Newsmax reports:

Pictures of the sentinels at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington, D.C., standing guard during an early rain band from Hurricane Sandy went viral online Monday — including one that was taken weeks before the storm. The 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment will continue its mission to guard the tomb throughout the storm in the same manner it does every day, as well as completing its other duties, regardless of how bad conditions get, according to its Facebook page. The regiment, known as The Old Guard, has maintained a 24-hour-a-day presence at the tomb since 1948. This is part of its mission as the U.S. Army’s official honor guard, which includes providing military ceremonies in Washington and as funeral escorts at Arlington National Cemetary. The picture of three tomb sentinels was first posted by the First Army Division East this morning and was shared more than 53,000 times, and picked up by dozens...

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In the last installment, I examined cables written by Christopher Stevens in 2008 (and available courtesy Wikileaks) that seem to capture a significant trend in his thinking, and, perhaps the thinking of others in the US government, which may have helped drive the evolution of the disastrous US "Arab Spring" policy that put Uncle Sam in alliance with al Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood and other groups driving the spread of sharia (Islamic law).

This trend appears as Stevens learned how to explain -- how to rationalize, really -- the jihad corridor that eastern Libyans in particular followed to fight Americans in Iraq. While the Washington Post today quite narrowly (ignorantly) tells readers that Derna sent more jihadists to Iraq "during the U.S. occupation [sic] than any other place in Libya," the larger truth is that eastern Libya, led by Derna and Benghazi, sent more jihadists to kill and maim Americans -- whose Iraq "occupation," by the way, included fighting AQ, preventing Sunni-Shiite civil war and "nation-building" all at the same time -- per capita than any place in the world. And, as discussed in Part 2, the citizenry is extremely proud of this ultimate anti-American fact.

...

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Frank Gaffney neatly recaps a slew of breaking reports by Catherine Herridge, Aaron Klein and Clare Lopez concerning what might have drawn the late Amb. Christopher Stevens to Benghazi on September 10 and 11. The diferent strands of this developing story indicate that Stevens may have been there to oversee or inspect an ongoing covert CIA operation to supply weapons and men to the jihadist-dominated "rebels" fighting Syria's Assad. Stevens' last meeting, after all, was with Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin. Turkey, of course, with Qatar and Saudi Arabia, is a leading supporter...

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The flag of Ansar al-Sharia, which reportedly led the Benghazi attack; and the flag of Libya Shield, which reportedly provided security to US Marines in Benghazi.

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This Week's Syndicated Column:

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column addressing the national scandal that investigation into the security failures and lies surrounding Benghazi-gate must also expose. This even larger scandal concerns the fact that throughout the revolutionary cycle known as Arab Spring, the Obama administration threw in Uncle Sam’s lot with the bad guys – the “rebels,” the “martyrs,” the Muslim Brothers, the whole jihad-happy and Shariah-ruling crew in Libya and the wider Middle East. In so doing, Uncle Sam,...

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White House Press Gaggle, October 24, 2012

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Yesterday, Reuters, Fox, CNN, CBS and other media reported that on 9/11/12 emails went to top Obama administration officials alerting them that the Benghazi consulate was under terrorist attack. The first arrived at 4:05 pm ET on 9/11/12 -- 10:05 pm Benghazi time, about 25 minutes into the attack. At 6:07 pm ET, another email reported that Ansar Al-Sharia had claimed responsibility for the attack.

At some point after that, the White House cook-up-a-protest-that-didn't-happen and blame-the-video lie began.

Yesterday, also, White House spokesman Jay Carney -- he who repeatedly perepetrated the above lie in the weeks after the terrorist attack in Benghazi -- went before the press, the Fourth Estate, our eyes and ears. The skeptics. The questioners of authority.

And?

The Benghazi emails didnt come up until Question #8.

For scene-setting purposes, it's worth nothing Question #7 was: "Based on some of those stats...

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Charles Woods, father of fallen ex-SEAL Tyrone Woods, called in to the Lars Larsen radio show yesterday to express his thoughts about the news that Benghazi was known to be a terrorist attack right away, was observed via Drone cameras in real time, and that relief forces remained undeployed from nearby countries.

Tyrone and ex-SEAL Glen Doherty were both killed by a mortar fired at the safe house annex late in the firefight, after Wissam bin Hamid's Libya Shield Brigade had escorted eight Marines from Tripoli to the safe house.

Charles Woods says: "Someone had to say `don't go rescue them.' We need to find out who gave that order and why."

Woods says he's not angry at anybody but believes "something doesn't smell right." He recounted...

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About that Libya Shield Brigade which 1) fought under the black flag of al Qaeda during the February 17 Revolution, and 2) escorted the eight US Marines who arrived from Tripoli to aid the Benghazi consulate under attack on the night of 9/11/12.

Two Libya Shield Brigade leaders met with US diplomat(s) on September 9, according to a US embassy cable drafted by David C. McFarland, signed by Christopher Stevens and dispatched on September 11. (It was posted online by the House Oversight Committee.) This cable was first discussed in the Daily Beast on October 8 in a story recounting the fact that generic militia leaders had threatened to pull security from US interests in Benghazi, but it contains some interesting details not previously noted.

Here is the cable's Item 4 in toto:

Militia commanders discuss Muslim...

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Bouchra Ismaili, Dutch Labor Party member of Rotterdam City Council: "Listen up, crazy freaks, we're here to stay. You're the foreigners here, with Allah on my side I'm not afraid of anything. Take my advice: convert to Islam, and you will find peace."

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Via IsraelNationalNews.com, a report by Giulio Meotti from the end of the world:

The Middle East is full of churches turned into Islamic sites, like the Umayyad in Damascus, the Ibn Tulun in Cairo and the cathedral of St. Sophia in Instanbul.

In Hevron and on Jerusalem's Temple Mount, the Muslims built their sites on the Jewish ones.

A sad prophecy of the writer Emile Cioran once cast a sinister prophecy on Europe: “The French will not wake up until Notre Dame becomes a mosque”.

This...

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From The Des Moines Register staff blog comes a journalistic milestone: Obama makes the case for the paper's endorsement off the record, and the paper is perplexed. "No reason was given for the unusual condition of keeping it private," they write. "We relented and took the call. How could we not? It’s the leader of the free world on line one."

Probably going off again about transparency again.

The Des Moines Register’s publisher and I spoke with President Barack Obama this morning — but we can’t tell you what he said.

Just four days before the Register’s presidential endorsement is released, Laura Hollingsworth and I received a phone call from the president. He was calling from Florida, on the heels of a morning campaign appearance and about 14 hours after his debate with GOP nominee Mitt Romney at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla.

The conference call lasted nearly 30 minutes and was an incredibly informative exchange of questions, answers and an insightful glimpse into the...

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Arrested: Kevin Carroll. Paul Weston and Tommy Robinson

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Totalitarian UK Watch:

Gates of Vienna has pulled together what is known about a government crackdown on British Freedom and the English Defense League, two parties that refuse to go quietly into the Islamic night over Britain.

Baron Bodissey writes:

I first learned of the arrest of Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll early yesterday morning — after most Americans were in bed, and before most Brits were awake. I held off posting anything (other than a single sketchy MSM report) until I had more information.

And now Paul Weston has also been arrested — events are overtaking us thick and fast.

Before I get into the details (such as I have), let’s take a look at the broad picture: this was obviously a carefully-planned takedown of the English Defence League.

The Powers That Be in the UK have apparently determined that the EDL is weak at the moment. They calculated that a precisely-targeted...

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October 19, 2012: The CIA concludes "Innocence of Muslims" did not cause the terrorist assault in Benghazi

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The Daily Beast's Eli Lake reports on a "suspect" in the Benghazi assault but his B-matter is more interesting.

He writes:

The CIA’s latest assessment also says once and for all that the assault didn’t start as a protest against an anti-Islam Internet video. In the first eight days following the attacks, Obama administration cited that video as the primary cause of the assault.

The CIA presented its "latest assessment" to Congress on Friday, October 19. Once and for all, there was no video-inspired protest that spiralled into a terrrist attack in Benghazi, the multi-billion-dollar intelligence-gathering institution finally said 38 days after the attack.

Lake continues:

Yet the FBI knew there was no protest as early as Sept. 14,...

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As the Benghazi storyline clears to a point where CIA Director Petraeus' personal testimony is absolutely required to establish how the White House came to perpetuate a lie for at least two weeks -- namely, that a "spontaneous" but, we now  know, non-existent protest combusted into a terrorist attack on the consulate -- diversionary tactics become inevitable. Media static ensues. One likely entry in that category was Saturday's WaPo column by David Ignatius, discussed here, in which an intelligence trial balloon went up to the effect that while there wasn't a live protest in Benghazi, the terrorists watched the Cairo protest live on TV, which is practically the same thing. (Hard to imagine such nonsense flying but you never know.)

Today, Commentary's Max Boot  seems to enter this same realm of Petraeus damage control with a blog entry clarifying, postscript-style, an earlier post pointing out that reading news reports on Benghazi probably yielded more accurate information than reading classified...

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Yesterday, we learned specifically that the CIA station chief in Tripoli reported to Washington within 24 hours that the consulate attack was executed by terrorists and was not a spontaneous demonstration over a video that turned violent. The  President, of course, would continue to weave a narrative blaming the video for two more weeks, hitting that narrative's climax in his UN address on September 25. Citing the video six times in his address, Obama declared: "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam." It seems clear that the video, not the jihad, simply had to be driver in all of the 9/11/12 Islamic rampaging or else Obama's big pitch for the Islamic anti-"blasphemy" movement wouldn't have been, even in his world, feasible.

...

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An essay by George W. Ford:

Is CBS News coordinating a one-two punch with the Obama campaign in Monday's third debate? This is a question worth asking as it is certainly possible that CNN coordinated with the campaign in the second debate, and failed to inform beforehand the Romney campaign and the public they were doing so. Did Candy Crowley simply intervene on the president’s behalf during the exchange on Libya? Or was she, prior to the debate, ordered or prodded by the campaign to do so? In other words, did she act merely as a biased journalist/moderator, or did she know ahead of time that her help would be needed by Obama to maintain the fiction that the US government did not place the blame for Benghazi on an American film maker? When Obama said, “Get the transcript,” it is obvious that the order was directed at Crowley, and that the words meant she must either pick up and read from a piece of paper he had reason to believe was lying on the moderator’s desk, or at least acknowledge...

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Part 1 is here.

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To attempt to understand Christopher Stevens' long-standing interest in ben Qumu, the al Qaeda terrorist suspected of leading the Benghazi attack on September 11, 2012 in which Stevens and three other Americans were murdered, we must seek context in more of Stevens' cables. (Thanks be to Wikileaks.)

On February 15, 2008, Stevens wrote a lengthy cable titled EXTREMISM IN EASTERN LIBYA. On one level it confirms that Stevens was NOT some liberal naif when he docked in Benghazi in April 2011 to serve as point man to the so-called "rebels"-- that cutesy bluff of a name which disguises a movement better described by Clare M. Lopez as "individuals and groups that were, at a minimum, allied ideologically with Al Qaeda." No real stretch to simplify and call Stevens the Obama administration's point man to al Qaeda.

This early 2008 cable recounts the analysis of a US-Libyan dual national who regularly visited eastern Libya concerning...

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This week's syndicated column:

Honestly, did the buck really stop with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Benghazi-gate, or did the buck just stop?

Here’s what Clinton said: “I take responsibility. I’m in charge of the State Department’s 60,000-plus people all over the world, 275 posts. The president and the vice president wouldn’t be knowledgeable about specific decisions that are made by security professionals. They’re the ones who weigh all of the threats and the risks and the needs and make a considered decision.”

Stop. Clinton’s taken responsibility, she’s in charge – and then she declares that “security professionals” make the decisions? Not only is this a non sequitur, it’s nonsense. One thing Americans learned from recent House hearings about the Sept. 11 orchestrated terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya – which killed four Americans and which President Barack Obama insisted for two weeks was sparked by a YouTube video – is that the security professional in question, Eric Nordstrom, asked Clinton’s State Department for more security and was denied.

...

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In analyzing the Benghazi scandal, it is crucial to highlight not only the dangers of relying on jihadist armed gangs for American security in Benghazi, but also the betrayal of American principle undertaken by the Obama administration in setting such a policy in place. The fact is, relying on "local militias" was not some stop-gap practice; it was official US policy. This begins to tell us why "Benghazi-gate" is so much more than an inquiry into a calamitous security break-down, and the ghastly chain of lies the administration told thereafter.

On March 28, 2012,  Regional Security Officer Eric Nordstrom sent a cable from Libya requesting more  security. His request was denied. This cable, however, is evidence of more than State's negligence in failing to address a dangerous security situation that would be exploited by al Qaeda affiliates on September 11, 2012. In the cable, Nordstrom makes note of the fact that "rebuilding and expanding post's PSA Local Guard Force" was one of his "core objectives." Further: "As recommended by the Department, post is developing plans to transition our security staffing ... to [a model] that incorporates more locally-based and non-emergency assets."

...

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Libya Shield spokesman Hafez al-Aquri, April, 2012. And yes, that's the black flag of al Qaeda behind him.

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John Rosenthal adds a shocking, crucial new piece to the Benghazi puzzle today at WND:

Video and documentary evidence shows that a Libyan-government-sponsored militia that reportedly provided support to American Marines on the night of the Sept. 11 Benghazi attacks is a radical Islamic militia that, like the presumed assailants, flies the black flag of jihad.

Over one month after the attacks – and despite a congressional hearing – the details of what occurred remain murky. But according to several largely concordant reports, certain broad outlines appear clear. It is generally agreed that the American consulate was attacked by Islamic extremists from a local Libyan militia. According to widely publicized speculations, the militia in question is thought to go by the name Ansar al-Shariah. Thus, for example, a recent New York Times article cites an eyewitness account attributing the attack to Ansar al-Shariah and notes that the witness claims to have seen the attackers “waving the black flag favored by such ultraconservative jihadis.”

...

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A friend writes in to underscore the importance of noting also the series of events that befell the consulate survivors on evacuating the sacked and burning compound -- without Amabassador Stevens, whose body wouldn't be recovered until much later. "The description reads like some of Mark Bowden’s descriptions of American servicemen surrounded by hostile crowds and armed gangs in Mogadishu in Black Hawk Down," he writes.

Picking up from this post, here is the State Department background briefing on October 9, 2012:

Here it’s a little harder to understand because I don’t have a diagram that you can show – that I can show you. But in a nutshell, they take fire almost as soon as they emerge from the compound. They go a couple of – they go in one direction toward the annex. They don’t like what they’re seeing ahead of them. There are crowds. There are groups of men. They turn around and go the other direction. They don’t like what they’re seeing in that direction either. They make another u-turn. They’re going at a steady pace. There is traffic in the roads around there. This is in Benghazi, after all. Now, they’re going at a steady pace and they’re trying not to attract too much attention, so they’re going maybe 15 miles an hour down the street.

...

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First, late last night in Peru, SecState Hillary Clinton phones it in that she has "taken responsibility" for the Benghazi -- almost literally, what with a CNN correspondent doing a post-modern "Hello, sweetheart, get me rewrite" routine on the line into the NY bureau with a breathless report of what her SecStateness had just intoned:

"I take responsibility," Clinton said during a visit to Peru. "I'm in charge of the State Department's 60,000-plus people all over the world, 275 posts. The president and the vice president wouldn't be knowledgeable about specific decisions that are made by security professionals. They're the ones who weigh all of the threats and the risks and the needs and make a considered decision."

But she said an investigation now under way will ultimately determine what happened at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, where Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed on September 11.

Then Hill went off about "fog of war" confusion, etc. (maybe...

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Time Warner's Carol Melton and Huma Abedin at the Washington, DC "Argo" party, October 12, 2012

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As some readers will recall, a few months ago, in the spirit of columnist-bites-editor, I "spiked" the Washington Examiner after editorial page editor David Freddoso refused to run my column "Outing the Muslim Brotherhood." The column reported on a written request, then making gigantic media waves, from Rep. Michele Bachmann and four House colleagues to inspectors general at five government agencies asking them simply to investigate alarming evidence of Muslim Brotherhood penetration of US government decision-making. One of the members' exhibits was SecState Clinton's top aide Huma Abedin, whose family members, in a nutshell, have been tightly, deeply and demonstrably involved with groups and movements dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization.

...

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Just read the State Department blow-by-blow briefing, or  "tick-tock," on events in Benghazi given reporters on background on October 9. As senior official #2 summed up the attack in his concluding remarks:

The lethality and the number of armed people is unprecedented. There had been no attacks like that anywhere in Libya – Tripoli, Benghazi, or elsewhere – in the time that we had been there. And so it is unprecedented. In fact, it would be very, very hard to find a precedent for an attack like that in recent diplomatic history.

Aside from harrowing descriptions of terror and entrapment, loss and courage, what stands out is the depiction of a quiet night suddenly broken by massive armed attack. No Youtube protest Gone Wrong, in other words as the Obama White House has continually insisted, lying in such a way as to advance the world Islamic movement against free speech about Islam, whose...

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As Eyeore writes at Vlad Tepes writes, "this is quite a little report" by a Russian correspondent on the state of the Islamic takeover of Paris.

Me, I prefer director Rouben Mamouliam's Paris, via Rogers & Hart and Maurice Chevalier.

Libya's "humanitarian vulcans" Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power (Thrice the brinded cat had mew'd...)

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At her indispensable blog Refugee Resettlement Watch, Ann Corcoran wonders:  "Are they keeping Samantha Power under wraps now so she won’t be tainted by the Libya scandal washing over Washington?  And, why would they do that?"

Power, with Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton, form the troika of "humanitarian vulcans" that helped drive Obama's Libya intervention, sending Uncle Sam to join the jihad. Rice and Clinton have been thoroughly "Benghazi'ed" since the consulate attack, with more of the same likely in store. Power, however, has not been part of the conversation -- almost as AWOL as CIA Director Petraeus. Ann thinks the silence on Power is calculated to save her from Benghazi-gate so she remains eligible to succeed Hillary in a second (please, no) Obama term. To be sure, her remaining in cognito as the Libya scandal burns is also a function of a comatose...

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US Consulate in Benghazi, 9/11/12

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Andrew C. McCarthy deftly and thoroughly dispatches the  Obama administration's blatant, repeated lies on Benghazi today at NRO, then -- naturally, as the author of the essential and super book Spring Fever, the debunking of "Arab Spring" -- hits the bullseye on the real scandal of Benghazi:

The straight line from Obama’s Libya policy of empowering Islamists to the Benghazi massacre is rarely discussed. Maybe it would be clearer if the Republican establishment had not ardently supported Obama’s war against Libya.

Remember the "Libya hawks."

Maybe it would be clearer if Romney and Ryan stopped sounding nearly as delusional about the “Arab Spring” as Obama and Biden do. Maybe it would be clearer if Romney and Ryan stopped talking about reprising the Libya debacle in Syria, joined at the hip to what they call “our ally Turkey” — Hamas’s new sugar daddy and staunchest defender....

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The NYT's Dean Baquet, Jill Abramson and Bill Keller: Newshounds all.

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The explanations offered by NYT exec editor Jill Abramson and managing editor Dean Baquet for why the newspaper isn't covering House hearings on Benghazi-gate goes beyond parody, science fiction and satire. Of course, it could have been written by the Obama campaign.

NYT "Reader's Representative" Margaret Sullivan reports:

I talked with Jill Abramson, the executive editor, about the decision, which she said she may have set in motion while running the morning news meeting on Wednesday.

“I said that I wanted us to weigh the news value against the reality that Congressional hearings are not all about fact-finding,” she said. In other words, they are often deeply politicized.

She described The Times’s Libya coverage in recent weeks as “excellent and very muscular,” and she said that for her and the managing editor Dean Baquet, “it’s been one of the absolute key stories – getting to the...

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David Petraeus accepting the James Madison Medal at Princeton, 2010

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Two weeks ago, I wondered whether CIA Director Petraeus was politicizing the intelligence after a source told Fox News  on September 27 that three days after the Benghazi assault, Petraeus briefed the House Intelligence Committee that "Benghazi was an out-of-control demonstration prompted by the YouTube video. According to the source, this was `shocking' to some members who were present and saw the same intelligence pointing toward a terrorist attack."   

Knowing Petraeus' sensitivities to the faux-stimulus of what he has called in Senate testimony "Arab anger,"  such politicization, or, perhaps better, such Arabizing of the intelligence would likely come naturally to him. No stranger to politicking, Petraeus as CENTCOM commander engaged in what was described as an "unprecedented" political push in early 2010 on behalf of Islam's Israel-centered demonology in order to enhance Americas's military standing in Iraq and Afghanistan. This dovetailed neatly with his perhaps surprising take on Gitmo -- close it, its "existence has been used by the enemy against us" --  and his really shocking take on Hezbollah: “Hezbollah’s justifications for existence will become void,” Petraeus told the Al Hayat as reported in the Lebanese Daily Star, “if the Palestinian cause is resolved.” Given this Arabist sensibility (and don't forget one of his thesis directors at Princeton was Stephen Walt of Walt & Mearsheimer), it's no stretch to imagine the man taking up cry of Islamic video-rage as well.  ...

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This week's syndicated column:

Imagine, pre-9/11/12, that you were responsible for arranging the defense of the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Would you have considered American interests and personnel best protected by bringing in a local security outfit called the February 17 Martyrs Brigade?

The question has yet to come up in House hearings, but I think it holds the key to the Obama administration’s betrayal of the American people in “Benghazi-gate.” To an American with common sense not subverted by advanced degrees, the thought of putting Islamic “martyrs” in charge of American “infidels” in Benghazi – which, fun fact, literally means “city of holy warriors” – would trigger the inevitable “heck, no.” And that’s without even knowing what is significant about Feb. 17.

But I’m talking about Washington, D.C. Here, placing the lives of Americans in the hands of a thug-army linked to multiple atrocities and drawn from jihad-epicentral eastern Libya disturbs no collective brain...

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Pat Smith's son Sean was killed during the 9/11/12 assault on the American consulate in Benghazi that left three other Americans dead including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. In her initial grief, Mrs. Smith describes being embraced by the Obama administration, and being told by "all of them" that her son's death was caused by the video. They promised her facts about his death; that's all she wanted. Biden, she says, was "a treasure." Panetta took her face in his hands and promised her the truth. She cried on President Obama's shoulder and "then he kind of looked off into the distance." She has heard nothing. She sees bloody handprints in pictures of the sacked US building and wonders if they are her son's. They are still studying it, they tell her, "and the things they are telling me are outright lies."

 

...

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WND's Jerome Corsi has a hot one today, reporting that "according to Arabic-language and Islamic experts, the ring Obama has been wearing for more than 30 years is adorned with the first part of the Islamic declaration of faith, the Shahada: “There is no god except Allah.' "

Corsi continues:

The Shahada is the first of the Five Pillars of Islam, expressing the two fundamental beliefs that make a person a Muslim: There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is Allah’s prophet.

Sincere recitation of the Shahada is the sole requirement for becoming a Muslim, as it expresses a person’s rejection of all other gods.

Egyptian-born Islamic scholar Mark A. Gabriel, Ph.D., examined photographs of Obama’s ring at WND’s request and concluded that the first half of the Shahada is inscribed on it.

“There can be no doubt that someone wearing the inscription ‘There is no god except Allah’ has a very close connection to Islamic beliefs, the Islamic religion and Islamic society to which this statement is so strongly attached,” Gabriel told WND.

...

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Dear Mitt,

I know you're a busy man. But this foreign policy needs some more time and thought on your part, and before your next debate with Obama.

It's not that O's a foreign policy genius; he's not. It's not that his foreign policy is good; it stinks. But what you have crafted (excerpted below) is more of the same. Just as you want to remap the economic course of the nation, you should also want to remap the foreign policy course of the nation. Why? The fact is -- the fact your experts won't tell you --  through the Bush-Obama years our foreign policy course has been hijacked by a tiny band of extremists: Leftists, dupes and Islamic agents. Or, as we call them today, COINdinistas, neocons/McCainiacs and the Muslim Outreached.

I've read excerpts of your Monday speech at VMI at NRO. I'm going to skip your paeon to George Marshall, about whom the nicest thing I can say is that he is the most overrated...

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SecState Hillary Clinton and Philippines President Aquino in June 2012

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The Philippines government has agreed to the creation of a new Islamic substate of 4 million people in the south: "Bangsamoro." According to the AP, the accord calls for establishing a 15-member "Transition Commission" to "work out the details of the preliminary agreement and draft a law creating the new Muslim autonomous region in about two years." The accord also calls for deactivating "rebel forces" without specifying a timetable. 

 Details, details.

On Radio Australia, Dr. Steve Rood noted the government agreed the new Muslim region would have a separate form of government altogether:

They have...

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Black Panther 21 demonstration, New York City 1970

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This week's syndicated column:

I tweeted recently about shocking news in the Daily Caller that Attorney General Eric Holder, as a Columbia University student and leader of the Student Afro-American Society (SAS), participated in the armed takeover of a vacant campus ROTC office. The takeover lasted five days in the spring of 1970. The online news site added: “Department of Justice spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler has not responded to questions from the Daily Caller about whether Holder himself was armed – and, if so, with what sort of weapon.”

Holder himself has acknowledged participating in a separate takeover of a college dean’s office until SAS demands were met – for starters, transformation of the ROTC office into the Malcolm X Lounge. The Columbia Daily...

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The Winner.

Wasn't it great not to have to worry about what might come out of the Republican's mouth next (Bush, Bush, McCain...)?

AFP reports:

KABUL — Afghanistan's senate voted to cut the word "friendship" from a pact with France because Islamic texts say it cannot be used to describe relations between Muslims and infidels, senators said Tuesday.

More to the awkward point, "Islamic texts" also say "friendship" cannot exist between Muslims and infidels, period.

France, which has seen 88 of its troops killed as part of the NATO coalition backing the Afghan government against Taliban insurgents, signed the 20-year "friendship and cooperation treaty" earlier this year.

"Some senators said that based on Sharia rulings we cannot use the word friendship with infidels, so after voting the word friendship was replaced with relationship,"...

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"It's going to spark controversy, obviously, when you deem one side savages and the other side civilized." That's what man-on-the-street Colby Richardson says in this news clip, knitting his brows earnestly in the direction of an advertisment (above) posted in the New York subway by organizations run by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer.

It is indeed "controversial" to frame the war waged by the Arab-Islamic world -- and, don't forget, its Eurabian patrons -- against the state of Israel as The Savage vs. The Civilized, but is it also correct? Is such a question possible to answer from the rut of moral equivalence we have dug for ourselves? Is today's brain-washed cultural relativist even capable...

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The headlines sound promising: The entire Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Republicans and Democrats, has asked the State Department to explain what went wrong before, during and after the 9/11/12 attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, during which the US ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed.

But there's a catch. The bi-partisan letter that went out on September 27 says: "It would be very helpful to us if we could receive responses and a briefing on these matters during the week of November 13th when the Senate is expected to go back into session."

The election is on November 6th.

Benghazigate represents a major failure of intelligence and competence in national security by the Obama administration and the American people require all the facts on the table before they choose the next commander-in-chief....

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What's that they say about a cartoon being worth 884 words?

This week's syndicated column:

Who said the following: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

Iran’s Ahmadinejad? Egypt’s Morsi? Some little-known, fatwa-flinging cleric increasing the bounty on Salman Rushdie’s head?

None of the above. The words are President Obama’s, and he spoke them this week to the U.N. General Assembly.

No Big Media outlet reported this stunning pronouncement. It’s as if Ronald Reagan addressed the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983 and the media failed to report that he used the phrase “evil empire.” To make the comparison more direct, imagine if a Republican president declared that “the future must not belong to those who slander the messiah of Christianity” – or, for that matter, the prophet of Latter-day Saints. We would have heard all about it, and for the rest of our lives.

Of course, the Islam-Christianity comparison isn’t a perfect match, given the peculiar definition of “slander” under Islamic...

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The great Robert Conquest, whose work provides one of the windows into my forthcoming book American Betrayal, put it so elegantly:

"Not even high intelligence and a senstive spirit are of any help once the facts of a situation are deduced from a political theory and not vice versa."

In a national security context, this is called politicizing the intelligence -- making the facts fit a political narrative rather than allowing the facts to construct a narrative of their own.

The Obama administration's repeated, stubborn, hectoring insistence that the Youtube video "Innocence of Muslims" caused murder and mayhem throughout the Muslim world since 9/11/12, including the jihadist assault on the Benghazi consulate, represents one of the most flagrant displays of this malpractice, and also one of the most serious breaches of public trust. President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Jay Carney and other Obama officials all engaged in this transparent and now failed Big Lie. And so, Fox News is...

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A long overdue update on the Smolensk airplane "accident" that destroyed the heart of the pro-Western Polish leadership in April 2010 on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet massacre of 20,000 Polish officers known as the Katyn Forest Massacre. (Some earlier coverage here, here, here and here.)

The shocking news this week is that a snapped rivet was found during...

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Here is my most recent piece for Dispatch International, the brand new weekly newspaper edited by Lars Hedegaard, available in English, Danish, Swedish and German. (Subscription information here)

Our motto is taken from Thomas Jefferson: Freedom of the press cannot be limited without being lost.

"Now Playing in Washington: More Lies from Tariq Ramadan"

WASHINGTON, DC -- When I read that Tariq Ramadan would be speaking at a local bookstore in Washington, DC on September 11, the juxtaposition gave me a jolt. Was Ramadan – the world-famous and Left-celebrated Muslim “intellectual” banned from France for six months in the 1990s for alleged terror ties, and later from the US for six years (2004-2010) for reasons said to include charitable donations to HAMAS – really an appropriate choice for this darkest of anniversaries? But there was something...

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All you need to know about the about Mona Eltahawy (with spray can) is that she describes herself as "a liberal, secular Muslim" -- except when it comes to free speech.

On Wednesday the 26th and Thursday the 27th at 8pm, Glenn Beck's The Blaze TV will debut a two-part documentary, The Project, which I've had the privilege of participating in with an all-star cast, including: Michele Bachmann, Stephen Coughlin, M. Stanton Evans, Louie Gohmert, Sebastian Gorka, John Guandolo, Andrew C. McCarthy, Patrick Poole, and Erick Stackelbeck.

Below watch two individuals -- one a NY state senator, one an Israeli UN ambassador -- stand up and walk out on enemies of civilization. Both men are both to be commended.

But what about the rest who remained?



...

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Army chief of staff Odierno's so-called response to SSG Sitton's letter is below.

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More on the story of SSG Sitton from the Tampa Tribune -- specifically, the US military's response:

LARGO — Cheryl Sitton's questions are simple. To her, the answers should be, too.

And so far, she's not satisfied with what top U.S. military officials have explained in the wake of the death of her son, U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Matthew Sitton. So she'd like the chance to talk to them in person.

On June 4, Matthew Sitton wrote a letter to U.S. Rep. C.W. Bill Young. In it, Sitton asked for help. For months, he wrote, his platoon had been mandated to patrol empty fields and compounds littered with explosives. His objections, and requests for an explanation, were disregarded. He was told to quit complaining.

About two months after writing that email, Sitton stepped on an explosive and died. He was 26.

Young, deeply disturbed by Sitton's message and subsequent death, sought...

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Michelle Malkin and Ilana Mercer have ripped David Brooks and Peggy Noonan for either slobbering over Obama or raking Mitt Romney, both along MSM lines, all the while impersonating or assuming a conservative guise. Something to take into consideration, too, is the heavily oracular voice, particularly notable on Noonan's part.

Well, how did PN's reading of the fiery signs and entrails fare last time around?

I went back to the Noonan's "case for Barack Obama" piece of October 30, 2008, where she possibly, coyly, maybe, maybe not joined a line of other conservative reputationists...

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An Army team carries the transfer case containing the remains of Army Staff Sgt. Matthew S. Sitton of Largo, Fla., upon arrival at Dover Air Force Base, Del., on August 4, 2012.

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Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) joins Rep. C.W. "Bill" Jones (R-FL) in calling for a withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan before the 2014 deadline.

From the Congressional Record, September 19, 2012:

BRING OUR TROOPS HOME IN 2013

(Mr. JONES asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 minute.)

Mr. JONES. Mr. Speaker, today I had the privilege and honor to visit Walter Reed Hospital to say thank you to our wounded from Afghanistan and Iraq, and I saw those who have lost both arms and legs. It’s just so sad to go there.

That brings me today to the floor to thank the chairman of the Armed Services Appropriations Committee, C.W. ‘‘Bill’’ Young, who has come...

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SSG Matthew Sitton (1986-2012)

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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," as Sitton wrote. Twice daily basis, in fact. On August 2, 2012, Sitton and another US soldier were killed in one the IED-riddled field he spoke of. Eighty-one-year-old Rep. Young, who attends the same church in Florida...

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