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Just for a little background watch this from the end of September: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTHKGXpKQvA Fast forward to today: "CNN – Yemen’s presidential palace has been completely taken over by Shiite Houthi rebels, the country’s Minister of Information Nadia Sakkaf told CNN on Tuesday amid reports of renewed clashes. Sakkaf said the Prime Minister’s residence was also under attack from the street. She called the situation “the completion of a coup,” adding that “the President has no control.”" What a success story! Obama really knows how to pick’em.

The army of Allah received some reinforcements last night, as President Obama’s plan to close the Guantánamo Bay terrorist detention center moved forward. Five Yemeni “detainees” captured in Pakistan were released, leaving 122 left in the Cuba camp. Four will go to Oman, and one will shiver in Estonia until the spring comes. Both nations are welcoming their first Gitmo alumni. Felicia Schwartz of the WSJ reports: "The Pentagon said detainee Akhmed Abdul Qadir was transferred to Estonia, while four others were transferred to Oman. They included Al Khadr Abdallah Muhammad Al Yafi, Fadel Hussein Saleh Hentif, Abd al-Rahman Abdullah...

President Barack Obama’s New Year gift to Israel and the Middle East is a multibillion fund for establishing an Iraqi army as a division of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC). Wednesday, the last day of 2014, two defense ministers, Iran’s Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehqani and Iraq’s Khallid al-Obeidi, signed a pact whereby Iran i.e. the Revolutionary Guards, will “continue to train new Iraqi military units" for replacing the army that crumbled under the onslaught launched by the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant since last June. “We do not see any other option than cooperation and being on the same...

MIAMI (AP) — Five men who were held for a dozen years without charge at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been sent to the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan for resettlement, the U.S. government announced. The two men from Tunisia and three from Yemen had been cleared for release from the prison by a government task force but could not be sent to their homelands. The U.S. has sent hundreds of prisoners from Guantanamo to third countries but this is the first time Kazakhstan has accepted any for resettlement.

After Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May 2011, top CIA officials secretly told lawmakers that information gleaned from brutal interrogations played a key role in what was one of the spy agency's greatest successes. Then-CIA Director Leon Panetta repeated that assertion in public, and it found its way into a critically acclaimed movie about the operation, "Zero Dark Thirty," which depicts a detainee offering up the identity of bin Laden's courier, Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, after being tortured at a secret CIA interrogation site. As it turned out, bin Laden was living in al-Kuwaiti's walled family compound,...

<p>Torture is repulsive. Even on the scaffold or in front of a firing squad, a man can meet death with dignity. The torturer sets out to strip his victim of dignity, to break him, to violate not only his body but also his soul. In England, torture was outlawed in 1660, and for most of the past 350 years, that seemed to be a final verdict. Torture had been a barbarous relic of the dark ages. Anyone who suggested that it might still have a role would have been laughed to scorn; no doubt he would also have been in favour of burning witches.</p>

Unbelievable if true. He has ordered the FBI to read Islamo-terrorists ‘Miranda rights’ reserved for US citizens, so it’s reasonable to conclude that he ordered his Navy Seal commandos to seek al-Qaida’s surrender first before opening fire. If that’s the case, then he made it that much more difficult for these Seals to carry out their mission.

By/Major Garrett/CBS News/November 6, 2014, 9:23 PM Obama writes private letter to Iranian leader WASHINGTON -- U.S. officials confirm President Obama sent a letter to Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in mid-October, as first reported in the Wall Street Journal. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest would neither confirm nor deny the letter's existence. "I'm not in a position to discuss private correspondence between the president and any world leader," Earnest said Thursday. When asked about secret negotiations with Khamenei, Iran's top political and religious leader, Earnest said the White House "also" conducts private briefings with key members of Congress...

Barack Obama should listen to Peter Arnett. Arnett is the well-known war correspondent who not only covered the long war in Vietnam for the Associated Press, for which he won the Pulitzer, but who covered the shameful evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon in April 1975. Most recently, he was embedded in Baghdad, reporting from the front. The year 1975 was when the United States abandoned the people of South Vietnam to their fate as soldiers of the Communist North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong descended upon the city. They did so after the South Vietnamese Army, our...

Egypt responded strongly to a Hamas jihadi terror attack that killed 30 Egyptians soldiers, with helicopter strikes, a curfew of 100,000 people, and the announcement they are going build a security wall.  to control the border with Gaza.  Unlike President Obama, Egyptian President Al-Sisi has no trouble identifying the enemy and didn’t feel the need to assure people that Islamic terrorists are lone wolves, representing nothing and no one.  Instead he asserted the attack was supported by foreign forces.  He vowed to protect the lives of Egyptian military at home and to pursue an “extensive war” against the jihadists,...

Like many liberal criticisms of market-based solutions to public policy problems, the idea of privatized armies is likely to conjure images of rogue mercenaries advertising in the back of Soldier of Fortune magazine. However, many of today’s paid civilian soldiers are highly skilled and professional former Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, and Marines. They often are employed by private contractors because of their effectiveness as support staff, training instructors, security personnel, and occasionally as combat-ready operators. They are trained and ready to kill the enemy, not “degrade” him. Such contractors have been instrumental in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; filling...

Former President Jimmy Carter said President Barack Obama "waited too long" to go after ISIS and criticized what he described as the president's changing foreign policy. "First of all, we waited too long. We let the Islamic State build up its money, capability and strength and weapons while it was still in Syria," Carter told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in an interview published Tuesday. The 39th president was in Texas working on a Habitat for Humanity project. "Then when [ISIS] moved into Iraq, the Sunni Muslims didn't object to their being there and about a third of the territory in...

It is not President Barack Obama's fault that the media, and hence the public, did not understand what he meant when he said he had "decimated" the core leadership of al-Qaida. That misunderstanding grew when it was revealed that the Osama bin Laden-less leadership of al-Qaida was still alive and had moved into Syria, morphing into what is now known as the Khorasan Group within ISIS -- the Islamist State in Iraq and Syria

Joseph Miller is the pen name for a ranking Department of Defense official with a background in U.S. special operations and combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has worked in strategic planning. President Barack Obama has taken a lot of flack since his Sunday night “60 Minutes” interview, in which he blamed the intelligence community for his failure to tackle the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. And that is right and proper. Because not only was his excuse of blaming us a lie, but when questioned on his lie, White House press secretary Josh...

Recently, I cautioned my fellow Americans against falling for the notion that the so-called “Islamic State” is among the gravest threats, or any considerable threat, to the United States. I noted that if the hyperbolic cries of politicians and their media propagandists in both parties so much as remotely resembled reality, then we’d have long ago witnessed at least two phenomena that, as of the present moment, remain conspicuously, indeed, painfully, absent from the current discourse. First, at long last, we would have jettisoned the Politically Correct labels—“Islamo-Fascism,” “Islamo-Nazism,” “Islamism,” “radical Islam,” “Islamic extremism,” etc.—that we invariably assign to Islamic...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: This morning on CBS This Morning. Holly Williams is the foreign correspondent for CBS News, and she was reporting about the war against ISIS in Syria and the impact of US air strikes there. WILLIAMS: The fighters in Mahmoodin village told us that the US-led air strikes against ISIS in Syria have so far had very little impact on the ground. Like many people, in this part of the world, they would like to see more of them. RUSH: What? What? What? Whoa, whoa! Wait, wait, wait. That's not right. Last week John Kerry said that they...

merican airstrikes against ISIS targets are under way in Syria, according to a Pentagon official. "I can confirm that U.S. military and partner nation forces are undertaking military action against ISIL [ISIS] terrorists in Syria using a mix of fighter, bomber and Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles," Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Admiral John Kirby said. "Given that these operations are ongoing, we are not in a position to provide additional details at this time. The decision to conduct theses strikes was made earlier today by the U.S. Central Command commander under authorization granted him by the commander in chief. We will...

Erik Prince says his old private army could have dealt with the Islamic State militants on their own—and that Republicans need to start fighting ‘like we pay them to.’ Erik Prince has a message for ISIS: You’re lucky Blackwater is gone. On Friday night, the controversial founder of the private military company had plenty to say about what the organization he once ran could be doing in the fight against the so-called Islamic State—and also why Republicans need to stop being such losers. “It’s a shame the [Obama] administration crushed my old business, because as a private organization, we could’ve...

There will be 1,600 U.S. troops in Iraq by the time President Obama’s current plans are fully in place — but none of those are considered combat troops, which means the U.S. is not officially reengaged in the war there, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told Congress on Tuesday.

I am, if you haven’t noticed, an instinctual Jacksonian (in the sense of Walter Russell Mead’s quadripartite characterization of American foreign policy types). My first reaction is to hit hard at those who confront the US or threaten American interests. ISIS is therefore a natural candidate for a good drubbing. But more sober reflection (figuratively and literally!) leads me to conclude that a full-blooded response to ISIS is unwise, especially in Syria. For many reasons, the commitment that would be required to fully extirpate the organization is not worth the cost, and it’s better not to fight at all than...