SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND’S SPECIAL PROBLEM: SOCOM limits public discussion of special operations — or tries to. SOCOM has punished several elite commandos for discussing their experiences and in the process revealing operational procedures. Jim Dunnigan analyzes the issue.

Brief excerpt:

Surprise has always been a major weapon for SOCOM, and the more potential foes know the less effective special SOCOM equipment and techniques are.

MEXICAN CARTEL EXTORTION RACKET: Breitbart Texas has dramatic video of cartel gunmen burning a gas station in northern Mexico. “…the brazen attack is the latest example of a region where cartel members continue to extort money from local businesses to the point of running them out of town.”

ILLICIT CASH FUNDING NORTH KOREAN NUKES: The US government has charged a Chinese company with helping finance North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

Dandong Hongxiang Industrial Developmental Company Limited (DHID), as well as its chairwoman Ma Xiaohong and three top executives, were charged with conspiring to evade sanctions against North Korea, including by facilitating money laundering through U.S. financial institutions…the Justice Department charged Dandong Hongxiang employees with using dozens of fake businesses and bank accounts to evade U.S. sanctions on North Korea’s nuclear and weapons program. At the same time, the Treasury Department froze the assets of the company and its employees, including 25 bank accounts and 21 alleged front companies.

China is also investigating the company and its connections to a North Korean bank.

DARPA SEEKS HACK-PROOF COMPUTER CODE: It’s being tested.

…the computer code underpinning the hardware was essentially unhackable with current technology. The report notes the code is “as trustworthy as a mathematical proof.” The programming approach is known as formal verification, and it’s written informally and evaluated based on whether it works or not. The language follows step-by-step, logically, and can be tested just like a mathematical proof. So why is this formal verification essentially hack-proof? Because most hacks are made by exploiting bugs and errors in code. Code that’s gone through this process, with this approach, is supposed to be bug-proof. So there are no holes for hackers to exploit, because the code just works.

A MURDER IN JORDAN: “A prominent and outspoken Jordanian writer (Nahed Hattar) on Sunday was shot dead in front of the courthouse where he had been on trial for sharing a cartoon deemed offensive to Islam.”

Hattar’s murderer was arrested, immediately. The government called it a heinous crime — which it is. However, the government was prosecuting the author for putting a cartoon on Facebook. The cartoon as described in the AP report:

“The caricature depicted a bearded man in heaven, smoking and in bed with two women, asking God to bring him wine and cashews. Relatives said the cartoon was meant to illustrate what Hattar viewed as the twisted religious views of Islamic State extremists. The post was quickly deleted after many angry responses.”

Islamist fanatics called for Hattar’s death. Hattar’s family notes that the government did not respond to the fanatics’ explicit on-line death threats.

How should his murderer be punished?

Read the entire report.

AN APT RIPOSTE TO TEAM HILLARY’S MARK CUBAN (NOT FIDEL) GAMBIT: Demonstrating his genius for political theater, Trump is threatening to give Gennifer Flowers a front row seat at his upcoming debate with Hillary Clinton. Democrats love to seed debate audiences with aggressive supporters who’ll violate rules of decorum and mock Republican candidates. Team Hillary has given Trump-antagonist Mark Cuban a seat. Cuban has been cultvating an anti-Trump rep. ABC News called Cuban a dedicated Trump-troller and he’s been touting his front row ticket. Cuban hasn’t said he intends to disrupt Trump but the touts are meant to suggest he might. Team Hillary has calculated Cuban serves a propaganda purpose even if he behaves and remains silent, Giving Cuban a ticket and having him sit in a seat tv camera’s can’t miss give media commentators ready-made anti-Trump story lines. For example, at one time Cuban supported Trump, now he doesn’t. Talk that one up, Anderson Cooper. Cuban thinks Trump is a weak candidate, etc. Now repeat Cuban’s assessment of Trump 30 times, CBS News. Yup, Team Hillary’s Cuban Gambit — how clever. Cuban is a sharp fellow, but Flowers is a better than an apt counter-punch. She’s still attractive and camera-ready. (Here’s a photo from 2013.) As Bill Clinton’s former mistress she’s a far more sensational story line. Illicit sex, anyone? Suddenly every Clinton scandal and subsequent coverup are chitchat fodder. Flowers’ personal history calls into question major Clinton campaign themes, to include Hillary’s “I’m for women and Trump’s a sexist” pitch. Compared to Flowers, Cuban is just a guy in a seat.

MONTEREY JAZZ FESTIVAL: Downbeat reviews it. The article has a photo of Clint Eastwood introducing Quincy Jones. Eastwood served “as an MC of sorts” on opening night.

OBAMA RELUCTANT TO PURSUE ISLAMIC STATE GENOCIDAIRES: This is an AP article.

War crimes investigators collecting evidence of the Islamic State group’s elaborate operation to kidnap thousands of women as sex slaves say they have a case to try IS leaders with crimes against humanity but cannot get the global backing to bring current detainees before an international tribunal. Two years after the IS onslaught in northern Iraq, the investigators, as well as U.S. diplomats, say the Obama administration has done little to pursue prosecution of the crimes that Secretary of State John Kerry has called genocide…The West looks to the United States for leadership in the Middle East, and the focus of this administration has been elsewhere – in every respect,” Bill Wiley, the head of the independent investigative group, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, told The Associated Press…The U.S. has no legal obligation to take on the genocide of the Yazidis, but President Barack Obama has said that “preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States of America.”

The media and academic left would be gnashing teeth and throwing moral authority fits if we had a Republican president downplaying mass murder and sex slavery while engaging in hypocritical posturing.

THE ROTTEN IMMUNITY DEALS BEHIND THE FBI’S ROTTEN INVESTIGATION: Here we go again. FBI Director Comey’s recommendation not to prosecute Hillary stank when he made it and the stench just gets worse. Don’t let FBI Director Comey put a criminal in the White House.

HOME INVASIONS IN HIDALGO COUNTY, TEXAS: Hidalgo County is on the Texas-Mexico border– across the Rio Grande from the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. Yes, home invasions by armed thieves occur throughout the US. However, the attacks described in this article mimic similar attacks in nearby northern Mexico that are associated with drug cartel turf wars. Over the last two years I’ve read several reports of home invasions by gangs in Texas. In at least one of them the attackers struck a house holding a large shipment of drugs. This December 2015 attack is similar to the one I recall. Note this comment in the December 2015 article:

Along the Texas border, the term “home invasions” is not used to describe common burglaries. The term is used to describe teams of gunmen that storm homes they believe are being used as stash houses to hide drugs, bulk cash or illegal aliens.

Here is another attack that occurred in May 2015. The attackers thought they were hitting a stash house. They were wrong,

The home invasions described in the September 21, 2016 Breitbart article appear to be very violent robberies, not attempts to steal drugs per se. But who knows. The article mentions a robbery by gunmen traveling in a SUV. This type of attack occurs far too frequently along highways in the northern Mexican states of Coahuila and Tamaulipas. Here is an earlier report on the home invasions by a TV station in the Rio Grande Valley.

THE 2016 ELECTION’S CORE ISSUE: It connects Hillary’s illegal email server, Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation, ObamaCare and the Obama Administration’s foreign policy.(My latest New York Observer column, bumped)

FORGOTTEN?: If it isn’t discussed at the first presidential debate, then the debate is a sham. The Clinton State-Foundation is a national disgrace.

MY LATEST NEW YORK OBSERVER COLUMN: The Election’s Core Issue Since Clinton Declared Candidacy in 1808 (bumped)

DEFENDING FREE ENTERPRISE: A review of Edward Conrad’s The Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class. I like this phrase: “an accessible yet learned rebuke to arguments we often hear from left-leaning economists and pundits…”

HILLARY SAYS TRUMP GIVES AID AND COMFORT TO THE ENEMY: Oh what a presidential election this is. Sensational charge after sensational charge, by both candidates. Does Hillary provide evidence of Trump’s aid and comfort? No, not really, but she leveled the charge. However, there is very good reason to suspect Hillary’s rogue email server system gave American enemies access to classified national security information. That’s aiding enemies — enemies plural.

MY LATEST NEW YORK OBSERVER ESSAY: Hillary is a one woman War On Honesty. (bumped)

THE US NAVY’S TROUBLED LITTORAL COMBAT SHIP (LCS): StrategyPage’s Jim Dunnigan says the obvious. The USN has decided to turn the LCS into something it was supposed to replace: the frigate. The post reviews the entire program.

ACCUSED DOMESTIC TERRORIST: That’s what Ahmad Khan Rahami is called in this report. If investigators discover Rahami has operational connections to international terrorist organizations will that make him an international terrorist?

The article quotes John D. Cohen, a “professor at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice and former counterterrorism official at the federal Department of Homeland Security”:

In the past, when a tip came in or we conducted a terrorism investigation, one of the elements was to find some operational connection to a terrorist organization…(Now) we have an increasing number of individuals in this country who become inspired by terrorist and extremist ideas based on social media and what they see on the internet.”

If investigators discover –just by chance– that Rahami was influenced by Islamist supremacists who seek to create a global caliphate and proceeded to commit an act of terror in order to help said Islamist supremacists achieve that goal, does that make him an international terrorist? Or a traitor? Or both?

On the internet, ISIS and Al Qaeda provide tactical and operational guidance for conducting “distributed” terror attacks in order to obtain their ideological goals. Immediately after an attack like Rahami’s, ISIS propagandists launch a media blitz in order to magnify its political impact. The ideological encouragement to launch a terror attack, the “how to” guidance for conducting the strike and the terror group’s quick and global use of the strike as war waging propaganda are international connections. However, Barack Obama is very relucant to publicly concede their existence and relevance.

NOTE: Clarified the last paragraph.

ALL THE QUEEN’S HORSES AND ALL THE QUEEN’S MEN COULD BARELY HUMPTY HER UP AND DUMPTY HER OFF, AGAIN: Then her bodyguard of liars utterly failed to patch a convincing tall tale together from the pieces of her shattered stories. (bumped)

PAUL MIRENGOFF AT POWERLINE: Two hours of rural driving, not one Hillary sign. She is a very bad candidate.

WORLD’S OLDEST ROCK: Earth’s crust formed a little over four billion years ago. “Scientists at the University of Alberta have precisely dated the world’s oldest rock unit at 4.02 billion years old. The ancient rock’s composition is different than scientists expected, suggesting the planet’s earliest continental crust was oceanic in structure and composition.”

SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL, HILLARY’S BIRTHER CONSPIRACIST PROPAGANDIST: Ole Sid’s doing the deny deny deny shuffle, but McClatchy has the email trail. Get this: “McClatchy has not been able to reach Blumenthal for comment. He worked for both President Bill Clinton and more recently for the Clintons’ charitable foundation.” You mean the Clinton State-Foundation? The end of this essay narrows the Grail Quest for the Ur-Birther to two suspects.

YOU CANNOT MAKE THIS STUFF UP: Well, I guess a slick novelist could, but who’d believe it? Linking a plunge in the peso to Hillary’s health? No no no no no. Pay attention. Hillary’s a weak and utterly dishonest candidate. Trump has a genius for political perception.

ATTEMPTED MURDER OF TWO POLICEMEN: New Jersey authorities have charged the Manhattan (Chelsea) bomber with attempted murder. He tried to kill two policemen. The jerk attempted mass homicide in New York and wounded 29 people. Is terrorism a crime in New York? Why, indeed it is. Will Loretta Lynch’s Justice Dept. also file federal charges?…Stay tuned.

THE ELECTION’S CORE ISSUE SINCE HILLARY DECLARED HER CANDIDACY IN 1808 (bumped)