Barack Obama may not have come into office pledging to get the U.S. out of Afghanistan, but he did pledge one thing: to close the Bush-era prison at Guantánamo within a year. That couldn’t have been clearer. And as I wrote back then, it was also a reasonable basis on which to judge whether a …
Continue reading “Plotting Terrorism”
“This was a war of Obama’s choosing. This is not something the United States has actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.” Strictly speaking, Republican Party Chair Michael Steele was way off base when he made this remark at a closed-door meeting of party contributors in Connecticut. For the war began in 2001 under George …
Continue reading “The Real Sin of Michael Steele”
Chris Norby is a freshman Republican state legislator from Orange County, Calif. He previously served on the Orange County Board of Supervisors and as mayor of Fullerton. “If he [Obama] is such a student of history, has he not understood the one thing you don’t do is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? Everyone …
Continue reading “Steele Speaks the Truth”
Insisting that the bond between their two nations was “unbreakable,” U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emerged all smiles from their long-awaited White House meeting Tuesday. Speaking before reporters, the two men, whose last encounter in March appeared to confirm a crisis in bilateral ties, lavished compliments on each other. “[T]he …
Continue reading “Obama and Netanyahu All Smiles”
Army Specialist Bradley Manning, the intelligence analyst who leaked the “Collateral Murder” video of US pilots shooting down Iraqi civilians (including two Reuters photographers) in cold blood, is finally being charged. For revealing to the American people the truth about what’s going on in Iraq, Manning faces horrendous legal consequences – nearly sixty years in …
Continue reading “Bradley Manning, American Patriot”
The follow-up investigation of a botched Special Operations Forces (SOF) raid in Gardez Feb. 12 that killed two government officials and three women, ordered by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal April 5, was ostensibly aimed at reconciling divergent Afghan and U.S. accounts of what happened during and after the raid. That implied that the U.S. investigators …
Continue reading “McChrystal Probe of Afghan Killings Excluded Key Eyewitnesses”
Updated at 9:29 p.m. EDT, July 6, 2010
At least 11 Iraqis were killed and 48 were wounded in attacks that focused on pilgrims traveling through Baghdad for an important Shi’ite observance. Reports were scarce from other regions of the country, perhaps due to tightening security ahead of the holiday. There were several other stories mostly regarding foreign relations, but even the plight of Iraqi widows made the headlines.
“What, Me McWorry?” noted that by replacing Stan McChrystal with David Petraeus, Barack Obama has bought the Pentagon’s Long War agenda lock, stock, and pork barrel. “Helmand in a Handbag” discusses why it seems that our national security team is losing its woebegone wars on purpose. Gen. Stanley McChrystal had ample reasons for wanting to …
Continue reading “Helmand in a Handbag”
PESHAWAR, Pakistan – The number of Afghan refugees in Pakistan who will return to their homeland this year is expected to be double the 2009 figure, but it’s not only a longing for their native soil that is fueling the Afghans’ departure. Many of the refugees say Pakistanis – officials and local folk alike – …
Continue reading “Afghans Find Their Welcome Running Out in Pakistan”
As the Barack Obama administration continues to roll out justifications for its policy of targeting U.S. citizens and others thought to be attacking U.S. troops, legal and national security experts are pondering a central question: What if there’s a mistake and the wrong person gets killed? There are no do-overs. It is a death sentence. …
Continue reading “Death by Remote” 
