Monday, July 11, 2022
Friday, May 20, 2022
Thursday, December 1, 2016
FBI and NSA Poised to Gain New Surveillance Powers Under Trump
By: Chris Strom
The FBI, National Security Agency and CIA are likely to gain
expanded surveillance powers under President-elect Donald Trump and a
Republican-controlled Congress, a prospect that has privacy advocates
and some lawmakers trying to mobilize opposition.
Trump’s first two choices to head law enforcement and
intelligence agencies -- Republican Senator Jeff Sessions for
attorney general and Republican Representative Mike Pompeo for
director of the Central Intelligence Agency -- are leading advocates
for domestic government spying at levels not seen since the aftermath
of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
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the world.
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The fights expected to play out in the coming months -- in Senate
confirmation hearings and through executive action, legislation and
litigation -- also will set up an early test of Trump’s
relationship with Silicon Valley giants including Apple Inc. and
Alphabet Inc.’s Google. Trump signaled as much during his
presidential campaign, when he urged a consumer boycott
of Apple for refusing to help the FBI hack into a terrorist’s
encrypted iPhone.
An “already over-powerful surveillance state” is about to “be
let loose on the American people,” said Daniel Schuman, policy
director for Demand Progress, an internet and privacy advocacy
organization.
New Hacking Rule
In a reversal of curbs imposed after Edward Snowden’s
revelations in 2013 about mass data-gathering by the NSA, Trump and
Congress may move to reinstate the collection of bulk telephone
records, renew powers to collect the content of e-mails and other
internet activity, ease restrictions on hacking into computers and
let the FBI keep preliminary investigations open longer.
A first challenge for privacy advocates comes this week: A new
rule is set to go into effect on Dec. 1 letting the FBI get
permission from a judge in a single jurisdiction to hack into
multiple computers whose locations aren’t known.
“Under the proposed rules, the government would now be able to
obtain a single warrant to access and search thousands or millions of
computers at once; and the vast majority of the affected computers
would belong to the victims, not the perpetrators, of a cybercrime,”
Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who serves on the Intelligence
Committee, said in a statement.
Wyden is one of seven senators, including libertarian Republican
Rand Paul, who have introduced a bill, S. 3475, to delay the new
policy until July to give Congress time to debate its merits and
consider amendments.
Orlando, San Bernardino
Sessions, Pompeo and officials with national security and law
enforcement agencies have argued that expanded surveillance powers
are needed, especially because of the threat of small, deadly
terrorist plots that are hard to detect, like the killing of 49
people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June and 14 people
in San Bernardino, California, last year.
The FBI had at one point opened a preliminary investigation into
the Orlando killer, Omar Mateen, but didn’t have the authority to
keep it going for lack of evidence of wrongdoing.
“What’s needed is a fundamental upgrade to America’s
surveillance capabilities,” Pompeo and a co-author wrote
in a Wall Street Journal commentary in January. “Legal and
bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed.”
Pompeo and Sessions want to repeal a 2015 law that prohibits the
FBI and NSA from collecting bulk phone records -- “metadata” such
as numbers called and dates and times -- on Americans who aren’t
suspected of wrongdoing.
"Congress should pass a law re-establishing collection of all
metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and
lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database,"
Pompeo wrote.
Press aides for Sessions and Pompeo declined to comment.
Warrantless Interceptions
Sessions has opposed restraints on NSA surveillance and said in
June that he supported legislation to expand the types of internet
data the FBI can intercept without warrants.
Congress is also expected to consider legislation early next year
that would renew the government’s ability to collect the content of
e-mail and other internet activity from companies such as Google and
Facebook Inc.
Under the Prism program, investigators pursuing suspected
terrorists can intercept the content of electronic communications
believed to come from outside the U.S. without specific warrants even
if one end of the communications is inside the country or involves an
American.
Patriot Act
Prism came under criticism when it was exposed by Snowden, the
former NSA contractor who stole hundreds of thousands of documents on
agency surveillance programs. Section 702 of the USA Patriot Act,
under which Prism and other spy programs are conducted, is set to
expire at the end of 2017 if it isn’t reauthorized by Congress.
James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has
said he also wants to renew a debate early next year about whether
Apple and other companies can resist court warrants seeking to unlock
encrypted communications. The agency went to court trying to force
Apple to create new software to crack password protection on a phone
used by the shooter in San Bernardino.
“Boycott Apple until they give up the information,” Trump said
at a rally in South Carolina in February. He said Tim Cook, Apple’s
chief executive officer, “is looking to do a big number, probably
to show how liberal he is. Apple should give up.”
While the FBI dropped that case against Apple after buying a tool
to hack into the phone, the increasing use of encryption on mobile
devices and messaging services remains a challenge to national
security and law enforcement agencies.
Browsing History
Republicans led by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard
Burr of North Carolina are expected to re-introduce legislation
requiring companies to give investigators access to encrypted
communications.
The FBI is also seeking legislation that would allow it to obtain
“non-content electronic communication transactional records,”
such as browsing histories and computer Internet Protocol addresses,
without court oversight or a warrant.
Sessions and Burr supported the legislation earlier this year,
while it was opposed by major technology groups as well as Google and
Facebook.
Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg
Terminal.
Tuesday, November 29, 2016
Federal agencies push flurry of 'midnight' rule-making under Obama
With less than two months before US President-elect
Donald Trump's inauguration, federal agencies under President Obama are
pushing for a final flurry of new rules – despite the high likelihood
that many will not survive.
WASHINGTON (CSM)
- President Obama is heading into his administration's final weeks with
a full agenda of new draft orders to consider, even though his
successor has vowed to scale back job-killing regulation and cancel "all
illegal and overreaching executive orders."
Despite the likelihood that US President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress would kill any controversial late-in-the-game moves by Mr. Obama, federal agencies under the Democratic president are pushing for a flurry of so-called "midnight" regulations on everything from the environment to transportation and financial marketplaces.
The White House was reviewing as many as 98 final regulations, as of Nov. 15, that could be implemented before Mr. Trump takes office, including 17 with an estimated annual economic impact of $100 million or more, Politico reported. But lawmakers have warned agency heads to avoid rushing to finalize rules or regulations before Obama leaves office.
"Should you ignore this counsel, please be aware that we will work with our colleagues to ensure that Congress scrutinizes your actions – and, if appropriate, overturns them," House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R) of California, wrote in a letter last week.
Several of the new rules slated for installation before Trump assumes office include environmental protections that critics argue hamper business interests and economic potential. Although some offices had initially delayed implementation of their rules, expecting Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to win on Election Day, the offices have pivoted to promulgate the rules quickly after Trump's unexpected win – and faced criticism.
"We're looking at the stack of regulations and the fact that the agencies are just as ill-prepared to make these new regulations work as we are confused on how we can possibly comply in such a short time," Kathleen Sgamma, vice president of government and public affairs at the Western Energy Alliance in Denver, told The Hill.
Despite the likelihood that US President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress would kill any controversial late-in-the-game moves by Mr. Obama, federal agencies under the Democratic president are pushing for a flurry of so-called "midnight" regulations on everything from the environment to transportation and financial marketplaces.
The White House was reviewing as many as 98 final regulations, as of Nov. 15, that could be implemented before Mr. Trump takes office, including 17 with an estimated annual economic impact of $100 million or more, Politico reported. But lawmakers have warned agency heads to avoid rushing to finalize rules or regulations before Obama leaves office.
"Should you ignore this counsel, please be aware that we will work with our colleagues to ensure that Congress scrutinizes your actions – and, if appropriate, overturns them," House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R) of California, wrote in a letter last week.
Several of the new rules slated for installation before Trump assumes office include environmental protections that critics argue hamper business interests and economic potential. Although some offices had initially delayed implementation of their rules, expecting Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to win on Election Day, the offices have pivoted to promulgate the rules quickly after Trump's unexpected win – and faced criticism.
"We're looking at the stack of regulations and the fact that the agencies are just as ill-prepared to make these new regulations work as we are confused on how we can possibly comply in such a short time," Kathleen Sgamma, vice president of government and public affairs at the Western Energy Alliance in Denver, told The Hill.
Monday, October 24, 2016
U.N. goes all-in for unlimited migration
The United Nations has cooked up a “New Urban Agenda” coming soon to a city near you.
By: Leo Hohmann
ACROSS THE GLOBE (WND) - It was unveiled this week in Quito, Ecuador, at the so-called Habitat III conference.
And part of the plan, enthusiastically embraced by Hillary Clinton, calls for unlimited migration across open borders. Migrants displaced by war, failing economies or other hardships will be seen as having “rights” in nations other than their own. Cities are seen as the key battlegrounds and the U.N. conference in Quito had a lot to say about how your city will be expected to embrace migrants of all types, from all regions of the world.
By now most Americans who follow world events are familiar with the U.N’s plan for global governance as envisioned by its “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” approved by some 190 world leaders including President Obama and Pope Francis in September 2015.
This agenda includes 17 goals aimed at ending hunger, wiping out poverty and stamping out global income inequality by “transforming our world” through sweeping changes ostensibly aimed at freeing cross-border “labor mobility,” among other things.
Hillary Clinton, anointed by Obama as his successor, said in a speech to Wall Street bankers she envisions the U.S. as part of a single “hemispheric common market with free trade and open borders,” according to WikiLeaks data dumps.
In another bombshell revealed by WikiLeaks, Mrs. Clinton told Goldman Sachs bankers that Americans who want to limit immigration are “fundamentally un-American.” She has also called for a 550-percent increase in the resettlement of Syrian refugees in America – that’s 550 percent more than Obama’s vastly increased level of more than 12,000 resettled in one year.
In short, Hillary’s agenda for cities sounds an awful lot like the U.N.’s agenda for cities as laid out in the New Urban Agenda document approved this week by world leaders in Quito.
“She’s totally in line with the U.N. agenda, on board with everything they do,” says economist Patrick Wood, author of “Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation.”
Clinton earlier this year announced her $135 billion “breaking every barrier” program to transform America’s cities.
In this plan, she makes 37 pledges promising everything from removal of blight to construction of affordable housing in areas that are currently out of the price range of refugees, immigrants, the chronically unemployed and under-employed. She intends to build on the “successes” of her husband and the Obama administration in using public-private partnerships to transform cities. Obama’s contribution in this area included his Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which forces grant-receiving cities to infuse their low-crime suburban areas, deemed “too white,” with subsidized housing marketed to low-income renters.
This fits right in with the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda.
“She’s making a pre-announcement here that she’s going to follow the U.N. agenda,” Wood said. “She’s signaling to her fellow globalists that she’s 100 percent on board with their agenda.”
The problem that keeps globalists like Obama and Clinton up at night is how to implement the sweeping changes laid out in the U.N. 2030 Agenda last September at the global sustainability summit in New York.
That’s where Habitat III comes into play. It’s called the U.N. Conference on Housing and Sustainable Development or “Habitat III” for short. Its focus is on the world’s cities.
Largest U.N. conference ever
Habitat III was attended by a staggering 50,000 people including more than 200 mayors and another 140 city delegations.
The sole purpose of this conference is to approve a 24-page document called the New Urban Agenda.
“The only purpose of the conference is to rubber stamp this document and elevate it and lift it up to the world,” said Wood. “And right now it looks like they are. Everybody. All the nations.”
In this document lies the globalists’ plans for cities. All cities. Big, small, even tiny cities. Every American who lives in a city will at some point see the fruits of the plan the U.N. has in store for the world, says Wood, an expert on global governance and the technocracy movement.
The Habitat conference convenes only once every 20 years but when it does, it leaves a trail of anti-capitalist, anti-liberty “global standards” in its wake, says Wood. These are the standards by which the U.N. wants each and every city in the world to be operated. They come packaged as “non-binding” and Congress never approves them.
Yet, somehow, the global standards coming out of the major U.N. conferences always seem to filter down to even the smallest American hamlet. How? Through federal grants. Any city that accepts federal grants will at some point be required to implement the practices that the U.N. has declared “sustainable.”
‘Inclusive’ by design, coercive by default
The buzzword in the New Urban Agenda is “inclusive” or “inclusivity.” This concept has a long history with global elites and technocrats.
The definition of “technocracy” as used by the original technocrats back 1938 was “the science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism, to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population.” That’s according to The Technocrat magazine.
“They use the word ‘entire’ twice in that definition so I’m really not surprised we see it showing up in these conferences today,” Wood said. “Their intent is to create a net that will catch 100 percent of the people.”
The word “inclusive” or “inclusivity” appear in the New Urban Agenda document no fewer than 36 times.
“There is no exclusion,” Wood says. “If you read the document, you’ll find for instance under item 6a, ‘transformative commitments,’ the statement starts out ‘leave no one behind.'”
That same phrase, leave no one behind, is in the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda.
“In fact just about everywhere you go now at the U.N. you’ll find this concept,” Wood said. “It’s a little disturbing.”
Wood says the U.N. is resurrecting an old concept that fizzled in the early days of the technocracy movement. Its time hadn’t arrived yet, back in the 1930s, but now things are different. The world is run by big data and the world is eager to embraced a set of globalized, one-world standards for everything, whether it be Common Core education standards, globalized police standards that Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced at the U.N. last fall in the form of the Strong Cities Network, or global standards for healthcare, ala Obamacare. You name it, the United Nations wants to standardize it.
The next big hurdle in the race to standardize the world is the issue of immigration.
Point 42 on page 7 of the New Urban Agenda talks about cities providing opportunities for dialogue, “paying particular attention to the potential contributions” of women and children, the elderly and disabled, “refugees and internally displaced persons and migrants, regardless of migration status, and without discrimination based on race, religion, ethnicity, or socio-economic status.”
Everyone is welcome
Wood notes that, in America, that would mean exactly what John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager, has already said — that anyone with a driver’s license should be allowed to vote.
“This is the way I read it,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if they’re legal or illegal, wanted or unwanted, jihadists or non-jihadists, sick or healthy. If they show up in your country, they must participate in the affairs of that country immediately, whatever country they find themselves in.”
The preamble to the New Urban Agenda says cities are the “key to tackling global challenges.”
“So these people are viewing cities as the key ingredient right now to implementing sustainable development, and they say this battle for sustainability will be won or lost in the cities.”
And the U.N. document goes on to state that this agenda is “the first step for operationalizing sustainable development in an integrated and coordinated way at the global, national, subnational, and local levels.”
In essence, it’s a roadmap to global governance where American cities will no longer get their direction from elected officials representing them on the city council, or even the state legislature, but the United Nations itself. The local councils will likely not even know that the rules they are following in order to qualify for federal grants are tied to United Nations’ standards for sustainability.
Cities committing to ‘a paradigm shift’
The document talks about cities committing to “a paradigm shift” in the way they “plan, develop and manage urban development.”
“It’s top to bottom,” Wood said. “They’re saying it’s going to be a top-down implementation. But for all the gains that sustainable development have made since 1992, there’s been a complaint that it hasn’t gone fast enough or far enough, and that it’s not inclusive enough, that some pockets have been left out. So, what they’re saying here is that this New Urban Agenda document is really, in their minds, the first step for operationalizing it. First step to making sustainable development completely operational. That’s huge.”
Wallace Henley, a journalist and former aide in the Nixon White House who went on to become a Christian pastor and who has written extensively on globalism, said the U.N. is making a full-on assault against the American system of government, which requires federalism, states’ rights and separation of powers.
“The U.N. is a glaring example of the inevitable course of bureaucracies. Like kudzu in Alabama, a tiny seed will inevitably spread until it controls the whole of a hillside,” Henley, author of “God and Churchhill,” told WND in an email.
And he, like Wood, sees Hillary Clinton in the thick of the battle, fighting on the side of the globalists, not America first.
“The leftist-progressive philosophy is the fertilizer. Agencies sprout and grow, and bring forth policy confabs like Habitat III. The conferences then produce white papers that ultimately become the source of policies,” he said. “It is a leftist-progressivist dream.”
“Sustainability” is a code word for regulatory authority, Henley said, and that is the suffocating vine that chokes out everything else.
“This meshes perfectly with the New Globalism and its dream of a world without borders. Anything can be done in the name of a ‘sustainable’ future, including the ‘humanitarian’ invasion of a sovereign state – but only if its leaders embrace the same left-progressive philosophy as the bureaucracies headquartered in New York. This makes a Hillary Clinton presidency even more foreboding,” he said.
And these “progressives” include many in the Republican Party who are now shilling for Clinton, such as House Speaker Paul Ryan and Arizona Sen. John McCain. Ryan, according to an article by Breitbart’s Julia Hahn, has been working hand in hand with the Clinton campaign for months.
“The true conservative seeks preservation of liberty-nurturing principles, and the sustenance of values that resist the control of the bureaucrats and guarantee freedom from a globalist hegemon in the form of the U.N.,” Henley said.
Eric Voegelin’s 1975 book, “From Enlightenment to Revolution,” describes with amazing prescience the “line of progress” according to the revolutionaries who drive what Henley calls the New Globalism, from the local to the global, from the individual to the mass of humanity, from nation-states to a concentrated global power.
“This is the big picture of which Habitat III and its New Urban Agenda is a part.”
By: Leo Hohmann
ACROSS THE GLOBE (WND) - It was unveiled this week in Quito, Ecuador, at the so-called Habitat III conference.
And part of the plan, enthusiastically embraced by Hillary Clinton, calls for unlimited migration across open borders. Migrants displaced by war, failing economies or other hardships will be seen as having “rights” in nations other than their own. Cities are seen as the key battlegrounds and the U.N. conference in Quito had a lot to say about how your city will be expected to embrace migrants of all types, from all regions of the world.
By now most Americans who follow world events are familiar with the U.N’s plan for global governance as envisioned by its “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” approved by some 190 world leaders including President Obama and Pope Francis in September 2015.
This agenda includes 17 goals aimed at ending hunger, wiping out poverty and stamping out global income inequality by “transforming our world” through sweeping changes ostensibly aimed at freeing cross-border “labor mobility,” among other things.
Hillary Clinton, anointed by Obama as his successor, said in a speech to Wall Street bankers she envisions the U.S. as part of a single “hemispheric common market with free trade and open borders,” according to WikiLeaks data dumps.
In another bombshell revealed by WikiLeaks, Mrs. Clinton told Goldman Sachs bankers that Americans who want to limit immigration are “fundamentally un-American.” She has also called for a 550-percent increase in the resettlement of Syrian refugees in America – that’s 550 percent more than Obama’s vastly increased level of more than 12,000 resettled in one year.
In short, Hillary’s agenda for cities sounds an awful lot like the U.N.’s agenda for cities as laid out in the New Urban Agenda document approved this week by world leaders in Quito.
“She’s totally in line with the U.N. agenda, on board with everything they do,” says economist Patrick Wood, author of “Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation.”
Clinton earlier this year announced her $135 billion “breaking every barrier” program to transform America’s cities.
In this plan, she makes 37 pledges promising everything from removal of blight to construction of affordable housing in areas that are currently out of the price range of refugees, immigrants, the chronically unemployed and under-employed. She intends to build on the “successes” of her husband and the Obama administration in using public-private partnerships to transform cities. Obama’s contribution in this area included his Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which forces grant-receiving cities to infuse their low-crime suburban areas, deemed “too white,” with subsidized housing marketed to low-income renters.
This fits right in with the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda.
“She’s making a pre-announcement here that she’s going to follow the U.N. agenda,” Wood said. “She’s signaling to her fellow globalists that she’s 100 percent on board with their agenda.”
The problem that keeps globalists like Obama and Clinton up at night is how to implement the sweeping changes laid out in the U.N. 2030 Agenda last September at the global sustainability summit in New York.
That’s where Habitat III comes into play. It’s called the U.N. Conference on Housing and Sustainable Development or “Habitat III” for short. Its focus is on the world’s cities.
Largest U.N. conference ever
Habitat III was attended by a staggering 50,000 people including more than 200 mayors and another 140 city delegations.
The sole purpose of this conference is to approve a 24-page document called the New Urban Agenda.
“The only purpose of the conference is to rubber stamp this document and elevate it and lift it up to the world,” said Wood. “And right now it looks like they are. Everybody. All the nations.”
In this document lies the globalists’ plans for cities. All cities. Big, small, even tiny cities. Every American who lives in a city will at some point see the fruits of the plan the U.N. has in store for the world, says Wood, an expert on global governance and the technocracy movement.
The Habitat conference convenes only once every 20 years but when it does, it leaves a trail of anti-capitalist, anti-liberty “global standards” in its wake, says Wood. These are the standards by which the U.N. wants each and every city in the world to be operated. They come packaged as “non-binding” and Congress never approves them.
Yet, somehow, the global standards coming out of the major U.N. conferences always seem to filter down to even the smallest American hamlet. How? Through federal grants. Any city that accepts federal grants will at some point be required to implement the practices that the U.N. has declared “sustainable.”
‘Inclusive’ by design, coercive by default
The buzzword in the New Urban Agenda is “inclusive” or “inclusivity.” This concept has a long history with global elites and technocrats.
The definition of “technocracy” as used by the original technocrats back 1938 was “the science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism, to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population.” That’s according to The Technocrat magazine.
“They use the word ‘entire’ twice in that definition so I’m really not surprised we see it showing up in these conferences today,” Wood said. “Their intent is to create a net that will catch 100 percent of the people.”
The word “inclusive” or “inclusivity” appear in the New Urban Agenda document no fewer than 36 times.
“There is no exclusion,” Wood says. “If you read the document, you’ll find for instance under item 6a, ‘transformative commitments,’ the statement starts out ‘leave no one behind.'”
That same phrase, leave no one behind, is in the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda.
“In fact just about everywhere you go now at the U.N. you’ll find this concept,” Wood said. “It’s a little disturbing.”
Wood says the U.N. is resurrecting an old concept that fizzled in the early days of the technocracy movement. Its time hadn’t arrived yet, back in the 1930s, but now things are different. The world is run by big data and the world is eager to embraced a set of globalized, one-world standards for everything, whether it be Common Core education standards, globalized police standards that Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced at the U.N. last fall in the form of the Strong Cities Network, or global standards for healthcare, ala Obamacare. You name it, the United Nations wants to standardize it.
The next big hurdle in the race to standardize the world is the issue of immigration.
Point 42 on page 7 of the New Urban Agenda talks about cities providing opportunities for dialogue, “paying particular attention to the potential contributions” of women and children, the elderly and disabled, “refugees and internally displaced persons and migrants, regardless of migration status, and without discrimination based on race, religion, ethnicity, or socio-economic status.”
Everyone is welcome
Wood notes that, in America, that would mean exactly what John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager, has already said — that anyone with a driver’s license should be allowed to vote.
“This is the way I read it,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if they’re legal or illegal, wanted or unwanted, jihadists or non-jihadists, sick or healthy. If they show up in your country, they must participate in the affairs of that country immediately, whatever country they find themselves in.”
The preamble to the New Urban Agenda says cities are the “key to tackling global challenges.”
“So these people are viewing cities as the key ingredient right now to implementing sustainable development, and they say this battle for sustainability will be won or lost in the cities.”
And the U.N. document goes on to state that this agenda is “the first step for operationalizing sustainable development in an integrated and coordinated way at the global, national, subnational, and local levels.”
In essence, it’s a roadmap to global governance where American cities will no longer get their direction from elected officials representing them on the city council, or even the state legislature, but the United Nations itself. The local councils will likely not even know that the rules they are following in order to qualify for federal grants are tied to United Nations’ standards for sustainability.
Cities committing to ‘a paradigm shift’
The document talks about cities committing to “a paradigm shift” in the way they “plan, develop and manage urban development.”
“It’s top to bottom,” Wood said. “They’re saying it’s going to be a top-down implementation. But for all the gains that sustainable development have made since 1992, there’s been a complaint that it hasn’t gone fast enough or far enough, and that it’s not inclusive enough, that some pockets have been left out. So, what they’re saying here is that this New Urban Agenda document is really, in their minds, the first step for operationalizing it. First step to making sustainable development completely operational. That’s huge.”
Wallace Henley, a journalist and former aide in the Nixon White House who went on to become a Christian pastor and who has written extensively on globalism, said the U.N. is making a full-on assault against the American system of government, which requires federalism, states’ rights and separation of powers.
“The U.N. is a glaring example of the inevitable course of bureaucracies. Like kudzu in Alabama, a tiny seed will inevitably spread until it controls the whole of a hillside,” Henley, author of “God and Churchhill,” told WND in an email.
And he, like Wood, sees Hillary Clinton in the thick of the battle, fighting on the side of the globalists, not America first.
“The leftist-progressive philosophy is the fertilizer. Agencies sprout and grow, and bring forth policy confabs like Habitat III. The conferences then produce white papers that ultimately become the source of policies,” he said. “It is a leftist-progressivist dream.”
“Sustainability” is a code word for regulatory authority, Henley said, and that is the suffocating vine that chokes out everything else.
“This meshes perfectly with the New Globalism and its dream of a world without borders. Anything can be done in the name of a ‘sustainable’ future, including the ‘humanitarian’ invasion of a sovereign state – but only if its leaders embrace the same left-progressive philosophy as the bureaucracies headquartered in New York. This makes a Hillary Clinton presidency even more foreboding,” he said.
And these “progressives” include many in the Republican Party who are now shilling for Clinton, such as House Speaker Paul Ryan and Arizona Sen. John McCain. Ryan, according to an article by Breitbart’s Julia Hahn, has been working hand in hand with the Clinton campaign for months.
“The true conservative seeks preservation of liberty-nurturing principles, and the sustenance of values that resist the control of the bureaucrats and guarantee freedom from a globalist hegemon in the form of the U.N.,” Henley said.
Eric Voegelin’s 1975 book, “From Enlightenment to Revolution,” describes with amazing prescience the “line of progress” according to the revolutionaries who drive what Henley calls the New Globalism, from the local to the global, from the individual to the mass of humanity, from nation-states to a concentrated global power.
“This is the big picture of which Habitat III and its New Urban Agenda is a part.”
Friday, October 7, 2016
Dozens of Afghan troops missing from military training in U.S.
Forty-four Afghan troops visiting the United States for
military training have gone missing in less than two years, presumably
in an effort to live and work illegally in America, Pentagon officials
said.
By: Idrees Ali
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - Although the number of disappearances is relatively small --
some 2,200 Afghan troops have received military training in the United
States since 2007 -- the incidents raise questions about security and
screening procedures for the programs.
They are also potentially embarrassing for U.S. President Barack Obama's administration, which has spent billions of dollars training Afghan troops as Washington seeks to extricate itself from the costly, 15-year-old war. The disclosure could fuel criticism by supporters of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who has accused the Obama administration of failing to properly vet immigrants from Muslim-majority countries and has pledged a much tougher stance if he wins.
While other foreign troops on U.S. military training visits have sometimes run away, a U.S. defense official said that the frequency of Afghan troops going missing was concerning and "out of the ordinary."
Since September alone, eight Afghan troops have left military bases without authorization, Pentagon spokesman Adam Stump told Reuters. He said the total number of Afghan troops who have gone missing since January 2015 is 44, a number that has not previously been disclosed.
"The Defense Department is assessing ways to strengthen eligibility criteria for training in ways that will reduce the likelihood of an individual Afghan willingly absconding from training in the U.S. and going AWOL (absent without leave)," Stump said.
Afghans in the U.S. training program are vetted to ensure they have not participated in human rights abuses and are not affiliated with militant groups before being allowed into the United States, Stump said.
The defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added there was no evidence any of those who had absconded had carried out crimes or posed a threat to the United States.
The Afghan army has occasionally been infiltrated by Taliban militants who have carried out attacks on Afghan and U.S. troops, but such incidents have become less frequent due to tougher security measures.
Trump, whose other signature immigration plan is to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, has proposed a temporary ban on Muslims seeking to enter the country, and has said that law enforcement officers should engage in more racial profiling to curb the threat of attacks on American soil.
After Omar Mateen, whose father was born in Afghanistan, killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando in June, Trump said an immigration ban would last until "we are in a position to properly screen these people coming into our country."
BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN TRAINING
Washington has allocated more than $60 billion since 2002 to train and equip Afghan troops, but security remains precarious and the Taliban are estimated to control more territory in Afghanistan than at any time since 2001 when the U.S. invaded.
Earlier this year Obama shelved plans to cut the U.S. force in Afghanistan nearly in half by year's end, opting instead to keep 8,400 troops there through the end of his presidency in January.
The military training program brings troops to the United States from around the world in order to build on military relations and improve capabilities for joint operations.
In some cases, officials said, the Afghan students who went missing were in the United States for elite Army Ranger School and intelligence-gathering training. The officials did not identify the missing troops or their rank.
Even though the troops were in the United States for military training, they were not necessarily always on a military base.
If students under the military program are absent from training for more than 24 hours, they are considered to be "absent without leave" (AWOL) and the Department of Homeland Security is notified.
In one case the Pentagon confirmed that an Afghan student had been detained by Canadian police while attempting to enter Canada from the United States.
It was unclear how many others have been located by U.S. authorities, and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Experts said low morale and insufficient training to fight the Taliban could explain the troops leaving, in addition to a dearth of economic opportunities in the impoverished country.
"They face a formidable enemy, with very limited resources and many Afghan troops aren't getting paid on time,” said Michael Kugelman, a South Asia specialist at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington think-tank.
They are also potentially embarrassing for U.S. President Barack Obama's administration, which has spent billions of dollars training Afghan troops as Washington seeks to extricate itself from the costly, 15-year-old war. The disclosure could fuel criticism by supporters of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who has accused the Obama administration of failing to properly vet immigrants from Muslim-majority countries and has pledged a much tougher stance if he wins.
While other foreign troops on U.S. military training visits have sometimes run away, a U.S. defense official said that the frequency of Afghan troops going missing was concerning and "out of the ordinary."
Since September alone, eight Afghan troops have left military bases without authorization, Pentagon spokesman Adam Stump told Reuters. He said the total number of Afghan troops who have gone missing since January 2015 is 44, a number that has not previously been disclosed.
"The Defense Department is assessing ways to strengthen eligibility criteria for training in ways that will reduce the likelihood of an individual Afghan willingly absconding from training in the U.S. and going AWOL (absent without leave)," Stump said.
Afghans in the U.S. training program are vetted to ensure they have not participated in human rights abuses and are not affiliated with militant groups before being allowed into the United States, Stump said.
The defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added there was no evidence any of those who had absconded had carried out crimes or posed a threat to the United States.
The Afghan army has occasionally been infiltrated by Taliban militants who have carried out attacks on Afghan and U.S. troops, but such incidents have become less frequent due to tougher security measures.
Trump, whose other signature immigration plan is to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, has proposed a temporary ban on Muslims seeking to enter the country, and has said that law enforcement officers should engage in more racial profiling to curb the threat of attacks on American soil.
After Omar Mateen, whose father was born in Afghanistan, killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando in June, Trump said an immigration ban would last until "we are in a position to properly screen these people coming into our country."
BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN TRAINING
Washington has allocated more than $60 billion since 2002 to train and equip Afghan troops, but security remains precarious and the Taliban are estimated to control more territory in Afghanistan than at any time since 2001 when the U.S. invaded.
Earlier this year Obama shelved plans to cut the U.S. force in Afghanistan nearly in half by year's end, opting instead to keep 8,400 troops there through the end of his presidency in January.
The military training program brings troops to the United States from around the world in order to build on military relations and improve capabilities for joint operations.
In some cases, officials said, the Afghan students who went missing were in the United States for elite Army Ranger School and intelligence-gathering training. The officials did not identify the missing troops or their rank.
Even though the troops were in the United States for military training, they were not necessarily always on a military base.
If students under the military program are absent from training for more than 24 hours, they are considered to be "absent without leave" (AWOL) and the Department of Homeland Security is notified.
In one case the Pentagon confirmed that an Afghan student had been detained by Canadian police while attempting to enter Canada from the United States.
It was unclear how many others have been located by U.S. authorities, and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Experts said low morale and insufficient training to fight the Taliban could explain the troops leaving, in addition to a dearth of economic opportunities in the impoverished country.
"They face a formidable enemy, with very limited resources and many Afghan troops aren't getting paid on time,” said Michael Kugelman, a South Asia specialist at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington think-tank.
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