“Gilroy, a former Fort Pierce police officer, said Mateen frequently made homophobic and racial comments. Gilroy said he complained to his employer several times but it did nothing because he was Muslim.”
Omar Mateen – who as we reported earlier was licensed as a security guard and also holds a firearms license – was employed by the US subsidiary of G4S plc, a British multinational security services company, whose US-headquarters are located in Jupiter, Fla, and which also happens to be the world’s largest security company by revenue….
But where it gets more disturbing is that as Judicial Watch reported several days ago, in a post titled, “DHS Quietly Moving, Releasing Vanloads Of Illegal Aliens Away From Border”, border patrol sources said that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was quietly transporting illegal immigrants from the Mexican border to Phoenix and releasing them without proper processing or issuing court appearance documents. As a reminder, the government classifies them as Other Than Mexican (OTM) and this week around 35 were transferred 116 miles north from Tucson to a Phoenix bus station where they went their separate way. Judicial Watch was present when one of the white vans carrying a group of OTMs arrived at the Phoenix Greyhound station on Buckeye Road.
And this is where the Mateen-G4S link emerges: as JW reported previously, a security company contracted by the U.S. government is driving the OTMs from the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector where they were in custody to Phoenix, sources said. The firm is the abovementioned G4S, the world’s leading security solutions group with operations in more than 100 countries and 610,000 employees. G4S has more than 50,000 employees in the U.S. and its domestic headquarters is in Jupiter, Florida.
Mateen’s father, Seddique Mateen, hosted a “shoestring” talk show in which he regularly unleashed anti-U.S. tirades and once praised the Taliban.
The timeline of the shooting shows, at the very least, massive misjudgment on the part of the police. The shooting started at 2:02 AM, but police don’t call in the SWAT team until 3 AM? And it’s another two hours before they storm the club? And all this after the shooter had called 911 to pledge allegiance to the Islamic State?
Reddit’s main news group evidently decided to censor mentions of the shooting once it became known that the shooter was a radical Muslim. They even censored posts providing information on blood donations.
For years, too many Americans – including the lion’s share of our elite media and most of our politicians — have been content to deny the obvious, namely that quite a few Muslims espouse beliefs that are deeply at odds with what the vast majority of Americans believe. Some of those Muslims openly advocate violence and, if they are otherwise maladjusted, the odds they may murder in the name of Islam increase commensurately. We need to have a robust national debate on this important issue. Donald Trump has opened the door to that discussion, in his customary brusque, ham-handed way. More tact is required, but we cannot put off talking about radical Islam and jihadism any longer.
After the Bataclan massacre last autumn, the French government in effect went to war with radical Islam, pledging a “merciless” response to terrorism. This wasn’t just talk. Mass arrests of suspected radicals followed, dealing a serious blow to ISIS networks in the country. Paris meant business, finally.
In the aftermath of our own Bataclan, President Obama has offered his usual platitudes about “hate” and “guns.” This is escapism-as-counterterrorism-policy. Americans must demand better, including a reality-based assessment of our terrorism threat, from our next commander-in-chief. If we cannot name our enemy, we are already halfway to losing the war.
Milo Yiannopoulos weighs in: “The Christian Right may not be totally down with homos, and Trump may say things that hurt our delicate feelings, but they aren’t going to kill us or put us in camps. Only Islam would do that — the same Islam that, bizarrely, now stands at the top of the left’s hierarchy of victimhood.”
As today is a made-up celebration called “Earth Day,” be sure to have beef for dinner…
Reminder: “Officials at VA’s Phoenix hospital manipulated wait-time data to make it appear they were connecting doctors and veterans seeking appointments much faster than they actually were. This was done so VA managers at the Arizona facility could keep getting generous performance bonuses. They got their bonuses but dozens of waiting veterans died.” So how did the VA address the problem? They hired someone accused of doing the exact same thing at another hospital.
Following a congressional subpoena over Benghazi, Hillary’s state department staff hid requested files in another department. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
How Ted Cruz could beat Hillary Clinton. “Clinton is entering the general election with glaring vulnerabilities of her own. Her image is toxic to Republicans and independents, and her popularity among Democrats is now at an all-time low as a presidential candidate, according to Gallup’s polling. It won’t take a top-tier Republican candidate to win.” Also: “Cruz consistently runs far more competitively against Clinton than Trump does.”
“It’s not just Wall Street banks. Most companies and groups that paid Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to speak between 2013 and 2015 have lobbied federal agencies in recent years, and more than one-third are government contractors, an Associated Press review has found. Their interests are sprawling and would follow Clinton to the White House should she win election this fall.”
“Although our panel’s original estimates had Trump finishing with 1,175 pledged delegates, my revised deterministic projections have him at 1,155, and the probabilistic version has him at 1,159.”
“Walden is less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.”
My contract technical writing position ended, so I’ve been busy looking for a new job (if you know of one, drop me a line). As such, this LinkSwarm is a bit out of band. I’ve been busy.
“Free of the pension costs and union contracts that weighed down its previous owners, Hostess has nurtured retail sales of its products nearly back to their pre-liquidation level of more than $1.3 billion in 2012, with a fraction of the workers. The old Hostess—which included other brands—employed some 19,000 people. The Twinkies purveyor these days has just 1,100.”
Larry Correia fisks that idiot Lorraine D. Wilke piece about how writers shouldn’t write fast, where Correia discusses greedy desire that his children wear shoes.
Heh: “Extension Cord On Stage Steals Spotlight From Jeb Bush During Campaign Rally.”
Austin had a very, very wet spring, but August is shaping up in normal fashion: Bone dry and hot as hell. Try to keep cool and enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:
Politicized or not, the DOJ will be increasingly boxed in by the FBI and intelligence community investigations. Normally, when the intelligence community finds classified materials in unauthorized locations, it seeks felony prosecutions. Gen. David Petraeus was sunk for keeping his own personal calendars in an unlocked drawer at home. The calendars were deemed classified, even if they lacked an official stamp. President Clinton’s CIA Director, John Deutsch, lost his job and security clearance for using his portable computer at home. It had classified material on it. Those violations are trifling compared to Hillary Clinton’s exposure.
Someone spilled millions of gallons of toxic waste into a river! Call the EPA! Oh wait, it was the EPA.
Islamic State executes 300 electoral civil servants in Iraq. Good thing we’ve got Nobel Prize winner Barack Obama sowing peace and stability to the Middle East rather than that warmongering bungler Bush… (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)
China devalues the Yuan. This is Big Freaking News, but hard to conceptualize, since China’s economic statistics are have not even a nodding acquaintance with reality, and haven’t for at least a decade. So is China’s current bubble bad, or super mega world-shatterling bad?
Cop-killing inmate dies in prison riot. Alas, my electron microscope is being recalibrated, so I won’t be able to find the proper sized violin to commemorate this sad occasion… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Social Justice Warriors continue their war on comedy on campus.
Man arrested for shooting at police in Ferguson was completely unarmed. Except for his guns.
I was queuing up a LinkSwarm for Monday when it occurred to me that I have more than enough links on the fallout from the Bergdahl swap to put up a separate post, so here it is:
The entire Obama Administration seems shocked at the fact that those bitter, gun-clinging freaks from Jesusland who make our military actually have values. “The bitter criticism of Kerry in 2004 and Bergdahl today would carry no force if it came from mere ‘right-wingers.’ It comes, instead, from servicemen and veterans who see the two men as having behaved dishonorably. Once again the left is being undone by its failure to comprehend the centrality of honor to military culture.”
“Instead of just bringing Bergdahl back, they had to do the full kissy-huggy announcement with mom and dad figuring this good news would push the VA mess off the front page.”
For many in the military, the stupidity of thinking behind the Bergdahl swap (and how it was accomplished) was the last straw. “They have lost all respect for their commander in chief.”
“Perhaps President Obama stumbled into an announcement of the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl that was ignorant and insulting to those who serve our country in uniform, but his subsequent reaction to the criticism it has provoked is a disgrace.”
For a dissenting opinion on the right, Charles Krauthammer says he would have done the Bergdahl deal. Though I doubt he would have had the Rose Garden photo op, or been as sanctimonious about his own unerring judgment.”
If you want to see how quickly consensus wisdom can change as the facts come to light, take a look at the 180º turn in opinion on the five Taliban leaders for Bowe Bergdahl exchange.
UN Ambassador Susan Rice also hailed the exchange, saying that Bergdahl’s poor health was a factor in making the swap and that he had “served the United States with honor and distinction.”
All in all, it seemed like the perfect media event to distract public attention from the VA scandal. Republicans were criticized for complaining that swapping five high value Taliban commanders for one soldier was a mistake.
Then it came to light that Bergdahl was not universally loved among his comrades in arms, to put in mildly. “Bergdahl was a deserter, and soldiers from his own unit died trying to track him down.”
The revelation of Bergdahl’s desertion seemed to blindside the Obama Administration. It shouldn’t have. Never mind that it should have been able to find that out before the swap from its own internal military reports. (If not, then there’s a “thermocline of truth” in the chain of command even more serious than previously suspected.) For an Administration that claims it first learns of its own scandals from the media, it should have learned about Bergdahl’s desertion no later than June 7, 2012, when Rolling Stone published an extensive profile on Bergdahl and his status as a prisoner of war:
Bowe Bergdahl had a different response. He decided to walk away.
In the early-morning hours of June 30th, according to soldiers in the unit, Bowe approached his team leader not long after he got off guard duty and asked his superior a simple question: If I were to leave the base, would it cause problems if I took my sensitive equipment?
Yes, his team leader responded – if you took your rifle and night-vision goggles, that would cause problems.
Bowe returned to his barracks, a roughly built bunker of plywood and sandbags. He gathered up water, a knife, his digital camera and his diary. Then he slipped off the outpost.
Even those notorious right-swing shills at The New York Timesreport that Bergdahl “slipped away from his outpost.”
Team Obama and its base cannot comprehend the values still cherished by those young Americans “so dumb” they joined the Army instead of going to prep school and then to Harvard. Values such as duty, honor, country, physical courage, and loyalty to your brothers and sisters in arms have no place in Obama World. (Military people don’t necessarily all like each other, but they know they can depend on each other in battle — the sacred trust Bergdahl violated.)
As for Rice, Ralph Peters noted “At least she didn’t blame Bergdahl’s desertion on a video.”
Then footage emerged of the Taliban handing over Bergdahl, which did not seem to indicate he was in particularly frail physical health. (Mentally? Well, Blinky McDeserter obviously has some issues…)
Even Obama’s usual defenders in the media are questioning the exchange:
Now Obama’s State Department (and liberal Administration defenders) are saying that “there are a ton of conflicting reports”. This is such a general purpose cop-out I’m surprised we don’t hear it from the Obama Administration more often. “Did the IRS target conservative groups?” “There are a ton of conflicting reports…”
The fact that liberal opinion has swung from “This was a triumph for Obama and Republicans look petty for raining on his parade” to “we don’t have enough information to judge yet” tells you all you need to know about the optics…
I spent a few minutes on the phone yesterday and today with Dr. Joe Agris, who recently filed as a Republican for the Texas Senate race.
As previously mentioned, Dr. Agris is a plastic surgeon who has done numerous good works, many in association with late Houston broadcasting legend Marvin Zindler (who frequently made use of Dr. Agris services). Dr. Agris waged a campaign for Texas House District 134 in 2008, losing in the general election. “That was Obama’s year. All Republicans in Harris County lost.”
I asked why he was running. He said that voters will “trust a doctor” more than politicians, who he accused of having “constipation of thought and diarrhea of words.” He said his biggest issue was the budget deficit. “The federal government needs a balanced budget amendment.”
ObamaCare was also a particular target of the doctor’s ire: “This Obama medical bill is just an atrocity. We have to get rid of it. The medical care in this country is just going downhill.”
He also had some stinging criticisms of the current state of American healthcare, noting how rules might require a patient to undergo an increasingly expensive series of tests, when only the first and last may be necessary. “If you don’t do things step by step, Medicare and insurance won’t pay for it. 50% of the doctors in my hospital don’t take Medicare. If these cuts go through in February, it will be closer to 100%.”
Dr. Agris also complained about the short-sighted nature of the federal government. “China is our biggest threat. They have plans out to 100 years, and we can’t plan out two weeks. We just have knee-jerk responses. We need 1-year, 2-year, 5- or 10-year plans.”
Given his concern over the deficit, I asked him which programs would he cut. That gave him pause. He finally named foreign aid and military deployments overseas.
He was particularly critical of our efforts in an area he’s visited many times. “I just got back from Afghanistan and Pakistan. We’re not doing any good over there. They just want to take our money.”
Dr. Agris said he had the financial resources to wage a serious senate campaign. “I’ll self-fund some, and we’ll raise some.”
Dr. Agris sounds like an interesting guy, and might have more resources to campaign with than some other longshots. But he’s entered the race very late indeed, he’s virtually unknown outside of Houston, he’s facing three well-organized, well-funded candidates who have been running hard most of the year (plus a fourth, Craig James, who has much higher name recognition than Dr. Agris), and so far it does not sound like he’s thought through the intellectual and organizational demands it takes to run a serious Senate campaign in state as large as Texas. And the good doctor’s Brooklyn accent may not play well statewide.
But I do thank Dr. Agris, both for his many previous good works and for taking the time to speak with me.
Sometimes different stories you’re following twine together in weird and unexpected ways. Today it’s news from MEMRI that former mujahideen commander, Islamic radical, and all-around-asshole Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is taking credit for inspiring Occupy Wall Street.
If you don’t remember Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, he first rose to prominence as commander of the Hezb-i islami faction of the mujahideen fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Fighting the Soviets was pretty much the last decent thing Hekmatyar ever did, and he wasn’t very good at it, especially compared to his chief rival, Ahmed Shah Massoud, commander of Jamiat-i Islami, who was one of the greatest guerrilla warfare commanders of the 20th century. If “Hezb-i islami” sounds an awful lot like “Hezbollah,” that’s because they’re both different branches of the same transnational affiliation of radical Shia Islamic fundamentalism. Hekmatyar the sort of guy who thought the Ayatollah Khomeini was too much of liberal softie. Hekmatyar spent almost as much time fighting Massoud as he did fighting the Soviets, and after the Soviets left he changed sides so many times in the various Afghan civil wars that followed (in the government, out of the government, with the Taliban, against the Taliban, etc.) that it’s hard to keep track. He was also one of Osama Bin Laden’s drinking buddies in the 1990s. Pretty much anytime he showed up was bad news for Afghanistan, and now he’s one of the head jerks fighting the Afghan government.
Now he’s taking credit for “inspiring” Occupy Wall Street. Yeah, right. I think you would be hard-pressed to find anyone at Occupy Wall Street that had even heard of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (or even any foreign political figure before Bush43 that isn’t featured on a t-shirt).
America’s victory in Iraq broke the back of Al-Qaeda and left Osama bin Laden’s dream in ruins. He died a defeated fanatic in his Abbotabad hideaway; his dream was crushed in the Mesopotamian flatlands where he swore it would win…The tragedies of Iraq are real and well known. The victory is equally real—but the politically fastidious don’t want to look. The minimum we owe our lost and wounded warriors is to tell the story of what they so gloriously achieved.
I walk my dog in the local park, and last year on Veteran’s Day I came across this memorial bench for Cpl. Chad Eric Oligschlaeger, which I had seen before, but which this time was festooned for the occasion:
Here’s a closeup of the plaque on the bench:
I thought doing a post on the late Cpl. Oligschlaeger might provide a somber but uplifting story for Memorial Day, but in researching him, I found his story was a lot sadder than most. He didn’t die in combat (despite doing two tours in Iraq), but died due to “accidental death due to multiple drug toxicity,” the drugs in question being various prescription drugs he was taking to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder while waiting (over half a year) for a spot to open up in a PTSD treatment center.
A list of Texas casualties from Operation Iraqi Freedom can be found here.
One Texas Medal of Honor recipient who died recently was David H. McNerney, who died October 10, 2010. His citation reads:
Rank and organization: First Sergeant, U.S. Army, Company A, 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry, 4th Infantry Division. place and date: polei Doc, Republic of Vietnam, 22 March 1967. Entered service at: Fort Bliss, Tex. Born: 2 June 1931, Lowell, Mass. Citation: 1st Sgt. McNerney distinguished himself when his unit was attacked by a North Vietnamese battalion near polei Doc. Running through the hail of enemy fire to the area of heaviest contact, he was assisting in the development of a defensive perimeter when he encountered several enemy at close range. He killed the enemy but was painfully injured when blown from his feet by a grenade. In spite of this injury, he assaulted and destroyed an enemy machinegun position that had pinned down 5 of his comrades beyond the defensive line. Upon learning his commander and artillery forward observer had been killed, he assumed command of the company. He adjusted artillery fire to within 20 meters of the position in a daring measure to repulse ??enemy assaults. When the smoke grenades used to mark the position were gone, he moved into a nearby clearing to designate the location to friendly aircraft. In spite of enemy fire he remained exposed until he was certain the position was spotted and then climbed into a tree and tied the identification panel to its highest branches. Then he moved among his men readjusting their position, encouraging the defenders and checking the wounded. As the hostile assaults slackened, he began clearing a helicopter landing site to evacuate the wounded. When explosives were needed to remove large trees, he crawled outside the relative safety of his perimeter to collect demolition material from abandoned rucksacks. Moving through a fusillade of fire he returned with the explosives that were vital to the clearing of the landing zone. Disregarding the pain of his injury and refusing medical evacuation 1st Sgt. McNerney remained with his unit until the next day when the new commander arrived. First Sgt. McNerney’s outstanding heroism and leadership were inspirational to his comrades. His actions were in keeping with the highest traditions of the U.S. Army and reflect great credit upon himself and the Armed Forces of his country.
When I first read on Ace of Spades that Obama intended to let our soldiers go without paychecks during the shutdown, I was somewhat incredulous. After all, even Obama should be able to see how lousy the “optics” are with withholding paychecks from troops involved in no less than three wars kinetic military actions overseas. Surely not even Obama could be that stupid?
To dramatize the issue, I’ve actually created a small film about the topic. I’ve taken the details of who all will still be getting checks in a shutdown from this piece up on Reason (which was, in turn, taken from The New York Times, saving you the 15 seconds it would have taken you to defeat the paywall…) Keep in mind that I’m putting it up in advance of the actual shutdown, so the details may vary…
I did this quick and dirty, and I didn’t see any actually U.S. soldiers as part of any character sets…
