Underground stories 06-16-14

Defense Secretary Orders Vessel to Arabian Gulf

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel today ordered the amphibious transport dock ship USS Mesa Verde into the Arabian Gulf, Pentagon Press Secretary Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby said.

The ship has completed its transit through the Strait of Hormuz, the admiral said in a statement.

“Its presence in the Gulf adds to that of other U.S. naval ships already there – including the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush – and provides the commander in chief additional options to protect American citizens and interests in Iraq, should he choose to use them,” Kirby said.

USS Mesa Verde is capable of conducting a variety of quick-reaction and crisis response operations, the press secretary said, and it carries a complement of MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.
The ship is part of the USS Bataan Amphibious Ready Group, which departed Norfolk, Virginia, in February and is operating in the region on a routine deployment to support maritime security operations.
It is rumored but not confirmed that a contingency of 500 Marines are aboard.

Hillary group proclaims she’s guided by the Bible; Twitter roars with total disbelief

witter conservatives are having a field day with the latest effort by a group of religious organizations backing Hillary Clinton for president, ridiculing a Twitter post where the former first lady claims the Bible as an everlasting influence on her life.

Here is the post, put out by Faith4Hillary, a group that last made news in mid-May when it announced bumper stickers available touting Clinton’s nascent presidential campaign.
 
FaithVoters4Hillary        ✔ @Faith4Hillary Follow

RT If you love this quote by @HillaryClinton on how the Bible was and remains an influence on her life #Faith4Hillary

3:32 PM - 14 Jun 2014

To be charitable, the influence of the Bible is not the first thing that comes to most people’s minds when they think about the life of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Nor is her trouble-ridden tenure as secretary of state — no matter what her partisans might say. Nor, for that matter, is her eminently forgettable single-term Senate career, which consisted mainly of keeping her in the headlines long enough to launch a failed presidential campaign in 2008.
Let’s face it, the influence of the Bible pales compared to the influence of Bill — the known liar, adulterer and widely suspected rapist who carried Hillary into the national eye in 1992 that she hasn’t left since.
Twitter responses were not charitable.
Here’s a sample, via Twitchy.com.
Some focused on Hillary’s widely perceived problems with telling what most of us think of as “the truth.”

The Hillary Tapes

Newly discovered audio recordings of Hillary Clinton from the early 1980s include the former first lady’s frank and detailed assessment of the most significant criminal case of her legal career: defending a man accused of raping a 12-year-old girl.
In 1975, the same year she married Bill, Hillary Clinton agreed to serve as the court-appointed attorney for Thomas Alfred Taylor, a 41-year-old accused of raping the child after luring her into a car.
The recordings, which date from 1983-1987 and have never before been reported, include Clinton’s suggestion that she knew Taylor was guilty at the time. She says she used a legal technicality to plead her client, who faced 30 years to life in prison, down to a lesser charge. The recording and transcript, along with court documents pertaining to the case, are embedded below.
The full story of the Taylor defense calls into question Clinton’s narrative of her early years as a devoted women and children’s advocate in Arkansas—a narrative the 2016 presidential frontrunner continues to promote on her current book tour.
Her comments on the rape trial are part of more than five hours of unpublished interviews conducted by Arkansas reporter Roy Reed with then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and his wife in the mid-1980s.
The interviews, archived at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, were intended for an Esquire magazine profile that was never published, and offer a rare personal glimpse of the couple during a pivotal moment in their political careers.
But Hillary Clinton’s most revealing comments—and those most likely to inflame critics—concern the decades-old rape case.

Clinton: Matt Drudge, Karl Rove Planting ‘False Information’

WASHINGTON (CBS DC) – Former secretary of state and potential 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton ridiculed Matt Drudge and Karl Rove as “gamers” simply looking to “divert attention” from real issues facing Americans.
In an interview with National Public Radio, Clinton responded to recent comments from the Drudge Report namesake and Karl Rove, dismissing claims that she may have posed with a walker on the cover of People magazine.
NPR host Terry Gross posed the question: “So I have to ask you about the kerfuffle over the People magazine cover that you were on. You were standing with your hands resting on the back of a chair, apparently a patio chair. But the photo was cropped, so all we saw of the chair was the bar across the top of the chair. And your good friend, Matt Drudge, tweeted, is Clinton holding a walker? Now, you know, obviously it wasn’t a walker but – and he didn’t lie. He didn’t say you were holding a walker. He just asked a question in the tweet. Is that a technique that you’ve become used to, like…”
Clinton responded: “They are trying constantly to, you know, raise false canards, you know, plant, you know, false information, and that’s what they do.”
“Yeah, Karl Rove tried that with my health and got totally, you know, shot down. I am so used to these people. They’re like a bunch of, you know, gamers,” said Clinton.
Clinton added that she believes Rove and Drudge pose such questions simply to avoid a “real debate” of important issues affecting the American people, saying it’s business-as-usual for conservatives to attack her on matters that are “totally off subject.”

DOJ lawyer says gov’t emails are backed up nightly; calls IRS claim they were deleted ‘laughable’

Not that there was any doubt, but a Department of Justice lawyer has anonymously contacted Powerline Blog to say why the IRS claim about losing emails because of a computer crash is “laughable”:

I’m a DOJ lawyer, so you obviously cannot use my name or any identifying information. But the idea that a “hard drive crash” somehow destroyed all of Ms. Lerner’s intra-government email correspondence during the period in question [2009-2011] is laughable. Government email servers are backed up every night. So if she actually had a hard drive fail, her emails would be recoverable from the backup. If the backup was somehow also compromised, then we are talking about a conspiracy.
Keep up the good work.

He reiterates in a postscript:

I’m serious about your keeping any identifying information out of the media. Things are very, very bad.

When the story broke on Friday, I really believed this administration was insane to think the story wouldn’t hit the headlines. But if you look at the Sunday morning news shows, not one featured the outrageous stonewalling by the IRS. Let’s hope our political leaders have the courage to pursue this outrageous abuse of power.

Democrat Party Uses Wrong Flag to Celebrate Flag Day

You’ve got to hand it to the Democrat National Committee (DNC), led by the “patriotic” Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

They sure do know how to honor the American flag.

Saturday was “Flag Day,” the day in which Americans celebrate the red, white and blue in all its glory. But, the Democrat Party tweeted out a picture of the wrong flag to honor Old Glory on Flag Day. Check it out!. 

Is Obama Tired Of Being President?

If he is, it’s not his fault. It’s never his fault. It’s your fault, America.
Amie Parnes and Niall Stanage, The Hill:

Is President Obama done with Washington? …

The president twice went for unscheduled walkabouts last week, taking a trip to a Starbucks near the White House with his chief of staff Denis McDonough on Monday and, the next day, turning up at a burger joint in Alexandria, Va…

Last Tuesday, Obama was asked about gun control during a question-and-answer session hosted by the social networking website Tumblr. He didn’t try to assert that progress on legislation was realistically possible, instead launching into a personal broadside, permeated with a sense of resignation, against “this town…”

The couple have also never sold their family home in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, a fact that prompts speculation they will return there after his White House tenure ends.

If he’s so miserable, he could end that tenure right now. Today. He could get out before his ineptitude and dishonesty cause even more problems for the world, and, most importantly, for himself.
But he won’t, because his ego won’t let him. He’s willing to destroy the Democrats’ brand just to hold onto his power, no matter how miserable it makes him. No matter how many times he screws everything up, and part of him can’t push away the shame.
Even now, there are people with an emotional investment in this guy. They believed in him, and no matter how he disappoints them, no matter how many outrageous lies he tells them, they can’t bring themselves to abandon him.
There’s nothing the rest of us can do but laugh at them. You can point at them as you do so, but either way works. Just laugh at them. They hate it. And the more they seethe, the better it gets.

Sen. Graham: ‘We Need to Coordinate With the Iranians’ Over Iraq Crisis

(CNSNews.com) – Less than a year after Sen. Lindsey Graham was advocating for a use-of-force authorization against Iran, the South Carolina Republican on Sunday suggested the U.S. sit down and talk to the Iranians about stopping the advance of Sunni jihadists in Iraq.
Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, Graham conceded that the notion of coordinating with Iran did not make him feel comfortable, but he argued that “we have common interests.”
“Why did we deal with Stalin? Because he was not as bad as Hitler,” he said. “The Iranians can provide some assets to make sure Baghdad doesn’t fall. We need to coordinate with the Iranians.”

Iran sends troops into Iraq to aid fight against Isis militants

Tehran hints at cooperation with US to aid Nouri al-Maliki as jihadist group threatens to take Baghdad
How an arrest in Iraq revealed Isis's $2bn jihadist network
Iraq crisis live: all today's developments

Iran has sent 2,000 advance troops to Iraq in the past 48 hours to help tackle a jihadist insurgency, a senior Iraqi official has told the Guardian.
The confirmation comes as the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, said Iran was ready to support Iraq from the mortal threat fast spreading through the country, while the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, called on citizens to take up arms in their country's defence.
Addressing the country on Saturday, Maliki said rebels from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) had given "an incentive to the army and to Iraqis to act bravely". His call to arms came after reports surfaced that hundreds of young men were flocking to volunteer centres across Baghdad to join the fight against Isis.
In Iran, Rouhani raised the prospect of Teheran cooperating with its old enemy Washington to defeat the Sunni insurgent group – which is attempting to ignite a sectarian war beyond Iraq's borders.
The Iraqi official said 1,500 basiji forces had crossed the border into the town of Khanaqin, in Diyala province, in central Iraq on Friday, while another 500 had entered the Badra Jassan area in Wasat province overnight. The Guardian confirmed on Friday that Major General Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' elite Quds Force, had arrived in Baghdad to oversee the defence of the capital.
There is growing evidence in Baghdad of Shia militias continuing to reorganise, with some heading to the central city of Samarra, 70 miles (110km) north of the capital, to defend two Shia shrines from Sunni jihadist groups surrounding them.
The volunteers signing up were responding to a call by Iraq's most revered Shia cleric, the Iranian-born grand ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to defend their country after Isis seized Mosul and Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit in a lightning advance this week. Samarra is now the next town in the Islamists' path to Baghdad.
"Citizens who can carry weapons and fight the terrorists in defence of their country, its people and its holy sites should volunteer and join the security forces," Sheik Abdul-Mahdi al-Karbalaie, Sistani's representative, said on Friday in a sermon at the holy Shia city of Kerbala.

State Dept. Ignored Warnings of Iranian Efforts to Destabilize Iraq

State Department counterterrorism officials warned in late April that Iran had “trained, funded, and provided guidance” to ethnic Iraqi terror groups bent on destabilizing the country.
The April warning appears to directly contradict and undermine comments last week by a State Department spokeswoman claiming that the United States and Iran have a “shared interest.”
As Iraqi militants continue to wage attacks and seize territory, the State Department has signaled that it is willing to work with neighboring Iran to stabilize the country. They have even raised the idea of discussing Iraq on the sidelines of the ongoing nuclear discussions taking place in Vienna.
However, the recent outreach to Iran runs counter to the State Department’s own Country Report on Terrorism issued just six weeks ago.
That report warned that Iran is building a terror network across the globe and that it was specifically seeking to undermine U.S. goals in Iraq by fostering terror groups on both sides of the ethnic Arab divide in Iraq.
“Despite its pledge to support Iraq’s stabilization, Iran trained, funded, and provided guidance to Iraqi Shia militant groups,” the report stated.
Iran also has sought to protect and bolster al Qaeda, a Sunni Muslim group that has ties to Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the extremist terror group that is currently seeking to violently depose the Iraqi government.
“Iran remained unwilling to bring to justice senior al Qaeda (AQ) members it continued to detain, and refused to publicly identify those senior members in its custody,” the State Department determined in its April report.
“Iran allowed AQ facilitators Muhsin al-Fadhli and Adel Radi Saqr al-Wahabi al-Harbi to operate a core facilitation pipeline through Iran, enabling AQ to move funds and fighters to South Asia and also to Syria,” according to the report.

Another Attack Discovered at an Electricity Substation Near the Border  

and One Congressman Says It’s ‘Only a Matter of Time’ Before More Attackers ‘Exploit This Vulnerability’

A 50,000 gallon diesel fuel tank at a critical transformer substation south of Tucson near a border town that has been the center of immigration news lately was the target of an attack last week, but the make-shift bomb failed to cause a major explosion or power outage.
More than 30,000 Arizona residents could have been stripped of all access to power for their homes and businesses, for an unknown period of time, if the explosive device had knocked out their critical transformer substation.

Instead, the device — roughly described by local police as a homespun device that could fit in the palm of your hand — failed to ignite the diesel fuel in one of the storage tanks for four back-up power generators housed at the site.

“On the morning of June 11th, an employee discovered that a hole bad been cut in the fence of a substation that serves Nogales AZ and that the remains of a crude incendiary device was found at the base of a diesel fuel tank,” Joe Salkowski, UniSource Energy Services spokesman told TheBlaze.
Reports last week indicated a large explosion had occurred at the plant, but Salkowski said, “The device caused a small, temporary fuel leak and blackened a small section of the surface of the tank, but did not cause any serious damage to the fuel tank.”
The targeted facility is an electric substation just a few miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, that provides service to the city of Nogales and the surrounding areas. Most of the power delivered to the customers comes through that substation by way of a transmission line — the large electric cables you see lining the highway and crossing the country — that links the Nogales plant to a larger substation the Tucson area.
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