If there’s one clear example of continuation from the Obama to Trump administrations, it’s that the war in Afghanistan has no end in sight. Fifteen years in, it remains the longest military conflict the United States has been involved in. The most recent evaluations from generals ...read more
Photojournalist Luke Somers, a hostage held captive by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula for the past fifteen months, was killed by his captors as U.S. Special Forces attempted a rescue Saturday morning. According to The New York Times, Seal Team Six went into a village in ...read more
On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit released a previously secret Justice Department memo which the Obama administration used as legal justification for the targeted drone killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011. Awlaki was a U.S. citizen who had gone to Yemen ...read more
"It is a bizarre reading of the cauldron that is the Middle East today, to claim that but for the removal of Saddam, we would not have a crisis....The reality is that the whole of the Middle East and beyond is going through a huge, agonising and protracted transition. We have to ...read more
With former Bush administration officials and other such neoconservatives coming out of the woodwork to offer their super ideas on the situation in Iraq while slamming President Obama, it's never been a better time for a Throwback Thursday post to remind everyone why Iraq is the ...read more
The Washington Post published a travesty of a column on Monday by the baby-faced, toddler-brained, and whiny, Marc Thiessen that as of this writing, had notched a whopping 4,064 comments. What could possibly account for this mind-blowingly high number of comments on a piece by ...read more
It seems that the National September 11 Memorial Museum has been in the news lately for every reason but the fact that it opened last month. There's the gift shop with questionable souvenirs; the lavish cocktail party thrown for wealthy benefactors; and the reporter who was ...read more
Polls are really weird, frustrating things sometimes. Cheerleaders on the right are trumpeting a new Fox News poll that shows 67% approval for the establishment of a select #Benghazi committee. That could be due in part to the lies embedded in the poll's questions, but even ...read more
The horrific murder of a man in London yesterday afternoon has shocked Britain and much of the world. Two armed men ran over, then decapitated an unarmed soldier near his army barracks in Woolwich, South East London, in broad daylight. An eyewitness described a horrendous ...read more
There was a fascinating exchange on MSNBC's Morning Joe program today between host Joe Scarborough and Time columnist Joe Klein on Obama's use of drones. Here's the partial transcript: SCARBOROUGH: "What we're doing with drones is remarkable: the fact that over the past eight ...read more
The best summations from around the blogosphere on the third and final Presidential debate: Andrew Sullivan: After the first truly epic implosion in the first debate, Obama has clawed his way back in the following two, in my view. He has marshalled his arguments as potently as ...read more
The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From the Washington Post: The United States on Wednesday strongly condemned a deadly attack on its consulate in eastern Libya and vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice, as indications began to emerge that the assault may have been planned ...read more
On Friday, I wrote a post about the moral argument for using drones. I argued that while technically they may be safer with less civilian casualties and fewer deaths over all, they actually signify a much more alarming trend - the outsourcing of war to robots that further removes ...read more
A prominent Sunni cleric, well-known as an opponent to Syria’s president Bashar al Assad, was shot by soldiers in Akkar, northern Lebanon ten days ago. The killing has caused some in Lebanon to fear that Syria’s bloody uprising is spilling over into its neighbour. Sheikh ...read more
Letters from Osama bin Laden's last hideaway, released by U.S. officials intent on discrediting his terror organization, portray a network weak, inept and under siege -- and its leader seemingly near wit's end about the passing of his global jihad's glory days. The documents, ...read more
By Ray McGovern: John Brennan, President Obama’s chief adviser on counter-terrorism, has again put on public display two unfortunate facts: (1) that the White House has no clue as to how to counter terrorism; and (2) (in Brennan’s words) “the unfortunate fact that to save many ...read more
By Chris Woods: For some weeks in early winter 2009 the people of al-Majala, southern Yemen, had noticed a spotter plane overhead. The aircraft, most likely American, wasn’t seen as a threat. After all, it had been seven years since the last US military action in Yemen, when a ...read more
By Bob Cesca: Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher last Friday and the issue of the president's targeted predator drone killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki came up. Naturally, since it's one of his pet topics, Glenn Greenwald spoke against the ...read more
The brother of the man who killed seven people in south-west France in recent weeks has been charged over the murders, judicial sources say. Abdelkader Merah, 29, is suspected of complicity in murder and theft, and involvement in terrorism. He will be kept in custody, ...read more
As many as 20 US military strikes in Somalia since 2007 have killed up to 162 people, new research by the Bureau indicates. Of those killed, between 11 and 59 people are reported to be civilians. US military intervention in war-torn Somalia is shown to be on a far lower scale ...read more
Image via Wikipedia Andrew Sullivan on Netanyahu's relentless war against moderation and the Middle East peace process: The Obama goal was simple: win back global soft power in the war against Jihadist terrorism by demonstrating even-handedness again with the Israelis and ...read more
The L.A Times has done a must read piece on the ludicrous amount of money the US government is spending on domestic security measures. The article reports: A decade after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, federal and state governments are ...read more
Elect a president like Obama who actually takes national security and the defense of America seriously and the results tend to follow. ‘This type of radical fundamentalism or terrorism is a threat not only to the United States but to the global community,’ Jones said. ‘The world ...read more
I have waited so long for this. So long. One of the things I'll never forgive Bush for is that he let Bin Laden get away. The man and the network responsible for the worst terror attack in our history still breathes, and its an insult to the dead and their loved ones every day ...read more
Just sayin'. Al-Qaeda is watching the U.S. stock market's downward slide with something akin to jubilation, with its leaders hailing the financial crisis as a vindication of its strategy of crippling America's economy through endless, costly foreign wars against Islamist ...read more
Again. "A federal appeals court has slammed the reliability of U.S. government intelligence documents, saying just because officials keep repeating their assertions does not make them true. A guard looks over the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in this ...read more
The ongoing story of how the Bush administration sacrificed American and global security to Al Qaeda in order to invade Iraq marches on. Current and former military and intelligence officials said that the war in Iraq consistently diverted resources and high-level attention from ...read more
The last 7 years have been about Republicans pounding their chests about 9/11 and Democrats doing their best to talk about everything else, feeling safe in the cocoon of kitchen table issues. In the vital debate over national security, Democrats simply haven't been showing up. ...read more
Conservatives once again try to whip up the noise machine to attack Obama for stressing the role of law enforcement in fighting terrorism, yet as I've noted for years here, law enforcement is often the first line of offense versus terrorism. Because it works. The only way to ...read more
I say again: If the president had declared war, these issues would likely not have come up. But he chose to do it under murky legal auspices and it becomes a FUBAR. ...read more
This keeps happening again and again and again. These idiot cons who Bush packed into our government think that they can just make up brand new laws in their heads and ignore the existing ones. They do so mostly to keep up the mirage of strength cons need to make it through the ...read more
According to a report from the Homeland Security Department. ...read more
John McCain said in the Petraeus testimony today that Al Qaeda was a "sect of Shi'ites". Al Qaeda is Sunni. These are not "gaffes" from John Mccain - who thinks we should stay in Iraq for at least 100 years - he honestly is clueless on these issues and uses his military service ...read more
