The following is a book review by Debbie cross posted from Right Truth.

Over the life of Right Truth and prior to the inception of Right Truth Book Club, I have read, reviewed and recommended many books. I can say without reservation that The Gathering Storm by W.C. is a MUST READ for every person concerned about Islamic terrorism. I think we should send a copy of this eBook to the White House!

According to W.C., we have not begun to fight this war, we have not even been brave enough to accurately identify the enemy, out of fear we may offend someone. He notes some want to conduct the war as a “criminal investigation” while others see it as a war “against the acts of terror.” He believes both are wrong and what we are involved in now is only a “prelude to the real war.”

To quote former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:“Churchill saw that there was a storm gathering, but there were people in Europe who didn’t believe it and who didn’t take the periodic storm clouds and the squalls as a real threat. They thought they were transitory and, of course, paid an enormous penalty in treasure and life for their failure to understand the nature of that threat. I worry we are in a gathering storm and we do not, as a society, accept it. Many of the elites of our society, the key opinion leaders, are unwilling or unable to accept what an awful lot of people believe to be the case. The penalty for being wrong can be enormous.”

We are fighting Jihadists who have one goal, “… imposing peacefully or violently the rule of Shariah law upon the world.” We have two choices — surrender or Victory. It’s that simple, and that complicated all at the same time. The Jihadists can impose their laws upon us by force or they can “change our laws.” Remind you of any current events or Islamic groups?

The enemy uses “intimidation, infiltration and disinformation tactics” and the “appeasers and apologists” defend and aid the enemy. Those would be “what Lenin called ‘Useful Idiots’,” according to W.C. The Gathering Storm is packed full of facts, figures, resources, history. You will not want to miss one page in this book.

According to Walid Shoebat in the Forward, “This book “is definitely void of any politically correct language, censorship, spin, double-talk, or complex vocabulary.” … And “explains in detail the chilling prognosis — radical Islam is even more of a threat than Nazi Germany and has so many parallels in it‘s ideology.: … “Reading The Gathering Storm will leave us with only two choices – surrender or Victory.”

I believe that there is only one choice, Victory! However, the intimidation, infiltration and disinformation tactics are sometimes so subtle that we let them slide right by us. It brings to mind the old vaudeville skit used in the Three Stooges movie, “Gents Without Cents” made in 1944 and Abbott and Costello movie entitled “Lost in A Harem”: “Slowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch…I took my revenge.”

That is the premise the Jihadists are working under right here in the United States. They are patient, subtle, effective, and will use any means to reach their goal.

The Gathering Storm is an eBook, easy to purchase, download, and easy to read. Price $6.95, order here. Jacket Notes are by Always on Watch Two

Todd Bensman of the San Antonio Express-News has written a four-part series on a human smuggling ring from the Middle East into the United States. The entire series is well worth the read, but I’ll quote one important excerpt.

“They are not all economic migrants,” said attorney Janice Kephart, who served as legal counsel for the 9-11 Commission and co-wrote its final staff report. “I do get frustrated when people who live in Washington or Illinois say we don’t have any evidence that terrorists are coming across. But there is evidence.”

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehension numbers, agents along both borders have caught more than 5,700 special-interest immigrants since 2001. But as many as 20,000 to 60,000 others are presumed to have slipped through, based on rule-of-thumb estimates typically used by homeland security agencies.

“You’d like to think at least you’re catching one out of 10,” McCraw said. “But that’s not good in baseball and it’s certainly not good in counterterrorism.”

This human pipeline, Bensman reports, is embedded in Syria and flows through Texas which coincides with a local report I read documenting a South Texas sheriff holding up patches torn off the clothes of IRGC officers.  Yep, that’s Iran’s special unit. There have been known terrorists who crossed the southern border that have been caught, but how many escaped capture?

This is the concern that should be front and center in Washington today, yet we all know the ridiculous calls of racism and the terror-denying open border advocated have turned the debate on end.

Read Bensman’s full report.

NRO’s Byron York on House Democrats wanting to bring climate change as a national security matter, thus making intelligence agencies in the United States divert funds and other resources against the pursuit of Al Qaida and towards figuring out if eggs will fry on Texas sidewalks in August five seconds faster today than five years ago:

Hoekstra and other Republicans worry that Democrats want to return intelligence policy to a time in the 1990s when the Clinton administration established what was known as the DCI Environmental Center within the CIA. The Center used satellite spying resources to track environmental matters. “They took pictures of volcanoes and sea turtle nests and took air samples of air pollution, as opposed to checking for traces of biological or chemical weapons, and it was all done at the behest of Al Gore,” says one Republican knowledgeable about intelligence affairs.

Former CIA director George Tenet mentions Gore’s environmental emphasis in his new book, At the Center of the Storm. “True to his interests, [Gore] had a fascination for wonkish issues,” Tenet writes. “He asked lots of questions about the impact on national security of water shortages, disease and environmental concerns.” Tenet reveals that some inside the CIA derided Gore’s priorities as “bugs and bunnies.”

“We started allocating precious intelligence resources to environmental issues just as al Qaeda was on the upswing,” says Rep. Hoekstra. “We were becoming politically correct. My fear is that we’re going back to the same place.”

What the hell was the CIA taking photos of sea turtle nests for when there were two declarations of war against the United States without action?  Priorities, I know, but last I checked, while there’s a very small chance you or anyone you know will be killed by a terrorist attack in the United States, you stand a better chance of getting blown up by someone named Muhammad than drowned by a sea turtle nest.

It is well known that after the Cold War ended, United States intelligence took a deep blow that ended up leaving the nation unprepared for an enemy who was already building. Despite numerous attacks and two different declarations of war given by Osama bin Laden, the CIA was still under-funded and treated with disdain.

Things changed on September 11, and the CIA was given more leeway to act as they saw fit. Increased funding was given and preperations were made to try to transform the agency into getting more field agents in which the agency had cut over the decade prior.

As a result of the 2006 mid-term elections putting Democrats in charge of Congress, I didn’t think there would be any real change in this regard. It appears I was wrong and there will be a change, and that change is to make the issue of climate change an intelligence operation. What?

The House next week will consider the Democrat-crafted Intelligence Authorization bill, which includes a provision directing an assessment of the effects that climate change has on national security . . .

Intelligence panel Chairman Silvestre Reyes, Texas Democrat, said the climate-change study is one of several shifts his party has made to intelligence policy.

“We’re concerned that global warming might impact our ability to maintain national security,” he told The Times, describing the idea as “cutting edge.”

“We want to get feedback from the intelligence community to understand if there are possible global issues,” Mr. Reyes said.

I suppose that’s good news the CIA will try to determine if warmer weather will somehow make jihadists more determined to remake the world in their shadow?

I imagine much of this comes on the heels of an old Osama bin Laden statement that one of the reasons he declared war against the United States was due to global warming.  The terror chief did in fact say that, but it’s bogus and was stated only to find allies in non-Islamic nations.  While I won’t call Reyes an ally of OBL, he seems to have bought the OBL line hook, line and sinker.

Remember though, this is the same man who had no clue what the difference between Sunni and Shia is, stating “it’s not like the Hatfields and the McCoys, it’s a heck of a lot more complex.” And now he’s determined divert funds used to gather intelligence of America’s enemies and find out if climate change will do anything.

Learned people around the world cannot fathom that the mighty super power America, who has somewhere around 144,000 soldiers plus supporting personnel in Iraq, can’t seem to beat the terrorists. That’s not my words, I think we can win with a little time and some change in the rules of engagement. As the L.A. Times said, Congress is NOT the Commander in Chief, but Congress seem to think they are. They want us out of Iraq before the job is done.

According to them, Iraq is the wrong war at the wrong time. Ah, but Afghanistan is a righteous war, and that’s where we need to concentrate our troops. Does anybody believe that Congress is going to send the 144,000 to Afghanistan if we pulled them out of Iraq today? Well of course not. Charles Krauthammer on that:

Of all the arguments for pulling out of Iraq, its comparative unimportance vis- a-vis Afghanistan is the least serious.And not just because this argument assumes that the world’s one superpower, which spends more on defense every year than the rest of the world combined does not have the capacity to fight an insurgency in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan. But because it assumes that Afghanistan is strategically more important than Iraq.

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This past Friday, the FBI announced through a bulletin what the Associated Press is calling “foreign extremists” have applied to become school bus drivers in the United States. The FBI notes “recent suspicious activity” of foreigners who drive school buses or are licensed to do so, but either the FBI or the AP doesn’t bother to list that suspecious activity.

Foreigners under recent investigation include “some with ties to extremist groups” who have been able to “purchase buses and acquire licenses,” the bulletin says.

But Homeland Security and the FBI “have no information indicating these individuals are involved in a terrorist plot against the homeland,” it says. The memo also notes: “Most attempts by foreign nationals in the United States to acquire school bus licenses to drive them are legitimate.”

Also in the bulletin was the following: “There are no threats, no plots and no history leading us to believe there is any reason for concern.”  Which is why, I presume, there was a bulletin made?

So what exactly would an ‘extremist’ want with a school bus?  There are numerous possibilities, but there’s no way to tell if by extremist the FBI means FARC or a radical Islamic group.  The Investor’s Business Daily ponders if this is a warning for an American Beslan.

[Recent events that raise the ire of the FBI] include last year’s surprise boarding of a school bus in Florida by two Saudi men dressed in trench coats. Authorities suspect they were making a dry run to see how easy it would be to hijack or blow up a school bus filled with American children . . .

Authorities fear the school massacre that took place in Beslan, Russia, in 2004 may be a dress rehearsal for what al-Qaida plans to do here. Chechen terrorists tied to al-Qaida seized a building in Beslan on the first day of school and slaughtered 338, including 172 kids.

That’s the first I have heard the Beslan school siege could have been a dry run, and in no way do I believe that.  The school siege in Beslan was carried out by radical Islamists in Chechnya that are linked with Al Qaida, but that group has their own gripe against the Russian government which was the supposed reason for taking nearly 1,000 people, mostly children, hostage.  It is more than reasonable to assume Al Qaida learned from that incident, but the school siege didn’t exactly increase sympathy for the Chechen terrorists’ cause, which is the main reason why there are terrorist attacks in the first place.

While I listen to talk radio throughout the day, I never listen to Rush Limbaugh.  But Limbaugh provides commentary on the FBI bulletin that is worth the read.  There’s even a story of the over-hyped patriotism of Shamu if you can believe it.

Kenneth Timmerman of Front Page Magazine reports on the testimony given by the Director of National Intelligence, Michael McConnell that I posted upon at great length earlier this week (video included).  Timmerman notes the refreshing candor of McConnell, something I too had noticed and was relieved with, in describing a series of events over the course of the past 30 years that has brought this nation to where we are today in terms of the threats faced.

While McConnell did not mention what could have happened thirty years ago nor was he asked by senators trying to score political points and television time moreso than just ask questions regarding national security, McConnell’s statement of just that time period relates to a very important occurrence almost three decades ago.  It was the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

And many of today’s challenges for not just the United States, but for the entire world, can be traced back to that one moment in history.  It is therefore quite telling on how the refusal to back the Shah when his government was in peril has pushed the world into the course we all are headed in now.

Timmerman notes some of the political posturing given at the testimony by senators on board.

The Democrats tried repeatedly to get McConnell to say that al Qaeda was more powerful today than it had been before 9/11. Unfortunately for their 2008 game plan, the facts just don’t line up that way.

“First of all, just let me say that al Qaeda leadership, as it existed prior to 9/11 or prior to going into Afghanistan — somewhere in the neighborhood of three-quarters of the leadership have been killed or captured,” McConnell said.

And then, there’s the little detail about the Afghan training camps that flourished under Taliban rule. “Now, when I looked at prior to going into Afghanistan, there were literally thousands of those forces in training with multiple camps. That’s gone,” McConnell said.

Sure, al Qaeda is recruiting. And yes, Senator: they are a danger. “They are attempting to rebuild in the North-West Frontier of Pakistan,” he said. “But the numbers are not the same.”

It was, surprisingly, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) who asked direct questions and at least tried to stay out of the political mess, and it was McConnell’s answers to Sen. Graham that were the most revealing.

As I wrote in the previous post on this testimony, you really do need to watch the full three-hour testimony (skip ahead on dates as there’s no direct link to the video) if you are interested in the war on Islamism and what is around without the constant spin of journalistic punditry.  There is a good deal of talk on North Korea and some on both China and Venezuela, therefore if those issues are of no interest to you then you can skip ahead.

If you are not willing to sit for three hours and watch a video on the Internet, and who can blame you, watch the 10-minute excerpted video I made that catches many of the main points on Iran and Al Qaida.  McConnell’s testimony was remarkable in both its insight and, again, candor; it’s nothing like former DNI John Negroponte used to deliver where things were left unanswered as Negroponte ebbed and flowed around political hot potatoes.  McConnell delivered.

During the Annual Threat Assessment of the Director of National Intelligence for the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill this week, newly appointed DNI John McConnell fielded several questions and prepared an opening statement laying the groundwork for the discussion. The Washington Post did a short write-up on the discussion and highlighted a few choice items if you’re interested in their summary of events.

But the hearing was just over three hours in length, making a short summary fitting on what one wants to include. The full briefing is available for viewing on C-SPAN’s site, but there’s something incredibly wrong with the site’s search feature so I cannot directly link the video. You can start HERE, and move on as the days advance.

Among the points made on Al Qaida by McConnell from his opening statement (PDF) are the following:

• Al-Qa’ida is the terrorist organization that poses the greatest threat to US interests, including to the Homeland. We have captured or killed numerous senior al-Qa’ida operatives, but we also have seen that al-Qa’ida’s core elements are resilient. They continue to plot attacks against our Homeland and other targets with the objective of inflicting mass casualties. And they continue to maintain active connections and relationships that radiate outward from their leaders’ hideout in Pakistan to affiliates throughout the Middle East, northern Africa, and Europe
• Many of our most important interests intersect in Pakistan, there the Taliban and al-Qa’ida maintain critical sanctuaries. As I noted earlier, Pakistan is our partner in the war on terror and has captured several al-Qa’ida leaders. However, it is also a major source of Islamic extremism
• Eliminating the safehaven that the Taliban and other extremists have found in Pakistan’s tribal areas is not sufficient to end the insurgency in Afghanistan but it is necessary. We recognize that aggressive military action, however, has been costly for Pakistani security forces and appreciate concerns over the potential for sparking tribal rebellion and a backlash by sympathetic Islamic political parties. There is widespread opposition among these parties to the US military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. With elections expected later this year, the situation will become even more challenging—for President Musharraf and for the US.

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According to the upcoming issue of Newsweek, New York City police are concerned “bridges and tunnels, Jewish organizations and Wall Street” may be the targets of Tehran following increased tensions between the United States and Iran.  The warning was presented by the NYPD and given to “security execs.”

NYPD officials have worried about possible Iranian-sponsored attacks since a series of incidents involving officials of the Iranian Mission to the United Nations. In November 2003, Ahmad Safari and Alireaza Safi, described as Iranian Mission “security” personnel, were detained by transit cops when they were seen videotaping subway tracks from Queens to Manhattan at 1:10 in the morning. The men later left New York. “We’re concerned that Iranian agents were engaged in reconnaissance that might be used in an attack against New York City at some future date,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly told NEWSWEEK.

While the targets due fit both Tehran’s ambitions and the likely targets of a regime that sponsors terrorism, the fact that Jewish organizations are potential targets sticks out like a sore thumb.  During a 2006 news conference at the United Nations in New York, Ahmadinejad stated “Jews are respected by everyone, by all human beings” and that he is “not anti-Jew.”

The rationale behind statements against the nation of Israel and for Jews tries to blind the entire world into Ahmadinejad’s true feelings.  And indeed that is the duplicit rationale by Islamists everywhere.  With respect to Ahmadinejad, his repeated comments questioning the Holocaust where Jews who didn’t just migrate to Israel were invovled in and his top advisors condemning Jews as dogs, not to mention Iranian children’s shows depicting Jews as apes, Jewish centers in New York and elsewhere would be prime targets of an Iranian attack.

Ahmadinejad wishes to frame the world into two camps.  Those who support the United States and the Jews, and those who support his regime.  That’s fine and dandy, really, but he’s feeding the world false promises with regards to almost everything that comes out of his mouth.  And indeed you don’t really know what Ahmadinejad believes in if you don’t read trandscripts of his rallies in Tehran because his words to members of the Western media are complete fabrications.  And besides, it’s not as if an Iranian proxy hasn’t explicity attacked a Jewish Center before.

The Opinion Journal writes of former Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and his “honest mistake” to take documents for his own “personal use.”

The committee’s 60-page report makes it clear that Mr. Berger knew exactly what he was doing and knew that what he was doing was wrong. According to interviews with National Archives staff, Mr. Berger repeatedly arranged to be left alone with highly classified documents by feigning the need to make personal phone calls, and he used those moments alone with the files to stuff them in his pockets and briefcase.

One incident is particularly suggestive. By his fourth and final visit to review documents and prepare for testimony before the 9/11 Commission, the Archives staff had grown suspicious of how Mr. Berger was handling the documents, so they numbered each one he was given in pencil on the back of the document. When one of them–No. 217–was apparently removed from the files by Mr. Berger, the staff reprinted a copy and replaced it for his review. According to the report, Mr. Berger then proceeded to slip the second copy “under his portfolio also.” In other words, he stole the same document twice.

So not only is Berger a document theif in what appears to have been an effort to cover something up, he’s a bad one at that.  He admitted to stealing only five documents, but the same House Government Reform Committee earlier revealed Berger took the documents that he had stuffed in his pants and socks, folded them into a ‘V’ formation and stuffed them under a construction trailer.  If he just wanted to documents for his own personal use, as he alleges, why would he discard them under a trailer?