Current Events - April 28, 2013

 

Creating Monsters: Terrorism, Welfare and “Celebrating Diversity”

To call the Tsarnaev family a “piece of work” is an insult to work. 

But they are a piece of something, something the editors won’t let me write here (just think of what last night’s dinner is now). Not only were Tamerlan, the Boston terrorist currently burning in Hell, and Dzhokhar, the Boston terrorist soon to be burning in Hell, on welfare, but their whole family was on the government dole. 

This isn’t as much a case against welfare as it is a case against immigration reform. In their time in this country this family did nothing but take and added nothing but misery. 

The famous plaque at the Statue of Liberty reading, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” is a not the call for every degenerate, miscreant and slacker to come suckle the government teat as liberals would have you believe. In fact, the whole poem is a beacon of hope saying anyone can come here and make of their life what they will. 

It’s the story of America. It’s the hope and opportunity that your life will be as good as you can make it, unlike most of the rest of the world. We have no caste system, the only limits on your life are set by you and your abilities. It is declaring that we are the only nation where someone can do anything, where even the child of worthless, absentee parents who shirk their responsibility can grow up to be president.

Enter the Tsarnaevs…

They came to this country legally…and got on welfare. Why was a family that literally brought nothing to the table allowed to immigrate? I haven’t seen an answer yet, but I suspect asking the question will be called “bigoted.” As would asking why we should legalize millions of unskilled workers when we have too many of them already. 

In the days since the Boston terrorist attack, we’ve learned the Tsarnaev family – except for Uncle Ruslan – is exactly the type of people a functional immigration system should be designed to keep out. It’s not, and despite all the lip-service being paid by advocates, the “reform” making its way through the U.S. Senate won’t do anything about it either.

That the Tsarnaev family, a group exhibiting behavior rarely seen outside of meth-infested trailer parks, came to this country and took, then left and left these children behind is a disgrace. That so many on the political left have even entertained the idea, now being pushed by Mama Tsarnaev, that America is somehow to blame for their radicalization is an even bigger one.

It started when The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder asked, “What is it about America that so alienates young men?” in the context of wondering about “the possibility that something about America is radicalizing people of all sorts.” Others soon followed suit in suggesting America had a major share of the blame, including the woman from whose loins these creatures sprang.

Well, I’ll take the bait. 

Aside from what appears to be awful parenting, the Tsarnaev boys were immediately engulfed in a progressive ideology. Generous social services for all-comers is a staple of the left’s Utopian philosophy. They lived in a progressive state, attended schools similar to those across the country where self-esteem was given, not earned, and still turned out to be monsters…well, you see where this is going.

The progressive philosophy is designed to make you “feel” good about yourself, but for merely existing, not doing anything. It’s designed to “celebrate diversity,” not assimilation. This line of thinking not only granted cover to the Tsarnaevs to care about their former homeland 

The United States has a history of self-segregation. Every major city has a “Little Italy,” “Chinatown” and the like, but they’ve shrunk. They didn’t shrink because outside forces overtook them, they were overtaken by outside forces because the goal was to assimilate. New immigrants moved there as a transition from their old home to their new one. They lived there while they learned the language, culture and the ability to move out. Progressives have reversed this trend. 

This trend has been reversed to the point that the winner of the $338 million lottery winner in New Jersey, who immigrated to this country 26 years ago, needed a translator at his press conference to express his joy.

New immigrants are told they don’t have to assimilate, that they shouldn’t. Not that they have to give up their culture, but suggesting they might want to embrace the culture and language of their new homeland is now a bridge too far. Perhaps that was a factor in why immigrants who’ve lived here for nearly all of the impressionable part of their lives would identify more with a land that is nothing more than a distant memory than the one that welcomed them.

So if progressives seek to assign responsibility for why the terrorist now burning in Hell and the other terrorist who should soon join him in those flames felt alienated from society, they need look no further than the nearest reflective surface. 

Of course blame for any terrorist attack lies firmly with the perpetrators. But since liberal progressives seek to assign blame elsewhere, have no delusions that if there is any extra to go around it is firmly on their hands.

http://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2013/04/28/creating-monsters-terrorism-welfare-and-celebrating-diversity-n1580530/page/full/

Army says no to more tanks, but Congress insists

Built to dominate the enemy in combat, the Army's hulking Abrams tank is proving equally hard to beat in a budget battle.

Lawmakers from both parties have devoted nearly half a billion dollars in taxpayer money over the past two years to build improved versions of the 70-ton Abrams.

But senior Army officials have said repeatedly, "No thanks."

It's the inverse of the federal budget world these days, in which automatic spending cuts are leaving sought-after pet programs struggling or unpaid altogether. Republicans and Democrats for years have fought so bitterly that lawmaking in Washington ground to a near-halt.

Yet in the case of the Abrams tank, there's a bipartisan push to spend an extra $436 million on a weapon the experts explicitly say is not needed.

"If we had our choice, we would use that money in a different way," Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army's chief of staff, told The Associated Press this past week.

Why are the tank dollars still flowing? Politics.

Keeping the Abrams production line rolling protects businesses and good paying jobs in congressional districts where the tank's many suppliers are located.

If there's a home of the Abrams, it's politically important Ohio. The nation's only tank plant is in Lima. So it's no coincidence that the champions for more tanks are Rep. Jim Jordan and Sen. Rob Portman, two of Capitol's Hill most prominent deficit hawks, as well as Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. They said their support is rooted in protecting national security, not in pork-barrel politics.

"The one area where we are supposed to spend taxpayer money is in defense of the country," said Jordan, whose district in the northwest part of the state includes the tank plant.

The Abrams dilemma underscores the challenge that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel faces as he seeks to purge programs that the military considers unnecessary or too expensive in order to ensure there's enough money for essential operations, training and equipment.

Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, faces a daunting task in persuading members of Congress to eliminate or scale back projects favored by constituents.

Federal budgets are always peppered with money for pet projects. What sets the Abrams example apart is the certainty of the Army's position.

Sean Kennedy, director of research for the nonpartisan Citizens Against Government Waste, said Congress should listen when one of the military services says no to more equipment. "When an institution as risk averse as the Defense Department says they have enough tanks, we can probably believe them," Kennedy said.

Congressional backers of the Abrams upgrades view the vast network of companies, many of them small businesses, that manufacture the tanks' materials and parts as a critical asset that has to be preserved. The money, they say, is a modest investment that will keep important tooling and manufacturing skills from being lost if the Abrams line were to be shut down.

The Lima plant is a study in how federal dollars affect local communities, which in turn hold tight to the federal dollars. The facility is owned by the federal government but operated by the land systems division of General Dynamics, a major defense contractor that spent close to $11 million last year on lobbying, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

The plant is Lima's fifth-largest employer with close to 700 employees, down from about 1,100 just a few years ago, according to Mayor David Berger. But the facility is still crucial to the local economy. "All of those jobs and their spending activity in the community and the company's spending probably have about a $100 million impact annually," Berger said.

Jordan, a House conservative leader who has pushed for deep reductions in federal spending, supported the automatic cuts known as the sequester that require $42 billion to be shaved from the Pentagon's budget by the end of September. The military also has to absorb a $487 billion reduction in defense spending over the next 10 years, as required by the Budget Control Act passed in 2011.

Still, said Jordan, it would be a big mistake to stop producing tanks. "Look, (the plant) is in the 4th Congressional District and my job is to represent the 4th Congressional District, so I understand that," he said. "But the fact remains, if it was not in the best interests of the national defense for the United States of America, then you would not see me supporting it like we do."

The tanks that Congress is requiring the Army to buy aren't brand new. Earlier models are being outfitted with a sophisticated suite of electronics that gives the vehicles better microprocessors, color flat panel displays, a more capable communications system, and other improvements. The upgraded tanks cost about $7.5 million each, according to the Army.

Out of a fleet of nearly 2,400 tanks, roughly two-thirds are the improved versions, which the Army refers to with a moniker that befits their heft: the M1A2SEPv2, and service officials said they have plenty of them. "The Army is on record saying we do not require any additional M1A2s," Davis Welch, deputy director of the Army budget office, said this month.

The tank fleet, on average, is less than 3 years old. The Abrams is named after Gen. Creighton Abrams, one of the top tank commanders during World War II and a former Army chief of staff.

The Army's plan was to stop buying tanks until 2017, when production of a newly designed Abrams would begin. Orders for Abrams tanks from U.S. allies help fill the gap created by the loss of tanks for the Army, according to service officials, but congressional proponents of the program feared there would not be enough international business to keep the Abrams line going.

This pause in tank production for the U.S. would allow the Army to spend its money on research and development work for the new and improved model, said Ashley Givens, a spokeswoman for the Army's Ground Combat Systems office.

The first editions of the Abrams tank were fielded in the early 1980s. Over the decades, the Abrams supply chain has become embedded in communities across the country.

General Dynamics estimated in 2011 that there were more than 560 subcontractors throughout the country involved in the Abrams program and that they employed as many as 18,000 people. More than 40 of the companies are in Pennsylvania, according to Sen. Robert Casey, D-Pa., also a staunch backer of continued tank production.

A letter signed by 173 Democratic and Republican members of the House last year and sent to then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta demonstrated the depth of bipartisan support for the Abrams program on Capitol Hill. They chided the Obama administration for neglecting the industrial base and proposing to terminate tank production in the United States for the first time since World War II.

Portman, who served as President George W. Bush's budget director before being elected to the Senate, said allowing the line to wither and close would create a financial mess. "People can't sit around for three years on unemployment insurance and wait for the government to come back," Portman said. "That supply chain is going to be much more costly and much more inefficient to create if you mothball the plant."

Pete Keating, a General Dynamics spokesman, said the money from Congress is allowing for a stable base of production for the Army, which receives about four tanks a month. With the line open, Lima also can fill international orders, bringing more work to Lima and preserving American jobs, he said.

Current foreign customers are Saudi Arabia, which is getting about five tanks a month, and Egypt, which is getting four. Each country pays all of their own costs. That's a "success story during a period of economic pain," Keating said.

Still, far fewer tanks are coming out of the Lima plant than in years past. The drop-off has affected companies such as Verhoff Machine and Welding in Continental, Ohio, which makes seats and other parts for the Abrams. Ed Verhoff, the company's president, said his sales have dropped from $20 million to $7 million over the past two years. He's also had to lay off about 25 skilled employees and he expects to be issuing more pink slips in the future.

"When we start to lose this base of people, what are we going to do? Buy our tanks from China?" Verhoff said.

Steven Grundman, a defense expert at the Atlantic Council in Washington, said the difficulty of reviving defense industrial capabilities tends to be overstated.

"From the fairly insular world in which the defense industry operates, these capabilities seem to be unique and in many cases extraordinarily high art," said Grundman, a former deputy undersecretary of defense for industrial affairs and installations during the Clinton administration. "But in the greater scope of the economy, they tend not to be."

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_TOO_MANY_TANKS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-04-28-08-58-08

The Brothers Tsarnaev and the Danger Whose Name we Dare not Speak

We now have had a number of terrorist attacks on the homeland -- though the administration often refers to them in ridiculous euphemisms like "workplace violence" -- and the behavior of the administration, including our lavishly funded FBI and Homeland Security Administration, and our richly rewarded media stars remains so predictable I've decided to spare you the time it takes to unravel the unending lies and poppycock we are regularly fed about these horrors, lies, and blundering that only increase our danger.

This week's bombing of civilians at the Boston Marathon in which three people, including an 8-year-old child, perished upon being torn to bits and 250 were wounded, some most grievously, followed the template set by the other Islamist incidents on Obama's watch. The media stumbles over itself trying not to see why we were attacked while glorifying terrorists, showing them in the most innocent-looking youthful pictures they can find, interviewing irrelevant credulous neighbors and school chums and blaming innocents (us) for the acts of terror. The federal government in large part, starting with the White House, is no better. HSA Secretary Napolitano urges us, "see something, say something" but the major media and all the president's men (and women) seem to operate under a different order, "See, hear, and speak nothing of the Islamist evil that threatens us."

A. The Media 

1. Making Celebrities of Terrorists

If you've never read Sultan Knish's blog, you ought to. He's one of the brightest stars of the internet and his comments this week on the media treatment of terrorists could not be more acid nor accurate.

The media's coverage is weighed down by its old fetish of murder as celebrity. The media covers murderers and celebrities in the same way. It writes exhaustively about them, but rarely meaningfully. The murderer, like the celebrity, is famous for being famous. And fame clips context and suppresses meaning. It becomes its own reference. A thing is famous for being known. It is known for being famous. It enters the common language as a reference. A metaphor.

In the case of the Tsarnaevs, the surface coverage, the endless rounds of interviews with friends and relatives, with anyone who ever met them or retweeted them, is mandatory because it avoids the more difficult question of why they killed.
[snip]

Prisons are full of 300 pound men who beat their 90 pound wives to death in self-defense and spree killers who felt bullied and misunderstood and defended themselves with killing sprees. The kind of evil we see in movies, the serial killer who gleefully whisper about demonic pacts and the joy of killing, are a rarity. Even human monsters are human. They explain things in terms of their egos. They are always defending themselves against some form of oppression and looking for someone to sympathize with their outrage.

Muslim terrorists are no different.
[snip]

Islam, as one of the great world religions, has a long history of needing to be defended against small boys, blind female poets and elderly cartoonists. Sometimes Muslims have to defend Islam against each other, the way they are now doing in Syria. Other times defending Islam requires demolishing its archeological sites, the way that the Saudis are doing. Either way defending Islam is difficult work.

Sultan Knish (Daniel Greenfield) deftly explains that there is a private Islam, which guides the daily life of its practitioners, and a "public Islam" which would force us all to follow the same proscriptions. That Islam, the public Islam, "must be defended by bombs", he argues. Both the media and the administration refuse to acknowledge that distinction.

Why did Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev detonate bombs at the Boston Marathon? They were engaged in an old disagreement over political systems. Terrorists of the left set off bombs to force a political revolution. Their Islamist fellow-travelers are doing the same thing. Dig away enough of the trappings of the celebrity murderer and you come to the ideas buried underneath all the rubble.
[snip]

[The media] wants us to speak of foreign policy as an isolated American act and of random violence as arising from thin air. It does not want us to understand the nature of the struggle. It does not want us to know why we die. It is determined to keep from us the reason why Muslims kill.

Sulltan Knish's article is something that should be read in its entirety, but if you want a short form of the media celebrity treatment of Islamist thugs he describes, Iowahawk provided it in a tweet:

"When I tweeted [Guy sends 268 people to the hospital, and the NY Times want to rewrite him as the new Holden Caulfield. #BomberInTheRye] last night, it was in response to the Times' bizarre stream of 'poor little misfit alienated immigrant teen' profile puff-pieces. It was (as satire is suppose to be) an intentional exaggeration meant to make a point. As God is my witness, I swear I had no idea they would ACTUALLY LIKEN HIM TO HOLDEN CAULFIELD."

What an embarrassment.2. The Media Act as if We Are Murderous Thugs
It may be that the media dissembles concerning the impetus for these murderous acts because it knows no better. Certainly they give evidence everyday of their thin knowledge of the world outside their pressroom cloisters. But one cannot help but feel that from 9/11 on the media has treated Americans as if WE were the murderous thugs who must not learn of the Islamist nature of the slaughterers lest we grab our pikes and scimitars and start off to mosques to behead the innocent.Brendon O'Neill at the Telegraph captured my puzzlement at this continued inexplicable treatment of the media's audience:

Clearly, some observers fear ordinary Americans more than they do terrorists; they fret more over how dangerously unintelligent and hateful Yanks will respond to bombings than they do over the bombings themselves. But where is this Islamophobic mob? Where are these marauding Muslim-haters undergoing a post-Boston freakout? They are a figment of liberal observers' imaginations. In the years since 9/11, the American public has been admirably tolerant towards Muslim communities. According to federal crime stats collected by the FBI, in 2009 there were 107 anti-Muslim hate crimes; in a country of 300 million people that is a very low number. In 2010, a year of great terrorism panic following the attempt by Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad to detonate a car bomb in Times Square in NYC, there were 160 anti-Muslim hate crimes. In 2011, there were 157. To see how imaginary the Islamophobic mob is, consider a state like Texas, fashionably mocked as a backward Hicksville full of Fox News-watching morons: there are 420,000 Muslims in Texas, yet in 2011 there were only six anti-Muslim hate crimes there. It simply isn't true that mad racist Yanks are biting at the bit to attack Muslims.

There were similarly wrongheaded fears of an outburst of mass Islamophobic hysteria in the wake of the 7/7 bombings in London, too. Policemen were posted outside mosques. NHS trusts encouraged doctors and nurses to keep their eyes peeled for anyone who expressed anti-Muslim hate. Trade union officials warned of a "backlash" against Muslims. But the backlash never came. Brits did not rise up in spite and fury against Muslims. Crown Prosecution Service crime figures for 2005-2006, covering the aftermath of the 7/7 attacks, showed that only 43 religiously aggravated crimes were prosecuted in that period, and that Muslims were the victims in 18 of those crimes. Eighteen prosecutions for anti-Muslim crimes -- all those crimes are unfortunate, of course they are; but this was far from an "Islamophobic backlash". As the then Director of Public Prosecutions, Ken Macdonald, said: "The fears of a [post-7/7] rise in offences appear to be unfounded." Time and again, Left-leaning campaigners and observers respond to terror attacks in the West by panicking about the possibly racist response of Joe Public -- and time and again, their fears prove ill-founded and Joe Public proves himself a more decent, tolerant person than they give him credit for. What this reveals is that liberal concern over Islamophobia, liberal fretting about anti-Muslim bigotry, is ironically driven by a bigotry of its own, by an deeply prejudiced view of everyday people as hateful and stupid. The anti-Islamophobia lobby poses as the implacable opponent of bigotry, yet it spreads a bigoted view of ordinary white folk as so volatile, so brimming with fury, that they are one terrorist bombing away from transforming into an anti-Muslim pogrom. Yes, some prejudiced things have been said about Muslims post-Boston; but far more prejudiced things are being said or implied about ordinary Americans.

This contempt for the innocent victims of Islamic terrorism permeates the International set of anti-democratic American and Israeli haters. Princeton Professor Richard Falk who sits on the preposterously named and constituted UN Human Rights Commission is an exemplar of this caste of blinkered mandarins. He publicly blamed the bombing on U.S. foreign policy and its support of Israel. Just as he has earlier suggested our government had a hand in 9/11.

As the NY Post's Michael Goodwin observed, Falk's fault finding error is shared with the president:

Yet Falk is not the only one with warped views. His praise for President Obama's apologies to Muslims should give the president reason to pause, but the White House is too busy making sure it passes the test of the Boston bombing trial.

Not so much the test of whether Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is guilty, about which there seems little doubt. Rather, the trial is a test of American values, according to all the president's men.
Obama himself still refuses to cite Islam as a motive for the bombing, despite the copious evidence investigators and the media have produced. He rushes to judgment only when it suits his worldview.
[snip]

The dynamic is bizarre. Americans are attacked and, in return, are warned by their president to behave. Obama used that formula to defend the proposed mosque at Ground Zero, saying it was important that "we stay focused on who we are as a people and what our values are all about."

Apparently, the president sees the Constitution as a suicide pact.

B. The Administration Shares the Media and Mandarins' Distorted View and Exacerbates the DangerThere was little doubt as the week ended that the FBI and HSA both seriously blundered in their treatment of the terrorists and their family, in the lies they told to us about what they had done and why, and there can be little doubt that, absent a sea change, we are in far greater danger now than we were before Obama was elected, a time when we had a president who thought us worthy of defending. Apart from the president's history outlined by Goodwin, we have seen unfolded a series of acts that could only have maximized our peril and that could be directed only from the top levels of the administration.

1. It has stripped the FBI manual of relevant information and blinded it to the danger of Islamism:

As The Washington Examiner's Mark Flatten reported last year, FBI training manuals were systematically purged in 2011 of all references to Islam that were judged offensive by a specially created five-member panel. Three of the panel members were Muslim advocates from outside the FBI, which still refuses to make public their identities. Nearly 900 pages were removed from the manuals as a result of that review. Several congressmen were allowed to review the removed materials in 2012, on condition that they not disclose what they read to their staffs, the media, or the general public.

With the recent proliferation of revelations about FBI blindness on the Brothers Tsarnaev, a comment made last year by Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, to Flatten now has a tragic resonance: "We've got material being removed more because of political correctness than in the interest of truth and properly educated justice officials. We are blinding our enforcement officers from the ability to see who the enemy actually is." The Boston bombing showed the tragic consequences of that.

Even if they are made aware of the danger, the FBI fails to act against Islamists, undoubtedly because it is a certain career ender.

The Russian FSB (the successor to the KGB) warned us about the bomber, the CIA brought this information to the FBI which performed a perfunctory interview, never looked at the bomber's Facebook page, and no one seemed to have noticed that he went to Russia for 6 months, doubtless meeting with Islamist Chechen terrorists. Even the Obama-loving Washington Post found the FBI performance remarkable:

there are reasons for concern about the two agencies' performance, based on what is known so far about their tracking of Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The older and more radical brother was first identified as a possible extremist by Russia, which asked the FBI to investigate him in early 2011. Later that year, also after prompting from Russia, the CIA asked that his name be added to a watch list maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center, The Post's Greg Miller and Sari Horowitz reported. His subsequent departure for Russia in early 2012 resulted in "a ping" to customs officials, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told Congress on Tuesday.

However, it appears the FBI never learned that Tamerlan had left the country and was not informed when he returned in July.

2. The FBI seriously interfered with the interrogation of the Dzhokhar Tzarnaev.

Dzhokhar was apparently wounded in the leg and neck by Boston police officers when, after firing hundreds of rounds, made Swiss cheese of the Boston whaler in which he was hiding unarmed.

Despite his throat wound and under a special exception set by the Attorney General, FBI agents were given 48 hours in which to question him without Mirandizing him, the questioning was slow going because of his wounds, especially the throat wounds which we'd earlier (falsely) been told were self-inflicted. But after only 16 hours and while the FBI was still questioning him and reportedly getting "crucial information," another FBI agent filed a criminal complaint in Boston and a magistrate accordingly appeared, told the terrorist he had a right to remain silent and Dzhokhar availed himself of the proffered privilege and stopped talking. 

Whether this was just another in a series of blunders or a deliberate act to keep him from revealing more, I am sorry to say I don't know. Given all that preceded this -- including a litany of bald-faced lies megaphoned by the press -- no conspiratorial explanation seems unthinkable.

3. Federal agents were clearly the sources of repeated early claims the brothers were self trained lone wolves, and they did so without evidence of that and at a time when they couldn't possibly know that to be true. In fact, the evidence indicates they were not.

The nature of the bomb shows they had some assistance in bomb making. Friday afternoon FNC reported the FBI is now considering there was a third bomber whose identity we do not know.

There's also a report that the terrorists' mother, wanted for shoplifting in Boston, was also on a terrorist watch list and that Tamerlan's wife played some role -- if only to tip them off they were being watched. The mosque in Boston which they attended has radical ties and been associated with other terrorism suspects.

4. There is more than a small hint that other federal agencies were involved in getting a Saudi injured at the scene of the blast and tagged a "person of interest" off a watch list and perhaps even spiriting him out of the country.

• A Saudi national originally identified as a "person of interest" in the Boston Marathon bombing was set to be deported under section 212, 3B -- "Security and related grounds" -- "Terrorist activities" after the bombing on April 15

• TheBlaze received word that the government may not deport the Saudi national -- identified as Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi -- as the story gained traction on April 18.

• Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano refused to answer questions on the subject by Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) on Capitol Hill on April 18, saying the inquiry was "so full of misstatements and misapprehension that it's just not worthy of an answer."

• An ICE official said April 18 that a different Saudi national is in custody, but that he is "in no way" connected to the bombings.

• Key congressmen of the Committee on Homeland Security request a classified briefing with Napolitano on April 22

• New info provided to TheBlaze reveals Alharbi's file was altered on the evening of April 17 to disassociate him from the initial charges

• Sources said on April 22 that the Saudi's student visa specifically allows him to go to school in Findlay, Ohio, though he appears to have an apartment in Boston, Massachusetts. A DHS official told TheBlaze that Alharbi properly transferred his student visa to a school in Massachusetts

• TheBlaze sources reveal April 22 that Alharbi was put on a terror watchlist after the bombing, and Napolitano confirms he was on a "watchlist" April 23.

By week's end, Beck's story, now confirmed after an early denial by Secretary Napolitano, grew even more shocking:

• At the time the event file was created for Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, it indicated he was "armed and dangerous"

• Alharbi was admitted into the country under a "special advisory option," which is usually reserved for visiting politicians, VIPs, or journalists. The event file cover page indicates he was granted his status without full vetting.

• One of the first excuses given by law enforcement when confronted about Alharbi's pending deportation was an expired visa. But according to the event file, his visa is good until 11-NOV-2016.

• The event file indicates he entered the U.S. on 08/28/12 in Boston, MA but says he is a student at the University of Findlay, in Findlay, Ohio. He has an apartment in Boston, and doesn't seem to have been a full-time student in Ohio.

• When a file is created in the system the author(s) are notified via email when it is accessed, and given the email address of the person accessing, so there is a record within the government data system of who deleted them. It was amended to remove the deportation reference, then someone later went in and tried to destroy both the original event file and amended versions. Copies had already been made.

• The original event file was reviewed and approved by two high level agents -- Chief Watch Commander Maimbourg and Watch Commander Mayfield.

Sure looks like a cover-up. Since there are pictures of Michelle Obama visiting Alharbi in his hospital room, since the Administration has been lying about him repeatedly and altering official records, and since there's as yet no answer as to how and why he was admitted under a "special advisory opinion" and since we do not yet know if he's still here or was spirited out of the country, we have good reason to be suspicious.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/the_brothers_tzarnaev_and_the_danger_whose_name_we_dare_not_speak.html#ixzz2RnZO22jS

'Democracy May Have Had Its Day'

Donald Kagan, Yale's great classicist gives his final lecture, fighting as ever for Western civilization.

Donald Kagan is engaging in one last argument. For his "farewell lecture" here at Yale on Thursday afternoon, the 80-year-old scholar of ancient Greece—whose four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War inspired comparisons to Edward Gibbon's Roman history—uncorked a biting critique of American higher education.

Universities, he proposed, are failing students and hurting American democracy. Curricula are "individualized, unfocused and scattered." On campus, he said, "I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness." Rare are "faculty with atypical views," he charged. "Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of our Western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values." He counseled schools to adopt "a common core of studies" in the history, literature and philosophy "of our culture." By "our" he means Western.

This might once have been called incitement. In 1990, as dean of Yale College, Mr. Kagan argued for the centrality of the study of Western civilization in an "infamous" (his phrase) address to incoming freshmen. A storm followed. He was called a racist—or as the campus daily more politely editorialized, a peddler of "European cultural arrogance." 

Not so now. Mr. Kagan received a long standing ovation from students and alumni in the packed auditorium. Heading into retirement, he has been feted as a beloved and popular teacher and Yale icon. The PC wars of the 1990s feel dated. Maybe, as one undergrad told me after the lecture, "the pendulum has started to swing back" toward traditional values in education.

Mr. Kagan offers another explanation. "You can't have a fight," he says one recent day at his office, "because you don't have two sides. The other side won."

He means across academia, but that is also true in his case. Mr. Kagan resigned the deanship in April 1992, lobbing a parting bomb at the faculty that bucked his administration. His plans to create a special Western Civilization course at Yale—funded with a $20 million gift from philanthropist and Yale alum Lee Bass, who was inspired by the 1990 lecture—blew up three years later amid a political backlash. "I still cry when I think about it," says Mr. Kagan.

As he looks at his Yale colleagues today, he says, "you can't find members of the faculty who have different opinions." I point at him. "Not anymore!" he says and laughs. The allure of "freedom" and "irresponsibility" were too strong to resist, he says.

His sharp tongue and easy sense of humor hearken to the Brooklyn of his youth. Born in 1932 in a Lithuanian shtetl, Mr. Kagan was raised in Brownsville, which was then a working-class Jewish neighborhood. He rooted for the Yankees on Brooklyn Dodgers turf—"everything you need to know about him," as his son Robert, the neoconservative writer, once said. He was a high school fullback. Mr. Kagan is personally warm, always tough and occasionally smart alecky. Imagine Robert DeNiro as an eminent conservative scholar of ancient Athens. He has no patience for "nonsense" or "wrong ideas." He's a guy who'll tell you what's what and that's that. Generations of faculty and students came away bruised from Kagan encounters. 

The tussles over course offerings and campus speech of course speak to something larger. Democracy, wrote Mr. Kagan in "Pericles of Athens" (1991), is "one of the rarest, most delicate and fragile flowers in the jungle of human experience." It relies on "free, autonomous and self-reliant" citizens and "extraordinary leadership" to flourish, even survive. 

These kinds of citizens aren't born—they need to be educated. "The essence of liberty, which is at the root of a liberal education, is that meaningful freedom means that you have choices to make," Mr. Kagan says. "At the university, there must be intellectual variety. If you don't have [that], it's not only that you are deprived of knowing some of the things you might know. It's that you are deprived of testing the things that you do know or do think you know or believe in, so that your knowledge is superficial."

As dean, Mr. Kagan championed hard sciences, rigorous hiring standards for faculty, and the protection of free speech. Those who see liberal education in crisis return to those ideas. "Crisis suggests it might recover," Mr. Kagan shoots back. "Maybe it's had its day. Democracy may have had its day. Concerns about the decline of liberty in our whole polity is what threatens all of the aspects of it, including democracy."

Taking a grim view of the Periclean era in Athens, Plato and Aristotle believed that democracy inevitably led to tyranny. The Founding Fathers took on their criticism and strove to balance liberty with equality under the law. Mr. Kagan, who grew up a Truman Democrat, says that when he was young the U.S. needed to redress an imbalance by emphasizing equality. The elite universities after the war opened to minorities and women, not to mention Brooklyn College grads like himself—then "it was all about merit," he says.

The 1960s brought a shift and marked his own political awakening. Teaching at Cornell, Mr. Kagan watched armed black students occupy a university building in 1969. The administration caved to their demands without asking them to give up their rifles and bandoliers. He joined Allan Bloom and other colleagues in protest. In the fall of that year, he moved to Yale. Bloom ended up at the University of Chicago and in 1987 published "The Closing of the American Mind," his best-selling attack on the shortcomings of higher education.

In the decades since, faculties have gained "extraordinary authority" over universities, Mr. Kagan says. The changes in the universities were mirrored in the society at large. "The tendency in this century and in the previous century at least has been toward equality of result and every other kind of equality that could be claimed without much regard for liberty," he says. "Right now the menace is certainly to liberty."

Over lunch at the private Mory's club last week, we marvel over the first-ever NCAA championship for Yale's hockey team, the oldest program in the country. "Unbelievable!" says Mr. Kagan with the gleam of a sports obsessive. In 1987, he stepped in for a year to direct Yale's athletic department—probably the only classics professor ever to hold the post anywhere. His first initiative was to call to disband the NCAA or take Yale out of it. "I wish I had," he says. "It's so disgusting, it's so hypocritical, it's so wicked. The NCAA is just a trade organization meant to increase profits."

Whether athletics, democracy or war are the topics of discussion, Mr. Kagan can offer examples from the ancients. His lifelong passion is Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War—the epic clash between those former allies, militaristic Sparta and democratic Athens, that closed out the fifth century B.C. 

As Thucydides wrote, people go to war out of "honor, fear and interest." War, he also said, "is a violent teacher." Another enduring lesson from him, says Mr. Kagan, is "that you can expect people, whatever they may be, to seek to maximize their power"—then a slight pause—"unless they're Europeans and have checked their brains at the door, so mortified are they, understandably, by what happened to them in the 20th century. They can't be taken seriously."

These days the burden of seriousness among free states falls on America, a fickle and unusual power. The Romans had no qualms about quashing their enemies, big or small. While the U.S. won two global conflicts and imposed and protected the current global order, the recent record shows failed or inconclusive engagements in the Middle East and Afghanistan. 

Some would argue that free societies are too soft to fight brutal wars too long. Mr. Kagan offers culture and political leadership as an explanation. "We're a certain kind of culture which makes it hard for us to behave rationally when the rational thing is to be tough," he says. "We can do it when we're scared to death and there seem to be no alternatives. When it's time to nail down something, we very often sneak away."

The protection and distance offered by two oceans gives America the idea—or delusion—of being able to stay out of the world's problems. Mr. Kagan also wonders about possible "geocultural" shifts at play. A hundred years ago, most people worked the land for themselves. Today they work for a paycheck, usually in an office. "Fundamentally we are dependent on people who pay our salaries," says Mr. Kagan. "In the liberal era, in our lifetime, we have come more to expect it is the job of the government to provide for the needs that we can't provide. Everything is negotiable. Everything is subject to talk." Maybe that has weakened the American will.

Also don't forget, says Mr. Kagan, "unsubtle Christianity" and its strong strain of pacifism. "Who else has a religion filled with the notion 'turn the other cheek'?" he asks. "Who ever heard of such a thing?! If you're gonna turn the other cheek, go home. Give up the ball."

In 2000, Mr. Kagan and his younger son, Frederick, a military historian and analyst, published "While America Sleeps." The book argued for the reversal of the Clinton Cold War peace dividend to meet unforeseen but inevitable threats to come. The timing was uncanny. A year later, 9/11 forced the Pentagon to rearm. 

With the end of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the U.S. is slashing defense again. "We do it every time," Mr. Kagan says. "Failing to understand the most elementary childish fact, which is: If you don't want trouble with somebody else, be sure he has something to be afraid of."

Brownsville, not Thucydides, taught him that. "Any kid who grows up in a relatively tough neighborhood gets quick early lessons in what the realities are," he says. His 1995 book, "On the Origins of War," made a moral and strategic case to exert as much effort and money to safeguard peace as to win a war.

Thucydides identified man's potential for folly and greatness. Mr. Kagan these days tends toward the darker view. He sees threats coming from Iran and in Asia, yet no leadership serious about taking them up. The public is too ignorant or irresponsible to care. "When you allow yourself to think of it, you don't know whether you are going to laugh or cry," he says. 

The Kagan thesis is bleak but not fatalistic. The fight to shape free citizens in schools, through the media and in the public square goes on. "There is no hope for anything if you don't have a population that buys into" a strong and free society, he says. "That can only be taught. It doesn't come in nature."

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