Congressional Report Warns U.S. Underestimating Iran's Nuclear Progress

WASHINGTON -- Congressional investigators say some foreign intelligence analysts believe U.S. intelligence is underestimating Iran's progress toward designing a nuclear warhead before Tehran halted its program in 2003. ....

Are You an Obama Winner? Or an Obama Loser?

(Compiler's note: This is a must read article.)

by Newt Gingrich

If there was one feeling that inspired almost a million Americans to come out for the Tax Day Tea Parties last month it was this: That our government, supposedly created of the people, by the people and for the people, is busy picking winners and losers.

The feeling that our politics are increasingly rigged against us didn’t begin with President Obama. Deciding to bailout Wall Street rather than let deserving companies go bankrupt began under President Bush.

But the Obama Administration has elevated rewarding some Americans and punishing others to a governing philosophy.

And as he has expanded the size and the scope of government, President Obama has only increased his ability to reach into our businesses, our communities, and even our homes to separate Americans into two groups: Those who will benefit from the new order, and those who will pay the bills.

What follows is just a partial list of the winners and losers of the Obama Administration so far, organized by the government policies that will decide their fate:

The Chrysler Bankruptcy Pt. 1: From the Rule of Law to the Rule of Politics

Winners: The United Auto Workers

Loser: The Rule of Law

Bankruptcy was once a legal process in which an insolvent company, an impartial judge and creditors voting in good faith worked together to make the best of a bad situation.

Under the Obama Administration, the Chrysler bankruptcy has become a political process in which government has bought off some creditors, demonized others, and predetermined a favorable result for an important political constituency.

What happened last week with Chrysler was an unprecedented case of executive branch involvement in a bankruptcy proceeding. The Obama Administration bullied smaller investors to fall in line with TARP-funded creditors in a deal that ultimately benefited the union bosses who bear so much of the responsibility for Chrysler’s downfall to begin with. In the end, the losers weren’t just the secured creditors and the taxpayers who have footed the bill for all these bailouts, but the rule of law itself.

The Chrysler Bankruptcy Pt. 2: America, Get Ready for the “Model O”

Winners: The People Who Are Evading Responsibility for Chrysler’s Bankruptcy

Losers: Consumers Who Want to Buy Good American Cars

The end result of the rigged Chrysler bankruptcy is that two political entities whose priority is winning votes (the Federal Government and the UAW) now have majority ownership of a commercial entity whose priority should be making good cars.

And despite his protestations that he wants to get out of the auto business, President Obama has some definite ideas about what kind of cars Chrysler should make. Announcing the bankruptcy, he blamed Chrysler’s troubles, not on its uncompetitive labor costs, but on its “failure to make the fuel-efficient cars like its foreign competitors.”

Politicians, not businessmen and women, are calling the shots at Chrysler. America, get ready for the Model O.

Cap and Trade: Punishing Americans With High Energy Taxes

Winners: Government Favored “Green Industries”

Losers: Anyone Who Heats a Home, Drives a Car or Has a Job

I’m in favor of doing all we can to protect our environment, but I have a fundamental difference with Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the White House: I believe in incentivizing Americans to produce the innovations that will protect our environment, not punishing Americans with taxes, regulation and litigation.

The Administration’s cap and trade legislation makes losers of the American people by imposing a $1 trillion-$2 trillion energy tax on an already struggling economy. And the winners? They’re the lobbyists for favored special interests and “green” industries who are already lining up in Washington to collect the spoils.

Closing Gitmo: Terrorists from Guantanamo Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You

Winners: Terrorists and Anti-Americanism Worldwide

Losers: The New Neighbors of Terrorists and The American Tax-Payers

You may have missed it in all the news of the week, but the Administration has a truly mind-boggling idea about how to solve the problem of the terrorists left homeless by closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay: Send them to a neighborhood near you.

That’s right. As many as 30 detainees at Guantanamo are slated for release into the United States, including a group of Chinese, al Qaeda-trained jihadists who are reportedly being encouraged to settle in Northern Virginia.

And not only is the Obama Administration releasing these terrorists into the United States, it’s proposing that the U.S. taxpayers foot the bill.

Here’s how Dennis Blair, President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, rationalizes their plan for welfare for terrorists: "If we are to release them in the United States, we need some sort of assistance for them to start a new life," Blair said last month. "You can't just put them on the street."

Picking a New Supreme Court Justice: Playing Favorites Through the Courts

Winners: Anyone the President Deems Deserving of Judicial “Empathy”

Losers: Everyone Else

President Obama has announced that his criteria for picking a Supreme Court Justice to replace the retiring David Souter are jurists with the proper “empathy” and those who don’t regard justice as “abstract legal theory.”

Empathy for the less fortunate should have a central place in our public policy. But feeling the people’s pain is the job of the people who make the laws. The job of judges is to interpret the laws without regard to the race, color, creed or station of the individuals involved.

When we start picking judges based on their “empathy” for certain groups, the rights of favored groups inevitably collide with the rights of others. That’s why we have – or should have – equal justice before the law.

Demonizing Wall Street: Putting Talent and Resources Where Washington Wants Them

Winners: Professional “Community Organizers” and Other Government Activists

Losers: Young Americans Who Want to Chose Their Own Careers

President Obama frequently urges young Americans to emulate him by making the choice to forgo a lucrative career in finance or law and choose public service instead. But now he’s put the full power of the federal government behind his favored career path for young Americans.

Speaking last week to the New York Times, President Obama said that his anti-business, high-taxing, and high-regulating crusade against Wall Street “means that more talent, more resources will be going to other sectors of the economy. I actually think that’s healthy."

The message will not be lost on young Americans: Do what the President thinks is “healthy.” Be an Obama winner, not a loser.

What is at Stake Isn’t Just Tax Dollars and Jobs But Freedom

The list could go on and on.

What is at stake isn’t just the tax dollars, the jobs and the opportunities of those Americans who come out on the losing side of the Obama Administration’s policies -- as important as these things are.

What is at stake are moral issues of fairness and freedom. As Arthur Brooks, the President of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote last week, it’s immoral for the government to “confiscate more income from the minority simply because the government can. It's also a moral issue to lower the rewards for entrepreneurial success, and to spend what we don't have without regard for our children's future.”

Americans don’t mind working hard and competing to win. We don’t even mind losing sometimes.

What we mind is government making the call. That was the real message of the Tea Party movement, and it’s one President Obama and his aides would do well to hear.

Fiddling While Rome Burns

by Michael Sall

How long will we sit by while the education of literally millions of children is trashed in the wake of the teachers unions? In schools where, if children are taught at all, they are taught politically correct garbage - a fantasy of some radical liberal having nothing to do with the real world – leaving American kids with third world education levels, preparing them for nothing productive?

How long will we sit by while our State Department engages in imaginary fixes for the threats that face America and her allies? While Obama says the actions of North Korea have consequences, North Korea continues with impunity to arm itself and other rogue nations. While Rahm Emanuel says disarming Iran can be accomplished only if Israel moves forward with the "peace" process, the Palestinians continue to plot to drive the Jews into the sea, and Iran rockets forward with their nuclear program, threatening the entire world, and hiding behind propaganda that ridiculously claims Palestinian grievances as their motive.

How long will we sit by while Obama destroys the rule of law, the latest example being the threats to the senior debt holders in Chrysler who refused to allow the administration to force them to take less money than their contracts call for? Before that, this administration tried to pass a law that would allow judges to abrogate mortgage obligations. It is as if the administration is saying, "We don't care what your contract says, we don't care what the law says, we will do what we want (for the 'greater good' of course)." Activist judges unconstitutionally continue to write law with tortured logic, while Obama applauds. They even have the temerity with convoluted logic to try to undo many purely democratic and Constitutionally-passed ballot initiatives.

How long will we allow the liberals to undermine our security, our lives and our limbs? On the home front they restrict guns, thereby creating the perverse situation where criminals are armed and law abiding citizens are not. They expose secret and successful programs that have made us safer from terror, yet the traitors go unpunished. They treat terrorists sworn to our destruction as if they were shoplifters, inventing "rights" and privileges for them that never existed and don't exist now.

How long will we allow fictions like global warming to go unchallenged? The supposed universal agreement on its very existence is a myth promoted by a group of political extremists, the media, and a few scientists, many of whom were bought and paid for through grants and tenure. This theory is as much proven science as its predecessors - nuclear winter, the population bomb, and the imminent exhaustion of the world’s commodities - all of which were safely discredited and are now resting on the trash heap of history.

How long will we allow the nonsense of universal health care to be taken seriously, even as we move closer and closer to that goal? There are 46 million uninsured. 10 million are illegal aliens. 10 million can afford it but choose not to buy, and 10 million already qualify for government-paid programs but are too dysfunctional to enroll. The health care quality in America is so far superior to what it is anywhere in the world or what it would become that any thinking person should dismiss the idea as an idiot’s rant. Those who doubts this can just look around the world where government health care has been mandated (to a country it is a disaster), rather than listen to the continuing stream of lies from the left.

How long will we sit by and allow the government to take over the economy? In varying degrees the government currently controls Citi Bank, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, GM, Chrysler, AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Obama proposes nationalizing health care (one sixth of the economy), and imposing a cap and trade energy tax that will effectively give the bureaucrats control over the energy sector. This has been tried before and failed. See the old Soviet Union, Cuba and North Korea for details.

When are we going to stop the growth of federal regulations governing everything we do, and thereby snatching the very freedoms guaranteed to us under the Constitution? Don't people understand that laws, by definition, are direct restraints on our freedom and, although we need laws to take us out of "a state of nature" as Hobbs said, extending legal controls as broadly as we are doing today will surely result in a Soviet-style society.

When are we going to give God the same status in the public square that we give the other religion, atheism? Those unfortunate enough not to know God should be given a voice, but those of us who embrace Him are entitled to speak out as well.

Our friends at the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan and others remind us that we must accept some of this garbage on the theory that 51 votes in a Senate comprised of 20 John McCains and Olympia Snows is better than 30 votes made up of all Jim DeMints and John Kyls. I disagree. If we run only genuinely conservative candidates, we will get our chance to govern, and then we have at least a chance of doing it right. Bush senior and junior slowed the pace of the race towards socialism, but allowed it to continue. Reagan was the only President since Eisenhower to even attempt to stop the growth of government. The 30/20 mix of Republicans will only delay our decline, not arrest it.

For those who doubt that an all-conservative coalition will get a chance to govern, I would suggest that governments are almost always voted out, not voted in. During the Depression every ruling party in every democracy, liberal and conservative alike, was voted out. Obama didn't win nearly so much as Republicans lost. I predict that this fantastic surge towards Socialism, this vast overreaching, will usher in a new government in a very few years. The question is: will it be the party of Reagan, or of Obama lite?

History demonstrates to us that, when either party moves more to the right, they win.

U.S. Importing Somali 'Pirate-Jihadists'

By: David A. Patten

The Obama administration is preparing to reinstate a fraud-riddled immigration program that has brought over 36,000 Somalis into the United States under questionable circumstances, including two dozen Minneapolis men that the FBI fears may be planning a terrorist attack.

The FBI has launched an “aggressive” manhunt for the men, who have “gone to ground” and have mysteriously disappeared, terrorism experts tell Newsmax. Authorities fear the men may have been recruited by extremists to carry out suicide attacks inside the United States, or abroad.

Critics of the State Department programs that brought the Somalis to America express grave concerns about the practice of admitting refugees from failed nation-states known to harbor extremists. It can be difficult or impossible to verify a person’s identity in such a country, let alone obtain knowledge of their past associations, several experts tell Newsmax.

One Somali refugee who vanished in early November, Shirwa Ahmed, re-emerged in northern Somalia in February behind the wheel of a truck packed with explosives.

Ahmed, whose family immigrated to the Minneapolis area in the mid-1990s, drove his truck into a crowd and triggered a massive explosion that left some 30 persons dead. Ahmed’s case marked the first known suicide bombing conducted by an American citizen, according to FBI director Robert S. Mueller III.

“It appears that this individual was radicalized in his hometown in Minnesota,” Mueller told the Council on Foreign Relations, warning that in the past two years, about two dozen Somali men have disappeared from their residences near Minneapolis.

Authorities say the men may have been recruited by al-Shabab, a terrorist group believed to have ties to al-Qaida. There has been speculation the men were radicalized at mosques in the area.

Ahmed’s recruitment and training, and the subsequent suicide attack, is especially worrisome for the FBI because of the other missing Somali-Americans. “It raised the question of whether these young men will one day come home, and, if so, what might they undertake here,” Mueller said.

Fox 9, a Minneapolis television station, reported that eight local refugees left the Twin Cities area on August 1, and 10 more departed on Nov. 4. The men’s families later found flight itineraries for travel from Dubai to Nairobi and on to Kenya. From there, it is believed they most likely entered Somalia by boat.

Counterterrorism experts worry that operatives who are already familiar with U.S. society and culture would be much more difficult to stop, if they were employed to attack the U.S. homeland.

Terrorism analyst Daveed Gartenstien-Ross recently told CBN: “There’s a concern that … they’re going to training camps and receiving the kind of training they would need to carry out some kind of mischief in the United States.”

Critics of the program that grants immigrants their refugee status, even when their past activities and associations cannot be thoroughly documented, point out that since 1991 Somalia has exhibited the same type of failed-nation status associated with the rise of Islamic extremism in Afghanistan. That nation provided al-Qaida with a safe haven prior to 9/11.

They cite the spate of piracy off the Horn of Africa, including the dramatic rescue of Captain Richard Phillips -- who was freed after U.S. Navy SEAL sharpshooters shot and killed three Somali pirates -- as evidence that Somalia is a dangerous hotbed of extremism.

Experts disagree over the level of cooperation between the pirates and Somalia’s radical Islamic warlords. A recent Der Spiegel report warned: “The pirates are increasingly working hand-in-hand with Islamists, who are allies of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida. It’s a terrifying alliance: the Pirates supply money and arms, while the Islamists have troops and the power on land.”

Jane’s Intelligence Review reports the pirate-Islamist alliance is “fragile.” In some cases, the pirates pay a percentage of their ransom money to al-Shabab units, in return for protection against land-based attacks on their bases.

Jane’s Intelligence also states that pirates have paid for military-style training at the hands of al-Shabab, conducted in terrorist boot camps.

Conservative foreign-policy expert Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the D.C.-based Center for Security Policy, is among those who perceives a definite link between Somali’s pirates and its violent Islamic extremists.

“Shariah-adherent Somali pirates are a threat to the world's shipping,” Gaffney tells Newsmax. “Their refugee counterparts being dumped into American communities are a threat to our country and its people. It adds insult to potentially enormous injury that, as the State Department has acknowledged, 80 percent of those refugees are here on the basis of fraudulent family-reunification grounds.”

Gaffney says the State Department “imports pirate/jihadist types into this country.”

One major concern: The pirates’ statements following the freeing of Phillips appeared to be couched in jihadist terms. They identified America as their “No. 1 enemy,” and one pirate leader told The Associated Press: “In the future, America will be the one mourning and crying.”

Don Barnett, a fellow with the Center for Immigration Services, tells Newsmax that it is clear some young refugees of Somali extraction have been recruited by extremists, and could now be working with al-Qaida or al-Shabab.

“I think that really should cause us to look at taking any refugees from Somalia with a much more fine magnifying glass,” Barnett says.

There are about 150,000 Somalis now living in the United States, and law-enforcement officials consider the vast majority of them to be peaceful and law-abiding.

Once resettled, the refugees are free to relocate and live anywhere they like.

A State Department official who asked not to be identified says refugees receive U.S. papers that identify them and their status. They are eligible to apply for a green card after residing in the United States for one year. Five years after receiving green cards, the source says, refugees are eligible to apply for American citizenship.

There are three State Department programs that vet and process refugees for admittance:

The Priority One (P-1) program provides a means for individuals from Somalia and other nations to immigrate to the United States based on referrals from the United Nations, from a U.S. embassy, or from a non-governmental organization (NGO). The Priority Two (P-2) program gives refugee status to all members of a specific, persecuted group. In 1999, for example, the State Department granted blanket refugee status to some 12,000 persecuted Somali-Bantus who had been driven from their native country to Kenya. The Priority Three (P-3) program awards refugee status specifically for the purpose of family reunification with other refugees already legally residing in the United States. When a family or individual qualifies for the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, a Department of Homeland Security agency, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS), conducts an interview with the “refugee applicant” to verify their eligibility and establish they are “otherwise admissible to the United States,” according to a State Department fact sheet about the program. One of the purposes of USCIA is to ensure “that no one is admitted who is a threat to public safety,” according to its Web site. The P-3 program was suspended in October, after reports of fraud led the State Department and DHS to conduct DNA testing on 3,000 applicants. Those tests revealed that as many as 80 percent of the family-reunification claims were false and did not involve relatives. Officials suspended the program until new procedures -- such as DNA testing -- could be developed to verify claims of a family relationship. The P-1 and P-2 programs continue to be in effect. Barnett tells Newsmax that the State Department is prepared to resume the troubled P-3 program in June. He also criticizes the P-1 program, due to U.N. refugee programs he describes as “one big long running fraud.” He adds: “The U.N. referral program itself has been subject to bribery and fraud.” The State Department spokesman tells Newsmax it is unclear if the P-3 program will be reinstated by June, adding, “We do anticipate that the program will restart. A little later this year, we will have this program reinstated.” Most critics of the program recognize that some resettlement in the United States is inevitable and probably beneficial. The problem, they say, comes when large numbers of immigrants arrive from chaotic nations known to harbor extremists. It is very difficult or impossible to review the backgrounds of people living in such countries, they say, because documentation and even birth certificates may be nonexistent. Advocates for refugees, on the other hand, point out that those are the very situations where resettlement may be most urgent. Fred Burton, vice president of counterterrorism and corporate security for Stratfor, a global intelligence firm based in Austin, Texas, tells Newsmax: “Across the spectrum, when you attempt to vet the identify of that person, you have nothing to cross reference it to.” Burton participated in the arrest of 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind Ramzi Yousef, and says the lack of intelligence about Somali extremists is quite serious. “Whenever you have a suspected intelligence operative, whether it be from an espionage side or the terrorism side -- and it’s more foreboding from the terrorism side -- you really get a sense of dread, not knowing what he is up to,” he says. Burton says the FBI is sparing no effort to locate the men who have gone missing in Minneapolis, but adds that it may be difficult. “Knowing how the process works from a domestic terrorism perspective, there is no doubt the FBI is looking for the individuals involved, and probably very, very aggressively,” Burton tells Newsmax. “But then you go back to what has always been the Achilles’ heel in the counterterrorism business, your lack of human intelligence to tell you where that person is, because you lack the human sources to identify him.” Burton states “I would certainly say the program appears to be a failure at this juncture.” He says verifying identity is essential before admitting any refugee into the United States, and adds: “Having participated in several of those State Department meetings for many years, I would say, ‘Well, I’m sure we followed whatever process is in place, but what guarantees do we have that this process is not broken?’”

House GOP Introduces Keep Terrorists Out of America Act

Legislation Aims to Stop World’s Most Dangerous Terrorists Held at Guantanamo Bay Prison from Being Imported into the United States

House Republicans today introduced the Keep Terrorists Out of America Act, legislation aimed at stopping the transfer or release of terrorists held at the Guantanamo Bay prison into the United States.....