Clarion Project‘s Ryan Mauro examines some of the key challenges a president Donald Trump will likely face in office.
Iranian demonstrators hold anti-US slogans and portraits of supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during a rally in Tehran’s Azadi Square (Freedom Square) to mark the 34th anniversary of the Islamic revolution on February 10, 2013. Hundreds of thousands of people marched in Tehran and other cities chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” as Iran celebrated the anniversary of the ousting of the US-backed shah. AFP PHOTO / BEHROUZ MEHRI
A member of jihadist group Al-Nusra Front stands in a street of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on January 11, 2014. Fighting pitting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) against other rebel groups — including Al-Nusra Front, which is also linked to Al-Qaeda but is seen as more moderate — broke out in Syria last week. AFP PHOTO / BARAA AL-HALABI
Professor Ryan Mauro is the National Security Analyst for the Clarion Project, a nonprofit organization that educates the public about the threat of Islamic extremism and provides a platform for voices of moderation and tolerance within the Muslim community. Clarion Project films have been seen by over 50 million people.Read the rest of this entry »
The disclosure came as the FBI released its second batch of documents on Clinton’s email investigation.
President Barack Obama used a pseudonym in email communications with Hillary Clinton and others, according to FBI records made public Friday.
The disclosure came as the FBI released its second batch of documents from its investigation into Clinton’s private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.
The 189 pages the bureau released includes interviews with some of Clinton’s closest aides, such as Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills; senior State Department officials; and even Marcel Lazar, better known as the Romanian hacker “Guccifer.”
In an April 5, 2016 interview with the FBI, Abedin was shown an email exchange between Clinton and Obama, but the longtime Clinton aide did not recognize the name of the sender.
“Once informed that the sender’s name is believed to be pseudonym used by the president, Abedin exclaimed: ‘How is this not classified?'” the report says. “Abedin then expressed her amazement at the president’s use of a pseudonym and asked if she could have a copy of the email.”
The State Department has refused to make public that and other emails Clinton exchanged with Obama. Lawyers have cited the “presidential communications privilege,” a variation of executive privilege, in order to withhold the messages under the Freedom of Information Act.
The report doesn’t provide more details on the contents of that particular email exchange, but says it took place on June 28, 2012, and had the subject line: “Re: Congratulations.” It may refer to the Supreme Court’s ruling that day upholding a key portion of the Obamacare law.
A report on the FBI’s June 7, 2016 interview with “Guccifer” confirms FBI Director James Comey‘s claim that Lazar falsely asserted that he’d surreptitiously accessed Clinton’s server.
“Lazar began by stating that he had never claimed to hack the Clinton server. [An FBI agent] then advised that Fix News had recently published an article which reported that Lazar had claimed to have to Clinton server. Read the rest of this entry »
…Picture Comey’s office when the complete 68 pages of the FBI investigation comes to his desk. It’s a mess for her:
Despite many public denials, 110 of her e-mails contained classified information. This, by itself, is a crime.
She and/or her team destroyed e-mails that were under congressional subpoena.
Her team used BleachBit to erase e-mails that were required to be preserved under public-records laws.
She had not turned over work-related e-mails as she claimed; several thousand work-related e-mails were not given to the State Department, as required by law.
Despite her continued insistence that her system was secure, an unknown individual using the encrypted privacy tool Tor to hide their tracks accessed an e-mail account on a Clinton family server.
The evidence pointed to a deliberate, ongoing effort to keep all of her communications off of the secure State Department system, which would be subject to subpoenas and Freedom of Information Act requests. She used several different e-mail servers on her private system, as well as 13 mobile devices and five iPads.
At no time did she get permission, as required, to do official work on her mobile devices. Clinton frequently lost her phones — which included her e-mails with classified information — and she and her staff could not account for them. An assistant to former president Bill Clinton lost a laptop holding Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. Again, as secretary of state, she swore an oath to protect that information. As Comey declared in his statement, “even if information is not marked ‘classified’ in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.”
Either she or her staff lied to the FBI; Clinton said she never had a computer in her Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility (basically, a room that is nearly impossible to bug or eavesdrop). Huma Abedin said she did.
During the interview with the FBI, Clinton said she “couldn’t recall” more than three dozen times. One portion of the report suggests Clinton could not remember whether or not she received security briefings. But she had previously signed official documents declaring she had been properly briefed.
Comey looked at that report and saw plenty of potential reasons to recommend impaneling a grand jury. But had the FBI recommended seeking an indictment of Hillary Clinton, it undoubtedly would have created a political earthquake.
The entire Democratic Party would have exploded in rage at the bureau. Comey would have instantly been painted as worse than Ken Starr, worse than Inspector Javert, worse than Torquemada. Clinton defenders would charge that the FBI was torpedoing her presidential campaign, and they might just be right: At the time of Comey’s decision, the Democratic convention was just three weeks away. Read the rest of this entry »
…Clinton could not even recall when she got her security clearance. She told FBI agents she wasn’t sure if she carried it over from the U.S. Senate or if she got it from State. But perhaps even worse, Clinton told FBI agents she couldn’t even remember any briefing or training by State “related to the retention of federal records or handling of classified information.”
That admission could raise the question if Clinton was ever trained at all in handling secret information.
Below is the list of things Clinton could not recall in the FBI interview:
When she received security clearance
Being briefed on how to handle classified material
How many times she used her authority to designate items classified
Any briefing on how to handle very top-secret “Special Access Program” material
How to select a target for a drone strike
How the data from her mobile devices was destroyed when she switched devices
The number of times her staff was given a secure phone
Why she didn’t get a secure Blackberry
Receiving any emails she thought should not be on the private system
Did not remember giving staff direction to create private email account
Getting guidance from state on email policy
Who had access to her Blackberry account
The process for deleting her emails
Ever getting a message that her storage was almost full
Anyone besides Huma Abedin being offered an account on the private server
Being sent information on state government private emails being hacked
Receiving cable on State Dept personnel securing personal email accounts
Receiving cable on Bryan Pagliano upgrading her server
Using an iPad mini
An Oct. 13, 2012, email on Egypt with Clinton pal Sidney Blumenthal
Jacob Sullivan using personal email
State Department protocol for confirming classified information in media reports
Every briefing she received after suffering concussions
Being notified of a FOIA request on Dec. 11, 2012
Being read out of her clearance
Any further access to her private email account from her State Department tenure after switching to her HRCoffice.com account
Martha Stewart wishes she’d thought of saying “I don’t recall” to FBI agents.
A video produced by CounterJihad critical of the Muslim Brotherhood, jihad and sharia law was removed from YouTube Tuesday due to the company’s “hate speech” regulations.
The video — titled “Killing for a Cause: Sharia Law & Civilization Jihad” — was uploaded to YouTube last Thursday.
“Terrorism seems to be everywhere, and it’s getting worse. The bad guys have lots of names—ISIS, al Qaeda, Boko Haram—but they have one thing in common. They are all killing for a cause: Islamic Law known as Sharia.”
“I am stunned that the policy that YouTube developed for the express purpose of fighting Islamic State propaganda is now being used to silence critics of radical jihad,” Jim Hanson, executive vice president of the Center for Security Policysaid Wednesday.
Hanson added, “Instead of counteracting radical propaganda online, these policies are now being used to silence the very speech that YouTube said it wanted — speech that challenges ISIS.”
“Sharia is a return to medieval Islam.”
YouTube’s hate speech policy states that “hate speech refers to content that promotes violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on certain attributes.” These attributes include religion. Read the rest of this entry »
On Monday, Murray’s housing committee released its recommendations for ways the city can increase housing in the city. Most ideas were what you’d expect, including increasing the city’s housing levy and implementing new rules and regulations to foster development of market-rate and lower-income housing.
One suggestion would help followers of Sharia law buy houses. That’s virtually impossible now because Sharia law prohibits payment of interest on loans. The 28-member committee recommended the city convene lenders and community leaders to explore options for increasing access to Sharia-compliant loan products.
“They could easily qualify for home loans but opt not to apply ‘simply because they don’t want to pay interest.’”
More and more lenders are offering Sharia-compliant financing, according to a USA Today report. The sector has grown to more than $1.6 trillion in assets worldwide over the past three decades, and analysts see potential for continued growth as the number of Muslims in the United States and Europe grows.
“Their religious beliefs also call for killing those who leave Islam, killing gays…having four wives, marrying children, and waging jihad…Is Murray going to help Muslims enjoy those aspects of their religion too?”
It’s unclear how many Muslims in Seattle would benefit from Murray’s plan. The Washington state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) estimates more than 30,000 Muslims live in the greater Seattle area, and Chapter Executive Director Arsalan Bukhari on Tuesday said it’s “fairly common” for some not to seek loans.
Based on what he called “rough anecdotal evidence,” Bukhari estimated a couple hundred people aren’t borrowing money for houses due to their religion. He said this includes even high-wage earners, such as the more than 1,000 Muslims who work for Microsoft (Nasdaq: MFST) and more than 500 Amazon.com employees. Read the rest of this entry »
Mary Chastain reports: An explosion has killed Egyptian Prosecutor General Hisham Barakat and injured at least seven more people on Monday morning in Cairo.
Hossam Abdel Ghaffar, a spokesman for the health ministry, said Barakat passed away after surgeries. Ghaffar had previously stated he did not believe the prosecutor had suffered life-threatening injuries.
A Heliopolis resident told Daily News Egypt they heard the explosion early Monday, and stepped onto their balcony to see a damaged motorcycle.
The witness also said there was an exploded vehicle, which according to the testimony, was Barakat’s security vehicle. The witness added that surrounding vehicles were in flames.
The damages on the attack scene included seven other injuries from Barakat’s staff and passengers, in addition to damages to 35 cars and nine houses in the area of the explosion.
No group has yet to take responsibility for the attack. A group called Giza Popular Resistance claimed it first, but someone removed it from their Facebook page and the Twitter account denounced the post. Read the rest of this entry »
The Obama-tied leftist group that helped a gunman commit an act of terrorism against a conservative organization has assembled a starter kit for Islamists to attack American women who refuse to comply with Sharia law, the authoritarian doctrine that inspires Islamists and their jihadism.
It’s the summer special from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an extremist nonprofit that lists conservative organizations that disagree with it on social issues on a catalogue of “hate groups.” A few years ago a gunman received a 25-year prison sentence for carrying out the politically-motivated shooting of the Family Research Council (FRC) headquarters after admitting that he learned about the FRC from the SPLC “hate map.” Prosecutors called it an act of terrorism and recommended a 45-year sentence.
Now the SPLC, which has conducted diversity training for the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ), is targeting female bloggers, activists and television personalities who refuse to comply with Sharia law which is rooted in the Quran. The European Court on Human rights has repeatedly ruled that Sharia is “incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy” yet politically-connected radical Muslim groups—such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR)—keep pushing to implement it in the United States and the movement has gained steam.
Among those resisting this effort publicly are the high-profile women being targeted by the SPLC. Some of them are colleagues or friends of Judicial Watch and now they must fear for their safety simply for practicing their rights under the U.S. Constitution. The new hate list is titled Women Against Islam/The Dirty Dozen and includes illustrations and detailed information on all the women, who are branded “the core of the anti-Muslim radical right.” The new SPLC hate brochure further targets them by claiming that they’re “a dozen of the most hardline anti-Muslim women activists in America.”
Political activist and commentator Pamela Geller is branded the “country’s most flamboyant and visible Muslim-basher” for, among other things “smearing and demonizing Muslims.” Blogger Ann Barnhardt is identified as one of the “most extreme Muslim-bashers in the United States” and radio talk-show host Laura Ingram made the list for saying that hundreds of millions of Muslims were delighted that 12 people were massacred by Islamic terrorists in the Paris headquarters of a satirical magazine. Read the rest of this entry »
Saturday’s decision is latest in a series of mass trials that have led to death penalty verdicts against the leadership and supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood
CAIRO— Tamer El-Ghobashy and Dahlia Kholaif write: The decision is the harshest of multiple sentences given to Mr. Morsi and underscores the breadth of current President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi’s crackdown on his chief political opponents, the Muslim Brotherhood.
The court’s preliminary verdict Saturday is subject to review by the Grand Mufti, Egypt’s highest religious authority, whose opinion isn’t legally binding but is traditionally adopted by the court.
“The death penalty has become the favorite tool for the Egyptian authorities to purge the political opposition.”
— Amnesty International
A final verdict based his opinion will be delivered June 2 but will be open to appeals, which can take years in Egypt’s clogged judicial system.
Mr. Morsi has already been sentenced to 20 years in prison last month in a separate case in which he was found guilty of fomenting violence during a series of protests in 2012 that dogged his year in office.
The former Egyptian president was among 106 members and leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood sentenced to death on Saturday, including the group’s spiritual guide Mohammed Badie and prominent Islamic scholar, Youssef al-Qaradawi, who is based in Qatar.
The decision—broadcast on state television as Mr. Morsi and some of co-defendants smiled defiantly from inside the caged dock used to hold the accused—was received quietly in Egypt. However, authorities said it may have inspired a violent response in the restive Sinai Peninsula where security forces have struggled to contain a low-level Islamist insurgency.
Hours after the verdict was delivered, unknown gunmen attacked a vehicle carrying several judges and aides in the northern Sinai town of al-Arish, killing three judges, a driver, and wounding three others, according to Egypt’s state news agency.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but the state news agency quotes unnamed security officials saying the attack may have been retaliation for the verdict against Mr. Morsi. Read the rest of this entry »
At least three top Hillary Clinton aides used email addresses hosted on the former secretary of state’s private server while she was in office, according to reports from two different news outlets.
A conservative magazinereported Wednesday that Clinton’s State Department chief and deputy chief of staff both had the private addresses.
‘Two of Hillary Clinton’s top aides used personal email while they were employed at the State Department,’ Weekly Standard senior writer Stephen Hayes said in a Fox News Channel interview, naming ‘Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff.’
‘The State Department has evidence of this,’ Hayes claimed.
SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO
Longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin had an email address on the former secretary of state’s private server, judging from records maintained by Lexis-Nexis
Abedin (left), shown with then-Secretary of State Clinton during a 2010 diplomatic meeting in Vietnam, was her deputy chief of staff and is expected to play a key roll if Clinton runs for presiden
The Weekly Standard‘s Stephen Hayes claimed on Fox News that the State Department has evidence Abedin and Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s two top aides, both used private email addresses for government work
Clinton has come under fire for exclusively using her own ‘clintonemail.com’ address while she was America’s top diplomat.
She admitted Tuesday during a news conference at the United Nations that she deleted more than 30,000 emails she decided were personal in nature and unrelated to her job.
Separately from claims by The Weekly Standard, the gossipwebsite Gawker reported this month that Abedin and Phillippe Reines, Clinton’s top communications strategist, had the private addresses. Abedin married into a separate scandal when she wed former congressman Anthony Weiner, whose sexting exploits landed him on front pages and hastened his departure from Congress.
Daily Mail Online was able to confirm Abedin’s email address through Lexis-Nexis, a commercial service that compiles public records.
‘Huma@clintonemail.com’ was one of several of Abedin’s email addresses Nexis collected in conjunction with other public records.
Email addresses typically land in the Nexis database when people list them on credit applications, mortgage paperwork or other legal documents.
Her first public words about ’email-gate’ attracted a crush of reporters at the United Nations
Searches for similar email addresses belonging to Reines and Mills were unsuccessful, as were searches for email addresses belonging to current and former State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, Jen Psaki and Marie Harf, along with current Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill.
Merrill told Gawker this month that Reines ‘has never had’ an email address on the private Clinton server, ‘not for communicating with anyone about anything.’
But Merrill wouldn’t say whether Reines used a separate private account to conduct government business with Clinton. Read the rest of this entry »
Colin Campbell and Hunter Walker write: A key member of Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton’s team sent several angry emails to a group of journalists on Tuesday night.
The messages criticized a source for being a “lying liar” and what the aide described as a reporter’s “cockamamie theory.”
CJ Ciaramella, a reporter for Vice and the Washington Free Beacon, subsequently emailed Philippe Reines, a veteran Clinton communications aide, asking about the Gawker story. In his response, Reines CC’d multiple media critics and Trotter. Among other things, Reines’ email criticized Trotter’s “creepy” reporting methods and accused him of relying on a source who lied about Clinton.
Update (March 5, 2014 11:18 a.m.): An internal email Gawker editor-in-chief Max Read sent to Trotter and his executive editor for investigations, John Cook, was published on the site’s story about this chain. We included it here to ensure our version of the email chain is complete.
Trotter’s piece said an unnamed source who “has worked with Clinton in the past” alleged both Reines and another top Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, used private email addresses on the domain clintonemail.com when they worked under Clinton at the State Department. The accusation came on the heels of a New York Times report published Monday that suggested Clinton’s use of a private clintonemail.com address to conduct official State Department business may have violated federal regulations and prevented the government from preserving her communications.
In his email to Trotter and Ciaramella, Reines vehemently denied he ever used personal email without including his government address.
Reines provided Business Insider with a copy of the exchange on Wednesday. In addition to Trotter and Ciaramella, Reines included Washington Post media reporter Erik Wemple and CNN’s senior media correspondent Brian Stelter. Reines explained his rationale for bringing Wemple and Stelter in the conversation at the beginning of his message.
“Since this fundamentally comes down to honesty, transparency and accountability, I thought we’d go through an exercise together – with Erik Wemple of The Washington Post and Brian Stelter of CNN included as observers,” Reines wrote.
Reines proceeded to offer a point-by-point rebuttal of Trotter’s article. In the story, Trotter wrote that Lexis Nexis records indicated Abedin had a clintonemail.com address. He also noted he wrote to the address listed in Nexis and the message did not bounce back. Reines dismissed this as “creepy” and questioned whether Trotter attempted to use similar techniques to check if he also had a clintonemail.com address.
“Did you attempt to verify your source’s assertion of my use of such an email using the same creepy methods you did with my close friend and colleague Huma Abedin? Assuming you did, why doesn’t your piece note the results of your creepy methods?” Reines wrote, adding, “Did you attempt to send an email to me at that domain, and if so did it go “through without bouncing”? Assuming you did, why don’t you note the results of your test?”
Reines went on to question whether Trotter’s unnamed source had been able to provide email exchanges proving Clinton’s aides used the private addresses.
“If your lying liar pants on fire source worked with me at a federal agency as you and they contend, did you ask them to provide even a single email exchange with my using that account?” Reines asked in the email, which was first reported by The Washington Post.
Trotter’s initial story said the source’s claim that Reines and Abedin used private email addresses might explain “the State Department’s puzzling response to several FOIA requests filed by Gawker in the past two years.” The first of those requests was sent by Gawker in September 2012. Trotter said the request sought correspondence between Reines and a “variety of reporters” in the wake of a memorable, expletive-filled exchange Reines had with the late BuzzFeed reporter Michael Hastings in 2012.
“That request was confoundingly denied on the grounds that the State Department had no record of Reines—whose job it was to communicate with reporters—emailing Hastings or any other journalists (Gawker is currently appealing the rejection),” Trotter wrote.
Trotter also claimed a 2011 FOIA request from Gawker to the State Department asking for copies of Abedin’s correspondence was also denied.
In his email, Reines suggested the idea private email addresses would prevent the State Department from responding to FOIA requests for his communications with the media was a wild “conspiracy.”
“Is your cockamamie theory that the reason there is no record of my emailing with reporters is because I improperly used my personal email address to email with those reporters in an attempt to circumvent FOIA, and that every one of the many reporters you reasonably assume I emailed with are in on this conspiracy of having only emailed with me on my non-official email?” Reines asked. “All sorts of media outlets reached out to me, including FOX and The Daily Caller. Are they in on it? Is everyone in on it aside from Gawker?”
Last March, Business Insider filed our own FOIA request asking the State Department for records of Reines’ communications with several news organizations from the start of 2012 until after Clinton left her position as secretary of state in February 2013. A response sent to Business Insider by the State Department on March 21, 2014 indicated they would “being processing” the request and that they do have records of Reines’ emails with the media.
“Unusual circumstances (including the number and location of Department components involved in responding to your request, the volume of requested records, etc.) may arise that would require additional time to process your request,” the State Department response said.
Ciaramella responded to Reines and began with a greeting for the many reporters CC’d on the exchange.
“Hi Philippe, And hello JK and Erik and Brian and Nick. It’s wonderful that we can all be here, together,” he wrote.
Ciaramella went on to note that, if Reines’ claim he “didn’t use private email” is correct, then the State Department was “either lying through its teeth or wildly incompetent” in its response to Gawker’s FOIA request.
Ciaramella concluded by pointing out that BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith tweeted a claimed that Reines used a private Gmail account for his exchange with Hastings. This would seem to be solid evidence Reines was indeed using private email for State Department business.
Reines responded with another email where he looped in Smith.
“Let me welcome Ben to our little party, because, well, he’s flat out wrong,” Reines wrote. “Michael emailed me that morning on my State account, I responded from my State account, I even added a second State person’s State account to that exchange, and it entirely remained on our State accounts without my personal account being referenced or used in any way. … But hey, why let truth or facts get in the way of a good Tweet.”
Smith answered with an apology for the tweet, which he said was incorrect.
“Hey guys: this is my fault. I misremembered. I’m sorry for sewing confusion,” Smith wrote. “I have corresponded with Philippe on his gmail, but this was not that.”
Read the entire email exchange Reines sent to Business Insider below. It was lightly edited for consistent formatting and to remove all personal contact information.
Email 1:
From: CJ Ciaramella
To: Philippe Reines
Date: Tuesday, March 3, 6:47 p.m.
Subject: Comment on private email address at State Dept
Hi Philippe,
This is CJ Ciaramella, a reporter for the Washington Free Beacon and Vice. Wondering if you have any response to this Gawker article alleging that you and Huma Abedin used private email addresses to conduct official government business while at the State Dept: http://gawker.com/source-top-clinton-aides-used-secret-email-accounts-at-1689246408
As I’m sure you well know, not archiving official business conducted on a private email address is a violation of the Federal Records Act. A FOIA request for your State Dept. emails is also currently being appealed. Please email or call: [phone number redacted]
Best,
CJ Ciaramella
:Email 2:
From: Philippe Reines
To: CJ Ciaramella, J.K. Trotter, Erik Wemple, Brian Stelter, Nick Merrill
Date: Tuesay, March 3, 9:57 p.m.
Subject: Email
Hi CJ. And hi JK.
Since this fundamentally comes down to honesty, transparency and accountability, I thought we’d go through an exercise together – with Erik Wemple of The Washington Post and Brian Stelter of CNN included as observers.
JK,
In your piece, which CJ references below, you wrote
“’Her top staffers used those Clinton email addresses’ at the agency, said the source, who has worked with Clinton in the past. The source named two staffers in particular, Philippe Reines and Huma Abedin, who are said to have used private email addresses in the course of their agency duties.”
That’s a pretty clear assertion by you through your source that they had firsthand knowledge of my having and using an email account on the clintonemail.com domain. You then wrote:
“We were able to independantly [SIC] verify that Abedin used a ClintonEmail.com address at some point in time. There are several email addresses associated with Abedin’s name in records maintained by Lexis-Nexis; one of them is huma@clintonemail.com. An email sent to that address today went through without bouncing.”
A few questions:
1) Did you attempt to verify your source’s assertion of my use of such an email using the same creepy methods you did with my close friend and colleague Huma Abedin? Assuming you did, why doesn’t your piece note the results of your creepy methods?
2) Did you attempt to send an email to me at that domain, and if so did it go “through without bouncing”? Assuming you did, why don’t you note the results of your test?
3) If your lying liar pants on fire source worked with me at a federal agency as you and they contend, did you ask them to provide even a single email exchange with my using that account?
4) Better yet, in the off chance they don’t have every single email they ever sent or received, have you availed yourself of the same FOIA laws to petition the lying liar’s agency for any email between them and me that you have with our email?
I mean, you either naively or knowingly swallowed quite the whopper. Not sure which is worse. Actually, that’s not true.
Now, on the subject of FOIA…
You have to ask State about your requests, appeals, etc.
But while I have you I’m really hoping you can explain something to me. You wrote that “The use of private email addresses may explain the State Department’s puzzling response to several FOIA requests filed by Gawker in the past two years,” continuing, “That request was confoundingly denied on the grounds that the State Department had no record of Reines—whose job it was to communicate with reporters—emailing Hastings or any other journalists.”
So, is your cockamamie theory that the reason there is no record of my emailing with reporters is because I improperly used my personal email address to email with those reporters in an attempt to circumvent FOIA, and that every one of the many reporters you reasonably assume I emailed with are in on this conspiracy of having only emailed with me on my non-official email? All sorts of media outlets reached out to me, including FOX and The Daily Caller. Are they in on it? Is everyone in on it aside from Gawker?
Now, to answer your question: email is a two way street. You’d be surprised how many reporters deliberately email government officials to their personal accounts. You’d be equally surprised to know that when they did, I moved the exchange to my state.gov account because, between you and me, my personal account is about the last place I want to be emailing reporters or conducting work.
Which brings me to my last question(s) – for both JK & CJ:
Have either of you ever deliberately emailed a US Government official anywhere other than their official address to discuss official US Government business? If so, why? Have you ever received an email from a US Government official from anywhere other than their official address to discuss official US Government business? If so did you ask them why?
Brendan Bordelon reports: Shortly after news broke of a deadly January 27 attack by Islamic terrorists on a hotel in Libya’s capital, Al Jazeera English executive Carlos van Meek shot out an email to his employees.
“All: We manage our words carefully around here,” the network’s head of output wrote to staff at the Doha-based news channel’s New York and Washington, D.C. newsrooms. “So I’d like to bring to your attention some key words that have a tendency of tripping us up.”
In an email obtained by National Review Online, van Meek warned the network’s journalists against the use of terms including “terrorist,” “militant,” “Islamist” and “jihad.”
“One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter,” the Al Jazeera executive wrote….(read more)
From: Carlos Van Meek Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2015 10:06 AM To: AJE-Newsdesk; AJE-Output; AJE-DC-Newsroom Subject: Terrorists, Militants, Fighters and then some…
All: We manage our words carefully around here. So I’d like to bring to your attention some key words that have a tendency of tripping us up. This is straight out of our Style Guide. All media outlets have one of those. So do we. If you’d like to amend, change, tweak.. pls write to Dan Hawaleshka direct who is compiling the updates to the Style Guide and they will be considered based on merit. No mass replies to this email, pls.
EXTREMIST – Do not use. Avoid characterizing people. Often their actions do the work for the viewer. Could write ‘violent group’ if we’re reporting on Boko Haram agreeing to negotiate with the government. In other words, reporting on a violent group that’s in the news for a non-violent reason.
TERRORISM/TERRORISTS – One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. We will not use these terms unless attributed to a source/person.
ISLAMIST –Do not use. We will continue to describe groups and individuals, by talking about their previous actions and current aims to give viewers the context they require, rather than use a simplistic label.
NOTE: Naturally many of our guests will use the word Islamist in the course of their answers. It is absolutely fine to include these answers in our output. There is no blanket ban on the word. Read the rest of this entry »
Brendan Bordelon reports: As journalists worldwide reacted with universal revulsion at the massacre of some of their owxn by Islamic jihadists in Paris, Al Jazeera English editor and executive producer Salah-Aldeen Khadr sent out a staff-wide email.
“Please accept this note in the spirit it is intended — to make our coverage the best it can be,” the London-based Khadr wrote Thursday, in the first of a series of internal emails leaked to National Review Online. “We are Al Jazeera!”
“I guess if you insult 1.5 billion people chances are one or two of them will kill you.”
— Mohamed Vall Salem
Below was a list of “suggestions” for how anchors and correspondents at the Qatar-based news outlet should cover Wednesday’s slaughter at the Charlie Hebdo office (the full emails can be found at here at NRO).
“Defending freedom of expression in the face of oppression is one thing; insisting on the right to be obnoxious and offensive just because you can is infantile,” Khadr wrote. “Baiting extremists isn’t bravely defiant when your manner of doing so is more significant in offending millions of moderate people as well.”
— Salah-Aldeen Khadr
Khadr urged his employees to ask if this was “really an attack on ‘free speech,’” discuss whether “I am Charlie” is an “alienating slogan,” caution viewers against “making this a free speech aka ‘European Values’ under attack binary [sic],” and portray the attack as “a clash of extremist fringes.”
“What Charlie Hebdo did was not free speech it was an abuse of free speech in my opinion, go back to the cartoons and have a look at them!” Salem later wrote. “It’ snot [sic] about what the drawing said, it was about how they said it. I condemn those heinous killings, but I’M NOT CHARLIE.”
— Mohamed Vall Salem
“Defending freedom of expression in the face of oppression is one thing; insisting on the right to be obnoxious and offensive just because you can is infantile,” Khadr wrote. “Baiting extremists isn’t bravely defiant when your manner of doing so is more significant in offending millions of moderate people as well. And within a climate where violent response—however illegitimate [sic]—is a real risk, taking a goading stand on a principle virtually no one contests is worse than pointless: it’s pointlessly all about you.”
His denunciation of Charlie Hebdo’s publication of cartoons mocking the prophet Mohammed didn’t sit well with some Al Jazeera English employees.
Hours later, U.S.-based correspondent Tom Ackerman sent an email quoting a paragraph from a New York Times’ January 7 column by Ross Douthat. The op-ed argued that cartoons like the ones that drove the radical Islamists to murder must be published, “because the murderers cannot be allowed for a single moment to think that their strategy can succeed.”
That precipitated an angry backlash from the network’s Qatar-based correspondents, revealing in the process a deep cultural rift at a network once accused of overt anti-Western bias. Read the rest of this entry »
Three journalists working for Al Jazeera were convicted Monday by an Egyptian court to seven years in prison on terrorism-related charges, The Associated Press reported.
The three journalists for the network’s English-language channel — Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, an Egyptian-Canadian who has previously worked for CNN and The New York Times; Peter Greste, an Australian who has previously worked for the BBC; and Baher Mohamed, an Egyptian who has worked for other international news organizations — have been in jail since December. Read the rest of this entry »
“Few of us would have the courage to practise true investigative journalism in places like Mexico, where your head can end up next to your laptop on a road as a message to others.”
— Investigative reporter Nick McKenzie
He says his case has become an emblem for the need for freedom of press worldwide.
In a message read by his parents in Sydney on Friday, Greste said the irony of his sending greetings from Mulhaq Al Masra Prison hardly needed mentioning.
“Yet here we are, the Al Jazeera three, facing our 126th day of detention and a seventh appearance before an Eygptian court on charges of terrorism,” he said.
Greste, a reporter with the Al Jazeera network, and television producers Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed have been detained since December 29 on charges of helping terrorist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood. They will make their seventh request for bail on Saturday.
Greste said many local journalists were also in jail because of what Egyptian authorities described “as their own war on terror”.
His parents Lois and Juris Greste were “panic stricken” when they heard that nearly 700 members of the Muslim Brotherhood had been sentenced to death. Read the rest of this entry »
Medea Benjamin of Code Pink announced on twitter last night that she had been jailed by Egyptian police as she was on her way leading a group of activists to “Hamas-lead” Gaza traveling via Cairo. This morning she tweeted that the Egyptian Police had broken her arm.
(see more of the feed at Breitbart.com) It’s unclear how Benjamin is tweeting with a broken arm, or allowed to tweet at all from her Egyptian jail cell.
Protesting Egyptian students loyal to the Muslim Brotherhood set fire to two buildings at Al-Azhar University‘s Cairo campus following clashes with police on Saturday, state television reported.
At least one student was killed in the fighting, a doctor told the AFP news agency. Reuters also quoted an activist as saying a protester had been killed, although this was denied by a security source.
State TV broadcast footage of black smoke billowing from the university’s faculty of commerce building and said “terrorist students” had set the agriculture faculty building on fire as well.
State-run newspaper Al-Ahram said the fighting began when security forces fired teargas to disperse pro-Brotherhood students who were preventing their classmates from entering university buildings to take exams. Protesters threw rocks at police and set tyres on fire to counter the teargas.
The Brotherhood was officially designated as a terrorist organisation by the state earlier this week after 16 people were killed in a suicide attack on a police station, although the group condemned the attack and it was claimed by a radical faction based in the Sinai Peninsula.
A demonstration on Sunday marked 100 days since the mass killing at Rabaa al-Adawiya, a square in Cairo where security forces fired on protesters while trying to break up an Islamist sit-in.
CAIRO — David D. Kirkpatrick writes: Egypt’s military-backed government has issued a law that all but bans street protests by applying jail time or heavy fines to the public demonstrations that have felled the last two presidents and regularly roiled the capital since the Arab Spring revolt.
The new law, promulgated on Sunday, is the latest evidence of a return to authoritarianism in the aftermath of the military takeover that removed President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood in July. It criminalizes the kind of free assembly and public expression that many Egyptians had embraced as a cherished foundation of their new democracy after the 2011 ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. And the relatively muted outcry against the law, mainly from human rights advocates, demonstrated how far public sentiment has swung.
Rights activists said the new law appeared even stricter than those in place under Mr. Mubarak. It effectively replaces a three-month “state of emergency” declared in August, when the government used deadly force to crush street protests by Islamist opponents of the July 3 takeover, killing more than a thousand. The state of emergency — which suspended protections against police abuse — expired last weekend, but the new protest law now grants the police other added powers that they could use to squelch any attempt to mobilize.
Ishaan Tharoor writes: When it happened, Egypt’s February 2011 revolution seemed an epochal global event. If Cairo was not the birthplace of the Arab Spring, it was its apogee. The people of the Arab world’s most populous, most important nation, long oppressed, had finally found their voice. Braving bullets, tanks and tear gas, they overthrew the entrenched dictatorship of three-decade President Hosni Mubarak. The whole planet watched a jubilant Tahir Square explode with fireworks and celebration, while the international media hailed the advent of democracy and people power in a part of the world where both were conspicuously lacking.
But, as we all know now, Mubarak’s exit marked only a fleeting victory. In the near three years since, Egypt has lurched from crisis to crisis, antagonism to antagonism, each time punctuated by mass protests in Tahrir Square, a traffic roundabout that has come to symbolize both the dreams and the failures of the Revolution. This summer, many of the same revolutionaries who gathered at Tahrir in 2011, calling for the downfall of Mubarak, returned to cheer in elements of his old regime as the military removed the democratically-elected Islamist government of divisive President Mohamed Morsi. In August, a bloody crackdown on pro-Morsi demonstrators led to hundreds of deaths. The turmoil has effectively brought the revolution back full circle. Some commentators fear the counter-revolution has already won.
(CAIRO) — Egyptian riot have fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of supporters of ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi who cut a main road in Cairo outside a prestigious Muslim institution and hurled stones.
The Sunday clashes were the second in two days at Al-Azhar University, Sunni Islam’s most prominent center of learning. Many supporters of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood group are students at Al-Azhar.
The protests come amid heated debate over a new law that would place new restrictions on demonstrators, imposing heavy fines and possible jail time on violators.
Morsi was overthrown on July 3 after millions took to the streets to demand he step down. Since then, Cairo has seen non-stop demonstrations by his supporters demanding his return. A military-backed crackdown has left hundreds dead and seen thousands arrested.
Tires burn as Egyptian Muslim brotherhood and supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi clash with riot police in Cairo on 6 October. Photograph: Mohammed Abdel Moneim/AFP/Getty Images
The US decision to stop military aid is not enough to stem the escalating violence. Terrorist attacks on civilians could be next
Jonathan Steele writes: The Obama administration’s decision to suspend some military aid to Egypt is a clear case of better late than never. Although an announcement was originally planned for August, its timing now is a warning to Cairo’s military coup-makersthat their repressive treatment of the opposition risks plunging Egypt into uncontrollable violence.
Troops again shot scores of peaceful Muslim Brotherhood protesters last weekend, and the next day unknown assailants struck a series of military and government targets in the most serious counterviolence since the coup. No one has taken responsibility for the attacks but it was predictable that General Abdul Fatah al-Sisi’s refusal to relax the clampdown on the Brotherhood would provoke violence. In what other country in the world today is an elected president held for three months with no access to his family or lawyers? In what other country are demonstrators routinely shot without warning, not with birdshot or rubber bullets but live ammunition?
Protesters throw stones during a clash between supporters and opponents of ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi, at Ramsis square, which leads to Tahrir Square, in Cairo October 6, 2013.
Ashraf Khalil reports: Egypt’s latest spasm of violence over the weekend—which led to at least 57 deaths and 400 injured—confirmed the troubled nation’s new reality: The emergence of two distinct, opposed Egypts that hate each other.
One Egypt is in the ascendant—that of a nationalist, pro-military populace that has nothing but contempt for the country’s Islamists, represented chiefly by the Muslim Brotherhood. The Egypt of the Brotherhood is reeling and embittered: it has seen its democratically-elected President ousted by the military this July and its supporters gunned down in the streets. But it’s showing no sign of backing down. Read the rest of this entry »
Young girls in Chah Bahar, Iran. Iran’s body of clerics and jurists has not yet vetted the new legislation on child marriage. Photograph: Jamshid Bairami/EPA
Human rights activists say approved bill, making girls vulnerable to the ruling from age 13, ‘legalizes paedophilia’
Saeed Kamali Dehghan reports: Parliamentarians in Iran have passed a bill to protect the rights of children which includes a clause that allows a man to marry his adopted daughter and while she is as young as 13 years.
Activists have expressed alarm that the bill, approved by parliament on Sunday, opens the door for the caretaker of a family to marry his or her adopted child if a court rules it is in the interests of the individual child.
Iran’s Guardian Council, a body of clerics and jurists which vets all parliamentary bills before the constitution and the Islamic law, has yet to issue its verdict on the controversial legislation.
To the dismay of rights campaigners, girls in the Islamic republic can marry as young as 13 provided they have the permission of their father. Boys can marry after the age of 15. Read the rest of this entry »
Sept. 22, 2013: Pakistani Christians chant slogans as they burn materials during a protest against a suicide attack on a church in Karachi, Pakistan. A suicide bomb attack on a historic church in northwestern Pakistan killed scores of people Sunday, officials said, in one of the worst assaults on the countrys Christian minority in years. (AP)
Lela Gilbert reports: The sights, sounds and scents of Jerusalem are kaleidoscopic and ever changing. When I first arrived in Israel in 2006, I realized that it would take a lifetime to see and appreciate the endless array of cityscapes, holy sites, museums, gardens, archeological digs and – most wonderful of all – the colorful people that surrounded me.
I suppose that’s why I wasn’t all that impressed at the sight of some ugly, spray-painted graffiti a friend pointed out to me in Bethlehem. “It’s Arabic,” she explained. “And it means, ‘First comes Saturday, then comes Sunday.’”
“And that means…what?”
“It’s a jihadi slogan. It means, more accurately, ‘On Saturday we kill the Jews; on Sunday we kill the Christians.’” Read the rest of this entry »
CAIRO (AP) — A farmer in southern Egypt was arrested Saturday after putting the military chief’s name and an army-style cap on his donkey, and eight people were detained elsewhere in the country for spraying anti-military graffiti.
The arrests point to a long-standing taboo in Egypt against criticizing the country’s powerful military, an offense magnified amid the ongoing crackdown on supporters of the country’s ousted President Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood.
The farmer, Omar Abul-Magd, was arrested late Friday in Qena province for allegedly insulting Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi when he rode the donkey through town, reported the state MENA news agency. Read the rest of this entry »
With the country in turmoil, the Egyptian presence at Venice is small this year. The notable exception being multi-hyphenate Amr Waked, who is on the Lido wearing two hats despite what he claims is the Muslim Brotherhood’s best attempts to keep him home in Cairo.
“They sent a message to the festival organizers here saying that I am a supporter of what they claim is a bloody coup,” alleges Waked, known internationally for thesping turns in “Syriana” and “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.” He is not only on the Horizons jury but also on the Lido as producer of “The Cat,” screening in the Venice Film Market’s Final Cut workshop.
Egypt today is a zero-sum game. We’d have preferred there be a democratic alternative. Unfortunately, there is none. The choice is binary: the country will be ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood or by the military.
Perhaps it didn’t have to be this way. Perhaps the military should have waited three years for the intensely unpopular Mohamed Morsi to be voted out of office. But Gen.Abdel Fatah al-Sissi seems to have calculated that he didn’t have three years, that by then there would be no elections — as in Gaza, where the Palestinian wing of the Brotherhood, Hamas, elected in 2006, established a one-man-one-vote-one-time dictatorship.
What’s the United States to do? Any response demands two considerations: (a) moral, i.e., which outcome offers the better future for Egypt, and (b) strategic, i.e., which outcome offers the better future for U.S. interests and those of the free world.
Anti-Morsi protesters in Tahrir square in July 2013, before the Egyptian army massacres. Photograph: Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters
When a state massacres 600 demonstrators, it is not just its own citizens it murders. It also kills the possibility of compromise. The perpetrators mean you to understand that there can be no going back. When they kill, they are well aware that they are shedding too much blood for normal politics to kick in and allow differences to be patched up and deals made.
The killers have the swagger of gangsters. “We know,” they seem to say, “that we are breaking all the basic standards of civilised behaviour. We know people will hate us until the day we die for what we have done today. But do you know what? We don’t care.”
Egyptian security forces in riot gear swept in with armored vehicles and bulldozers to clear two protest camps in Cairo Wednesday, igniting clashes with pro-Morsi supporters as violence flared across Egypt, leaving more than 50 people dead and hundreds injured.
Egypt’s Health Ministry said 56 people were killed and 526 were injured in clashes in Cairo, Alexandria, and several other Nile Delta provinces.
At least five policemen were confirmed to have died in Cairo’s morning crackdown, while the Health Ministry said at least 10 protesters were killed and nearly 100 injured in the two camps. Three more people were killed in clashes in Minya province south of Cairo.
Leading Middle Eastern cultural figures and academics have warned that the arts of the Arab spring are under threat because of increasing violence, censorship and lack of political vision.
The popular perception that the region is experiencing unprecedented freedom of expression is “simplistic and misleading”, with many artists “wary of the increasingly violent nature of the Arab spring”, according to a study for the British Council by the postwar reconstruction and development unit at York University. The report, Out in the Open: Artistic Practices and Social Change in Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia, found that the system of strict government censorship that has existed for decades is “largely still in place”.
While artists have become emboldened by the 2011 uprisings, many were struggling to deal with the new political landscape amid worrying signs of a wave of political and religious censorship, said lead researcher Professor Sultan Barakat.
In Egypt, which held the second round of its constitutional referendum yesterday, and Tunisia, the predominant fear was the rise of political Islam, ranging from new moderate Islamist governments, whose policies are unclear, to ultra-conservative Salafis, who have attacked cinemas and artists.
“I think we are at a brink point. The Muslim majority [in Egypt] could just react and suppress artistic expression even more than Hosni Mubarak,” Barakat said. The Egyptian playwright Ahmed el-Attar said: “I’m afraid the country is sliding towards fascism. So far culture has been kept on the side. The Muslim Brotherhood don’t yet have a cultural agenda. They’re talking about focusing on historical Islamic figures. I’m not sure that applies to the Salafis, who question the notion of art itself.”
Karim el-Shennawy, a film-maker who protested in Tahrir Square, said: “A lot of things have been stopped and censored. This can get worse. There’s a lot of voices attacking directors and actors, accusing them of filling the mind of the new generation with inappropriate issues and images. One actress was accused of doing prostitution on screen.”
The report said some established cultural figures have become marginalised because they were regarded as too close to the fallen dictatorships, such as the Egyptian comedy actor who was criticised for being slow to criticise Mubarak and after the fall of the regime faced a charge of insulting Islam in his films…
In Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which is generously reviewed by VDH in the current edition of NR, I argue that Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood will follow (and is following) the trail blazed by Turkey’s Islamist prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Brotherhood-influenced party, the AKP. This path is called the “Turkish Model” by enthusiasts of “Islamic democracy.” As I demonstrate in the book, the Turkish Model is actually a formula for turning a society that is pro-Western and reasonably democratic into a sharia state — the implementation of sharia, Islam’s societal framework, being the goal of all Islamic supremacists. As Erdogan put it, “Democracy is just the train we board to reach our destination” — not a way of life, but a route to Islamization.
For various reasons, I contend in the book that Egypt will descend into sharia totalitarianism much more quickly than the decade it has taken Erdogan to accomplish the still ongoing process in Turkey. That theory is borne out more with each passing day. One of Erdogan’s key tools of intimidation and the crushing of dissent is the abuse of prosecutorial authority. Mohamed Morsi is proving a quick study.
One of Morsi’s early moves was to sack the prosecutor general and appoint a Brotherhood loyalist, Talaat Ibrahim Abdallah. (See this photo of Morsi meeting with Abdallah within minutes of the latter’s swearing-in.) Today, in the middle of the debate over the new sharia constitution that Morsi is planning to ram-rod through in a referendum next week, the Egypt Independent reports that Abdallah has opened an investigation against several of Morsi’s principal political opponents — including former presidential candidates Amr Moussa and Mohamed ElBaradei, as well as Ahmed al-Zend, the head of the so-called “Judges Club” — on suspicion of espionage and sedition.
The report elaborates that the investigation is based on a lawyer’s complaint, alleging that
Moussa met with former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and agreed with her to fabricate internal crises, and that all of the politicians named in his complaint then met at the Wafd Pary headquarters to implement the “Zionist plot.” He requested that the accused be banned from travel and that the Wafd Party headquarters be confiscated for investigation. Filing criminal charges against opposition figures was a common practice during former President Hosni Mubarak’s era.
Yeah . . . and it’s a common practice in Islamic “democracies.”
The Muslim Brotherhood stooge running Egypt doesn’t care about free speech or tolerance; he cares about his own theocratic will to power — and making Americans grovel.
…the tribe of barbarism doesn’t get to lecture the tribe of liberty about what freedom means…
…the thugs haranguing us about the proper limits of free expression aren’t members of that tribe. They haven’t paid their dues…
We’re just inviting you to take a timeout into the rhythmic ambiance of our breakfast, brunch and/or coffee selections. We are happy whenever you stop by.
two years.” The first of those requests was sent by Gawker in September 2012. Trotter said the request sought correspondence between Reines and a “variety of reporters” in the wake of 
Department was “either lying through its teeth or wildly incompetent” in its response to Gawker’s FOIA request.
(CAIRO) — Egyptian riot have fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of supporters of ousted 
pundit from another planet 