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Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

If ever there was a federal agency supposed to be nonpartisan and apolitical, it would be the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), established in 1934 and with a current budget of nearly $370 million and more than 3,000 employees. During its existence, the Archives has been overseen by four presidentially appointed acting and ten Senate-confirmed archivists, many of whom served under successive presidents of both major political parties, reflecting the nonpartisan nature of its work.

No more.

The current Archivist of the United States is David Ferriero, appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009. Under his leadership, this once-apolitical entity designated to preserve the vital historic documents and exhibits of the United States has become a flashpoint for the same left-wing, racism-based ideology now coursing throughout the Biden administration.

The prime catalyst for this ideological crusade by President Joe Biden was Executive Order 13985, the very first order he issued on his very first day in office. The document declared that systemic racism permeates the entire federal government, and directed every Executive Branch agency to develop a plan to address it.

Some five months prior, however, in September 2020, Ferriero on his own had directed that a 35-member “Internal Task Force on Racism,” comprised mostly of Archives employees, would advance a plan to identify evidence of “systemic racism” and “White supremacy” that he apparently believes undergirds not only the work of the National Archives, but the “vast majority of institutions in the United States.” The Task Force was directed also to recommend ways to address current and future racism. Ferriero’s group accomplished this mission with a vengeance, as detailed in a 105-page report presented internally in April, released this Summer, and which recommendations now are being implemented.

The bizarre findings of this Archives Task Force included declaring that the magnificent paintings adorning the main floor of the Capitol Rotunda are deeply problematic and require “reimagining” because, as now presented, they “laud wealthy White men in the nation’s founding while marginalizing BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People of Color], women, and other communities.”

Even more disturbing, however, are the numerous findings and recommendations of the Task Force on Racism relating to the National Archives Catalog. The Catalog is the vast digital compendium of millions of documents and other materials which the agency is charged by law with protecting; it is how citizens and non-citizens access and view our nation’s important records.

The Catalog includes such founding documents as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights and the Emancipation Proclamation.

The Task Force found that “[r]acism is embedded in the history and current practices of NARA .  .  .  at every level,” and that “white supremacy is present in all American institutions and culture.” It therefore concluded that steps must be undertaken to ensure that current and future customers of this treasury of historical material be given fair warning of such dangers by use of mechanisms such as “content” and “trigger warnings,” along with “removable covers for sensitive content.”

Recommendations for future steps to ensure Archives Catalog items are to be viewed only through the racial lenses employed by Ferriero and his Task Force, include a state-of-the-art “find-and-replace feature” so that replacement or additional appropriate language could be inserted.

These practices constitute censorship by camouflage.

The truly Orwellian nature of this project, however, is perhaps best illustrated in Appendix VII where, among other things, the authors “recommend addressing not only harmful language that is present in the Catalog, but also the language that is not there.” You cannot make this nonsense up; it is there in actual printed words.

The insidious nature of this project lies in the fact that by declaring our founding documents and exhibits to be systemically racist and reflective of white supremacy, and by placing explicit and directive “warnings” impliedly probative of such perceived content, the Archivist and his Task Force obviously — and intentionally — are reaffirming their opinion that America is and always has been a systemically racist society.

What they are doing is deplorable and is an affront to our nation’s history and culture.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Townhall

by Bob Barr

New Orleans, and the state of Louisiana of which the city is a part, does not have a global warming problem. It has a political-cultural problem that not only resists progress, but appears to revel in doing so. The state is captive to a crony political system that has changed little since the days of Huey Long in the 1930s.

Now, after Hurricane Ida’s visit, federal taxpayers once again will be on the hook for the Pelican State’s failure to prepare.

If Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was supposed to have been a wakeup call for the Crescent City, its leaders refused to answer the phone. On August 29, Hurricane Ida ripped past the city, taking out critical electrical grid infrastructure that plunged the entire city into darkness (some areas remain without electricity even now).

Despite having failed repeatedly over the years to upgrade their power system to standards beyond those of the 1970s, government officials and energy company representatives continue to blame the “unforeseeable” ferocity of the storm for the extensive damage it caused to the power grid.

In New Orleans, “unforeseeable” means “eyes closed.”

Louisiana’s deplorable infrastructure is neither a time issue, nor a money one. The same officials responsible for lagging infrastructure upgrades will be the first lining up to beg Uncle Sam for billions in taxpayer relief. Of course, this plea is more like a strong-arm ransom. Presidents and members of Congress know that refusing, or even hesitating to open the federal checkbook will incur calls of racism (as happened during the Katrina relief effort 15 years before). Billions will be spent; billions will disappear; and, history will repeat itself.

Not surprisingly, New Orleans played a pivotal role in the federal government initially assuming responsibility for natural disasters many decades ago. The federal response to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which devastated New Orleans and the Mississippi delta region, was the first time significant federal resources were expended for a specific geographic area recovering from a serious natural disaster.

Prior to the 1927 flood, costs of disaster recovery and other assistance was seen primarily as the responsibility of those affected, charitable organizations, and local governments. Grover Cleveland best summarized this approach when vetoing a federal relief bill in 1887, saying the “friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow-citizens in misfortune,” while warning “federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government.” Prescience, indeed.

What incentive is there for New Orleans to expedite infrastructure improvements when federal taxpayers can be tapped year after year for rebuilding but without demanding verifiable modernization in return?

Also hampering New Orleans’ recovery is a broader sentiment among global warming-minded Leftists that focuses exclusively on the future, and what can be done to change it, as opposed to the more difficult task of fixing the present. It is far easier to sit back on one’s self-proclaimed laurels and bark about global warming being the cause of New Orleans’ disaster loop, as doing so shifts blame to external actors and “global efforts for change,” over which they have no control.

For lazy and corrupt government officials, this cop-out provides the perfect cover to respond to the consequences of their incompetence. After all, when you blame Mother Nature, there is no rebuttal to defend against.

This has been the strategy employed by state and local officials for the last 15 years. However, as any visitor to New Orleans knows, the stench of garbage and sewage, and the painful visages of poverty are a constant presence in the French Quarter and elsewhere, not the temporary inconvenience of another disruptive disaster.

Such unpleasantries reflect the perpetual incompetence and corruption of a government that wrings its hands and surrenders to whatever comes next, instead of actually preparing for it. So long as federal dollars keep feeding this delusion of colorful grit and decay, residents, visitors, and taxpayers alike will be forced to continue filling the coffers of a corrupt system.

The expensive aftermath after Hurricane Ida is certain to illustrate once again the political system described to me by a fellow United States Attorney in the late 1980s — a system where “people don’t just expect corruption on the part of their elected officials, they demand it.” In the Big Easy, it comes rolling back in.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

After causing Americans to suffer whiplash over the past year and a half with conflicting and at times openly contradictory statements on how to deal with COVID-19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), seems now to have shifted focus to issues that more easily fit within the overarching themes driving the Biden-Harris administration: Racism, guns and climate change.

Not coincidentally, for an agency that urges everyone except itself to “follow the science,” there is far less need to do so when pontificating on racism, guns and the climate, because there really is no “science” involved.

In April, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky declared that “racism is a serious public health threat” that has become an “epidemic impacting public health.” As overseer of the 13,000 employees at CDC, Walensky directed that every component of the agency, which has been headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia since its founding 75 years ago, must consider racism as a top priority.

In late August, Walensky explained in a CNN interview that “preventing gun violence and gun deaths” has shot to the top tier of priorities at the CDC, which has been chomping at the bit to jump back into the “gun violence” business after having been prevented from using taxpayer money to do so since the late 1990s.

As for climate change, or the climate crisis as this administration has now rebranded the issue, the creation of a new “Office of Climate Change and Health Equity” within the Department of health and Human Services, of which CDC is a part, will provide many new avenues for Dr. Walensky and her cohorts to save the world.

The executive order that prompted the establishment of this particular new bureaucracy was one of the many President Joe Biden issued during his first days in the White House. The 21-page “Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad,” called on virtually every federal department and top-level presidential adviser, including CDC’s parent agency, Health and Human Services, to tackle climate crisis-related issues. These offices were also directed to address the amorphous problems of “environmental injustice” and “equity.”

These tasks alone are sufficient to keep HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and Walensky busy for the remainder of Biden’s term, notwithstanding that none of it has anything to do with disease control and prevention, which happens to define the jurisdiction of CDC since it was established in 1946 to direct the fight to eradicate malaria, which at the time was rampant in the southeastern United States.

Going off on such a tangent, however, never has given CDC pause to expand its mission to include all manner of non-disease problems. It is, indeed, the poster child as an example of “mission creep,” notwithstanding it has not always been successful in taking on new issues outside its defined jurisdiction.

Late last month, for example, the Supreme Court shot down the eviction moratorium mandate that CDC had been pressing.

Also, the agency’s previous, repeated moves to involve itself in the highly political subject of gun control led the Congress in 1996 to slap the agency’s hands and declare that none of its appropriated funds could be used for such activities. The ban was partially lifted in 2019, which paved the way for congressional Democrats to now start pouring millions into CDC’s budget so it could once again engage in “gun violence prevention.” Dr. Walensky has enthusiastically embraced this windfall.

Shortly after taking the reins at CDC, Walensky identified all three of these issues – racism, gun violence and climate change — as top priorities for her tenure as America’s “Top Doc.” She has not disappointed her supporters.

In her Aug. 27 interview with CNN, Walensky offered as justification for pulling CDC directly into the ongoing and highly political gun violence policy debate, the fact that she “swore to the president and to this country” to protect our health. Seems she has already forgotten the oath she took upon becoming CDC director was actually to the Constitution and laws of the United States, not to Biden.

Pledging allegiance to Biden, however, makes it easier to justify engaging in activities and policies bearing little, if any, relationship to the Constitution or the legal jurisdiction of the CDC.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Townhall

by Bob Barr

Gender unicorns. “Social justice” physics. Math and reading skills deemed no longer necessary. College grads multiple thousands of dollars in debt but unemployable in the marketplace. America’s once world-class education system is crumbling around us, rotting from within.

Measured by money spent, our education system should be working magnificently. At more than $14,000 per student, the U.S. spends the fifth-most of any country in the world educating children, in a highly managed system overseen by officials from local school boards to the presidential cabinet.

Despite all this – actually because of it – the return on our investment in education has never been worse.

Decades ago, liberals realized educational institutions were a crucial tool by which to push their radical agenda into American culture; first covertly, but now openly, even proudly. The result is a system far less concerned with the actual, objective education of students, than with consolidating power by the adults who oversee it. Students suffer, but teachers’ unions, public school officials, bureaucrats at all levels of government, and well-funded special interest groups gain ever greater control.

Students barely able to read and write are being taught about gender unicorns. White students are demeaned as being “racist” simply for being white. All the while, students are being emotionally scarred and taught to be afraid of everything around them, thanks to masking mandates, social distancing, plexiglass barriers, and constant “active shooter” drills.

Sadly, private schools are not immune to these destructive shenanigans. As John Sailer writes at City Journal, plans by a Washington, D.C. private school for “anti-racist” education  includes “discussions of social justice such as kneeling during the national anthem, Title IX, and paying college athletes while learning about concepts such as Newton’s Laws of Motion.”

Linking physics to the social justice movement would be laughable, were it not part and parcel of the Left’s scheme to destroy rational thinking and replace it with mind-numbing groupthink.

This problem has been simmering for years, as far back as the late 1960s, but it is only recently that parents, students, and citizen groups have awakened fully to what two generations of indoctrination fueled by trillions in taxpayer spending has wrought. Government mandates directed at schools and students as justified by the COVID pandemic, suddenly have exposed the evil scheme by those in control of education.

This revelation sparked by governments’ COVID mandates, has been aided by the way in which the education elite has openly and aggressively pushed its “woke” agenda in the classroom.

In a sense (and thankfully), the Left’s own hubris and its irresistible urge to overreach, has put its insidious agenda at risk.

Whereas the push of Common Core a decade ago began to stoke the ire of parents, today’s onslaught of progressive politics disguised as educational curriculum – best personified by “critical race theory” – coupled with the absurd and debilitating COVID mandates in schools nationwide, is moving these parents from simply being upset to becoming angry and, more important, actively so.

Democrats consider contentious school board meetings taking place in communities across the country as manufactured conservative outrage, and they publicly belittle parents choosing to stand up vocally against arrogant school board members. The anger manifested by these parents, however, is very real; more important, it is well-founded.

In many instances, the confrontations at these school board meetings focus on political issues, but at its core, the fight is about who should control the education of America’s children – parents, or progressive bureaucrats and union officials in swanky offices with well-connected friends in Congress and the Department of Education.

Parents moving to seize control of school districts from the hands of bullying officials serving their overlords in Washington, D.C., Sacramento, California, Chicago, Illinois, and other liberal enclaves, are fighting not only for their children, but for America’s future.

It is a battle long in the making but now existential in importance. The Left senses this and will continue to use every tool in its power to thwart it, from withholding grant monies, to ordering police to arrest and jail protesting parents. For the sake of our children and our country, these liberal bullies cannot be allowed to prevail.

Daily Caller 

by Bob Barr

President Gerald Ford often was disparagingly and unfairly said to be “unable to walk and chew gum at the same time.” Recent comments by U.S. Army Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley responding to questions about the decision to evacuate Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan tells us that our nation’s leaders appear to have lost the will to take on more than one mission at the same time.

During a news conference on Aug. 18, as the scope of the disastrous exit from Afghanistan was beginning to manifest itself, Milley was asked why the Bagram Airfield was prematurely evacuated. The four star general declared that of the two tactical missions demanding decisions by he and other top military leaders — specifically, to protect the American Embassy in Kabul and the Bagram Airfield — the United States could only do one or the other, but not both. Thus, the decision  to “collapse” (not “evacuate”) Bagram.

The toll in lives and resources resulting directly from this decision to close the only secure airfield in Afghanistan has been enormous. More important from a strategic national security perspective, however, is that it reveals that as a country our leaders no longer possess the will to carry out more than a single military operation at a time.

America’s post-9/11 military involvement in and exit from Afghanistan will be the source of debate for years to come; as was our involvement in and exit from Vietnam a half century earlier. In many respects, the more recent conflict mirrors the manner by which military historian Andrew Bacevich described how the U.S. military fought in Vietnam — not as a decade-long war with a specific goal, but as a “one-year war [fought] ten times over.” Bacevich rendered this assessment in the preface to his 2005 book, “The New American Militarism,” but it precisely fits the obvious lack of a strategic goal and of consistent tactics to achieve a goal in Afghanistan.

More recent and objective analyses of America’s military strengths have revealed troubling deficiencies, not only in our declining ability to engage militarily in two major theaters of conflict simultaneously (a view that used to be a defining benchmark for the United States as a global superpower), but also in our national will to fight.

The Heritage Foundation in recent years has published an annual assessment of our country’s military – the “Index of U.S. Military Strength.” Unlike the periodic assessments issued by the Department of Defense and by various presidents, which tend to serve as support for an administration’s policy and budgetary priorities, the Heritage studies each year objectively assess America’s military strength, effectiveness and readiness. Its “2021 Index” (prepared late in 2020) does not present an encouraging assessment, even before the recent Afghanistan exit debacle.

The Heritage Foundation panel of experts concluded that, based on an analysis of our military “capability, capacity, and readiness,” none of the four operational branches – Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines – scored higher than “marginal.” Making this assessment even more troubling is the fact that its conclusions were based only, and appropriately, on detailed assessment of “hard” factors capable of quantifiable analysis — budgets, unit strengths, equipment modernization, logistics, etc.

Not incorporated in the Heritage Foundation’s analysis, however, is what many experts consider perhaps the single most important factor determining our, or indeed any country’s war-fighting ability and its likelihood of battlefield success, the “will to fight.”

A 2019 study on “The Will to Fight” by the RAND Corporation concluded that, “[w]ith very few exceptions, all wars and almost all battles are decided by matters of human will.” This reflects a principle long known to our country’s top wartime generals, who, like Douglas MacArthur, understood that “it is fatal to enter a war without the will to win it.”

Our current military leaders, hand-in-hand with their civilian cohorts, fail or refuse to recognize this foundational military principle, even when facing a decision to carry out two limited wartime missions at the same time in the same theater of operation. Heaven help us if and when these same decision-makers face such predicaments on a larger scale.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Townhall

by Bob Barr

Underlying virtually every policy of the Left is the notion that, with enough laws, society will be ordered, and that from order will emerge safety, security, and happiness. The problem is, the well-ordered utopia long sought by leftists over the centuries, including our own, is a pipe dream that always comes at the cost of individual freedom. Still, social engineers from Washington, DC to Canberra, Australia continue their drive to force socialism upon us.

The continuing COVID-19 pandemic has provided an endless supply of excuses for Big Brothers of all stripes to find new ways to control our lives – a situation that in many respects is worse than the virus itself – and the results can be bizarre.

In Australia, for example, government officials are shooting rescue dogs as a way of preventing people from traveling during COVID to adopt them. Closer to home, elementary school children in districts across America are being forced to wear masks (even outdoors) that restrict their own breathing, despite the overwhelming data that the COVID risk facing these youngsters is virtually nil.

The illusion of ordered safety has come to trump facts, common sense, and even basic human decency.

Over the course of our nearly two-year long COVID journey, we have moved from temporary measures designed to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed, to myriad legal mandates and economic restrictions wielded, rescinded, and then reimposed by public officials whenever they feel the situation warrants.

It is only our Constitution — and the fact that there remain Americans who still understand and defend its guarantees of individual liberty — that has thus far protected us from suffering Australia’s version of what amounts to COVID martial law. But officials here are trying mightily to change that.

The many absurd COVID mandates that are troubling in and of themselves. But it also is the way in which the deception practiced by government officials is undermining the “social contract” between the citizenry and the government. This includes the credibility of government policies and actions that is essential for the proper functioning of any democratic society.

Throughout the current pandemic, we have seen these problems on full display. It began with the onset of COVID, when Dr. Anthony Fauci and the CDC intentionally misled the public about the need for masks, presumably to conserve the limited supply of the paraphernalia for frontline healthcare workers. While this “little white lie” may have been considered at the time to be harmless and necessary, it quickly undermined the public’s trust in the CDC. Subsequent government recommendations became increasingly difficult to enforce, which in turn justified transitioning from “recommendations” to “mandates” so as to ensure compliance.

Fauci now looks down from his Ivory Tower and mocks those who might say they would rather take dangerous livestock medicine than a proven, safe vaccine, but this is a situation he and his government cohorts created. It was their lies that undermined the credibility of the CDC at the outset; their punitive rules and excuses that turned a public health crisis into a political football; and their irrational drive to attain the elusive goal of complete and total “public safety” that led to an ever-widening rift between the people and the government.

Public health policy now has devolved into repetitive shows of force by the government pursuing the delusion of perfect order.

Rather than forcing more mandates, more laws, and stricter punishment on a society barely holding it together after a year of fear and restrictions, the country should be asking itself, why is it that, after spending trillions of dollars on COVID relief since early 2020, is it deemed necessary to feed American citizens the same pap about masks and “social distancing” that constituted the knee-jerk solution to a then-unknown virus almost two years ago?

In some ways, the government’s response to COVID-19 feels much like the parable about the scorpion and the frog. Successfully handling a health pandemic requires trust and transparency between citizens and government, or else chaos ensues. Could it be that the absence of those essential factors of trust and transparency simply provides the justification for further government control – to bring order to the chaos it birthed? Is one to be viewed as a conspiratorialist for considering such a scenario? Or do what we know about the facts, history, and the nature of the Left provide plausibility?

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

In the aftermath of the Taliban’s victory over the U.S.-backed Afghan government and military and as the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks is close upon us, one would think that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) might be more worried about Islamic extremist attacks than about COVID lockdown opponents and critics of Biden’s 2020 election victory. Not so.

According to a DHS National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin that is effective until Nov. 11, extremists who “may seek to exploit the emergence of COVID-19 variants by viewing the potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the United States as a rationale to conduct attacks” are a significant terror threat. The department also warned of “calls for violence on multiple online platforms associated with … perceived election fraud and alleged reinstatement.”

According to this analysis, “racially- or ethnically-motivated violent extremists (RMVEs)” and other “anti-government” and “anti-authority” extremists are some of the nation’s top terrorism threats at this time.

While DHS also considers “foreign terrorist organizations” a potential threat, it appears to be lower priority than threats posed by domestic extremist groups that are ideologically motivated and prone to “conspiracy theories.” DHS reaches this conclusion despite, in its own words, there being “no credible or imminent threats identified.”

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley belatedly seems to have realized and spoken about the danger that “terrorist groups” will “reconstitute” in Afghanistan, but his conclusion seems not to have registered meaningfully with the head of the Homeland Security Department, Alejandro Mayorkas. A review of the DHS website’s public information releases in the days since the fall of Kabul reflects little such concern.

The Department’s press releases instead focus on political matters such as Mayorkas’ meetings with families that reportedly were reunited after having been “separated under the previous administration’s “Zero-Tolerance policy.”

The closest that DHS appears to have come to recognize the dangers posed by the crisis in Afghanistan (at least as reflected in its public statements) are phone calls between the secretary and several of his foreign government counterparts, in which they agreed on the importance of cooperating in any efforts to secure passage out of Afghanistan of their respective national citizens and refugees.

The Department of Homeland Security continues to target domestic “extremists” such as those the Department has concluded are poised to commit violent acts of terrorism because they disagree with government-mandated COVID restrictions. This policy, which focuses resources not so much on foreign adversaries as on domestic, reflects a troubling perspective found throughout this administration, including the Defense Department and the FBI.

It is this mindset that led Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to declare an armed forces-wide “stand down” earlier this year. This highly unusual measure was not mandated to ensure military readiness to meet external threats such as those posed by China, Iran, the Taliban and others. Instead, the stand down was designed to weed out “white extremism” and “racism” perceived by this administration to be deeply embedded in our armed forces.

It is this mindset also that has led the FBI and the Justice Department to continue a massive investigative and prosecutorial drive against virtually anyone who entered the U.S. Capitol building during the demonstrations last Jan. 6. As part of this vindictive effort, the government has demanded that judges deny bail to demonstrators even in the absence of evidence that they engaged in violent acts.

Perhaps if this administration had expended a bit of the energy it devotes to running down individuals who disagree with mask and vaccination mandates, or to ferreting out individuals who may disagree with the priorities reflected in recent Army and CIA recruitment videos stressing adherence to the LGBTQ movement, then maybe, just maybe, our nation would be better prepared to prevent and defend against real national security threats such as a Taliban takeover in Afghanistan.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Townhall

by Bob Barr

Like most Americans, the debacle surrounding the fall of Afghanistan’s capital city to the Taliban caused me great concern. In fact, we are witnessing failures of leadership decision-making and foreign intelligence analysis worse than any in modern history; certainly, worse than the failures that lead to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

To a degree, this conclusion is based on my personal experiences of having lived in that part of the world in my youth (I graduated from high school in Tehran, for example), having worked at the CIA for eight years in the 1970s, and having served in the Congress before, during, and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Even without this background, however, the many negative short and long-term ramifications of this debacle cannot be overestimated.

Broadly speaking, there is more than enough blame to go around leading to the dismal situation in Afghanistan that President Biden inherited on January 20th, including mistakes by all three of his immediate predecessors (one Democrat and two Republican). But the final series of decisions – or non-decisions – leading directly to this fiasco, were made by this administration, and efforts by Biden to shift blame to others is an act of cowardice.

The lenses through which this administration viewed events in Afghanistan were deep rose-colored. This caused them to overlook the otherwise obvious weaknesses in both the Afghan military and its civilian government. They persisted in the narrative that the fall of Kabul to the Taliban was only a “possibility,” and certainly not an “inevitability.” Even worse, they concluded that this possibility was months away, and therefore we had adequate time to arrange for an orderly exit.

Last weekend’s collapse of both the Afghan civilian leadership and its military was either not foreseen at all by Biden, or even worse its fact was presented to him and ignored.

Regardless of which of these two horrible options prevailed over the past several weeks, during the course of 20 years, 2,300 military lives lost, and two trillion dollars, it appears that the Intelligence Community screwed up so badly as to make the pre-9/11 intelligence failure pale by comparison.

Whether our military leadership tried to save face after failing to mold the Afghan army into some semblance of a fighting force after two decades of tutorial, or whether civilian intelligence is simply that ineffective in the Middle East (even inside a country the U.S. government effectively ran), there is no legitimate way to attribute the gulf between expectations and reality in Afghanistan to a “miscommunication” or “bad intel.”

What appears to have happened is beyond fundamentally incompetent, and borders on intentional and deceptive.

The intelligence shortcomings resulting in our failure to stop the 9/11 terror attacks were devastating, but for the most part played out behind the scenes. Also, the 9/11 attacks were an American tragedy; they did not undercut our reputation with allies, or adversaries. If anything, the attacks engendered a rare bit of empathy from the international community, while providing an opportunity to remind the world the dangers of awakening the “sleeping giant filled with terrible resolve.”

Afghanistan’s fall is far different. The intelligence failures here happened in real-time, on live television, across the world. Worse, rather than being exclusively an American blunder, the international coalition of allies who helped with the U.S. effort means the decades of blood and treasure lost this week are theirs to share as well. There is no question their anger and distrust will reverberate years down the road if the United States seeks future coalitions.

America’s adversaries will be emboldened at our stunning defeat in Afghanistan. Already China is looking to move into the vacuum left in America’s wake, and seizing the opportunity to escalate saber-rattling over Taiwan. Their enhanced foothold in the Middle East will be employed to weaken ours. Had policy makers in Washington – Republican and Democrat – cared to read the long history of China and the so-called “Silk Road,” some in Washington might have seen this coming; but apparently not.

American citizens and the rest of the freedom-loving world, deserve better than what our Intelligence Community has become – a dangerous hive of self-serving bureaucrats.

As with the 9/11 Commission, Congress owes it to us all to find the truth behind the fall of Afghanistan, and the role America’s civilian and military intelligence services played in the government’s decision-making. If answers and learning do not then follow, the damage to our national security will be brutal and long-lasting.

Townhall

by Bob Barr

Republican Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs introduced House Resolution 582 on August 10. If passed by the House of Representatives, this measure would impeach President Joe Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas.

The safety and security of our country requires passage of H. Res. 582.

Unlike the two impeachments of former President Donald Trump by the same House Democrat majority now in control, the impeachment resolution directed against Mayorkas is based on real substance and, considering the Biden-manufactured crisis still unfolding at our southern border, is extremely timely.

Over the course of our nation’s history, numerous federal judges have been impeached, as have three presidents – Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998, and Donald Trump in 2019 and 2021. Only a single cabinet-level official has suffered this fate; Secretary of War William Belknap was impeached in 1876 for bribery.

The lack of precedent for impeaching high Executive Branch officers, however, should not deter representatives from proceeding against Mayorkas, who has presided over the Biden administration’s disastrous and dangerous open border policy since his confirmation Feb. 2.

Res. 582, as authored by Biggs and co-sponsored by a dozen of his fellow Republicans, describes the clear and disturbingly factual basis for which Mayorkas should be impeached.

On paper, Mayorkas’ qualifications and background should have made him an outstanding leader of the sprawling Department of Homeland Security, which was established in 2002 to consolidate in a single executive department myriad responsibilities of the federal government relating to all aspects of border security, from customs and immigration to anti-terrorism, but most importantly, protection of our nation’s borders. The Cuban-born Mayorkas served previously as a federal prosecutor and then as a top official in DHS itself, including deputy director during the final three years of the Obama administration.

On his current watch, upwards of 800,000 aliens have poured across our border with Mexico into the arms of waiting U.S. Border Protection officers. Add to this number the estimated 1,000 aliens per day who cross the same border but “get away,” and the number balloons to one million or more; larger than the population of Wyoming and Alaska combined.

It is not simply the huge number of non-citizens that have been permitted to walk into our country from Mexico during the past half-year that is alarming. What truly justifies Mayorkas’ impeachment is the fact that, as secretary, he deliberately has allowed this massive breach in violation of federal laws that clearly direct him to stop it. These violations of federal law are set forth in H. Res. 582, and include charges that Mayorkas:

• “willfully refused to maintain operational control of the border as required by the Secure Fence Act of 2006:”
• refused to contract for additional border wall construction even though the Congress appropriated funds expressly directing his Department to do so;
• unlawfully released aliens into the interior of the country without detaining them for inspection and processing, as required by the Immigration and Nationality Act;
• unlawfully released hundreds of thousands of aliens into the interior of the country, relying solely on them to self-report to federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices even though federal law prohibits such practice; and
• exposed numerous federal employees and countless American citizens to COVID-19 by permitting aliens to enter the United States and be transferred to locations across the country without subjecting them to screening for the virus as required by the Public Health Service Act.

None of the articles of impeachment set forth in the pair of resolutions lodged against Trump in December 2019 and January 2021  were based on any specific violations of federal laws. To the contrary, the two articles against Mayorkas contained in H. Res. 582 include extensive evidence supporting the allegations that he willfully violated several specific federal laws.

Permitting Mayorkas to continue his lawless and irresponsible tenure at the helm of DHS necessarily will endanger even more millions of American citizens than his reckless leadership already has. He richly deserves to be impeached.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Townhall

by Bob Barr

From the onset of COVID, the World Health Organization (WHO) proved itself unfit for the task of managing a global pandemic. This was not for lack of funding or of access to international experts on virology and disease; the organization had plenty of both.

The WHO’s abject failure stemmed from its decision at the very start that its most important mission was to help Beijing save face over China’s role in the outbreak. With this goal in mind, the leadership intentionally downplayed any critical information about the virus that might be damaging to China’s international reputation.

It is impossible for us to ever really know what China’s actions cost the international community, by both initially hiding the COVID-19 outbreak and then interfering with efforts to study the virus during its early spread. A safe guess, however, would be millions of lives and trillions of dollars. As for WHO, it simply watched China set the house on fire, then blocked fire fighters from getting to the scene.

WHO’s role in helping China with this cover-up earned it a long-overdue rebuke by the Trump administration, which promised to pull U.S. funding from yet another international forum for anti-Americanism. Predictably, President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s efforts to defund WHO, but not because the organization has finally got its act together. In fact, with a recent announcement from WHO supporting a moratorium on COVID-19 vaccine boosters in the United States, the interests of WHO and those of the United States could not be more divergent.

Were WHO a neutral, public health-focused agency not controlled by outside bad actors, the call for a booster moratorium could be viewed as a misguided but earnest attempt to expand vaccine access to other, underserved countries.  Considering WHO’s history, however, especially during COVID, the moratorium appears as an intentional effort to stymie the vaccination efforts being undertaken by wealthier nations, even as the international health agency expects to enjoy access to the product of American work and ingenuity.

Instead of requesting help with reaching nations that have not yet received initial doses of vaccines, such as seeking support for logistics, increased funding, or even supplementing vaccine supply (all of which would be reasonable to ask of the United States), the WHO wants to tie our country’s hands as we try to take care of our own citizens. “We should not accept countries that have already used most of the global supply of vaccines, using even more of it while the world’s most vulnerable people remain unprotected,” said WHO’s pious, two-faced director general.

The United States already has its hands full at home dealing with rank incompetence at the Centers for Disease Control, a long-festering problem that rendered the sprawling, Atlanta-based agency functionally useless at its core mission. It therefore boggles the mind why the U.S. would willingly fund a foreign agency that has shown itself similarly incompetent at disease prevention and control.

If, as appears increasingly likely, the GOP regains a congressional majority in next year’s election, the CDC and its international counterpart should be among the first agencies to face the fiscal knife cutters — the CDC for its inept handling of the COVID pandemic as well as for its decades of mission creep into policy areas far outside the scope of disease and virology, and the WHO for serving as little more than a mouthpiece for its puppet masters in Beijing.

To its credit, the Biden administration has called WHO’s proposed booster moratorium a “false choice,” but there is no indication it is reconsidering U.S. financial support. This is a huge mistake, though unsurprising coming from a president obsessed with being the “cool guy” in the international community.

If Biden possessed some semblance of a policy backbone, not one more dollar would be deposited into the coffers of the WHO. At most, America might supply health data that could benefit global research initiatives, but cooperation with the organization should stop right there.

The COVID vaccines are the product of American research and ingenuity, developed by American companies, and made possible, at least in part, by American taxpayers. No foreign government or agency should be permitted to tell us what we can and cannot do with the vaccines. Especially the China-pandering World Health Organization.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.