NATO spokesman Brig. Gen. Katz: "We take these incidents very, very seriously. But we must not forget that on the other side we still got almost 500,000 soldiers and policemen who work together, as we speak right now actually...."

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A reader wrote in to note another way to assess the rampant murder rate in ISAF: by converting the statistic to murders per 100,000.

While NATO and US defense officials play down the murders of American and other Western forces by their Afghan "partners" and trainees as paltry few incidents among the half a million total security forces in Afghanistan, this week's column argues that the 62 murders we know about in 2012 (it seems likely there were additional unreported incidents) were committed against the estimated 25,000 American and other Western forces who actually do the training and interacting with the 400,000 Afghans in uniform.

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This week's syndicated column:

Early in 2012, I opened a column with this question: “Is there a single public official who is examining – who cares about – the murder spree by Afghan security forces against Western troops and security contractors in Afghanistan?”

Nearly one year has passed, during which 62 Americans and other Westerners have been killed by Afghan forces “inside the wire.” The president has yet to call for “meaningful change”; in fact, he has said nothing about it. The Congress has said nothing about it. During the presidential campaign, Mitt Romney said nothing about it. Such silence is a national disgrace, but it’s an answer to my question. No. They don’t care. Not about the men. Not about their families. What they care about is the story line – the fraud that has kept the national arteries to Afghanistan open, fueling the American-led “counterinsurgency” fantasy that an ally, heart-and-mind, exists in the umma (Islamic world), if only Uncle Sam can mold it and bribe it and train it into viability.

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A list of 2012 Afghan "insider" murders from the Chinese news agency Xinhua.

Complete? I don't think so.

A civilian police advisor with the NATO-led coalition forces was shot and killed by an Afghan policewoman in Kabul police headquarters on Monday [December 24], in an attack that seems to be the latest in the so-called "green-on-blue" insider attacks when Afghan army or police or gunmen in their uniform turned their weapons against their foreign partners. The female police officer, who used her pistol in the attack, was detained. The following is a list of such attacks since the beginning of this year [2012]: On Nov. 11 -- One British soldier with the coalition or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was killed and one was wounded when an Afghan soldier opened fire following an argument in southern Helmand province. The injured shooter was detained. On Oct. 30 -- Two British soldiers were killed after their patrol was being shot by a man wearing Afghan police...

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At the Washington Times today, American hero (and, I am honored to say, Team B II colleague) Gen. Jerry Boykin writes:

In 1993, Task Force Ranger fought an 18-hour battle in Mogadishu, Somalia, against a tribal militia numbering in the thousands. I was there as the commander of the Delta Force and bore responsibility for getting 99 warriors out of the city that day after having accomplished our primary mission. The mission was to capture a band of loyalists and supporters of a warlord and tribal leader named Mohammed Aideed. We succeeded in that task rather quickly, but when a Black Hawk helicopter was shot down, the mission changed to one that was even more critical. The battle is chronicled in the book and movie “Black Hawk Down.”

What most people do not realize is that the special operations forces involved in that fierce fight, which claimed 15 U.S. lives, were fighting over the bodies of two of their comrades. Both the pilot and the co-pilot of the crashed helicopter were killed on impact and trapped in the twisted wreckage. No one was willing to leave their bodies behind because everyone lived by a code that is encapsulated in the fifth stanza of something called the Ranger Creed: “I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy.”

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In this New York Times video, watch the tyranny of the mob break through the veneer of preening self-congratulation.

Doesn't it remind you a little bit of something else?

On August 2, 2012, while many millions of Americans were either on, refreshed from or perhaps contemplating their summer vacation, Army Staff Sgt. Matthew Sitton and another US soldier stepped on an IED in a mine-riddled field in Afghanistan. They were both killed. Sitton's sacrifice came to our attention all too briefly in September when a letter he had written to his Congressman in desperation about the strategic futility of such patrolling -- a COIN staple -- became public.

In looking back on the year, it is important not to forget what Sitton wrote. The recklessness and failures of COIN must still be addressed by the nation.

From September 21:



Below is an extraordinary, heart-stopping and historic letter. It is a letter SSG Matthew Sitton sent to U.S. Rep. C.W. "Bill" Young after his commanders in Afghanistan told him to "quit whining" about orders to lead patrols without objective "through,  for lack of a better term, basically a mine field on a daily basis,"...

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Los Angeles Times photo of Army Pvt. 2nd Class Chris Wade "advising" Afghan soldiers inside an Afghan National Army compound at FOB Naghlu.

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2012 began with the continuing Islamic jihad against infidel troops in Afghanistan, euphemistically sanitized, or, perhaps better, neutered as "blue on green" shootings, or "insider attacks." Given that US government and military officials permitted the deadly assaults to continue unchecked under cover of "additional risk," as Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey so very, very shamefully put it, it is little surprise that Christmas week brought us another such murder....

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These are the times that try men's souls; the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

My friend Cliff Kincaid of AIM wrote in to take strong exception to my last column on the Bradley Manning pre-trial hearings, calling my attention to a report by Trevor Loudon titled "Julian Assange: Whistleblower or Spy for Moscow? (read it here), He also updated me on his own coverage of the case here, here and here, which includes coverage of a Manning hearing in April of this year here.

To be sure, questions about Wikileaks, about its founder Julian Assange, remain -- his sources of support, his apparent decision not to proceed with large-scale Russian releases and -- instead? -- take a job with Russia TV, Putin's state-controlled media organization. Rather surreally, Assange performs this job from his state of asylum inside the Embassy of Ecuador in London. (For example, see this interview...

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Judge Robert Bork died early this morning of complications from heart disease. He was 85. His legacy as the pre-eminent Constitutional "originalist" of the age remains as precious and essential today as it was when his 1987 nomination to the Supreme Court was defeated through epic slanders and smears by Senate Democrats led by Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Depicted above with President Reagan on a better day.

RIP.

Long frontpage takeout taking out the Kagans today in the Washington Post. The so-what-else-is-news headline --  "Civilians Held Petraeus' Ear in War Zone" -- almost caused me not to read it, given this obvious fact has driven so many posts and columns here over the years. There is news in the story though, all of it stomach-turning. As I read it, Petraeus, in addition to everything else, is a weak commander who used the Kagans as a crutch. The Post, meanwhile, is more interested in underscoring what the Kagans gained from the relationship.

Some excerpts, starting with the Post's equation of No Salary (the Kagans refused USG compensation) + Petraeus Access = Defense Contractor Contributions.

The pro-bono relationship which is now being scrutinized by military lawyers, yielded valuable benefits for the general and the couple. The Kagans’ proximity to Petraeus, the country’s most-famous living general, provided an incentive for defense contractors to contribute to Kim Kagan’s think tank....

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The "independent" Benghazi Report has concluded the White House remained in the dark.

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The Benghazi Report is out and it's official: President Obama, SecState Hillary Clinton, CIA Director Petraeus all had nothing to do with the US government response to the attack on the US mission in Benghazi. Indeed, the names Obama, Clinton, Petraeus, Panetta, Rice do not appear anywhere in its 39 pages. DoD -- Panetta? -- however, is singled out for having deployed unarmed drones that, for example, "provided visual surveillance during the evacuation."

Hooray?

The red flags didn't go up over this so-called investigation for nothing. The White House isn't just whitewashed in the report, it's whited-out.

Here, for example, is how the report on Benghazi sums up the US government response.

Upon    notification   of    the    attack  from the TDY  RSO  (temporary regional  security officer...

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This week's syndicated column:

Some thoughts about Army Pfc. Bradley Manning’s pretrial hearing, which concluded this week.

Manning, of course, is charged with leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the website WikiLeaks and, at his trial in March, will be pleading guilty to certain charges while rejecting the military’s contention that he “aided the enemy” in doing so.

Manning was in court this month seeking dismissal on the grounds that since his arrest in May 2010, he has been subjected to unlawful pretrial punishment. Certainly the conditions Manning and his civilian lawyer David E. Coombs described in often dramatic testimony were inhumane, especially for someone not convicted of anything – two months in a dark “cage” in Kuwait; nearly nine months in solitary confinement in Quantico, Va.; orders to stand for inspection naked.

Oddly, the mainstream media and conservative media have been cool, if not callous, to the whole story. This is hard to understand...

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Recently, I asked the Turkish Consul General in Benghazi, Ali Akin, what he could tell me about the night of September 11, 2012. Ali Akin, according to the State Department timeline of events that night, was the last person to meet with the late Amb. Christopher Stevens before the US compound in Benghazi was attacked at 9:40 pm.

As the State background briefer put it on October 9:

About 7:30 in the evening, he [Stevens] has his last meeting. It is with a Turkish diplomat. And at – when the meeting is over, at 8:30 – he has all these meetings, by the way, in what I call Building C – when the meeting is over, he escorts the Turkish diplomat to the main gate. There is an agent there with them. They say goodbye. They’re out in a street in front of the compound. Everything is calm at 8:30 p.m. There’s nothing unusual. There has been nothing unusual during the day at all outside.

Ali Akin was that Turkish diplomat. To my knowledge, this is the first time his version...

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Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) has told Breitbart News yesterday that the State Department has "thwarted" his efforts to visit American survivors of Benghazi, some of whom are still recovering from injuries sustained during the attack.

“My understanding is that we still have some people in the hospital. I’d like to visit with them and wish them nothing but the best but the State Department has seen it unfit for me to know who those people are—or even how many there are,” Rep. Chaffetz said. I don’t know who they are. I don’t know where they live. I don’t know what state they’re from. I don’t even know how many there are. It doesn’t seem right to me.

“This is so patently different than any other experience I’ve had. Unfortunately, people have been killed and maimed and in harm’s way in Afghanistan and Iraq and in points beyond. It’s typically been the case that they would release those names but in this case, they won’t. My challenge is to the media. You try and figure it out. They won’t let Congress know. They won’t seem to let the media know either.”

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The Wall Street Journal reports this week about a new draft handbook for US troops in Afghanistan designed to prevent their Afghan "partners" from murdering them. (And yes, we've seen this same material before.)

The problem, according to the Army, is "ignorance of, or lack of empathy for Muslim and/or Afghan cultural norms" on the part of US troops.

The solution, according to the Army, is for troops to accept these same Muslim and/or Afghan norms -- or else be killed. In effect, then, Uncle Sam is ordering Americans to submit to Islam or die -- exactly the...

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The Death of the Grown-Up (2007) was written just before texting became ubiquitous to the point of further short-handing human relations -- and certainly before "sexting" further short-circuited human development ... in children. If I ever update Chapter 5, "Sophisticated Babies," this report on an investigation into "sexting" among British 13- and 14-year-olds in the Daily Mail goes in:

Boys and girls as young as 13 routinely swap explicit pictures of themselves, a disturbing investigation reveals today.

Children are now so sexualised the practice has become ‘mundane and mainstream’. One girl told researchers: ‘I get asked for naked pictures at least two or three times a week.’

A boy said: ‘You would have seen a girl’s breasts before you’ve seen their face’ while another youngster referred to so-called sexting as ‘the new flirting’.

Yesterday censors were forced to announce a crackdown on depraved films amid fears they distort the way teenage boys view women.

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You can almost hear the Obama administration call out, as one voice, "Aha! We'll designate the Syrian al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra a terrorist organization, thus barring the group from receiving Western money and arms,  and be done with it!"

And so they did. But they weren't.

From the NYT story, picking up with paragraph 9:

But a growing number of anti-government groups — including fighters in the loose-knit Free Syrian Army that the United States is trying to bolster — have signed petitions or posted statements online in recent days expressing support for the Nusra Front. In keeping with a tradition throughout the uprising of choosing themes for Friday protests, the biggest day for demonstrations because it coincides with Friday Prayer, many called for this Friday’s title to be “No to American intervention — we are all Jabhet al-Nusra.”...

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There's something wrong with a government "secrets" case when millions of people have access to those same "secrets."

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The pre-trial hearing of PFC Bradley Manning is underway at Ft. Meade, MD -- though you'd hardly know it given overall media inattention. Manning, of course, is being tried for allegedly releasing some 250,000 diplomatic cables, as well as a huge cache of documents from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the leak site Wikileak.

Just to sum up where we are in the process, the AP writes:

Manning is seeking dismissal of all charges due to what he claims were excessively harsh conditions during his nine months in the brig.

Brig commanders say they kept Manning confined 23 hours a day, sometimes without clothing, to keep him from hurting or killing himself.

He's charged with 22 offenses, including aiding the enemy. He could get life in prison if convicted.

I've been looking at reports about the hearing, about Manning's defense and...

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70 percent of Egyptians favor the new sharia draft constitution -- true or false? Only the ballot box knows for sure. So why are Egypt's "liberals" and "secularists" rioting to prevent a national referendum?

From the Vancouver Sun:

Egypt's vice-president Mahmoud Mekki floated the possibility late Friday that the Islamist government might postpone a referendum on a hugely controversial draft constitution that critics have condemned because they believe it gives some powers to unelected Islamic scholars and ignores the rights of women and the country's Coptic Christian minority. ...

Tens of thousands of protesters continued to mass in the dark outside the presidential palace early Saturday. At one point some of them broke through a hastily erected outer concrete barrier and clambered on tanks near the palace walls. As they did so, other protesters continued to throng...

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It's "Candid Camera" meets the Global Green-Bots, as CFACT (Committees for a Constructive Tomorrow) "punks the UN." DC-based CFACT is, as Lord Monckton puts it, the "only climate-skeptical group recognized by the UN."

In the video, CFACT asks delegates to this week's UN Climate Change Conference in Doha, Qatar -- you bet it's a weird place for a conference designed to shut down oil and gas production, although what could be better PR for the Qataris? -- if they would consider wearing a "carbon capture mask" to filter out the carbon dioxide (CO2) they exhale.The answers must be seen, not to be believed, exactly, but to take the measure of world zealotry, duly noting how each assent feels like contact with a blunt instrument. CFACT's lesson: "If the UN delegates are open to this, just think what they'd like to impose on the rest of the world!"

And I didn't even mention Prince Talal bin Alwaleed's stake in News Corp....

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This week's syndicated column:

No doubt in the spirit of the season, somebody bestowed an audio sweetmeat upon Bob Woodward of the Washington Post – 13-plus minutes of an off-the-record conversation that took place in spring 2011 between Gen. David Petraeus, then ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) commander in Afghanistan, and Fox News analyst K.T. McFarland, who was visiting Petraeus’ Kabul HQ.

At the end of an interview, McFarland announces she has a personal message for Petraeus from Fox News President Roger Ailes, part of which is: If Petraeus isn’t appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he should resign in six months and run for president.

Obviously, Petraeus didn’t take the advice. And that’s the Post headline – “Fox news chief’s failed attempt to enlist Petraeus as presidential candidate.” But there is more to the message than that.

The segment starts thus:

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Went on with Pat And Stu and my Team B II colleague Patrick Poole to talk about Egypt on the Glenn Beck Program last night.

No doubt in the spirit of the season, somebody bestowed an audio sweetmeat upon Bob Woodward -- 13-plus minutes of an off-the-record conversation that took place  in the spring of 2011 between Gen. David Petreaus, then ISAF commander in Afghanistan, and Fox News analyst KT McFarland, then visiting Petraeus' Kabul HQ. The exchange under consideration comes at the end of an interview when McFarland announces she has a personal message for Petraeus from Fox News President Roger Ailes, part of which is: If Petraeus isn't appointed joint chiefs chairman, he should resign from the Army in six months and run for president. Obviously, he Petraeus didn't do. it And that's the Washington Post headline -- "Fox news chief failed attempt to enlist Petraeus as presidential candidate." But there is more to the message than that.

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Foreign policy and national security analyst (and friend) Fred Gedrich passed this along from his lifelong pal Duke Berkoski, U.S. Marines (retired):

The Food Stamp Program, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is proud to be distributing this year the greatest amount of free Meals and Food Stamps ever, to 46 million people. Meanwhile, the National Park Service, administered by the U.S. Department of the Interior, asks us: "Please Do Not Feed the Animals." The stated reason for the policy? "The animals will grow dependent on handouts and will not learn to take care of themselves."

Thus ends today's lesson in irony.

As some readers know, I am Washington correspondent for Dispatch International, a new weekly newspaper that appears every Thursday in English, Danish, Swedish and German. Our motto from Thomas Jefferson is our raison d'etre: "Freedom of the press cannot be limited without being lost." Thus, the paper -- helmed by journalist and free- speech-hero Lars Hedegaard of Denmark and the equally strong journalist Ingrid Carlqvist of Sweden -- is committed, indeed, came into exstence to print news the rest of media will not. These include stories about Islam, government corruption, immigration, crime and other urgently important features about our life and times that the MSM seek to ignore and deny. 

This helps explains why severe and massive cyber attacks on Dispatch International are originating in part from MSM organizations in Sweden!

Here is an excerpt from a letter Dispatch International's Henrik Raeder Clausen sent out today:

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