The Washington Post, in an apparent effort to embellish President Barack Obama’s national security credentials, has given him credit for accelerating the military’s highly successful drone program in an article entitled, “Under Obama, an emerging global apparatus for drone killing.”

President-elect Obama greets eager Washington Post fans (Jan. 2009)

That headline is impressive to all but the most die-hard anti-war activists (mostly quiescent under a Democratic president). The conclusion the Post evidently wishes readers to draw is that Obama has been a tough, courageous, and uniquely successful commander-in-chief.

The article begins:

The Obama administration’s counterterrorism accomplishments are most apparent in what it has been able to dismantle, including CIA prisons and entire tiers of al-Qaeda’s leadership. But what the administration has assembled, hidden from public view, may be equally consequential.

In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force­ ­cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents…

With a year to go in President Obama’s first term, his administration can point to undeniable results: Osama bin Laden is dead, the core al-Qaeda network is near defeat, and members of its regional affiliates scan the sky for metallic glints.

But the drone program did not begin on January 20, 2009–even if mainstream media squeamishness about it ended on the day. The most important elements of the program began under Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush–a fact buried deep into the article:

Inside the White House, according to officials who would discuss the drone program only on the condition of anonymity, the drone is seen as a critical tool whose evolution was accelerating even before Obama was elected.

What is new is that Obama reversed himself and embraced the idea that terrorists could be killed abroad in what the left used to described as “extrajudicial killings,” partly because of Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder’s ideological hostility to terrorist detention. (more…)

After last night’s Republican debate over national security and foreign policy, CNN called upon Tom Foreman to check some of the facts asserted by the candidates, in a segment entitled “Keeping Them Honest.”

It soon became clear that Foreman and CNN were not interested in checking the candidates’ facts–which were correct in each case–but in checking their opinions, while misleading viewers about the candidates’ honesty.

First, Foreman checked Mitt Romney’s list of the Obama administration’s proposed defense cuts. Foreman had to admit that “He’s got all the numbers right. All of those cuts are correct, the ones he named.” Yet he objected to Romney’s alleged exclusion of “context” such as the fact that the U.S. spent $700 billion on defense, “more than the next 17 nations combined.” Hence he rated Romney’s statement “true, but incomplete.”

That’s not fact–that’s Foreman’s own apparent opinion that Obama’s defense cuts are irrelevant as long as the U.S. remains the world’s pre-eminent military power. Foreman begged the question of whether we are spending as much as our potential enemies, rather than considering America’s existing commitments and unique leadership role. It was, essentially, an anti-war critique of Romney’s view–not an analysis of his facts. (more…)

The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof is a simpleton. There is really no other way to say it, no gentler phrasing possible, to explain how childish and uncluttered his tiny little mind really is. The latest example of his utter inability to think clearly can be seen in Kristof’s screed against Americans that love America. Kristof thinks that conservatives and Republicans should look with longing at the troubled nation of Pakistan and see it as a model state. He says that they are no better than Muslim extremists that employ oppression, murder, and terrorism as a tool of the state. No, he’s serious.

How does he justify this simple-minded, hyperbolic, partisan hate-speech? Not very well, I’ll tell you that much.

He makes all sorts of idiotic charges against Republicans, but the best way to understand how unthinkingly childish his screed is, is to simply imagine that everything he says conservatives support he must imagine that liberals are against. After all, the only way to see his calumnies as such is to imagine he thinks that he stands on the opposite side of the ideas of which he accuses conservatives of being in favor.

Let’s take his points and then imagine what the opposite is and you’ll see what I mean.

He says that Republicans are for the lowest tax burden. If this is true and he finds this a negative point, then we must assume Kristof wants the absolute highest tax burden, a crushing tax burden that destroys all capitalist endeavors. That would be the opposite, wouldn’t it?

Next Kristof says Republicans want a limited government so that, “burdensome regulations never kill jobs.” The only take away here is to understand that Kristof sees this as a bad thing. He is smarter than we are, you see. So, Kristof, then, wants a government that is so burdensome that it kills jobs. He must. He finds the non-burdensome government to be a negative against Republicans doesn’t he? (more…)

What a waste of 60 Minutes. Actually, it was more like 42 minutes, but Kroft gave us nothin.’

I will say this was exactly as I predicted, but that would be way too easy. The activist old media is easier to predict these days than a Laker loss to the Mavericks.

Every question I said Kroft would not ask, was not asked.

Was it an assassination or capture mission?

Why all the different versions coming out of the White House?

Are you glad the CIA water boarded Khalid Sheik Mohammed to get the intel? You don’t get the intel, you don’t get bin Laden.

Secret prisons and Gitmo? Not asked.

(more…)

In May, we exclusively broke the story that Taliban leader, Mullah Omar had been taken into the custody of Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Since that time, there has been multiple reporting that supports our exclusive, including Colonel Oliver North and Afghan Television.

And while Newsweek nibbled around the edges of the story two weeks after us, they have now come out with a new article stating:

Taliban sources say Pakistan uses catch-and-release tactics to keep insurgent leaders in line. All told, the ISI has picked up some 300 Taliban commanders and officials, the sources say. Before being freed, the detainees are subjected to indoctrination sessions to remind them that they owe their freedom and their absolute loyalty to Pakistan, no matter what. As one example, the sources mention Abdul Qayum Zakir, who spent five years at Guantánamo and is now the group’s top military commander. They say the Pakistanis detained him and about a dozen other Taliban commanders and shadow governors earlier this year, soon after having picked up the insurgency’s No. 2, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, only to set them free several days later after making sure their priorities meshed with Pakistan’s.

Some leading Taliban even suspect that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader and symbol of their jihad, may also be in ISI custody. He has appeared in no videos and issued no verifiable audio messages or written statements since he disappeared into the Kandahar mountains on the back of Baradar’s motorcycle in late 2001. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the ISI arrested us all in one day,” says a former cabinet minister. “We are like sheep the Pakistanis can round up whenever they want.

(more…)

*** Updated and clarified

In a recent post, respected milblogger Bill Roggio of The Long War Journal had this to say about Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s status, a story we have been discussing since May:

Mullah Omar is thought to be in a safehouse in Karachi, under the protection of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate.

This comes more than two months after Mr. Roggio made the following statement on his Twitter account:

Since I have been asked this quite I (sic) bit, there is no indication that Taliban supremo Mullah Omar has been captured.

We believe we have a semantic difference with Roggio: “captured” or “protected,” why hasn’t the U.S. gotten access to Omar?   (more…)

One month ago we broke the exclusive story of Mullah Omar’s capture.

Additional confirmations have come from The Jawa Report, Oliver North, Milblogger Baba Tim, Blackfive.net, and even The Nation.

Then, two weeks ago, Newsweek published a report that the Taliban is in serious turmoil because Mullah Omar is MIA.

Today, Iranian State Television reports that the Pakistanis are indeed harboring Mullah Omar.

Mullah Abdul Salam Hanafi, a former senior member of the Taliban and governor of central Urozgan Province under the Taliban regime, is quoted as saying:

Pakistani security forces are harboring the fugitive Taliban leader, Mullah Omar in Karachi.

As the tempo of Omar stories increases, so does the pressure on Pakistan and its Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), as well as the Obama administration and the CIA to deal with the Omar issue.

(more…)

The Power Line blog has a post this morning on a surprising honest review in the Washington Post of the new book, Necessary Secrets. From the Power Line post:

The review is by Leonard Downie, Jr., who was the Post’s executive editor until 2008. Downie is obviously uneasy with Schoenfeld’s view that editors and reporters at the New York Times should be prosecuted and imprisoned for revealing two of the Bush administration’s antiterrorism programs – the warrantless intercept program for monitoring calls to the U.S. by foreign terrorists and the program though which the international financial transactions of terrorists were secretly tracked.

The exposure of these programs by the fearless reporters and editors at the Times unquestionably contributed to the prolonged detention of its reporter, David Rohde, because we lost the tools for finding to a kidnap victim in the tribal areas of Pakistan.  For that very reason the Times was forced to find “outside the box” options to try and gain Rohde’s freedom and apparently one of those options involved hiring civilian contractors who had contacts and access into the denied areas of the North West Frontier. Here is a quote from the first story the Times published on the subject: (more…)

From the noted miliblogging site Free Range International comes this confirmation of Big Government and Big Journalism’s exclusive story by Brad Thor about the capture by Pakistani authorities of Mullah Omar:

Which brings me to my final topic and it is not something Americans should be happy about. I have been hearing for weeks rumors about the detention of this guy:

I have heard about this from both prominent Afghans and from a source from the USG who has impeccable credentials and has never been wrong in the past. The media story is here and that story is that the Pakistan ISI has Mullah Omar under house arrest, that our government knows this but for some reason wants to keep it a secret. I need to stress that not everyone I have contacted about this story has heard these rumors and a few important, well informed milbloggers flat out do not believe them. Regardless this story has legs and if it is true there is a huge huge problem. That problem is very simple – there should be no doubt about what happens when an allied intelligence service gets their hands on Mullah Omar. There is nothing to discuss, nothing to think through, nothing to spin, there only this; give him to us. Immediately. End of negotiation. There should be no question on the part of the USG about what to do with this dirtbag either. He is an unlawful enemy combatant and needs to be detained and held for trial by military tribunal. There is no other conceivable option. If this story proves true, and I think it is, what the hell is going on back in DC? This isn’t a game, dammit, it’s war and needs to be treated as such.

The media’s reaction to the Faisal Shahzad story was quite telling.  It began with many clamoring for the idea that the would-be bomber had to be a rightwing nutjob.  It ended with many  drawing a curiously sympathetic picture of an enemy of everything we believe in.

As the narrative went, Shahzad fell on tough times due to the recession and grew ever more insular.  So he picked up the Koran and devoted himself to Islam, and then up and left for Pakistan to train with al-Qaeda.  Surely this is the natural reaction to being short the month’s mortgage payment.  I find it more plausible that it was the plight of the New York Mets that drove him to attempt to blow up a car bomb in Times Square.

Which is to say that the rationalization by the MSM for why Muslims are driven to carry out terrorist attacks is utterly incoherent.  Equally as dumbfounding is the MSM’s tortuous attempt to humanize those who would carry out the most inhuman of acts. (more…)

In Robert Wright’s May 11 New York Times essay,“The Making of a Terrorist,” we learn a very interesting and useful fact: terrorists are complicated.  No offense, Hamlet, but there needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us this.

Yet tell us Wright does. Refuting the (in Wright’s mind) simplistic takes of The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg and National Review Online’s Daniel Pipes that “jihadi intent” drove Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, Wright writes:

I’d like to invite Pipes and Goldberg to imagine an alternative universe, a universe in which behaviors — such as planting a bomb — don’t have a single “root” cause. In this universe, bomb-planting behavior is kind of like the bombs themselves: a number of ingredients have to come together before things get explosive. If you figure out what those ingredients are, and which of them you can control, maybe you can make bomb-planting behavior less common.

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, liberal commentator Ellis Hennican espoused nearly an identically-worded theory on Fox News Channel’s News Watch program on Saturday, only Hennican used the more palatable metaphor of a cocktail of ingredients as opposed to a pipe bomb of factors. (more…)

Not surprisingly, the country’s oldest continuously published magazine, The Nation, is turning a jaundiced eye toward Brad Thor’s explosive scoop that the notorious Mullah Omar has been captured. Originally an abolitionist broadsheet, The Nation has evolved into the most radical leftist publication in the U.S.; among its more notable moments was the publication in 1966 of the Cloward-Piven strategy for social destabilization.

In that light, consider Jeremy Scahill’s recent screed, “(Not) Much Ado About Mullah Omar.” While Scahill might think it’s good journalism to bury the lead, we don’t.  So let’s get right to it, shall we?

In his rush to criticize Brad Thor’s reporting that Mullah Omar has been captured, he waits until the middle of his piece before admitting:

I wouldn’t even be bothering to look into this now if I had not heard some parallel buzz about these rumors from military sources I actually trust.

But before Scahill gets to this nugget, he engages in some traditional liberal nihilism.  Unable to attack the message, which he admits he has heard “parallel buzz” on, he attacks the messengers, saying: (more…)

Through key intelligence sources in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I have just learned that reclusive Taliban leader and top Osama bin Laden ally, Mullah Omar has been taken into custody.

According to the State Department’s Rewards for Justice Program there is a bounty of up to $10 million on Omar for sheltering Osama bin-Laden and his al-Qaeda network in the years prior to the September 11 attacks as well as the period during and immediately thereafter.

At the end of March, US Military Intelligence was informed by US operatives working in the Af/Pak theater on behalf of the D.O.D. that Omar had been detained by Pakistani authorities. One would assume that this would be passed up the chain and that the Secretary of Defense would have been alerted immediately. From what I am hearing, that may not have been the case.

When this explosive information was quietly confirmed to United States Intelligence ten days ago by Pakistani authorities, it appeared to take the Defense Department by surprise. No one, though, is going to be more surprised than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It seems even with confirmation from the Pakistanis themselves, she was never brought up to speed.

(more…)

KATIE COURIC:  Thank you, Mayor Bloomberg, for sitting down with us.  The other day, sir, you guessed that the Times Square bomber was “homegrown,” and now authorities have arrested a Connecticut man in connection with the case.  Can you tell us anything about this naturalized American citizen person, whose identity we won’t mention because we don’t want our audience to think “Muslim,” even though part of his last name is “Shah” and his first name is “Faisal?”

MAYOR BLOOMBERG:  He’s from Connecticut.  I’m from Boston.  How am I supposed to know?  Especially since the Feds never tell me anything.  After all, I’m a Republican… right?

COURIC: Yes, sir, but you’re also the Mayor of the City of New York.  So let me get to the most important question: Yankees or Red Sox?

BLOOMBERG: As you know, Katie, I’m the mayor of all the people of this great city, including the ones in boroughs I’ve never been to.  So that question’s above my pay grade, even though I’m a billionaire.  Ha ha. Therefore, let me address your first question. Several of Mr. What’s-his-name’s neighbors in Bridgeport say he often complained that property taxes were too high — and, what’s worse, that he might have been recently foreclosed on.  In Bridgeport, where you can buy a house for less than the price of a loaf of bread! (more…)

This morning MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer appeared on the Stephanie Miller radio show, a small syndicated left-wing talker, and during her appearance she expressed her “frustration” that the Times Square bomber was a Pakistani terrorist instead of a white person. Apparently Brewer had hoped that a new Tim McVeigh, perhaps coming from the Tea Party movement, would turn out to be responsible for the attempted bombing in New York instead of just another boring ol’ radical Islamist terrorist.

Brewer told the lefty radio host, “there was part of me that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country,” and intimated that the fact that since it was an Islamic terrorist evil white America would just use that as another excuse to be racists. “I mean they use it as justification for really outdated bigotry,” Brewer said.

So according to Brewer, I guess we should excuse all acts of terror because, after all, it’s those evil, racist, white bigots in America that force them to blow people up? (more…)

Need Bullets? The shortest distance between South Carolina and Kandahar is about 7,500 miles. (As the rocket flies.)

Shah Wali Kot, Afghanistan
11 March 2009

The military axiom that “amateurs talk strategy while professionals talk logistics” has special meaning in Afghanistan. During the Soviet war, though the Bear comprised Afghanistan’s entire northern border, the Afghan resistance was frequently able to block Soviet logistical operations, which were dependent on scant roads, tunnels and corridors. Captured Soviet logistics convoys often supplied the Mujahidin.

Logistics in landlocked Afghanistan are exceptionally tough because the country is a transportation nightmare of impassable mountains, barren deserts, and rugged landscape with only capillary roads and airports.

When we lose a bridge, we can’t just detour twenty miles to the next one, as we might on the plains of Europe.  In Afghanistan, there might not be another route for hundreds of miles. Conversely, Afghan fighters, who have used guerilla warfare tactics for decades—centuries even—lack our tanks, vehicles and massive supply lines, leaving them less dependent on infrastructure.  Most of the guerrillas we face are from the immediate area. Their corn comes from their own stalks; ours comes from other continents. (more…)

**Video embed updated

**Post updated with link to downloadable video.

With breaking news out of Palestine today that a top aide to President Mahmoud Abbas has been literally caught with his pants down, rape tapes seem to be popping up all over the pious Muslim world.  And some are
horrifically worse than others.

Last month on the FOX Business Network, Colonel Oliver North revealed a startling piece of information.  Conservative mullahs and elements within the Haqqani terror network – known as the backbone of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the Af/Pak theater – are working to take the Haqqanis down from the inside.  Their key weapon is a disturbing video that shows the serial sexual assault of several young girls.

Colonel North explained that no one in American intelligence had yet seen this video.  Here it is:

***STRONGEST POSSIBLE CONTENT WARNING.  NOT SAFE FOR WORK***

DOWNLOAD VIDEO HERE.

Transcript here.

When I travelled to Afghanistan to research my novel, The Apostle, contacts of mine introduced me to a mid-level Taliban commander in the Haqqani network.  Over tea and considerable time talking together, he provided me with some very good, inside-baseball information on the Haqqanis and how their network operates. (more…)

Fourth of a series.  Find parts one, two and three here.  And don’t miss this report, either.

Martha Coakley declares that terrorists are “gone from Afghanistan” and has no idea the Taliban are either terrorists or our sworn enemies.

No one ever accused Martha Coakley of having any foreign-policy experience.  After all, as a career lawyer, prosecutor, state attorney general and lifelong Democrat party hack, the “Massachusette” can’t rationally be expected to be as up on the nuances of the “war on terror” as, say, Joe Biden.

Still, her remarks during her one debate with Scott Brown on January 11 should trouble anyone who hopes that a potential successor to the warm body currently occupying the deceased Lion of the Senate’s seat would have, shall we say, a greater grasp of the geo-political situation.

First, in her own words, her foreign-policy credentials:

I have a sister who lives overseas and she’s been in England and now lives in the Middle East.  I’ve spent a lot of time on my own traveling, ‘cause I’m interested in it.  Less so as attorney general, and my responsibilities don’t take me overseas.

Unbelievable?  See for yourself:

(more…)