Diana West

Allen West: President Owes Us an Explanation for Release of Hezbollah Killer

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:18:00 GMT

Ali Musa Daqduq, Hezbollah terrorist killer of five American servicemen in Iraq, is free today, thanks to President Obama's decision to turn him over to an Iraqi court, which has just released him.

Michael Behenna, Evan Vela, John Hatley, Corey Clagett and the rest of the Leavenworth Ten, not to mention Lawrence Hutchins and now Derrick Miller and I'm sure others remain in US military prisons, most of them having served four, five, six years already for "fog of battle" killings that were prosecuted as murder in the military justice system, all too often, it seems to me, with an eye toward appeasement of our Iraqi "allies." Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan terrorists with innocent blood on their hands have been given clemency by the US government and our Iraqi and Afghan "allies."

This is a US government travesty of epic proportions.

With Daqduq walking free, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) has now called out the President on this gross stain on America's honor.

West wrote:

"It is with great disappointment and concern that I write to President Barack Obama today with regard to Ali Musa Daqduq and the decision by the Administration to release this madman to an Iraqi court, who in turn set this known terrorist free.

Ali Musa Daqduq led a well-planned and coordinated attack in Karbala, Iraq in 2007 in which one American soldier, Captain Brian Freeman, was killed and four other service members were abducted and later murdered.

The Administration mistakenly used the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which required Iraqi citizens to be handed over to Iraq before December of 2011, as a reasoning for Daqduq's release to an Iraqi court. However, since Ali Musa Daqduq was born in Lebanon, and was in fact a Lebanese citizen at the time of his capture, SOFA should not have applied to him.

As someone who served 22 years in the United States Army and served in both Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom, I can tell you that true leadership means making responsible decisions, not necessarily popular ones. The President had options when dealing with this terrorist. Daqduq could have been transferred to Guantanamo Bay where he could have been tried in front of a military commission.

The fact that our President makes these kinds of decisions, while American soldiers like Michael Behenna, William Hunsaker, and Joseph Mayo remain imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth for incidents that occurred during the heat of battle, is pure hypocricy.

I find the release of Ali Musa Daqduq to be an utter betrayal, not only to those who perished at the hands of this terrorist, but to all men and women who paid the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I ask President Obama for a prompt and personal response to this decision. As the Commander-in-Chief, he owes the American people nothing less."

Kudos to West. Here's hoping his is the first voice of many.

Uncle $ucker $trike$ a Deal

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:09:00 GMT

Pakistan agrees to re-open supply roads to NATO forces in Afghanistan. But there's a price.

Christian Science Monitor reports:

The accord, which the Pakistani government announced late Tuesday, would revive the transport of vital supplies of food and equipment from Pakistani ports overland to land-locked Afghanistan.

In return, the US-led coalition will pay Pakistan a still-to-be-fixed fee of $1,500 to $1,800 for each truck carrying supplies, a tab that officials familiar with negotiations estimated would run nearly $1 million a day. ...

Pakistan closed the land route to supplies headed to the coalition after American aircraft mistakenly attacked two Pakistani border outposts Nov. 26, killing 24 Pakistani soldiers. Since then, supplies for coalition forces in Afghanistan have passed through one of two routes that stretch from Afghanistan through central Asia and Siberia to Georgia on the Black Sea. One of the routes is nearly 6,000 miles long. The Pakistan route is less than 500 miles.

Officials in Washington said they didn’t know how much of the new cost the United States would bear. As the United States contributes more than two-thirds of the 130,000-strong international force, which operates under the command of NATO, it’s expected that Washington will pay most of the new fee.

Ya think? Speaking of paying most of new fees...

Headline from The Guardian:

"Afghanistan hopeful of extra US cash to fund security"

"Officials believe Washington will pay more on top of lion's share of expected $4.1bn annual budget after foreign troops leave"

Stupid lion.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan, which ranks 180/183 among all nations in corruption (according to Transparency International), is pushing to control the money.

Who's more corrupt? Only Myanmar (181), North Korea (182), and Somalia (183).

Dying Inside the Closed Circle

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 16 May 2012 11:47:00 GMT

At the end of a detailed account in today's NYT about an assault by three Afghan Army members against American troops inside the wire on March 1 which left two Americans killed and one hit (in body armor and unwounded), the report says:

Why had three men attacked American soldiers they barely knew? Was it a personal grudge against Americans? Or had they turned to the Taliban?

The detainee has since presumably been asked those questions. But in a reflection of the official reticence to discuss green-on-blue attacks, his answers remain shrouded in secrecy. It is not even clear whose custody he is in.

The reporter has posed a series of questions that politely, fearfully and inadequately skirts the central question for investigators, strategists, military leaders, elected officials and citizens: Does Islamic ideology, particularly the core Islamic tenet of aggression (jihad) against those who do not believe in Allah -- the kufar, the infidel, the dhimmi, the slave -- have anything to do with this heinous pattern of attacks on armies hailing from what used to be known as Christendom? (Hint: yes.)

This Times' reporter may have travelled to the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, but it's clear he remains locked in an Occidental mindset. To him, only a personal grudge, politics, could explain the Afghans' attacks on American troops. Grudges based on Islam, politics based on Islam -- such things do not occur to him, or, if they do, he dare not write them down.

In The Death of the Grown-Up (p. 203) I quoted Indian medievalist K.S. Lal, who came up with a vivid metaphor for the fixity of Koran and its teachings:

Muhammed could not change the revelation; he could only expain and interpret it. So do the Muslims today. There are liberal Muslims and conservative Muslims, there are Muslims learned in theology and Muslims devoid of teaching. They discuss, they interpret, they rationalize, but all going round within the closed circle of Islam; there is no provision of introducing any innovation.

We, too, go round within a similarly closed circle. Our circle constricts free inquiry into and discussion of Islam. Inside our circle we are permitted only vetted opinions that fit the accepted narrative: Islam is peace; Islam is a great religion, just like our own; there is nothing outside "normal" about it. Thus, we discuss, interpret, rationalize, and go round inside our own circle, attempting to explain all manner of Islamic phenomena without access to the facts that lie outside the circle into which we as a society have retreated.

The damage this is doing to reason will be (or has been) our undoing.

Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl: Prisoner of COIN

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:06:00 GMT

From today's New York Times, a story about Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the lone American POW in Afghanistan. We still don't know the circumstances under which he was captured in 2009, but we do know something about his outlook on the counterinsurgency (COIN) disaster as conceived and executed by Gens. Petraues and McChrystal under Presidents Bush and Obama.

From the story:

Sergeant Bergdahl was assigned to the First Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, Fourth Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, based at Fort Richardson, Alaska. He deployed as a machine gunner in early May 2009 to a small combat outpost in Paktika Province, at a time when American forces were extremely sparse in the area.

At first his e-mails home were effusive. “He was happy as a clam,” Mr. Bergdahl said. He wrote of “how beautiful it was, how wonderful the people were.”

But the tone of his son’s e-mails soon darkened, Mr. Bergdahl said, although he declined to say specifically what set off the change.

Mr. Bergdahl would say only that he himself had become disillusioned by the military’s doctrine of counterinsurgency, aimed at winning over the Afghan population by building roads, schools and good governance while protecting them from insurgents. As part of the strategy, American troops often travel on roads planted with homemade bombs, or improvised explosive devices, to meet with villagers during the day to collect information about their needs — and to ask the whereabouts of insurgents so they can target them in night raids.

Direct consequences of this COIN strategy here. This "strategy" is a scandal the House and Senate Armed Services Committee should/must investigate. There are many questions our commanders and strategists should be required to answer, beginning with how and why they call themselves professionals when they formulated war plans in the Islamic world without taking Islam into account?

“The doctrine is fallacious,” Mr. Bergdahl said. “It doesn’t achieve what they say it’s going to achieve. It’s a biometric data-gathering device — send the rabbits out there to get I.E.D.-ed so you can figure out who to kill at night. How ethical.” His son, Mr. Bergdahl contended, was frustrated by what he saw.

Once upon a time, I would have advised against a Taliban/Gitmo prisoner swap for Bowe as a doctrinal compromise that undermined our position of "not negotiating with terrorists," and, more tangibly, also endangered the lives of other US and other NATO troops. There are no principles in operation in the Afghanistan fiasco; we negotiate with (and release) terrorists all the time. Nor are the lives of our troops anything but COIN fodder in the eyes of our generals desperately seeking vindication for their bankrupt strategy while our elected officials turn away from the terrible sight. In other words, soldiers such as Bowe Bergdahl are already in jeopardy from their own leaders, whether from being ordered to live and sleep alongside pre-murderous Afghan troops, or from being sent out like "rabbits" every day along the IED-seeded roads.

Bring Bowe home now -- and every one of his fellow soldiers in arms.

Happy Mother's Day

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Sun, 13 May 2012 13:45:00 GMT

"Operation Hot Mic"

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Tue, 08 May 2012 11:26:00 GMT

This is making the rounds, as it should:

Cheryl Bormann, Defense Dhimmi

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Sun, 06 May 2012 13:11:00 GMT

More...

Islam's War on Wilders and Us

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 04 May 2012 14:34:00 GMT

More...

Invasion of the Body Snatchers -- For Real

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 04 May 2012 01:55:00 GMT

Remember the sci-fi cult classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”? The 1956 movie is about a small town where extraterrestrial “pods” take over the townspeople. Even pillars of the community change into zombielike clones, as revealed by their blank stares and abnormal impulses. Outwardly, though, the “pod people” remain unchanged.

The town doctor, played by Kevin McCarthy, figures out what’s going on, but, as the movie progresses, there are fewer real people to warn. Soon, they’ve all gone over to the Other Side! The climactic sequence features McCarthy, the last free man, running across a rugged landscape and onto a crowded highway to warn the rest of humanity.

“Let him go – they’ll never believe him,” say his erstwhile neighbors, now pod people.

“Stop! Listen to me! You’re next!” he shouts to people in cars, barely dodging traffic.

Brakes squeal, horns blare. Angry drivers (“You’re drunk!”) wave him away. Needless, to say, he can’t make them understand.

True confession: I can relate. Sometimes, gearing up for a weekly column – particularly when it’s another entry in the annals of the Islamization of the West – feels a lot like running onto the highway yelling, “Stop! Listen! It’s coming! You’re next …” The feeling gets stronger still when sizing up what I can describe only as body-snatched impulses in real-life pillars of society. I refer to people in positions of responsibility – in uniform, even – who, by all appearances, are “normal” until – wham! – their eyes go glassy and you realize you’re looking at … a pod person.

Am I kidding? I don’t know how else to explain the memorandum sent out last week by the Joint Chiefs chairman, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey. (Well, I do, but bear with me.) Could it have been sent out by a pod person who just looks like a Joint Chiefs chairman? It’s the general’s signature, all right, and his official seal. But the memo itself is from another planet.

In this memo, our highest-ranking military officer orders the entire United States military to purge its educational and training classes, files and rosters of instructors to ensure that no members of the U.S. military are ever again instructed in the basic principles of Islamic jihad. The body snatchers call such allegedly offending educational material “anti-Islam,” but it covers study of Islamic-style war. Given the unchecked threat of such war, both violent and covert, to spread Shariah (Islamic law) until a new global caliphate exists, the question is whether eliminating instruction in the enemy threat doctrine is something a “normal” Joint Chiefs chairman would do. The answer is no. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” strikes again.

It all started this time (there was an earlier round last fall) due to one elective course – “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism” – offered at a military staff college in Norfolk, Va. According to Wired online, this course included guest lectures by Maj. Stephen Coughlin (U.S. Army Reserves). Coughlin is an expert in Islamic law and jihad doctrine (he and I are among the 19 co-authors of “Shariah: The Threat to America”), whose rigorously sourced briefs are legendary in Washington security circles and beyond. Coughlin’s contributions alone would make the whole course worth taking.

When I read that the general’s deputy for education, Lt. Gen. George Flynn, described the course as “inflammatory,” my eyes widened in horror: Oh, no – that’s what a pod person would say! Joint Chiefs Chairman Dempsey canceled the course, then ordered that top-to-bottom purge. Clearly, only an im-pod-ster would do that.

Dempsey wrote that he was concerned the military was teaching material “inconsistent with the values of our profession, and disrespectful of Islam.” A new review would “ensure our Professional Military Education programs exhibit the cultural sensitivity, respect for religion and intellectual balance that we should expect in our academic institutions.”

How about teaching material consistent with the values of free inquiry and with respect for veracity instead? What is urgently needed is a review to ensure military education offers unflinching threat analysis based on meticulously sourced facts and research. That’s what a “real” Joint Chiefs chairman would demand, not a “politically correct” curriculum designed to subordinate U.S. national security interests to a policy of not offending Islam.

Wake me when this horror flick is over.

Egyptian Death-Sex in Islamic Context

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Tue, 01 May 2012 18:04:00 GMT

Raymond Ibrahim has written a very important if thoroughly revolting piece tracing the movement in the Egyptian parliament to legalize "farewell intercourse" straight back to the traditions (hadiths) of Islam's perfect man, Mohammed. I'm sorry to say it's essential reading.

To call such Islamic practices barbaric gives barbarism a bad name. To fund them, as the United States does, through $1.3 billion in recently released aid, is much, much, worse.

By Raymond Ibrahim

Aside from provoking shock, disgust, and denial, last week's news of Egyptian parliamentarians trying to pass a "farewell intercourse" law legalizing sex with one's wife up to six hours after she dies has yet to be fully appreciated.

To start, consider the ultimate source of this practice: it's neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor the Salafis; rather, as with most of Islam's perversities—from adult breastfeeding to pedophilia marriage—Islamic necrophilia is traced to the fount of Islam, its prophet Muhammad, as found in a hadith (or tradition) that exists in no less than six of Islam's classical reference texts (including Kanz al-'Umal by Mutaqi al-Hindi and Al-Hujja fi Biyan al-Mahujja, an authoritative text on Sunni Doctrine, by Abu Qassim al-Asbahani).

According to this hadith, Muhammad took off his shirt and placed it on a dead woman and "lay with her" in her grave. The gravediggers proceeded to hurl dirt atop the corpse and the prophet, exclaiming, "O Prophet, we see you doing a thing you never did with anyone else," to which Muhammad responded: "I have dressed her in my shirt so that she may be dressed in heavenly robes, and I have laid with her in her grave so that the pressures of the grave [also known as Islam's "torments of the grave"] may be alleviated from her."

What was Muhammad saying and doing? Perhaps his magical shirt would transport the dead woman to heaven, and his blessed body would protect her from the "pressures of the grave"? A more cynical—a more human—reading is that he stripped his shirt as a natural step before copulating; that he precisely, if not sardonically, meant the act of sex would "alleviate" the pressures of death from the corpse; and that the observers covered them with dirt for privacy and/or for shame.

This interpretation is given much more weight when one considers that the secondary meaning for the word I translated above as "lay with" is "intercourse," further demonstrating that the proposed Egyptian law is, in fact, based on this hadith: after all, the Arabic root-word used for "intercourse" in the phrase "farewell intercourse" is derived from the same root-word that Muhammad used to explain what he did with the dead woman (d-j-'). As if this was not enough, necrophilia finds more validation in Islam's legal texts. For example, according to al-Sharwani's Hawashi, "there is no punishment for having intercourse with a dead woman" and "it is not necessary to rewash the dead after penetration."

Incidentally, this issue of "death-sex" far precedes Egyptian parliamentarians. In fact, I first wrote about this macabre topic back in 2009, based on an episode of Father Zakaria Botros, where he explored the perverse sexual habits of Islam's prophet Muhammad (see here). Interestingly, when that episode first aired, many Muslims were livid, denying the existence of the hadith, and renewing calls to assassinate the priest for trying to "defame" Islam: yet here it is, once again—only this time, the hadith is being passed into a "law," further documenting the existence, if not legitimacy, of necrophilia in Islam.

Which leads to another eye-opener: it is no longer this or that "radical" cleric, but parliament members who are, not merely acknowledging bizarre Islamic practices, but trying to implement them as "laws." (Perhaps this should be unsurprising, considering weeks earlier in Egypt, suit-and-tie wearing Muslim court lawyers attacked with knives a Christian defendant for supposedly "blaspheming" Muhammad.)

What else do such "parliamentarians" and "lawyers" have in store for Egypt and its neighbors? If this little know, ghoulish practice is being endorsed simply because of one arcane hadith, how much more support must Egypt's Islamist-dominated parliament be giving to those other ironclad teachings of Islam—for instance, Muhammad's unequivocal commands, recorded in hundreds of canonical hadiths, to fight, deceive, and subjugate all non-Muslim infidels?

When it comes to Islam, it is high time for the West to learn to connect the dots.

And throw up.