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A random websurf today shows no shortage of prominent coverage in the Arabic language media including running commentary on the fiasco as well as in some cases detailed background explanations as to how the recent State Dinner security breach occured at the White House and uncleared people were able to come into close access with the President of the United States and visiting The Prime Minister of India.One such outlet is Arab Times in Arabic, located in the United States, but many other outlets are carrying it outside of the USA--including on some questionable sites. This appeared on Arabic...

Desiree Rogers is under scrutiny for her office's role in the infamous security breakdown at the state dinner. A woman with a reputation as a consummate perfectionist is being criticized for dropping the ball — and, by some, for putting her own aggrandizement over her job. The White House social secretary under fire for her office's role in the security breakdown that let an invited couple into a state dinner once joked that she regularly allowed party crashers at White House events. Desiree Rogers made the claim in an interview with the trade magazine BizBash at the Creative Coalition's annual...

Bush dinner tastes sour for Obama - PMO decision to entertain former President causes hurt in Washington K.P. NAYAR Washington, Oct. 24: Preparations for Manmohan Singh’s visit to Washington on November 24 have begun on a negative signal to the Obama administration with a decision by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to host former President George W. Bush for dinner at Singh’s residence at the end of this month. Bush is visiting New Delhi on October 30 and 31 at the invitation of an Indian newspaper and will speak at a conference organised in New Delhi on October 31 on...

The head of the Secret Service accepted full responsibility Thursday for last week's security breach at President Barack Obama's first state dinner, but he said that the president and Vice President Joe Biden were never in danger from a party-crashing couple who shook hands and posed for pictures with them. Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan told the House Homeland Security Committee that his agents were at fault for allowing uninvited Washington socialites Tareq and Michaele Salahi into a lavish state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Sullivan told the committee that three uniformed agents had been put on administrative...

Ostensibly, White House party crashers Tareq Salahi and his wife could facilely be dismissed as another pair of publicity infatuated cretins. Commentators have been quick to compare them to the deranged Balloon Boy parents, desperate for fame at any price. Obamanutz devotes an entire chapter to the putrification of our pop culture that has spawned and enabled this kind of narcissism. Two strangers getting access to the President of the United States is disturbing enough by itself. We were told early on that Salahi is “half Palestinian.” That’s not the half of it. The Salahi’s are deeply in debt as...

Will Obama Throw Desiree Rogers Under the Bus for State Dinner Fiasco?Obama State Dinner Fiasco - Will Desiree Rogers Get Thrown Under the Bus? (Part Two woth video)A bombshell claim by a friend of Michaele Salahi last night on Larry King Live could end up blowing White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers out of the East Wing and under the Obama bus of discarded friends and associates.Politico reported on what was said on Larry King Live:As far as I know, they were invited," said Teresa Foss-Conlan, one of three Salahi friends who appeared on King's CNN show Monday night after...

State Dinner Crashers Exchanged E-Mails With Pentagon Official The special assistant to the Secretary of Defense, who was appointed by Obama, said she clearly stated in correspondence with the couple that she could not extend any kind of invitation. By Josh Meyer and Peter Nicholas November 30, 2009 Reporting from Washington - As Congress prepares to examine how a Virginia couple crashed the first state dinner of the Obama administration, the pair may be pointing to e-mail correspondence they had with a senior Pentagon official as evidence that they were invited guests after all. Federal authorities say Tareq and Michaele...

The Justice Department intends to drop manslaughter and weapons charges against one of the Blackwater Worldwide security guards involved in a deadly 2007 Baghdad shooting, prosecutors said in court documents Friday. The shooting in busy Nisoor Square left 17 Iraqis dead and inflamed anti-American sentiment abroad. It touched off a string of investigations that ultimately led the State Department to cancel the company's lucrative contract to guard diplomats in Iraq. Iraqis have said they're watching closely to see how the U.S. judicial system handles the five men accused of unleashing an unprovoked attack on civilians with machine guns and grenades....

In his controversial new book on the 2020 election, Battle For The Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Donald Trump. Edward-Isaac Dovere repeats a canard that has become something of a staple of Democratic mythology. According to Dovere, in November 2020, then-president Barack Obama had a hard time making sense out of Hillary Clinton's loss "to a man he thought of as a moronic carnival barker." Dovere traced Obama's grudge against Donald Trump to the birth certificate issue. Obama, writes Dovere, "would never forgive [Trump] for turning a fringe obsession with his birth certificate into an issue he'd had...

The trial of Austrian anti-Sharia activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff for “denigrating” Islam has major implications for free speech in Europe. (Also read Michael Ledeen: "Islamophobia") The “hate speech” trial of the Austrian housewife and anti-Islam activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff resumed at a Vienna courthouse on January 18, following a two-month break in the hearings. Sabaditsch-Wolff, who has been charged with “incitement of hatred” and “denigrating religious teachings” after giving a series of seminars about the dangers of radical Islam, faces a possible three year prison sentence. Her case, which is eerily similar to the one involving the Dutch politician Geert Wilders,...

If you were president of the United States, would you hire an alleged former spy for Fidel Castro to be ambassador to El Salvador, a country teetering on the brink of hard-core socialism? President Obama just did. On Dec. 9, Obama nominated Mari Del Carmen Aponte to be ambassador to El Salvador, despite the fact that in the late 1990s, the FBI discovered that she was working with Cuban intelligence officers. According to Insight Magazine, "When the FBI eventually questioned her about her involvement with Cuban intelligence, she reportedly refused to cooperate." Why would Aponte escape the Obama administration's scrutiny?...

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today it received records from the U.S. Secret Service showing that, for the first five and a half years of the Obama administration, Hunter Biden traveled extensively while receiving a Secret Service protective detail. During the time period of the records provided, Hunter Biden, son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, took 411 separate domestic and international flights, including to 29 different foreign countries. He visited China five times. Judicial Watch’s February 7, 2020, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request sought: Records reflecting the dates and locations of travel, international and domestic, for Hunter Biden...

Few Americans could fathom the notion that the United States is so indebted to China that one of Beijing’s spies could get away with espionage – especially with an White House in love with espionage prosecutions. But that might be the only reasonable explanation for the Obama administration’s decision to pass on prosecuting a State Department contractor who was allegedly paid thousands of dollars to someone believed to be a Chinese agent seeking information on Americans. According to Fox News, a November 2014 FBI affidavit that was filed in U.S. district court in Maryland indicates that the FBI launched a...

Health Ministry: Flu, respiratory diseases claim 344 lives in Ukraine Yesterday at 20:36 | Interfax-Ukraine The current flu epidemic and other acute respiratory diseases in Ukraine has claimed 344 lives by Wednesday evening, the Health Ministry said. It said 18 people had died of such diseases in the previous 24 hours. The ministry said 1.502 million people had contracted such illnesses since the epidemic broke out and that 44,781 had fallen ill in the past 24 hours. A total of 83,904 people have been hospitalized since the start of the epidemic, and 54,407 of them have been discharged from the...

Note: The following blog entry is a quote: Iranian Official: The U.S. Is No Longer Immune to Attack At a November 21, 2009 conference in Qom, Ali Saeedi, Khamenei's representative in the IRGC, aimed a veiled threat at the US, saying that this country is no longer immune to attack. Assaults like 9/11 have proved that its stability can be compromised, he explained. Source: Fars (Iran), November 22, 2009 Posted at: 2009-11-22

The Air Force Times' Sean Naylor scored an interview with Major General Mike Flynn, director of intelligence for General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan. There isn't a lot new here to longtime readers of The Long War Journal and Threat Matrix. Flynn gives an overview of the Taliban groups, notes that al Qaeda operatives serve as combat enablers for the Taliban, estimates Taliban forces in Afghanistan at between 19,000 to 27,000 fighters, and said Pakistan remains a major haven for the Taliban and al Qaeda. Of particular interest are Flynn's comments on Iran and the role...

SNIPPET: "Lula and Chavez have established a "strategic relationship," and recently agreed upon a joint Brazilian-Venezuelan oil venture worth billions of dollars. Lula and Chavez have joined with Daniel Ortega, the returned Nicaraguan Marxist dictator, to form an anti-U.S. Latin American military alliance - all with Russian assistance - funded by the region's abundant oil reserves. Brazil is engaged in its own arms build-up and Lula is determined that Brazil will become at least a first-rate regional power. Unfortunately, Lula is establishing Brazil as an anti-American military power by aligning with nations hostile or potentially hostile to the U.S. Lula...

Gunmen ambushed a convoy carrying Honduras' top prosecutor, but neither he nor his bodyguards were harmed, police said Sunday. Police spokesman Orlin Cerrato said Attorney General Luis Alberto Rubi was riding on a northern highway when assailants opened fire Saturday night. Cerrato said no one was hurt. One car was damaged. He did not give a motive for the attack or say whether it was related to Honduras' four-month political crisis. But he speculated the attack could be an attempt to "provoke unease in the country." After the June coup, it was Rubi who filed criminal charges against ousted President...

The ousted ex-president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, has arrived back in his home country, greeted by thousands of supporters after being run out of office almost two years ago. Zelaya's flight from Nicaragua landed at Tegucigalpa's airport Saturday afternoon where thousands of his supporters had been camping out. Zelaya, who spent much of his exile in the Dominican Republic, is scheduled to meet with Hondura's current President, Porfirio Lobo, and Organization of American States chief Jose Miguel Insulza. Zelaya was removed from office in June 2009 by the military for ignoring a Supreme Court order to cancel a referendum, which...

The ugliness surrounding the pushing out of White House Counsel Gregory Craig was months in the making, but culminated on the day on which the White House announced that the Justice Department would be prosecuting Guantanamo prisoners on U.S. soil, the very project Craig was supposedly brought into the administration to bring about. *snip* Rumors -- some generated by current Hillary Clinton allies at the State Department -- swirled that Craig had failed to gain the proper security clearances for his job, or that he had run afoul of the First Lady's staff in not moving quickly enough to clear...