From Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid.

Al-Jazeera is spinning the newly released “Guantanamo files,” saying they show that dozens of enemy combatants detained at the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay were innocent. But that’s not what the previously secret documents say about one high-profile detainee, Sami al-Hajj, an Al-Jazeera journalist released from Guantanamo after legal intervention by his Soros-funded lawyer and protests from human rights and press freedom groups.

The controversial allegations against this former “enemy combatant,” as detailed in this document, are being denounced by al-Hajj’s lawyer as “false and discredited allegations.”

But they show that U.S. officials suspected high-level cooperation between Al-Jazeera and al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. The charges also raise serious questions about why officials of the Obama Administration are currently praising the channel and cooperating with it.

The document says about Sami Muheidine Mohamed al-Haj, known as Sami al-Hajj and Prisoner 345, “His involvement as a money courier, involvement in the transfer of weapons and leadership position within the Muslim Brotherhood, along with his numerous connections made through Al-Jazeera and his pro-jihadist propaganda activities, illustrates his intelligence value.”

The detailed Department of Defense document, posted by WikiLeaks, is designated, “SECRET / / NOFORN / / 20330404DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE HEADQUARTERS, JOINT TASK FORCE GUANTANAMO U.S. NAVAL STATION, GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA APO AE 09360” (more…)

In April, I reported that the New York Times was about to publish a list of covert American operatives providing force protection for our troops in Afghanistan. A month later, the Times admitted that it did in fact have the list, but that they did not intend to publish the names. It was the right thing to do and we commended them for it. We are hoping that they will once again exhibit such sound judgment.

From a source inside the Times, I have just been told that the findings of a confidential Department of Defense investigation have been leaked to a specific NYT reporter (whose name I am withholding).

Since March, I have been writing about the ongoing battle between the CIA and the Department of Defense over the DoD’s use of former Special Operations and former CIA personnel to provide force protection for our troops in the Af/Pak theater. The good news is that the CIA and the DoD have decided to bury the hatchet. The bad news is that they are doing so right in the back of one of America’s most dedicated patriots, Michael Furlong.

Until recently, Furlong helped coordinate the DoD’s force protection efforts in Afghanistan. His efforts, as well as those of the brave men and women working within the force protection program he oversaw, have prevented the deaths of incalculable numbers of American troops. It would seem, though, that Furlong and his team were too good at their jobs.

At great personal risk, they were doing what the CIA claimed couldn’t be done. What’s more, they were doing it more efficiently and for far less cost to the American taxpayer. The turf battle that ensued between Langley and the Pentagon quickly found its way onto the front pages of the New York Times where the Central Intelligence Agency drove most of the narrative, including all sorts of accusations. (more…)

Of late, the left is full of brilliant ideas on how we should fight terrorism, er whoops, I mean “man caused disasters” or do we refer to it as countering violent extremism this week?  (I can’t seem to keep it straight.)

From Matthew Modine, who believes we should simply sit down and talk with terrorists to Barack Obama who hopes to defeat Islamic radicalism by not mentioning Islamic radicalism, there doesn’t seem to be any issue liberals can’t solve by simply waving a magic wand and applying their considerable genius.

Would that this dangerous method of thinking existed only in the realm of politics and Hollywood liberalism.  Unfortunately, an even deadlier mindset exists at the Central Intelligence Agency.

As I have chronicled over the past several weeks, an impotent CIA, which better resembles a pack of jilted, jealous teen-aged girls has been waging a despicable proxy war against the Department of Defense for hiring former military and intelligence personnel to do the job the CIA is incapable of doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  In the process, there have been terrible character assassinations and the leaking of classified information.

Leading the charge on behalf of the CIA is the “venerable” New York Times, which seems ever-ready to broadcast sensitive operational details to our enemies that put American lives at risk.  In fact, the New York Times appears to be the “paper of record” anytime “patriots” at the Central Intelligence Agency want to leak material which is damaging to America and helpful to those bent on destroying her. (more…)

On Tuesday, March 23, a symposium will convene in Laurel, Maryland on “Climate Change and Energy Imperatives for Future Naval Forces.”  Sponsored by Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory and the US Navy, it will include roundtable discussions on a variety of topics to include: potential effects of global climate change, temperature increases, and reduction of sea ice, melting glaciers, desertification, deforestation, water and fuel shortages, rising sea levels, and forced population migrations.  Alarming topics all, events that, should they happen, are the stuff of nightmares, of an environmental apocalypse, even the end of humankind.

They are also the boilerplate propaganda of anthropogenic global warming fanatics that have been so humiliated by exposés of their contrived science, they are frantically trying to stem the tide of public outrage, so much of their evidence has been debunked.  Manipulations of research data to support warming fabrications have been too systemic for their claims to be taken seriously any longer.  As the nation endures mammoth snowstorms and low temperatures, and as record low temperatures are being set across the globe, one wonders if it will take glaciers on Al Gore’s front lawn for them to see the fallacies of their ideology-driven “science.”

True to form, the media is publishing articles claiming the warming is causing the cold.  “Global warming” has morphed to “climate change.”  Their outrageous journalistic acrobatics would be hilarious were they not so pitiful.  Time Magazine has a doozy entitled: “Snowstorm: East Coast Blizzard Tied to Climate Change” and apparently the citizen rabble are not buying it.  One need only read the comments to this article on line to see what the peasants in fly-over-country think of press delusions. (more…)

This is the kind of story that might be expected to draw a journalist’s attention, for it has the kind of elements that should outrage the average reader: a commander playing politics with the military, troops called upon to execute a mission they had neither expected nor been trained for, and subsequent accusations that heavy casualties might have been avoided, but for politically-motivated shell games.

The commander in question is the commander-in-chief, who has made it the policy of his administration to reduce troop deployments in the “bad war” (Iraq) while increasing the number of boots on the ground to fight the “good war” in Afghanistan. While the President has followed through on the latter, the former has yet to happen in any substantive way and our troops have paid the price for this political sleight of hand.

On February 17, 2009, the Defense Department announced, to great fanfare, that it was deploying an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan, including the 5^th Stryker Brigade, 2^nd Infantry Division. The problem with that, which would soon become evident when the 5^th Stryker entered combat, is that the Brigade was trained to fight one kind of war and then, apparently for the sake of political expediency, deployed to fight quite another.

One of the 5^th Stryker’s units, the 1^st Battalion, 17^th Infantry Regiment (1-17) has been particularly hard hit since arriving in Afghanistan last fall, suffering twenty-one combat deaths in one battle in the Arghandab district alone. One of the battalion’s company commanders, Capt. Joel Kassulke was replaced after that action, a move that angered some of the Captain’s troops, according to this Army Times article. The problem, some soldiers said, was not their commander, but mismatched training: (more…)