Friends,
I am a member of a blog group of current and former Naval Intelligence personnel. We may receive anywhere from five to 20 emails a day concerning open source intelligence information from around the world. While it is very tempting to slide from intelligence issues into religious or political arenas, the moderator is very diligent in keeping everyone on track. However, tonight I received an email about the new head of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), Lt. General Ronnie Hawkins, USAF.

In a brief that he gave to agency employees that he titled “Ronnie’s Rules,” he gave an outline of his 18 priorities. His lead-off slide stated, “Always put God first, and stay within His will.” The last slide stated, “Always remember God is good – all the time!” To say that some of his employees were “concerned” would be an understatement. For many decades now it has been taboo for commanders, or anyone other than official military chaplains to speak of God. Some person who, I believe, has no regard for America took an obscure passage from a Thomas Jefferson letter and blew it up into the creed of separation of church and state.

The moderator of the Naval Intelligence blog group sent out a note that this type of posting was not appropriate for this forum. Normally I agree with this type of decision when members get into political or religious discussions but in this case I cannot agree.

One of our learned and well-reasoned members has made an outstanding argument that we as intelligence professionals should be very concerned about the religious nature of our country and military. He made the point from the view of infiltration of subversive elements. These elements have taken place over the life of our country but have increased over the past 60 or so years. Of particular concern is the infiltration of anti-American thought which has seeped into our education system to the point that now very little if any American thought is taught in our schools. Even our sitting president has called the US “a Muslim nation.” At this point in time that is only wishful thinking; but wait another 10 years and that may not be the case.

We as intelligence professionals should be very concerned with this infiltration. Of course, most of us are retired or no longer on active duty so we can look at and study any open source material on any arena we wish. Unfortunately, those on active duty cannot do this due to Executive Order 12333. This E.O. prohibits national level intelligence agencies from looking within the borders of the US. But those of us on the “gray beard” side of the line can look at these issues as they concern us.

But somebody in the Intelligence Community (IC) had better be doing it with the view of the Muslims striving to force Sharia law on us. At this time in our history, the main stream media will only identify the bad guys by name and/or nationality. For instance, an illegal Moroccan immigrant was caught just a few days ago in a plot to bomb the US Capitol. Does anyone want to bet he was Muslim and was planning on this deed as a way to further his religion?

When we look at our own history we need to go back to the Founders. Those of you who have read these pages over the years know that I love referring back to the Founders. In the late 1700s and early 1800s no man was more revered in the United States than George Washington. He led our country to freedom and brought this new nation through the harsh transition from war to an effective new type of government; one that had never been tried. It has been reported that he spent at least one hour each morning in prayerful contemplation of the Bible. In his farewell address published on 19 September 1796, he wrote:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Would Washington approve of the chastisement military leaders such as Lt. Gen Hawkins are sure to receive? We should be looking at this issue from two points of view. First and foremost is the moral character of our country. God has been taken out of our schools. The primary reading primer of the 1800s was the Bible. I contend the morality of our country was on a much higher plane than it is today. When you look at the debauchery that is depicted in the entertainment industry I can only imagine what the Founders would think if they were to see it.

The other point of view that is equally important is that of examining those forces seeking to destroy the very core of our country; Muslims who are striving to institute Sharia law within our country. A number of states have already passed laws stating that no foreign laws are to be considered when cases are brought before the bench. When these laws are passed, the Muslims scream. They say it is a violation of the First Amendment and therefore unconstitutional.

Really? Is it unconstitutional to uphold the laws of the United States? Is it really wrong for a commander to tell his employees where he stands on the issue of his faith? Just remember, there is NO language in the Constitution dictating a separation of church and state.

As always, I welcome your comments and discussion,

Dan

Friends,

This morning a coworker and I were discussing the increased use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or as the mass media lumps them, drones. UAVs are used for a wide variety of tasks today that just 10 years ago were the purview of manned aircraft, requiring a human in the cockpit to execute the mission. That mission could be anything from taking reconnaissance pictures to bombing the bad guys who are shooting at the good guys.

The conversation twisted around to the ever encroaching sterility of war as seen by our populace. I won’t address the rest of the people in the world. When we look back on the wars of the last 150 years this country has been involved in we see that they were much different in the area of casualties. Probably the most horrific war this country has seen was the Civil War. Hundreds of thousands of young men were killed in individual battles. There was scarcely a family in the United States that wasn’t affected by the war. Those that survived often were scarred mentally and physically.

Looking ahead to World War I and World War II, while the loss of American lives was not as heavy, they were still national efforts because we, the citizens of this great country knew that losing those wars would have irreparably change our way of life and our way of government, not to mention our national language.

In the Korean and Vietnamese wars, there was no chance of a direct attack on the US mainland from our foes; there was still a national effort, no matter how unpopular. The American people sent their young to fight and die for our national interests. Many scars came out of those conflicts, both on the warriors and the families.

Now, let’s fast-forward to Iraq and Afghanistan. When you look at the magnificent young men and women fighting and supporting those efforts, they are almost viewed as being in a vacuum. Looking around today life goes on much the way it did before September 11, 2001. We are in our second president’s term and everyone is concerned about the next shoe to drop out of Congress or the administration but there is very little talk of progress, or lack thereof, being made in Kandahar, or the increased bombing in Iraq.

In short, the country is either completely ignorant of what is going on in the Middle East or they have become so calloused as to be unaffected. Please don’t misunderstand me, massive numbers of soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen, and their families are deeply affected by these conflicts. But how affected is the general public? In World War II we had campaigns for scrap metal, war bonds, and rationing. Now our forces are much smaller and more high tech and the bad guy they are fighting is 8,000 miles away. Why should we care back here? I won’t go into the possibility of success or failure in Afghanistan, which is another issue. My concern is the concern felt by the American public; what used to be called National Will.

A few days ago I read a story about Hezbollah developing relationships with the Mexican drug cartels. This is a terrorist group that is supported directly by Iran. Unfortunately, Iran is the Big Daddy Rabbit in the terrorist game. Their only major rival in that contest is the Muslim Brotherhood. I consider al Qaida as a subsidiary of the Brotherhood.

The Mexican cartels already have almost unfettered access across our southern border and with the developing partnerships with Hezbollah they will have the same access.

Now the military is leaning heavily on the use of UAVs to do those tasks we used to send young men into harm’s way for. Personally, I would much rather see an unmanned piece of machinery shot at than one of my shipmates. But this further sterilizes the conflicts in which we are engaged. The average citizen has not been made aware of what is at stake if the forces of evil are allowed to have their way anywhere at any time. The reason for “The War on Terror” has not been fully explained to the American public sufficiently to get the message across.

The unfortunate side effect of this sterility is that Americans will be extremely surprised when large numbers of coordinated attacks take place right here at home, in our own neighborhoods, churches, malls, and schools. Those attacks will be perpetrated by those same Muslim terrorists crossing the border with the aid of the cartels.

I can’t help but wonder if anyone at the Department of Homeland Defense has any clue what-so-ever as to how many Muslim terrorists have crossed our southern border. We are already aware of numerous Muslim terrorist training camps located within our borders. Couple the graduates of those training camps with the Muslim terrorists crossing our borders and you have a recipe for disaster on a grand scale. I am not talking about another 9-11, I am talking about a massive number of coordinated incidents, whether suicide bombers, snipers, or improvised explosive devices.

Our military is fielding many marvelous implements to aid our troops but are utterly failing at telling the American public why they are doing it. It is my belief that this administration is charging full speed ahead while wearing blinders. They don’t have a clue how to address the situation with the American public and we will be caught flat-footed.

As always, I welcome your comments and questions.

Dan

Friends,

Boy! Yesterday’s posting caused quite a discussion today. One of my coworkers had had a long lonely drive the day before and had a lot of time to think. Needless to say, he came into the conversation with his ruminations. He brought a very intriguing idea on how to collect taxes.

Bottom line up front; the IRS goes away and the admin section of the treasury department shrinks down to about 100 people. Of course with the fed’s propensity to manufacture money the mints would have to keep running as well as the secret service.

First the setup; remember that there are 435 representatives in the House. Each representative elected represents approximately the same number of US citizens.

OK, here’s the plan. Each year, Congress would determine the
budget for the next year, just like they are supposed to do now. The figure Congress decides is required for running the federal government is divided by 435, the number of representatives. That number is multiplied by the number of representatives in each state. That final figure is entered on a bill that the greatly reduced treasury admin section will send to the governor of the state as what the state owes for the next year.

Let’s put some numbers to it for an example. Let’s say Congress decides it will take $2T to run the government for the next year. $2T / 435 = $4,597,701,149. This represents the prorated amount due from each representative district. Let’s say a state has 10 representatives. $4,597,701,149 X 10 = $45,977,011,490. This represents the amount that state would owe the federal government for the next year’s expenses.

The state is free to determine the method of collecting that money. It could be all income tax, property tax, sales tax, or any combination of taxes. This takes the federal government out of the tax collecting business and gives more control to the states where it belongs.

This is where my contribution to the plan comes in. One thing that needs to happen is to repeal the 17^th amendment. This is the amendment that put the election of senators in the hands of the voters. I believe that senators should be directly answerable to the state legislatures and the governor as originally intended. The reason is coming below. Now back to my friend’s plan.

When the governor of the State of Confused receives his bill from the federal government and looks at this enormous figure, he will have someone who is accountable to him to call home and have stand tall on the carpet in front of his desk and tell, “this bill is too much, take it back and get it reduced!” Since the Senator works for the governor and legislature, he has to comply with his bosses’ wishes and goes back to DC to say that he is getting too much heat and that the budget needs to be reduced. As it stands right now, senators have a very high plausible deniability factor in that they can always point to someone in the state and say that they are doing what the voters wanted. In this way we may have some hope of reining in the profligate spending that is a constant in DC.

This is obviously a very simple description of what would have to happen for this plan to work but I thought it was brilliant in its simplicity. I have long been a fan of the Fair Tax (as long as it comes with a repeal of the 16^th amendment) but this one makes more sense than any plan I have seen to date.

As always, I welcome your comments and discussion.

Dan

Friends,

Well, we now have an agreement to saddle our great grandchildren with even more debt that they will not be able to pay. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats seem to have a clue to what it takes to manage a budget. It’s not that tough. You determine what you have coming in and adjust your spending to fit into that parameter.  Of course it has not been done since 1957.

We all know that it is not the goal of government to operate on the same basis as we mere citizens have to operate our own households. Something happens to politicians when they go to Washington to “govern” us. Over the past couple of weeks I have learned that our government borrows 40% of everything they spend. I guess that has never been a secret, but it finally sunk into my thought process.

As I have written on numerous occasions there is a way to balance the budget and pay off the debt that has been accumulated over the past couple of hundred years.

What is the most effective and efficient way for government to raise revenue? Increase the number of taxpayers. In April of this year the Congressional Research Service published “Analysis of an Estimate of the Total Costs of Federal Regulations.” They determined the cost of federal regulations for 2008 was $1.75 trillion. That is an enormous burden on the backs of American business. Imagine how many new employees businesses could hire; imagine the growth of those businesses if they did not have the regulations and the associated financial burden hanging over them.

Now imagine the new employees and growth if corporate taxes were reduced to a manageable level. I could envision a maximum of 15%. Just these two areas would spur such a growth in economic activity that businesses and government would have trouble keeping track of it.

Just today, the Secretary of Homeland Defense, Janet Napolitano, announced initiatives to draw foreign investors and businesses to come to the United States to set up shop. Is that because all of the regulations have driven the wage payers out of business? Is it because US businesses cannot pay new employees because of the onerous taxes and cost of regulation compliance?

But that is only the first part of the cure. As someone recently said, we don’t have a budget deficit problem, we have a spending problem. This has to be stopped. The best guideline to use to curb the spending is the Constitution.

No place in that revered document does it mention that it is the responsibility of the federal government to regulate education; nowhere does it say that the federal government is to take the side of labor to bring business to its knees; and in a more recent issue, the government has absolutely no business getting into citizens’ health issues.

These are only a very few areas that the federal government has no business. Conversely, Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution expressly states the responsibilities and powers of the Congress. Paragraph 15 states that “Congress shall have the power….To provide for the calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel Invasions” (emphasis added). When is Congress going to take this responsibility seriously? In fact, looking over Section 8, it looks like the only responsibility Congress has decided to execute is paragraph 2, “To borrow Money on the credit of the United States.” They really have gotten this one down.

Challenging this Congress and Administration to curb spending and vote to keep the United States of America off welfare is like asking Hitler to be nice to Jews. So I will end by saying that it is time for all of us Americans to tell Congress and this Administration that they have diddled around with our wallets for the last time. They have been riding rough shod over us for years, now it is our turn.

As always, I welcome your comments and discussion.

Dan

PS: On a personal note, I am really rising in the polls, so far, three people have promised to vote for me for president, only 200,000,000 to go.

Friends,

Boy! Where do I start? The news in the past few weeks has been going crazy with uprisings and revolution around the globe. Let’s review some of the big ones.

• It all started with Tunisia. In January, the president of that country was ousted by a popular uprising. It is now being reported that he had a stroke two days ago and is in a hospital in Saudi Arabia in a coma.
• Next on the Hit Parade is Egypt. Just 10 days ago, Hosni Mubarak, the 30 year president, was ousted by a popular uprising. The military now controls the country. The citizens of Egypt normally think very highly of their military but now there seems to be a change in attitude. The ruling military council has promised to hold a referendum on democratic elections within two months. The populous is dubious.
• In Morocco, pro-reform protests have been scheduled via Facebook. The government has announced that it will be injecting over $1.5b in subsidies for basic goods in an effort to stave off a repeat of the actions of Tunisia and Egypt.
• In Algeria, “student protests” have taken place and the government, in an effort to quell them, has promised to lift the 19 year old state of emergency.
• Yemen has been boiling for a couple of weeks. Demonstrators have taken to the street in Aden and Al-Mansura demanding the resignation of the president. Police have used deadly force to break up the protests.
• In one of the US’ most trusted allies in the Persian Gulf region, Bahrain, police have killed at least four demonstrators as of 17 Feb. I understand that most of the police are Pakistani and they do what the signer of the paycheck says. The royal family does not seem to be listening to its citizens. This seems to be a Shiite vs. Sunni clash. The Shia are claiming that they are second class citizens in the country. This unrest puts the docking agreement for the US 5^th Fleet in question.
• Most recently, Libya closely resembles Egypt of a couple of weeks ago. There is some question as to the whereabouts of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. Yesterday, the government made a statement that he had NOT fled the country. This is normally an indication that the subject has left in a hasty fashion.  His son Seif al-Islam tried to place himself in a leadership role but has been rebuffed by the crowds. Libya will fall soon if not already.

These are just a few of the uprisings that have/are taking place across the Arab world. While the MSM is not reporting such, it is my belief that the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) has a strong hand in these events. As I discussed in my Discourse “Arab Falling Dominos,” the coalescing of Arab nations under the loose federation enabled by the MB can have disastrous consequences for our border enforcement. This is a segment of earth’s humanity that wants to destroy our way of life. If the Arabs develop a unified plan of action against “The Great Satan,” we could see increased terrorist infiltration across our southern border.

Just yesterday, 20 Feb, a Muslim cleric, Anjem Choudary, announced that he is calling for a protest outside of the White House in March in an effort to rally American Muslims to establish Sharia law in the United States. Conventional American wisdom would say that this protest will be sparsely attended and be shouted down by counter protests. However, we are seeing in the Arab world that the organization with which events have been orchestrated over the past two months has been extraordinary. There could be a lot more Muslim marchers than conventional American wisdom would expect.

There is a large and growing Muslim population in the US and they want to be counted. They may now think the time is right to push for acceptance of pockets of Sharia as they have in the UK. Also, don’t forget the over 30 Muslim terrorist training camps currently operating in the US. These camps are populated with a large number of recruits from Americas’ prisons. In short, these are bad people who feel no loyalty to the United States.

What is our government going to do about it? The short answer is, probably nothing. What would I do? The OWH is determined to hire thousands of new IRS agents to get into the lives of honest hard working Americans. OK, I would agree to hiring thousands of new government personnel, but not to spy on Americans, but to secure our borders. What is happening on our southern border is an invasion. It must be repulsed! Not just because of the illegal Mexican and other Latin Americans coming across to soak our national treasure, but because of the terrorists that are and potentially will come to do us harm.

I have asked the OWH before, “When are you going to execute your primary job? When are you going to undertake to protect the United States?” Of course, we know the answer to that question.

But who am I to criticize the OWH? I am just a patriotic American citizen who loves this country. Unfortunately, the OWH shares neither of those attributes.

As always, I welcome your comments and discussion.

Dan