A Gangster With Oil

Via-IBD

Geopolitics: Years ago, Americans worried about Venezuela's leftist Hugo Chavez becoming a new Castro — with oil. It happened. Now he's filling his cabinet with drug lords, and the threat morphs into something creepier.

Last week, Chavez promoted Major General Henry Rangel Silva to general-in-chief, the top position in the Venezuelan military command.

It was a rogue act because, in 2008, the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control named Rangel and two other Chavez loyalists as "Tier II Kingpins" for material support of drug trafficking.

The U.S. designation came of an administrative process so strict and thorough the U.S. government could indict someone if it's right — and be sued if it's wrong. There have been no lawsuits.

Rangel is said to provide material support for Colombia's FARC communist terrorists, who control 60% of Colombia's cocaine production, pushing it into Mexico and other destinations.

With Mexico endangered by local cartels' trade with Venezuela's government-linked suppliers, the link to Mexico's drug war is very real. And it's a national security problem for the U.S. — a big one.

The promotion shows Chavez is surrounding himself with drug lords. Most leaders would expel someone with those credentials. Not Chavez. He almost seems to be flaunting Rangel and others like him. One can only conclude that Venezuela is now a narcostate.

With seven other Chavez loyalists also on the Treasury's list (but not yet announced) the rot is far deeper than the U.S. wants to admit. The only real question left is what will we do about it?

It's important because drug lords have turned Mexico a battlefield. Violence on the U.S.-Mexico frontier began in 2005, the same year Chavez stopped cooperating with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. In 2006, Mexican President Felipe Calderon began his six-year term by declaring war against the drug cartels. So far, it has cost 30,000 lives, and the war's now spilling over our borders.

Two Fridays ago, Mexican marines killed Antonio Cardenas, the chief of the Gulf Cartel, in a shootout that shut the U.S. border with Mexico down. Cardenas' war was fueled by people like Rangel.

Now, there are even people who can prove it. Last August, Colombian forces captured a major Venezuelan drug lord named Walid Makled-Garcia, who'd had a falling out with Chavez.

Makled was so high-ranking the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration last week declared him the "King of Kingpins" after his indictment in New York. Until this summer, Makled commanded Venezuela's air and seaports. His gigantic jetliners loaded with tons of cocaine flew from "the presidential ramp" headed for Mexico.

Obama's oil disaster

Via-Washington Examiner

By: Linda Chavez

The night he locked up the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama predicted that generations hence, people would look back on the historic day as "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." At the time, his words reeked of hubris. Today, they look positively delusional.

President Obama can't stop the oil leak in the Gulf, but he can and should be held accountable for the inept government response to cleaning it up and mitigating its worst effects on the shoreline. And you can bet that if George W. Bush were in the Oval Office, the media would be blaming the president for the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. But they're largely giving Obama a pass, implying that small-government conservatives have no room to complain when government fails to live up to its responsibilities.

Believing in limited government isn't the same thing as believing in no government. Even hard-core libertarians believe that the federal government is responsible for providing for the common defense of the nation. All the small-government conservatives I know believe that government has responsibility to protect the citizenry from attack -- it's the primary reason we pay taxes and live in a civil society.

Granted, millions of gallons of oil washing up onshore in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida is not the same thing as a military or terrorist attack -- but it is an environmental assault that requires federal government action. But the Obama administration's response was slow and ineffective. The president's first reflex was to try to distance himself from the crisis, hoping Americans would blame BP and leave his administration out of the picture. When that didn't work, he opted for photo-ops on the damaged shoreline and angry rhetoric. Now, nearly two months into the crisis, he's decided to use the oil spill to advance his own policy agenda, namely cap-and-trade legislation that would make energy more expensive and punish consumers.

The Obama administration can't stop the oil flow -- only the oil industry has the expertise to do so. But the administration can and should be doing more to protect the shoreline. The president has yet to suspend the Jones Act, which limits the ability of foreign-flag ships to join the effort to contain the spill. Why? Because U.S. maritime trade unions might complain. And he has not done enough to enlist the help and support of other oil companies who have experience dealing with spills. Why hasn't the president asked for help from the Saudis, for example, or enlisted supertankers and foreign skimmers?

Instead, the president delivered an Oval Office address this week -- the first of his presidency -- to try to turn the oil spill disaster into an argument for ending "America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels." And his primary means of doing so is to discourage further exploration for oil and gas on U.S. land and to further tax oil consumption.

The president claims that cap-and-trade legislation -- which would cost Americans up to $200 billion a year in new taxes, according to the Treasury Department's own estimates -- will help create incentives for new, green technologies. But whatever hypothetical jobs might be created in the future, the effect of the legislation would be to kill current jobs today. And with unemployment at nearly 10 percent and sluggish economic growth, the last thing we need is a job-killing tax amounting to $1,700 per year on the average household.

Americans don't want the president to transform the U.S. economy. They don't want him to cure us of addictions to oil -- or anything else for that matter. They don't want him taking over companies like GM or driving other companies out of business -- not even BP. They don't expect him to stop the ocean's rise or heal the planet either. But they do expect him to engage in effective emergency preparation and crisis response. And so far, he's failed to lead the government's efforts at both.

Calling a State Sponsor a State Sponsor

A growing body of evidence points to Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez’s singular role in supporting terrorism and related criminality.

Via-The American

By Roger F. Noriega

This month a dozen U.S. senators fired the opening salvo in what promises to be an aggressive oversight campaign to get to the bottom of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez’s support for terrorism. A May 25 letter challenges Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to explain what the administration knows about Venezuela’s support for a sprawling network of terrorist states and groups, including Iran, Hezbollah, Colombian “narcoterrorists,” Cuba, and Syria.

Rallied by John Ensign (R-Nevada) and George LeMieux (R-Florida), the senators are asking that Secretary Clinton explain what the administration knows about alleged arms shipments, high-level contacts, and financial dealings linking Venezuela to a rogue’s gallery of, well, rogues. The detailed letter signals that the senators already know more than the administration has been willing or able to substantiate about dictator Chávez’s collaboration with anti-American terror groups and hostile regimes.

“We are deeply concerned about Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s growing ties to U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations and state sponsors of terrorism,” the letter begins. Following a litany of examples of how Chávez economically bolsters terrorist regimes (including Cuba and Iran) and provides material support to terrorist groups (from Hezbollah to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), the senators ask Clinton to explain why Venezuela evades designation under U.S. law as a state sponsor of terrorism.

Among Chávez’s notorious actions the senators cite:

• The provision of “sanctuary” and the “flow of guns and money”—including the provision of portable missiles, anti-tank rockets, and other weaponry—to Colombian guerrillas;
• Complicity in the illegal narcotics trade that fuels terrorism—including the burgeoning traffic from Venezuelan territory to west and north Africa;
• The “presence and activities of Hezbollah inside Venezuela,” and a November 2009 shipment of Russian weapons from a Venezuelan arms cache to that group;
• “Extensive support of the Castro regime in Cuba,” and Chávez’s reliance on Castro henchman Ramiro Valdes to repress internal opponents;
• Possible support for “Iran’s covert nuclear enrichment program” in exchange for Iran’s providing “nuclear knowhow” to Chávez;
• Venezuela’s delivery of gasoline to Iran and its help for Iran to evade international sanctions; and
• Suspicious air traffic and lax immigration controls on Caracas-Damascus-Tehran airline flights.

The Ensign-LeMieux letter was co-signed by John McCain (R-Arizona), Robert Bennett (R-Utah), Scott Brown (R-Massachusetts), Sam Brownback (R-Kansas), Jim Bunning (R-Kentucky), John Cornyn (R-Texas), James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), Republican Whip Jon Kyl (R-Arizona), James Risch (R-Idaho), and Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi). LeMieux’s involvement is significant because he was one of several senators who held up multiple diplomatic nominations last year over concerns regarding the administration’s policy toward Latin America.

This stepped-up congressional oversight is bound to build on the growing body of evidence pointing to Chávez’s singular role in supporting terrorism and related criminality. The Obama administration’s decision to the pull the trigger on Venezuela may hinge on whether the United States can afford to forfeit petroleum exports from that South American country.

Anticipating the argument that Venezuela’s oil supply is too essential to the U.S. economy to risk slapping that country with the terrorist label, the senators ask the administration to explain its “contingency plan” for dealing with a “sudden and prolonged unavailability of Venezuelan oil exports to the United States.”

The reality is, although the United States will likely find new sources of oil on the international market within a few weeks, Venezuela’s economy will be crippled by the loss of oil revenue and consumer imports. Moreover, Chávez has wrecked Venezuela’s state-owned oil company and has failed to identify new importers with the special refineries required to distill the viscous heavy crude his country produces. Ironically, oil-rich Venezuela may be one of the few countries against which these anti-terror sanctions may have a decisive impact.

Since the last years of the George W. Bush administration, U.S. diplomats have steered clear of Chávez for fear of “provoking” him. Thanks to congressional oversight, we are about to confront the terrible downside of that naïve, passive policy.

Roger F. Noriega was Ambassador to the Organization of American States from 2001-2003 and Assistant Secretary of State from 2003-2005. He is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and managing director of Vision Americas LLC, which represents U.S. and foreign clients

We Have Overcome

Via-JWR


By Linda Chavez

Benjamin Hooks, former head of the NAACP and long-time civil rights activist died this week at 85. I will miss him, my sometimes-adversary but always-gentleman debating partner. Hooks took over the leadership of the NAACP in 1977 from Roy Wilkins and was executive director until 1992. I first met Hooks when I was the director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights during the Reagan years. My agency was much in the news at the time, largely because my fellow commissioners and I were heavily involved in shaping the affirmative action debate. We were arguing against racial preferences and for colorblind equal opportunity, but that put us at odds with much of the civil rights establishment of the time, including Ben Hooks.

One evening during the height of the controversy over the commission, I turned on the network news to hear my name being vilified by none other than Hooks. He was in full throat, railing against the new direction at the commission, and me in particular. I still hadn't met him face to face, but that was to come later, at the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas. I was seated up in the balcony, when Hooks walked in and sat down. I chided him about some of the things he'd said about me, and told him I had been an NAACP member and marched in civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s. At which point, he said, "Get out your checkbook. You're about to become a lifetime member of the NAACP. We welcome you back into the fold." And there on the spot, he insisted I write a check putting me back "in good standing" with the NAACP. I was dumbstruck — but he wasn't a man you could easily refuse

Years later, Hooks and I went on a tour of schools around the country debating affirmative action. He walked with a cane and his wife, Patricia, was often with him to help him get around. But whatever pain and infirmities he suffered, he still managed to debate forcefully. But I often felt, as I looked out over the crowd of young men and women, that the world of widespread racism and discrimination Ben Hooks described was unfamiliar to his audience and a relic of the past. He seemed locked in a world of Jim Crow that simply didn't exist any longer. He made the old arguments for affirmative action — that it was necessary to make up for the effects of past discrimination — as if little had changed in the years after Selma and Birmingham.

But the kids he was trying to reach had never faced such discrimination. They were often the children — in some cases, grandchildren — of college graduates who had benefited from affirmative action programs, and their arguments in favor of the programs that granted them preferential treatment were all about promoting "diversity."

The irony couldn't have been greater at one of our last joint appearances. We were at a New England prep school debating affirmative action before an audience of high school students, which included a number of young blacks who, in Hooks' youth, could not have imagined attending such an institution. We'd gone through our prepared remarks and some back and forth with questions from the audience when Hooks decided he wanted to end the program on a high note. He stood up from the table and pulled me up with him, locking arms.

"We shall overcome, someday," he sang, in a deep, rich baritone, swaying in time with the song. And, of course, I joined in, as did the faculty on stage and the kids in the audience. But the fact we were there and that the audience included young, privileged children of all races whose futures couldn't have been brighter sang louder than our voices that we had overcome, not someday, but now.

Benjamin Hooks lived to see the promise of the movement he helped lead, even if he wouldn't have admitted it.



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The World Is About To Get a Whole Lot More Dangerous

Via-The Patriot Post

By Linda Chavez

The world is about to get a lot more dangerous. For more than 60 years, the United States has been the pre-eminent nuclear power in the world, and the world has been safer as a result. While anti-nuclear fanatics warned of an apocalypse if the U.S. continued to expand and improve its nuclear arsenal during the Cold War, the reality was that our superiority over our enemy and our unwillingness to foreswear the use of nuclear weapons prevented the conflagration many feared. Now, President Barack Obama is determined to abandon six decades of proven nuclear deterrent policy in favor of a fantasy that he can rid the world of these dangerous weapons by tying America's hands behind our backs.

Obama announced his new nuclear strategy this week before heading to Prague to sign a dubious arms-control agreement with Russia in advance of next week's Nuclear Security Summit in Washington. The strategy he outlined is a virtual blueprint to those who would seek to destroy us. For the first time ever, an American administration has announced the specific circumstances under which a deadly attack on the United States will not result in a nuclear response.

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed authored by Vice President Joe Biden, the administration put itself on record, promising "a policy that the United States will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states, as long as they are party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and in compliance with their nuclear nonproliferation obligations."

So, let's say a signatory to the NPT launches a chemical, biological or devastating cyber attack on the American heartland, killing thousands and crippling our economy. What will Obama do? We know what he won't do. He's now taken our most threatening response off the table. And for what? To provide "additional incentives for countries to fully comply with nonproliferation norms," as Biden argues? Yeah, right.

The list of signatories to the NPT includes an unsavory and threatening bunch: Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Yemen, to name just a few. We know many of the regimes that currently control these nations can't be trusted, but the future is even more frightening. What about some future Yemen led by the likes of Anwar al-Awlaki or a re-Talibanized Afghanistan or a Saudi Arabia in which the House of Saud has been replaced by the House of bin Laden?

And never mind that the current risks to the United States come mostly from loosely affiliated terrorist organizations -- who are often aided by signatory countries like Iran, North Korea, and Syria, which would now be immune to a nuclear retaliation under the administration's policy. If a current or future enemy wants to wipe out an American city, they'd be wise to use botulin toxin or perhaps release some poison gas -- just don't use a suitcase nuke.

As if this new policy weren't bad enough, the administration has coupled it with a promise "not to develop new warheads or add military capabilities as we manage our arsenal for the future." Since President Ronald Reagan first proposed and President George H.W. Bush later signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the U.S. has committed itself to reducing its nuclear arsenal. But it has never promised not to "add military capabilities," which basically freezes our technology at today's capacity. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev made no such commitment before signing the new treaty.

Thankfully, President Obama's signature on the treaty isn't enough to bind the nation -- and it remains to be seen whether he can get the 67 senators he'll need to get Senate ratification. But in a real sense, the harm has already been done. Obama has made the critical mistake of signaling to our enemies our willingness to hold back if we are attacked by a weapon of mass destruction. And you can bet they've taken notice.

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