We cannot be sure that this is true, but we think it is plausible.

Mike Cernovich writes at Cernovich Media:

Susan Rice, who served as the National Security Adviser under President Obama, has been identified as the official who requested unmasking of incoming Trump officials, Cernovich Media can exclusively report.

The White House Counsel’s office identified Rice as the person responsible for the unmasking after examining Rice’s document log requests. The reports Rice requested to see are kept under tightly-controlled conditions. Each person must log her name before being granted access to them.

Upon learning of Rice’s actions, H. R. McMaster dispatched his close aide Derek Harvey to Capitol Hill to brief Chairman Nunes.

“Unmasking” is the process of identifying individuals whose communications were caught in the dragnet of intelligence gathering. While conducting investigations into terrorism and other related crimes, intelligence analysts incidentally capture conversations about parties not subject to the search  warrant. The identities of individuals who are not under investigation are kept confidential, for legal and moral reasons.

Under President Obama, the unmasking rules were changed.  …

Three people close to President Obama, including his “fall guy” for Benghazi (Susan Rice), had authorization to unmask.

Susan Rice is infamous for having lied over and over again to the public about the tragedy of Benghazi, when four Americans including a US ambassador, Chris Stevens, were murdered there by Muslim terrorists as a result of Hillary Clinton’s negligence and incompetence – and President Obama’s policies.

The other two, according to Mike Cernovich, are (again plausibly), “CIA Director John Brennan and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch”.

From whom did these – or some others – have “authorization to unmask”?

The ONLY person who could have given that authorization was President Obama.

Whatever else in the Cernovich report is still open to doubt, this much is certain: Americans were unmasked and that is a felony.

President Trump was right when he said that his team was being “wire-tapped” – by which he meant spied upon.

So Obama himself, as well as those who carried out his orders, committed a felony.

Now we wait to see if Barack Obama – along with Susan Rice perhaps – will be indicted for this crime.

*

C. Gee, The Atheist Conservative co-editor, explains more accurately just what is illegal and criminal in this unravelling story:

Unmasking by itself is not illegal. Being authorized to request unmasking, Rice was not acting illegally in unmasking names. And she is probably authorized to unmask by virtue of her office rather than direct permission or instruction from Obama. What is illegal is improperly asking for unmasking – without there being a national security basis for the request. And if the pattern of requests shows targeting of Trump associates, that would be evidence of using power to attack a political opponent – illegal. It also points to a motivation for the leaks – which are illegal. Insofar as the unmasking and dissemination within the agencies facilitated leaks – the unmasking, although legally requested, is evidence of criminal corruption.

Barack Obama thinks that his presidency has been a great success. That if he could have stood for a third term, he would certainly have been elected again.

And yet he is not entirely comfortable in his mind that he has accomplished everything he intended to while he had all that power.

We can reproduce the list if his top four aims with a fair chance of accuracy:

The empowerment of Iran. Okay, done that. Tick it off.

Compulsory health insurance as a step towards a national health service (“Obamacare”). Tick.

The emptying of Guantanamo prison for prisoners of war and terrorists (“Gitmo”) and its closure. Gosh! Not achieved. Try again. Not many prisoners left. Can I do it before January 19? Let them go, let them go, let them go!

The final settlement of the Israel-Palestine problem, to be accomplished to the advantage of the Palestinians, and to the severe disadvantage of Israel, possibly facilitating its ultimate extinction. TICK.

The  deal with Iran may be torn up by Trump? My State Department will stop that happening.

Obamacare will be repealed? I doubt it.

Gitmo still open. Damn!

Israel f***ed. Yay!

Now carve my head on Mount Rushmore.

Ben Shapiro writes at Townhall:

President Barack Obama likes to see himself as a moral leader. “The arc of the moral universe is long”, Obama likes to say, quoting Martin Luther King Jr, “but it bends toward justice”. According to Obama, Obama is a genteel representative of decency and good grace, a man pointing America toward a broader vision, a fellow questing for social justice and contextual consideration.

In reality, he’s a narcissistic fool. And like Burgess Meredith’s character in The Twilight Zone, he will be left standing in the ruins, bewailing the fates that abandoned him, leaving no worshipful admirers upon whom to lean.

Obama’s legacy is one of failure all around the world. He leaves office with a genocide in Syria on his record – a genocide he pledged to prevent, then tolerated and finally lamented, mourning the fates while blithely ignoring his own cowardice. Libya, meanwhile, remains a full-scale disaster area, with tens of thousands of refugees from that failed campaign swamping Europe, along with those fleeing Syria, and his leftist European allies paying the political price.

Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, stands on the brink of a nuclear dawn, its pockets filled with billions of dollars, its minions ascendant from Tehran to Aleppo to Beirut. Obama made that happen with nearly a decade of appeasement and a willingness to abandon freedom-minded Iranians to the tender mercies of the mullahs.

Meanwhile, Russia has only expanded its reach and influence, invading the sovereign nation of Ukraine and seizing Crimea to the deafening silence of the Obama administration. Russia has flexed its muscle in Kaliningrad, where it has stocked missiles, and in Syria, where it has assured Syrian President Bashar Assad’s continued dominance.

China has grown its sphere of influence across the South China Sea, putting American allies from Taiwan and Japan to the Philippines directly under its thumb. Thanks to Obama’s military cuts, China believes that it can bully American allies into embracing Chinese supremacy in international waters – and it may be right. Simultaneously, Obama continues to drive America into debt, and the Chinese are large buyers of that outstanding debt.

The communist Cubans have been re-enshrined; so have the socialist Venezuelan authorities. The Islamic State group remains an international threat, and western capitals have been struck by Islamic terror time and again, to Obama’s teeth-gnashing and general inaction.

Not so sure about that teeth-gnashing. Does Obama give a damn about Islamic terrorism?

But at least Obama is truly putting his focus where it’s necessary: on declaring that our only ally in the Middle East, Israel, has no historic claim to its own existence and threatening Jews with sanctions for building bathrooms in East Jerusalem.

Right. The sarcasm is necessary. Exasperation is hard to express adequately.

Obama came into office amidst grand promises to restore America’s place in the world.

Did he? If so, he saw its place as lower, not higher. We seem to remember that he desired – perhaps not saying so in exactly these words – to bring America down a peg or two.

Unless our place is the outhouse, he’s failed. But at least he feels good about his accomplishments, even if thousands have died – and thousands more will die – in order to ensure his moral stature in his own mind.

The CIA has concluded in a secret [!?] assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.

(Words taken from the Washington Post whose report is to be found here.)

Donald Trump dismissed CIA claims that Russian hacks on Democratic emails were intended to help him win the presidency as “ridiculous”. He told Fox News Sunday that it was “another excuse” for Democrats and said he believed that rival politicians had spread the news. He’s not the only one with doubts – in a secret Capitol meeting last week, a senior FBI official refused to back the CIA’s claim. Russia has been named as the culprit in a number of hacks during the election that saw Democratic emails being leaked. But the FBI says there isn’t enough evidence to confirm Russia was pro-Trump, rather than just causing interference with the election.

(Words taken from the Daily Mail whose report is to be found here.)

The Obama man heading the CIA is John Brennan.

That great resource, Discover the Networks, reveals the following (inter alia) about John Brennan:

In September 2012, Brennan was involved in crafting the false talking points that then-Secretary of State Susan Rice gave regarding the 9/11/12 terrorist attack against a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. Specifically, Rice claimed that according to the “best information at present”. the deadly attack was not premeditated, but rather, a “spontaneous reaction” to “a hateful and offensive video that was widely disseminated throughout the Arab and Muslim world.”

On January 7, 2013, President Obama nominated Brennan for the position of CIA director. …

At a May 21, 2013 CIA ceremony honoring the Agency officials killed in the September 11, 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, several CIA officers who had survived those attacks were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) — despite the fact that they were: (a) leaving government service, and (b) still bound by previous NDAs which they had signed. Both before and after the May 21st NDAs, intelligence officials adamantly denied that anyone affiliated with the CIA had been asked to sign nondisclosure agreements regarding the events in Benghazi.

Perhaps the most notable of those denials came in a September 3, 2013 letter from CIA director Brennan to House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chairman Mike Rogers, in which Brennan responded to several specific questions that Rogers had previously posed (in a letter dated August 2, 2013) regarding whether or not the CIA officers who survived the Benghazi attacks were subsequently subjected to polygraphs or required to sign NDAs. Posing and answering several questions as a means of responding to Rogers’ queries, Brennan wrote:

Has any officer, either staff of contractor, been forced to undergo any polygraph because of their presence or their participation in any activity related to Benghazi attacks? Response: No.

Has any officer, either staff of contractor, been required to sign any non-disclosure agreement because of their presence at Benghazi or their participation in any activity related to the Benghazi attacks? Response: No.

According to sources familiar with the NDAs that were presented to the Benghazi survivors at the May 21, 2013 memorial service, the documents did not specifically mention the Benghazi attacks and thus were technically consistent with Brennan’s letter. But as a Weekly Standard analysis notes:

That’s a generous interpretation. The new NDAs were presented to Benghazi survivors after they had flown in from around the country (or world) to attend a CIA memorial for the Benghazi fallen at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia — where the attacks in Benghazi were the focus of the day. It’s hardly a leap to imagine that these NDAs, perhaps not even necessary, were intended to remind CIA officials a little more than six months removed from their service in Benghazi that the U.S. government would prefer that they not discuss what happened there.

In March 2014, Senator Dianne Feinstein — the head of a Senate Intelligence Committee that was involved in a multi-year probe (begun in 2009) of the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation measures on suspected terrorists during the Bush Administration — went to the Senate floor and angrily accused Brennan’s CIA of having hacked into the computers of her Committee staffers. In response, Brennan expressed dismay that “some members of the Senate” were making “spurious allegations about CIA actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts”. Moreover, he demanded an end to “outbursts that do a disservice to the important relationship that needs to be maintained between intelligence officials and Congressional overseers”. And he told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell:

As far as the allegations of the CIA hacking into Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. We wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the, you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we do.” Brennan likewise told the media that “a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong.

But according to the findings of a CIA inspector general’s report released on July 31, 2014, it was actually Brennan who was proved wrong. The report indicated that five CIA employees — two attorneys and three computer specialists — indeed had surreptitiously and unlawfully searched files and emails on the computers of the aforementioned Senate investigators. In response to the report, Brennan apologized to Senate Intelligence Committee leaders.

Committee members were infuriated, however. Senator Mark Udall (D-Colorado), for example, called for Brennan’s resignation, citing “the unprecedented hacking of congressional staff computers”, damaging leaks about the Committee’s investigations, and Brennan’s “abject failure to acknowledge any wrongdoing by the agency”.

By contrast, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said that President Obama continued to support Brennan and had “not at all” lost faith in the CIA leader’s credibility. …

In a May 2012 teleconference, Brennan revealed some highly sensitive information that, in turn, was relayed to the press by one of the other parties to the call — Richard Clarke, former chief of counter-terrorism in the Clinton White House. This highly serious intelligence leak blew the cover of secrecy off of an active counterterrorism operation in which the British and Saudi intelligence agencies had successfully placed an operative deep inside al Qaeda’s organization in the Arabian Peninsula. Consequently, the initiative had to be terminated immediately, enraging America’s foreign intelligence allies.

… CNN reporter Tal Kopan found a striking admission from CIA Director John Brennan. When he first applied to join the CIA, and received his polygraph test, he was asked this standard question:

Have you ever worked with or for a group that was dedicated to overthrowing the US?

Remarking on this last week during a panel discussion at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual conference, Brennan said: “I froze…. This was back in 1980, and I thought back to a previous election where I voted, and I voted for the Communist Party candidate.” Brennan was responding to a question about barriers to recruiting diverse candidates for the intelligence agencies, including whether past records of activism could hurt someone applying for a clearance later in life.

Brennan called his support of the Communist Party a mere “indiscretion”, and reminded his audience that the Constitution grants free speech. He then remembered that he said to himself he could either lie and the polygraph machine would “go wacko” or tell the truth and face the consequences, including possibly being rejected for employment. He told the audience he voted for Gus Hall because while in college he was unhappy “with the system” and saw the “need for change”.

It is relevant to mention that John Brennan probably converted to Islam. (He has not confirmed this.) He is certainly highly protective of Islam.

In a March 2015 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Brennan refused to refer to the Islamic State (ISIS, a.k.a. ISIL) terror group as an “Islamic” entity. Said the CIA director: “Quite frankly I am amused at the debate that goes on [that] unless you call it what it is [Islamic terrorism], you don’t know what you’re fighting. And let’s make it very clear that the people who carry out acts of terrorism, whether it be Al Qaeda or the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant [ISIS], are doing it because they believe it is consistent with what their view of Islam is. It is totally inconsistent with what the overwhelming majority of Muslims throughout the world [believe]. And so by ascribing it as a Muslim terrorism or Islamic extremism — I think it does really give them the type of Islamic legitimacy that they are so desperately seeking, but which they don’t deserve at all. They are terrorists, they’re criminals. Many of them are psychopathic thugs, murderers, who use a religious concept and masquerade, mask themselves, in that religious construct. And I do think it does injustice to the tenets of religion when we attach a religious moniker to [ISIS]. The Muslims I know … The people I’ve worked with throughout the Middle East most of my career find just disgraceful that these individuals present themselves as Muslims.”

Considering all this, we would concede that John Brennan’s trustworthiness may be a little higher than Hillary Clinton’s.

And the reliability of reports that come out of John Brennan’s CIA may sometimes rise to the level of Susan Rice’s statements about the Benghazi attack.

Q: Why do people help and protect the Clintons?

A: Because they are afraid of them.  

They fear for their lives, and with good reason.

Aaron Klein writes at Breitbart:

Dave Schippers, who served as the Chief Investigative Counsel for the House Judiciary Committee’s probe into whether Bill Clinton committed impeachable offenses, stated in an exclusive radio interview that he is “terrified” of Hillary Clinton.

Schippers is one of the few people who personally viewed – indeed he helped to collect – the roomful of evidence in the impeachment probe. He says the evidence included 60,000-plus pages of written documents, video and “hours and hours” of tape recordings, all of which are still under lock and key.

During the interview, which aired on this reporter’s talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” Schippers, unprompted, raised questions about the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster. He further claimed, “We know that there were people who disappeared.”

Regarding his stated fear of Hillary, Schippers said:

Today, I am still terrified of Hillary. Absolutely I am terrified. Because if she gets into office. In fact, I’ve told my wife, I said, ‘If Hillary gets elected, look for the FBI or somebody to come and pick me up the next day.’ And I think I’m the only one left. [Former Congressman] Henry Hyde is dead. [Independent Counsel Kenneth] Star didn’t really hurt her. Yeah. I was scared when I was out there …  I’ve been terrified ever since. Because things happen. Things happen.

Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, had asked Schippers, a Democrat, to lead the House impeachment probe.

During the interview, Schippers raised questions about the death of Foster, whose body was discovered on July 20, 1993 in Virginia’s Fort Marcy Park. An autopsy concluded the cause of death was a “perforating gunshot wound mouth-head.” …

Schippers said he believed that Foster was a “weak link in the chain of evidence”, and that his investigative committee was barred from probing the lawyer’s death.

He stated:

Vince Foster was probably as close to Hillary as anybody on the face of the Earth. He knew all about the (Rose) law firm. He knew all about Whitewater. He knew all about the money she made, the $100,000 she made overnight in the commodities market. He knew everything. And I think he was a weak link. In my opinion, he was a weak link in the chain of evidence. And obviously, we could never have called him as a witness. But I was going into that investigation. I was going to call FBI agents. I was going to call the Park Service. I was going to call the coroner and everybody else. We weren’t allowed to do it. We were stymied. Just stopped dead in our tracks. And I don’t know why.

Five official or governmental investigations concluded that Foster committed suicide. The nature of Foster’s work, as well as the six days it took before Foster’s suicide note was found, led to speculation and conspiracies about his death.

I asked Schippers, “Are you saying, if I am hearing you correctly, that there are legitimate questions that you believe should be asked about the deaths surrounding the Clintons, like Vince Foster and others?”

“Absolutely. Absolutely,” he replied.

Schippers further claimed that “We know that there were people who disappeared.”

He continued:

“When we started our investigation, Henry Hyde said, ‘How wide do you want to go?’ And I said, ‘Get us an open investigation. We have so many things that we want to investigate.’ And we got an open investigation where we were permitted to investigate as far as whatever came up in the impeachment inquiry.

“Immediately after the 1998 election, the leadership in the House put the brakes on.

We had a meeting and Henry Hyde said the House has told us that we’ve got Monica Lewinsky and we can go no further.We are not permitted to do any additional investigation. And I said, ‘My God, we’ve got at least three murders and other things that we are going into.’ And he says, ‘I’m sorry we can’t do it.’”

Schippers described the room at the Ford House Office Building where the evidence was housed during the impeachment probe as having armed guards outside. He said those who were permitted to enter were not allowed to bring anything in or out.

He said he was one of the few people who actually reviewed all of the evidence in the impeachment case. He said that only 65 House members accepted an invitation to review the evidence in the room and that all senators declined before they voted against impeaching Clinton.

Asked about the specifics of the evidence, Schippers said he is barred from answering the question. However, he replied, “Let me say this. Sixty-five Congressmen saw that evidence. And 64 voted to impeach. Take your own conclusion.”

And this is from the Political Insider:

Twenty-three years ago during the Clinton administration, Deputy White House Council Vincent Foster was found dead in his car.

But did he die in his car? Did he own the gun that shot him? Was he shot once or twice? A lot of evidence that pointed to the scene being fixed to look like suicide was suppressed.

This scandal shocked the country, and raised massive questions about just how dangerous the Clintons are.

Foster’s apparent suicide was quite suspicious. Two investigators – Robert Fiske and Kenneth Starr – separately concluded that Foster shot himself and died, due to suicide.

But over time, major questions have been raised about what may have really killed him. Now, recently discovered evidence blows the case wide open!

Discovered in the files of the National Archives and Records Administration, Starr’s lead prosecutor Miguel Rodriguez submitted a 2-page resignation letter and a 31 page memo about the injuries Foster sustained. Rodriguez notes in the letter details about injuries around Foster’s neck which were not reported in official government documents.

At the time, the FBI claimed that Foster’s neck injury photos were underexposed, and therefore useless to them.

Rodriguez claims that after he produced additional damning evidence of a possible Foster murder coverup, he became a target and was investigated internally!

In the letter, he explained 12 ways in which the case has mishandled and compromised. Then, he noted:

“I steadfastly maintained, and continue to maintain, that I, at all times, conducted myself as an experienced and trained prosecutor, with years of federal prosecutorial experience and federal grand jury experience.”

These records indicate Foster didn’t really die from one .38 caliber gunshot … but two gunshots! The other shot was on the right side of his neck, made by a “Small caliber” bullet hole.

This raises serious questions about Foster’s motives for suicide. He was tied to Hillary Clinton’s roles in White House scandals at Whitewater and the White House Travel Office. …

The theory is, as Vince Foster was one of Hillary’s closest friends, he knew too much about these scandals. In fact, he may have had a romantic relationship with the then first-Lady.

Foster had been a long-time friend and companion to Hillary. The two shared a brokerage account called Midlife Partners. When Barbara Walters asked Hillary if she had been having an affair with Vince Foster, Hillary lowered her eyes and told the 20/20 cameras, “He was a very special man.” When he died, Hillary said publicly that Vince Foster was the last person who would have committed suicide. Friends reported she was genuinely shocked and aggrieved.

Why, then, did Hillary lie under oath about the last time she saw Vince Foster?

Testifying before the Office of the Independent Counsel (OIC) in 1994, she claimed that the last time she had spoken to Vince Foster was on the phone “the Friday or Saturday before Father’s Day.” Yet documents from the National Archives, acquired by the New York Megaphone, show that Foster’s assistant, Tom Castleton, reported he “saw Hillary Clinton in Foster’s office approximately four times during the five weeks he was employed.” Castleton didn’t start working for Foster until after Father’s Day, 1993. …

Hillary Clinton asked Vince Foster to help her spy on her libertine husband in 1990. Foster hired Jerry Parks, an Arkansas investigator who later worked as the head of security for the Clinton/Gore campaign. According to Parks’s widow, “Jerry asked Vince why he needed this stuff on Clinton. He said he needed it for Hillary.”

When Vince Foster showed up dead in a Washington-area public park in the summer of 1993, Parks was terrified.

Two months later Parks was shot nine times at close range, at a stoplight, in his SUV, in Little Rock. Parks’s home was then raided by eight Federal agents, including officers from the FBI, IRS, Secret Service, and (unusual for a domestic case) the CIA.

If true, this means Vince Foster was murdered to make sure he didn’t tell the world what he knew about President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary. He was too honest, and therefore couldn’t be trusted anymore.

This is actually worse than transmitting classified documents on a home email server… This is murder!

Not sure about that. Hillary endangered the lives of many Americans with her insecure emailing, all too easily hacked. Her recklessness with her emails probably contributed to the murders of Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans at Benghazi on 9/11/12. The attackers knew in advance where the Ambassador would be that night. How did they know?

And while Vince Foster and Jerry Parks may very well have been murdered on the orders of Hillary, did she not certainly cause the violent deaths of uncountable numbers in Libya, Iraq, Syria, and the Mediterranean sea? 

But to return to the death of Vince Foster: even if he did kill himself, there is a strong case for believing that Hillary drove him to do it:     

This is from the Washington Times:

The FBI found that a week before Foster’s death, Hillary held a meeting at the White House with Foster and other top aides to discuss her proposed health care legislation.

Hillary violently disagreed with a legal objection Foster raised at the meeting and ridiculed him in front of his peers, former FBI agent Coy Copeland and former FBI supervisory agent Jim Clemente told me. Mr. Copeland was Mr. Starr’s senior investigator and read the reports of other agents working for Mr. Starr.

During the White House meeting, Hillary continued to humiliate Foster mercilessly, both former FBI agents say.

“Hillary put him down really, really bad in a pretty good-size meeting,” Mr. Copeland says. “She told him he didn’t get the picture, and he would always be a little hick town lawyer who was obviously not ready for the big time.”

Indeed, Hillary went so far as to blame Foster for all the Clintons’ problems and accuse him of failing them, according to Mr. Clemente, who was also assigned by the FBI to the Starr investigation and who probed the circumstances surrounding Foster’s suicide.

“Foster was profoundly depressed, but Hillary lambasting him was the final straw because she publicly embarrassed him in front of others,” says Mr. Clemente, who, like Mr. Copeland, spoke about the investigation for the first time.

“Hillary blamed him for failed nominations, claimed he had not vetted them properly, and said in front of his White House colleagues, ‘You’re not protecting us’ and ‘You have failed us’,” Mr. Clemente says. “That was the final blow.”

After the meeting, Foster’s behavior changed dramatically, the FBI agents found. Those who knew him said his voice sounded strained, he became withdrawn and preoccupied, and his sense of humor vanished. At times, Foster teared up. He talked of feeling trapped.

On Tuesday, July 13, 1993, while having dinner with his wife Lisa, Foster broke down and began to cry. He said he was considering resigning.

That weekend, Foster and his wife drove to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where they saw their friends, Michael Cardoza and Webster Hubbell, and their wives.

“They played tennis, they swam, and they said he sat in a lawn chair, just kind of sat there in the lawn chair,” Mr. Copeland says. “They said that just was not Vince. He loved to play tennis, and he was always sociable, but he just sat over in the corner by himself and stared off into space, reading a book.”

Two days later, Foster left the White House parking lot at 1:10 p.m. The precise time when he shot himself could not be pinpointed. After Park Police found his body, they notified the U.S. Secret Service at 8:30 p.m.

Based on what “dozens” of others who had contact with Foster after that meeting told the agents, while Foster was already depressed, “The put-down that she gave him in that big meeting just pushed him over the edge,” Mr. Copeland says. “It was the final straw that broke the camel’s back.”

No one can explain a suicide in rational terms. But the FBI investigation concluded that it was Hillary’s vilification of Foster in front of his colleagues, coming on top of his depression, that triggered his suicide about a week later, Mr. Copeland and Mr. Clemente both say.

Mr. Starr issued a 38,000-word report, along with a separate psychologist’s report on the factors that contributed to Foster’s suicide. Yet Mr. Starr never mentioned the meeting with Hillary, leaving out the fact that his own investigation had found that Hillary’s attack had led to her friend’s suicide.

Mr. Starr never told Mr. Copeland or Mr. Clemente why he decided to exclude the findings from his report. But Mr. Clemente says, “Starr didn’t want to offend the conscience of the public by going after the first lady. He said the first lady is an institution.”

Q: How can anyone want Hillary Clinton to be president of the United States? 

A: ?

That is a statement of fact. Russia IS preparing for war with the United States.  

If Putin wants war – and it seems that he does – this is the time for him to start it.

Europe without its own defense, a demoralized NATO, a feckless president of the US to be possibly followed by an incompetent woman, and an American public distracted by the invention of new pronouns – what has he to fear?

We quote from Western Journalism (making use of information from the Daily Mail here):

A new order from Russian leader Vladimir Putin has stirred fears across the globe that Russia is preparing for a massive conflict.

Russia has ordered all government officials to fly home any relatives living abroad, including college students regardless of any impact this has on their studies. “This is all part of the package of measures to prepare elites to some ‘big war’, ” said Russian political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky.

“It’s a fallacy to think that this is like the Cold War. The current times are different and more dangerous,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said of the rising tensions between Russia and the West.

According to the Russian-language site Znak.com, administration staff, regional administrators, lawmakers of all levels and employees of public corporations are covered by the order. They are warned that their chances for promotion depend upon their compliance.

The action comes in the context of many troubling developments. Putin recently cancelled a planned Oct. 19 visit to France, which has denounced Russia’s role in the Syrian civil war. Further, the U.S. recently broke off talks with Russia regarding finding a diplomatic solution to the Syrian crisis. Cancelling a visit so close to its date is a “serious step… reminiscent of the Cold War,” said Russian foreign policy analyst Fyodor Lukyanov. “This is part of the broader escalation in the tensions between Russia and the West, and Russia and NATO,” he said.

Recent Russian saber-rattling has included Russia’s action on Saturday to put nuclear-capable missiles in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania.  …

Russia recently … held civil defense drills that included 40 million citizens. … [And] bunkers capable of holding all of Moscow’s 12 million residents have been constructed to protect citizens in the event of a nuclear attack.

The Free Thought Project reports:

Amid collapsed diplomatic efforts over Syria and increasing tensions with the United States, the Russian government is beginning emergency response exercises [this week] that will include the participation of thousands of government officials and many millions of citizens who will respond to a mock nuclear attack or other large-scale catastrophe.

The four-day drill will reportedly include 200,000 rescue professionals, tens of thousands of emergency vehicles, and an estimated 40 million civilians from around the country.

“Our priority during the drill is to train evacuation of the civilian population from potentially-risky areas,” Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov, who oversees all civil defense in Russia, told the Interfax news agency. “The main goal of the drill is to practice organization of management during civil defense events and emergency and fire management, to check preparedness of management bodies and forces of civil defense on all levels to respond to natural and man-made disasters and to take civil defense measures.”

The exercise, versions of which have been held in the country since 2012, take place following an announcement by Russia that it will pull out of a long-term plutonium disposal agreement if the U.S. and its NATO allies do not reverse a recent military build-up in eastern Europe and the Baltic countries.

The emergency drills also comes on the heels of the announcement by the U.S. State Department on Monday it was severing diplomatic communications with Russia over the deteriorating situation in Syria following the collapse of a cease-fire agreement and an intensifying assault by Syrian and Russian armed forces against the rebel-held city of Aleppo.

“The United States is suspending its participation in bilateral channels with Russia that were established to sustain the cessation of hostilities,” announced State Department spokesperson John Kirby on Monday. Kirby said it was “not a decision that was taken lightly” as he blamed Russia for failing to “live up to its own commitments” on the joint effort.

As the U.S. and Russian officials traded blame, outside critics of the White House called the suspension of diplomatic channels by the U.S. troubling.

James Carden, writing for The Nation, said the “collapse of talks takes the United States one step closer to an unnecessarily deadly ‘military solution’ to the Syria crisis” as he called it the “most dangerous development in a New Cold War”. Such a development deserves fierce rebuke, Carden indicated, especially when it comes amid growing calls among influential members of the national security apparatus to impose a “no-fly zone” in Syria as a way to counter Russian and Syrian targeting of jihadist rebel forces aligned against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

“A military solution, and facile promises of easy answers like the imposition of no-fly and/or safe zones (which are neither easy nor answers) is not the way forward,” warned Carden. “Obama and his advisers have made a potentially grave error in cutting off talks with the Russians, and even a cursory glance back through the history of recent American military interventions should steer them back to, not away from, the negotiating table.”

In an analysis published Monday under the title, Do We Really Want Nuclear War with Russia?, veteran journalist Robert Parry openly condemned the Obama administration’s foreign policy position vis-a-vis Russia and Syria.

According to Parry, a “propaganda war against Russia” in the U.S. and western mainstream press “is spinning out of control, rolling ever faster downhill with a dangerous momentum that threatens to drive the world into a nuclear showdown.” Though he acknowledges the Syria-Russia situation is deeply complex, Parry argues that a misinformation campaign is putting the United States on a worrisome, yet familiar, path:

This propaganda apparatus now has so many specialized features that you get supposedly “progressive” and “anti-war” organizations promoting a major U.S. invasion of Syria under the guise of sweet-sounding policies like “no-fly zones” and “safe zones,” the same euphemisms that were used as the gateway to bloody “regime change” wars in Iraq and Libya.

There exists what intelligence veterans call a Mighty Wurlitzer, an organ with so many keys and pedals that it’s hard to know where all the sounds come from that make up the powerful harmony, all building to the same crescendo. But that crescendo may now be war with nuclear-armed Russia, which finds in all this demonizing the prelude to either a destabilization campaign aimed at “regime change” in Moscow or outright war.

Yet, the West can’t seem to muster the sanity or the honesty to begin toning down or even showing skepticism toward the escalating charges aimed at Russia. We saw similar patterns in the run-up to war in Iraq in 2002-2003 and in justifying the ouster, torture and murder of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

Western propaganda also has enveloped the conflict in Syria to such an extent that the American people don’t understand that the U.S. government and its regional “allies” have been supporting and arming jihadist groups fighting under the command of Al Qaeda and even the Islamic State. The propaganda has focused on demonizing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, while downplaying or ignoring the real nature of the “moderate” opposition.

Carden also summoned Iraq and Libya as cautionary tales for the Obama administration, but said the stakes are perhaps even more elevated given the numerous military interests now operating inside Syria. Unlike Iraq and Libya, he explained, “both the Russians and Iranians have personnel on the ground in Syria, while the Russian and the Syrian Arab Air Forces are executing an air campaign over rebel-held (or more accurately, jihadi-held) east Aleppo. The mainstream media continue to gloss over the rather salient fact that civilians who are trying to flee the Russian-Syrian bombardment are often blocked from doing so by US and Gulf State funded ‘rebels’.”

Also raising concerns, a group of veteran officials from the U.S. intelligence community on Monday issued an open memo to President Obama warning him against the continued erosion of U.S.-Russian relations. As opposed to cutting ties, the former intelligence officers called on Obama to increase cooperation by holding direct one-on-one talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin as a way to avert deeper divisions and a more protracted war inside Syria.

“We strongly recommend that you invite President Putin to meet with you in a mutually convenient place,” the memo asserts, “in order to try to sort things out and prevent still worse for the people of Syria.”

It remains unclear as of this writing whether or not Obama received, or has read, the memo’s warning.

It remains unclear whether Obama has any understanding at all of what is happening in the Middle East, or cares.

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize soon after he became (absurdly!) president of the United States – for no achievement whatsoever. Perhaps he is earning it now by not paying any attention to the loud sound of Russia’s saber-rattling.

Is Putin to be taken seriously?

If so, where is the Western leader who knows it and will act?

The protection of Hillary Clinton requires ever more defiance of the rule of law.

Now a report at Politico reveals that an accused law-breaker is freed from charges in order to avoid “embarrassing” her:

The Obama administration is moving to dismiss charges against an arms dealer it had accused of selling weapons that were destined for Libyan rebels.

Lawyers for the Justice Department on Monday filed a motion in federal court in Phoenix to drop the case against the arms dealer, an American named Marc Turi, whose lawyers also signed the motion. The deal averts a trial that threatened to cast additional scrutiny on Hillary Clinton’s private emails as Secretary of State, and to expose reported Central Intelligence Agency attempts to arm rebels fighting Libyan leader Moammar Qadhafi.

Government lawyers were facing a Wednesday deadline to produce documents to Turi’s legal team, and the trial was officially set to begin on Election Day, although it likely would have been delayed by protracted disputes about classified information in the case.

A Turi associate asserted that the government dropped the case because the proceedings could have embarrassed Clinton and President Barack Obama by calling attention to the reported role of their administration in supplying weapons that fell into the hands of Islamic extremist militants. …

Turi adviser Robert Stryk of the government relations and consulting firm SPG accused the government of trying to scapegoat Turi to cover up Clinton’s mishandling of Libya.

“The U.S. government spent millions of dollars, went all over the world to bankrupt him, and destroyed his life — all to protect Hillary Clinton’s crimes,” he said, alluding to the deadly Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. …

Turi was indicted in 2014 on four felony counts: two of arms dealing in violation of the Arms Export Control Act and two of lying to the State Department in official applications. The charges accused Turi of claiming that the weapons involved were destined for Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, when the arms were actually intended to reach Libya.

Turi’s lawyers argued that the shipments were part of a U.S. government-authorized effort to arm Libyan rebels. …

Turi’s case had delved into emails sent to and from the controversial private account that Clinton used as Secretary of State, which the defense planned to harness at any trial. …

Turi’s defense was pressing for more documents about the alleged rebel-arming effort and for testimony from officials who worked on the issue the State Department and the CIA. The defense said it planned to argue that Turi believed he had official permission to work on arms transfers to Libya

Every time the law is flouted to save Hillary, she is more tainted, more disreputable.

And so are the officials in the FBI and the DOJ who cover her corruption.

Hillary Clinton, she of the Benghazi Massacre, retorts when she is criticized for her actions and inactions in connection with that disaster, that “eleven hours of questioning” by the Foreign Relations Committee “found nothing” to reproach her with.

(Also that an earlier inquiry into the event had positively exonerated her – which indeed it did, being conducted by one of her accomplices who saw no reason even to question her. See our post, Send in the whitewasher, November 3, 2012.)

It now emerges that the Foreign Relations Committee hearing was not an entirely honest inquiry to determine the truth of what happened, but in part a staged performance, scripted in advance by the Clinton gang.

Catherine Herridge reports:

Newly released emails suggest a senior Hillary Clinton aide stage-managed her first hearing on the Benghazi terrorist attack by feeding specific topics Clinton wanted to address to Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, who at the time was acting chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

“We wired it that Menendez would provide an opportunity to address two topics we needed to debunk (her actions/whereabouts on 9/11, and these emails from Chris Stevens about moving locations,)” Clinton media gatekeeper Philippe Reines wrote to Chelsea Clinton the morning of the Jan. 23, 2013 hearing.

Right out of the gate, the first hearing question from Menendez that day covered both topics referenced by Reines.

Menendez asked for Clinton’s “insights on the decision-making process regarding the location of the Mission”. … [And] “Can you also in your response, you touched upon it in your opening statement, but what actions were you and your staff taking the night of September 11 and into September 12?”

The then-secretary of state had an answer on both fronts. She told the committee that “[Ambassador] Chris [Stevens] was committed to not only being in Benghazi but to the location,” and that on the night of the attack, “I was notified of the attack shortly after 4:00 p.m. Over the following hours, we were in continuous meetings and conversations both within the department with our team in Tripoli, with the interagency and internationally.”

Stevens was among four Americans killed in the attack.

The emails were obtained by the group Citizens United as part of its ongoing Freedom of Information Act request to the State Department for emails from Chelsea Clinton and Hillary Clinton’s closest aides.

“This email chain provides a rare behind the scenes look at which Benghazi-related issues the Clinton camp had concerns about going into Secretary Clinton’s January 2013 testimony on Capitol Hill, and what they had apparently plotted out beforehand with a Democrat committee member to deal with those concerns,” Citizens United said in a statement. “Citizens United will continue to release all new Benghazi emails we receive through our FOIA lawsuits as they come in — the American people have a right to know the full picture.”

Fox News asked the Clinton campaign as well as Menendez’s office if they coordinated before the 2013 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing; what was meant by the term “wired”; and how the email exchange was consistent with the principle of independent congressional oversight. Both confirmed receipt of Fox’s questions.  The Senator’s office said they would not be commenting.  The Clinton campaign said they would advise Fox if they decided to react to Reines’ email. In 2013, the New Jersey senator – who is now facing federal public corruption charges – at the time of the hearing was about to become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, replacing John Kerry who was in line to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. …

A previous release of emails from a separate FOIA action showed that on the night of the attack, Clinton told her daughter, who used the email pseudonym Diane Reynolds on clintonemail.com, that the attacks were the work of an “Al Queda-like group” – with no mention of an obscure anti-Islam video Clinton publicly linked to the 2012 terrorist attack. Chelsea Clinton uses the same pseudonym in the Menendez email.

Reines is a founding member of the Clinton-aligned consulting group Beacon Global Strategies. The online bios for its founders and managing director suggest no group knows more about the Benghazi terrorist attack and the Obama administration’s response.

One of its senior counselors is former CIA Acting Director Mike Morell, who heavily edited the controversial Benghazi talking points, which helped establish the administration’s initial flawed narrative about the attack. Morell recently endorsed Clinton to the New York Times, but later was criticized for not fully disclosing his relationship to Beacon.

In a follow up Q-and-A with the Times, Morell wrote: “Among the many things I do in my post-government life — teaching and writing, serving on corporate boards, speaking publicly on national security issues — is work with Beacon Global Strategies, a firm that has prioritized nonpartisanship. The firm’s advisory board — composed of appointees of both Republican and Democratic presidents, as well as career military officers — make that priority clear. It all stems from a strong and shared belief that our national security is paramount and needs to be devoid of partisan politics.”

Superb hypocrisy!  

The Clintons and their hoodlums lie so consistently that they are no longer expected to be truthful.

A vote for Hillary is a conscious vote for dishonesty.

But why should it matter? She’s Hillary Clinton. She’s above the law. She’s beyond good and evil. She’s entitled to power and riches. And she needs to be the first woman president of America.

Understood?

The House Select Committee’s report on the lethal attack by Muslim terrorists on the US mission in Benghazi on 9/11/12, now released, is a damning indictment of the Obama administration, exposing its mendacity, incompetence, and callousness.

The whole document is a must read.

Everything in it needs to become common knowledge.

We select a section that seem to us particularly interesting and yet have seen no mention of elsewhere.

The report is titled:

Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi June 29, 2016

Betrayal in Benghazi: A Dereliction of Duty

We quote from pages 52 – 55:

Right around 8:00 p.m. Eastern time [on the night of the attack], Tripoli DCM (now Acting Chief of Mission) Greg Hicks spoke by phone with Secretary Clinton and her aides, telling them in no uncertain terms that it had been a terrorist attack and that the “Innocence of Muslims” YouTube video was a “non-event” in Libya …

A State Department “Call Sheet” stamped with the 11 September 2012 date states clearly as well that “Armed extremists attacked U.S. Mission Benghazi on September 11, setting fire to the Principal Officer’s Residence and killing at least one [of the] American mission staff, Information Management Officer Sean Smith … ”

Further, Secretary Clinton was personally in contact with foreign leaders, including Libyan General National Congress President Mohammed Yousef el-Magariaf and Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Mohamed Qandil. At 6:49 p.m. Eastern time the night of 11 September, Clinton was on the telephone with Magariaf, discussing the attack and frankly discussing with him the Ansar al-Shariah claim of responsibility for it.

Nevertheless, Secretary Clinton spoke with President Obama around 10 p.m. Eastern Time, and shortly thereafter (at 10:08 p.m.) issued a formal State Department statement that blamed the attack on the YouTube video. The statement read, in part: “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet.” This State Department statement was coordinated with the White House. “Per Ben [Rhodes’] email below, this should be the USG comment for the night” …

Then comes a fact that seems to have been overlooked by commentators, but which makes it absolutely clear that the video story was concocted as a deliberate lie to mislead the public:

The cover-up in fact had begun even earlier, kicked off apparently while the battle was still raging in Benghazi, by a White House attempt to “reach out to U-tube to advise ramifications of the posting of the Pastor Jon Video”,  referring to a video by Oregon-based Pastor Jon Courson, entitled “God vs Allah”. 

The administration had already (by 9:11 p.m. Eastern Time, 11 September/ 3:11 a.m. Benghazi Time, 12 September) decided to blame an online video for the attack, but hadn’t quite settled on which video.

Ponder that. They hadn’t “quite settled” what video they would claim was responsible for provoking the attack in Benghazi!

Again, there was no question that Secretary Clinton knew it was an Islamic terror attack: she’d emailed her daughter Chelsea at 9:12 p.m. Eastern Time to tell her that an “Al Qaeda-like group” was responsible.

As the administration response to the Benghazi attack was taking shape, the one question never specifically asked by anyone seems to be about where Hillary Clinton, [Defense Secretary] Leon Panetta, General David Petraeus and President Barack Obama actually were throughout the night of 11-12 September 2012. In 2014, former national security spokesman Tommy Vietor told Fox News’ Bret Baier that President Obama was not in the Situation Room that night, but somewhere else in the White House. But aside from hints that emerge from various timelines and emails pried years after the fact from government databases, we still don’t know for sure where any of them, especially the President, were that night, or what they were doing.

The next morning, on 12 September, President Obama did appear and spoke in the White House Rose Garden about the Benghazi attack, saying “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.” Nevertheless, he refused to call the Benghazi attack forthrightly a terror attack, a pattern that would persist for weeks. 113 That same day, CBS’s Steve Kroft asked the president directly, “Mr. President, this morning you went out of your way to avoid the use of the word “terrorism” in connection with the Libya attack. Do you believe that this was a terrorist attack?” And Obama refused to answer the question directly, saying instead, “Well, it’s too early to know exactly how this came about, what group was involved, but obviously it was an attack on Americans.”

CBS sat on this exchange, refusing to air it even after the infamous moment in the 16 October presidential debate between Obama and Governor Mitt Romney. At that time, moderator Candy Crowley interjected to wrongly say that Obama had called the Benghazi attack an act of terror on 12 September. Then, on the afternoon of 12 September 2012, Clinton spoke by telephone with Egyptian Prime Minister Qandil. According to the official State Department record of that call (obtained by Judicial Watch), Clinton clearly told him, “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack — not a protest.” After PM Qandil replied back to her in a redacted segment, Clinton added, “Your [sic] not kidding. Based on the information we saw today we believe the group that claimed responsibility for this was affiliated with al Qaeda.”

Despite knowing that the attack at Benghazi was a pre-planned Islamic terror attack by a group affiliated with al-Qa’eda, the Obama administration decided to lie about it and tell the American people that the attack was the result of a video. Statements over the following days from Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, and from Clinton herself continued to push the narrative that the attacks were because of the YouTube video. On 14 September, Clinton attended the transfer of remains ceremony for those killed in Benghazi at Andrews Air Force Base. According to handwritten notes that Charles Woods, father of Tyrone Woods, kept, Clinton told him, “We are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son.” …

She said the same to the mother of Sean Smith, whose coffin was also being carried behind her as she spoke.

And on 15 September, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the filmmaker who produced “Innocence of Muslims”, was duly arrested in California, accused of violating his probation, and ultimately sentenced to one year in jail on unrelated charges. This looks to many like a clear case of official U.S. government submission to the Islamic Law on slander.

It was precisely that.

Of course the actual events in Libya were the most atrocious part of the story. They were caused by the foreign policy of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Neither of whom gave a damn for the hell that broke out in Benghazi that night, for the suffering and death of their ambassador, or of the men who died trying to protect him and the US mission.

Obama and Hillary Clinton cared only to save their own political reputations and stay in power. They deserve no power. Their reputations should be mud for all time.

This is an extract from the film The Caliphate:

A world war is being fought, by one side only: Islam.

The other side, the civilized West and its outposts and allies, is letting the invaders into its territory and suffering the enemy’s attacks from within, over and over again.

Why?

The West has far greater military and technological strength than Islam. Yet it is choosing not to fight back. Or, where it now and then does, it chooses not to win.

Why?

There is surely no precedent for such an irrational, suicidal choice in all recorded history.

Sohrab Ahmari reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Islamic State jihadists staged a triple-bombing in the Belgian capital — two at the Brussels airport and a third at a metro station downtown — that killed [more than]  30 people … It was the latest reminder that Islamic terrorism is now a permanent and ubiquitous hazard to life in every city, on every continent.  In coming days European authorities will level reproaches about the missed warning signs, security lapses and the larger failure to integrate Belgian Muslims. Commissions will be formed. Sympathetic memes will proliferate on social media. Je suis Belge.   This routine has become numbingly familiar. And these habitual responses, while understandable, defer a reckoning with a larger truth: Not a single day now goes by without an Islamist suicide bombing, rocket attack, shooting spree, kidnapping or stabbing somewhere in the world.   Consider the past 10 days [up to March 22, 2016, when the bombings in Belgium were carried out].   On Sunday, March 13, jihadists sprayed gunfire on sunbathers in Grand Bassam, a resort town in the Ivory Coast popular with Westerners and wealthy Ivorians. The attack, which was claimed by al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, killed 16 people, including Burkinabe, Cameroonian, French, German, Ivorian and Malian citizens.   On Monday, March 14, two Palestinians fired on Israelis waiting at a bus stop in Kiryat Arba, in the West Bank, wounding one soldier before Israeli forces killed both. A third Palestinian terrorist rammed his car into an Israeli army vehicle in the area and was shot dead. Israel has suffered a wave of Arab knife-and-car attacks for six months, known as the stabbing intifada.   On Tuesday, March 15, al Qaeda’s Somali franchise, al-Shabaab, kidnapped three Red Crescent aid workers in the country’s southwest, according to local media. The abductions followed al-Shabaab’s seizure of a village in central Somalia, amid a broader Islamist resurgence in the Horn of Africa. The aid workers were freed a day later after local villagers pleaded for their release.   On Wednesday, March 16, a pair of female suicide bombers blew themselves up at a mosque in Nigeria, killing 24. No group has claimed credit, but the bombing took place in Nigeria’s Borno state, the birthplace of Boko Haram, an Islamic State affiliate that is Africa’s most savage terror outfit.   On Thursday, March 17, the stabbing intifada claimed a fresh victim when a pair of Palestinian terrorists jumped and wounded an Israeli soldier with a knife in Ariel, in the West Bank. Israeli security forces killed both assailants.   On Friday, March 18, suspected al Qaeda fighters fired rockets at the Salah gas facility in Algeria. No one was injured, but BP and Norwegian oil giant Statoil, which operate the facility, withdrew some staff and suspended operations.   On Saturday, March 19, a bomb went off in a tony shopping district of Istanbul, killing three Israelis (two of whom were U.S. citizens) and one Iranian, and wounding 39 others. This was the fifth mass-casualty terrorist bombing in Turkey in as many months, most of them claimed by or attributed to Islamic State. The same day, a mortar assault on a checkpoint in El-Arish, Egypt, killed 15 policemen. A Sinai-based Islamic State affiliate claimed responsibility.   On Sunday, March 20, al-Shabaab overran a Somali military base just 28 miles from the capital, Mogadishu, killing at least one person and seizing several vehicles. Also on Sunday, the Istanbul governorate canceled a hotly anticipated soccer match after receiving “serious intelligence” regarding a planned terror attack.   On Monday, March 21, Islamist fighters likely affiliated with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb targeted a hotel in the capital of Mali, Bamako, that houses a European Union military-assistance mission. EU personnel were unharmed, and one attacker was killed by hotel security.   Brussels was the first major terrorist incident in the West since November’s jihadist killing spree in Paris and December’s in San Bernardino, Calif. You could create a calendar like this one that stretches back for weeks and months, and the above doesn’t even include the civil wars and humanitarian calamities in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan.   The Syrian vortex is especially perilous. It has been drawing the barely stable nations that surround Syria into its spin and spewing out battle-hardened jihadists along with millions of legitimate refugees. The biggest refugee crisis since World War II was bound to pose serious security threats to Europe. Meanwhile, the longer Islamic State and al Qaeda thrive in Syria and Iraq, the stronger their adherents and affiliates elsewhere will become.

(In fact, there have been even more such attacks in that period. See The Religion of Peace for a more comprehensive list. And see their tally of lethal Muslim attacks world-wide since 9/11 in our margin.)

Here’s a picture of the train bombed by Muslim holy warriors in Brussels yesterday (the dead bodies cut off by the publishers, not by us).

And here’s the scene after one of the Muslim holy warriors’ bombs exploded at Belgium’s international airport.