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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New York Times readers, meet former automobile workshop owner Wissam bin Hamid

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Walter Duranty was an evil, venal fabulist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Soviet Russia -- only he "forgot" to cover the 1932-1933 Terror Famine in the Ukraine, where Stalin purposefully starved some five or six million people to death. Attempts to dislodge this besmirched award from the Times' grasp in the name of human decency have proved fruitless.

Moving right along to yesterday's Times, we have yet another entry in the Times storied annals of reader-deception, this one from Benghazi by reporter Kareem Fahim (with contributions from Osama al-Fitory and Suliman Ali Zway).

In an article titled "Benghazi Violence Is Beyond the Control of Even the City's Powerful Militias," Timesman Fahim interviews one Wissam bin Hamid.

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This week's syndicated column

It is neither “racist” nor “sexist” to question U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice’s role in the Benghazi scandal. It is, however, almost entirely beside the point.

Rice wasn’t making life-and-death decisions on Sept. 11, 2012, when the U.S. compound in the Libyan city of Benghazi came under attack; President Obama was. Rice, therefore, is unable to answer the all-important question about what order President Obama issued upon hearing that U.S. diplomats in Benghazi were under fire. She can’t look America in the eye and answer whether the U.S. military was ordered not to rescue Americans fighting for their lives.

Nor is Rice likely to be the Obama administration official who first concocted the false narrative blaming a YouTube video for a (nonexistent) protest in Benghazi, which, the false narrative continues, “spontaneously” erupted into “unplanned” violence – the whopper President Obama told for two full weeks.

Another key piece of the puzzle Rice...

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Just read Cliff Kincaid's excellent Nov. 8 analysis of the election in which he highlights Karl Rove's leading role in shaping the Romney campaign strategy not to define Barack Obama as the radical that he is: the Communist-mentored, Frantz Fanon inspired, faculty-lounge-Marxist who began his political career as a "fusion" candidate, running on both the socialist New Party and Democrat ticket.

As Rove saw it, the GOP couldn't say anything bad about Obama or it would turn voters off. Romney, alas, apparently agreed. (My rundown of what happened and why, here and here.)

Kincaid cites exclusive Bloomberg Businessweek coverage of a closed event at the tail-end of the GOP convention in Tampa where Rove addressed 70 top GOP donors. There, he laid out his strategy to win over crucial swing voters to defeat Barack Obama: as the reporter put it, "to criticize Barack Obama without really criticizing him."

Here is what Rove said, via Bloomberg:

What had emerged from that...

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The LA Times reports:

On the morning of April 27 last year, Afghan Air Force Col. Ahmed Gul walked into a control room on the Afghan military side of the Kabul international airport. He was armed with a Smith & Wesson pistol provided by the United States military.

Within minutes, eight U.S. Air Force advisors and an American contractor were shot dead. The advisors were executed with bullets to the head. The nine killings remain the single deadliest incident among insider attacks that have targeted U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan.

A couple of previous posts here and here.

An Air Force investigation concluded that Gul, who had been radicalized by Islamist extremists, acted alone. ...

My take on the Air Force investigation here. Also, here is a report worth revisiting on the anti-infidel invective of Kabul mosques (Ahmed Gul attended one such mosque), which I now notice includes the revelation that in February 2011, two months before Gul's rampage,...

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Former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) at WND.com dispels the notion that a soul-selling, GOP amnesty push would lead to Hispanic-driven GOP victories. Not only is such a strategy numerically a non-starter, it is also a political non-starter. Hispanics are registering as Democrats not because the GOP, at least theoretically, is identified with border control and immigration control, but because they identify with the Democrat Party. Think about it. If the one issue of amnesty drove Hispanics, they would have voted, for example, not only for John "Shamnesty" McCain in 2008, they would have voted for the party of Reagan in the 1988 election, two years after the historic amnesty legislation supported by Ronald Reagan passed. That 1986 act, of course, disastrously served as a magnet to draw millions more mainly Spanish-speaking illegal aliens to this country and "into the shadows" where they have been awaiting the "next"...

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Below is a CNN transcript of Rep. Peter King's appearance before the press after David Petraeus appeared  before the House Intelligence Committee on November 16. King is clearly struggling with what he has heard from Petraeus: a version of Petraeus' September 14 briefing at odds with what King and, more important, the record as set at the time by the ranking Democrat Dutch Ruppersberger, recall. In a nutshell, on September 14, Petraeus emphasized a "spontaneous," video-driven protest that became violent as "extreme" groups opportunistically attacked the US compound (with RPGs and mortars). Petraeus spun this false narrative to the intell committee at a time when the US government already knew no protest whatsoever had taken place in Benghazi; rather, that the ambassador and three other Americans had been killed in a planned assault by al-Qaeda linked groups on the anniversary of 9/11. Petraeus' testimony, in other words, was a lie and an outrage -- but no one seems to care. Meanwhile, it is a crime...

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This is a photograph of Anne Casper, the new US Consul General in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In the photograph, she is beaming about the 25,000th visa presented in Saudi Arabia in 2012 on October 21 (93.7 percent of Saudi visa applicants have been approved this year, according to the article in Prince Alwaleed's Arab News). The lucky visa-holder is a "Saudi businessman" heading for the US for meetings about a company which is described as  promoting "studying engineering sciences through after-school programs for young people."

How great is that?

One day earlier, Casper had been "received" by the OIC's SecGen Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, which is OIC-ese for "met with." Caspar and Ihsanoglu, the OIC declared, had a "useful and extensive exchange of views on issues of mutual interest" (read: Islamic interest), which, in this case, you can bet, was an exchange about outlawing defamation of Islam, or, as...

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As CIA Director, David Petraeus testified before the House Intel Committee in a closed hearing on Benghazi  on September 14.

(Mistake #1: These hearings should have been open.)

A recap from a post of October 20 titled "What Did the CIA Know and When Did It Stop Knowing It":

On September 14, ABC established that a bifurcated narrative was emerging from different wings of the administration. On the one hand, CIA Director David Petraeus was putting out the (non-existent) protest story; on the other hand, the Pentagon was already talking terrorist attack.

(Worth tucking away as background from an earlier Ignatius column is that the CIA Director "is also said to have pushed hard in Libya, rushing case officers there to work with the opposition" -- a.k.a. al Qaeda.)

ABC reported:

The attack that killed four Americans in the Libyan consulate began as a spontaneous protest against the film “The Innocence of Muslims,” but Islamic militants who may have...

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This week's syndicated column:

Was David Petraeus as great a general as the write-ups of his downfall routinely claim? This is a provocative question that I will begin to answer with another question: Did America prevail in the Iraq War? I suspect few would say "yes" and believe it, which is no reflection on the valor and sacrifice of the American and allied troops who fought there. On the contrary, it was the vaunted strategy of the two-step Petraeus "surge" that was the blueprint of failure.

While U.S. troops carried out Part One successfully by fighting to establish basic security, the "trust" and "political reconciliation" that such security was supposed to trigger within Iraqi society never materialized in Part Two. Meanwhile, the "Sunni awakening" lasted only as long as the U.S. payroll...

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On Tuesday, November 13 at Hillsdale College in Washington, DC, the Center for Security Policy presented a live-streamed panel discussion on the shariah doctrinal threat to national security. Dr. Andrew Bostom, Diana West and Stephen Coughlin were joined by Frank Gaffney to discuss "Benghazi: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Influence of Shariah Doctrine."

Another reason not to be nostalgic

Time magazine:

“Petraeus is a remarkable piece of fiction created and promoted by neocons in government, the media and academia,” argues Douglas Macgregor, a retired and outspoken Army colonel and innovator, known for Breaking the Phalanx, his book taking the Army to task for the way it organizes and uses its ground forces.

Macgregor elaborates:

“How does an officer with no personal experience of direct fire combat in Panama or Desert Storm become a division CDR in 2003, man who for 35 years shamelessly reinforced whatever dumb idea his superior advanced regardless of its impact on soldiers, let alone the nation, a man who served repeatedly as a sycophantic aide-de-camp, military assistant and executive officer to four stars get so far? How does the same man who balked at closing with and destroying the enemy in 2003 in front of Baghdad agree to sacrifice more than...

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In 59 voting divisions of Philadelphia, Mitt Romney lost 59,605 to zero. As IBD notes, Romney was

similarly blanked in nine precincts in nationally pivotal and heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County, Ohio, centered on Cleveland, where he did even worse than third-party candidates.

Seem impossible? Yes, it does. And that's not just our opinion. Rich Exner, the Cleveland Plain Dealer's data analysis editor, said he doesn't find the shutout credible.

Equally as implausible were the turnouts in Democratic strongholds that either exceeded the number of registered voters or the voting-age population.

What to do? At least Allen West (R-FL), for one, is fighting back, demanding a recount...

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Saudi Arabia's Turki al Faisal addressing Bill Clinton at Clinton Global Initiative shindig, September 25, 2012:

"Muslims will never forget your deliverance of Bosnia-Herzogovenia and Kosovo, and near-deliverance, within 100 meters, of Palestine from occupation."

Uncle Sam Wants Him: Libya Shield spokesman Hafez al-Aquri and the grand old al Qaeda flag

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From the Washington Post, November 10:

Last week, a U.S. Embassy delegation, led by CIA operatives, traveled to Benghazi to meet and recruit fighters directly from the Libyan Shield, a powerful umbrella organization of militias, according to Fathi al-Obeidi, a commander of the group.

The Libyan Shield provided the rescue force that assisted the U.S mission in Benghazi on the night of the attack, and Obeidi said his fighters represent the most viable local option for a special unit.

Wonder how that Libya Shield "assistance" worked out? All I seem to read about it is that the US rescue force was held up at the airport in Benghazi for hours awaiting permissions or papers or red tape or until everyone was dead or whatever. It seems that after the ragtag US team...

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They say Romney is shell-shocked; well, so am I.

As what passes for post-election conventional wisdom crescendoes in choruses of "Republicans can win again if they become Democrats," some counter-conventional wisdom lies deep in the exit polls. Bottom line: Don't accept the isolating, poisonous, drip-drip demonization of white men. Yes, they voted for Romney 62 to 35 percent (for which the Left is cranking up re-education camps to put them through intensive rigors of shaming and peer pressure until they are fit to join brave new Obamaworld), but polling tells us they are not alone.

The first and most seismic poll result blows up the GOP's so-called "gender gap." Yes, a majority of women voted for Obama (55 to 44 percent), and a majority of men voted for Romney (52 to 45 percent). However, a majority of white women voted for Romney, too. Fifty-six percent of white women voted for Romney; 42 percent voted for Obama. End of gender gap. We're back to a racial divide.

I first...

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Read and weep, America

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This week's syndicated column:

If Election Day is about picking winners, the morning after is for post-mortems. That’s when we slice open the losing campaigns, set aside the hundreds of millions of dollars that gush out and pick apart the cause of death.

Why did the Romney campaign fail? Maybe the country is now GOP-proof. That is, maybe a Constitution-guided, free-market, limited-government candidate no longer can “appeal” to the majority of the electorate. It could be that the death knell rang early this year once 67.3 million of us, or one in five Americans, had come to depend on federal assistance, formerly known as “the dole.”

This nearly takes us back to the level we hit in 1994 (23.1 percent), before President Bill Clinton and the GOP-led Congress “ended” welfare as we...

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Via Newsbusters.

Everybody tried to pin them down? Who's Everybody?

For shame.

Stanley Kurtz provides a likely summation of what is in store in Obama's second term.

What would that be? Obama's first term.

Kurtz explains:

That’s because the president’s first term hasn’t really happened yet, at least not in the conventional sense. Ordinarily, a president enacts various policies in his first term, the public test-drives the changes, and the president’s reelection campaign is a referendum on those new policies. The difference in Obama’s case is that in order to secure reelection, he has backloaded nearly all of his most transformative and controversial changes into a second term. Obama’s next term will actually put into effect health-care reform, Dodd-Frank, and a host of other highly controversial policies that are already surging through the pipeline yet still barely known to the public.

...

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On September 17, Reuters ran a story headlined: "Intel agencies warned U.S. Embassy in Egypt of possible violence."

That's nice. So why didn't "intel agencies" warn the US Embassy in Libya of possible violence, too? Presumably because the "intel agences" -- Petraeus' CIA, no doubt -- were focused on a "video threat" in Egypt, not in Libya, and on September 10 they cabled the embassy in Egypt accordingly. Egypt was indeed jump-starting another Islamic rage cycle from a Youtube video clip, "Innocence of Muslims," whose producer, incredibly, remains in jail on "parole violations." But, conveniently forgotten amid the many administration statements that there was no forwarning of an attack in Libya, AQ leader Ayman al-Zawaheri uploaded a video of his own on September 9 and 10 calling for Libyans to attack the US to avenge the US killing of a senior AQ leader from Libya, Yahya al-Libi. This video apparently went ignored by these same "intel agencies."

Why did a clip from a Mohammed movie...

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Herschel Smith at The Captain's Journal isn't buying the Pentagon's just-baked tale that there simply were no assets available to support beleaguered Americans in Benghazi. On considering a recent post by Paul Wolfowitz advancing this same claim (interesting how Wolfowitz and Condoleeza Rice have been vocal in supporting O narrative), Smith writes:

According to this claim, the Africa command (based in Europe) had no assets to which it could turn.  None.  Contrary to reports (that I have cited), there were no Delta operators at Sigonella.  There was no AC-130, there wasn’t even Marine Force Recon, again, contrary to published reports that I have cited.

They were apparently all in the field, deployed across Africa.  No one was available.  There were no air assets available to assist the poor souls at Benghazi.  Not even an MP or cook could have responded...

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First, the WSJ, now the NYT: CIA Director David Petraeus is feeling a little heat from the spotlight regarding Benghazi. It's an extremely soft-focus spot, however, one that obscures the most important question regarding Petraeus' role in Obama administration mendacity in characterizing what was a planned terrorist attack as a violent melee growing from a "spontaneous" protest over a Youtube video. That most important question is, Why, three days after this terrorist attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, did Petraeus go before the House Intelligence Committee and brief lawmakers that a Youtube video was to blame for a "spontaneous" protest -- wholly fictitious -- that "went on," as ranking Democrat Dutch Ruppersberger told ABC on September 14 following the Petraeus briefing, "for two to three hours"?

Ruppersberger:

“In the Benghazi area, in the beginning we feel that it was spontaneous – the protest- because it went on for two or three hours, which is very relevant...

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