Remember Iran's so-called Green Revolution in 2009? And, more to the point, the resulting Green Pundit Rush to Judgment?

This was, as noted here in June 2009, the widespread assumption that " `the Persian street' is filled with Our Kind of People: anti-Khomeini, anti-sharia, anti-Islamic Revolution, anti-regime, anti-nuke, pro-West, pro-Israel, pro-secular masses yearning to "free"--  in the specifically Western sense, which emphasizes the rights and will of the individual, and not the Islamic sense, which speaks to a "perfect enslavement" to Allah."

Andrew Bostom flags new Pew poll results that demonstrate the fallacy of this assumption, which has only ossified in the intervening years.

Bostom writes:

...

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A "processed" P-63 Kingcobra undergoes final inspection in June 1945 at Great Falls Army Air Base, a hub of the massive Lend-Lease supply program (photo courtesy of the Malmstrom Museum). Such processing, it can be seen, included application of the Soviet red star.

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If American Betrayal tells our lost history, reading and discussing the book is a means of restoring that lost history to the American people where it beongs.

I recently had the opportunity to go on the radio on "Voices of Montana" with Aaron Flint to discuss  Lend Lease, whose WWII supply pipeline to the USSR included a key base in Great Falls, Montana. As American Betrayal explains, Lend Lease-Soviet looks very much like a rogue operation run out of the White House by FDR's top advisor Harry Hopkins for shipping not just hundreds of millions of dollars worth of aircraft and war materiel but also uranium...

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An intriguing aspect of the Mainly Mexican Immigration Debate is the impact endless masses of "amnesty"-lured, unskilled and cheap labor has had on the mechanism and nature of the American family. Cheap child care -- whether via "imported labor," as the Washington Post has actually called it, or government -- "liberates" mothers to work. In some cases, little more is earned than the nanny wages.

The cultural, political, and probably evolutionary repercussions of this fact of very recent American life are many and many-faceted. There is the cultural and familial impact of child-raising by non-mothers; there is an impact on marriage/divorce; there is an impact on the economy where dual-income families drive prices up; there is an impact on certain particularly "feminized" professions where a surfeit of workers, male and female, drive wages down.

I'm sure there are more repercussions but none...

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I would trade the "Gang of Eight" for Edward Snowden any day

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I have been reading through five- and six-year-old columns on the Amnesty Wars of 2006-2007 that We, the People won. That means George W. Bush, Big Business, The Wall Street Journal, the illegal alien street protests ("Si, Se Puede," "Yes, We Can"), and La Raza lost.

This time around the set-up seems quite different. George W. Bush is gone and there are no Mexican flags in sight. In this period of high unemployment, I haven't heard the old mantra, "They do the work Americans won't do." Barack "Si, Se Puede" is in the White House. Today, the amnesty show is run by the sober-suited, gruesomely named "Gang of Eight" under intense, but low-profile oversight from the Obama White House.

Have the more incendiary aspects of pro-Amnesty forces gone quiet as a matter of political strategy? It would seem...

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Flags flying over Montebello High School, 2006

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You think maybe Edward Snowden is a "traitor" for exposing the totalitarian structure and function of the thuggish mega-state? Me, I think any senator who votes for the dissolution of the USA should be in the dock.

From the Vaults: April 3, 2006, "Which Flag Do You Want?" 

As one of those American rarities -- a Los Angeles native -- I looked at recent, mainly Mexican protests against proposed restrictions on illegal immigration with more than just outrage over lost U.S. sovereignty. I was also reflexively examining aerial photos to pinpoint where in Los Angeles those hundreds of thousands of Mexican-flag-waving demonstrators were marching.

It was downtown Los Angeles, a section of the sprawling city I rarely visited growing up. Then it hit me: As a kid in the 1960s, my mother had taken me on an outing to Olvera Street, an old...

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Lucianne.com has magnanimously given its prime real estate today, June 15, to American Betrayal, calling it: "Our Pick for an Absolute MUST READ."

Starts at Minute 39.

This week's syndicated column

At what point does it become clear that we no longer inhabit America?

When we “Press 2,” not “1,” for English?

When a national Social Security Number syncs an electronic identity that the government hospital provided us at birth to track us till death?

When borders are no more, but the Surveillance State always knows where we are?

Ours is the age of dislocation before realization: The United States of America no longer exists. Why? How? The answer is simple, tragic and outrageous: Government officials, elected and unelected, with precious exceptions, no longer preserve, protect and defend the U.S. Constitution. Instead, they do whatever it takes to beat it, flout it and ignore it. Worse, We, the People, let them.

This can’t go on. Otherwise our-country-’tis-of-thee becomes a melody to be forgotten, a mirage of a tradition more storybook than real every day. Nowhere is this more the case, of course, than in Washington, D.C., where absolute unaccountability corrupts absolutely, where echoing down the cool, white marble halls of power, hollow men and women trample sovereignty and citizenship in a pathway to American betrayal. And I haven’t even gotten to Congress, busy “reforming” the illegal-alien crisis they antiseptically refer to as “immigration,” while considering passage of a $940 billion “farm bill,” 80 percent of which will fund food stamps. These two laws alone can institutionalize the lawlessness of the land and make countless more Americans wards of the state.

...

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If anyone wants to know what American Betrayal is about, here are some recent conversations about the book, along with some new reviews. Earlier interviews also linked below.

On "The Tammy Bruce Show" with Debra Burlingame here.

On "The Monica Crowley Show": Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.

Q & A with David Stokes at Fair Oaks Church here

Edward Cline review for Family Security Matters here

Andrew Bostom review for PJMedia here.

Robert Stacy McCain for American Spectator here

Robert Stacy McCain report at ViralRead.com here

Robert Stacy McCain blogs it all here

Liza Connor review for Dispatch International here.

Jeffrey Norwitz review here.

...

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NSA leaker Edward Snowden is a national Rorshchach test. Reactions to his mega-leak about mega-data-mining, etc. -- Big Gov intrusions I cannot reject strongly enough -- have revealed divisions among allies, and bonds among adversaries. While the libertarian/Republican split is predictable, some of the results are suprising, and many have yet to come in. Many commentators are withholding judgement. My thoughts are here.

From what I can glean, some conservatives seem sympathetic to a point given their natural reflex against the federal government's flouting of the Fourth Amendment with these mass seizures of US citizens' electronic records. Among these it seems fair to include Rush Limbaugh, who points out the real danger is Obama, not Snowden. This is a theme Mark Levin is...

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My new book, American Betrayal, presents evidence of stunning but little known parrallels between Communist infiltration/Soviet influence during World War II and today's Islamic infiltration/influence in the post-9/11 era.

Here is a one that struck me anew this week after going back to statements by former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden on jihad (discussed here).

In October 2010, Hayden said to me:

"People I trust say to be careful not to use the term `jihadist' because it does have a broader use across the Islamic world."

"People I trust"? What sort of "people" would want to stop a US intel chief from mentioning  "jihadist" issues or aims? Not "people" who are eager to stop jihad. Maybe the influence of such "trusted" people explains the fact that US intelligence,...

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On November 14, 2002, the late, great New York Times columnist William Safire wrote a column called "You Are a Suspect." It is posted below, an early signpost to our current state of dislocation and upset.

It is dislocating and upsetting to be confronted with the Edward Snowden leaks: the leaked court order, the leaked logistical scope of what is being aptly labeled the Surveillance State. This what Safire predicted would be foisted on Us, the People. We are told it is The Only Means Possible to prevent "another 9/11."

The mendacity of this rationale is as appalling as the totalitarian structure of the hyper-state it supports.

Yesterday, I focused on the failures of former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden to comprehend the quite simple...

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Gen. Michael Hayden (USAF ret.) defended PRISM on Fox News Sunday and NPR Weekend Edition Sunday, perhaps elsewhere.

The message here is the distinguished official packaging: Gen. Hayden formerly led both the CIA and the NSA under Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama. He exemplifies both intelligence experience and bi-partisanship.

What more solid, soothing spokesman could there be for this highly controversial program conceived, they say, to prevent terrorist attacks from occurring?

That's the packaging.

The ex-intelligence chieftain, however, draws a blank on jihad -- the specific source of the vast majority of terrorism that threatens Americans. I know this from talking to him in October 2010; from asking...

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Monica Crowley gave American Betrayal an extremely warm, generous and also provocative launch on The Monica Crowley Show this weekend.

She also called the book "pure dynamite"!

Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat today predicts that Americans will react mainly with complacency over government Internet and telephone surveillance. He goes on to assure us "America isn't about to turn into East Germany with Facebook pages."

For us, the age of surveillance is more likely to drift toward what Alexis de Toqueville described as "soft despotism" or what the Forbes columnist James Poulos has dubbed "the pink police state."

He continues:

Our government will enjoy extraordinary, potentially tyrannical powers, but most citizens will be monitored without feeling persecuted or coerced.

What police state officer from East Germany eastward could express it better? 

So instead of a climate of pervasive fear, there will be...

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@diana_west_ will be on my radio show today. Her new book, "American Betrayal," is a monumental achievement. Brilliant & important.

— Monica Crowley (@MonicaCrowley) June 8, 2013

I'm taking a short break today from promoting "American Betrayal" -- an Amazon History "Hot New Release" since publication day (thanks, everyone!) -- to write about the latest stages of tyrannical development in these United States for Dispatch International. The assignment is the burgeoning Obama scandals -- IRS, Prism, whatever breaks next.

This means two things: 

One, this assignment is really no break at all from promotion of American Betrayal, because American Betrayal is a history of tyrannical development in these United States, and why we can't see it.

Two, partly because of the newspaper's mainly Euopean readership, I will be taking an explanatory step back from the tight-focus coverage and anaylsis of events to date.

Americans should, too.

Regarding the latest scandal to break -- the communications surveillance scandal -- I think something big is...

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Ex-Soviet spy Elizabeth Bentley came forward to identify 150 Communist agents and collaborators for the FBI. Read American Betrayal to learn why US history still remembers  her as a "neurotic spinster," not  a heroine.

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I have known Jeffrey Norwitz since shortly after I wrote the following column in mid-2007 about David Kilcullen, at that time riding high as a top strategist of the Petraeus Counterinsurgency.

The 2007 column opens:

"If I were a Muslim, I'd probably be a jihadist. The thing that drives these guys — a sense of adventure, wanting to be part of the moment, wanting to be in the big movement of history that's happening now — that's the same thing that drives me, you know?"

No. I don't know. And I sorely wish I could tell him so — "him" being David Kilcullen, senior counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, senior U.S. commander...

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This is a photo of Capt. York's B-25 the day after it landed in Russia in 1942. It comes from this amazing online collection of Doolittle Raid photos.

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The Daily Beast reports:

While employees of American NGOs sat in Egyptian prisons, Secretary of State John Kerry quietly waived the law that would prevent the U.S. from sending the Egyptian military $1.3 billion worth of weapons this year.

Let me flip on the Time Machine:

While crew members of Doolittle's 1942 raid on Tokyo remained "interned" by the Soviet Union, the U.S. continued without pause to supply $300 billon of "Lend Lease" weapons and other aid (including uranium) to our Communist "ally" in the Kremlin.

The...

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If you haven't read @diana_west_'s "American Betrayal" yet, you're missing out on a terrific, real-life thriller: amazon.com/American-Betra…

— Brad Thor (@BradThor) June 5, 2013

US Army Pvt. Elliot West, 1944

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Today is the 69th anniversary of D-Day.

Sixty-nine years ago, my 20-year-old father was two days away from walking ashore onto the hard-won beaches of Normandy, a member of the 102nd Calvary Reconnaissance Squadron in Gen. Omar Bradley's 2nd Army. Pvt. Elliot West's shooting war would begin a little later at the Battle of St Lo.

It seems right to flag the day once again, to pay homage to the heroes of Normandy even as the ranks dwindle to a scattered few -- and even as my own doubts have arisen as to the motives and gullibility of some of their leaders in ordering these marvelous young men into an epic battle that, for reasons laid out and mulled and questioned in American Betrayal, may not have been necessary to defeat Nazi Germany.

All hail.

Harry Hopkins: Stalin's Man in the White House?

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Robert Stacy McCain has seized on the conclusion I draw in American Betrayal that Harry Hopkins, FDR's top aide and widely hailed  "Co-President" was a "conscious Soviet agent." He developed the argument I made based on an extensive dossier against Hopkins into a news story at ViralRead.com.

McCain writes:

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt‘s most powerful assistant was a “conscious Soviet agent,” according to a new book that details how Harry Hopkins and others in FDR’s administration revealed U.S. secrets — and influenced American policy...

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If anyone ever asks you what American Betrayal is about, here are some of my most recent efforts to explain. 

Today's interview with Tim Sumner at Freedom Radio is here.

Went on TruNews with Rick Wiles yesterday. Listen here.

Q & A with Ruth King at Family Security Matters is here.

Interview with Allen West (13 minutes) at Next Generation TV is here. "Thriller" interview with Jerry Doyle (17 minutes) is here. Daily Caller interview with Ginni Thomas (43 minutes) is here One-hour with Frank Gaffney at Secure Freedom Radio is here.

Three hours with Brooks Agnew at X-Squared Radio is here.

That somewhat notorious interview with Ariel Cohen at CSPAN Book TV "Afterwords" is here.

And kick-off interview...

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I posted my three-hour interview with Brooks Agnew of X-Squared Radio at my Facebook page (yes, I have a Facebook page). I am now cross-posting them at this site (see links in letter below) after getting the following email from a listener.

The letter is now logged in with other reader reader reactions to the book at "Reader's Comments."

The letter-writer writes:

Hello Diana, I've admired your clear-eyed analysis and writing for several years now, but tonight, after listening to the full three hour interview on X-Squared Radio regarding the substance of American Betrayal...

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I am particularly happy to present a new interview with my great friend Allen West on Next Generation TV where we discuss American Betrayal.

Here is the link to the interview. 

Here is the backstory to our friendship.

Way back in the summer of 2007, I was heading out the door on vacation, having thought I was also on vacation from my weekly column. Apparently not, according to my editor, who helpfully suggested writing something "quickly."

OK. I obliged with a rare fantasy column: What if, during Vice President Cheney's 125-minutes of presidential powers while George W. Bush was in surgery, Cheney actually used those powers?

The column opened like this:

For precisely two hours and five minutes on the morning of July 21, 2007, there was something different about our world.

The center of gravity shifted: President George W. Bush temporarily transferred the powers of his...

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US Attorney Bill Killian

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Hackle-raising headline of the week: "Feds Suggest Anti-Muslim Speech Can Be Punished"

Politico ran the story on May 31, picking up on this May 21 story from the Tullahoma (TN) News: "Group sets meeting to increase tolerance of Muslims, culture."

The only way to accomplish such a goal in the USA where liberty -- freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, equal protection under the law -- is protected by our founding documents is to prevent Americans from learning that Islamic law specifically forbids and punishes the exercise of such freedoms.

Fact: there is no freedom of religion under Islamic law; there is only a capricious "tolerance" for the dhimmi (Christians and Jews in Islam) that controls and constrains religious identity to a punishing and humiliating degree, often leading to death. Fact: there is no freedom of speech, either, with critics and students of Islam subject to charges of apostasy and blasphemy, often leading to death. Fact: there is no equal protection under Islamic law. Islam is a supremacist creed, where Muslims and men command greater legal and social power than non-Muslims and women.

...

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During my research for American Betrayal, it became clear to me that I had in effect stumbled across a historical crime scene, a realization I explain in detail in the book.

That's why I was so delighted when Jerry Doyle picked up on this theme in our radio interview earlier this week and declared the book "reads like a thriller..."

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for compiling images to go with the audio for this video.

Maj. George Racey Jordan

This week's syndicated column

A book called American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press) shouldn’t promise uplift and spiritual renewal. I know. I wrote it.

That said, the story of “betrayal” my new book lays out – betrayal enabled by a de facto Communist occupation of Washington by American traitors loyal to Stalin, which would solidify in the 1930s under FDR and be covered up by successive U.S. administrations and elites – is not without inspiration. I am talking about the inspiration of the truth-tellers.

“American Betrayal” presents a rewrite of most of World War II and Cold War history, something I never imagined doing when I first began writing the book. This is simply the...

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I am happy to say that Frank Gaffney devoted today's entire hour-long program to a conversation about American Betrayal, and the lessons that yesteryear's Communist infiltration and "secret assault on our nation's character" can teach about our struggle to protect liberty from Islam today.

Listen or download the show here.

When I was speaking about American Betrayal with Sandy Rios this morning on AFR Talk, she brought up a fascinating item at the American Spectator by Paul Kengor and Ion Mihai Pacepa (both of whom I quote in my book, as a matter of fact).

They write:

In watching President Obama speak on terrorism last week, we were taken aback to hear him say that America needs an anti-terrorism program that is both our sword and our shield. This was a striking choice of words by an American president. Remember the emblem of the KGB? Maybe you don’t, but we do. One of us (Pacepa) spent over two decades working for the KGB community as one of the highest ranking intelligence/military/political officials in the entire Soviet Bloc, and paid with two death sentences for his freedom. The emblem of the KGB was a sword and a shield symbolizing its duties: to put the country’s enemies to the sword, and to shield and protect the communist revolution.

...

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Ruth King, monthly columnist for Outpost and daily blogger-aggregator extraordinaire at Ruthfullly Yours, has a review of American Betrayal at Family Security Matters today followed by my first written Q & A. Even though we are a friends (as Ruth notes, full-disclosure style), I think I managed to shock her!

"A Review and Interview about American Betrayal"

by Ruth King

Were the Reagan years just a temporary feel good blip since what the late Jeane Kirkpatrick called "the blame America first crowd" still dominates our academies, the media and...

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DHS advisor Mohammed Elibiary: Reduce US policing of Muslims and let the imams control jihad!

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Neil Munro at The Daily Caller reports today on a very significant development in the Islamization of US security agencies.

Politically influential Muslim activists are pushing to reduce the FBI’s role in countering Islamic terrorism and are seeking greater federal reliance on hard-line orthodox Imams.

The White House’s “Countering Violent Extremism” program “did not produce the results a lot of us were hopeful … [and] kind of collapsed towards the end of last year,” complained Mohamed Elibiary, a Texas-based advocate who was appointed to the Homeland Security Advisory Council.

“I don’t know where it is today … [but] it presents us with the opportunity to look at the question of [whether] it is right to house it within the FBI,” he said at an May 28 event in D.C. staged by the...

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A writer awaiting the official release (tomorrow!) of a book could do absolutely no better than to sit down and talk through the sure-to-be-controversial findings with The remarkable Ginni Thomas of The Daily Caller.



In her introductory comments, Ginni writes:

Dear reader, Diana West is a meticulous researcher who writes compellingly. She is also a new friend. Her new book, "American Betrayal," reads like a historical thriller as she weaves remarkable details from a variety of sources, including intelligence archives from the collapsed Soviet Union. In this week's interview, West explains the thesis of her book that she admits even shocked her: "Americans have been betrayed ... by our leaders...

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In a rousing letter to Fox colleagues regarding the Obama administration's outrageous investigation of James Rosen, Roger Ailes reveals either his accommodation of the Marxian narrative or his stunning ignorance of history:

The administration’s attempt to intimidate Fox News and its employees will not succeed and their excuses will stand neither the test of law, the test of decency, nor the test of time. We will not allow a climate of press intimidation, unseen since the McCarthy era, to frighten any of us away from the truth.

Could someone please ship Fox a ton of Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story...

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This week's syndicated column

Nearly 20 years after a Hasidic Jewish boy riding across the Brooklyn Bridge was killed by a Muslim fighting jihad, a British soldier was hacked to death and reportedly beheaded on the streets of London by Muslims fighting jihad.

Thanks to the happenstance of a passer-by with a video recorder, the world heard almost immediately from one of the two London suspects, Michael Adebolajo. His hands red with blood, Adebolajo confessed to the murder of Lee Rigby, 25, that he had just committed in Koranically correct terms of revenge, presumably for Britain’s efforts against jihad in Iraq and Afghanistan. We also know that cries of “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is great”) punctuated the knifing and meat-cleavering of the victim.

But if “Allahu Akbar” is the historic...

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Over the years, I have received many wonderful letters from readers, and particularly from readers who were moved to write after reading my first book The Death of the Grown-Up.

Preceding the launch of American Betrayal next week, I am inaugurating a "Reader's Corner" where I will post letters from time to time. (The new button is in the blue navigation bar above.)

The book isn't out yet but the first one  is here, a quite fascinating memoir triggered by last weekend's conversation about the book on CSPAN Book TV's "Afterwords," which, by the way, replays on Sunday, May 26 at noon ET. 

Went on with the delightful Michael Coren on Sun TV in Canada last night to make my first attempt at sound-byting the 401 pages and 961 footnotes of American Betrayal. He said it "read like a novel," which made my day.

Click "Read More" to see video.

Via Vlad Tepes. 

...

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The inspirational team at TrentoVision mixes it up with American Betrayal.

The overwhelming presence in the Extortion 17 press conference last week, which I wrote about in last week's syndicated column, was the pain that filled every corner of the room. The shootdown of the Chinook CH-47 carrying 17 SEALS and 13 other American forces on August 6, 2011 may have faded like newsprint for most of us, but there on the top floor of the National Press Club, a stone's throw from the White House, the shock of it was still nightmare-vivid, particularly as the families described the holes in the military's investigation, and closed doors and runaround they gotten ever since. What  they want are answers to their natural questions, and accountability for the failures of the mission. For them, this is a grieving process without...

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Great Britain is once again being rocked by revelations of the hell on earth little British girls are growing up in as sex slaves to gangs of Muslim, mainly Pakistani men -- and the craven impotence of British society which above all are supposed to be guardians of its own precious children.

The Telegraph's Alice Pearson writes:

Rochdale, Rotherham, Derby, Oxford. The towns change, but the pattern is always the same. Gangs of men, mainly of Pakistani Muslim heritage, lure white girls as young as 10 with gifts and displays of affection. Next, the girl is raped as a way of “breaking her in”. Once the child’s spirit is subdued, and her mind fogged with drugs, she is sold for sex to multiple men at £200 a time....

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A preface to my appearance on Afterwords this weekend, airing on C-SPAN2 on Saturday May 18 at 10pm, Sunday May 19 at 9pm, and Monday May 20 at midnight and 3am. It will re-air on C-SPAN2 next Sunday May 26 at noon.

Every author wants to go on C-SPAN Book TV's Afterwords, and why not? Book TV audiences actually tune in to hear about books they might like to read. I was elated to have my new book, American Betrayal, chosen for the Afterwords show and went to tape the program yesterday with high hopes.

It is a most civilized setting, produced by lovely people, and it provides an author, who has spent years alone in a hole, reading, writing, toiling, thinking, with the chance, faciliated by an informed interviewer, to tell the world what it's all about. Lay out the themes. Hit the highlights. Even defend the controversial bits and emit some sparks along the way just for fun. 

But no. That is, this was not exactly my experience as you'll see if you tune in. It was tough at times to get a word in edgeways (especially before the off-camera intervention took place midway through) so there are times when the interview is more like a battle for airtime-space -- more Senate filibuster meets Hunger Games than convivial let-the-author-cut-loose-and-talk-about-baby. (Watch for host's reading of verses from The Internationale.) Baby still made as much noise as possible, of course, but the birthday party didn't come off quite as expected.

...

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This week's syndicated column

Grief and politics don’t mix. When raw, aching grief and the dirtiest kind of politics meet, a hot volcano of pain and outrage erupts that is unstoppable. But it is necessary. It is the only way things might ever be clean again.

I am thinking of recent casket transfer ceremonies that have taken place at Dover Air Force Base, where senior administration officials have used the solemn occasions – Benghazi, the shoot-down of Extortion 17 – less to comfort grieving families than to lay blame, to establish a narrative, to lie.

Think of Sean Smith’s mother. Think of Tyrone Woods’ father. After the Obama administration’s hugs came the Obama administration’s stonewalling. They still don’t have answers about what happened in Benghazi on the night of Sept. 11, 2012.

We don’t either.

We still don’t know who in the U.S. government gave the order not to rescue Americans under fire for eight and a half hours, and how and why such an unconscionable order was given. We still don’t know who convinced senior White House officials to tell grieving parents meeting their children’s caskets that a video-maker, not jihad against the West, was to blame for the assault that took four American lives – or what the political motivation was.

...

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Maybe I missed it in the US press, but I never saw this heart-stopping shot of the Martin family and other innocent Americanss in the presence of pure evil, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (circled in red), who has just set his back-pack bomb packed with nails and ball bearings near the Boston Marathon finish line.

Young Richard, 9, circled in blue, was killed, his mother Denise suffered brain injuries and lost the sight in one eye, and little Jane, in the green jacket next to Richard, lost her left leg. Father Bill, who was finishing the race, is still recovering from a shrapnel wound and hopes to regain hearing he lost in the blast.

According to the London Daily Mail, which published the picture and update on the Martin family...

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A word about the Islamic burial of Tamarlan Tsarnaev in a cemetery in Virginia.

Virginia. Cradle of our Founders -- and resting place, too. George Washington. James Madison. Thomas Jefferson. ... Tamarlan Tsarnaev.

This is a defilement of the land. The killer waged jihad by destroying American lives as viciously as possible -- killing three, including young Richard Martin, consigning many Americans to life without limbs, skull and brain injuries, pain, trauma, shrapnel, nails, ball bearings lodged in their bodies, sowing terror in the land. He should have no resting place here, anywhere. His corpse should have been cremated and disposed of.

Why wasn't this done? Why did Tsarnaev receive undue consideration? Islam, we read in every story about this abomination, does not permit cremation. Well, that's too bad. The vicious act...

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The Behennas write:

To all the thousands of Michael supporters, Just a quick update to let you know that the Government filed their Response to Michael's Petition before the Supreme Court.  Michael's lawyers now have ten days to file a Reply to the Government's Response. The Supreme Court will then set Michael's case for Conference (hopefully by June) and decide whether to grant Certiorari which means a review by the whole Supreme Court.  For the Supreme Court justices to grant Certiorari from the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces would be the first time a military petition has reached this stage - so prayers for discernment for these nine Justices are certainly welcomed. An encouraging tidbit was that Michael's case was selected by the Supreme Court Blog as the petition of the day for May 1st - http://www.scotusblog.com/2013/05/petition-of-the-day-446/ We ask that you spread this email and please continue...

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On the lighter side ...

An LA Mirror "Movieland Mystery Photo" in 2010 feature asked readers to identify the young man in a candid photo with a young Elizabeth Taylor.

A second photo (above) showed him in uniform in a still shot from a movie. The Mirror caption reads: "Here’s another photo of our mystery guest with a mystery companion. Aren’t her eyes haunting?"

His name is Jimmy Lydon. Her name is Barbara Belden -- my mother!

The movie is "When the Lights Go On Again," and it came out in 1944, when Barbara Belden was 15 years old.

This week's syndicated column:

“I want to ask a couple of questions about the February 17 Martyrs Brigade,” said Rep. Blake Farenthold.

The Texas Republican was addressing the three State Department “whistleblowers” who testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. The three witnesses were Mark Thompson, acting deputy assistant secretary of state for counterterrorism; Greg Hicks, former deputy chief of mission in Libya; and Eric Nordstrom, former regional security officer in Libya.

When Farenthold introduced this crucial subject into the hearings, he also opened a window into Benghazi that shone light not only on disastrous Western support for “Arab Spring,” but also on the core crisis in U.S. foreign policy.

Farenthold: “Mr. Nordstrom, can...

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9/11 anniversary outside the US Embassy in London

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This week's article for Dispatch International:

"US Religious Commission Won't Touch Sharia"

But is keen to revile Western countries trying to defend against Islamic law

WASHINGTON DC. Fifteen years ago, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom opened shop with a mandate from Congress to examine the state of religious freedom around the world, and issue an annual report to the President. The idea was to provide the information necessary for the U.S. government to make religious freedom a greater factor in foreign-policy-making by highlighting the world’s worst offenders. Such offenders run, as the commission’s 2013 religious freedom report tells us, from Saudi Arabia to China to Russia to Sudan to Iran to Western Europe.

Western Europe?

The 2013 report marks the first time...

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