Who could of seen this coming eh? Surely not Obama:

Egyptian election results present ‘nightmare scenario’

Naw, the only thing Obama saw coming was the huge political benefits in portraying himself as the man who backs the little people as they fight oppression.

One little flaw in that thinking. He was backing those who wanted to ensure fanatical Islam ruled once more.

Egypt looks set for weeks of tension and uncertainty after the first round of its landmark presidential election produced a runoff between the candidate backed by the powerful Muslim Brotherhood and a former general who is seen as a hangover from the regime of the deposed Hosni Mubarak.

In what many described as a “nightmare scenario” that will mean a polarised and possibly violent second round, Mohammed Morsi of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party polled around 26% in the two-day first round. Ahmed Shafiq, Mubarak’s last prime minister, came second with 23% when 90% of the votes had been counted.

Amr Moussa, the former head of the Arab League, who tried to capture the centre ground, was knocked out. Late on Friday there was only a slight chance that the final picture would change when votes for Cairo and Giza were in.

Turnout was said to be around 40% of the 51m-strong electorate. Official results are yet to be published but a combination of exit polls, centrally collected data and reporting by the candidates appeared to confirm a dramatic runoff that many supporters of the revolution consider a catastrophic outcome. “It feels as if the revolution never took place,” lamented a despondent George Ishaq, a founder of the leftwing Kifaya Party.

“The Brotherhood are despotic and fanatical and Shafiq is the choice of Mubarak. It is a very bad result. The revolution is not part of this contest”

Shocking! I mean Hillary assured us that Islamic Democracy would cause western values to spring forth…and here we are. The Muslim Brotherhood or a Mubarak General.

This vainglorious administration is so self-absorbed that it refuses to keep secrets if it can in any way benefit politically from them regardless of the cost. Obama is so bent on preening he seems not to have any concern at all for those who actually make the sacrifices. First Joe Biden outs SEAL Team 6 as those who participated in the Bin Laden raid and then Leon Panetta outed the doctor who helped provide intelligence for the raid. That was catastrophic for the doctor.

First he and his wife were fired for engaging in a “fake” vaccination program.

In a notification issued in this regard, the health department said that Afridi’s services were terminated under the Efficiency and Disciplinary (E and D) Rules for being involved in anti-state activities, the Express Tribune reports.

Earlier, 15 lady health workers who were part of the alleged fake vaccination campaign, were were also sacked from their jobs.

It was reported earlier this month that Dr Afridi was dismissed from his post, along with four LHVs.

Earlier, Dr. Shakeel’s wife, Imrana Ghafoor was also removed from her post. She was the principal of the Government Girls Degree College in Darra Adam Khel.

Now he has been jailed for 33 years for treason:

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A Pakistani surgeon recruited by the CIA to help find Osama bin Laden was on Wednesday sentenced to 33 years in prison for treason, officials said.

Shakil Afridi, who was sacked as a government doctor two months ago, was found guilty under the tribal justice system of Khyber district, part of Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal belt.

In addition to his jail sentence, he was fined 320,000 rupees ($3,500). The doctor had worked for years as a surgeon in lawless Khyber, part of the Taliban and al-Qaeda infested tribal belt.

Afridi was not present in the court and not given a chance to defend himself, officials said. Under the tribal system, he would not have had access to a lawyer.

“He has been sentenced for 33 years on treason charges and has been moved to Peshawar central jail after the verdict was announced by the local court,” said Mohammad Siddiq, spokesman for the administrative head of Khyber.

In January, U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta confirmed Afridi had worked for U.S. intelligence by collecting DNA to verify bin Laden’s presence and expressed concern about Pakistan’s treatment of him.

He was arrested shortly after U.S. troops killed the al-Qaeda leader on May 2, 2011 and in October a Pakistani commission recommended that he be tried for treason.

Golly, given this event who wouldn’t want to want to come to the aid of America? The left has not had word of complaint- not about this nor about the unprecedented access to classified material offered to filmmakers in the process of Obama idolatry.

Contrast that to the phony kerfuffle over Valerie Plame and the scorn wrongly heaped upon George Bush.

Do you recall a time, a few years back, when the media wouldn’t shut up about a supposed outing of an agent? Yup, the left and the media were pissed.

I bet you could just imagine the firestorm of coverage that would result if instead of a former Secretary of State leaking a name it was our President….right?

Guess not:

Just a week ago the establishment media was aflutter with news that a CIA double-agent had thwarted a new type of underwear bomb attack targeting U.S. flights in a plot devised by al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula.

But as the week progressed, a developing bombshell story got buried under President Obama’s gay marriage announcement. Not only is the supposed CIA asset not a CIA asset at all, but the entire operation was exposed prematurely and the double-agent’s life was immediately threatened by an intelligence leak that very well may have come out of the White House for political gain.

As the story broke, the establishment media was more than happy to attribute the intelligence coup to the CIA and the Obama administration, describing the mole as a “CIA informant.”

It turns out that wasn’t true. The double-agent hadn’t been recruited and placed by the CIA, but by British intelligence, who also managed the operation. In fact, the Americans had only recently been made aware of the joint British-Saudi effort.

The leaks about the operation from the American side have infuriated British intelligence officials, who had hoped to continue the operation. The leaks not only scuttled the mission but put the life of the asset in jeopardy. Even CIA officials, joining their MI5 and MI6 counterparts, were describing the leaks as “despicable,” attributing them to the Obama administration.

As the stillborn investigation into the leaks continues (stillborn, because if the leaks are in fact traced to the White House, there will be no repercussions), the zeal with which the establishment media trumpeted the supposed CIA coup won’t likely be surpassed by the more important story of how the Obama administration attempted to score political points at the expense of one of the most important intelligence operations since 9/11.

Wait, for “political gain?”

Wasn’t the left and the media very upset that non-spy Valerie Plame’s name was uttered by Richard Armitage for “political gain?”

Weren’t there hearings and trials and all that? Or was I just imagining that?

And here we had a Yemeni deep cover agent that we may get once in a generation:

One US official has noted that “this operation could have gone on for some time … when it was cut off by a leak”. Even once the agent turned up in Saudi Arabia, it was clear that his intelligence was helping to target a spate of crucial drone strikes within Yemen – including one that killed AQAP’s head of external operations, a man responsible for the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.

If the group learnt of their member’s defection from the media, who knows what countermeasures they took? How did that stymie further arrests or airstrikes? AQAP’s chief bomb-maker, Ibrahim Al-Asiri, might even have escaped as a result.

After all, the agent was reportedly evacuated from Yemen two weeks before the appointed date for his attack. He might have remained quietly operational for that entire period, contacting his colleagues and passing on their location. This leak appears to have frustrated a painstaking and risky operation, of the sort that cannot come around very often.

But the Obama administration deliberately scuttled that huge undercover operation, and put the life of a British agent in jeopardy to boot. For what? To boost his re-election hopes. This wasn’t some non-spy desk jockey at the CIA. This was someone who had infiltrated al-Qaeda for god’s sake!

But the MSM and the left are ignoring it.

At least one Democrat lawmaker isn’t

Senator Diane Fienstein:

“AQAP is the number-one threat to our country. … The leak really did endanger sources and methods, and the leak, I think, really has to be prosecuted.”

Congressman Peter King:

“This was more secret than any operation I’m familiar with — even more classified than bin Laden. … That’s why I’m saying the FBI should do a full and complete investigation, because this really is criminal in the literal sense of the word to leak out this type of sensitive, classified information on really almost unparalleled penetration of the enemy.”

Congressman Mike Rogers:

“This has been a damaging leak. We shouldn’t underestimate what really happened here. When you jeopardize our foreign-service liaison partners, any of them that may or may not have been involved, or you jeopardize the conclusion of wrapping up all of the people involved, that’s dangerous to our national security.”

Paging Patrick Fitzgerald….paging Patrick Fitzgerald

Exit thought….ya think they will make a movie about this?

Thomas Ricks quips,

But — it happened in your backyard, dude.

Or maybe even the frontyard?

To be fair, Pakistan has been instrumental in some of the successes we have enjoyed in the GWoT, such as the capture of AZ and KSM.

While arguments are being made regarding the value of kills over capture…there’s also something satisfying about “swifter” forms of justice that do not drag out for years and years at taxpayers’ expense, along with making a mockery of our justice system.

After almost 12 years since the bombing of the USS Cole, Fahd al Quso has finally breathed his last:

Quso was traveling in a car with at least two other AQAP operatives when the unmanned Predators or Reapers fired missiles at his car, an intelligence official told The Long War Journal. Three AQAP operatives are believed to have been killed in the strike, which occurred at nighttime.

Quso has been sheltered by the Awlaki tribe, the same tribe that sheltered US cleric and AQAP ideologue and operational commander Anwar al Awlaki, who was killed in a US drone strike in September 2011.

The wanted AQAP leader has been the target of at least one other US airstrike, in July 2011. A convoy transporting Quso in Abyan province was hit by US aircraft, killing eight AQAP fighters. Quso survived the strike.

Previously, Quso was rumored to have been killed in a US Predator airstrike in Pakistan in September 2010. In October 2010, US intelligence officials warned The Long War Journal that the US had been unable to confirm Quso’s death. Al Qaeda did not release a martyrdom statement announcing Quso’s death.

On Dec. 7, 2010, the US State Department added Quso to the list of specially designed global terrorists, and the chief of State’s Terrorist Designations Unit told The Long War Journal that the US did not believe reports that Quso had been killed. Nine days later, Quso was interviewed by Al Sharq al Awsat and expressed surprise that people thought he had been killed in Pakistan.

Quso is considered to be a senior AQAP leader. According to the State Dept.’s designation in December 2010, he leads an al Qaeda cell in Yemen, and “is connected to other designated AQAP senior leaders, including Anwar al Awlaki [a top ideologue and propagandist], Nasir al Wuhayshi [AQAP's leader], and Said Ali al Shihri [AQAP's deputy leader].” In May 2010, Quso appeared in an AQAP propaganda video and threatened to attack the US and its interests abroad, including embassies and warships.

Quso is wanted by the FBI for his role in the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen. The suicide attack on the warship killed 17 US sailors. Quso is also known to have provided funds to a key planner of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the US. Quso was detained by Yemeni security forces after the Sept. 11 attacks, but escaped from prison in 2003. He was later recaptured in 2004, but released again by the Yemeni government in 2007, and quickly rejoined al Qaeda in Yemen.

Additionally, Quso has been identified as one of the AQAP operatives involved in the failed airline bombing attack over Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009.

It was only just last month that President Obama approved an expansion of signature drone strikes, especially in regards to Yemen.

And seeing as how much of the progressive base isn’t happy with it, he must be doing something right, after all.

Every time I listen to Barack Obama describe how he repelled down a rope from a stealth helicopter on a dark Pakistani night and took down Osama Bin Laden I am reminded of the movie “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

Seldom has a story been more dishonestly spun than the one surrounding the death of Osama Bin Laden.

Barack Obama is celebrating the deathday of Obama Bin Laden with a party from himself. I caught a post over at Weekly Standard in which Dan Halper notes that the smirking Obama once again suggests that Mitt Romney would not have made the decision to kill Bin Laden. Obama is quoted as saying:

“I’d just recommend that everybody take a look at people’s previous statements in terms of whether they thought it was appropriate to go into Pakistan and to take out bin Laden,” Obama said, obviously taking a shot at Romney. “I assume that people meant what they said when they said it. And that’s been at least my practice. I said that I would go after bin Laden if we had a clear shot at him–and I did. If there are others who have said one thing and now suggest they would do something else, then I’d go ahead and let them explain it.”

But here’s the part that caught my eye:

“I’d just recommend that everybody take a look at people’s previous statements in terms of whether they thought it was appropriate to go into Pakistan and to take out bin Laden,”

As if going into Pakistan was his decision. Or his plan.

It wasn’t.

Going into Pakistan was George Bush’s decision, based on the advice of a CIA analyst named “John.”

While he was shepherding the hunt for bin Laden, John also was pushing to expand the Predator program, the agency’s use of unmanned airplanes to launch missiles at terrorists. The CIA largely confined those strikes to targets along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. But in late 2007 and early 2008, John said the CIA needed to carry out those attacks deeper inside Pakistan.

It was a risky move. Pakistan was an important but shaky ally. John’s analysts saw an increase in the number of Westerners training in Pakistani terrorist camps. John worried that those men would soon start showing up on U.S. soil.

“We’ve got to act,” John said, a former senior intelligence official recalls. “There’s no explaining inaction.”

John took the analysis to then CIA Director Michael Hayden, who agreed and took the recommendation to President George W. Bush. In the last months of the Bush administration, the CIA began striking deeper inside Pakistan.

Barack Obama adopted John’s and Bush’s plan. Then he co-opted it.

“John” persisted in the hunt for Bin Laden for a very long time. Then in 2007 a co-worker of John’s targeted “Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.”

All the while, John’s team was working the list of bin Laden leads. In 2007, a female colleague whom the AP has also agreed not to identify decided to zero in on a man known as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, a nom de guerre. Other terrorists had identified al-Kuwaiti as an important courier for al-Qaida’s upper echelon, and she believed that finding him might help lead to bin Laden.

“They had their teeth clenched on this and they weren’t going to let go,” McLaughlin said of John and his team. “This was an obsession.”

It took three years, but in August 2010, al-Kuwaiti turned up on a National Security Agency wiretap. The female analyst, who had studied journalism at a Big Ten university, tapped out a memo for John, “Closing in on Bin Laden Courier,” saying her team believed al-Kuwaiti was somewhere on the outskirts of Islamabad.

The intel used to find and kill Bin Laden came from a career CIA analyst- not from Barack Obama.

John and his team had guessed correctly, taking an intellectual risk based on incomplete information. It was a gamble that ended a decade of disappointment. Later, Champagne was uncorked back at the CIA, where those in the Counterterrorism Center who had targeted bin Laden for so long celebrated. John’s team reveled in the moment.

And it has been revealed that the decision to undertake the raid was not Obama’s decision either. That belonged to Admiral William McRaven.

It’s been almost a year since President Obama’s leadership and foreign policy bona fides were allegedly established by the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. A campaign film narrated by Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks tells of the president’s alleged solitary, agonizing decision.

With apologies to Vice President Biden, maybe President Obama doesn’t carry quite as big a stick as Joe would lead us to believe.

As reported by Big Peace, Time magazine has obtained a memo written by Leon Panetta, then-director of the Central Intelligence Agency and now-Secretary of Defense, that says “operational decision-making and control” was really in the hands of William McRaven, a three-star admiral and former Navy SEAL.

“The timing, operational decision-making and control are in Adm. McRaven’s hands,” the memo says. “The approval is provided on the risk profile presented to the president. Any additional risks are to be brought back to the president for his consideration. The direction is to go in and get bin Laden and, if he is not there, to get out.”

In other words, it was McRaven’s call to pull the trigger or not on the raid.

Now back to that Obama assertion:

President Obama’s campaign has highlighted a 2007 quote from Mitt Romney, who suggested that the fight against terrorism was bigger than bin Laden, and that it wasn’t important to “move heaven and earth” to catch him.

Curiously, back in 2009 Obama held pretty much the same position:

Obama: Killing bin Laden may not be essential

In a late Wednesday interview with CBS News, Obama signaled a more measured approach to catching the ever-elusive bin Laden, refusing to deliver any “dead or alive” ultimatums.

“I think that we have to so weaken his infrastructure that, whether he is technically alive or not, he is so pinned down that he cannot function,” Obama said.

“My preference obviously would be to capture or kill him. But if we have so tightened the noose that he’s in a cave somewhere and can’t even communicate with his operatives, then we will meet our goal of protecting America.”

It’s no stretch to assert that it was Barack Obama who in 2009 co-opted Romney’s 2007 position on the capture of Barack Obama. It is completely disingenuous for Obama to suggest otherwise because he was the beneficiary of the decisions made by George Bush and “John’s” detective work. You’d never know that by listening to Obama. Contrast the braggadocio of Obama

“I directed Leon Pannetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority”

“I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden”

“I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden”

“I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action and authorized an operation to get Usama bin Laden and bring him to justice”

“Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad Pakistan”

“I have made clear, just as President Bush did shortly after 9/11, that our war is not against Islam; bin Laden was not a Muslim leader”

to the quiet and classy reserve of George Bush describing the capture of Saddam Hussein:

The success of yesterday’s mission is a tribute to our men and women now serving in Iraq. The operation was based on the superb work of intelligence analysts who found the dictator’s footprints in a vast country. The operation was carried out with skill and precision by a brave fighting force. Our servicemen and women and our coalition allies have faced many dangers in the hunt for members of the fallen regime, and in their effort to bring hope and freedom to the Iraqi people. Their work continues, and so do the risks. Today, on behalf of the nation, I thank the members of our Armed Forces and I congratulate ‘em.

Barack Obama did not decide to take the war into Pakistan. Obama did not decide to send drones deeper into Pakistan. Obama did not find Bin Laden. Obama did not pull the trigger on the raid. What you could bet your life on is that had the mission failed McRaven would have been thrown under the bus and Obama would have said “You know, this was not our plan, per se.” What Obama did do was take credit for it all.

His behavior is so offensive that he has blasted by John McCain and the SEALS. Even Arianna Huffington has called Obama’s ad “despicable.”

This morning on Fox News the CIA interrogator who over saw the CIA EIT program (and who personally briefed Nancy Pelosi) said that the interrogating Abu Zubaydah gave them a rather important piece of information- that Osama Bin Laden was communicating with the outside world through one person- the courier.

Barack Obama has called waterboarding torture and sought to prosecute those who carried out the EIT’s all the while being the beneficiary today of the information gained from those techniques.

Barack Obama is full of sh*t. He is a miserable low life.

But we can’t leave without revisiting the only truth Ted Kennedy ever uttered:

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are few realists who will argue that the MSM isn’t functioning as a propaganda bureau for Obama. There are a few operatives for the Left who complain with righteous indignation that media is in the “tank” for the GOP, but no one in touch with reality takes this outlandish diversion seriously. Most people are intuitive enough to recognize blatant dishonesty, especially when the subject matter requires the reader/viewer to ignore common sense to accept the premise of the deception.

Vogue is the medium, Asma al-Assad (wife of the Syria’s hereditary dictator for life) is the subject, and deception is the game, but deception for the sake of deception is little more than the musings of a pathological liar. No indeed, our propagandists are not pathological liars, they have definitive purposes to justify their lies and deceit.

To understand the nuances, we must travel back in time to the period leading up to the Islamic Spring of 2011. When Americans were asking why our president only backed certain Islamic Fundamentalists in their bids for freedom and seemed to ignore secular struggles, like those by students in Iran and Syria. It was as if he had a secret playbook and would only use the considerable leverage of America when we could help those closely aligned with our enemies, like the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is times like this that fluff rags like Vogue can gin up support for the president’s peculiar partisan support of radical Islamic Fundamentalists by portraying a murderous dictator’s wife as a beautiful reformer and as a positive influence on the bloody henchman that is her husband. Unfortunately, propaganda can often be exposed, even in innocuous articles like “A Rose In The Desert.”

“Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic – the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies,” writes Joan Juliet Buck, of Syria’s first lady, for her introduction of Asma in the fluff article of the type for which Vogue is well known and respected. She describes her “energetic grace” and stylish shoes. Ms Buck tends to get carried away with her flowery penmanship:

“The 35-year-old first lady’s central mission is to change the mind-set of six million Syrians under eighteen, encourage them to engage in what she calls ‘active citizenship.’ ”

While writing the glowing and meaningless report, Buck never thought to do independent research. Journalism is not part of her mission, her mission is to provide covering for Obama and his exposed ass in the wind. If she must write believable prose that dresses tyranny up as a fashion statement, she will do it; otherwise, her role in the propaganda industry becomes vulnerable.

Unfortunately, Buck’s propaganda appeared on news stands as Syrians took to the streets to demonstrate against the tyranny that Buck tried so desperately to mask for her president. Unfortunately, the blood splatter from 9,000 victims of Assad’s stained the pages of Vogue and the face of Ms Buck.

First Lady Asma made no attempts to mask her priorities or her contempt for young people seeking “active citizenship,” for while her young people were being slaughtered in the streets by her husband’s goons, Asma continued to shop online, according to leaked emails, for designer shoes and jewelry from boutiques in Paris and London, but Ms Buck did mention Asma’s keen sense of fashion and when you are married to Syria’s hereditary president for life, you must look your best, especially when the blood of martyrs is flowing in the streets.

Oh the article caused many people, who, like the author, peruse magazine covers in grocery checkout lanes, to gasp in disbelief when the March 2011 Vogue magazine featured Asma. However, Vogue had the presence of mind to make the glowing propaganda that had turned sour disappear. Oh, the printed page is history, but the cyber ink is no longer in existence. There were 3,200 words of cyber ink, and now there are none. The article and its CTPA (covering the president’s ass) motive has been scrubbed from Vogue’s website. Obviously, the article will be around a long time despite the hypocrisy and deception of Vogue.

Propaganda seems to be a benign enterprise; especially, when you are promoting and supporting your “Gift from God” (Nancy Pelosi quote), but there are often unintended consequences for writing lies and deception. Ms Buck and Conde Nash, the author and owner of Vogue, have just experienced what it is like to be humiliated when your lies and deceptions are exposed.

Ms Buck is now saying it was “horrifying” to be near the Assads and her biggest regret is that Vogue asked her to cover the story. Is her regret a result of being exposed as a fraud or an honest appraisal. Since honesty and integrity are compromised from the onset of this debacle, we may safely assume Ms Buck is horrified at the thought of being exposed as a liar.

Still the world is left to ponder why President Obama allows the wholesale slaughter of secular dissidents with western style philosophies of freedom, but not dissidents who are Islamic Fundamentalists. Sadly, propaganda never uses the truth, unless it benefits the purpose of the promotion; consequently, it is hard to judge the truth from the lies. Therefore, by applying simple logic, none of the product of the MSM media can be judged as being factual or legitimate.

Epilogue: Apparently the Assads liked the article, they are the ones who have chosen to preserve it for prosperity, oh the irony of failed propaganda.

Well….dead enemy.

Like Joe Darby (of Abu Ghraib fame), an anonymous soldier took 18 sensitive photos and “leaked” them to the press. Specifically, to the LA Times.

The photos have emerged at a particularly sensitive moment for U.S.-Afghan relations. In January, a video appeared on the Internet showing four U.S. Marines urinating on Afghan corpses. In February, the inadvertent burning of copies of the Koran at a U.S. base triggered riots that left 30 dead and led to the deaths of six Americans. In March, a U.S. Army sergeant went on a nighttime shooting rampage in two Afghan villages, killing 17.

The soldier who provided The Times with a series of 18 photos of soldiers posing with corpses did so on condition of anonymity. He served in Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne’s 4th Brigade Combat Team from Ft. Bragg, N.C. He said the photos point to a breakdown in leadership and discipline that he believed compromised the safety of the troops.

The only comment I want to make here is to question whether or not this anonymous “whistleblower” bothered to bring attention to these photos by first going through the proper chain of command. What compelled him to give these 2-yr old photos over to the Los Angeles Times? And why now?

Actually, it doesn’t seem that the soldier was offended by these photos having been taken (which violates Army standards). He wasn’t motivated by a belief that these photos were wrong to take. Apparently he’s using them to draw attention to something else.

It would seem that personal security concerns are allegedly his motive, 2010 being a tough year for his brigade:

He expressed the hope that publication would help ensure that alleged security shortcomings at two U.S. bases in Afghanistan in 2010 were not repeated. The brigade, under new command but with some of the same paratroopers who served in 2010, began another tour in Afghanistan in February.

U.S. military officials asked The Times not to publish any of the pictures.

~~~

The soldier who provided the photos, and two other former members of the battalion, said in separate interviews that they and others had complained of inadequate security at the two bases.

And so by making these photos public, security for his brigade will improve…how?! How does that correlate? The photos are 2 yrs old and the brigade itself is under new leadership. Yet he feels that these photos will expose “a breakdown in leadership and discipline that he believed compromised the safety of the troops.” Unless what results is our immediate withdrawal and surrender from Afghanistan, does anyone believe public attention to this will increase the security of our troops?

Times Editor Davan Maharaj explains why he denied the request of the military not to publish any of the photos:

“After careful consideration, we decided that publishing a small but representative selection of the photos would fulfill our obligation to readers to report vigorously and impartially on all aspects of the American mission in Afghanistan, including the allegation that the images reflect a breakdown in unit discipline that was endangering U.S. troops.”

And I’m sure they weighed in the potential consequences of whether or not publishing these photos might not be used for propaganda purposes, potentially further endangering U.S. and NATO troops. Surely it wasn’t for macabre sensationalism to sell papers.

Why not simply tell the soldiers’ stories about security inadequacies and personal losses without the publishing of these photos?

Photo: Soldiers from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division, along with Afghan police, pose with the mangled corpse of a suicide bomber. The Army says such photos are a violation of military standards and has launched a criminal investigation.

Soldiers have always done macabre things, along with displaying gallows humor to cope: Trophy body-part collecting, photos with the gruesome, etc. And given that these guys lost about 35 in their brigade in 2010 with 23 from suicide bombers, taking a photo with a failed suicide bomber is a rather tame reaction. Should we demand a higher standard of our soldiers? Certainly, the rest of the world always seems to be holding our soldiers to a tighter microscope.

The soldiers might have used bad judgment in defying Army standards by taking the photos; really poor judgment in circulating them around. The soldier who wanted to make a statement exercised even worse judgment in handing the photos over to the LATimes. But worse than all this? The LATimes going ahead and publishing a couple of them.

WaPo:

The 18 photographs were taken in 2010 in Zabul province by soldiers from the 82nd Airborne’s 4th Brigade Combat Team, the newspaper reported. Although the pictures were dated, the fresh disclosure of misbehavior extends a string of recent incidents in which U.S. troops have disrespected the dead, allegedly killed Afghan civilians and desecrated the Koran.

U.S. officials, concerned that the cumulative impact will further alienate an Afghan public already weary of foreign military occupation,

The Afghan public aren’t the only ones that are growing war weary…

“Our presence by its very nature creates tension between us and the local population,” Smith said in an interview Wednesday. “Past a certain point, a foreign presence is as destabilizing as it is stabilizing, and that’s what these incidents are pointing out.”

Call me crazy, but I would have thought the beard would be a dead giveaway:

U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan have assigned ‘guardian angels’ – troops who watch over their comrades even as they sleep – as part of a series of increased security measures to protect troops against possible rogue attacks.

The added protections are part of a directive issued in recent weeks by Marine General John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, to guard against insider threats.

And they come in the wake of a spike in attacks on U.S. and coalition forces by Afghans, including the point-blank shooting deaths of two U.S. advisers in Afghanistan’s Ministry of Interior.

The lengths the Taliban are prepared to go to in order to gain access to coalition forces was illustrated yesterday when local police arrested seven men dressed in women’s clothing in Mehterlam, Laghman province, east of Kabul.

Not that this cross-dressing tactic hasn’t been tried before…

In this July 4, 2011 file photo, Taliban militants, who were arrested by Afghan Border Police, stand over their guns while they are presented to the media at the Afghan Border Police headquarters in Jalalabad, Nangarhar province, east of Kabul, Afghanistan. All of them were dressed as women and at least one was strapped with an explosive vest. The border police confiscated six AK-47 rifles. Five of them men were Pakistani and two were Afghans. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul, File)

…Maybe they learned this from al-Qaeda (in Iraq)?

Also blogging:
Gateway Pundit
The Blaze

A Blast From The Past...This Is How The Left Viewed Bush Then

As I wrote about in an earlier post, the hypocrisy of the left in regards to Obama’s policy of allowing assassinations of United States citizens is quite telling.

Take for example this speech given by our Attorney General in 2004:

With all due respect to President Reagan, the problem is not government. The problem is with those who run the government. In the struggle against terrorism, these people have made a mockery of the rule of law…

And yet a disturbing pattern has emerged. Lawyers for this administration have attempted to sanction the wholesale roundup and extended detention of Middle Eastern men on routine immigration violations, and the indefinite detention of American citizens with minimal judicial supervision, and without access to legal counsel.

Now I understand that we live in difficult times, and that we face an extraordinary, unprecedented threat. We cannot be naive in how we expect to conduct this struggle. This is not a time for the liberal community to see our enemy for anything other than what they are: murderers bent on the destruction of our way of life, which is superior to that which they seek to impose. We must be aggressive in the conduct of the war, and in the interrogation of prisoners taken in that war. But this Administration’s view, that the President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief can almost always overcome what it views as burdensome laws, restrictive International treaties, and tired old customs is extremely dangerous.

Our history is replete with scandals and miscues that are tied to the unrestricted exercise of Executive Branch power, in peace and in war. We must employ techniques in the current struggle that are consistent with the spirit of our founding documents, and that will also stand the test of time. We must feel comfortable, fifty years from now, looking back at our actions in a way that we do not when we examine for instance, the detention of American citizens during World War II.

Now let me be clear. This is not to equate American al-Qaeda sympathizers with law abiding Japanese-American citizens. But citizenship must mean something. The guarantees that come with it must be respected.

The war on terrorism can be won and our tradition of respect for civil liberties can be respected. The tension that this administration sees existing between the two simply is not correct.

That was then, this is now:

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. asserted on Monday that it is lawful for the government to kill American citizens if officials deem them to be operational leaders of Al Qaeda who are planning attacks on the United States and if capturing them alive is not feasible.

“Given the nature of how terrorists act and where they tend to hide, it may not always be feasible to capture a United States citizen terrorist who presents an imminent threat of violent attack,” Mr. Holder said in a speech at Northwestern University’s law school. “In that case, our government has the clear authority to defend the United States with lethal force.”

…While Mr. Holder is not the first administration official to address the targeted killing of citizens — the Pentagon’s general counsel, Jeh Johnson, did so last month at Yale Law School, for example — it was notable for the nation’s top law enforcement official to declare that it is constitutional for the government to kill citizens without any judicial review under certain circumstances. Mr. Holder’s remarks about the targeted killing of United States citizens were a centerpiece of a speech describing legal principles behind the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies.

“Some have argued that the president is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or associated forces,” Mr. Holder said. “This is simply not accurate. ‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.”

I agree wholeheartedly with Bush’s practice of fighting this war on terror and I agree wholeheartedly with Obama’s new policy.

But the hypocrisy is mindboggling.

I never thought I would link to Glenn Greenwald but he is especially pissed at the hypocrisy from his side of the aisle:

(1) The willingness of Democrats to embrace and defend this power is especially reprehensible because of how completely, glaringly and obviously at odds it is with everything they loudly claimed to believe during the Bush years. Recall two of the most significant “scandals” of the Bush War on Terror: his asserted power merely to eavesdrop on anddetain accused Terrorists without judicial review of any kind. Remember all that? Progressives endlessly accused Bush of Assaulting Our Values and “shredding the Constitution” simply because Bush officials wanted to listen in on and detain suspected Terrorists — not kill them, just eavesdrop on and detain them — without first going to a court and proving they did anything wrong. Yet here is a Democratic administration asserting not merely the right to surveil or detain citizens without charges or judicial review, but to kill themwithout any of that: a far more extreme, permanent and irreversible act. Yet, with somerighteous exceptions, the silence is deafening, or worse.

How can anyone who vocally decried Bush’s mere eavesdropping and detention powers without judicial review possibly justify Obama’s executions without judicial review? How can the former (far more mild powers) have been such an assault on Everything We Stand For while the latter is a tolerable and acceptable assertion of war powers? If Barack Obama has the right to order accused Terrorists executed by the CIA because We’re At War, then surely George Bush had the right to order accused Terrorists eavesdropped on and detained on the same ground.

That the same Party and political faction that endlessly shrieked about Bush’s eavesdropping and detention programs now tolerate Obama’s execution program is one of the most extreme and craven acts of dishonesty we’ve seen in quite some time.

He goes on write and link to my post, saying “By stark contrast, right-wing leaders, pundits and bloggers are being commendably consistent”

Yup. We have.

I agreed with the policy then and do now.

And I completely agree with Glenn when he writes that the hypocrisy of the left is “the most extreme and craven acts of dishonesty we’ve seen in quite some time.”

Obama in 2006:

The bottom line is this: Current procedures under the CSRT are such that a perfectly innocent individual could be held and could not rebut the Government’s case and has no way of proving his innocence.

I would like somebody in this Chamber, somebody in this Government, to tell me why this is necessary. I do not want to hear that this is a new world and we face a new kind of enemy. I know that. I know that every time I think about my two little girls and worry for their safety–when I wonder if I really can tuck them in at night and know that they are safe from harm. I have as big of a stake as anybody on the other side of the aisle and anybody in this administration in capturing terrorists and incapacitating them. I would gladly take up arms myself against any terrorist threat to make sure my family is protected.

But as a parent, I can also imagine the terror I would feel if one of my family members were rounded up in the middle of the night and sent to Guantanamo without even getting one chance to ask why they were being held and being able to prove their innocence.

This is not just an entirely fictional scenario, by the way. We have already had reports by the CIA and various generals over the last few years saying that many of the detainees at Guantanamo should not have been there.

But it’s ok to assassinate that person without judicial review now eh?

Where’s the terror for your family members now?

H Y P O C R I S Y

In a sign that the left’s hypocrisy may not be going over so well is this editorial from the NYT’s today:

Perhaps most disturbing, Mr. Holder utterly rejected any judicial supervision of a targeted killing.

We have said that a decision to kill an American citizen should have judicial review, perhaps by a special court like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which authorizes eavesdropping on Americans’ communications.

Mr. Holder said that could slow a strike on a terrorist. But the FISA court works with great speed and rarely rejects a warrant request, partly because the executive branch knows the rules and does not present frivolous or badly argued cases. In Mr. Awlaki’s case, the administration had long been complaining about him and tracking him. It made an earlier attempt to kill him.

Mr. Holder said such operations require high levels of secrecy. That is obvious, but the FISA court operates in secret, and at least Americans are assured that some legal authority not beholden to a particular president or political party is reviewing such operations.

Mr. Holder argued in his speech that judicial process and due process guaranteed by the Constitution “are not one and the same.” This is a straw man. The judiciary has the power to say what the Constitution means and make sure the elected branches apply it properly. The executive acting in secret as the police, prosecutor, jury, judge and executioner is the antithesis of due process.

While the NYT’s editorial pages maybe coming around to their hypocrisy, we do not hear the wailing and the crying from the rest of our media, the rest of the Democrat party, the rest of the liberals.

H Y P O C R I S Y