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Sept. 3, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:23
September 3, 2014, Wednesday, Hour #2
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Yes, great to be with you.
Rush is out for a few days.
Eric Erickson will be here tomorrow, and Rush will be back next week for authentic full-strength all-American as apple pie, if you can still say that in these days of Michelle Obama's nutritional guidelines.
Rush will be back live next week for the real deal when it comes to excellence in broadcasting.
I mentioned earlier in the show this intriguing story out of Tripoli.
Obama's failed war.
Libya is in danger of imploding entirely as a failed state.
The government has resigned.
The parliament has resigned.
Warring militias are now carving up the joint.
And Egypt is talking about military intervention because a lot of the Muslim Brotherhood fellas from Cairo have gone across the border into Libya and maybe making mischief there to use against Egypt.
And among the many fascinating details of what's happened there, 12 commercial passenger jets have gone missing from Tripoli airport and fallen into the hands of a jihadist militia.
And nobody quite knows where they are or what's going to be done with them or what the purpose to which they could be put.
But one fellow who's as close to anybody on this story is Bill Goertz, who wrote about it in the Washington Free Beacon today.
And Bill's on the line.
Bill, this is an amazing story.
Essentially, just on the eve of the anniversary of 9-11, a date we know these guys attach great significance to, they have managed to get their hands on an even dozen passenger airliners.
Yeah, hi, Mark.
Good to be on the program.
This is an alarming story.
It's based on some recent intelligence reports indicating that Islamists in Libya, who took over the Tripoli airport, got control of 11 to 12 jetliners of two state-run Libyan airlines.
And again, this set off alarm bells and security alerts from Lagos, Nigeria, all the way to Cairo, Egypt in the last couple of weeks.
People are on the lookout.
The CIA is trying to confirm these reports.
The administration's trying to play down the seriousness of this.
The intelligence sources that I talk to are very, very worried about the use of one of these or more of these aircraft in some type of a terrorist attack coinciding with the 9-11 anniversary.
Now, when the Malaysian jet disappeared, and none of us know what happened to that so many months after it, but when that disappeared, a lot of people in this age of drones and satellites didn't actually think it was possible for something as large as a passenger jet for its whereabouts not to be known.
And that was what caught their attention about the Malaysian airliner, when you don't even know whether it's in China or the southern Indian Ocean or maybe headed up to one of the Central Asian stands.
You just don't know where it is.
Now, we've got that now with 12 jets and 12 jets that were reliably in one place on the ground and in a place where you would have thought that U.S. drones would be keeping an eye on things as they were on the night of Benghazi a couple of years ago.
Yes, the problem here is that Libya is spiraling out of control and into a failed state.
The government of Libya announced on Sunday that they no longer control the capital city.
And what you have is these marauding militias, and they're divided up into numerous camps between Islamist and anti-Islamists.
And of course, the al-Qaeda groups are among the best armed.
The group Ansar al-Sharif, they have surface-to-air missiles.
They have some armored vehicles, lots of shoulder-fired missiles.
And if they get a hold of some jetliners, again, this really raises the specter of some type of 9-11 suicide attack that could be carried out against some target in the region, or perhaps even a long-range attack.
Some of these Airbus jets that are owned, if in fact it's confirmed that they obtained some of these Airbus jets, they have the range to reach certainly NATO, the NATO summit coming up, or the United States.
Right.
So these aren't, I mean, by the time these jets were taken, not a lot was flying in and out of that airport except to Tunisia and Egypt and Nigeria and a couple of other relatively local places.
But actually, they've got a first world air force, as it were, that can get to Europe and conceivably to North America as well if they wanted to.
Yes, and they have access to fuel as well, because, of course, Libya is an oil-rich country and they have refineries, and they definitely have the makings of a very dangerous missile-type suicide bomb attack.
Another possibility, according to the terrorism experts I talked to, is that they could use these jets to transport their militias to other places.
And another key element of the story that I reported on is that the Egyptians are finally getting very serious about making some preparations for possible military intervention in Libya to try to prevent the country from being taken over completely by Islamists and then turning it into yet another al-Qaeda safe haven in that part of the world.
Well, and you've got a situation where the more or less functioning Middle Eastern states now all border the most dangerous pathologies, like at the eastern Jordanian Trabil border crossing, that now borders.
On the other side of that, there's a guy from ISIS standing underneath an ISIS flag in Egypt, where they're spending all this time cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood.
Presumably, they don't just want every dodgy character in the country to skip over the border to Libya and use that as a base to destabilize Egypt.
I mean, these are real problems for what's left of the functioning Middle East.
Absolutely.
And the Islamists in Libya have been staunch supporters of the Syrian rebels.
What's not known clearly is what are the relations between some of these al-Qaeda-linked groups like Ansar al-Sharia and ISIL, the emerging Islamic State terror group, which has been in the headlines lately.
So if they were to connect, again, you could, again, be seeing an expansion of this terror threat expanding not just from Syria into Iraq, but potentially from Syria and Iraq into Libya.
Well, you link these jets.
You quote someone from Morocco who says these jets have fallen into the hands of something called the Masked Men Brigade, which sounds like a kind of joke name for a serious organization, but in fact is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States.
Who are these masked men?
As the Lone Rangers guys used to say.
Yeah.
The State Department just did this designation in December, and they are an offshoot of Ansar al-Sharia, and they go by a number of different names.
They're one of these al-Qaeda-linked groups that have been operating as a militia inside Libya.
I don't think there's a lot of details on their activities at this point, although the United Nations is getting ready to develop some more designations of Libyan terrorist groups.
They just passed a resolution doing that, and they warned that the threat of al-Qaeda terrorism in Libya is growing.
So this is clearly a growing and bigger problem for not just the United States, but all the states in that region.
Well, one of the interesting things is that some of these countries haven't been waiting for U.S. leadership on this.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates actually scrambled their planes and took military action without notifying Washington a few days ago in Libya.
And that's presumably because one of the things these planes could reach very easily is the Saudi oil refineries.
Yes.
Yeah, and they're very extremely vulnerable to that kind of an attack.
And the terrorists have been targeting these oil refineries for years.
Of course, they've gone to great lengths to protect them against such attacks.
But an aerial strike on the Saudi oil fields and refineries there could have major implications on the world economy because it would sink the world into an oil crisis.
And so that clearly would be one of their targets if they were in fact able to get these jets and use them as guided suicide bomb missiles.
Yeah, that's certainly true.
You've said that in essence the State Department is underplaying this threat, that the disappearance of 12 passenger jets from some ruined, burned-out airport is like no big deal.
Do you think that's just like the official line and that somewhere in the government they're actually taking this thing quite seriously?
The latter, yes.
The people that I talked to, I wouldn't say that their hair was on fire about it, but they are very, very worried about this, especially because of the threat of a 9-11 attack-style attack on the anniversary.
We're 13 years out from the 2001 attack and two years from the Benghazi attack.
And these are Libyans who would want to make a statement this is something that they can do.
My sense is, and I'm only speculating, the State Department's playing this down, is that they just don't want another crisis on their plate, having to deal with Iraq and ISIL.
And here you have a failed state.
They're hoping that perhaps the Egyptians can pick up the ball on this.
Like I said, I got the sense that the other thing is that the CIA was caught flat-footed on this and has been unable to locate all of these jets.
And they're working very hard to try and account for these two state-owned Libyan airlines inventory of commercial jets, which range from Airbuses to Bombardier regional jets to some turboprop planes.
Right.
And in other words, the same planes that everybody uses to fly around The Western world.
So even though they're Libyan airlines, presumably it would be the work of it would be relatively easy to repaint the tail fin so it looks like an Air France jet or whatever.
And so in essence, these planes could get quite a long way without any, if you knew flight schedules and things before anybody was alert to the fact that it was like a it was a fake passenger plane, as it were.
Right.
And well, the question was: could they get pilots?
Can they train up terrorists to fly the plane?
We know that from 9-11, that they were able to do that.
Question is: would they be able to do that?
Obviously, they have targets throughout the Middle East.
They could crash it into embassy buildings.
They could do it into capital cities of states they regard as enemies.
They certainly could reach Europe fairly easily.
And the question could be, could they cross the Atlantic pond and attack targets in the U.S.?
Again, at this point, it's a theoretical threat, but certainly there are people that are very worried about it and they're trying to account for all those missing aircraft.
Well, thank you for the story, Bill, and we'll keep an eye on it.
And great to have you and your insight on the show.
And we don't want this to be like Benghazi, folks.
So we hope that Bill's story will at least have caught the attention of people so that this isn't like the night of September 11th, 2012, when the deputy ambassador back in Tripoli was calling Washington and nobody wanted to take his calls and they'd all left.
They'd gone to the Vegas fundraiser or whatever it was, and Hillary Clinton wasn't answering the phone at the 3 a.m. phone call.
Bill's story is a fascinating story.
It's in the Washington Free Bacon, and he's given us a heads up.
So hopefully, if anything does go down on the anniversary, there will be someone there to answer that 3 a.m. phone call.
Thanks, Lot Bill.
This is Mark Stein Inforus.
We'll take your calls straight ahead.
Mark Stein sitting in for Rush.
Before we leave the subject of those missing Libyan planes, I forgot to ask Bill what was the kind of obvious question, which is how these planes got out of the airport.
Because I was in Tripoli Airport, as I said, years ago, and I remember it as being, you know, when you land at an air, you land on the field and you then go past the hangars and all the rest of it.
And I remember there being Libyan jets from some Libyan airlines sitting around there that you don't see a lot of.
It's not a big hub for US Air or Northwest or Delta or whatever.
So the planes that are sitting around there are the ones from these Libyan airlines.
And it wasn't, it seemed to me that once you were, it would not be relatively easy to get hold of those planes and actually fly them and take them off.
Bill says they don't actually know how those planes left the airport, whether somebody actually drove them past the parking garage.
You know, if these guys have been, if these planes have been seized by guys who don't know how to fly, then they can just take them out the parking garage onto the highway toward downtown Tripoli and then fork off and go into the desert and do what they want.
But if they actually had pilots who could fly them out of there, then who knows where those planes are by now?
And this is why I asked Bill the question about the drones.
As Tripoli airport was falling, we have these drones.
We pay for the most expensive military on the planet that has about 44% of the planet's total military expenditure.
And on Benghazi, that money didn't actually get us a lot.
But what it got was drones that could see what was, they could watch in the Oval Office, what was happening in real time.
They could watch in the situation room live footage of those drones over Benghazi and what was going on at that time.
And you would have thought, you would have thought, given the complete failure of Obama's Libyan policy, given the total implosion of Libya, given the total disaster of it, that as the capital city falls, as the main airport falls, that these drones they had over Benghazi, a couple of years later, they might have been actually watching what was going on at Tripoli Airport.
So at least even if we weren't doing anything, we would know what was happening.
Just like in Benghazi, we didn't do anything.
The superpower was passive, but it at least knew what was happening.
And it's distressing to learn that even that minimal advantage of the 44% planet's military expenditure, even that minimal advantage was apparently squandered when Tripoli Airport fell to these guys.
You know, Obama is testing out a new slogan.
Gregory French just sent me a thing, calling it his latest platitude.
Cynicism is a choice.
This was in his speech for Labor Day.
Cynicism is a choice and hope is a better choice.
But we're conservatives, you know, and sometimes you don't get to choose.
There are certain things you don't get to choose.
Reality isn't a choice.
Reality is a given.
And it doesn't matter whether you're cynical and it doesn't matter whether you're hopeful.
At some point you have to acknowledge reality.
And Obama's whole shtick that simply the total awesomeness of his charisma, the spectacular, godlike, messianic glow of his clique-like celebrity can negate reality, which is essentially the deal he sold to the American people in 2008, is what is up for grabs here.
And you notice he seems, what I find interesting is how listless he seems when he professes to be outraged.
You know, he's outraged by the latest beheading of an American.
That's what he said in Estonia.
And he's so inert and listless and unengaged.
He's been written these butched up words to express his outrage.
And at the same time, he doesn't sound in the least bit outraged because he's not.
In the end, he still believes that his awesomeness, his klieglike celebrity trumps reality.
And the lesson of the world is that it doesn't.
Hey, great to be with you.
Let us go to Janine in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I will be at Orchestral Hall at October the 9th, I think it's going to be.
So if you happen to be in that part of town, it's the center of the American Experiment.
It's an evening with Mark Stein.
Oh, great.
I love that guy.
I must make a point to be there.
Oh, I will be there.
October the 9th in Orchestral Hall, Minneapolis, presented by the Center for the American Experiment.
Let's go to Janine, who is in Minneapolis, that fair city itself.
Great to have you with us on the show, Janine.
Hi, Mark.
Thanks for having me.
My pleasure.
I really, I appreciate this opportunity to vent on an issue that has been very frustrating to me for many years.
I'll just say that I was a many, many year mechanic with a major airline here in the Twin Cities.
And in 2005, the workforce changed greatly.
There was a mechanic cleaner strike, and the mechanics, most of them were outsourced at that time, and all of the cleaners were outsourced to contract companies.
And the Somali population was growing in the Twin Cities here.
And what we found were the majority of the cleaner replacements were done with a Somalian workforce.
Right.
And at that time, I was shocked, actually, because the employees were security-cleared, drug-tested, long-term employees.
And this was not that long after 2001, September 11th.
And I was just shocked.
I couldn't believe it.
And I tried to make an issue of it.
And at this time, the workforce was out on strike, the cleaners and the mechanics.
And we had a lot of newspapers, the coverage, and the reporters were there.
And I went to the newspapers and I said, listen, how do you get background checks and security clearance out of Somalia?
Right.
And the union leaders, I went to them, and I even went to the conservative radio stations and was cut off because nobody would touch this story with a 10-foot pole.
Nobody wanted to listen.
And you make a, the Somal, people who don't live in Minnesota are not generally aware that in the last 20 years, Minneapolis has become a, has acquired a significant Somali population to the point where there's a part of town called Little Moggad Issue and they're in the position to elect people to office and as may well happen in November.
And that these people came to America originally as refugees during the collapse of Somalia a couple of decades back.
And actually, and under chain migration, you're allowed to bring in your relatives and all the rest of it.
But nobody knows anything about Somali paperwork.
Nobody actually, when these people are admitted, you have to take their name on trust.
Nobody knows their identity.
Nobody knows who their brother is.
So in fact, these people were admitted to the country without a background check, but then amazingly aced the background check when they want to get a job at Minneapolis airport, Janine.
Well, you know, Mark, I don't know how that works because back in 2005, it was acknowledged that there was not background information, even to the point of not having agents.
And you're right, even names, nobody being able to tell what was proper and correct.
Right, right.
So I stood there and we were growing this behemoth protection government agencies and I saw the people going in with their little kids in the front door of the airport and they would go through the scanners and the screening lines and TSA and I just stood there and I thought this is all a farce.
Right.
Because you can put all the locks you want on the front door.
If your back door is open, none of it matters.
None of it works.
It's absolutely meaningless.
No, no.
And that gets back to the security theater point we were making.
Basically, These guys are expressed through to the secure area of the airport.
And they have free reign to do what they want there and then.
And like, you know, a lot of them just want to do a job and get their money and go home at the end of the day.
But if you're not like that, if you're like this fellow who wound up signing up with ISIS, Abdulrahman Mohammed from Minneapolis, who went off to fight for ISIS, and you want to make mischief at an American airport, then this gives you a secure pool to splash around in because the checks are not being done.
Yeah, and nobody wants to make a fuss about it.
Nobody wants to make a fuss about it because you're racist or you're Islamophobic or we're going to have to put you in for...
That was the other story out of Minneapolis a few years ago.
The Imams who started behaving oddly on, I think that was a U.S. Airways flight.
There were six of them, and they started asking for the seatbelt extenders and doing a lot of funny stuff before takeoff.
And people made a fuss about it.
And that wound up as a lawsuit.
And the guys, the flight crew wound up going to the sensitivity training to be trained not to notice suspicious behavior, which is the insanity of this system.
So if you're trained not to notice suspicious behavior by an imam asking for seatbelt extenders, even though he's not a large imam, while he's saying Allahu Akbar, if you're trained not to notice that, the only thing left to notice is the 93-year-old granny making her remove her leg brace or whatever.
And this is the craziness of the system we have, Janine.
But you tried to interest people in your city about it in Minneapolis, and they didn't want to hear about this.
Well, I'll tell you what.
It is not on my behalf.
I am not racist.
I'm not an Islamophobic.
I care about the security of the aircraft.
That's it.
I have people I love getting on those aircraft.
I see families with their children getting on those aircraft.
That's what I care about.
Security of the aircraft.
Yeah.
Well, you're right there.
And that's what we're told this stuff is all about, Janine.
Thank you for your call.
By the way, this is why I'm in favor of the President of the United States flying commercial.
We were originally told that he has to fly Air Force One because in the old days, because airports, anybody could turn up and get on, get off and all the rest of it.
And then after 2001, they made airports secure, secure.
And they're supposedly secure.
Why can't the President of the United States fly on a commercial jet then, if they're so secure?
The Prime Minister of Australia does.
He flew coach.
He flew coach on a commercial flight from Sydney to a skiing vacation in the Swiss Alps over the winter a few months back.
So that's like a long flight.
That's like a 23-hour flight or whatever the hell it is.
It's like takes forever from Sydney all the way to the Swiss Alps.
He's sitting there, the Australian Prime Minister's sitting there at the back of the plane in coach.
And people say, hey, Fred, how was your flight to Geneva?
Oh, it was a murder.
I had the Prime Minister in the next seat.
He wouldn't shut up all night.
If the plane is secure, it's secure for everyone.
So the President of the United States should be able to fly on those planes.
But if not, all the hell of travel now, the hell of travel is completely pointless.
If, as Janine says, you've got all this security at the front door, but at the back door, everybody's going in.
Same thing with this thing that Homeland Security gave false and evasive answers on.
You have to have picture ID to board a plane.
Again, that's a waste of time because there's all kinds of millions of people in this country have fake picture ID.
Millions of illegal aliens have driver's licenses.
On September 11th, those guys got on the plane in Washington, boarded with genuine state of Virginia ID they got from the 7-Eleven parking lot in Falls Church, Virginia, which provided them with an address.
They went to the Virginia DMV and got formal picture ID.
So again, it's irrelevant.
But you see them now with these little loops screwed in, like jewelers looking at diamonds.
They got these things screwed into their eye and they're looking down for the watermark on your driver's license.
Or you don't need a fake driver's license to get on a plane in America.
Anybody can get a genuine driver's license.
But they've taken it to the next level now.
You have to sit there while the guy looks at your driver's license to see whether the watermarks are all correct and everything.
And he's got the thing screwed in his eye like he's the jeweler and you're pawning your grandmother's wedding jewelry.
And meanwhile, meanwhile, illegal aliens are able to board the plane without picture ID and with nothing but a so-called notice to appear for their deportation hearing.
So again, it's like everybody, the more they torment the law-abiding, the more they let the lawless do what they want in the United States of America.
Mark Stein for Rush, more straight ahead.
Mark Stein in for Rush as President Obama continues his travels.
He's on his way from Estonia in the Baltic to Wales for the NATO summit.
HR mentioned to me just before the show, he called NATO the military welfare state.
And in a way, it is.
Broadly speaking, it's a military alliance of countries that don't have any militaries.
And that was how the United States designed it in a way, that they would provide Western Europe with a security umbrella in order that Western Europeans would stop fighting and killing each other and everyone would get a bit of peace for a few decades.
And that situation no longer prevails.
And yet the United States still is basically picking up the tab for this so-called military alliance.
And if you look at, remember President Reagan's remarks about welfare queens, defense welfare queens, military welfare queens are in many ways no more attractive.
And as an old colleague of mine famously used to say, a country isn't really a country if it doesn't have a military.
So NATO is a problematic institution.
And like NATO, the European Union, the Middle East, all over the world, all these countries are looking for American leadership.
But the guy who currently occupies the role of leader of the free world doesn't take the title seriously, so he's not interested.
And so he just wants to stay home and play golf and do Obamacare and lots of other things that he's interested in, expand food stamps and all the rest of it.
He's not interested in the rest of the world.
And at one level, this is hilarious because the European Union guys finally got one of their own elected as President of the United States.
And then Now they're living with the consequences of it, which is that when you get someone who at best is like a Scandinavian social democrat and at worst is some Eastern European Marxist elected as president of the United States, the planet tends to go to hell because he's just like you.
He doesn't want to do anything.
He's waiting.
The fellow you look to for leadership isn't interested in playing that role.
And Mr. Snerdley spotted this story in the Associated Press.
They're now worrying that Afghanistan is going to go like Iraq and that they're things the minute the last Western troops depart, the whole thing is going to implode and the Taliban will be back in power in Kabul.
And the interesting thing I spotted in this story is that there's still a ton of countries with their militaries in Iraq.
The US has about 30,000 troops there.
Britain has 4,000.
Germany has 2,000.
Italy has about 1,600.
Okay, those are real deployments.
Those are real-sized deployments.
But 17 countries, 17 countries, there's officially a 48-nation coalition in Afghanistan.
And about a third of them, 17, have just 25 or fewer troops still deployed.
So if your kid, for example, went on an eighth-grade school trip to Washington in May or June, just before graduation, like my kid did, there's about the same number.
That's the military deployment.
Think of your kid getting on the school bus with his class.
That's the size of the military deployment that these countries have in Iraq.
They've got fewer than 25.
Austria has fewer than 25 troops in Afghanistan.
Bahrain, fewer than 25.
Bosnia and Herzegovina, fewer than 25.
Estonia, fewer than 25.
Greece, fewer than 25.
Iceland, fewer than 25.
Ireland, fewer than 25.
Latvia, fewer than 25.
Montenegro, fewer than 25.
Tonga, fewer than 25.
Ukraine, fewer than 25.
And right now, they could use those guys at home back now.
What's the point?
Now, you think you've got fewer than 25.
You've got fewer than 25 Austrians, fewer than 25 Bahrainis, fewer than 25 Estonians, fewer than 25 Greeks, fewer than 25 Irishmen.
And then you think about all the diplomatic effort the United States expended in flying to those capitals and twisting the arms of those people and providing incentives for them to send two dozen guys over to Afghanistan.
That's the first thing.
It's a complete waste of your energy.
Because by the time you've done that, by the time you've spent all the time twisting the arm of the fellow in Slovenia and the fellow in Sweden and whoever the defense minister of Montenegro is to get them to send a couple of dozen people, if that, this is fewer than 25.
So they might just be sending seven or eight or nine people to Afghanistan.
You've expended a ton of energy that would have been better focused on your strategy, killing your enemy.
And secondly, if you are going to go into information building, what is the hell the use of a 48-member coalition?
You know, when you've got a 48-nation coalition, who are you actually sacrificing blood and treasure for?
Who are those 30,000 U.S. troops still in Afghanistan fighting for?
You don't have a national interest when you've got a 48-member coalition.
You're basically a global traffic cop.
You're basically the school traffic guard of Afghanistan.
And that's why you end up in a country for 13 years and nothing to show for it but Sharia law and women in body bags and Afghan tribal warlords being bribed with Viagra so they can use it on their nine-year-old child brides.
The reason you're doing that is because of this fig leaf of this internationalism and the 48-nation coalition.
If you're going to go in for nation building, you build it in your interest, what serves your national interest, instead of wasting your time as a global traffic guard.
Mark's time for Rush.
Lots more still to come.
Atlantic City started this year with 12 casinos.
It will be down to eight casinos by the middle of this month with 8,000 people out of work.
Even gambling, even gambling isn't a gamble.
It's just the certainty of closure and out of work.
Coming up snake eyes in Atlantic City in the new Obama economy.
Trump Plaza is closing September 16th.
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