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Archive for June, 2015
State Department Gun Regs Designed To Counter Defense Distributed Lawsuit
According to Sean Davis at The Federalist the new regulations are nothing more than retaliation against Defense Distributed:
On June 3, just four weeks after Defense Distributed filed its complaint in federal court, the State Department suddenly decided to propose a new rule giving it the authority to pre-approve speech related to publicly available firearm plans. The State Department’s play here is obvious: it hopes to promulgate a new rule making its previous anti-speech efforts superficially legal in order to short-circuit Defense Distributed’s court case. If that were to happen, the non-profit would then have to file a new and separate suit alleging the unconstitutionality of the new rule.
A Net Assessment of the Middle East
“A Net Assessment of the Middle East is republished with permission of Stratfor.”
The term “Middle East” has become enormously elastic. The name originated with the British Foreign Office in the 19th century. The British divided the region into the Near East, the area closest to the United Kingdom and most of North Africa; the Far East, which was east of British India; and the Middle East, which was between British India and the Near East. It was a useful model for organizing the British Foreign Office and important for the region as well, since the British — and to a lesser extent the French — defined not only the names of the region but also the states that emerged in the Near and Far East.
Today, the term Middle East, to the extent that it means anything, refers to the Muslim-dominated countries west of Afghanistan and along the North African shore. With the exception of Turkey and Iran, the region is predominantly Arab and predominantly Muslim. Within this region, the British created political entities that were modeled on European nation-states. The British shaped the Arabian Peninsula, which had been inhabited by tribes forming complex coalitions, into Saudi Arabia, a state based on one of these tribes, the Sauds. The British also created Iraq and crafted Egypt into a united monarchy. Quite independent of the British, Turkey and Iran shaped themselves into secular nation-states. Read the rest of this entry »
Border Patrol Helicopter Takes Gunfire Near Mexican Border
From Business Insider:
“The rounds penetrated and damaged the aircraft, forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing,” Lee told Reuters. The pilot was not injured and no one on the ground was affected by the emergency landing, she said.
Supreme Court Declines To Hear San Fran Gun Case
By declining to hear the case the Supreme Court has essentially given the “thumbs up” to this law and signaled to other cities that they may do the same.
From Yahoo News:
By declining to hear an appeal filed by gun owners and the National Rifle Association, the court left intact a March 2014 ruling by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld the measure.
The regulation, issued in 2007, states that anyone who keeps a handgun at home must either store it in a locked container or disable it with a trigger lock.
Feds Want To Restrict Talking About Guns On The Net
The State Department has proposed new ITAR rules that would cover merely talking about guns according to the NRA.
From The Washington Examiner:
…the NRA boiled it down for gun owners with this warning:
“In their current form, the ITAR do not (as a rule) regulate technical data that are in what the regulations call the ‘public domain.’ Essentially, this means data ‘which is published and which is generally accessible or available to the public’ through a variety of specified means. These include ‘at libraries open to the public or from which the public can obtain documents.’ Many have read this provision to include material that is posted on publicly available websites, since most public libraries these days make Internet access available to their patrons.
“The ITAR, however, were originally promulgated in the days before the Internet. Some State Department officials now insist that anything published online in a generally-accessible location has essentially been ‘exported,’ as it would be accessible to foreign nationals both in the U.S. and overseas.
“With the new proposal published on June 3, the State Department claims to be ‘clarifying’ the rules concerning ‘technical data’ posted online or otherwise ‘released’ into the ‘public domain.’ To the contrary, however, the proposal would institute a massive new prior restraint on free speech. This is because all such releases would require the ‘authorization’ of the government before they occurred. The cumbersome and time-consuming process of obtaining such authorizations, moreover, would make online communication about certain technical aspects of firearms and ammunition essentially impossible.”
China Building Islands In Disputed Territory
China is building islands on disputed reefs in the South China Sea. The U.S. Navy has just released reconnaissance video of just that.
ISIS Targeting Saudi Arabia
From Defense One:
But today, in Dammam, a city on the Saudi eastern coast, a man dressed as a woman blew himself up outside a Shiite mosque and killed three others. (The attack would have been far more devastating had guards not stopped the bomber from entering the mosque, forcing him back into a parking lot.) ISISnow is bragging that their man reached his target despite heightened security after the group’s first attack in the kingdom just eight days ago. That one, on another Shia mosque in a village called al Qadeeh, killed 21.
What these attacks say is that Riyadh doesn’t have the comforting control over its land that Americans like to believe it does. And if the royal family doesn’t have its territory as buttoned down as Washington assumed, what other weaknesses has it been masking? What other vulnerabilities are now on view?
From Foreign Policy:
The May 22 suicide attack in Qatif, in eastern Saudi Arabia, may indicate the impact of that shift. Late Friday morning, a suicide bomber walked into a Shiite mosque in Qatif, an oil-rich province in the country’s East, as worshippers gathered for prayer. The blast ripped through the Imam Ali mosque, killing at least 19 people and wounding dozens. Photos on social media showed casualties streaming frantically from the wreckage.According to the BBC, citing an Islamic State-linked Twitter account, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the assault.
Reflections on Ramadi
Posted by Brian in News, Opinion, Threat Watch on 1/Jun/2015 07:00
“Reflections on Ramadi is republished with permission of Stratfor.”
Analysis
Editor’s Note: This analysis was written by Stratfor’s lead military analyst, Paul Floyd, who served in the U.S. Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment, a core component of the United States Army Special Operations Command. He deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan in a combat role.
The Iraqi city of Ramadi has fallen again into the hands of the Islamic State, a group born of al Qaeda in Iraq. That this terrorist organization, whose brutality needs no description, has retaken a city once fought for by American soldiers troubles me. I served two deployments in Ramadi, fighting al Qaeda. Comrades died in that fight. I was shot in Ramadi. My initial reaction, like that of many veterans, is to ask what the hell it was all for, when nothing seems to change. The whole endeavor was a costly bloodletting and it seems the price we paid yielded no actual benefit. Yet, Memorial Day is as much a day for reflection as it is for remembrance and commemoration. And in reflecting, I have had to sit back and define exactly what we are memorializing on this day. Read the rest of this entry »