The Daily Mail reports:

Leaked emails have allegedly proved that the White House gave the green light to a chemical weapons attack in Syria that could be blamed on Assad's regime and in turn, spur international military action in the devastated country.

A report released on Monday contains an email exchange between two senior officials at British-based contractor Britam Defence where a scheme 'approved by Washington' is outlined explaining that Qatar would fund rebel forces in Syria to use chemical weapons.

Barack Obama made it clear to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad last month that the U.S. would not tolerate Syria using chemical weapons against its own people.

According to Infowars.com, the December 25 email was sent from Britam's Business Development Director David Goulding to company...

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An important and encouraging bulletin came in last night from Scott Behenna, 1st Lt. Michael Behenna's father.

Today, the Supreme Court requested a response from the Government concerning Michael's petition. The Government had previously waived their right to respond. We knew Michael's petition did not have a chance of moving forward in the Supreme Court without the Court asking for the Government's position about Michael's petition. Today's request allows the Court to fairly analyze the petition and requires the Government to defend the military's actions against Michael.

We pray this step will increase the likelihood that Michael's case will be heard by the Supreme Court of the United States. Thanks for your support and we will advise you of any new actions by the Court.

...

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From Sunday's 60 Minutes joint-interview of President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

Steve Krofts: When we come back, the president and Secretary Clinton discuss the disaster in Benghazi and the state of her health.

I didn't watch this live, but if I had I would have spent the commercial break parsing the duality of the question. Why "disaster in Benghazi" and "state of her health" together? Mind you, the interview has been going on for sometime at this point, and Clinton's health would seem to be something better addressed in the opening niceties. But no. Will "disaster" be cushioned by "health"?

See how it worked out:

Steve Krofts: Hillary Clinton's final days as secretary of state included one of her most difficult. On Wednesday, she spent more than five hours being grilled on Capitol Hill for the security failures in Benghazi that led to the deaths of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans; the biggest diplomatic disaster of this administration. The Accountability Review led by Admiral Mike Mullen and Ambassador Thomas Pickering found, among many failures, that Stevens' repeated requests for better security never made it to Clinton's desk. And representatives and senators pressed her on whether the administration covered up the nature of the terrorist attack.

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Libya Shield -- a security provider to USA in Benghazi -- and the AQ flag of jihad. As Hillary Cinton testified last week: The United States has to be "effective in partnering with the non-jihadists, whether they fly a black flag or any other color flag."

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At Hillary Clinton's House "Benghazi" hearing last week, Rep. Tom Marino brought up the Library of Congress report "Al Qaeda in Libya: A Profile." The August 2012 report was prepared by the Library's Federal Research Division in conjuction with the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office's Irregular Warfare Support Program. Marino wanted to know whether the secretary of state had read it.

...

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The sidebar to my Dispatch International article introducing European readers to Blacklisted by HIstory (2007) by M. Stanton Evans, and Stalin's Secret Agents (2012) by M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, is now no longer behind the subscription wall. This second part provides synopses of some of the sensational findings Evans and Romerstein published in the new book.

Alger Hiss The treachery of Hiss, the most famous Soviet military intelligence agent/State Department official, is now grudgingly accepted (after decades of warlike controversy). The conventional wisdom, however, still holds that Hiss did little at the final wartime Yalta conference of the so-called Big Three (Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin).

Not true, as Evans and Romerstein discovered in previously unpublished portions of the papers of Secretary of State Edward...

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I cannot overestimate the fearless excellence of M. Stanton Evans' work as a historian, and, I am fortunate to say, mentor. His 2007 book Blacklisted by History is not only a shattering revision of half a century of lies about Joseph McCarthy and "McCarthyism" -- and, by extension, obfuscation about the successful penetration and subversion of the US government -- it is also an exercise in courage, in confronting a false and crippling consensus with an unshakeable dedication to fact and logic. On a personal note, the book served me as a rosetta stone by which I was able to begin deciphering the mendacious history we "know" as our shining cultural legacy. The results of this unnerving research-odyssey will be published in my forthcoming book, American Betrayal.

That said, I am delighted to post an article written for this week's edition of Dispatch International. My task was to introduce a European audience, in brief, to Evans' work. The piece below is the main article, which is available for free at the DI website. I also wrote accompanying piece assembling a series of thumbnail sketches of some of the sensational revelations Evans and co-writer and Cold War expert Herbert Romerstein discovered in their brand new book, Stalin's Secret Agents. It is behind the online-subscription wall -- so subscribe!

...

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Rounding out Hillary-week at this blog, this week's syndicated column:

One day, I hope, Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi hearings will stand as testament to the smoke-and-mirrors dangerousness of U.S. foreign policy, circa 2013 – both as executed by the executive branch of government and as weakly grasped by the legislative branch.

Did we learn who in the Obama administration concocted and/or coordinated the story about a totally imaginary video protest that was supposed to have led to the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, on 9/11/12? No.

Did we learn why the maker of the so-called anti-Islamic YouTube video clip is the only person in the world in jail for the attacks (for “parole violations”)? No.

Did we learn whether it was coincidental that the video-protest lie ended after President Obama blamed the video (six times) in a Sept. 25 address before the United Nations in which he declared, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam”? No.

Did we learn anything about the decision-making process that prevented U.S. military relief from being ordered to Benghazi during the seven-hour attack? No.

...

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When US forces killed Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011, Hillary Clinton hailed the event as coinciding with the end of the jihadist era -- sorry, "extremist narrative" era (she was still parroting Obama-approved lingo) -- in the Middle East and North Africa, just where we see it resurgent today.



Hillary Clinton, May 2, 2011:



History will record that bin Ladin's death came at a time of great movements toward freedom and democracy, at a time when the people across the Middle East and North Africa are rejecting the extremist narratives and charting a path of peaceful progress based on universal rights and aspirations. There is no better rebuke to al-Qaida and its heinous ideology.







Clinton's statement crystallizes the Western delusion, which is also the Western desire. In May 2011, Clinton's "freedom and democracy" -- a.k.a., the even more euphemistic and inaptly metaphoric "Arab Spring" -- were indeed moving across the Middle East and North Africa, but they were powered by the "extremist narratives" Clinton told us these Islamic lands were "rejecting." This phenomenon is something Clinton, Obama, Sarkosy (Bernard Henri Levy), Cameron will never, can never admit. Their claim to authority and respect, their reputations, their careers, their future exercise of power are all threatened -- doomed -- by any reckoning, any admission of the purely Islamic will to sharia, to conquest, to a caliphate, which the postmodern, 21st-century world is witnessing, and which these leaders have done so much to enable (George W. Bush et pere, also).

...

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Black flags of AQ over post-Qaddafi Benghazi, compiled by Libya 360

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The unexpected news of SecState Clinton's appearances on the Hill yesterday is the "spreading jihadist threat." The news is not that it's spreading, or that it's a threat, but rather that Hillary Clinton invoked the term "jihadist." Repeatedly. In both the Senate hearing and in the House hearing after lunch, during which, presumably, Obama administration speech commissars could have emergency-texted her that the terminology of O-choice remains "violent extremism." But no. Clinton talked "global jihad" all day, even if she did echo the same old Bush-Obama-disaster-policy that believes strengthening/stabilizing the new "regimes" of the Arab Spring is the way to combat it. Never mind that the jihadists and the regimes share a common goal: Islamically correct (sharia) totalitarianism.

Live-tweeting yesterday's proceedings, I first logged the J-phrase at 9:52 am EST, writing: "Clinton notes `global jihadist threat.' A first?"

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I live-tweeted Hillary Clinton's appearances before both the Senate and House today.

To quote the SecState, "What difference, at this point, does it make?!"

I don't know, so read it on Twitter or Facebook.

While contemplating (in horror, I hope) the Obama administration's unchecked delivery this month of F-16s to Muslim Brotherhood-led Egypt, consider what target Egypt is most likely to deploy them against: Israel.

But the Muslim Brotherhood is pledged to destroy Israel....

Right. That flag of ours may still be red, white and blue, but it waves over a brave new land where Uncle Sam increasingly and unopposedly supports the 21st-century-jihad, the same jihad fought and advanced over 14 centuries to spread Islamic law. Israel happens to sit on the front line of that jihad (Middle Eastern front), so naturally (?) Uncle Sam arms her open enemies -- and our own (or those we once thought of as our own).

What next -- F-16s to Iran? Our world-alignment seems that twisted. But no, our allies-in-jihad (Egypt, Saudi, Qatar, UAE, Turkey, Libya) wouldn't like that, so maybe that's off the table.

So, contemplating those F-16s about to enter Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood hands, consider...

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Below is the text of a speech I presented to the Maryland Conservative Action Network, January 12, 2013, in Annapolis. It was published yesterday at The American Thinker.

What might a "conservative" foreign policy look like?

In the post-9/11 era, it's fair to say we have mainly followed a "neoconservative" foreign policy. This policy has been based on the rock-solid belief that there exist universal values that all peoples everywhere share and indeed yearn for if they don't already enjoy them. Our neoconservative foreign policy, then - our war-fighting policy, too - has been a matter of spreading such universal values.

This has been a disaster. Think of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan -- policies predicated on this denial of the existence of cultural difference. Certainly in this decade since 9/11 we should have learned that cultures, the West and Islam, namely, are different and that such universalism is a fantasy. The West enshrines the liberty of the individual, while Islam, like other totalitarian systems, enforces a collective will. Still, to this day, we don't permit this simple reality to be discussed let alone reflected in any meaningful policy way.

...

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Four months and counting until American Betrayal comes out. (Canada) Sun News' Michael Coren and I discuss. 

...

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Saudi interior minister Prince Mohammed bin Naif. This first cousin of Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal was last noted in this blog for ordering the arrest last month of a Saudi novelist, Turki al Hamad, for tweeting that Islam required a "correction." Al Hamad now faces the death penalty for apostasy.

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From Al Arabiya (hat tip Ruth King):

Saudi Arabia and the United States have signed a “Trusted Traveler” agreement to facilitate and accelerate the trusted passenger screening on the principle of reciprocity in both Saudi and U.S. airports.

Yes, you are going mad.

The Saudi state agency reported that Minister of Interior Prince Mohammed bin Naif and U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano “signed an agreement on arrangements relating to the implementation of a program of the 'Trusted Traveler' between the two countries.”

There is something extra grotesque in the newspeak, Mr.-Rogers-style.

According to the agreement U.S. Customs...

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Back in 2010, I wrote here about Pvt. Corey Clagett, a prisoner of the US military at Ft. Leavenworth. Pvt. Clagett was convicted of the crime of following an unlawful order and killing two al Qaeda insurgents in Iraq. His superior who ordered the killings is free on parole, and the man who killed a third one is not only free but has been promoted. Corey, the most junior of all those involved received an 18-year-sentence and a dishonorable discharge.

Corey, the most junior of them, Corey, the least prepared, Corey, the youngest, Corey, who has been made to pay more than anyone else for this crime, has now spent over four years in solitary confinement. It's not by any measure fair.

Corey, I find from visiting the admirable United American Patriots website, has a clemency hearing coming up on or about February 2. I am going to write a letter on his behalf according to the instructions...

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This week's syndicated column:

Not one of the 23 executive orders that President Obama signed -- flanked by schoolchildren whom none of us want to see murdered and before an audience that included relatives of murdered schoolchildren -- would have prevented the massacre at Sandy Hook.

Did the main idea of the sentence above come through -- that the president's latest orders would not have stopped the heavily armed monster who entered a Connecticut school last month and killed 20 children and six adults? Or was your brain overwhelmed by anxiety signals arising from the imagery of vulnerable youngsters?

The overwhelming imagery is no accident. It's emotional manipulation, and I've never seen a more lowdown exercise of it than the White House's "gun violence" event this week. What President Obama put the nation through was the propaganda equivalent of a slasher movie, a disgustingly crude attempt to jam our emotional buttons and frighten us into surrendering more of our rights...

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UPDATE: 7:08 pm EST: GoV back up and running.

UPDATE 2:15 pm EST: Still no definitive understanding of why GoV went dark last night, but it seems that other Blogger sites also went down, which means it could well have been a technical problem.

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Last night, the invaluable blog Gates of Vienna disappeared from the Internet. Gate of Vienna, which chronicles like no other news and commentary outlet the Islamization of Europe and the wider West, simply vanished, removed without warning or explanation by its host Blogger (UPDATE: or by an attack, Vlad Tepes notes, pointing out the causes remain unknown).

Earlier this week, the Commentator (hat tip The American Thinker) reported that Facebook had removed the page of noted Arab-Israeli writer Khaled Abu Toameh.

From the Commentator:

The Commentator has learned that following...

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Pts. 1, 2, and 3 may be found here.

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

Last night, Bill O'Reilly devoted his "Impact Segment" to the Silence of the Non-Fox Media on the Gore-Al Jazeera deal. As noted in the past week of coverage at this website, Fox has been covering the deal with righteous, if micro-targeted indignation (Al Gore, Hypocrite) while overlooking choice hypocrisy (and worse) on its own team (Murdoch's House of Saud connections).

O'Reilly's "Memo" last night (video above) only underscored this troubling pattern.

O'Reilly:

Network news pretty much ignored Al Gore selling his cable network to Al Jazeera. Scant mention. MSNBC in prime time didn't mention it at all. Again, are you surprised? But think about this: What if Mitt Romney had sold one of his companies to Al Jazeera?

...

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Pt. 2 is here.

Pt. 1 is here.

Saudi journalist Hazma Kashgari has spent almost the entire past year in a Saudi prison -- the Islamic Gulag -- for tweeting an imaginary conversation with Mohammed. King Abdullah -- the man Barack Obama bowed to, the man George W. Bush kissed and held hands with, and the man whose nephew, Prince Talal bin Alwaleed, is a major stock-holder in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. -- put him there. Kashgari's story, and treatment of his story at Fox and elsewhere, is below.



From the vault:

1) Blog post, February 14, 2012: "(Prince Talal's) Fox News AWOL on (Prince Talal's) Twitter Story"

...

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Pt. 1 is here.

How could this -- Alwaleed's editorial interference to omit "Muslim" from "Muslim rioting" in a Fox crawl in 2005 --  not have been the begining?

That's the question I weigh in this week's column, testing it in those perplexing omissions in News Corp.'s coverage of the Gore deal -- omissions regarding Al Jazeera's strong ideological linkage with and political bias toward the Muslim Brotherhood, and omissions regarding Muslim Brotherhood leading figure Yusef Al Qaradawi and his role at Al Jazeera.

But there is a more important connection to make and Fox omission to note.

In the column and related news report, I discuss Al Risala, an Islamic channel that both Alwaleed and -- through Murdoch's 18.97 percent ownership of Al Risala's parent company Rotana -- Murdoch own. (Rotana is Alwaleed's Arabic media company.) On the "supreme advisory board" of Al Risala sits Abdullah Omar Naseef. Former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy has decribed Naseef as...

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It is nothing if not disorienting to live in times when a former Vice President of the United States finds the deeply patriotic, Constitution-respecting worldview of Glenn Beck to be political anathema in direct comparison with that of the sharia-compliant Qatari dictatorship that owns and controls Al Jazeera, better known as "the Muslim Brotherhood channel." I'm referring to Gore's decision to sell Current TV to Al Jazeera and not Beck's The Blaze TV, a subject that has occupied this blog this week.

By the way, "controls" is the appropriate verb to describe how the muscular little dictatorship runs its international media org. Qatar, after all, is a country Freedom House deems "not free" where, as reported in Freedom House's the 2012 Freedom of the Press Report, it is against the law for journalists to "criticize the Qatari government, the ruling family or Islam." The country's seven newspapers are all owned by the ruling family or its business associates, while "the state [i.e., the ruling family] owns and operates all broadcast media." That would include the country's two TV networks, Al Jazeera and Qatar TV. As for the Internet, "the government censors political, religious, and pornographic content through the sole, state-owned internet service provider." Interestingly enough, Qatari totalitarians are harder on foreigners than nationals when it comes infringements on goverenment speech controls. As Freedom House reports: "While local reporters often receive warnings and threats when they push the limits of permissible coverage, noncitizens employed by Qatari media outlets risk harsher repercussions, including termination, deportation, and imprisonment."

...

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This week's syndicated column:

Ever since Al Gore sold Current TV to Al Jazeera, the network founded and funded by the oil-rich emirate of Qatar, the former vice president has drawn continuous fire in conservative media. Fox News, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, for example, have all castigated Gore, a man of the left and leading avatar of “global warming,” for such hypocrisies as timing the deal to avoid lefty tax hikes and bagging $100 million in greenhouse-gas money.

These same news outlets share something else in common: They all belong to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. That means they also belong to Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

Alwaleed owns the largest chunk of News Corp. stock outside the Murdoch family. Shortly after his purchase of 5.5 percent of News Corp. voting shares in 2005, Alwaleed gave a speech that made it clear just what he had bought. As noted in The (U.K.) Guardian,...

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While I researching this week's column (to come), I ran into some breaking news and published it at WorldNetDaily.com:

WND EXCLUSIVE Gore deal follows Murdoch into Arab TV Sale of Current to Al Jazeera highlights Fox owner's link to Muslim Brotherhood channel By Diana West

The news that Al Gore chose to sell his Current TV to Al Jazeera, which some think of as Muslim Brotherhood TV, recently has raised eyebrows. But what few people realize is that Fox chief Rupert Murdoch already co-owns what amounts to a Muslim Brotherhood channel in the Middle East.

The channel is Al Risala, which translates into “the (Islamic) message.” It was launched in 2006 by Saudi prince Talal bin Alwaleed, the nephew of the King of Saudi Arabia and a Murdoch business associate who also owns a 7 percent stake in Murdoch’s News Corp., the parent company of Fox News and other U.S. media outlets.

...

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Scott and Vicki Behenna have now taken the final legal step on their son Michael's behalf: petitioning the US Supreme Court. If you are unfamiliar with the gross travesty of justice that is Michael's case -- he serves a 15-year prison sentence because the US military determined he lost his right to self-defense while interrogating a member of al Qaeda in Iraq, here is coverage of his final military court appeal in April 2012, where his conviction of unpremeditated murder was narrowly upheld 3-2 (more stories here).

Below read Scott and Vicki's letter to Michael's thousands of supporters. They invoke the great Holocaust witness Victor Frankl to help us understand Michael's indomitable spirit; they could easily have quoted Kafka to describe the ordeal the US military has inflicted on him.

...

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Before we heard that Al Gore's Current TV had rejected Glenn Beck's The Blaze TV as a buyer for, as Beck put it, "legacy" reasons and selected Al Jazeera as its white knight instead, Fjordman passed along this December 25 Deutche Welle interview with Aktham Suliman, Al Jazeera's former Berlin correspondent. Suliman argues that Al Jazeera's coverage is a policy instrument of its owners the Qataris, who, as he puts it, "tend toward the Muslim Brotherhood." Saudi-investor-funded Al Arabiya TV, on the other hand, is more Salafist. Big difference? Hah -- not when it comes to extending sharia. "Generally speaking, the Arab media landscape is very uniform," Suliman adds.

From DW:

The long-time Berlin correspondent for Al Jazeera, Aktham Suliman, recently resigned from his post. The journalist tells DW that the Qatari government is exercising undue influence on Al Jazeera's reporting.

DW: You've criticized...

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is a new weekly newspaper, for which, as some readers know, I am Washington correspondent. Our motto, from Thomas Jefferson, is "Freedom of the press cannot be limited without being lost." Co-edited by Lars Hedegaard of Denmark and Ingrid Carlqvist of Sweden, veteran journalists of note in Europe and determined free-speech-warriors, the paper now appears in three languages: English, Danish and Swedish.

But powerful forces with deep pockets are trying to destroy Dispatch International even as we try to set up shop in the Public Square. Small as we are at this early date, we have come under intense and sustained and no doubt expensive hacker attack to deny us a place on the web. Such attacks have happened before, during our run-up to regular publication, as noted most recently last month here. Now, with the new year, the attacks have begun again. Someone -- some people, some groups, some extremely repressive...

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Patrolling the boondoggling Kajaki Dam

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Armed Forces Journal posted this Letter to the Editor in December 2012. It is a concise, nuts-and-bolts argument for what I believe should be done: Declare the defeat of COIN, get out of Afganistan ASAP, and hold Congressional hearings to determine who was responsible for the strategy, and why they were permitted to procede in failure unchecked. Maybe that would help prevent such lunacy from taking hold again, although I doubt it. Still, the deceptions and self-deceptions should not slip away unrecorded by history.

The letter is headlined "Get out of Afghanistan":

I cannot believe that anyone in their rational mind would believe that there is anything to salvage out of the Afghanistan fiasco as described by Joseph Collins in “No time to go wobbly” [September]. The thought of even staying...

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There's nothing theoretical about the war on free speech, as Mark Steyn well knows.

From Mark Steyn at The Corner:

Thank you for your kind donations to our legal defense fund against a nuisance suit from self-endowed Nobel laureate Michael Mann. We can always use a little more — we’re in court in D.C. later this month, and the framed copy of my online legal diploma (valid most jurisdictions except the Northern Mariana Islands and Abkhazia) from a website in Tajikistan has apparently been delayed in the Christmas mail.

But here’s the thing. South of the border, National Review is being sued for defamation for publishing a piece by me. North of the border, they’ve gone to the next stage: one of Canada’s top bloggers is being sued for defamation merely for linking to me...

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This week's syndicated column:

Americans, Gallup tells us, admire Hillary Clinton more than any other woman in the world – again. This latest accolade marks the 17th time Gallup has found Clinton to be the Most Admired Woman (MAW?) since she became first lady nearly 20 years ago. Only Eleanor Roosevelt (13 MAWs) comes close. Only Mother Teresa (1995 and 1996) and Laura Bush (2001) have interrupted Clinton’s winning streak, and even then, Clinton came in second.

And therein lies America’s cosmic flaw. A country that could time and again embrace Hillary Clinton as its MAW has lost its mind or its memory or both.

Does the phrase “congenital liar” tinkle any bells? I know such non-admirable sentiments are thought to be in the worst of taste, if not also banishable offenses. Still, as conjured by the late New York Times columnist William Safire in 1996, the phrase described the...

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Four years ago, as Hillary Clinton awaited Senate confirmation, I had the terrifically bad manners to write the following column. It is in the utmost of bad taste, then, that I rerun it today. What is history, accountability and patriotism next to power, beatification and hospitalization?

January 9, 2009: A Rubber Stamp for Hillary If I were Gov. Bill Richardson, still smarting somewhere in New Mexico over his lost Cabinet post in the incoming Obama administration, I would be plenty sore about Sen. Hillary Clinton. According to all rosy media predictions, Clinton is destined to sail through Senate confirmation hearings and become secretary of state next week, a veritable regatta's worth of clapping senators trailing in her wake. Richardson, meanwhile, is out on his ear.

Why? As the story goes, Richardson wasn't forthcoming enough about a federal probe into whether officials in his New Mexico administration tipped a state project to a firm run by a major financial contributor...

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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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