Finally!

So we’re finally arming the Kurds.  At this point, it appears that the weapons are coming from the CIA, but plans are in the works for the Pentagon to supply them directly, rather than sending weapons to Baghdad that never ever get to the Kurds.

The Kurdish Peshmerga are as tough and determined as they come, but toughness and determination without weapons and ammo won’t win against ISIS and their captured state-of-the-art American weapons.

I’m tired of seeing this ISIS sweep falsely spun as an Iraqi civil war.  This is a multi-state terror movement that must be destroyed.  We need to go after ISIS full bore, not just to protect the Yazidis and Kurds and Baghdad, but on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border (such as it now is) and in Lebanon and Jordan.

The combination of intelligence failures about ISIS’ strength and a president who didn’t want to hear the news anyway have made the task much harder than it would have been if we’d nipped them in the bud.  Now it’s time to mow them down before they flower further.

It’s not up to the Iraqi Shiites to get their act together because they can’t and won’t.  It’s up to us to keep an enormous swath of the Middle East from falling to barbarians.

CIA Admits to Senate Spying

CIA Director John Brennan apologized to the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee for his agency’s spying on the Committee’s computers.

I’m sure the CIA is indeed very, very sorry — that it got caught.

Your Benghazi Dems

Nancy Pelosi has appointed the following House Dems to the Benghazi committee:  Elijah Cummings of Maryland, Adam Smith of Washington, Adam Schiff of California, Linda Sanchez of California, and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois.

Your Benghazi Committee

Besides the Chairman, Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, the GOP has appointed these other members:  Susan Brooks of Indiana, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Mike Pompeo of Kansas, Martha Roby of Alabama, Peter Roskam of Illinois, and Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia.

And also note that all seven are either from the Midwest or the South.

No word yet on whether Dems will join.  I hope not.

The Circus Comes to Town

As expected, the House voted, 232-186, to establish a select committee to investigate Benghazi.  The 232 included 7 Dems, no Republicans voted against.

This is the downside to Obamacare working out.  And the Prez failing to ‘splain.  Which you could still do, Barry.

How We Know the GOP Has Given Up on Obamacare

Because they’re back to Benghazi!

And John Boehner appointed one of the major nut jobs in the House, Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, to head the special select committee, because, you know, this is like Watergate or Irancontra.

I wish the President would just give a speech and explain that Benghazi was a CIA op running weapons from Libya to Syria.

WTF, CIA?

The CIA is prohibited from doing domestic surveillance.

Yet, the NYT has a front-page story* about four CIA officers who were embedded with the New York City police.  In response to a FOIA request, the Times got a declassified executive summary of a CIA Inspector General report from December 2011 about this relationship, which apparently occurred between 2002 and 2012.  They say it isn’t going on now, but how the hell do we know who and what to believe anymore?

*  “C.I.A. Sees Concerns on Ties to New York Police,” Charlie Savage

Nadler Walks It Back

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) is walking back his contention made in a public hearing with FBI Director Robert Mueller that he was told in a classified briefing that the NSA listens in on our phone conversations without a warrant from the FISA Court.

In the exchange, Nadler asks Mueller if they can listen in without a warrant, and Mueller says no.  Nadler asks if that is classified information, and Mueller says no.  Nadler then says that if Mueller’s answer isn’t classified, Nadler can then say that he was told the opposite in a classified briefing.  I’m not sure that’s correct.  Mueller may have been lying because he was put on the spot in a public hearing when asked by a Congressman who had opposite, classified information, just as happened to DNI James Clapper when questioned by Sen. Ron Wyden.  I think they think it’s okay to lie under those circumstances because if they told the truth, they’d be revealing classified info.  So they think they’re lying for national security reasons.

Nadler may have been told to back off or face getting into trouble for revealing classified info at a public hearing.  Note that he did something different from Wyden.  Nadler explicitly stated that he’d been told the opposite at a classified briefing.  Wyden simply asked the question if the government was collecting data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.  He didn’t argue with Clapper when Clapper denied it, but Clapper knew that Wyden knew the truth from his classified briefings.  Clapper knew that Wyden set him up to either lie or reveal classified information.

So now there’s an effort to discredit the CNET story about Nadler and warrantless eavesdropping, but I’m not convinced the story is wrong.  I’m more convinced pressure has been applied to Nadler to STFU.

Not Helping

In defending the NSA’s broad surveillance of all of us, out-going FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress that one of those programs identified Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s friend in Florida after the Boston Marathon bombings.

Yeah, they found him after the bombings.  And they killed him even though he was unarmed.  Great example.

Shoot the Messenger

So the broad reaction in Congress, both Dem and GOP, to Edward Snowden’s leaks is not that we need less spying on us, it’s that we need less contractor access to classified info.

For more, see “A Promise of Changes For Access to Secrets,” David E. Sanger and Jeremy W. Peters, NYT