Secure Freedom Minute

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Yesterday, President Trump’s National Security Advisor marked with a major policy address the anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion – the last, tragically failed, U.S.-supported effort to free the Cuban people and their counterparts throughout the hemisphere from the curse of Castro-style oppression. 

Particularly afflicted by such oppression at the moment are many millions of increasingly desperate Venezuelans suffering at the hands of a communist regime propped up Cuba and other foreign powers. To his credit, John Bolton announced several new sanctions designed to penalize and otherwise counter these nations’ interventions in Venezuela.  

We’ll see if such measures will prove sufficient to enable an end to Nicholas Maduro’s tyrannical misrule and the legitimate government of Juan Guaido to come to power. But cutting off the life-support Maduro has been receiving from Havana, Moscow, Beijing and Tehran is unquestionably a necessary precondition. 

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

For years, the immediate response by the FBI or other authorities to many a terrorist attack has been official denials that it was a terrorist attack. The effect has been to reduce the public’s situational awareness about actual threats in our midst and to erode confidence in our officials. The practice may even embolden our enemies.

When the facts eventually make such dissembling untenable, it is usually rationalized as an action deemed necessary to prevent increased sectarian tensions and possible violent retaliation. 

It was, therefore, as Yogi Bera famously quipped, “déjà vu all over again” when French leaders ruled out arson as the cause of the fire that consumed Notre Dame cathedral in Paris even before it was extinguished. That may ultimately prove to be the case, but it cannot be determined without a proper investigation. And the facts must out.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

On Friday, President Trump reiterated his commitment to America triumphing in the competition for the fifth- generation of wireless technology. He declared that, “Secure 5G networks will absolutely be a vital link to America’s prosperity and national security in the 21st Century….We cannot allow any other country to out-compete the United States in this powerful industry….It’s a race that we will win.”

To do that, he is “freeing up as much wireless spectrum as needed…and removing regulatory barriers to the buildout of [5G] networks.”

For Mr. Trump’s vision to be realized, however, a different approach is going to be needed – one featuring a wholesale, free-market spectrum auction allowing numerous 5G companies to utilize bandwidths allocated to the U.S. military. Such competition could generate a trillion-dollar reduction in mobile phone costs, while enabling America to achieve a secure network and lead the world.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Since Ilhan Omar entered Congress, she has become notorious for her serial anti-Semitism. Her latest outrage, though, was a statement supporting the Council on American Islamic Relations, better known as CAIR.

It featured a blithely dismissive – and reprehensible – description of the 9/11 attacks as “somebody did something.” Another, unremarked affront was its  preposterous claim that CAIR was founded to address the restriction of Muslims’ civil rights in the wake of that murderous “something.”

Actually, the U.S. government has proven in federal court that CAIR was established by the designated terrorist organization known as Hamas in the early 1990s. And, as Zionist Organization of America president Morton Klein documented in congressional testimony this week, the problem of so-called “Islamophobia” doesn’t begin to compare to the threat posed by the anti-Semitism inherent in Islam’s Sharia-supremacism embraced by CAIR and its enabler, Ilhan Omar.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Attorney General William Barr told Congress yesterday that he believed the Trump campaign had been subjected to “spying” during and after the 2016 election. President Trump described what he has experienced as nothing less than a “coup.”

Heads exploded all over official Washington. Particularly outraged were Democrats on Capitol Hill, who have endlessly touted an alternative investigation into what they have insistently alleged – despite the absence of comparable evidence – was Trump “collusion” with Russia to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton. They want no part of what might be called a “coup-lusion” inquiry into her partisans in government’s role in trying to help Hillary steal it from him.

Mr. Barr must, of course, pursue the actual evidence wherever it leads.  And if, as seems likely, it confirms that a stealth coup was mounted by Obama administration operatives, justice must be served.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Yesterday, prominent national security practitioners raised alarms about the Chinese Communist Party’s growing and multifaceted threats to America and the rest of the world. 

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Senator Ted Cruz, Congressman Chris Stewart and former Trump Strategic Advisor Steve Bannon joined members of the Committee on the Present Danger: China in conveying an urgent message: The PRC is making steady progress towards becoming the world’s dominant power. Should that happen, our prosperity, vital interests, security and freedoms would be imperiled.

Speaker Gingrich noted three ominous strategic victories Communist China has already secured: Its seizure of and effective control over the South China Sea; its empire-building inroads in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe; and its possibly irreversible ascendancy in the global 5G wireless market.

A present danger, indeed.

This is Frank Gaffney. Learn more at PresentDangerChina.org.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

The Trump administration took another, critically important step in its challenge to Iran’s despotic ayatollahs and their Sharia-supremacist regime. In announcing the decision to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization, Secretary of State  Mike Pompeo said the objective is to “deprive the world's leading state-sponsor of terror the financial means to spread misery and death.”

Mr. Pompeo noted that this adjunct to the Iranian military has the blood of more than 600 Americans on its hands.

Thank you, President Trump, for holding the government of Iran accountable for utilizing this proxy, and its two adjuncts – the Quds Force and Hezbollah – to wage terrifying jihad against us and our allies.

Next, the administration should designate the Muslim Brotherhood – a no-less-dangerous catalyst for jihadism that the Islamic doctrine of Sharia commands be employed to achieve its imposition worldwide.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

U.S. forces are being removed from Libya at that country descends further into bloody and destructive civil war, spiking oil prices and risking further regional instability.

This all began with the U.S.-led overthrow of a reliable, if unsavory, friend of the United States, Muammar Qaddafi.

The authorization for the reckless action that triggered the still-unfolding nightmare in Libya was reportedly contained in President Barack Obama’s Presidential Study Directive 11.  That classified document embraced the Muslim Brotherhood and its efforts to remove U.S. allies across the Middle East, a project euphemistically packaged as “the Arab Spring.”

In order to understand the true, Sharia-supremacist nature of the Muslim Brotherhood, the threat it poses – abroad and at home – and how best to counter it, President Trump must declassify PSD-11.  The next step should be to designate the Brotherhood as the terrorist organization it is.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Communist China has reportedly launched a new initiative aimed at crushing Christianity in the country. 

Not content with blowing up churches, imprisoning clerics and worshipers and relentlessly employing totalitarian surveillance techniques, President Xi Jinping’s regime has taken to bribing informants to reveal the location of underground congregations. According to the U.K.’s Christian Institute, helping to identify and arrest preachers and members of religious groups can earn a bounty worth as much as two months’ average salary.

President Trump, Vice President Pence and their senior subordinates are deeply committed to halting the  persecution of Christians and other religious minorities. As they pursue a bilateral trade deal with the PRC intended to better serve the interests of the American people, they must not ignore a hard reality: A China that treats its own citizens badly is unlikely to keep any promises to help ours.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Hateful divisions afflict our society and politics. The Southern Poverty Law Center has made over half-a-billion dollars purportedly documenting the sources of such hate.

Increasing numbers of Americans have begun to learn what has long been evident to those of us the SPLC has viciously accused of promoting hatred and bigotry: Far from being an objective and honest monitor of such phenomena, the organization is itself a prime contributor to them.

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton recently requested that the Internal Revenue Service investigate this political warfare machine’s tax-exempt status, noting that “The SPLC’s defining characteristic is to fundraise off of defamation….While IRS guidance lists several examples of tax-exempt purposes, engaging in defamation as a business model is of course not one of them.”

Those who amplify and legitimate hate-mongering by the discredited SPLC must cease and desist, or be complicit in it.

This is Frank Gaffney.