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The U.S. has commenced negotiations with the Taliban. The Afghan government is excluded from the talks, which I consider a disgrace. The U.S. has proved to be a worse than feckless partner. Why any state or group would ever again cast its lot with America, where there are other options, is beyond me. Quite apart from the exclusion of the Afghan government, the negotiations strike me as a classic case of “lose-lose” as far as the United States is concerned. The Taliban has no good reason to negotiate seriously with us. It knows that most of our troops will be...

In November 2008, Abid Naseer, a Pakistani student living in Manchester, England, began to e-mail a Yahoo account that was ultimately traced back to his home country. The young man’s e-mails appeared to be about young women — Nadia, Huma, Gulnaz and Fozia — and which of them would make a “faithful and loving wife.” British investigators later determined that the four names were code for different types of explosives and that a final April 2009 e-mail announcing a “marriage to Nadia” between the 15th and the 20th was a signal that a terrorist attack in England was imminent, according...

Muslim terrorists and their enablers like to complain about how America has military bases in Muslim countries. Even people such as half-crazy republican congressman Ron Paul constantly bring it up, erroneously blaming our global footprint for Islamic terrorist attacks against us (those of us who know history know better). Yet only rarely, and at the margins, is the truth pointed out that our enemy has thousands, literally thousands, of military bases here in the United States, and even more in Europe for that matter. Don’t just take my word for it, listen to Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan, from a...

President Barack Obama, Sen. John McCain and al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri now share a common goal: They support Syrian rebels seeking to overthrow Bashar Assad. Zawahiri announced his support for the Syrian rebels last year in an online video. "I appeal to every Muslim and every noble, free man in Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon to come to support his brothers in Syria with all that he possesses with himself, his wealth, his opinion and information," said the al-Qaida leader. "With the increased criminality of the secular, sectarian, Ba'ath regime, our audacious, brave, Mujahid people are each day becoming steadier,...

(Reuters) - As the Syrian civil war got under way, a former electrician who calls himself Sheikh Omar built up a brigade of rebel fighters. In two years of struggle against President Bashar al-Assad, they came to number 2,000 men, he said, here in the northern city of Aleppo. Then, virtually overnight, they collapsed. Omar's group, Ghurabaa al-Sham, wasn't defeated by the government. It was dismantled by a rival band of revolutionaries - hardline Islamists. The Islamists moved against them at the beginning of May. After three days of sporadic clashes Omar's more moderate fighters, accused by the Islamists of...

Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Wednesday suspended negotiations with Washington over a security agreement that would regulate the presence of U.S. troops here beyond 2014, apparently angered by the U.S.-backed initiative to start formal peace talks with the Taliban in Qatar. The announcement came a day after Taliban envoys appeared before reporters to give a U.S.-demanded statement that they did not want to plan or launch attacks on other countries from Afghan soil, and were open to talking with other Afghans. Those pledges met U.S. conditions for opening a Taliban political office in Qatar. However, the Taliban representatives also told...

The Taliban has claimed responsibility for an attack that killed four U.S. troops in Afghanistan, hours after the U.S. announced it was opening formal talks with the insurgent group. A Taliban spokesman said the group fired two rockets into the Bagram air base on Tuesday. Earlier, the U.S. said direct negotiations with the Taliban will begin Thursday in Doha, the capital of the Persian Gulf country of Qatar, in a push to establish a framework for ending more than a decade of war in Afghanistan.

... U.S. officials said the talks would involve the Taliban Political Commission, a newly formed group authorized by fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. They said they didn't yet know who was on the commission, but it apparently includes or represents armed insurgent groups that include the Pakistani-based Haqqani network, which has carried out some of the most ambitious attacks on international forces in eastern Afghanistan and in Kabul, the Afghan capital. "This is an important first step toward reconciliation, although it is a very early step," President Obama said as he wrapped up meetings in Northern Ireland with leaders...

By now even the increasingly ridiculous and irrelevant Nobel Peace Prize Committee, a stinking stain on the face of Scandinavia, must be wondering what possessed it to give Black Jesus its annual Donald Duck prize for being fashionably left-wing. Previous holders of the four-boxtops cuddly toy include a peanut farmer and a global-warming profiteer, both of whom, like Obama, are “Democrats.” The Christmas-cracker trinket has also been awarded to an Arab terrorist and to a South African terrorist. Recently, the Peace Popsicle has been given – fatuously – to the European Tyranny-by-Clerk and also to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate...

Obama weapons plan seen as adding to all-out sectarian conflict in Mideast WASHINGTON – Not only has the United States decided to begin providing weapons to the Syrian opposition, now Sunni Muslim clerics from the Gulf Cooperating Council countries, which are backed by the U.S. in arming and providing fighters to the opposition, have issued a fatwa calling for a “holy war” against Syria and its Shiite allies, principally Hezbollah, according to Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin. The fatwa, which signals the beginning of an all-out Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict, comes as foreign fighters led by the al-Qaida-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra killed 60...

Photo: Lance Cpl Greg Buckley, murdered by our Afghan "allies" The Obama Administration announced that it will meet with the Taliban in Doha for “peace talks.” The Taliban continue to orchestrate insider attacks, killing our soldiers. They continue to poison girls’ schools across Afghanistan, kidnap Red Cross workers, enforce the most brutal and extreme ideology on the face of the earth (the Sharia), and call for the defeat of American and coalition forces. These jihadists behead Afghan children, slaughter Afghans who dare to attend a party where dancing takes place, and mean to run Mullah Omar for President, despite the...

Is Barack Obama the “promised warrior” coming to help the Hidden Imam of Shiite Muslims conquer the world? The question has made the rounds in Iran since last month, when a pro-government Web site published a Hadith (or tradition) from a Shiite text of the 17th century. The tradition comes from Bahar al-Anvar (meaning Oceans of Light) by Mullah Majlisi, a magnum opus in 132 volumes and the basis of modern Shiite Islam. According to the tradition, Imam Ali Ibn Abi-Talib (the prophet’s cousin and son-in-law) prophesied that at the End of Times and just before the return of the...

A group of whistleblowers, including a number of aviation experts, have come forward in a new documentary to claim that the official explanation for the crash of TWA Flight 800 was wrong and a gas tank explosion did not bring down the flight off the coast of Long Island 17 years ago. However, the six whistleblowers, all part of the original investigation team, stopped short of saying the plane was shot down. Flight 800, a Boeing 747, had just taken off from JFK airport with 230 people aboard on July 17, 1996 enroute to Paris when it exploded and crashed...

After former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates considers the country’s involvement in the Syrian civil war “a mistake”, another prominent politician is riding the waves to drown the government’s decision to support Syrian rebels.Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin threw scathing remarks last Saturday against the government’s plans to provide weapons and ammunition to Syrian opposition groups. She said the US government should “let Allah sort it out” instead of meddling in the affairs of the troubled nation. Palin issued the statement as a closing talk during the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference in Washington, D.C. last June 15, as reported...

The ex-president's willingness to speak out on Syria spells disaster for Obama in more ways than one.I wish that when President Bill Clinton started spouting off the other day about the need for President Barack Obama to intervene in Syria's horrific civil war or risk looking like "a total fool," Obama had followed the example set by his wife when she was recently confronted by a heckler. I wish that Obama had leaped from his bully pulpit, got in Clinton's face and silenced him with a withering put-down. But of course, that didn't happen. Instead of resisting the intensifying pressure...

WASHINGTON: The United States will begin formal talks with the Taliban, including the Haqqani network, in Doha, Qatar, in a couple of days, Obama administration officials said in a major announcement on Tuesday. The engagement, the first of its kind since the post 9/11 conflict, follows key concessions made by Washington, including dropping the pre-condition that Taliban immediately break ties with al-Qaida, in return for much broader, generic, self-serving commitments by the unyielding terrorist group. In a conference call from Northern Ireland where President Obama is attending the G8 summit, US officials said they expected Taliban to issue a statement...

Bomb plots targeting the New York Stock Exchange and the city's subway were among more than 50 worldwide thwarted by top-secret surveillance programs since the al Qaeda attacks on the United States, authorities said on Tuesday. Gen. Keith Alexander, National Security Agency director, FBI and other officials revealed startling details at a House Intelligence Committee hearing aimed at finding out more about the telephone and e-mail surveillance initiatives that came to light this month through leaks of classified information to newspapers. It was the most comprehensive and specific defense of those methods that have come under ferocious criticism from civil...

To think it only took the world's most (in)famous whistleblower to get the NSA to disclose that it had heroically managed to prevent terrorist attacks involving the New York Stock Exchange (we supposed they refer to the Manhattan-based TV studio and not the actual exchange where the servers are now housed in Mahwah, NJ) and the NY Subway. Because whereas there was a time in the past when the various US secret services would scurry at the opportunity to disclose their expertise to the general public, now it is a false negative that is supposed to disprove a positive (pervasive...

General Carter Ham is scheduled to testify to the House Armed Services Committee on June 26 at a classified briefing about his knowledge of events that took place when the attack on the U.S. Consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya happened last September, reports Fox News' Greta Van Susteren: Below is from my FNC colleague Justin Fishel: Subject: Fox First: General Carter Ham to testify on Benghazi for first time next week Fox News has learned that the House Armed Services Committee will hold a classified briefing next Weds June 26 at 9:00 on Benghazi. Briefers will include: Gen....

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said if he were president, he would have intervened in Syria much sooner than President Obama did to identify the “reasonable” rebels opposed to the regime of President Basher Assad. “It behooved us to kind of identify whether there was any elements there within Syria fighting against Assad that we could work with—reasonable people that wouldn’t carry out human rights violations and could be part of building a new Syria. We failed to do that,” Rubio told Jonathan Karl on ABC News’ “This Week.” … Obama announced this week that the Assad regime had crossed the...

Al Qaida-linked group Syria rebels once denied now key to anti-Assad victories Nearly a year later, however, Jabhat al Nusra, which U.S. officials believe has links to al Qaida, has become essential to the frontline operations of the rebels fighting to topple Assad. “When we finish with Assad, we will fight the U.S.!” one Nusra fighter shouted in the northeastern Syrian city of Ras al Ayn when he was told an American journalist present. He laughed as he said it and then got into a van and drove off, leaving the journalist unable to ask whether it had been a...

Below is from my FNC colleague Justin Fishel: Subject: Fox First: General Carter Ham to testify on Benghazi for first time next week Fox News has learned that the House Armed Services Committee will hold a classified briefing next Weds June 26 at 9:00 on Benghazi. Briefers will include: Gen. Carter Ham (ret.) He was head of AFRICOM during Benghazi attack. LTC Gibson RADM Brian Losey – Special Operations Command Africa This is being coordinated by the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee of the HASC. It will be closed door but will be the first time Ham has been questioned by...

<p>FBI agents are going to meet an incoming flight at a New Jersey airport after reports that a passenger claimed that everyone aboard had been poisoned.</p> <p>United Airlines Flight 116 from Hong Kong is scheduled to land at about 2 p.m. Eastern on Monday at Newark Liberty Airport, outside New York City.</p>

A report on Channel Two Monday said that the brother of Hizbullah head Hassan Nasrallah was killed recently in a fierce battle in the Syrian city of Al-Qusayr. Khader Nasrallah was buried in the village of Kfar Kana in south Lebanon on Sunday, Channel Two said. If true, it would make Nasrallah one of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Hizbullah terrorists killed in the city, which has been a bloody battleground between troops loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and rebel groups. Hizbullah, a direct agent of Iran, has been assisting Assad. Hizbullah has been supplying manpower and organization to Assad....

Fighting terrorism? Don't be a chump. Excuses usually trade on something very important and genuine. But what is truly important can be abused, precisely because it should impress us. Government tries to fool us with phony excuses to do whatever officials and bureaucrats want to do. The NSA, et al., failed to detect the Tsarnaev brothers -- even after being tipped off by Russia -- before the Boston Marathon bombing. FBI agents actually investigated the Tsarnaev family in detail. Russia's tip would justify continuing, specific search warrants and phone taps. Yet the NSA and FBI never saw the bumbling brothers...

Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld of the New York-based American Center for Democracy's Economic Warfare Institute warns that last July "al-Qaeda's English-language online magazine, Inspire, published an article called 'It Is of Your Freedom to Ignite a Firebomb,' which featured instructions on how to build an incendiary bomb to light forests on fire. "A few months later, Russia's security (FSB) chief, Aleksandr Bortnikov warned, 'al-Qaeda was complicit in recent forest fires in Europe' as part of the terrorists' 'strategy of a thousand cuts.' Bortnikov spoke of 'extremist sites [that] contained detailed instructions of waging the forest jihad and stressed that such a...

Iran will deploy 4,000 Revolutionary Guards to Syria to bolster Damascus against a mostly Sunni-led insurgency, media reported. Meanwhile, US F-16s and Patriots will stay in Jordan – speculatively, to help establish a no-fly zone to aid Syrian rebels. The deployment of the first several-thousand strong military contingent was reported by The Independent on Sunday who quoted Iranian sources tied to the state’s security apparatus. The sources said the move signals Iran’s intention to drastically step up its efforts to preserve the government of President Bashar Assad. The Islamic Republic’s heightened military commitment could reportedly extend to the opening up...

It's becoming increasingly difficult to give the government the benefit of the doubt in regards to dragnet domestic surveillance. Even before Glenn Greenwald published a top secret court order compelling Verizon to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems and interviewed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, there were credible reports that the NSA was intercepting U.S. communications. The most significant of those occurred in July, when the court that was established to "hear applications for and grant orders approving electronic surveillance," called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), found that the NSA violated the Fourth Amendment's restriction...

House approach on Benghazi: Crazy — or plain stupid? By: Fred J. Eckert June 16, 2013 09:52 PM EDT Sometimes watching Speaker John Boehner and his House Republican “leadership” team in action calls to mind that scene from “Forrest Gump” in which Bubba’s mother looks incredulously at Forrest and asks: “Are you crazy — or just plain stupid?” More than six months ago, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) introduced a proposal to create a House Select Committee on the terrorist attack in Benghazi, a select committee being generally regarded as the best way to ensure an intelligent, well-coordinated, bipartisan investigation without...

While Director of Boston’s EMS, Richard Serino (now the Obama Deputy FEMA Director) developed and authored a 39 page PDF publication entitled “A Tale of Two Cities and the Running of a Planned Mass Casualty Event.” (1) In 2009, Serino retired from his Boston post to serve under FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate. Prior to his promotion, Serino created Course 18 which contains the following seven chapters: “Presentation Overview, Planned Disaster Concept, Groundwork, Collaboration , Planning, Execution, and Evaluation and Analysis.” Florida Atlantic University Professor James F. Tracy is being credited for bringing this important publication to our attention in...

We might expect Keith Alexander to advocate on behalf of the two programs at the center of our national debate about terrorism and surveillance. He is, after all, the head of the National Security Agency, which runs them. “It’s dozens of terrorist events that these have helped prevent—both here and abroad—in disrupting or contributing to the disruption of terrorist attacks,” Alexander testified last week. And it’s not entirely surprising that the four leading members of Congress on intelligence matters would argue on behalf of these programs, known as “215” and “702,” for the sections of the laws that authorize them....

A senior Pakistani police officer says gunmen have taken over parts of a hospital in a southwestern Pakistan. Fayaz Sumbal, the head of police operations in Quetta, says armed men captured different sections of the hospital complex Saturday and were positioned on rooftops. He says Frontier Corps troops, and police commandos have been called in.

... Obama authorized his administration to provide arms to rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, officials said Thursday, a major policy shift after the White House said it had confirmed that Damascus used chemical weapons in the country's civil war.

AP story so no excerpt

More details of a massacre in Homs late last month have emerged following the global outcry of a massacre in Deir el-Zour yesterday.The massacre, carried out by Free Syrian Army militants reportedly targeted men, women and children in the Christian village of al-Duwayr/Douar close to the city of Homs and the border with Lebanon. The incident received little media attention, having occurred at the same time as thousands of Syrian troops converged on the insurgent-occupied town of al-Qusayr.According to sources, around 350 heavily armed militants entered the village, broke into homes and assembled residents in the main square of...

Attorney General Eric Holder has agreed to meet with House Republicans as part of their probe into whether he misled Congress or acted inappropriately in the Justice Department’s investigation of two separate leaks to media outlets. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) made the announcement late Friday after exchanging several weeks worth of testy letters with the nation’s top cop. In agreeing to meet with the lawmakers, Holder staved off the threat of a subpoena from Goodlatte for a second time in as many weeks. Goodlatte is investigating whether Holder misled the committee last

FORT HOOD, Texas — A uniformed Army psychiatrist had no justification for gunning down U.S. troops and won’t be allowed to tell jurors that he was protecting Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, a military judge ruled Friday, appearing to clear the way for the Fort Hood murder trial to begin. Maj. Nidal Hasan’s “defense of others” strategy fails as a matter of law, Col. Tara Osborn said during a 45-minute hearing. That strategy must show that a killing was necessary to prevent the immediate harm or death of others. Osborn said no soldiers at the Texas Army post on Nov. 5,...

Avril Haines will be the first woman to be second in command at the CIA, but critics point not to her gender but her lack of CIA experience. Her choice suggests Obama wants a close ally. Plucking from a collection of high-powered female lawyers serving the White House, President Obama has nominated Avril Haines as the next deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. One former senior CIA official tells the Monitor that her nomination has prompted surprise among his former colleagues, not due to Haines’s gender, of course, but because she is a relative unknown in the community. He...

Complete Headline: Thousands Of Firms Trade Confidential Data With The US Government In Exchange For Classified Intelligence The rabbit hole just got deeper. A whole lot deeper. On Sunday we predicated that "there's one reason why the administration, James Clapper and the NSA should just keep their mouths shut as the PRISM-gate fallout escalates: with every incremental attempt to refute some previously unknown facet of the US Big Brother state, a new piece of previously unleaked information from the same intelligence organization now scrambling for damage control, emerges and exposes the brand new narrative as yet another lie, forcing even...

Regarding the Patriot Act’s Section 215, Rep. Sensenbrenner says that it “was originally drafted to prevent data mining,” not protect it. In a recent op-ed railing against Obama’s Big Brother tactics, the Wisconsin Representative writes: “[B]ased on the scope of the released order, both the administration and the Fisa court are relying on an unbounded interpretation of the act that Congress never intended. The released Fisa order requires daily productions of the details of every call that every American makes, as well as calls made by foreigners to or from the United States. Congress intended to allow the intelligence communities...

Republican Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) welcomed the chemical weapons assessment. The two have been among the sharpest critics of the administration, saying it has not been doing enough to help the rebels. “U.S. credibility is on the line,” they said in a joint statement. “Now is not the time to merely take the next incremental step. Now is the time for more decisive actions,” they said, such as using long-range missiles to degrade Assad’s air power and missile capabilities.

In a sharp escalation of the U.S. role in Syria's bloody civil war, the White House announced late Thursday that it will provide military aid to rebels fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad after confirming that his government used chemical weapons on the opposition. Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes told reporters on a conference call that President Barack Obama had heard pleas from Syria's rebel Supreme Military Council (SMC) for more help. "Our aim is to be responsive," Rhodes said, underlining that the new assistance would have "direct military purposes."

Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert lit-up and clearly irked Obama FBI Director Robert Mueller, who testified under oath before the House Judiciary Committee today. Gohmert specifically focused on the FBI’s handling (i.e., mishandling) of the Boston Bombings. Below is a partial text of the heated exchange...

War is hell and should be else there would be more of it, but there are things that are far worse. Living in a godless tyrannical Marxist/fascist hell with no liberty, no religious, political or economic freedom for one. No thank you. I'll stand by the constitution and defend my God-given unalienable rights, including the rights to free speech, free religion, to be armed, to be free from government spying, freedom from over-reaching tyrannical government, etc., etc., etc. The corrupt democrat politicizing of our government agencies must stop NOW!! The government snooping programs MUST be shut down NOW! Our borders...

The US officials have repeatedly mentioned Headley's case to defend the controversial spying programme, saying the surveillance had been critical in thwarting potential terror attacks and also to track the 2008 Mumbai attack convict. Washington: Questioning the effectiveness of America's secret surveillance programme, a top investigative publication here has said the US intelligence failed to track Mumbai attack convict David Headley and he was arrested only after a tip off was provided by the British intelligence. The US officials have repeatedly mentioned Headley's case to defend the controversial spying programme, saying the surveillance had been critical in thwarting potential terror...

Homeland Insecurity: The White House assures that tracking our every phone call and keystroke is to stop terrorists, and yet it won't snoop in mosques, where the terrorists are. That's right, the government's sweeping surveillance of our most private communications excludes the jihad factories where homegrown terrorists are radicalized. Since October 2011, mosques have been off-limits to FBI agents.

Chad Pergram �@ChadPergram 2m Deputy CIA Director Mike Morell resigns.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Wednesday that four members of Army special forces in Tripoli were never told to stand down after last year's deadly assault on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, disputing a former top diplomat's claim that the unit might have helped Americans under siege. Army Gen. Martin Dempsey said timing and the need for the unit to help with casualties from Benghazi resulted in orders for the special forces to remain in Tripoli. Four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, died in two separate attacks several hours apart...

There have been at least a dozen attacks by Muslim terrorists on U.S. soil since Ramzi Yousef’s parked rental van exploded in the basement of the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993. Some have caused death and injury—such as the 9/11 attacks, Nidal Hasan’s mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009, and the Boston Marathon bombings. Other attacks—such as Faisal Shahzad’s fizzled Times Square bombing or Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s unsuccessful underwear bombing of a flight—were thwarted or aborted. Yet fatal or not, all of these attacks were successful in some respects. They scared Americans and reduced freedom in...

On Sept. 11, 2001, 19 people hijacked four U.S. commercial airliners after those airliners took off from airports inside the United States. They then flew those airliners into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a field outside Shanksville, Pa. The hijackers had certain characteristics in common. All were young males from regions of the world that in recent decades had produced radicalized Muslims -- and the U.S. government had given all of them visas to enter the United States. The oldest of the hijackers was 33; the youngest was 20; their average age was about 24. One came...