It was hailed as a historic, landmark agreement that will prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was created in Vienna on July 14 between Iran, the European Union and the P5+1, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States – plus Germany.
But how many Americans are aware of the fact that the “agreement” is non-binding and was never signed, essentially relying on promises made by a radical Islamic regime that continues to lead rallies with chants of “Death to America”?
The “Iran deal” is the No. 1 underreported story of 2014, as selected by the WND editors with the help of the news site’s readers.
At the end of each year, many news organizations typically present their retrospective replays of what they consider to have been the top news stories of the previous 12 months. WND’s editors, however, long have considered it more newsworthy to publicize the most underreported or unreported news events of the year.
WND Editor and CEO Joseph Farah has sponsored “Operation Spike” every year since 1988, and since founding WND in May 1997, has continued the annual tradition.
Here are the 2015 picks:
1. The realities of the Iran nuclear deal
In a Nov. 19 letter to Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., a State Department representative spelled out in clear terms that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action “is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document.”
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
Julia Frifield, the State Department assistant secretary for legislative affairs, said the “success of the deal will depend not on whether it is legally binding or signed, but rather on the extensive verification measures we have put in place, as well as Iran’s understanding that we have the capacity to re-impose – and ramp up – our sanctions if Iran does not meet its commitments.”
But critics pointed out the agreement removes crippling economic sanctions and gives Iran more than $150 billion it can use to continue its development of intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach America’s shores and support terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas. It also opens the flow of weapons that previously had been blocked through a strategic arms embargo.
Meanwhile, the “Death to America” rallies continue, and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared in September in broken English that Israel will not exist within 25 years.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the agreement a “historic mistake for the world,” predicting Iran “is going to receive a sure path to nuclear weapons.”
Obama, for his part, has insisted he has the means of ensuring Iran will abide by its terms.
But in November, Iran quit dismantling nuclear centrifuges in two of its uranium enrichment facilities, Natanz and Fordow, sending another subtle message to the West about the tenuous state of the deal.
As part of the deal, the United States and other global powers are helping Iran to update and reconstruct a nuclear reactor that has been suspected of helping the rogue regime produce enough material for a potential nuclear weapon. While the U.S. says the goal is to help Iran refit the reactor so that it can no longer produce weapons grade material, Iran maintains the Western powers will soon provide “advanced equipment” for the reactor, near the city of Arak.
2. The truth about Black Lives Matter’s claims of racial discrimination
The Black Lives Matter activist movement, spawned by the shooting deaths of unarmed black teens Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and others, is built on the premise that there is a systematic, racially motivated campaign by law enforcement against African-Americans. Simply put, “Racist white cops across America are hunting down unarmed black youth and killing them.”
Sheriff David Clarke Jr. of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin.
But Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, an African-American, contends hard data proves President Obama, the media and Hollywood have engaged in a propaganda war against police.
“Once you strip away the myths, the lies, the propaganda, all that remains are the facts,” he said in October. “Lies put out and repeated over and over again by the president of the United States are not a substitute for empirical research.”
Clarke, citing federal data, noted that in a three-year period, 2009 to 2012, there were about 1,491 uses of deadly force by police officers.
“Sixty-one percent of the people involved in that use of force were white males, 32 percent were black males, an almost two to one ratio,” Clarke said. “If there’s anybody that has a claim on police use of force, it’s white males.”
He also pointed out that less than one-tenth of one percent, 0.04 percent, of perpetrators of black homicide are police officers.
“On the other hand, 93 percent of perpetrators of black homicide were committed by other black people,” Clarke said. “The president of the United States lacks the courage to look at the black community and tell them to look in the mirror as the source of their problems.”
Clarke said most of the people with whom police come into contact are “engaged in some sort of criminal behavior.”
Black Lives Matter die-in protest at Metro Green Line against Saint Paul Police Department (Wikimedia Commons: Fibonacci Blue)
“If you look at the other data, their participation rates in violent crime are off the charts in terms of, compared to their rates within the population of the U.S., which is about 13 percent,” Clarke said.
WND columnist Larry Elder, an African-American, points to “welfare state policies have incentivized women into marrying the government and men into abandoning their financial and moral responsibility.”
“Obama once said a kid growing up without a father is 20 times more likely to end up in jail,” he wrote. “Where is the Black Lives Matter movement on that?”
Elder cited Centers for Disease Control statistics showing that over the past 45 years, police killings of blacks are down 75 percent. What has increased, year-to-year, is the number of cop killings.
Elder noted the Democratic National Committee recently adopted a Black Lives Matter resolution.
“It promotes the phony narrative that blacks remain victims of racism. If Democrats truly want to help, they would rethink their welfare state policies that have decimated black families. In 1950, only 18 percent of blacks were born outside of wedlock. Today, that number is over 70 percent.
Jesse Lee Peterson, the founder of the civil-rights organization BOND has criticized establishment media for supporting a “radical” group.
“Black Lives Matter is an angry, godless, hateful group being held up as something good,” Peterson charged, pointing to tactics such as screaming protesters chasing Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti out of a town-hall meeting then blocking his car and jumping on its roof.
“We have total chaos in our country today,” said Peterson. “The authorities have just backed down.”
WND reported in November, Bill Ayers, the former colleague of President Obama who co-founded the domestic terrorist group Weather Underground, acknowledged in a radio interview that the Black Lives Matter movement is driven by the same ideology of political revolution that he pursued in the 1960s.
Jack Cashill, a WND columnist and the author of the new book “Scarlet Letters,” says Democrats are in an awkward position when it comes to Black Lives Matter.
“The Black Lives Matter movement can only thrive in progressive bubbles, like Los Angeles city government or college campuses like Wesleyan’s,” Cashill told WND. “When the movement ventures out into the real world, it causes problems for those who cannot be seen to discount it, Democratic politicians and college presidents most notably.”
Fox News host Elizabeth Hasselbeck drew the outrage of progressives on the morning show “Fox and Friends” in September when she asked why Black Lives Matter has not been labeled a “hate group.”
She expressed disgust at the chants of “pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon” by Black Lives Matter activists at the Minnesota State Fair.
“How much more has to go in this direction before someone actually labels it as such?” she asked.
3. How political correctness is destroying free speech on college campuses
The Atlantic magazine published in its September edition a lengthy investigation into how America’s college campuses have become a battleground over the offensiveness of everyday words. Harvard Law students, for example, asked their professors not to teach rape law because of the distress it might cause them.
University of Missouri student body president Payton Head (Photo: Facebook, Payton Head)
“Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities,” the article began. “A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.”
A month later, protests on the University of Missouri campus that eventually led to the resignation of President Timothy Wolfe were widely reported. But amid racial grievances that turned out to be unsubstantiated rumors at best, the attempt to control thought, let alone ban certain speech, was largely ignored.
A group of the International Socialist Organization, Concerned Student 1950, named for the year the university enrolled its first black student, not only demanded Wolfe’s resignation, it insisted that he “acknowledge his white male privilege” and “recognize that systems of oppression exist.”
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson responded.
“People are so frightened of the politically correct police that they’re willing to do things that are irrational to appease them,” he said. “If they continue to capitulate all the time, we’re going to be pushed further into secular progressive philosophy. You have to be brave in order to be free.”
Like the reporting you see here? Sign up for free news alerts from WND.com, America’s independent news network.
The examples of “politically correct policing” were abundant throughout 2015.
In November, the image of a Confederate flag on a laptop at Framingham State University in Massachusetts prompted a campus alert. An email was sent out assuring students that the “Bias Protocol and Response Team” had been made aware of the incident and would meet to “determine any measures that may be needed to respond to this incident.” The university’s chief diversity and inclusion officer offered a list of staff members that traumatized students could contact.
In September, the University of California’s regents voted to scrap a proposed speech code after protests from free speech groups who called it a form of censorship. The proposed “Statement of Principles Against Intolerance” called for the university’s 10 campuses to be “free from acts and expressions of intolerance.” Among other things, the proposed statement would have prohibited “depicting or articulating a view of ethnic or racial groups as less ambitious, less hardworking or talented, or more threatening than other groups.”
In August, a student at Texas Christian University was suspended for making critical comments about Islam and Mexicans on social media.
In July, the University of New Hampshire issued a “Bias-Free Language Guide” that advises against using the word “American,” labeling it “problematic.”
In June, a pro-life group claimed that Boise State violated its First Amendment rights when it asked the group to place warning signs around two exhibits that showed images from abortions and an autopsy photo of a woman who died having an abortion. Other groups weren’t asked to provide any signs, Abolitionists4Life said.
In April, the University of Michigan canceled a showing of the film “American Sniper” after a protest by students and staff. A protest letter that garnered more than 300 signatures said watching the movie “is provocative and unsafe to MENA [Muslim, Middle Eastern and North African] and Muslim students who are too often reminded of how little the media and world value their lives.” Amid a nationwide backlash, the university reversed the decision, calling it a “mistake,” and allowed the movie to be shown.
In March, the Associated Students of University of California, Irvine voted to remove all flags, including American flags, from an “inclusive” space on campus, contending they are “offensive.” The bill regards all flags, especially, the American flag, as “symbols of patriotism or weapons for nationalism.”
In February, dozens of posters plastered across the University of Michigan campus cautioned students not to say things that might hurt others’ feelings, part of a new “Inclusive Language Campaign” at the state’s flagship public university that cost $16,000 to implement.
In January, a professor at Marquette University was suspended for blogging about an instructor who warned a student not to criticize same-sex marriage.
4. The bypassing of state governments to resettle Muslim immigrants
The U.S. refugee resettlement program, launched in its current form in 1980, has flown mostly under the radar for 35 years. But when refugees from Syria and elsewhere began flooding into Europe at a rate of tens of thousands per day in August, and when it was discovered that at least one of the eight terrorists who launched the attack on Paris that killed 130 people had entered as a “refugee” with a Syrian passport, the issue became a media magnet.
Migrants in Tovarnik, Croatia, line up for coaches to registration centers
What was largely unreported by establishment media was that while the governors of more than 30 states refused to participate in the refugee resettlement program, federal contractors continued to send refugees to these states.
Judicial Watch filed a federal Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Obama administration seeking records and correspondence between the Department of State and a network of pro-immigrant private agencies that would help explain how nearly 100,000 foreign refugees get distributed to 180 U.S. cities and towns every year. The inner workings of the program have been largely a mystery for decades.
For example, why does Texas get flooded with more than 7,000 refugees per year while Vice President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware gets almost none?
Why did the federal government decide in the 1990s to start distributing more refugees to rural states like Idaho and North Dakota, which are now seeing a large influx of low-skilled refugees from Somalia, Uzbekistan and Bosnia, many of them taking jobs in corporate-owned food processing plants?
More than 40 Somali refugees or their children have left the United States to fight for ISIS, al-Shabab and other foreign terror organizations since 2007, the FBI has confirmed. One of them is reportedly tied to the San Bernardino and Garland, Texas, terrorist attacks.
“The Obama administration doesn’t want Americans to know about how it places refugees from terrorist states in their local communities,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The fact we had to file a federal lawsuit to obtain basic information about Obama’s dangerous refugee plans should tell Americans (and Congress) that the Obama administration has something to hide about refugees, terrorism and national security.”
Obama announced in August his plan to take 10,000 Syrian refugees in fiscal 2016 and “many more” the following year. And he did not back down after the Paris attacks.
In fact he doubled down. The Department of Homeland Security launched a slick public-relations campaign to repeatedly tout Syrian refugees, characterizing them as “widows and orphans” and chastising political opponents who were concerned about national security.
The State Department insists that refugees are the “most rigorously screened” of all travelers to the United States, but FBI Director James Comey has refuted that claim in congressional testimony, saying it’s virtually impossible to vet the vast majority of Syrians. The nation has fallen into the chaos of civil war and does not have the records available to cross-check the identities of those claiming to be Syrian refugees, Comey told Congress Oct. 1.
The U.S. has resettled more than 3 million refugees since 1990, at least half of which have come from Muslim-dominated nations with active jihadist movements. The authority for the resettlement program comes from the Refugee Act of 1980, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter.
The cost of the program is $1.6 billion per year to taxpayers, which does not include the welfare benefits refugees draw. More than 90 percent of refugees from the Middle East get food stamps, for example.
WND reported in December a Somali-American who entered the country as a refugee but left in 2008 to return to Somalia was involved in radicalizing Syed Farook, one of the shooters in the San Bernardino attack that killed 14 people at a Christmas party. The same refugee also helped inspire the attack on Garland, Texas, in May.
5. The true story of Ahmed the clock boy
A 14-year-old Texas ninth-grader with a record of pranks and suspensions – his sister also was suspended three years earlier for threatening to bomb the school – builds a contraption with wires, computer boards and a closable case that looks like a bomb.
He takes it without permission to his public school, where the device’s electronic alarm interrupts a class. When teachers and, later, police demand an explanation, he refuses to answer, other than to say it’s “a clock.”
School officials, on guard in today’s zero-tolerance school environment, call police, and he’s taken downtown for further questioning.
But Ahmed Mohamed of Irving, Texas, and his supporters, led by his activist father and the Muslim Brotherhood front group Council on American-Islamic Relations, immediately complained the boy was a victim of “Islamophobia,” and President Obama joined in, inviting him to the White House.
There was also the meeting with Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, at a science fair; praise by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg; a $20,000 fundraising campaign; an invitation by a Canadian astronaut; an appearance with Dr. Oz; praise from MIT scientist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein for being “my ideal student”; a proclamation by New York City of “Ahmed Day”; a visit with Sudanese President Omar al Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for genocide; and much more.
However, as WND reported, an electronics expert found the “clock” was a fraud, demonstrating how the boy simply took a commercial clock out of its manufactured case. Investor’s Business Daily, noting there “was no ‘school project’ or science assignment to justify Mohamed bringing the device to school,” also affirmed “he was no ‘science whiz.’”
“The ‘clock’ wasn’t made from scratch but just the guts of a mass-manufactured digital clock. … With its exposed wires and lack of a face, the gutted clock looked like a bomb. It also sounded like a bomb: the alarm was set to go off during English class; the beeping startled the teacher who called police.”
In “Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance,” renowned activist Pamela Geller provides proven practical guidance on how freedom lovers can stop jihadist initiatives in local communities.
Further, when police questioned Mohamed, he wasn’t cooperative and was described as “disrespectful,” IBD noted. The police chief said the device was “intended to create a level of alarm; in other words, a hoax bomb.”
The boy even admitted he knew beforehand that the clock would be controversial, explaining, “I closed it with a cable, so … because, I didn’t want to lock it to make it seem like a threat so I just used simple cable … so it won’t look that much suspicious.”
School officials didn’t back down on their three-day suspension of Mohamed, and the police maintained that their concern was legitimate.
School officials said they were not able to discuss the case because of privacy laws surrounding a juvenile. But school spokeswoman Lesley Weaver said, “If the family is willing to give us written permission, we would be happy to share with the public the other side of the story so they can understand the actions we took.”
And Islam expert Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch contends there was nothing anti-Islamic about the incident, suggesting instead that Mohamed stepped into the snake pit of fears concerning school violence.
“Would Ahmed Mohamed’s clock have been suspicious if he were a white Methodist, and would he have been arrested anyway? Without any doubt,” Spencer wrote. “But his arrest has become an opportunity for the purveyors of the Muslims-as-victims myth … to push hard on their spurious and insidious claim that Muslims are suffering from unwarranted scrutiny, including counter-terror programs, which should accordingly be relaxed or scrapped altogether.”
Ahmed’s father is a political activist who ran for president of the Islamist nation of Sudan twice and pushes 9/11 conspiracy theories.
In December, the city of Irving and Irving School District received a letter from the family’s attorneys stating the Mohameds want $10 million from the city and $5 million from ISD.
In October, the family left the U.S. for the Islamic nation of Qatar.
“We are going to move to a place where my kids can study and learn and all of them being accepted by that country,” Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, told the Dallas Morning News.
6. Planned Parenthood’s sale of baby parts
The brutality of abortion combined with the callousness of it perpetrators was brought to light as never before in a series of videos that featured an extensive undercover investigation by the non-profit Center for Medical Progress that caught Planned Parenthood staffers and executives discussing human organ harvesting and the fetal body part trade.
When Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina brought up the subject at the second primary debate, the public’s general ignorance of the videos became apparent. A YouGov poll in early August, found 70 percent of Americans had heard little or nothing about the videos.
In one video, Holly O’Donnell, a former staff member of a biomedical procurement company, described harvesting the brain of a late-term boy. She said she wasn’t sure if the baby was alive, since its heart was still beating, and that she harvested the brain by cutting his head open, starting with the chin.
Read the tested and proven strategies to defeat the abortion cartel, in “Abortion Free: Your Manual for Building a Pro-Life America One Community at a Time.”
Federal law allows reimbursement for costs of tissue donation but not profiting, and it prohibits the adjustment of any abortion procedure to salvage body parts. The videos show Planned Parenthood executives indicating that both of those standards were being violated.
In the first video released by CMP, Deborah Nucatola of Planned Parenthood described how body parts are procured.
“We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact,” she said.
See the first video:
Investigations were launched on Capitol Hill, but Congress approved a spending bill that continued to fund Planned Parenthood, which has received some $500 million from taxpayers annually.
It was discovered that Democrats appointed by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to a special committee investigating Planned Parenthood for its sale of body parts have received tens of thousands of dollars in donations from Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood and its defenders complained the videos were heavily edited, but two studies, including one commissioned by Planned Parenthood, found no evidence of bias.
At a House hearing in September, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, had a simple question for Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards in his opening statement at a congressional hearing.
If the videos were edited with bias, why did she apologize for them just two days after they surfaced?
Richards never gave a straight answer. She danced around the subject, repeatedly refusing to acknowledge any specific wrongdoing while insisting it was merely inappropriate for the doctor in the first video to have exercised the "bad judgment to have a clinical discussion in a non-clinical setting."
7. ISIS plots within America
While President Obama continues to downplay the strength and relevance of ISIS, a report shows the jihadist movement has recruited thousands of supporters in the United States.
Garland, Texas, SWAT officers prepare to evacuate attendees of the Muhammad art contest event May 3 (WND photo)
The Threat Knowledge Group, chaired by counter-terrorism expert and Department of Defense adviser Sebastian Gorka, has found that 82 people in the United States affiliated with ISIS were apprehended by law enforcement officials, including those who traveled or attempted to travel to Iraq and Syria, launched domestic attacks, or participated in recruiting or fundraising.
The 20-page report says that almost one third of these individuals had plotted attacks against Americans on U.S. soil in the last 18 months.
The FBI has said it has about 900 active ISIS investigations in all 50 states but has never given an estimate of how big the contingent of ISIS sympathizers may be in the U.S.
The Threat Knowledge Group report said “challenges of screening incoming refugees” from Muslim countries may be adding fuel to the fire.
The U.S. has imported 70,000 refugees per year for many years, more than half of them from Muslim-dominated countries such as Somalia and Iraq with active jihadist movements, and President Obama has pledged to increase that number to 85,000 this year and 100,000 the following year.
The new study is significant because the Obama administration has said that “around 200" Americans have left the country to join ISIS and could come back at any time using their American passports.
Through ISIS propagandists using social media, the Islamic terrorist group has been able to attract hundreds more supporters in the United States.
After the Paris attacks in November, ISIS issued a chilling video that vowed to strike Washington, D.C.
“We say to the states that take part in the crusader campaign that, by God, you will have a day, God willing, like France’s and by God, as we struck France in the center of its abode in Paris, then we swear that we will strike America at its center in Washington,” said a man dressed in fatigues and a turban, identified as Al Ghareeb the Algerian, on the video that was put on a site used by ISIS, Reuters reported.
Another ISIS video taunted America's military and mocked political leaders to "bring it on."
The first attack on U.S. soil claimed by ISIS took place in May when two Muslims wearing body armor and armed with assault rifles traveled 1,000 miles to a Dallas suburb to attack a "Draw Muhammad" contest event.
The killer of five U.S. servicemen in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in July and the knife attacker at the University of California at Merced both showed signs of allegiance to ISIS.
The father of San Bernardino killer Syed Farook said his son supported ISIS. And Farook's accomplice, his wife Tashfeen Malik, posted a note on Facebook pledging allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
In December, a 30-year-old Maryland man named Mohamed Elshinawy was arrested and accused in a court hearing of receiving almost $9,000 from ISIS to finance a terrorist attack in the United States.
The arrest took place after a couple of Illinois men were arrested and charged with planning to attack a military armory with grenades.
8. Hillary and the Benghazi lies
The former chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence says it’s now blatantly obvious that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton falsely claimed a YouTube video sparked the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, but he said the lies go even deeper on the video and that Republicans should have done a better job pressing Clinton on critical issues.
Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton and her supporters in establishment media heralded her testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi in October as a political victory, emphasizing she answered questions with confidence and survived the 11 hours with her composure intact.
But to any objective observer, she was caught in numerous lies, insisting, for example, that she had been transparent about the deleted emails on her private server and didn't use Sidney Blumenthal as an adviser.
The most blatant lie was her continued insistence that she believe the Benghazi attack had something to do with a YouTube video.
During the hearing, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, presented an email Clinton sent to her family and transcripts of phone conversations she had with Libyan and Egyptian officials on the night of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack. In each, Clinton stated that an al-Qaida-type group was responsible for the attack and deaths of Americans.
The most specific communication was with the Egyptian prime minister.
“We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack, not a protest,” said Clinton in the phone conversation.
Defending her actions, Clinton said the high volume of information coming in was difficult to sort out. She said the video explanation was plausible because it was stirring up protests that same day in Egypt, Tunisia and on the Arabian Peninsula.
But even that assertion is being challenged.
“I talked to people who were on the ground in Egypt who were very clear. The video had nothing to do with the attacks in Egypt. People said there were attacks going on throughout the region because of the video. That story just grew and grew,” said former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra.
In December, Clinton denied she told family members of the Benghazi victims that the video was to blame for the attack. Three family members said she did, during a Sept. 14, 2012, memorial service at Andrews Air Force Base.
In an interview with the Conway Daily Sun editorial board Dec. 30, Clinton was pressed on the issue.
"Somebody is lying," one of the paper's columnist's said. "Who is it?
Clinton replied, "Not me, that's all I can tell you.
Previously classified documents from the U.S. Department of Defense and the Department of State obtained by Judicial Watch reveal that DOD almost immediately reported that the attack was planned and carried out by al-Qaida and Muslim Brotherhood-linked terrorists.
A federal court ordered the government to hand over more than 100 pages of previously secret documents that showed Clinton and other senior Obama officials were given reports within hours of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack. In those memos, the DOD described details of a plan 10 days in advance “to kill as many Americans as possible.”
Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano charged Clinton lied during her October testimony when she denied any knowledge of secret arms shipments to Libya arranged by the State Department under her watch.
She specifically denied any knowledge of arms dealing by Marc Turi, who is being prosecuted by the Department of Justice for lying on an application to the State Department to obtain approval to ship arms to Libya.
“I am in profound disagreement with most of our media, and some of our Fox colleagues, who have gushed at the ‘brilliance’ of Mrs. Clinton’s ‘flawless’ and ‘unflappable’ performance last Thursday,” Napolitano said.
Napolitano explained that Clinton “had three audiences, and she forgot the most important of them.”
“Her immediate audience was the committee, whose members generally do not know how to ask questions of witnesses who are trying to hide the truth,” he said.
“Her second audience was the American people, who will recall no more than 15 second sound bites and general impressions,” he stressed.
“Her third audience – the one she must have forgotten about – consists of the 25 or so FBI agents and federal prosecutors who are investigating her.”
In her testimony, Napolitano said, the Department of Justice and FBI audience was looking for “perjury, for misleading statements and for what federal law calls ‘bad acts.’”
“Perjury is lying under oath. Mrs. Clinton committed perjury when she denied that she knew anything about supplying arms to rebels,” Napolitano said.
“Not only did she know about it, she authorized it,” he asserted.
As WND reported in February 2014, the Department of Justice indicted Turi for allegedly making false statements in filing to obtain a license to supply weapons to Libya.
WND has further reported that Turi’s defense attorney intends to establish at trial that Turi was encouraged by the State Department to engage in the actions for which he is now charged. Turi arranged to ship weapons to Libya via third-party countries to circumvent the U.N. arms embargo.
The Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi has alleged the State Department under Clinton’s direction was seeking to engage U.S. arms dealers in a secret scheme to deliver arms to Libya via intermediary countries such as Kuwait to mask an apparent violation of U.N. Resolution 1973. Passed March 17, 2011, the resolution imposed a no-fly zone over Libya with the goal of establishing an embargo on arms shipments.
In July, WND reported a video showing the chief spokesman for the Gadhafi regime displaying to reporters a cache of weapons and ammunition seized from Qatar supported the Citizens Commission’s contention that the Obama administration “changed sides in the war on terror” in 2011 by facilitating the delivery of weapons to the al-Qaida-dominated rebel militias attempting to overthrow Gadhafi.
9. The truth about the Paris climate-change deal
World leaders in December hailed a climate-change agreement they said would preserve the planet for future generations.
Secretary of State John Kerry
But many analysts found the non-binding agreement amounted to a massive transfer of wealth that will have no impact on "warming," particularly when the earth is clearly in a cooling phase.
Officials from nearly 200 nations agreed to reduce carbon emissions but they could not come up with a way to enforce the standards. Secretary of State John Kerry said the deal requires all nations to report on their emissions every five years, contending public exposure will keep them on the straight and narrow.
That approach is nothing more than a fantasy, says Tim Ball, former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg and author of “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science.”
Ball said the main accomplishment of the Paris summit, COP 21, was to establish the Green Climate Fund.
“They decided that developed nations had developed by using fossil fuels and the fossil fuel byproduct, CO2, was causing climate change or initially global warming,” Ball said. “Therefore, those 23 developed nations had to pay for their sins.”
The money is then to be "distributed to the developing nations that were being punished or penalized by those developed nations."
Secretary of State John Kerry admitted that 23 nations essentially will be bankrolling 175 others.
"He said this is not going to make any significant difference in terms of CO2, but it's important in terms of political policy and sharing the wealth," Ball said. "So it's a scam from top to bottom."
In addition to that admission, Kerry told Fox News Sunday there is no way to force any nation to abide by the new deal.
"If there had been a penalty, we wouldn't have been able to get an agreement," Kerry said, confident that mandatory emissions reporting requirements would keep everyone on target.
There was an environmental cost to the summit itself. The roughly 22,000 official and 33,000 unofficial attendees at the Paris conference put 300,000 tons of CO2 into the air while in transit.
A left-leaning, Democrat-voting, Obama-supporting physicist, Freeman Dyson, said Democrats and other supporters of the theory of human-caused global warming are ignoring “obvious” findings, including the fact carbon dioxide is not actually a pollutant.
Dyson taught physics for 40 years at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, with an emphasis on electrodynamics, climate studies and nuclear engineering. He said the burning of fossil fuels brings about “very unpleasant stuff,” but clarified pollution from coal, oil and gas is not a driving force of global warming.
He said the main problem is today’s scientific community constantly ties together air pollution with carbon dioxide to conclude both bring on global warming.
“The facts should be obvious: that the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide as a sustainer of wildlife and crop plants are enormously beneficial, that the possibly harmful climatic effects of carbon dioxide have been greatly exaggerated, and that the benefits clearly outweigh the possible damage,” he wrote in a recently released report by the Global Warming Policy Foundation in the United Kingdom.
Nearly 400 people, including 154 with doctoral degrees, 100 with master’s degrees and 95 with bachelor’s degrees, and including 21 climate scientists (14 with doctorates), have signed “An Open Letter on Climate Change to the People, their Local Representatives, the State Legislatures and Governors, the Congress, and the President of the United States of America."
10. The hack attacks and other cybersecurity failures under Obama
A major cyberattack resulted in the resignation of the Office of Personnel Management director after 21 million records were leaked, including social security numbers, fingerprints and medical reports containing information about mental health history.
That was after the OPM reported 4.3 million personnel records were hacked of current and former federal workers, including potentially active duty and former troops with the U.S. armed services.
The hackers are believed to have accessed and stolen every background check performed on potential government employees since 2000.
National Intelligence Director James Clapper said Chinese hackers were the leading suspects.
Experts say the feds are badly behind the private sector when it comes to addressing the threat.
“I don’t know whether I’d call it the Pearl Harbor. The cyber analysts have been trying to use that term for quite a while now. I guess this is one of those times you could theoretically use the term,” said Heritage Foundation cyber security expert Riley Walters.
Cyber experts said the shutdown of three major systems all at once in July – New York Stock Exchange trading, United Airlines flights and the Wall Street Journal website – was the result of a major cyberattack from China.
A huge NSA eavesdropping and data collection facility in St. Louis appeared to be the subject of major attacks in July as revealed by Norse Corporation’s real time global cyber attack map.
Also in July, a secret NSA map was publicly disclosed showing the Chinese government’s massive cyber assault on all sectors of the U.S economy, including major firms like Google and Lockheed Martin, as well as the U.S. government and military.
The map uses red dots to mark more than 600 corporate, private or government “Victims of Chinese Cyber Espionage” that were attacked over a five-year period, with clusters in America’s industrial centers. The entire Northeast Corridor from Washington to Boston is blanketed in red, as is California’s Silicon Valley, with other concentrations in Dallas, Miami, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles and Detroit.
Russia was detected in July targeting the unclassified email system at the Pentagon’s Joint Staff.
WND reported the Internal Revenue Service confirmed recent hacks led to more than 100,000 files coming into the hands of Russian criminal operatives.
Honorable mention
The radical Muslim influence on the U.S. government.
The Obama administration's adoption of "net neutrality" and its infringement of First Amendment rights
The facts of Miriam Carey's death outlined in a Department of Justice report.
The "third shooter" reported in San Bernardino who mysteriously vanished from news coverage.
Homosexual activists seeking the complete financial ruin of those opposing their agenda.