Command Authority: Tom Clancy's Last Thriller

Veteran journalist and author Joseph C. Goulden offers a good review of Tom Clancy's Command Authority in the Washington Times.

A feeling of sad finality gripped me as I read the last of the 739 pages of Tom Clancy's 18th and final thriller. Once again, the acrid scent of cordite wafted through my imagination during the climactic gunbattle as Clancy’s characters from the world of intelligence achieved yet another victory over the forces of evil.

Clancy, who died on Oct. 1 at 66, had boosters as disparate as President Ronald Reagan, who pronounced “The Hunt for Red October,” his first of 18 books, “the perfect yarn” and “non-put-downable.” National Public Radio's Alan Cheuse called him “Faulkner in a flak suit.”

Let’s be blunt about it. Clancy was an acquired taste — beloved by patriots who support a strong military and an effective intelligence community; mocked by leftist woo-woos who argue that a turned-cheek is the best defense against an adversary.

Clancy was an unabashed hard-liner. In his first novels, his heroes fought the USSR and its KGB. When the Iron Curtain tumbled, burying world communism under a heap of rubble, he made a seamless segue into a war against terrorism. I was one of the millions of fans who put him on the best-seller list for 17 straight books.

In “Command Authority,” Clancy has at it again with his original foes, correctly equating the current regime in Moscow as merely a relabeled version of what Reagan once termed “the evil empire.” The Russian president, one Valeri Volodin (somewhat rhymes with “Putin,” eh?) is threatening the military annexation of  Estonia, Ukraine and other former states of the USSR. 

Volodin's plan includes enhanced powers for the FSB, successor to the KGB as a vehicle to subvert his targets from within. He accuses the United States and other Western powers of instigating anti-Russian provocations in Estonia.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/17/book-review-tom-clancys-final-thriller/

Note: In 1984 my wife and I visited Jamaica, our favorite vacation island. I brought along several thrillers to read, including Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October.

I had not heard of Clancy at this point, but being a Defense Department civilian employee, as well as a Navy veteran who spent two years on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War and another two years on a Navy tugboat at the nuclear submarine base at Holy Loch, Scotland, I was drawn to the novel by the subject matter.

Reading the book on the beach and by the pool, I was surprised at how accurate the details were (he even got the nickname right of a phone dropped into the sea by surface craft to communicate with submarines), and I was even more surprised at his detailing what I believed at the time was classified information. (I later discovered that I was wrong - the information had been declassified).

I became a Clancy fan and I've enjoyed reading all of his subsequent thrillers and his nonfiction books.

Tom Clancy died far too young at 66 and he shall be missed.

Happy Birthday To Edgar Allan Poe

As Biography.com notes, Edgar Allan Poe was born on on this day in 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts.

Edgar Allan Poe was a U.S. American short-story writer, poet, critic, and editor. Edgar Allan Poe's tales of mystery and horror initiated the modern detective story, and the atmosphere in his tales of horror is unrivaled in American fiction. His The Raven (1845) numbers among the best-known poems in national literature.

You can read the rest of the piece and watch a video clip of Poe's life via the below link:

http://www.biography.com/people/edgar-allan-poe-9443160

You can also read my Crime Beat column on Edgar Allan Poe and a tribute to Poe from today's writers via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2009/04/my-first-on-crime-thrillers-column-for.html

FBI: Beware Of Prepaid Funeral Scam

The FBI web site offers a piece on the prepaid funeral scam.

Scamming nuns. Taking advantage of the mentally disabled. Stealing from the elderly. Just when you think con men couldn’t sink any lower, they do: This time, a group of fraudsters took money from individuals who prepaid their own funerals to ease the financial and emotional burdens on their families.
 
Recently, a Missouri man and five others were sentenced to federal prison for their role in a Ponzi-like prepaid funeral scheme that victimized some 97,000 customers in more than 16 states. The scheme caused more than $450 million in losses, smaller or non-existent death benefits for families at their most vulnerable, and huge profits that lined the pockets of the defendants.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2014/january/prepaid-funeral-scam/prepaid-funeral-scam?utm_campaign=email-Daily&utm_medium=email&utm_source=fbi-top-stories&utm_content=290194 

Happy Birthday To Cary Grant

As Biography.com notes, today is the birthday of one of my favorite actors, Cary Grant.

Cary Grant was born January 18, 1904, in Bristol, England. He ran away from home at 13 to perform as a juggler with a comedy troupe. They later toured the U.S., where he honed his acting skills. In the 1930s he signed with Paramount Pictures. He made films well into the 1960s, establishing a debonair persona that made him a screen icon. He died in 1986, having received an honorary Oscar in 1970.

You can read the rest of the piece and watch a short video on Cary Grant's life via the below link:

http://www.biography.com/people/cary-grant-9318103

Note: Ian Fleming wanted Cary Grant to portray his iconic character James Bond on the screen and Raymond Chandler wanted Grant to portray his iconic character Philip Marlowe. Watch Mr. Lucky and Notorious and you will see how Cary Grant would have played these famous characters.  

A Pre-9/11 Mindset: Obama Leads From Behind On NSA

Gary Schmitt at the Weekly Standard offers his take on the president's speech on NSA.

Thankfully, President Obama is not a doctor.  If he was and you happened to visit him in his office and mentioned that you were worried about the potential for lung cancer, he’d immediately put you under, open you up, and pull out a lung—or, at least, that’s the logic that seems to be guiding his decisions on NSA’s collection programs.  Yes, no one has found any evidence that NSA has broken the law, invaded constitutionally-protected privacy rights, or is about to.  But never mind, it’s the very possibility that someday, somehow, NSA will jump the tracks that requires the president now to unduly complicate the use of what he admits has been an important counterterrorism tool.

On the domestic front, the president has decided to modify substantially the 215 metadata collection program in which American telephony data (numbers called, numbers called from, and length of call) is currently stored in bulk by NSA and examined there to look for connections to foreign terrorists and terrorist organizations—all of which is done under the supervision of both congressional committees and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).  Starting now, however, the president will have the Justice Department go to the court for every discrete query of the database.  This is in contrast to the current process by which NSA can query the telephony database in any instance where an already FISC-approved, reasonably suspected terrorist number comes up on its screen.  Obviously, having to get court pre-approval for what have been a couple hundred queries annually will slow down the effort, make it far more burdensome and, in spirit, as former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden recently said, return us to “a pre-9/11 mindset.”

... If there is any good news coming from the president’s speech it’s that he didn’t accept any of the presidential panel’s even wilder recommendations about breaking up NSA into offensive and defensive components—a sure fire way of making both less effective—nor did the president adopt perhaps the panel’s silliest recommendation of all: telling NSA to stop looking for ways to defeat encryption systems that, needless to say, terrorists, criminals, and rogue states might want to use.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obama-leads-behind-nsa_774826.html

With DEA Support, Treasury Continues To Target Sinaloa Cartel Leadership

The DEA released the below information:

JAN 16 - (Phoenix) – Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Special Agent in Charge Doug Coleman announced today that the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) reported the designation of Jose Guadalupe Tapia Quintero, a Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico based senior lieutenant of the Sinaloa Cartel.  Jose Guadalupe Tapia Quintero was designated for his role in the drug trafficking activities of Ismael "Mayo" Zambada Garcia and for playing a significant role in international drug trafficking. 

"DEA and its OFAC partners will not allow these dangerous cartels and their associates to exploit the U.S. financial system," said DEA Special Agent in Charge Doug Coleman.  "We're relentlessly following the financial trail to deprive these traffickers of their assets, draining the lifeblood from their criminal enterprises."

Tapia Quintero oversees the transportation of cocaine and marijuana for the Zambada Garcia drug trafficking organization and is responsible for coordinating the purchase and transportation of cocaine and methamphetamine from Sinaloa into the U.S., specifically Arizona and California, on a monthly basis.  Tapia Quintero also transports methamphetamine on behalf of a drug trafficking cell affiliated with Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman Loera from Sinaloa to Tijuana, Baja California via tractor trailers.  The President identified Joaquin Guzman Loera, Ismael Zambada Garcia, and the Sinaloa Cartel as significant foreign narcotics traffickers pursuant to the Kingpin Act in 2001, 2002 and 2009, respectively.

Pursuant to the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act (Kingpin Act), this designation generally prohibits U.S. persons from conducting financial or commercial transactions with Tapia Quintero, and also freezes any assets he may have under U.S. jurisdiction. 

"We will continue to target all aspects of the narcotics trade," said Treasury's Director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) Adam J. Szubin.  "Our actions will focus on their financial nerve points as well as the underlying logistics which are essential to their day to day operations such as the transportation network that we are taking action against today."

Today's action would not have been possible without the support of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), specifically the Phoenix Field Division, and the multi-agency OCDETF Strike Force.

Since June 2000, the President has identified 103 drug kingpins, and OFAC has designated more than 1300 entities and individuals, pursuant to the Kingpin Act. Penalties for violations of the Kingpin Act range from civil penalties of up to $1.075 million per violation to more severe criminal penalties. Criminal penalties for corporate officers may include up to 30 years in prison and fines up to $5 million. Criminal fines for corporations may reach $10 million. Other individuals could face up to 10 years in prison and fines pursuant to Title 18 of the United States Code for criminal violations of the Kingpin Act.

Krauthammer: Not His War - Our Ambivalent Commander

  

Charles Krauthammer's column in National Review Online looks at President Obama's leadership of the war in Afghanistan.

 

By early 2011, writes former defense secretary Robert Gates, he had concluded that President Obama “doesn’t believe in his own [Afghanistan] strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his.”
Not his? America is at war and he’s America’s commander-in-chief. For the soldier being shot at in the field, it makes no difference under whose administration the fighting began. In fact, three out of four Americans killed in Afghanistan have died under Barack Obama’s command. That’s ownership enough.

Moreover, Gates’s doubts about Obama had begun long before. A year earlier, trying to understand how two senior officials could be openly working against expressed policy, Gates concluded that “the most likely explanation was that the president himself did not really believe the strategy he had approved would work.” This, just four months after Obama ordered his 30,000-troop “surge” into Afghanistan, warning the nation that “our security is at stake . . . the security of our allies, and the common security of the world.”

 

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

 

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/368668/not-his-war-charles-krauthammer

 

Note: The above U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Bertha A. Flores shows U.S. Special Forces soldiers fire a mortar round toward an identified enemy fighting position while assisting Afghan forces clear Bahlozi village in the Maiwand district of Afghanistan's Kandahar province, Jan. 1, 2014. Forces conducted the clearance mission to disrupt insurgents who hide in the village. The U.S. Special Forces soldiers are assigned to Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan.