Why John McCain Should Learn To Keep His Mouth Shut...For His Own Good

 

Senator John McCain of Arizona was recently taken ill with a fairly serious form of brain cancer, glioblastoma. There's only a ten percent chance of surviving more than a few years. Ordinarily, as much as I disagree with his politics and dislike his record in office, my normal policy would be to simply wish him luck on his recovery and leave it at that. Those sentiments still apply, but really, John McCain should learn to keep his mouth shut. For his own good.

Senator McCain has always been a sucker for press attention and apparently the 80-year-old wasn't too ill to cooperate with the drive by media by hitting out at President Trump. It's particular pernicious since he was personally involved in the matter at hand, albeit in a ludicrous way.

Today, President Trump formally ended a CIA program started by President Barack Hussein Obama
in 2013. It was a covert operation that by passed Congress to arm, train and support supposed moderate Syrian rebels in what was then called the Free Syrian Army against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.

McCain went nuts over this. After calling out the president in terms the usual suspects in the media just ate up, McCain said "If these reports are true, the administration is playing right into the hands of Vladimir Putin."

That right in the hands bit is particularly funny coming from McCain, but first a little background.

The Free Syrian Army were never 'moderate.' The movement was filled with Salafists, Islamists and jihadis of the most radical persuasion. One of the main components was al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusrah, an officially designated terrorist group. Other elements were part of the the Muslim Brotherhood.

The CIA operation also involved collusion with Qatar and President Obama's BFF, Turkey's Tayyip Erdoğan. There was  a documentary made by PBS ( hardly a right wing, anti-Obama platform) entitled " Syria: Arming the Rebels" that actually showed jihadis training, holding up U.S. weapons and supplies and describe their journey from the Syrian battlefield to meet with their American handlers in Turkey and then being shipped to Qatar. Once there, they're instructed in sophisticated combat techniques, including one course on “how to finish off soldiers still alive after an ambush.”

As PBS noted "it appears the Obama administration is allowing select groups of rebels to receive US-made anti-tank missiles."

Those 'select groups' became ISIS, and the Obama Administration spent $287 million equipping and training them before congress found out, after which Obama's Secretary of State John Kerry asked Congress for an additional half a billion dollars to essentially fund what became ISIS. Now you know how ISIS got so strong so fast. You see, ISIS started in Syria, not Iraq, with the Free Syrian Army.Iraq came later.

One of the Senators trying to push increased funding for them was none other than John McCain. In one unintentionally hilarious episode McCain met with some of the leaders of those 'moderate rebels.'

 

Let's see, left to right we have Abu Mosa, al-Qaeda operative and later ISIS press officer; Peeking over Mosa's shoulder in ISIS Calipha Abu Baker al-Baghdadi; McCain; 'General' Salim Idris, who headed up a small window dressing organization called the Syrian Military Council that had nothing to do with the Free Syrian Army or any real military action;  Mohammed Noor, a member of al-Nusrah and ISIS officer who kidnapped three hostages who were later beheaded in ISIS videos,;and Malik Massouwi, another al-Nusrah member and ISIS commander. So yes, the Obama Administration helped create and fund ISIS.

McCain went to Turkey and slipped just over the border to the Syrian border town of Bab-al-Salam to press the flesh with his pals.

Later on, having built up one terrorist army and seen it go out of control and become ISIS, President Obama found another group of 'moderates' to support along with Qatar and Turkey, Jaish-al-Fatah, the Army of Conquest.

 

So, who are these guys in Jaish-al-Fatah, the new moderates in Syria? Why, the two main components are Ahrar ash-Sham, an officially designated terrorist group and our old friends the al-Qaeda offshoot al-Nusrah, of course. These are the guys Obama (and yes, Senator McCain) screamed bloody murder about Putin targeting with air strikes.

Considering that they were hunkered down right next to Lebanon's border in large chunks of Idlib province including the provincial capitol, Putin targeting them certainly made sense strategically.

Trump finally pulling the plug on these jihadis also certainly made sense.And you can't call it aiding and abetting terrorism, a federal crime some other people I could mention could plausibly be charged with.

One group of real moderates Trump has been backing lately with great success is the Kurds. Under Obama's reign, the Kurds got just enough support to keep them going, but President Trump has increased support for the Kurds and their heroic Persh Mergah quite a bit. And as WAPO columnist David Ignatius had to sorrowfully admit, the Kurds cheer wildly whenever our president's name is mentioned. They know they finally have a real friend in the White House. And Ignatius also had a few things to say about our president's decisiveness. So much for Senator McCain's nonsense about 'no ISIS strategy:



So Senator McCain, for obvious reasons ought to learn for once to keep his mouth shut.

I wish him a full recovery and a nice retirement from public life. Maybe there's a savings and loan he can do commercials for on TV, just so he could enjoy a nice buzz from being on camera. In Spanish. I'm certain he could work out something with Univision, his chief donor.

Obama Is Aiding And Abetting Jihad Against The West - In Syria

 

In his commencement address at West Point, President Obama has announced that the U.S.is 'weighing military aid' for Syrian rebels. Separately, administration officials spoke off the record to reporters from the Associated Press and said that Obama and his team are planning to send U.S. military advisers to Jordan to train and equip certain moderate Syrian rebels.

Actually, the president has been covertly indulging his desire to intervene in Syria on the side of Islamist rebels without congressional oversight for quite some time, and its pernicious effect is starting to be felt. Just like the president's illegal intervention in Libya, our intervention in Syria has been like a rock dropped into a lake, sending ripples far beyond the original point of impact.

The training has mostly been done in Qatar and conducted by the CIA,although training of jihadis has also occurred in Jordan, where we already have almost 2,000 U.S. troops stationed and in camps along Syria's border with Turkey.

The president predictably lied about this when he was asked, but a documentary made by PBS ( hardly a right wing, anti-Obama platform) entitled " Syria: Arming the Rebels" actually shows jihadis training, holding up U.S. weapons and supplies and describe their journey from the Syrian battlefield to meet with their American handlers in Turkey and then being shipped to Qatar. Once there, they're instructed in sophisticated combat techniques, including one course on “how to finish off soldiers still alive after an ambush.”

As PBS notes "it appears the Obama administration is allowing select groups of rebels to receive US-made anti-tank missiles."

The United States has already spent $287 million so far in what's described as nonlethal aid for the rebels, with whom knows how much for military aid and training since the Obama Administration and the president still deny that took place. I mean, who are you going to believe? Barack Obama or your lying eyes?

In any event this new emphasis means that a lot more money and arms are headed to Syria. Secretary of State John Kerry is talking in the neighborhood of $5 billion. He also claims we have the ability to vet who the aid goes to, which is ridiculous given the facts on the ground unless we really are going to send boots on the ground to Syria to get involved and see who lines up next to us.

How have our efforts in Syria been turning out so far?

Well, first of all, as was apparent from the PBS documentary and other sources, we haven't really had all that much control of where the arms, money and supplies go, or really, even who gets trained.
It's a similar situation to what happened in Afghanistan back in the late 1970's when President Carter began arming the Afghan muhadejin to fight the Soviets. We sent the stuff to Pakistan and it was our dear friends the Pakistanis who decided who got what, not us. Any wonder the Taliban took over once the Soviets skedaddled?

What Syria is becoming is jihadi summer camp, with foreign fighters flocking there, picking up valuable experience and skills like how to make an IED that won't result in a work accident, gaining combat experience in Syria and Iraq and then ultimately heading back to their home countries to teach others. Al Nusrah and ISIS already run their own training facilities in Syria and in the parts of Iraq ISIS now controls.

The resurgence of al-Qaeda in Iraq, where ISIS now controls 3 of Iraq's 18 provinces can be directly linked to President Obama's covert decision to support and arm the Syrian rebels, and, as we will eventually find out when the truth about Benghazi surfaces, to his intervention in Libya. We have only estimates of how many jihadis with Western citizenship have been trained and indoctrinated there, and no one in the Administration is paying any attention to how many have received U.S. arms, money and training.

 In late October 2013, Mike Rogers, chairman of the US House Intelligence Committee, warned that al Qaeda allies in Syria were now "talking about conducting external operations, which is exactly what happened in Afghanistan, which led to 9/11."

 

'External operations'...that's pretty much what's going on in Iraq right now.And it isn't just Iraq.

Hundreds of EU citizens have ended up in the ranks of ISIS (The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), Al Nusrah and al-Qaeda, and a number of them who have returned are actively involved in terrorism on the home front.

In Belgium, for instance, Mehdi Nemmouche, the jihadi accused of killing four people in an attack on the Jewish museum in Brussels is a French national who spent time fighting in Syria and had a flag from ISIS in his possession as well as a Kalishnikov, a handgun, and jihad videos. None of this was news to the French Authorities that picked him up in Marseilles, since they had been attempting to track hi since they knew he had been fighting with ISIS in Syria.

Bomb threats were made against the Belgian Royal family after Belgian police arrested Ismail Abdelatif al Lal, a major al-Qaeda financier who was funding the recruitment and transport of Spanish and Moroccan Muslims to Syria. And the Belgian government ended up finally cancelling the government welfare benefits of 30 Belgian jihadis who were having the checks forwarded to banks in Turkey while they were fighting in Syria!

France's French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve estimated that almost 400 jihadis who hold French passports are currently fighting in Syria. Back in March, former Interior Minister Manuel Valls "estimated that 700 French nationals or residents of France were more or less involved in the Syrian conflict, that 250 were currently in Syria, 99 were in transit to get there, 150 had showed interest in going there, 76 had already returned, and that 21 had died on Syrian soil."

Those whom have returned will bring interesting skills back home with them, and a number apparently already have.

There are instances of this happening all over Europe.

And the U.S.? The estimates of battle trained Syrian jihadis who've returned here range from 70 to fifty.

If we can't even vet our own citizens returning from Syria or stop them from going in the first place, how does the Obama team imagine it's going to vet who gets U.S. military aid and training?

And is it a major leap to conclude that these arms and more importantly the training will be turned against us someday?

If you look at President Obama and his team and their actions in Syria,in Libya, in Egypt, in Iraq and our funding of the new Hamas-Fatah government, you'd have to conclude that not only is our current regime tolerant and favorably disposed towards Islamists, they're now actually aiding and abetting them.

And as we've seen, such things have a history of backfiring....horrendously.

Iraq Burns Along With Syria As al-Qaeda's ISIS Takes Over Jihad War

 

The carnage in Syria and Iraq has taken a new turn.

While the war in Syria against Bashir Assad had appeared to be going his way because of infighting between jihadi insurgents, the situation has changed radically with the killing of al-Nusra front leader Abu Mohammed al-Ansari(aka Abu Mohammed al-Golani), his wife, daughter, brother and niece in a house in Ras al-Hosn, Syria. The assassination was headed by the now dominant al-Qaeda force, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams, the jihadi name for Syria (ISIS).

This adds to the momentum ISIS has gathered in it's ongoing assault in Iraq, which has the U.S. trained Iraqi Army reeling.

Since the western Iraqi city of Fallujah fell to ISIS in a major victory over Iraq's 7th and 1st divisions, in January of this year, the Iraqi Army has been unable to drive them out.These are highly trained jihadis, amny of them foreign born, with battle experience in the war against Syria's Assad. and the use of

Initially, the Iraqi army was routed and went into a headlong retreat to wards Baghdad, but then returned back to Fallujah in several failed attempts to retake the city. The Iraqi forces have been limited to sporadic shelling of the city, which hasn't done wonders for feelings of the natives towards the Iraqi government.

ISIS is so confident of their hold on Fallujah that they actually held a military parade through the city that featured captured and very gently used Iraqi HumVees and APCs the Iraqi army received courtesy of the American taxpayer. I also have to wonder how much of the arms ISIS is using now came originally from Moamar Khaddaffi's arsenals after out ill-advised adventure in Libya.



At this time, the Iraqi military has been desperately working to shore up a defense line around Baghdad to keep ISIS from advancing to the outskirts of the city.Some sources say that ISIS has already penetrated the outskirts of Baghdad, and that armed jihadis are distributing packets of candy to children with a note attached advising their parents that they are invited to attend “repentance” sessions held by ISIS. ISIS has also secured the loyalty of a number of Sunni tribal militias who remain independent but fight with ISIS against what they see as Shi'ite oppression.Anbar is essentially lost to Iraqi control control at this point. Even Abu Ghraib prison, only two miles from Baghdad was evacuated this week as ISI and its tribal allies approached, because it was about to be overrun.

Meanwhile, ISIS has been engaged in some interesting tactics. Rather than a frontal assault on the Iraqi lines, They've been concentrating on - wait for it - using water as a war weapon.This started when ISIS forces captured a strategic dam just south of Fallujah, closed all of the dam’s 10 gates and essentially created a moat with the waters of the Euphrates to make a military assault by government forces an even more implausible undertaking.it also has the effect of cutting Baghdad's water supply and interfering with the city's power, causing blackouts because of the reduced flow to the steam generators. A spokesman for the Iraqi Electricity Ministry said the power supply from Mussayab power station had decreased from 170 megawatts to just 90 megawatts, almost a 50% cut.

Not only that, but ISIS is actually using bulldozers and earth moving machines in an attempt to divert the Euphrates River from its course to the south towards central Iraq.The idea here is flood and isolate the Iraqi army positions now facing Falluja and cut off passage by road from Baghdad to army bases in central Iraq. If ISIS pulls it off, if will isolate the largest part of the Iraq army, cutting off its supply lines and making movement towards Baghdad slower and more difficult. And it will reduce water supplies and power to the predominant Shi'ite cities in the south.

According to my sources, one of the major reasons Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki traveled to Washington last March was to ask President Obama for a major shipment of new equipment, including Apache attack helicopters. The package was on hold, quite correctly, (primarily by Democrat Senator Robert Menendez)because the Senate wanted assurances Maliki wouldn't simply use the new toys to further repress Sunni civilians ala' Saddam. Then, there were questions about whether the Irawqi army should receive more U.S. weaponry, given how much of it ISIS captured from the Iraqi army during its headlong retreat. Also the Senate wanted questions answered about what if anything the Iraqis were doing to stop overflights of Iranian arms shipments to the Syrian government of Basher al-Assad. The Obama Administration managed to push the sale through, but only by spreading it out over three years. And that might not be soon enough.

This new war in Iraq is taking place against the backdrop of the upcoming April 30th Iraqi parliamentary elections. Maliki and the Shi'ite bloc began repressing Iraq's Sunnis as soon as the Shi'ites got into power and removing them from the army and police forces. The last elections were marked by fraud and Maliki simply invalidating the election of enough Sunni seats to guarantee a Shi'te majority.If the April 30th elections go down in the same fashion, more and more of Iraq's Sunnis are going to see ISIS in a positive light.

Two years ago, President Obama was telling the American people about how al-Qaeda was on the run. Thanks in large part to his own missteps and poor judgement, they're not on the run but on the advance.

Israel Thwarts Al-Qaeda Attack On U.S. Embassy

Israel's Shin Bet thwarted a major terrorist attack by al-Qaeda using Palestinian Arabs and hard core terrorists from the Caucasus with fake Russian passports.

The targets were the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, the Jerusalem Convention Center and buses on the Jerusalem-Maaleh Adummim route.

The plan was to have suicide bombers attempt to blow themselves up in the entrance to the US embassy in Tel Aviv,and to coordinate that attack with a simultaneous assault on buses riding on the Maaleh Adummim-Jerusalem line.

The Jerusalem National Convention Center was also to be targeted by suicide bombers in a classic jihadi combo, one bomber to blow himself up inside the building a second one detonating a truck bomb as people tried to flee the first explosion and police and medical personnel arrived to increase the casualties.

Three of the conspirators are in custody, while a fourth is still being sought.

Ayad Abu-Sara, an Arab resident of East Jerusalem, was to be sent to Syria to receive training for the planned attacks. His role was to assist and to look after a group of terrorists arriving from Russia with false papers.

e would then facilitate the twin attacks, which were to be carried out by al-Qaeda operatives entering Israel with Russian paperwork, according to the Shin Bet. Abu-Sara is one of the trio now under arrest.

According to the Shin Bet a Gaza-based al-Qaeda operative, Oreib al-Sham, was the point man for the attacks. Al-Sham is still at large.

A second recruit, Rubin Abu-Najma, is a married father of four from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Tor.Al-Sham recruited him to attempt to kidnap an IDF soldier from the central bus station in Jerusalem and to aid in the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv attacks. According to my sources, he may have been the one chosen to set off the truck bomb at the Convention Center. He apparently sang a real aria to the Shin Bet, revealing where he had trained and the set up of the plot.

Jihadi #3 is Ala Anam, a 21-year-old resident of Aqaba, a town near Jenin in the Arab occupied area of Judea and Samaria.

All 3 men revealed that Al-Sham contacted them via social media over the internet.

Even more interesting, current al-Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri is reportedly to have taken a hand in planning this personally.

It's not too difficult to figure out al-Qaeda's strategy here, since it comes from Mohammed and the Qu'ran. The idea is multiple attacks on high profile targets, to erode any feeling of safety or security
in the target area.

In spite of our president's chest thumping, al-Qaeda is hardly 'on the run.' In fact, due to his actions, they're far stronger and better armed than they were before he took office.

Al-Qaeda Wins Major Victory Over Iraqi Army

 

Al-Qaeda forces under the command of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi turned back an Iraqi army offensive with heavy losses, winning a major military victory.

Baghdadi’s troops decimated Iraq's 7th and 1st divisions, which were trained and equipped courtesy of Uncle Sam as some of the most elite troops in the Iraqi Army. Not only did the al-Qaeda forces defeat them and send them in headlong retreat towards Baghdad, but the jihadis were able to advance, capture and hold virtually all of Fallujah and most of Ramadi, the provincial capitol of Anbar. These are both key Sunni strong points in western and central Iraq.

The Iraqi forces attempted a counterattack to retake these areas(their fourth),but were thrown back with heavy losses. Whole units fled the battlefield, dropping those shiny new American arms behind them.

The subtext of this is the ongoing war in Syria.

Al-Baghdadi is a commander in an al-Qaeda group that calls themselves Islamic State in Iraq and al-Shams, the jihadis name for Syria. ISIS, as it's known is part of the Islamists rebels fighting Syria's Bashir Assad, Hezbollah and Iran for control of Syria.

ISIS has been operating in the Sunni areas of Iraq for some time, fueled by the current Iranian-backed Shi'ite government headed by Nouri al-Maliki essentially marginalizing the Sunnis in government and in Iraq's security forces. This was exactly the opposite of what Iraq's Sunnis were promised by General David Petraeus when they went on the U.S. payroll and fought al-Qaeda in the “Awakening” groups during the 2005 Surge.Now, a lot of them are fighting with ISIS against al-Maliki's Shi'ite forces.

It's important not to overlook Iran's part in all this. Iraq is essentially an Iranian colony now, with al-Maliki kept in power by the Shiite bloc led by Muqtada al-Sadr. Remember Mookie? Al-Maliki was prodded to attack the Sunni areas of Anbar by Iran, who saw it as a second front to put more pressure on the Syrian rebels. Instead, the al-Qaeda forces, allied with the Sunni tribesmen kicked their collective behinds in and sent them retreating back to Baghdad.

The Obama Administration's response is almost sitcom worthy. They're sending al-Maliki F-16s and drones. We might as well send them to Tehran or to Basher Assad.

The al-Qaeda victory, aside from the morale boost and a harvest of gently used only-dropped-once weaponry has some major political consequences. Rather than opening up a new front for the Shiite/Iran bloc, it has done just the opposite, allowing the Iraqi al-Qaeda fighters and their Sunni tribal allies to link up with al-Qaeda elements in Syria like al-Nusrah and increasing the pressure on Assad.Iran, Assad and Hezbollah had the war in Syria pretty much going their way until this happened. Now things have turned around, with consequences for other al-Qaeda fronts in Sinai and Jordan as well.

Not only that,but the Obama Administration came out looking ridiculously ineffectual in the eyes of both sides, since they made a point of shipping heavy weapons to the Iraqi government..many of which are now in the hands of al-Qaeda and ISIS.If you think about it and remember this president's early arming of jihadis in Syria and his clueless adventure in Libya, more heavy weapons have ended up in the hands of our enemies due to American efforts since he took office than any president in modern history.

So much for President Obama's brag that 'al-Qaeda's on the run'. But as you'll recall, President Obama bears a great deal of responsibility for al-Qaeda's resurgence in the Middle East.

One thing that bears mentioning, when we talk about responsibility. President Obama was very quick to pound his chest and claim he ended the war in Iraq, and a lot of his critics are blaming him for the current chaos. Neither is true.The disposition of forces agreement was signed in 2009 by George W. Bush before he left office, and it was al-Maliki, following his Iranian friends orders who insisted on a complete U.S. withdrawal. Barack Obama had nothing to do with it - he simply followed the agreement. He neither ended the war not 'lost' it - although he certainly did his very best to do the latter as a U.S. senator.

Iraq is going to puzzle historians in the future. We went in with the idea of building a nation out of something that never really existed, just a handful of ethnically diverse provinces of the old Ottoman villayet of Mesopotamia the Brits threw together after WWI. Our only real allies and the only ones who actually had a shot at nation building were the Kurds, who begged us to be theirr allies, put our bases there and to help them establish an independent Kurdistan. Their IDF-trained Persh Merga killed every al-Qaeda jihadi that came anywhere near their territory without our having to even spend the manpower to patrol it. We sold them out for the likes of Turkey's Islamist fascist leader Tayyip Erdoğan, and instead we placed our billion dollar bet on the Shi'ites and on al-Maliki, who spent the Saddam years cuddled up with our enemies the Ayatollahs.

We went in and made a huge (and justified) deal about Saddam being a genocidal monster who needed to be taken out. And after that happened, we sat back and did nothing while Iraq's Christians were brutalized and ethnically cleansed on our watch.

Our warriors, in spite of the way they were handcuffed by the politically correct politicians back home won an amazing military victory. Osama bin-Laden made the mistake of making Iraq the central front of his war on America, and our troops decimated al-Qaeda and pushed them, for the most part, out of the Middle East.

After which we essentially left Iraq in the hands of a politician allied with our enemies and went home, washing our hands of it, and the situation has now returned to internecine violence.

Iraq will unfortunately rank with Somalia as a futile and quixotic misuse of America's armed might.

It remains to be seen how this all turns out, but hopefully the American people learned something from it..about how proper and clear objectives are needed when we go to war, and about how carefully we need to choose the leaders who make those decisions. And also about the nature of the Muslim world. Because they are not like us, they do not want what we want and pretending that they do is a sure route to repeated folly.

Were The Saudis Complicit In 9/11? - What You Won't See Elsewhere

Something rattling the blogsphere thew last two days is an op-ed in the New York Post by investigative reporter, author and columnist Paul Sperry. It concerns an alleged cover up by the Bush Administration on Saudi involvement in 9/11:

After the 9/11 attacks, the public was told al Qaeda acted alone, with no state sponsors.

But the White House never let it see an entire section of Congress’ investigative report on 9/11 dealing with “specific sources of foreign support” for the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals.

It was kept secret and remains so today.

President Bush inexplicably censored 28 full pages of the 800-page report. Text isn’t just blacked-out here and there in this critical-yet-missing middle section. The pages are completely blank, except for dotted lines where an estimated 7,200 words once stood (this story by comparison is about 1,000 words).

A pair of lawmakers who recently read the redacted portion say they are “absolutely shocked” at the level of foreign state involvement in the attacks.

Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) can’t reveal the nation identified by it without violating federal law. So they’ve proposed Congress pass a resolution asking President Obama to declassify the entire 2002 report, “Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.”

Some information already has leaked from the classified section, which is based on both CIA and FBI documents, and it points back to Saudi Arabia, a presumed ally.

The Saudis deny any role in 9/11, but the CIA in one memo reportedly found “incontrovertible evidence” that Saudi government officials — not just wealthy Saudi hardliners, but high-level diplomats and intelligence officers employed by the kingdom — helped the hijackers both financially and logistically. The intelligence files cited in the report directly implicate the Saudi embassy in Washington and consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks, making 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war.

Sperry goes on to detail a number of specific instances, all of them factual, as is his habit. He cites Saudi diplomats like Saudi consulate official Fahad al-Thumairy, Saudi intelligence agents Omar al-Bayoumi, Osama Bassnan actually set up safe houses for the 9/11 hijackers and provided them with funds. He relates how these men set up private meetings for the hijackers with American al Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who fled America to escape terrorism charges and was later killed by a drone in Yemen.Bassnan later fled America as well after 9/11.

He also says that then-Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar and his wife sent checks totaling some $130,000 to Bassnan, much of whom went to the hijackers and to al-Qaeda. The questionable donations are not actually not classified, but a matter of public record...yet nothing happened to Bandar and he was simply recalled.

it is also a matter of record that a number of Saudi government official and nationals were given priority after 9/11 in getting out of the country, including members of the bin-Laden family.

None of this is news, frankly, to anyone who took an honest look at 9/11. Nor is the news on how FBI attempts to investigate 9/11 were stymied by the Bush Administration.

Where Sperry and I part ways is his conjecture that this was an organized attack and an act of war by the Saudi government.

What we had instead, I think, was a number of high level members of the Saudi government and the royal family, plus others in the Gulf Emirates who funded and supported bin-Laden, mostly because, you know, jihad. Some were more involved than others, but probably few of them really believed a second attack on the WTC would succeed, or that it do the damage it did. If you recall, even bin-Laden was pleasantly surprised as how successful the attack went.There was no upside to the Saudis attacking the U.S.

So now we come to the Bush Administration's role in this.

Revealing that high level Saudis had been involved in 9/11 would have meant a declaration of war. Now had I been president, I would have had no problems going there, or at the very least getting a full Saudi mea culpa, financial compensation, the guilty Saudis repatriated back to America to stand trial and an end to their financing mosques and jihad friendly imams here in America.

But President Bush's relationship with these people was, shall we say, somewhat different.



As more than one Bush biography relates, the Bush family was so close to Prince Bander that his nickname within the family circle was 'Bandar Bush'. And a look at Neil Bush of Silverado Trust fame also reveals the family's close connections with the Gulf States.

Nor is it limited to the Bushes. A look at the 'bi-partisan' Carlyle Fund(a huge mega-hedge fund mainly run by former cabinet members, influential congressmen and yes, a few former presidents that included substantial investments by the bin-Laden family), the plethora of six and seven figure speaking and 'consulting fees' enjoyed by a number of political figures on both sides of the aisle including the Clintons, Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and former senators Bob Dole and Tom Daschle just to name a few, the vast amounts spent to fund presidential libraries and foundations, former president Bill Clinton's special 'business relationship' with the Sultan of Dubai that made him a multimillionaire and helped fund Hillary's Clinton's last presidential campaign..lots of members of our ruling class have had their snouts in the trough.

Which by the way, might just tell you why America has never sought to seriously become energy independent even though we have ample oil and are one of the top five petroleum exporters.

In any event. let's just say taking out Saudi Arabia would be bad for business with all that money involved...not to mention that as keeper of the Muslim shrines at Mecca and Medina, a strike at the Saudis might have widened the scope of the war just a bit.

Or would it? Aside from the Saudis and the Gulf Emirates, there was another Muslim country that was very much complicit in 9/11. And unlike The Saudis, we are talking about direct, proven government involvement.

Hezbollah and Iran were directly involved in the 9/11 attacks and it is a matter of record thanks to a federal trial that took place in response to lawsuits filed by families of 9/11 victims.

Iran facilitated the transit of the 9/11 hijackers into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, just like they allowed entry to al-Qaeda fighters after we invaded their stronghold in Afghanistan.

On page 240 of the 9/11 Commission’s final report, it mentions a “senior Hezbollah operative” who accompanied some of the future 9/11 hijackers on their final airline flights into and out of Afghanistan, Iran, and Lebanon.

It's now known beyond any doubt that the “senior Hezbollah operative” was our old friend Imad Mugniyeh. You'll remember that he was not only a member of al-Qaeda but a founding member of Hezbollah and a former member of Yasser Arafat's Force 17. He was the commander of the operation that killed 247 marines in Beirut, the man who tortured to death Marine Colonel William Buckley,videotaped the proceedings and sent it to the White House, and the facilitator in the Karina A arms shipment, which involved Iranian weapons sent to the PLO.

Mugniyah was the natural liaison man for the 9/11 hijackers as well,because he was one of the few people trusted by by all parties involved...Hezbollah, Iran and al- Qaeda. He was finally sent to hell in 2008, most likely by the Israeli Mossad.

The 9/11 commission report strongly suggested further investigation of the Iranian complicity at the time, but neither the Bush Administration or the Obama Administration ever saw fit to follow up.

As evidence given in the trials show, in addition to directing Mughniyah’s extensive involvement in recruiting, guiding, and training the hijackers, Iran provided vital material support to those hijackers by ordering its border and passport officials not to stamp their passports when they crossed Iranian territory. That meant they could enter the U.S. with clean passports, no questions asked and was of huge help in maintaining their cover.

Not only that, but there's evidence that emerged from the trials that the hijackers may even have received some training in Iran.

According to testimony by a former senior Iranian intelligence officer, Abolghasem Mesbahi, Mugniyeh helped train the hijackers in a camp set up by the MOIS, Iran's intelligence service. Mesabi, who has also been a witness for the German BND in investigating and trying cases involving Iranian assassins of expatriates and dissidents in that country, testified in Federal court that al-Qaeda received instruction in spy craft, explosives, communications, operational guidance and time on a flight simulator purchased by Iran from China for the exact model of domestic airliner the hijackers would use in the 9/11 attacks...which Iran did not have as part of its domestic air fleet in IranAir at the time.

None of this has ever been followed up on.

So, if we were actually talking about going after the perpetrators of 9/11, it seems like Iran Hezbollah, and probably the Saudis and some of the Gulf Emirates might have been on our list. Pretty specific targets, either for a diplomatic or military reckoning. Instead, we went after al-Qaeda, the jihad subcontractors, and we have done so in two consecutive administrations. Worse than that, we continue to appease these regimes who were involved in butchering 3,000 of our fellow Americans.

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) has talked several times about reconvening the 9/11 Commission to get some answers. As you might imagine, the response from the White House has not been overwhelming and I doubt it will happen.

The complicity of a number of Muslim countries is what they're not telling you about 9/11, and that's why more evidence of Saudi complicity in 9/11 is no big news.

The real story is how we got from there to where we are now over the past 12 years, and why. That's what we have yet to find out.

Obama Breaks U.S. Law To Arm Al-Qaeda And The Brotherhood in Syria

The Hill reports today that President Obama has issued yet another executive order trashing federal law on U.S. arms sales to begin supplying anti-chemical weapons equipment to insurgent forces in Syria.

Under the Arms Export Control Act, the U.S. is prohibited from authorizing shipment of any item included in what's known as the U.S. Munitions List.

Paragraphs (a)-(c) of Category XIV specifically outlaws exporting “chemical agents” or “equipment for dissemination, detection, and identification of, and defense against” those agents.

Section 121.7(e) explicitly names “nerve agents, gases, and aerosols” under the definition of the chemical agents that the government is explicitly banned from exporting.

National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden informs us that by dint of President Obama's awesomeness, the laws forbidding these exports now no longer apply to “"international organizations ... [and] select vetted members of the Syrian opposition, including the Supreme Military Council.”

"This action is part of longstanding and ongoing efforts to provide life-saving chemical weapons-related assistance to people in need in Syria," Hayden added.

Need I mention that the Supreme Military Council, the armed wing of the Obama -backed Syrian Opposition Coalition is Muslim Brotherhood dominated?

Or that the rebels themselves have poison gas?



 And have committed numerous atrocities? Although of course, to channel Hillary Clinton, since a lot of them have been carried out against Syria's Christians (it is the Sunni insurgents who are exclusively responsible for the murder and ethnic cleansing of Christians in Syria) what difference does it make?

 But wait, there's more. The the shipment will violate another law, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which, in case you've forgotten, mandates anyone suspected of providing material support to al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces is subject to indefinite detention in military custody. The Washington Post reported  on September 11 that the The Obama Administration has been sending the insurgents shipments that are “limited to light weapons and other munitions that can be tracked.” However, according to  CBS News, the list of materiel being trafficked to Syrian jihadis is a lot more heavy duty:

The agency has also arranged for the Syrian opposition to receive anti-tank weaponry like rocket-propelled grenades through a third party, presumably one of the Gulf countries that has been arming the rebels, a senior U.S. intelligence official and two former intelligence officials said Thursday. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the classified program publicly.

 President Obama has approved shipments of weapons and money to the Syrian insurgents, one of whose main components is the al-Qaeda franchise al-Nusra. Does anyone seriously believe that arms and money we've given to the president's Muslim Brotherhood friends hasn't found it's way to al-Qaeda? Oddly enough, this same president, who wants to arm our bitter, sworn enemies the jihadis and is spending taxpayer dollars to do it is doing absolutely everything he can to disarm Americans and destroy their Second Amendment rights. Why? Any 'journalists' out there with the stones to ask him?

My friend and Council mate Terresa over at The Noisy Room has a great piece  out  that puts this further into perspective.

Syria-Ossity

The war drums are beating again on Syria. British Prime Minister David Cameron is mouthing off about being ready to commit the downsized, miniscule Royal Navy and what's left of the RAF to an effort to punish Syria's Basher Assad, France's Socialist President Hollande is making aggressive noises and our own John Kerry says that as far as he's concerned, he's one hundred per cent cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die certain that the recent poison gas attacks at Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus that killed a couple of hundred people are the work of Syrian dictator Basher Assad and 'a moral obscenity' that of course demands a military response - even though there's no actual proof who launched the attack.

It was not so long ago that Kerry, who used to be on the Senate Foreign Relations committee was one of Assad's chief backers and shills. He was always saying how we needed to 'engage' with Assad, give him aid, and show him how friendly we were by pressuring Israel to give him back the Golan Heights, the better to kill Jews with.

During the entire time when Senator Kerry was pimping for Basher Assad, Assad was a sponsor of genocidal terrorists like Hezbollah and Hamas. He gave the orders for the assassinations of numerous Lebanese politicians including Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, not to mention a lot of journalists, business people and others who simply got in the way in Lebanon, Syria and occasionally in Europe. Assad's regime deliberately impeded UN investigative tribunals convened to investigate some of these crimes. Not only that,but after the 2006 Lebanon War, Syria, along with its ally Iran cheerfully violated UN Resolution 1701 to rearm Hezbollah and then turned Lebanon into a colony.

And of course, during the Iraq war, Syria was an open enabler of jihadis headed over the border to fight our warriors there, even providing them with havens as well as open borders to dodge back over if they needed it.

None of these particular 'moral obscenities' mattered one whit to Kerry back then. And they certainly never bothered France or the Brits.

That fact ought to raise certain suspicions in your mind when it comes to the current push to 'punish' Syria.

Actually, the more I find out about this gas attack, the more something smells.

On Aug. 21, the Syrian opposition announced that there had been a massive chemical attack in Ghouta which allegedly inflicted about 1,300 fatalities including hundreds of children. As in previous chemical attacks blamed on the Assad administration, the attackers claimed the attacks used Sarin nerve gas, and they flooded YouTube with videos, especially ones featuring children.But there was no conclusive evidence about the attack or the perpetrators.

Then, there were those conflicting claims at first from the insurgents about how the gas attack had been delivered. First, the gas was supposedly delivered via missiles. When EU politicians and our own local critters like John McCain started yapping about enforcing a no fly zone, all of a sudden the rebels started claiming the gas come via an aerial bombardment - except there was no evidence of shrapnel wounds that normally come with both artillery or airborne attacks of this kind. It's also worth remembering that when news of the attacks first went public, the UN delegation and foreign diplomats were denied access to the attack site for a few days by the Syrian opposition because it 'wasn't safe' for them.

We also don't know who fired shots at the UN delegation when they were finally allowed to enter the attack site by the Assad regime. It could very well have been Assad's men...but it could also just as easily been the insurgents.

And according to one of my Lil' Birdies, there's something else interesting about this attack. Ghouta was the site of a failed attack by the jihadist Syrian Free Army, who along with the other insurgents have steadily been losing ground to Assad's forces. This was a failed attempt to secure the area south of Damascus for the presumptive no fly zone the Obama Administration has been trying to arrange.

That attack resulted in a number of former opposition leaders publicly switching sides to Assad and even going public on Syrian TV about it. While I haven't seen the TV clips, it makes sense that after a failed attack, some of the local players would go public in switching sides to the Assad regime as it becomes seen as the strong horse.

If that's the case, it makes no sense that Assad would gas people who just came out backing him, especially with UN inspectors already in the country.On the other hand, if the rebels had captured some of Assad's gas weapons and decided to punish defectors in a way that would also give them a propaganda coup....and apparently the rebels do have Sarin gas themselves:


 The point is there's no way to know for sure. In fact, this ought to remind us of another occasion where the West was manipulated into intervening just 18 years ago.

During the war in Bosnia, it was obvious that it was a brutal war with atrocities on both sides, and the West was leery about getting involved in what was a long standing sectarian war. Until August 28th, 1995, when a mortar shell hit a market in Sarajevo, killing 38 people and wounding another 90 people, many of them children. The pictures were horrendous, another chapter in the propaganda battle that the Muslims were far better at fighting than the Serbs..or maybe that's just the way the media wanted it.

 The carnage at the the Markale market place was the spark that brought NATO in, just as President Clinton had been promising Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic. Even though a team led by Russian Colonel Andrei Demurenko, then the commander of UN Forces in Sarajevo rushed to the areas where the Bosnian Serb mortar teams were stationed and reported that there was no way the Serbs could have been responsible, it wasn't enough. NATO, led by the U.S. and President Clinton began bombing the Serbs, a long time American ally - including civilian targets. That decided the outcome of the war in favor of the Muslims, led to widespread ethnic cleansing of Christian Serbs in Kossovo and established a Muslim state there in defiance of the norms of international law.

As it turned out, there's a very good possibility that the strike on the Markale market place was friendly fire, initiated by the Bosnian Muslims to bring in NATO on their side. Almost certainly an earlier attack on the same location on February 5th, 1994 was. The London Times, writing about an earlier attack ["UN tracks source of fatal shell," (London) The Times, 2/19/94]admitted that there was a UN report that was later buried showing conclusively the the Bosnian Muslims had fired on their own people. And General General Michael Rose, the British head of UNPROFOR, revealed in his memoirs that the shells fired in the February attack came from the Muslim positions.

Ghouta could easily be Markale, the sequel.

 For that matter, we don't even have to go back to Bosnia to see how this works. Remember the Houla massacre that was supposed to have been perpetrated by Assad's troops and had the usual suspects screaming for us to make a 'humanitarian intervention'? It turned out that atrocity was performed by the rebels as a false flag operation. With Ghouta, the insurgents could very well be upping the ante to bring us in.

All that aside ( because Muslim violence is pretty much an equal opportunity sport)  let's take a look at what could happen if we intervene in Syria. If we destroy Assad's forces and remove him from power, it will just lead to a bloodbath for Alawites, Shi'ites and what's left of Syria's Christians..the al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood rebels have provided ample proof they're just as bloodthirsty and insane as Assad if not more so.

Not only that, but given the factional fighting, it's going to be tremendously hard to tell who's who. As the clueless Senator John McCain proved, it's going to be pretty difficult if not impossible  to 'tell who the good guys are.'

Another thing to consider is that to take out Assad we'd have to send in ground troops...who'd be fighting against Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. And it would be the same deal it was in Iraq, our forces being victims of covert terrorism from both sides while the American taxpayer pays to rebuild Syria and fund and train yet another anti-American Muslim Army. Seen our debt figures lately?
And remember, in Syria, there's no oil to help pay the tab.

 If we just bomb them, the first thing Assad and Hezbollah will likely do is is 'play the Jew card' and hit Israel. And Iran will get into it too as they did in Iraq. While I realize that President Obama and Secretary Kerry aren't all that concerned about dead Jews, the Israeli retaliation has the capacity to turn a localized sectarian war into a regional bloodbath. With U.S. forces caught in the middle, and Barack Obama as commander in chief.

I'd advise interested readers to look at what I wrote the last time the war drums were beating on Syria, after the Houla massacre. I stand by everything I wrote then, including what we're likely to face once we intervene in this viper's pit.

Nor do we need to provide the fascist Muslim Brotherhood with a reichlet courtesy of American blood and treasure. Recent polls show that American are overwhelmingly opposed to getting involved in Syria.  They're smart to feel that way. If President Obama gets us into an illegal war in Syria just to provide a diversion from the swamp of scandal his administration is mired in and we allow it, we'll regret the consequences.

There's nothing remotely beneficial to American interest in our getting involved here.

Syria - Obama's Next War

There has been a lot of commentary about a U.S intervention in Syria since a number of YouTube video have been posted by the rebels regarding a gas attack allegedly launched by Assad's forces that is supposed to have killed 500 people.

When seeing this stuff, its important to remember that both Muslim regimes and Islamist groups like al-Qaeda, the Palestinian Authority, Lashker e Tiaba, Hamas, Hezbollah, et al are very good at staging these sorts of things. al-Jazeera is based on this kind of propaganda.

The Arabs who refer to themselves as Palestinians are particularly noted for their use of propaganda, thus giving rise to the phrase ‘Pallywood’. Among many examples I could cite, during the so-called ‘Jenin Massacre’ ( heavily pushed by the BBC, which still has yet to apologize) a camera man actually caught a lot of the ‘corpses’ on their way to ‘mass graves’ jumping off stretchers and taking off. Maybe they thought someone yelled ‘cut’.

There was also ‘Green Hat Guy’, a Hezbollah operative who was caught carrying the same ‘corpse’ of a child at about a dozen sites during the 2006 war.

Assad’s people would also tell you that the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda rebels in al-Nusra have used gas on their forces. It is impossible to sort out the truth, especially from a bunch of YouTube videos.

And what if the gas attacks actually happened? If Syria's Christians weren't deemed worthy of a humanitarian intervention when al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood were ethnically cleansing them, why should America get involved now on behalf of the Islamists?

With the alleged gas attacks, there's a new push on to get the U.S to intervene, and I'm personally convinced this is no accident. Now that the Muslim Brotherhood has been crushed in Egypt, the president is planing to use U.S. blood and treasure to help the Islamists take over Syria.

I've already reported about the 1,800 U.S. Marines we have deployed on Jordan's border with Syria that came off the USS Kearsage. According to my sources, not only is President Obama considering sending these troops into battle, we also have advanced plans ready for a no fly zone to use American air power against Assad's forces to give the al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood rebels a haven where they can be supplied and launch attacks from.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, who last surfaced calling for the U.S. to arm Hezbollah is in Jordan as I write this setting up a war room for CENTCOM's command staff. Over 3,000 Muslim Brotherhood rebels will occupy an enclave extending from the Jordanian border to front lines on the outskirts of Damascus, with Assad's forces kept at bay by drones, missiles and a squadron of U.S. F-16s I'm told is based in Jordan that nominally belong to Jordan but will be manned by U.S. pilots.

Our troops will be training and arming Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda forces like the al-Nusrah Front. And openly this time, not via clandestine operations like the failed Benghazi arms smuggling that cost 4 Americans their lives.

What Obama is trying to do here is what he tried to do in Libya..put an Islamist regime in power. That certainly turned out well, didn't it? Proponents of a U.S. intervention might also want to remember how that worked out when we armed the muhajadeen in Afghanistan. The Reagan Administration at least had the excuse of the bigger cause of fighting the Soviet Empire, and the fact that no one could have foreseen how this would lead to al-Qaeda and the rise of Islamic fascism. Neither of those excuses exist today.

As a side benefit for the Obama Administration, the reports of gas attacks provide an excuse for a program dear to our president's heart...the importation of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees into the U.S.

Syria is a front in the Islamic civil war between the Iranian mostly Shi’ite faction which includes the Brotherhood and the Sunni faction composed of the Saudis, the other GCE countries and now, apparently Egypt.

Which side we should back, the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda or Assad? And with what goal? Based on this president’s track record, do we really want him in charge of another illegal war?

And if the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda win, what happens to Assad's weaponry, his chemical weapons, his missiles? Since the Brotherhood is now allied with the Iranian bloc against the Saudis, its a sure bet that these weapons will either be used directly by the rebels against Israel or transferred to Hezbollah right next door. Hatred of Israel and Jews trumps everything, something that may not exactly concern the Obama Administration for reasons that ought to be obvious. Imagine a terrorist enclave on Israel's borders launching attacks on Northern Israel and protected by a U.S. no fly zone.

Not only that, but some of these weapons may very well be used to destabilize Jordan, where the Brotherhood is very strong, there's a significant tribal issue between the Bedouin ruling class and the 75% of Jordan's population that label themselves Palestinians and King Abdullah is holding on by his fingernails.

I fail to see how this benefits anyone but the Islamists. Certainly it doesn't benefit the U.S. or our ally Israel.

There are no good guys here, and a U.S. intervention has a good chance of making a horrible situation even worse.

It's time we stood up to this president's pro-Islamist agenda. Call your representatives in Congress NOW.

Al-Qaeda Attacks? But Obama Said They Were On The Run!!

 

"Osama bin-Laden is dead and al-Qaeda is on the run." - Barack Obama's stump speech, 2012.

Last Friday, a story surfaced about a great deal of al-Qaeda chatter about a specific threat  of a  'coming attack.'

Note that word, 'specific'. In this context, it means you have real knowledge of what, where, and who.

In response, the Obama Administration closed 21  US embassies throughout the Muslim world. Originally, this was supposed to be for one day, but it's been extended for a full week.

According to my sources, there was some evidence of  an actual order from the head of al-Qaeda, Ayman Zawahiri to none other than Nasir al Wuhayshi, head of AQAP ( al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) to carry out an attack...with no other specifics released.

For the past two years the American people been told that al-Qaeda had been defeated. Those of you whom read this site and are members of Joshua's Army know different, of course and that if anything, this president and his clueless national security team have strengthened al-Qaeda and its various affiliates, but al-Qaeda's demise has been the proud boast of this president for some time. So if this is true. why risk embarrassment for the administration and the president by making something like this public now, and possibly burning a valuable intel source?

All you need to do is look at what else is happening right now.

As more and more revelations come out about the extent of the NSA's warrant-less spying, surveillance and data mining , the more questions are being asked and the more resistance to this is stiffening.And the Benghazi scandal has resurfaced, with a scoop by none other than CNN committing actual journalism by reporting that there were dozens of CIA operatives on the ground the night, and that they have not only been made to sign hardline non-disclosure agreements but have been prevented from testifying in front of Congress and that some have even been given new identities and hiden around the country to keep the American people from finding out what some of us knew all along - that this was an attempted  gunrunning operation that went wrong, collecting  Libyan arms from the local al-Qaeda affiliates that were  pilfered out of Khaddaffi's armories thanks to our president's clueless intervention there to ship to the Syrian rebels.

And its now been leaked that CNN is distancing itself from its own scoop after being threatened with loss of access to the White House.

Does this suggest anything to you? Like the Obama regime's time honored tactic of  'look, a squirrel' to take the spotlight off something even more potentially embarrassing and politically hazardous?

Either way, this is absolutely disgraceful. If there actually was intel about a specific attack, the White House had absolutely no business making it public and possibly burning an intel source.That's basic strategy. There was no need whatsoever to do so just to distract the American public from the swamp of political scandals this president and his administration are mired in.

If there wasn't one and this is a fabrication or merely some  chatter with no specifics, it's even worse. When nothing happens, it promotes a false sense of security that could lead to a lot more American  blood being spilled when a real warning is issued, either publicly or clandestinely to our embassies and assets.

Our New Al-Qaeda Allies Behead Catholic Bishop In Syria

(warning - this is an extremely disturbing and bloody video)

President Obama's new Syrian allies in the al-Qaeda group Jabhat al-Nusra beheaded a Catholic Bishop, François Murad. He was murdered on Sunday, June 23, in Gassanieh, in northern Syria, in the convent of the Custody of the Holy Land where he had taken refuge.

He and the two other unidentified Christians in this video were beheaded because they were accused of collaborating with the Assad regime, which could mean anything or absolutely nothing.

The religious motive behind the beheadings can be heard in the initial dialogue from the jihadis saying they are carrying out Allah's law - and the crowd cheering and screaming the old war cry against the infidel, 'Allahu Akbar' as the helpless victims are slowly decapitated with knives.

I put this video up for one reason - as disturbing as it is, the reaction of these people to these brutal murders needs to be seen to get an idea of what we're facing, just as we needed to know about the atrocities of the Nazis and the Japanese fascists to truly understand our enemies. So if you feel you can stomach this, I urge you to watch this video and think about it, especially when our political class wants to import these people into our countries and seeks to fund and arm them.

Look at how the crowd cheers this on, and how they greedily hold out their cell phones to catch every last squirm and cry of the victims for their own private jihadi videos.

And remember that the next time some idiot with multiculturalism on his mind tells you that Islam is a religion of peace and all cultures are equal.

Yes, there are peaceful Muslims, but Islam is not a peaceful religion.

Even more disgraceful is the Church's attitude. Instead of taking a clear stand and becoming a moral leader in this war, they are appeasing and accommodating radical Islam at every turn.

-Selah-

Obama Begins 'Negotiating' US Surrender To The Taliban

The US has confirmed statements by Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid that peace talks will begin between the US negotiators and a Taliban delegation in Doha, Qatar on terms for ending the war in Afghanistan and a U.S. withdrawal.

The talks have been authorized by the Taliban's leader Mohammad Omar.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government is being excluded from the talks, but he's insisting that his High Peace Council will follow up with its own talks a few days later,provided his preconditions are met. The preconditions?

“The conditions are: The talks, having begun in Qatar, must immediately move to Afghanistan,” Karzai said. “Second, the talks must bring about an end of the violence in Afghanistan, and third, the talks should not become a tool for any third-party country” to pursue its own interests in Afghanistan.

Since the Taliban are pretty open about calling Karzai 'a U.S. stooge' and refusing to deal with him, we'll see how that ends up.

The only U.S. conditions are almost exactly what I predicted when I first wrote about the U.S. working with Qatar to open a Taliban office six months ago:

Essentially, the scenario will likely go something like this. In exchange for releasing captured terrorists from Gitmo into Taliban custody, recognizing the Taliban as legitimate political rulers in Afghanistan plus a suitable baksheesh in the form of some more aid money, we will be allowed to retreat more or less gracefully and Mullah Omar and the Taliban will mouth some platitudes about disengaging from al-Qaeda.

Or to quote the New Speak spouted by the Obama Administration, two statements 'opposing international terrorism launched from Afghan soil and supporting the peace process:'

In addition to agreeing to meet with Afghans, the statement issued by Mujahid said “the Islamic Emirate does not want to inflict harm to other countries from its soil” and wants “good relations” with all countries. It said Taliban objectives for the office included “to support a political and peaceful solution.”

A U.S. official said the statement fulfilled the requirements. The Taliban also repeated its demand for an end to the foreign “occupation” of Afghanistan and its goal of establishing “an independent Islamic system” there.

Keep in mind that people like the Taliban don't regard the activities of people like Hamas, al-Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba or Hezbollah to be terrorism in the slightest. And at any rate, any agreements made with an infidel are meaningless anyway as far as the Taliban is concerned.

And that wonderful Islamic system? Pure 7th century, especially when dealing with uppity women:

 





















Yes, the Taliban want to be back in power, want all foreign troops out of the country and want all of their detainees released. They will undoubtedly get everything they want and more.

Those detainees include about 60 prisoners the United States still holds in Afghanistan and five being held at Guantanamo Bay. Most of the rest of the Taliban killers with American blood on their hands were already turned over to the Afghan government by the Obama Administration, so the remainder include some real hard cases.

We might even see a couple of celebrity detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed go free as well, perhaps being turned over to Qatari custody for awhile before being quietly released. The Qataris, who have acted as the Taliban's lawyer throughout the negotiations are a likely choice for role of halfway house in these situations.

Karzai and other members of the Afghan elite who've grown wealthy during our occupation will leave once the Taliban takes over. President Obama never liked him anyway - he was 'Bush's man' - and once President Obama failed in a clumsy attempt to muscle him out of power when he first took over, he ceased working with us or trusting us.

Those Afghan security forces we spent billions to equip and train? Some of the officers, especially the more high ranking ones who were in a position to steal and put a little bit away will likewise leave. The rest will serve Afghanistan's new masters. Like the other Muslim armies we built in Iraq and 'Palestine', the Afghan forces would happily turn those shiny new M-16s we gave them on us if the occasion arose.

This is how Obama's War ends, the Good War, the one he accused President Bush of 'dropping the ball on', the one Obama in his arrogance insisted he was going to win after his overblown campaign rhetoric.

Instead, after a dysfunctional adventure that saw us doubling down on the original folly with no clear goals and with Rules of Engagements that handcuffed our warriors and put them in harm's way to no purpose, we're bugging out. Again, from the original piece I wrote last January:

In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, we have emboldened our enemies, spent blood and treasure and accomplished nothing of real permanence, although it pains me to say it because I have a very real knowledge of the sacrifices involved.

Instead of handling AfPak the way it should have been handled from the very beginning, we blundered in without any clear strategic goals or direction. Once our enemies and for that matter, those whom were willing to be our friends realized our leaders had no idea what they were doing and weren't serious about real victory, the rest was merely a matter of time.

This is a national disgrace unworthy of the sacrifices of the brave men and women we sent there.

McCain Says We Can Identify The 'Good Guys' In Syria, After He Unwittingly Meets With Jihadi Terrorists

This would be hysterically funny if it wasn't for the fact that Senator McCain is pushing for us to supply US funds, arms and even boots on the ground to support an al-Qaeda and Islamist takeover of Syria. Senator John McCain claim's that we can identify who the jihadis are, except...while visiting Syria this week he posed in a photo with rebels who kidnapped 11 Lebanese Shi’ite pilgrims…:

“A number of the Syrians who greeted Senator McCain upon his arrival in Syria asked to take pictures with him, and as always, the Senator complied,” Rogers said. “If the individual photographed with Senator McCain is in fact Mohamed Nour, that is regrettable. But it would be ludicrous to suggest that the Senator in any way condones the kidnapping of Lebanese Shia pilgrims or has any communication with those responsible. Senator McCain condemns such heinous actions in the strongest possible terms,” Rogers said.

Well, yes. But the point is that he wants us to spend American blood and treasure to support replacing a Shi'ite theocracy's client state with an Islamist, salafist dictatorship and even Senator McCain, who claims to be well informed is clueless when it comes to telling who's 'moderate' and who isn't.

The arguments he makes above for an American intervention are ludicrous.

At 2:40, he says that we can “handle this". In other words, we ought to get involved regardless of whether it makes sense or not, but just to show we can. If Russian missiles shoot down out planes, then what? And if we send in the 1,800 American Marines based on Jordan's border with Syria in to fight Hezbollah, Assad's troop and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, is Senator John McCain going to guarantee that they don't go in handcuffed by the same ridiculous Rules of Engagement they're saddled with if Afghanistan that's gotten so many of them killed and maimed?

With this particular Islamist friendly commander-in-chief in the White House?

McCain has been sitting in the Senate while Christians have been ethnically cleansed from Iraq and hasn't said word one about it to my knowledge, let alone trying to do anything about it. Ditto with what's going on with the Copts in Egypt. Does he have any bold plan to stop the ethnic cleansing and massacre of Alawites, Druse and Christians in Syria when his Jihadi friends take over? Is it really worth us fighting a war to add another piece to the emerging Islamist caliphate? As bad as the status quo is, how does it help our interests to spend blood and treasure to change it? It doesn't, not in the least.

McCain is even more farcical when he tries to talk knowledgeably about how we can 'weed out' jihadis from the rebels. He says there are only 7,000 fighters in the openly al-Qaeda faction al-Nousrah (more like 10,000 according to my sources) and that we can avoid the arms and money falling into their hands. How, exactly? If you give an anti-tank weapon to someone, what guarantee do you have he won't sell it or transfer it? None whatsoever in those conditions. Has he not been paying attention to what's going on in AfPak?

Also, he seems to forget that the vast majority of the fighters actively involved are jihadis and Islamists even if they’re not in al-Nusra. Even Libyan arms dealers selling off the arms they got from Khaddaffi's armories thanks to President Obama's intervention couldn't care less about the distinction:

[F]irst, the Libyans wanted to know who the Syrians were exactly and which rebel group each represented. There was a representative from Jund-Allah (Soldiers of God), which operates in and around the capital Damascus; a commander from Ansar al-din (Supporters of the Faith) in Lattakia province; and most significantly a man who is one of the seven members of the political office of Jabhat Syria il-Islamiya (the Syrian Islamic Front), one of the country’s largest, most cohesive and strongest Islamist militant coalitions, led by the Salafi Ahrar al-Sham Brigades. (The extremist al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra is not part of this alliance.) Coffee was ordered — Turkish coffee for the Syrians and cappuccinos for the Libyans. The Libyan from Zintan, wearing faded black jeans, a cream-colored shirt stretched taut across his waist and a gray sports jacket, did most of the talking. He fingered black worry beads, while his colleague from Benghazi listened. His first question was about whether the men around him recognized the FSA and its 14 provincial military councils. All said they did not. “Their commanders are failures, they are corrupt,” the Syrian from Ansar al-Din said. “There is not even one battalion, in all honesty, that they can control,” the Islamic Front representative said. “These people [senior defectors in the FSA like the one the Libyans had met the night before] were placed as facades, in the beginning, as media personalities, but as real commanders on the ground? Not at all.”

The Free Syrian Army, which is also dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood is commanded by General Idris, who McCain met with in Syria a few days ago and who he’s pushing as some kind of moderate 'freedom fighter'. In reality, the FSA is rapidly merging with jihadis like al-Nousrah and Idris is just a figurehead, a convenient mask.

McCain actually says, at 4:40 that the rebels “are trying to achieve the same thing that we have shed American blood and treasure for for well over 200 years.” I wasn't aware that America made a practice of fighting for sharia rule, the suppression of women,the murder and ethnic cleansing of Jews and Christians or Islamist theocratic fascism. But then John McCain is a sitting Senator, and he undoubtedly knows better than me. Talk about calling someone else 'wacko birds'...!

 Senator McCain, it's past time for you to resign. Please, for your own sake and ours. Just go. (H/t Allah,via Ace's place)

Obama Plans To Send US Forces To Fight For Al-Qaeda and The Muslim Brotherhood In Syria

This is an absolute disgrace.

President Obama is preparing to commit US forces to put yet another radical Islamist regime in power in Syria.

He has ordered our Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare a plan for American aircraft to enter the Syrian civil war on behalf of the al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood rebels and enforce a no fly zone.

As for boots on the ground, as I revealed earlier we have 1,800 Marines off the USS Kearsage who landed at the Israeli port of Eilat ten days ago and are now deployed on the Syrian/Jordanian border. They'll undoubtedly be put into combat against Hezbollah, Assad's forces and Iran's Revolutionary Guard with the same sort of ridiculous rules of engagement that are getting our troops killed and maimed in Afghanistan.

Yes..we're now going to be going to go to war to aid al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.

And ironically, you can rest assured the usual suspects will accuse Obama of 'going to war for Israel' when the last thing Israel wants on their borders is another genocidal jihadist regime armed with US weapons.

Aside from spending US blood and treasure in putting yet another Islamist regime in power, this wag the dog adventure also provides a needed distraction away from the swarm of scandals surrounding the White House.

And if its successful Syria will become yet another cog in the Islamist Caliphate Hassan al-Banna dreamed about when he formed the Muslim Brotherhood back in the 1920's.

President Barack Hussein Obama is handing it to them on a silver platter.

Syria: EU Ends Arms Embargo On Rebels, Russia To Ship S-300s To Assad In Response

 

The Syrian civil war is about to heat up some more  as the outside players get involved.

According to my sources, the Israelis had just about convinced Vladimir Putin to delay shipment of Russia's sophisticated S-300 anti-air missile systems to the Assad regime in Syria when the EU surprised the Russians this morning with an announcement that they were ending a previous arms embargo on the al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood rebels and extending economic sanctions on Syrian leader Basher Assad's government.

Within hours, the Russians announced they were shipping the S-300s to Basher Assad.

To show you how feckless and unthought out  this was, here's a sample of Brit rhetoric from al-Guardian:


Downing Street has refused to say whether MPs will be given the chance to vote on any decision to send arms to Syria following the EU's decision to lift its arms embargo, the Guardian's Andrew Sparrow reports:

The prime minister's spokesman stressed that the government had not taken a decision to arm the Syrian opposition in the light of the EU decision, and indicated that Downing Street hoped that the threat of arms being supplied would persuade the Syrian government to enter negotiations.

Asked whether Britain would arm the rebels, the spokesman said: "The prime minister's view is that it is right that we have the flexibility to respond if [Bashar al-Assad's] regime refused to negotiate. What we are doing is sending a signal, loud and clear, to the regime."
Syrian peace talks are planned for Geneva next month and the spokesman indicated that Britain wanted the Syrian government to participate.

"What we need is a transitional regime [for Syria] that is supported by both sides, including the [opposition] Syrian National Coalition," said the spokesman. As part of that process, Assad would have to go.

As for France, French foreign ministry spokesman Philippe Lalliot said France could potentially send arms to the opposition before the embargo expires on Aug. 1, but said 'it had no immediate plans to do so.'

So...they're not actually shipping arms to the Syrian rebels, but they've announced they might..and that somehow is going to facilitate peace talks, which the rebels are against anyway! You simply couldn't be more clueless.

Meanwhile, Putin isn't waffling. He's responding to this lukewarm nonsense as a red line and is shipping the Syrian regime the tools they'll need to prevent America, the UK or anyone else from establishing a no fly zone like they did in Libya.

As for the Israelis, they're not at all happy at the likes of the EU wrecking what was some carefully worked out diplomacy on their part. Unlike the David Camerons,John McCains and other useful idiots, they understand that the rebels are dominated by al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood and are no friends to the West.

But on the other hand, they don;t want the Syrians (and by extension, Hezbollah) getting the S-300s. So they issued a clear warning to Putin that if the S-300s are shipped top Syria, they're going to take action. And they're definitely not kidding.

The last time Putin shipped S-300s into the Middle East, the Russian Ship Arctic Sea was mysteriously hijacked en route to Iran, the S-300s were removed and disappeared and it was Israel's Mossad who told the Russians where they could find their ship, which had been boarded by a mysterious group of men posing as narcotics agents off the coast of Sweden some days earlier.

I'd be very surprised if the Mossad wasn't likewise watching any current shipment of S-300s like hawks.

Clueless Sen. John McCain Meets With Syrian Jihadis

 

I've never questioned Senator John McCain's personal coverage, but for quite some time I've questioned his common sense.

Senator McCain crossed over into Syria from the Turkish border today to meet with General Salem Idris, the leader of Syria's Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army (SMC).

The meeting likely took place in the area around Azaz, Syria, which is just south of the Turkish border crossing at Kilis and the only area in the vicinity partially under the control of the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

As I've revealed before,the Free Syrian Army and Al Nusrah, the two main armed factions of the Syrian resistance are jihadist groups run by the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda. Al-Nusrah in particular is nothing more than al-Qaeda's franchise in Syraia, and is actually an officially designated terrorist group by our State Department.The SMC has very little to do with the actual leadership of the Free Syrian Army and General Idris is just a figurehead  who has no real power, because almost all of the other members of the council are leaders of radical Islamist rebel groups whose only use for the SMC and General Idris to use them as a front to acquire weapons from the west and western intervention to take out Assad.

I wonder if Senator McCain has the least clue about that?

“What we want from the U.S. government is to take the decision to support the Syrian revolution with weapons and ammunition, anti-tank missiles and anti-aircraft weapons,” Idris said. “Of course we want a no-fly zone and we ask for strategic strikes against Hezbollah both inside Lebanon and inside Syria.”

Of course they do. And General Idris and his friends will tell gullible ferenghis like McCain anything he wants to hear to get it.

Remember when Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were telling President Obama about how they were going to have a democratic regime that would respect religious freedoms for non-Muslims and human rights?

That pledge evaporated as soon as Mubarak was ousted with President Obama's assistance and the Brotherhood had control of the government.

Once we start sending the Syrian rebels arms, there is absolutely no way we can 'vet' who's getting them. General Idris and his front group have few if any boots on the ground and will have to send those arms to the jihadis in the Free Syrian Army and al-Nusrah. Rest assured that we will be arming jihadists who are the enemies of America and the West.

As for Senator McCain...I think it's time he retired.