strategy of regulatory rule making, executive orders, administration through “White House liaison officers,” and recess appointments of congressionally unpopular nominees. (These last have been carried out even when Congress was not in recess.) Such tactics are necessary to patch a weakness Obama has discovered in American government: the foundational structure of checks and balances.

“When Congress refuses to act, and as a result, hurts our economy and puts our people at risk, then I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them,” the president told a crowd in Shaker Heights, Ohio, in January 2011. “I’ve got an obligation to act on behalf of the American people. And I’m not going to stand by while a minority in the Senate puts party ideology ahead of the people that we were elected to serve. Not with so much at stake, not at this make-or-break moment for middle-class Americans. We’re not going to let that happen.”

Following that bold conviction, Obama launched a war in Libya without even the almost-constitutional fig leaf of a congressional authorization vote (thus making him even less deferential to Congress’ war-making power than George W. Bush). This “kinetic action” seemed to be a rousing success until the U.S. ambassador was killed by terrorists in September—an episode the administration has worked tirelessly to obscure. 

Obama has also claimed powers of life and death beyond Bush’s wildest ambitions, granting to himself a new presidential authority to kill citizens and noncitizens alike, both on U.S. soil and abroad, while asserting that an Oval Office discussion with advisers qualifies as constitutional due process. 

After all that, what would Obama fans consider an ambitious second-term agenda? I guess mandatory self-esteem boosts, universal health care for cats, and a global war on melancholy haven’t been tried yet. But Obama’s penchant for intervening in all aspects of American life (according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, he added 11,327 pages to the Code of Federal Regulations, a 7.4 percent increase, in his first three years) while overlooking constitutional niceties has produced a consistent pattern: As you get more regulation, you get less law. 

For some of us, this is a problem. Law is big and clear. It applies equally to the great and small. You can usually be confident that a law has passed at least some level of civic scrutiny. Regulation, by contrast, is small and stifling. It places burdens primarily on individuals and small companies that don’t have sufficient lawyerly infrastructure. 

And there’s no way to know which White House czar or career apparatchik composed any particular regulation. For example, who at Eric Holder’s Department of Justice (DOJ) decided in 2011 that the Americans with Disabilities Act requires hotels, restaurants, and airlines to accommodate “pygmy ponies” as service animals. (And should we be glad the DOJ is mandating horse fairness instead of giving more guns to Mexican drug cartels?)

“The best is yet to come,” Obama promised in his November victory speech. And the election result gave him some justification for that promise. He won a lopsided electoral victory and, rare in modern presidential races, a popular majority. This is what makes the second term such a matter of concern.

Nearly 61 million voters have gotten to know Obama’s mix of soaring rhetoric and bureaucratic reality, messianic claims and crushing mandates, cultish iconography and lawless actions, grand hopes and bland changes. And they decided they wanted more of it. 

I don’t expect that avoiding the “fiscal cliff” will be reward enough for those folks. Obama came into office with talk of reversing the tides, healing the earth, and “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” He has hinted at delivering big things in the security of a second term. If the first act was any indication, those things are going to suck.  

Good old Abraham and his gift to the World