Our Country is in the Best of Hands.

Obama Administration's Benghazi Cover-up time-line.

Americans funnelling money to Hezbollah.

I stumbled across this Toledo Blade story about the conviction of a Toledo couple who committed insurance fraud in order to funnel the money to Hezbollah:

A Toledo couple will be sentenced to prison after pleading guilty in federal court Monday to charges that they conspired to smuggle money to a terrorist group in Lebanon.


Hor Akl pleaded guilty to five counts pertaining to conspiracy and interstate commerce in support of terrorism. He could be sentenced to more than seven years in prison.

His wife, Amera Akl, pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization. She faces nearly four years in prison when sentenced.

As part of the plea agreement, an arson charge that would have carried a 10-year prison sentence was dropped against Hor Akl and two charges, including an arson-related charge, were dropped against his wife.

The couple was charged in June, 2010, in a 36-page indictment filed in U.S. District Court. It alleged they “did knowingly combine, conspire, and agree” to aid the terrorist group Hezbollah. They are alleged to have sent money and supplies to a foreign terrorist organization beginning on Aug. 30, 2009.

Counts one and two, pertaining to conspiracy and interstate commerce in support of terrorism, named both the husband and his wife, as did count six, which alleged the two of them collected $17,296 from a fraudulent insurance claim in early 2002. Prosecutors say they intentionally set a 1998 Jeep Cherokee on fire in late 2001 to destroy information, and that they committed wire and mail fraud in so doing.

On counts three, four, and five, Mr. Akl was charged with defrauding creditors, making false statements under oath, and fraudulently transferring or concealing property as it related to a bankruptcy filed in August, 2008.

So, did the Akl's burn the car to get money for Hezbollah?

Why did this surface now?  Was it discovered as part of a bankruptcy filing?

Weird.

In commemoration of recent events and a look back.

The Onion - 9/11 hijackers surprised to find themselves in Hell.

"I was promised I would spend eternity in Paradise, being fed honeyed cakes by 67 virgins in a tree-lined garden, if only I would fly the airplane into one of the Twin Towers," said Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11, between attempts to vomit up the wasps, hornets, and live coals infesting his stomach. "But instead, I am fed the boiling feces of traitors by malicious, laughing Ifrit. Is this to be my reward for destroying the enemies of my faith?"


The rest of Atta's words turned to raw-throated shrieks, as a tusked, asp-tongued demon burst his eyeballs and drank the fluid that ran down his face.

According to Hell sources, the 19 eternally damned terrorists have struggled to understand why they have been subjected to soul-withering, infernal torture ever since their Sept. 11 arrival.

"There was a tumultuous conflagration of burning steel and fuel at our gates, and from it stepped forth these hijackers, the blessed name of the Lord already turning to molten brass on their accursed lips," said Iblis The Thrice-Damned, the cacodemon charged with conscripting new arrivals into the ranks of the forgotten. "Indeed, I do not know what they were expecting, but they certainly didn't seem prepared to be skewered from eye socket to bunghole and then placed on a spit so that their flesh could be roasted by the searing gale of flatus which issues forth from the haunches of Asmoday."

According to Michael Barone...

... the irony of Obama's bin Laden success is that it involved the policies he and the anti-war left condemned under Bush.

While we may not know all the details about and behind this operation, it's fascinating to see how many of the things that made the success of this operation possible were not so long ago decried by many of the president's fans and fellow partisans.


For one thing, it apparently would not have happened without those infamous enhanced interrogation techniques -- "torture," according to critics of the Bush administration.

The enhanced interrogation techniques reportedly led to identification of the courier who eventually led our forces to bin Laden's hiding place. Critics of waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques assured us that "torture" could not produce reliable information.

They were probably right that sometimes such techniques yield false information. But the bin Laden operation shows that they can also produce actionable intelligence.

You may remember that many Democrats called for criminal prosecution of CIA interrogators who were acting under orders vetted by legal counsel. Attorney General Eric Holder actually considered bringing such prosecutions.

Fortunately he decided not to do so -- fortunately for the individuals involved but fortunately also for his own reputation. Who would want to be known for prosecuting the people who helped track down bin Laden?

It has also been reported that in hunting down bin Laden our forces relied on intercepted communications. I wonder if any of them included contacts between suspected terrorists abroad and persons in the United States.

This was the "domestic wiretapping" revealed to great acclaim by the New York Times and presented as an intolerable infringement of civil liberties. Given what we know now, it's a good thing our folks were tuning in.

Obama deserves credit also for employing the Navy SEALs who are part of the Joint Special Operations Command. It was fashionable a few years ago to call the JSOC Cheney's death squad and Cheney's assassination team.

The assumption behind such criticism was that Bush administration officials were using what they termed the war against terrorism as a smokescreen for persecuting domestic dissidents. But there is not a scrap of evidence that either the Bush administration or the Obama administration were doing anything of the kind. They were too busy trying to protect us.

There was criticism as well of the idea of targeting particular individuals for assassination. But in ordering the raid on bin Laden's compound Obama authorized the killing of bin Laden. And no Miranda warnings first.

Bin Laden's death removes the possibility of any debate about where he would be confined or tried. On this Obama has already been forced to keep the Guantanamo detention center open and Holder has had to concede that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will not be tried in a civilian court in Manhattan.

Finally, let us note that this was a unilateral operation. Obama didn't go to the United Nations Security Council. He didn't, so far as we know, consult NATO allies. He took care not to inform the government of Pakistan, some elements of which obviously knew that bin Laden was ensconced in a house 800 meters away from Pakistan's military academy.

For years we heard supposedly enlightened people excoriate our leaders for torture, lawlessness, unilateralism -- the list goes on and on. Now the president they have wanted has used the tactics and methods they excoriated to get bin Laden. Good for him.

Obama Bin Laden Killed by American Troops.

About time - and he won't be around to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of 9/11.

Here are the details:

Multiple outlets reporting some or all of these details (links when I get them, pulling together from TV reports):


U.S. Joint Special Operations Command Special Mission Unit (SMU) from the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU — formerly known as Seal Team Six) did the shooting. There were other JSOC spotters on the ground, as well as two special operations helicopters and an unmanned drone overhead.

One of the special-ops helicopters reportedly suffered mechanical difficulties and crash landed onsite. It was destroyed by U.S. forces.

Bin Laden was killed along with two al Qaeda couriers and one of Bin Laden’s adult sons. A woman who was used as a human shield by one of the couriers was also reportedly killed. Several other women were wounded and are reportedly receiving treatment.

The compound was located in an affluent suburb 35 kilometers north of Islamabad and is being described as huge, with a central building many times larger than other houses in the area and ringed by a 12-15-foot tall security wall. The compound reportedly had no incoming or outgoing electronic communications.

Bin Laden had apparently been hiding out in Pakistan, where our allies the Pakistanis couldn't find him.  He was about a mile from a Paki police station.

Mission accomplished. 

America's enemies have to know that they will be hunted down and killed no matter how long it takes.

According to this "Obama credited Pakistan's intelligence services for helping to lead the U.S. to bin Laden."  I guess translated that means the reward got high enough to make it worth someone's while.

Time to get out of Afghanistan and start supporting India.

Outrage of the Day.

Terrorist who confessed to murder acquitted.

According to Daniel Foster at NRO:

Ahmed Ghailani was found not guilty of each of the over 280 counts against him — save one — in the first civilian trial of a Gitmo detainee conducted by the Obama administration.


Among the charges were one count of murder for each of the 224 people killed in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, but Ghailani was found not guilty on each. The lone guilty verdict came on a conspiracy to destroy government buildings charge, which comes with a sentence of 20 years to life.

The jury in the case deliberated for seven days, with one juror requesting to be replaced after telling a judge she disagreed with her peers and was worried she’d face their ire.

Though Ghailani had previously confessed to his role in carrying out the bombings, that confession and a crucial prosecution witness were thrown out because both stemmed from interrogations at a CIA camp.

Ed Morissey observes:

Let’s face it. Barack Obama and Eric Holder gambled their entire national-security credibility on the Ahmed “Foopie” Ghailani trial, arguing that they could get convictions of detainees captured abroad by military and intelligence assets while using federal courts as a venue rather than the military commissions that Congress repeatedly authorized for that purpose. Holder scolded critics who pointed out all of the reasons that such a strategy was much more likely to fail for “politicizing” the process, especially in regard to the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whose case is more problematic than Ghailani’s, where the FBI did a large part of the investigation before intelligence assets were used to seize and interrogate Ghailani.


The failure of Holder’s DoJ to win anything more than a single conspiracy count against Ghailani as a result of using a process designed for domestic criminals than wartime enemies shows that the critics had it right all along. It also shows that both Obama and Holder have been proven spectacularly wrong, since a man who confessed to the murder of over two hundred people will now face as little as 20 years, with a big chunk of whatever sentence Foopie receives being reduced by time already served.

The administration is left with three choices in regards to Ghailani: announce that they will release him at the appointed date whenever his sentence ends, announce that they will hold him indefinitely without regard to the court’s ruling on the matter while referring the case back to a military commission despite his acquittals, or refuse to state which they will do and hope the issue falls to the next administration.  The first will mean that the US will knowingly release a master al-Qaeda terrorist with more than two hundred murders under his belt; the second will mean that the trial they staged was nothing but a sham.  And the third will be a cowardly dodge.

Apparently,  Obama is arguing for the principle of "post-acquittal detention":

Even had he been acquitted on all counts, the Obama administration had made clear that it would simply continue to imprison him anyway under what it claims is the President's "post-acquittal detention power" -- i.e., when an accused Terrorist is wholly acquitted in court, he can still be imprisoned indefinitely by the U.S. Government under the "law of war" even when the factual bases for the claim that he's an "enemy combatant" (i.e. that he blew up the two embassies) are the same ones underlying the crimes for which he was fully acquitted after a full trial. When he banned the testimony of the key witness, Judge Kaplan, somewhat cravenly, alluded to and implicitly endorsed this extraordinary detention theory as a means of assuring the public he had done nothing to endanger them with his ruling (emphasis added):

[Ghailani's] status as an "enemy combatant" probably would permit his detention as something akin to a prisoner of war until hostilities between the United States and Al Qaeda and the Taliban end even if he were found not guilty in this case.

Are American Muslims fighting Terrorism?

The answer is "yes," according to this timeline of foiled terror plots based tips by American Muslim.

I like knowing that.

Barrack Obama - War Criminal.

According to 2000 actors and prominent liberals:

NEW YORK — US actors and liberal intellectuals joined a list to be published Friday of nearly 2,000 people accusing President Barack Obama of allowing human rights violations and war crimes.


“Crimes are crimes, no matter who does them,” the statement reads over pictures of Obama and his predecessor George W. Bush due to appear in the New York Review of Books.

The statement, published as a paid advertisement, accuses Obama, who was elected in 2008 with the enthusiastic support of US liberals, of continuing Bush’s controversial approach to human rights in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in domestic security.

It takes aim especially at Obama’s decision — reported by US officials — to authorize the killing of a radical Islamic cleric and US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who is accused of ties to Al-Qaeda in Yemen.

“In some respects this is worse than Bush,” the statement says. “First, because Obama has claimed the right to assassinate American citizens whom he suspects of ‘terrorism,’ merely on the grounds of his own suspicion or that of the CIA, something Bush never claimed publicly.”

Among the signatories are linguist Noam Chomsky, “L.A. Confidential” actor James Cromwell, actor Mark Ruffalo and prominent Bush-era anti-war protestor Cindy Sheehan. By midday Thursday there were 1,804 signatures.

Not Cindy Sheehan!!!  She has a unique moral authority according to Dave Letterman.

Here is a link to the AFP source.

This seems to be the petition.

Well, at least these people aren't political opportunists - they sincerely view America as the cause of evil in the War on Terror.

Jumping Away from Conclusions

Jonah Goldberg observes:

We have a real problem when much of the political and journalistic establishment is eager to jump to the conclusion that peaceful political opponents are in league with violent extremists, but is terrified to consider the possibility that violent extremists really are violent extremists if doing so means calling attention to the fact that they are Muslims.

Every year it's the same thing: some American Muslim goes nuts and kills a lot of non-Muslim Americans....

...and then the American elites make dire warnings about "possible backlash" by average Americans...you know, those non-elite types who "cling" to their guns and religion.

This time it's the Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano:

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — The U.S. Homeland Security secretary says she is working to prevent a possible wave of anti-Muslim sentiment after the shootings at Fort Hood in Texas.


Janet Napolitano says her agency is working with groups across the United States to try to deflect any backlash against American Muslims following Thursday's rampage by Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim who reportedly expressed growing dismay over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The shootings left 13 people dead and 29 wounded.

Napolitano was in the United Arab Emirates on Sunday for talks with security officials and a meeting with women university students in Abu Dhabi.

It would have been nice if Secretary Napolitano hadn't decided to use her trip to an Arab country to raise fears about the xenophobia of the average American.

It would have been even nicer if she hadn't raised the subject without any evidence at all of American backlash against Muslims.

It would have been nicest of all if she had condemned Muslim "backlash" against Americans for imagined slights and grievances.

Taliban v. Al Quaeda

This story reports on conflict between our two enemies.

Interesting.

Anbar Province handed over to Iraq

The cradle of the Sunni insurgency is quiet and no longer our problem.

I like the times reference to "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia", which "homegrown" but "led by foreigners."

The circumlocutions that the New York Times will go to avoid saying that Al Qaeda is in Iraq is amazing.

From the "Nothing succeeds like success" file

Victor Davis Hansen:

How odd (or to be expected) that suddenly intelligence agencies, analysts, journalists, and terrorists themselves are attesting that al-Qaeda is in near ruins, that ideologically radical Islam is losing its appeal, and that terrorist incidents against Americans at home and abroad outside the war zones are at an all-time low—and yet few associate the radical change in fortune in Iraq as a contributory cause to our success.

But surely the US military contributed a great deal to the humiliation of al-Qaedists and the bankruptcy of their cause, since it has (1) killed thousands of generic jihadists, and to such a degree that the former Middle East romance of going to Iraq to fight the weak crusaders is now synonymous with a death sentence and defeat; (2) provided the window of security necessary for the growing confidence of the Maliki government whose success is absolutely destroying the Islamist canard that the U.S. backs only dictatorships. Indeed, al-Qaeda's greatest fear is successful Arab constitutional government; something still caricatured here at home as a neocon pipe dream.

The fact that people like to be on the winning side is a well-known historic phenomenon. The two great periods of democratic expansion were after World War II - when the democratic Allies kicked totalitarian butt - and after 1989 - when the collapse of the Soviet Union put paid to the totalitarian idea.

Wipe the smile from Osama's face.

Beer with Demos has a plan.

I'm going to run it past my Rotary club.

Newt Gingrich: "I am deeply worred.




It is interesting that Gingrich talks about people who hate America and preach sermons against America. Clearly, he was referring to Wahabi clerics, but apparently he could have been referring to certain American Christian clerics just as easily.