Tag: Yemen

Obama Negotiates With Iran as US Fleet Sails to Block Them in the Gulf

On By kingsjesterIn PoliticsLeave a comment

AFBrancoObamaCarterAward1092014It appears that President Barack Hussein Obama ‘s budding “bromance” with the Mad Mullahs of Iran made be headed toward rocky shoals.

Fox News reports that

The Obama administration is facing mounting pressure to use its leverage in the Iranian nuclear talks to demand the release of Americans imprisoned there — as Tehran proceeds with charges critics say are unfair and unjust. 

The latest case involves Washington Post Tehran bureau chief Jason Rezaian, whom the newspaper revealed Monday is being charged by Iran with espionage and other alleged crimes. 

He had been arrested, along with his wife, in 2014. His wife was later released, but he has been detained at the notorious Evin Prison. The charges reported on Monday marked the first time they have been publicly described — and the information only came from his lawyers, not from the court itself. A State Department official, asked Monday about the report, could not confirm the charges but said, if true, they are “patently absurd.” 

“He should immediately be freed so he can return to his family. The charges should immediately be dismissed,” spokeswoman Marie Harf said. 

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest echoed those remarks at his daily briefing. Yet, when asked why the White House can’t just tie the nuclear talks to the release of prisoners like Rezaian, Earnest said the talks are very “complicated” and must focus on one issue at a time. 

The development comes after new details surfaced about the prison conditions endured by a former U.S. Marine held in Iran. It was the case of that ex-Marine — Amir Hekmati, who was arrested in August 2011 on allegations of spying for the CIA while visiting his grandmother and other relatives in Iran — that prompted the latest high-profile plea to the administration to link the talks to the prisoner issue. 

The Veterans of Foreign Wars on Friday called for Hekmati’s release to be a part of the nuclear talks.  

“I am demanding that the U.S. government make his release a nonnegotiable part of whatever deal is cut with Iran,” VFW National Commander John Stroud said in a statement. Stroud said he has “grave concerns” over Hekmati’s imprisonment and allegations that “his Iranian captors are torturing a former Marine and a fellow VFW member.” 

For weeks, administration officials have insisted that the Iran nuclear talks will not involve non-nuclear issues. The State Department said as much when Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu urged negotiators to enshrine Israel’s “right to exist” in any agreement. 

“This is an agreement that doesn’t deal with any other issues, nor should it,” Harf said at the time. 

Really, precious?

These are Americans we are talking about, you incompetent over-aged Valley Girl.

Meanwhile,

A U.S. aircraft carrier has been dispatched to waters off Yemen to join other American ships prepared to block any Iranian shipments to the Houthi rebels fighting in Yemen. 

The U.S. Navy has been beefing up its presence in the Gulf of Aden and the southern Arabian Sea amid reports that a convoy of about eight Iranian ships is heading toward Yemen and possibly carrying arms for the Houthis. 

A Navy official confirmed to Fox News that the USS Theodore Roosevelt — along with her escort ship, the USS Normandy, a guided-missile cruiser — left the Persian Gulf on Sunday en route for the Arabian Sea, to help enforce the blockade. 

Tensions are rising in the region even as the U.S. and five other world powers scramble to strike a final deal with Iran on its nuclear program by the end of June. The fighting in Yemen, where U.S. ally Saudi Arabia is leading a coalition against the Iran-backed rebels, is complicating matters. 

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, without commenting specifically on any Navy movements, said the U.S. has concerns about Iran’s “continued support” for the Houthis. 

I’m sure they do.

After all, how can Obama and Kerry continue to suck up to the Radical Muslim Barbarians of Iran if they are forced to send Iranian Ships down to Davy Jones’ Locker?

While the President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm) and his Secretary of State John (I served in Vietnam) Kerry continue to acquiesce…err…negotiate with the Rogue Radical Islamic Nation of Iran, seeking an “agreement” in defiance of Article 6 of the United Stated Constitution, there remain 3 Americans, including a Forgotten American Man of Faith, being held in the squalor of an Iranian Jail.

Back in March, the country watched, as the holier-than-thou Liberal sycophantic pundits in the Main Stream Media and on the Internet, called the 47 Congressman, led by American Veteran Tom Cotton, “treasonous”, for sending a letter to the Mad Mullahs in Iran, informing them that any “agreement” enacted by Obama and Kerry, would not be worth the paper it may or may not be written on, as the next United States President could declare it null and void, as it would not be a Formal Treaty.

For you see, boys and girls, in order for any agreement with any foreign country to be binding, it MUST be ratified by Congress.

Our Founding Fathers, in their brilliance, set up a System of Checks and Balances, so that American would not become an oppressive monarchy, such as the one they had just left, seeking to practice their Christian Faith, however they saw fit.

I wonder what our Founding Fathers would think of a President, who seeks to allow one of our mortal enemies the means by which to annihilate us, while this same enemy continues to hold captive an American, simply because he is a Christian Pastor?

While they continue to shout,

Death to America!?

They probably would not think very highly of him…at all.

Until He Comes,

KJ

Obama’s “Success” in Yemen Leading to WWIII?

On By kingsjesterIn PoliticsLeave a comment

 

Iran-Cheat-600-LA“But I want the American people to understand how this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil. This counter-terrorism campaign will be waged through a steady, relentless effort to take out ISIL wherever they exist using our air power and our support for partner forces on the ground. This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years.” – President Barack Hussein Obama,  Foreign Policy Address to the Nation, September 10, 2014.

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. – Proverbs 16:18

Fox News reports that

Intervention by the U.S. and Iran in Yemen is raising the prospect of a proxy war even as the Obama administration tries to reach a nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic – with Iran sending two ships to waters near Yemen, as the U.S. speeds up military aid to the Saudi-led coalition striking Tehran-backed rebels there. 

Iran’s English-language state broadcaster Press TV quoted Rear Adm. Habibollah Sayyari as saying the ships, dispatched for the Gulf of Aden, would be part of an anti-piracy campaign “safeguarding naval routes for vessels in the region.” 

But the move comes amid the Saudi-led air campaign against Yemeni rebels, known as Houthis, which Iran is accused of backing. 

While the Pentagon has not yet weighed in on the ship movements, spokesman Col. Steve Warren said Wednesday: “We know that Iranians are providing support to the Houthis.” 

The developments underscore the growing international tensions surrounding the chaotic fighting in Yemen, with the U.S. shoring up Saudi-led forces on one side and Iran allegedly backing the Houthis on the other – though Iran and the rebels deny any direct military assistance. 

The fighting and international involvement threaten to hang over ongoing nuclear talks, which yielded a deal framework last week in Switzerland. The U.S., Iran and five other world powers are trying to strike a final deal by June – though critics have pointed to Iran’s involvement in Yemen and elsewhere as a serious cause for concern. 

But administration officials argue a nuclear deal is still worth pursuing, claiming it would cut off pathways to a nuclear bomb for the regime and make the world safer. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said Wednesday that “of course” the U.S. would like Iran to stop supporting the Yemen rebels and Hezbollah and other groups. 

“In a perfect world, of course we would have an agreement that does all of these things, but we are living in the real world,” she said, adding they want to get “this one issue dealt with.” 

Warren said Wednesday he could not say whether “Iranian money or equipment” has been delivered to the Houthis, but “we know the Iranians are partnered with the Houthis and they are working together.” 

Speaking a day earlier in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken blamed the violence in Yemen on the Houthis, and forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, saying that the U.S. is committed to defending Saudi Arabia. 

“We have expedited weapons deliveries, we have increased our intelligence sharing, and we have established a joint coordination and planning cell in the Saudi operations center,” he said in a statement to reporters after meeting with Saudi royals and Yemen’s President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who fled his country amid rebel advances.

Warren said Wednesday that no additional munitions have been delivered yet. He would not specify the types of bombs involved. 

In 1974, at the very first Conservative Political Action Conference, the future President of the United States said the following:

Somehow America has bred a kindliness into our people unmatched anywhere, as has been pointed out in that best-selling record by a Canadian journalist. We are not a sick society. A sick society could not produce the men that set foot on the moon, or who are now circling the earth above us in the Skylab. A sick society bereft of morality and courage did not produce the men who went through those years of torture and captivity in Vietnam. Where did we find such men? They are typical of this land as the Founding Fathers were typical. We found them in our streets, in the offices, the shops and the working places of our country and on the farms.

We cannot escape our destiny, nor should we try to do so. The leadership of the free world was thrust upon us two centuries ago in that little hall of Philadelphia. In the days following World War II, when the economic strength and power of America was all that stood between the world and the return to the dark ages, Pope Pius XII said, “The American people have a great genius for splendid and unselfish actions. Into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind.

We are indeed, and we are today, the last best hope of man on earth.

And when Reagan became president, he did everything within his power to uphold these lofty words.

I suppose that is why I hold Barack Hussein Obama in such disdain. As a young man just starting my new life in the business world, I was able to watch the economy start to turn around under the greatest president in our lifetime. There was a confidence in our strength as an American people that I had never seen before.

You could see it in people’s faces as you walked past them on the street… or at the gas station, as we all watched the price of a gallon of gas finally go down after the pain at the pump that we experienced during the Carter Presidency.

People who had been out of work and suffering along with their families were beginning to be hired again. And, young Americans who had no confidence in the previous commander in chief, were once again going to military recruiters asking to sign up to serve our country.

Yes, indeed. Once again, it was “Morning in America”.

However, the popularity of our president was not just limited to the boundaries of our nation. Reagan was admired the world over. The things that he accomplished, along with his friends, Prime Minister of Britain Margaret Thatcher, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, and Pope John Paul II, have caused the decade of the 1980s to be recorded as a seminal moment in world history.

I remember watching President Reagan speak at the Berlin Wall. When he said, “Mr Gorbachev…tear down this wall!”, I was never prouder to be an American and of an American president, than at that moment.

The Liberal Democrats lost their collective minds.

For you see, Liberal Democrats, just as they do now, hate it when Marxism gives way to Freedom.

Nothing bothers them more than when a strong American President is at the forefront of a conquering moment, when a strong foreign policy based on the reality that negotiating from a position of strength is always more effective than negotiating from a position of weakness.

Fast forward to the present, where an ineffective President Barack Hussein Obama is looking like a fool to a world who used to look to America as a bastion of strength and freedom, not weakness and political expediencies.

President Barack Hussein Obama has placed us in untenable position with his weak and vacillating Smart Power Foreign Policy.

Those who used to cringe in their desert tents, while calling us the Great Satan, now laugh in our faces as they walk across our southern borders with the rest of the illegal immigrants.

That is, if Obama simply does not invite them to the White House and meet with them, as he has the Muslim Brotherhood.

It should not surprise anyone that he has no qualms in giving Iran a timeline for acquisition of a nuclear bomb.

…Nor that ISIS is still on the march.

After all…he considers Yemen a “success”.

God protect us.

Until He Comes,

KJ

Obama’s Report of Al-Qaeda’s Death Was Greatly Exaggerated

On By kingsjesterIn Politics2 Comments

muslimredbeardYou know, for a “dead” group, al-Qaeda seems pretty lively to me.

According to the Wall Street Journal…

The State Department Sunday extended some embassy closures for the rest of the workweek, citing a need to “exercise caution” and take “appropriate steps” to protect American diplomats, local employees and visitors. Officials said the move wasn’t an indication that the U.S. had any new intelligence about the suspected plot or plots.

The high level of concern from U.S. officials underscores what many in the intelligence world have long warned. While al Qaeda’s central leadership may be weakened, the rest of the group has morphed into smaller entities and dispersed, which has made the threat harder to predict and track. This process was accelerated by the turmoil of the Arab Spring.

Officials briefed on the latest intelligence say the new warnings show that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, is as determined as ever to attack the West, but it is unclear whether the group is as capable of following through as it was before the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command started targeting its leaders in Yemen in parallel campaigns.

The deaths of Osama bin Laden and other top al Qaeda officials in Pakistan has fueled U.S. confidence that al Qaeda’s core leadership can’t mount attacks on the U.S. and that U.S. drone strikes there could be phased out over time. But al Qaeda affiliates, the most active and lethal of which is AQAP, have shown themselves to be increasingly capable and autonomous organizations, making it harder for the U.S. to track and target their leaders.

A major concern for the U.S. is AQAP’s chief bomb-maker—a Saudi citizen named Ibrahim al-Asiri—who is thought to still be at large and has been active both experimenting with new bomb designs and training other bomb-makers, according to American officials and analysts.

Beyond Yemen, al Qaeda in Iraq has reconstituted itself. Its branch in Syria is drawing in hundreds of foreign recruits each month. And in Mali, al Qaeda-linked fighters fled French warplanes and commandos and have set up a rudimentary base in the Libyan Desert outside Paris’s reach.

“The problem we face today is there are probably more al Qaeda cells and affiliates across the Arab world in 2013 than there have ever been before because of the chaos that’s followed the Arab Spring,” said Bruce Riedel, a Central Intelligence Agency veteran and now director of the Brookings Intelligence Project

About al-Qaeda...

The group was founded in approximately 1988 by Osama bin Laden, Abdullah Azzam, and Muhammad Atef — the latter a native Egyptian and a onetime member of the terrorist group Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Al Qaeda’s overriding objective is to establish a worldwide caliphate governing all the earth via the dictates of Islamic Law. Crucial to the achievement of that goal is the destruction of America by any means necessary. As one Al Qaeda Training Manual makes explicitly clear, violence is the preferred method of dealing with the enemy:

“Islamic governments have never and will never be established through peaceful solutions and cooperative councils. They are established as they [always] have been by pen and gun, by word and bullet, by tongue and teeth.”

The manual further exhorts jihadists to “pledge … to make their [the infidels’] women widows and their children orphans … to slaughter them like lambs and let the [rivers] flow with their blood.”

Al-Qaeda has been in Yemen for a number of years.

Al Qaeda’s presence in Yemen is due to the with the country’s domestic conflicts and the convoluted agendas of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. In the 1994 civil war, in which Saleh’s government defeated the Southern Rebels, Saleh and his loyal generals organized the mujahideen, some of whom would split off and form Al-Qaeda in Yemen, into fighting units against southerners who the jihadis already thought were godless socialists.

In the process of destroying an uprising of Zaydi Shiites in Yemen’s north known as the Houthi rebellion, Saleh backed the bujilding of Salafi schools linked with Al-Qaeda in Houthi territory, thus turning his political threat into a sectarian battle. Even during the war in Afghanistan against the Soviets, Yemeni leaders urged the country’s young men to travel to Afghanistan to fight.

Despite cooperating with them at the beginning, jihadis would find Saleh an undependable ally. Salah would readily cozy up to them when it suited his political goals, then he would just as readily turn on Al-Qaeda as soon as the benefits from doing so were presented to him, usually in the form of American aid money. His turncoat nature, in the years following the Cole bombing, led to the Yemeni Government arresting the group’s members, using deadly force against them, and allowing the U.S. intelligence services to operate in the country.

Saleh was an unfaithful friend to the United States in the war on terrorism, as well. His friendship ran hot and cold, even at one point refusing the FBI access to prisoners complicit in the USS Cole bombing.

Then, over the past decade, the U.S. supported a totally inept and totally corrupt Yemeni security apparatus When Yemeni security forces would somehow actually manage a victory in its fight against Al-Qaeda, it would lose to “escapes” twice as many Terrorists as it would capture.

Meanwhile, our American President, instead of providing troops to protect our American Embassies, has simply closed them, showing weakness to the barbarians, which is never a good idea.

I recognize the need to protect Americans, so more are not butchered, as Americans were on that fateful night in Benghazi. However. If this Administration does not show some backbone soon, America will continue to be in the same situation that England was under Neville Chamberlain.

We will be negotiating from a position of weakness.  

This is Smart Power?

Until He Comes,

KJ

Smart Power! Vs. Jihad: Guess Which is Winning?

On By kingsjesterIn Politics8 Comments

muslimredbeardBack on May 20, 2011, President Barack Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm) made a speech before a select group (and the television cameras, of course) gathered in the offices of the U.S. State Department. The purpose of the speech was to outline his wonderful Foreign Policy of Smart Power! and how he intended to had the ongoing “Arab Spring” and the growing tension between Israel and the Palestinians.

…The question before us is what role America will play as this story unfolds. For decades, the United States has pursued a set of core interests in the region: countering terrorism and stopping the spread of nuclear weapons; securing the free flow of commerce and safe-guarding the security of the region; standing up for Israel’s security and pursuing Arab-Israeli peace.

We will continue to do these things, with the firm belief that America’s interests are not hostile to people’s hopes; they’re essential to them. We believe that no one benefits from a nuclear arms race in the region, or al Qaeda’s brutal attacks. We believe people everywhere would see their economies crippled by a cut-off in energy supplies. As we did in the Gulf War, we will not tolerate aggression across borders, and we will keep our commitments to friends and partners.

Yet we must acknowledge that a strategy based solely upon the narrow pursuit of these interests will not fill an empty stomach or allow someone to speak their mind. Moreover, failure to speak to the broader aspirations of ordinary people will only feed the suspicion that has festered for years that the United States pursues our interests at their expense. Given that this mistrust runs both ways –- as Americans have been seared by hostage-taking and violent rhetoric and terrorist attacks that have killed thousands of our citizens -– a failure to change our approach threatens a deepening spiral of division between the United States and the Arab world.

And that’s why, two years ago in Cairo, I began to broaden our engagement based upon mutual interests and mutual respect. I believed then -– and I believe now -– that we have a stake not just in the stability of nations, but in the self-determination of individuals. The status quo is not sustainable. Societies held together by fear and repression may offer the illusion of stability for a time, but they are built upon fault lines that will eventually tear asunder.

So we face a historic opportunity. We have the chance to show that America values the dignity of the street vendor in Tunisia more than the raw power of the dictator. There must be no doubt that the United States of America welcomes change that advances self-determination and opportunity. Yes, there will be perils that accompany this moment of promise. But after decades of accepting the world as it is in the region, we have a chance to pursue the world as it should be.

Unfortunately for the safety of our nation, Obama’s policy of Smart Power! has been, and continues to be, an utter failure. The four brave Americans who were savagely murdered the night of September 11, 2012 at the US Embassy Compound in Benghazi, Libya would agree, if they were still alive  to do so.

Obama’s sucking up to the Radical Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East has not won the barbarians over to our side. They still want to destroy “The Great Satan”.

And, judging from the following statement, I would wager to say, that they believe that our President is a wuss.

Why should they be different?

Al-Qaeda’s military chief in Yemen warned Americans in an audio message posted online Sunday that the Boston bombings revealed a fragile security as he urged Muslims to defend their religion.

Qassim al-Rimi, the military chief of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, said making bombs such as the ones used in the twin blasts in Boston in April, is within “everyone’s reach”.

“The Boston events… and the poisoned letters (sent to the White House), regardless of who is behind them, show that your security is no longer under control, and that attacks on you have taken off and cannot be stopped,” he said, in the message entitled: “A letter to the American people.”

“Every day you will be hit by the unexpected and your leaders will not be able to defend you,” warned the man whose organisation is considered by Washington the world’s most dangerous Al-Qaeda branch.

Rimi said the killing of Al-Qaeda’s founder Osama bin Laden in May 2011 and top Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in September 2011, had not ended the struggle.

“Have you eliminated the jihadist groups that have spread everywhere after they had only been in Afghanistan? Today, they are in your land or close to it,” he warned.

To the Muslims in the United States, he said: “We encourage you to carry on with this way, be steadfast in your religion.

“Carry out your obligations, defend your religion and follow in the footsteps of those who supported their religion and Ummah (Muslim nation) while they are in their enemy’s den,” he said.

The “religion of peace”, my hindquarters.

Perhaps Obama should send that Federal Attorney from Tullahoma, Tennessee, who is warning us all about talking mean about Muslims on the Internet,  over to Yemen to talk to this Mad Mullah.

I am sure that the attorney would be just as effective as Smart Power!

God protect us.

Until He comes, KJ