Robert Draper, To Start a War

At Amazon, Robert Draper, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq.

Kalashnikov Automatic Rifle

Small-arms designer Mikhail Kalashnikov created this weapon in 1947, the Avtomat Kalashnikov (Автомат Калашникова), thus the AK-47.

History's most popular weapon of war, the AK's an avatar of revolutionary movement across the Third World. If you've been watching, they're everywhere in Ukraine. Seems like everyone's totin' one, even civilians. 

More, from Phillip Killicoat, "Weaponomics: The Global Market for Assault Rifles":

Existing data on aspects of the small arms market are extremely limited. Since 2001, the In the case of small arms there isan obvious choice: the AK-47 assault rifle. Of the estimated 500 million firearms worldwide, 100 million belong to the Kalashnikov family, three-quarters of which are AK47s (Small Arms Survey 2004). The pervasiveness of this may be explained in large part by its simplicity. The AK-47 was initially designed for ease of operation and repair by glove-wearing Soviet soldiers in arctic conditions. Its breathtaking simplicity means that it can also be operated by child soldiers in the African desert. Kalashnikovs are a weapon of choice for armed forces and non-state actors alike. They are to be found in the arsenals of armed and special forces of more than 80 countries. In practically every theatre of insurgency or guerrilla combat a Kalashnikov will be found. The popularity of the AK-47 is accentuated by the view that it was a necessary tool to remove colonial rulers in Africa and Asia. Indeed, an image of the rifle appears on the Mozambique national flag, and “Kalash”, an abbreviation of Kalashnikov, is a common boy’s name in some African countries.

The AK-47’s popularity is generally attributed to its functional characteristics; ease of operation, robustness to mistreatment and negligible failure rate. The weapon’s weaknesses - it is considerably less accurate, less safe for users, and has a smaller range than equivalently calibrated weapons - are usually overlooked, or considered to be less important than the benefits of its simplicity. But other assault rifles are approximately as simple to manage, yet they have not experienced the soaring popularity of the Kalashnikov.

The AK-47’s ubiquity could alternatively be explained as a result of a path dependent process. Economic historians recognize that an inferior product may persist when a small but early advantage becomes large over time and builds up a legacy that makes switching costly (David 1975). In the case of the AK-47 that early advantage may be that as a Soviet invention it was not subject to patent and so could be freely copied. Furthermore, large caches of these weapons were freely distributed to regimes and rebels sympathetic to the Soviet Union - more freely, that is, than weapons were distributed by the US - thereby giving the AK-47 a foothold advantage in the emerging post-World War II market for small arms.

According to a path dependence interpretation, inferior durable capital equipment may remain in use because the fixed costs are already sunk, while variable costs (e.g. ammunition, learning costs for new recruits) are lower than the total costs of replacing Kalashnikovs with a new generation of weapons of apparently superior quality. Whatever the exact causes, it remains that for the last half-century the AK-47 has enjoyed a near dominant role in the market for assault rifles making it the most persistent piece of modern military technology. Since the technology used in the AK-47 is essentially unchanged from the original, one may be confident that the prices observed across time and countries are determined market conditions rather than changes in the product...

SOURCE: Foreign Policy, "Looking for a deal on AK-47s? Go to Africa."

The Marlboro Marine

Have a good Veterans Day everybody.

The video's from the Los Angeles Times:

After Leaving '60 Minutes', Lara Logan Makes Comeback on 'Fox Nation' (VIDEO)

This woman is a beacon of truth and moral clarity, and of course it was too much for the MSM establishment hacks at CBS.

Flashback to 2012, "Lara Logan Speaks Truth to War on Terror."

And today, at LAT, "A combative Lara Logan plans a comeback on Fox News’ streaming service. Can she succeed?":

“Originally we thought Fox Nation would be purely an extension of the opinion brand of Fox News...The vast majority of the material that we’re doing now doesn’t have any political persuasion at all.”https://t.co/MlsQ6vssck

— Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) January 6, 2020

NEW YORK  —  Veteran foreign correspondent Lara Logan keeps a video of her Texas Hill Country home on her iPad. It shows the sunlight streaming through large trees on the five-acre property with only the sounds of chirping birds and an occasional truck passing by.

Logan, who risked her life being embedded in war-torn regions, has no desire to leave the bucolic domicile, even as she starts rebuilding her career as the host of a new documentary series — “Lara Logan Has No Agenda” — debuting Monday on the Fox News-operated streaming service Fox Nation.

“I don’t want to leave my children,” Logan, 48, said in a recent interview at a studio at Fox News headquarters in midtown Manhattan. “I don’t want to move to New York or Los Angeles. I live in a small town. I’m very happy there.”

No one would blame the former CBS News star for seeking some serenity after a turbulent decade. In February 2011, she was sexually assaulted on the streets of Cairo’s Tahrir Square while covering the celebration of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation.

Two years later, a serious mistake in a “60 Minutes” report that questioned the Obama administration’s response to the September 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, led to a diminished role for Logan on the venerable newsmagazine program. She took a significant cut in her $2-million-a-year salary, and her contract with CBS was not renewed in September 2018, a stunning downfall for an award-winning journalist and sought-after TV news talent.

But the South Africa native’s combination of grit, charisma and candor has kept her in the spotlight. She resurfaced in February in a 3 ½ hour interview on the podcast of her friend, former Navy SEAL Mike Ritland, in which she described the news media as predominantly left-leaning.

“The media is mostly liberal everywhere, not just the U.S.,” Logan said. “We’ve abandoned our pretense, or at least the effort, to be objective today.”

Right-wing websites and commentators latched onto her remarks, which went viral online. Invitations came from Fox News for her to appear as a guest with its President Trump-supporting prime-time hosts, who nightly accuse mainstream media outlets of liberal bias.

A noodle soup without the soup? A chef doubles down on a sidelined dish.

Her segments were well-received by the Fox News audience, and host Sean Hannity even lobbied his bosses on the air to hire her. Logan’s newest assignment eventually followed.

Logan insists her remarks were not an attempt to position herself a politically partisan pundit for a polarized media age. Her commitment to Fox News is limited to her four-episode series. “I’m not trying to be an opinion person,” she said.

Logan believes viewers who stream her new program will see that it adheres to its “No Agenda” title, despite its association with the conservative-leaning network.

“I can’t control the media landscape,” Logan said. “What I can control is the work that I do. I’m going to do that the same way here the way I did it at ‘60 Minutes.’ To date nobody has tried to make me do anything other than that. Nobody.”

The first episode of “Lara Logan Has No Agenda” looks at immigration enforcement, largely from the perspective of U.S. border agents who work along the Rio Grande. But she also devotes significant time to depicting the dangers that undocumented migrants face, and avoids taking a side in the heated political debate surrounding the issue...

RTWT.

Ukrainian Airliner May Have Been Shot Down in Iran

It's just too big of a coincidence for me, but it pays to be skeptical.

Maybe it was engine failure?

In any case, at the Conservative Treehouse, "Iran Refuses to Hand Over Black Box From Fatal Boeing Crash Near Tehran – Nose of SAM Missile Discovered Near Crash Site…"

And at New York Magazine, "It Sure Looks Like the Ukrainian Airliner May Have Been Accidentally Shot Down in Iran."

Trudeau was asked if he could rule out that flight PS752 from Tehran to Kyiv was not shot down: “I can not,” he said: Read more here: https://t.co/hVcgH4TLP7 pic.twitter.com/LueVrnah0s

— CBC Politics (@CBCPolitics) January 8, 2020

Remember, Russia Today is a Russian propaganda channel, although sometimes they post real news. (*Shrugs.*)

'13 Minutes'

At the People's Cube, lol.

John Krasinski to star in Trump era remake of Benghazi movie “13 Hours”

It’s called “13 Minutes”. It chronicles the 13 minutes from when the Marines landed at our Baghdad embassy to when the Iranian backed militias ran like cowards.#Benghazi

— The People's Cube 🚁🤸 (@ThePeoplesCube) January 1, 2020

Does It Even Need to Be Asked?

At the Other McCain, "Democrats: Pro-Iran or Anti-American?"

What Tehran is Likely to Do Next

I think we're at war already.

It's been proxy war for 40 years.

The latest is the rocket strikes on Iraqi military bases (targeting American personnel).

No casualties yet, but this latest conflagration is really just getting started. Neither side seems to want deescalation, and each side's target domestic audience is highly supportive of the action, and thus there's little political incentive to stand down.

I'll have more, as I always do.

In any case, from Ilan Goldenberg, at Foreign Affairs, "Will Iran’s Response to the Soleimani Strike Lead to War?":

Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, was one of the most influential and popular figures in the Islamic Republic and a particular nemesis of the United States. He led Iran’s campaign to arm and train Shiite militias in Iraq—militias responsible for the deaths of an estimated 600 American troops from 2003 to 2011— and became the chief purveyor of Iranian political influence in Iraq thereafter, most notably through his efforts to fight the Islamic State (ISIS). He drove Iran’s policies to arm and support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, including by deploying an estimated 50,000 Shiite militia fighters to Syria. He was the point man for Iran’s relationship with Hezbollah in Lebanon, helping to supply the group with missiles and rockets to threaten Israel. He drove Iran’s strategy to arm the Houthis in Yemen. For all these reasons and more, Soleimani was a cult hero in Iran and across the region.

In short, the United States has taken a highly escalatory step in assassinating one of the most important and powerful men in the Middle East.

The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump argues that Soleimani was a terrorist and that assassinating him was a defensive action that stopped an imminent attack. Both of those assertions may or may not be true, but the United States would never have felt compelled to act against the Iranian general if not for the reckless policy the administration has pursued since it came into office. In May 2018, Trump left the Iran nuclear agreement and adopted a “maximum pressure” policy of economic sanctions on Iran. For a year, Iran responded with restraint in an effort to isolate the United States diplomatically and win economic concessions from other parties to the nuclear agreement.

But the restrained approach failed to yield material benefits. By May 2019, Tehran had chosen instead to breach the agreement and escalate tensions across the region. First came Iranian mine attacks against international shipping in May and June. Then Iran shot down a U.S. drone, nearly touching off an open conflict with the United States. In September, Iranian missiles struck the Abqaiq facility in Saudi Arabia—arguably the most important piece of oil infrastructure in the world. Shiite militia groups began launching rockets at U.S. bases in Iraq, ultimately leading to the death of an American contractor last week. Retaliatory U.S. strikes eventually brought us to the Soleimani assassination.

The most important question now is how will Iran respond. The Islamic Republic’s behavior over the past few months and over its long history suggests that it may not rush to retaliate. Rather, it will carefully and patiently choose an approach that it deems effective, and it will likely try to avoid an all-out war with the United States. Nonetheless, the events of the past few days demonstrate that the risk of miscalculation is incredibly high. Soleimani clearly didn’t believe that the United States was going to dramatically escalate or he wouldn’t have left himself so vulnerable, only a stone’s throw away from U.S. military forces in Iraq. For his part, Trump has been adamant about his lack of interest in starting a new war in the Middle East—and yet, here we are at the precipice.

The United States must, at a minimum, expect to find itself in conflict with Shiite militias in Iraq that will target U.S. forces, diplomats, and civilians. Iraq is the theater where the U.S. strike took place and therefore the most rational place for Iran to immediately respond. Moreover, the militia groups have already been escalating their activities over the past six months. They are among Iran’s most responsive proxies and will be highly motivated, given that Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, one of their top commanders, was killed in the strike along with Soleimani.

Whether a U.S. presence in Iraq is still viable remains an open question. The security situation, which has certainly now been complicated, is not the only problem. The assassination was such an extreme violation of Iraqi sovereignty—done unilaterally, without Iraqi government consent—that Iraqi officials will come under tremendous political pressure to eject U.S. forces. Many Iraqis have no love for either the United States or Iran. They just want to have their country back to themselves and fear being put in the middle of a U.S.-Iranian confrontation. The current situation could turn into a worst-case scenario for these citizens.

But a chaotic U.S. withdrawal under fire could also present real dangers. The mission to counter ISIS remains a going concern, and if the United States is forced to leave Iraq, that effort could suffer a serious blow. ISIS retains an underground presence and could take advantage of the chaos of an American withdrawal or a U.S.-Iranian conflict to improve its position in Iraq.

The repercussions of the assassination won’t necessarily be confined to Iraq. Lebanese Hezbollah, which enjoys a close relationship with Iran and is likely to be responsive to Iranian requests, could attack American targets in Lebanon. Even if Iran decides to avoid a major escalation in Lebanon, Hezbollah operatives are distributed throughout the Middle East and could attack the United States elsewhere in the region. Alternatively, Hezbollah may choose to launch missile attacks on Israeli territory, although this response is less likely. Hezbollah wants to avoid an all-out war with Israel that would devastate Lebanon, and the Trump administration has publicly taken credit for killing Soleimani, increasing the likelihood that a retaliatory strike will target the United States directly.

Iran could conduct missile strikes against U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates or against oil facilities in the Gulf. The accuracy of Iran’s missile strikes on the Abqaiq oil facility in September took the United States and the rest of the world by surprise, although Iran did purposefully attempt to keep the attack limited and symbolic. In the current climate, Iran could choose to become much more aggressive, calculating that in the arena of missile strikes it has been highly successful in landing blows while avoiding retaliation over the past six months.

We should also expect Iran to significantly accelerate its nuclear program. Since the Trump administration left the Iran nuclear agreement in May 2018, Iran has been quite restrained in its nuclear response. After a year of staying in the deal, in May 2019, Iran began to incrementally violate the agreement by taking small steps every 60 days. The next 60-day window ends next week, and it is hard to imagine restraint in the wake of Soleimani’s death. At a minimum, Iran will restart enriching uranium to 19.75 percent, a significant step toward weapons-grade uranium. It has recently threatened to go even further by walking away from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty or kicking out inspectors. These would be profoundly dangerous moves, and until this week most analysts believed Tehran was unlikely to actually make them. Now they may well be on the table.

Perhaps the most provocative thing Iran could do is carry out a terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland or attempt to kill a senior U.S. official of Soleimani’s stature...

The Strike Against Islamic State's Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi Complicated Leftist Efforts to Destroy President Trump

From Mollie Hemingway, at the Federalist:

Here Are The Real Reasons Media Lost Their Minds When Baghdadi Died https://t.co/J2U5xEVSB2

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) October 28, 2019

The Final Humiliation of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

It's Graeme Wood, at the Atlantic:

My thoughts on the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the hirsute rapist who was the absentee Caliph of the Islamic State: https://t.co/f27Vwi7hkW (in @TheAtlantic/@TheAtlIdeas)

— Graeme Wood (@gcaw) October 27, 2019

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, thanks for the memories https://t.co/KkVHW6753S

— Graeme Wood (@gcaw) October 27, 2019

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi Killed

President Trump teased the news last night, and this morning he's got the far-left media in a psychotic tizzy.

At the Other McCain, "Al-Baghdadi ‘Died Like a Coward’."

And the New York Times, via Memeorandum, "Special Operations Raid Said to Kill Senior Terrorist Leader in Syria."

Searing Moment in the Middle East

For the record, I'm not pleased with President Trump's handling of Syria and Turkey this past week or so. Not pleased at all. Yeah, I can dig the current public sentiment to wind things down, and end "regime change wars," but previous commitments should be honored and our dealings with allies should be respectful and up and up. It's especially disgraceful to cough up territory and control in places Americans have shed blood, to say nothing of fierce fighters like the Kurds.

Oh well.

At WaPo, "The hasty U.S. pullback from Syria is a searing moment in America’s withdrawal from the Middle East":

The hasty U.S. pullback from Syria is a searing moment in America’s withdrawal from the Middle East https://t.co/Gk8dYbpM2N

— Claire Berlinski (@ClaireBerlinski) October 17, 2019

BEIRUT — The blow to America’s standing in the Middle East was sudden and unexpectedly swift. Within the space of a few hours, advances by Turkish troops in Syria this week had compelled the U.S. military’s Syrian Kurdish allies to switch sides, unraveled years of U.S. Syria policy and recalibrated the balance of power in the Middle East.

As Russian and Syrian troops roll into vacated towns and U.S. bases, the winners are counting the spoils.

The withdrawal delivered a huge victory to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who won back control of an area roughly amounting to a third of the country almost overnight. It affirmed Moscow as the arbiter of Syria’s fate and the rising power in the Middle East. It sent another signal to Iran that Washington has no appetite for the kind of confrontation that its rhetoric suggests and that Iran’s expanded influence in Syria is now likely to go unchallenged.

It sent a message to the wider world that the United States is in the process of a disengagement that could resonate beyond the Middle East, said Hussein Ibish of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

“There’s a sense that the long goodbye has begun and that the long goodbye from the Middle East could become a long goodbye from Asia and everywhere else,” he said.

Images shared on social media underscored the indignity of the retreat. Departing U.S. troops in sophisticated armored vehicles passed Syrian army soldiers riding in open-top trucks on a desert highway. An embedded Russian journalist took selfies on the abandoned U.S. base in Manbij, where U.S. forces had fought alongside their Kurdish allies to drive out the Islamic State in 2015.

“Only yesterday they were here, and now we are here,” said the journalist, panning the camera around the intact infrastructure, including a radio tower and a button-powered traffic-control gate that he showed was still functioning.

“Let’s see how they lived and what they ate,” he said, before ducking into one of the tents and filming the soldiers’ discarded snacks.

On Arab news channels, coverage switched from footage of jubilant Syrian troops to scenes of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s lavish receptions by the monarchs of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Washington’s most vital Arab allies in the Persian Gulf. The visits had been long planned, but the timing gave them the feel of a victory lap.

“This has left a bad taste for all of America’s friends and allies in the region, not only among the Kurds,” said a former regional minister who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to not embarrass his government, an American ally. “Many will now be looking for new friends. The Russians don’t abandon their allies. They fight for them. And so do the Iranians.”

It was the manner of the withdrawal, hastily called amid chaos on the battlefield as Turkish forces pushed deep into Syria, that gave the event such impact in the region, analysts said. Few had anticipated that the most advanced military in the world would make such a scrambled and hasty departure, even after President Trump signaled he would not endorse a war on behalf of the Kurds against a U.S. NATO ally.

Less than 48 hours before the withdrawal announcement, U.S. Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had given assurances that the troops would remain indefinitely, standing by their Kurdish partners to continue to hunt down the Islamic State.

 But the Turks’ capture Sunday of a key highway that served as the U.S. troops’ main supply line revealed the fragility of a mission that had narrowly focused on the Islamic State fight while neglecting regional dynamics, including the depth of Turkish animosity to the Kurdish militia with which the United States had teamed up...

More.

After Five Failed Attempts to Escape Islamic State, This Yazidi Woman Tried One Last Time

At the Washington Post, "After five failed attempts to escape ISIS slavery, she tried one last time":

After five failed attempts to escape ISIS slavery, this Yazidi woman tried one last time: The details in this story are so horrific they are hard to read, but thank you @leloveluck for telling her important story. https://t.co/Y67iaE9rVq pic.twitter.com/uPspM02LRF

— Anna Fifield (@annafifield) February 25, 2019

AMUDA, Syria — The walk to freedom lasted 53 hours, and the little boy cried all the way. It wasn’t their first escape attempt — she’d tried five times before to flee the Islamic State — but they would be shot on the spot if the militants caught them now.

They passed corpses in the darkness, and when exhaustion overwhelmed them, they huddled together and slept on the dusty path. Faryal whispered reassurances to her 5-year-old son, telling him that his grandparents were waiting and that, after four years as prisoners of the Islamic State, they were finally going home. He wouldn’t believe her.

“He was terrified,” she said, recounting their escape this month. “I held his hand and we just kept walking.”

As members of Iraq’s Yazidi minority, a largely Kurdish-speaking religious group, the pair had escaped what the United Nations has called a genocide. Islamic State militants kidnapped thousands of Yazidis on a single day in August 2014, massacring the men and dumping them in mass graves, and forcing the women into sexual slavery.

During her captivity, Faryal said she had six different owners, at times being passed on when a fighter wanted a new sexual partner or simply to settle a debt. “Monsters who treated us like animals,” is how she described them.

The atrocities committed against the Yazidis had initially prompted the United States to launch airstrikes against the militants and begin a military campaign to roll back the Islamic State’s caliphate that now, four years later, could end within days. U.S.-backed forces have the last Islamic State holdouts surrounded in the eastern Syrian hamlet of Baghouz.

In photographs, taken by aid workers on the night of her escape, a male companion hides his face but Faryal looks straight out at the camera. Her hazel eyes are fixed in a quiet stare. Her son’s face is wet with tears, and he’s sobbing. “I can’t put into words how I was feeling at that moment,” she said. “All I could think was: ‘Please, take me away from here.’ ”

Faryal, 20, told her story last week in the northern Syrian town of Amuda after being transferred there by the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces that rescued them. Throughout the interview, she kept a watchful eye on Hoshyar, her son, pulling him close as he cried and then trying, without success, to make him laugh. Details of her account were corroborated by members of her family in northern Iraq and through a team of Yazidi activists that had communicated with her secretly for months before the escape in attempts to smuggle her to safety.

Young child brutalized

The day before Faryal’s life changed forever in 2014 had dawned like any other in the Iraqi village of Tel Banat. She puttered around the house looking after her infant son Hoshyar, she recalled. By midday, the sun was roasting, and although rumors had swirled for weeks that Islamic State forces were drawing closer, few in Tel Banat were aware of the coming storm.

The Islamist militants arrived at dusk.

“We couldn’t run fast enough,” Faryal remembered, describing how she and 10 members of her extended family had piled into a car and joined an epic exodus. Yazidi towns and villages around Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq emptied within hours as more than 100,000 people fled to higher ground. Faryal and her husband, Hashem, made it only a few miles before militants blocked their path.

Yazidis have long faced persecution from more powerful religious groups for their beliefs, in part because of a false but commonly-held impression that they worship the sun, or the devil. There are fewer than 1 million Yazidis worldwide, and according to the United Nations, the Islamic State had intended to entirely wipe out those within their reach.

Yazidi men and boys who had reached puberty were separated from the women and other children and often shot dead at roadsides. Women were bused to temporary holding sites and then sold to Islamic State fighters at slave markets.

Islamic State clerics had decided that having slaves was religiously sanctioned, institutionalizing sexual violence across their caliphate. Women have reported being tied to beds during daily assaults. They were sold from man to man. Gang rape was common.

Many women and girls committed suicide in the opening months of captivity, according to Yazidi rights groups. Others harmed themselves to appear less appealing to fighters who might consider buying them.

Faryal recalled that an Islamic State fighter who was Iraqi and called himself Abu Kattab was her worst abuser. Hoshyar was abused, too, Faryal said. Abu Kattab beat him so badly there were hand prints on his face. Another had forced the boy’s arm onto a hot plate.

“He was so small, but for some reason the fighters hated him,” Faryal said. “I could never explain to him why.”

As the boy sat beside his mother last week, his eyes moved slowly from side to side as if scanning the room for threats. His blond hair was cut in jagged chunks. He did not speak and he did not smile...

More.

President Trump Makes Surprise Visit to Iraq to See American Troops

At Fox News:



Lefty journalists were salivating over their headlines blaring "Trump first president since 2002 not to visit troops over the holidays."

And it was in the works too:

Travel of this type is kept a secret for security reasons so the White House did not release details publicly in advance. On Thanksgiving, Pres.Trump said he had a trip to see troops planned with no details. He and Mrs. Trump left in secret for 1st visit to troops in war zone. https://t.co/8QbPw1occt

— Kelly O'Donnell (@KellyO) December 26, 2018

Fifteen Years After the Iraq War: A Veteran Reflects

Not a neoconservative manifesto, but well-stated nevertheless --- and interesting.

From Andrew Exum, at the Atlantic, "One Morning in Baghdad."

I wrote something about the war in Iraq for today, the war’s 15th anniversary. https://t.co/NCuvdiF6aI

— Andrew Exum (@ExumAM) March 20, 2018

G.W. Bush: 'The fact that there was any doubt in anyone’s mind about who the president was blows my mind,' adding that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld 'didn’t make one fucking decision...'

At Politico:

George W. Bush on his presidency: "The fact that there was any doubt in anyone’s mind about who the president was blows my mind,” adding that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld “didn’t make one fucking decision.” https://t.co/8KmHQEwQvP pic.twitter.com/TX0EOqlMo4

— POLITICO (@politico) November 20, 2017

Six Seconds to Live

This is astonishing.

Here, on Twitter.

Wow. Read this. pic.twitter.com/gg4pkFL23Y

— Jay Caruso (@JayCaruso) October 23, 2017

Vast New Intelligence Haul Fuels Next Phase of Fight Against Islamic State

At LAT:

Vast new intelligence haul fuels the next phase of the fight against Islamic State https://t.co/LZIYajfG6K pic.twitter.com/I5x8Y9WM7p

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) September 11, 2017

Out in Paper: Clinton Romesha, Red Platoon

Now available in paperback, at Amazon, Clinton Romesha, Red Platoon: A True Story of American Valor.

Julian Assange's Nihilism (VIDEO)

From Sue Halpern, at the New York Review, "The Nihilism of Julian Assange":

Sue Halpern reviews ‘Risk,’ Laura Poitras’s documentary portrait of Julian Assange https://t.co/tgEwRkGF1q

— NY Review of Books (@nybooks) June 20, 2017

About forty minutes into Risk, Laura Poitras’s messy documentary portrait of Julian Assange, the filmmaker addresses the viewer from off-camera. “This is not the film I thought I was making,” she says. “I thought I could ignore the contradictions. I thought they were not part of the story. I was so wrong. They are becoming the story.”

By the time she makes this confession, Poitras has been filming Assange, on and off, for six years. He has gone from a bit player on the international stage to one of its dramatic leads. His gleeful interference in the 2016 American presidential election—first with the release of e-mails poached from the Democratic National Committee, timed to coincide with, undermine, and possibly derail Hillary Clinton’s nomination at the Democratic Convention, and then with the publication of the private e-mail correspondence of Clinton’s adviser John Podesta, which was leaked, drip by drip, in the days leading up to the election to maximize the damage it might inflict on Clinton—elevated Assange’s profile and his influence.

And then this spring, it emerged that Nigel Farage, the Trump adviser and former head of the nationalist and anti-immigrant UK Independence Party (UKIP) who is now a person of interest in the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, was meeting with Assange. To those who once saw him as a crusader for truth and accountability, Assange suddenly looked more like a Svengali and a willing tool of Vladimir Putin, and certainly a man with no particular affection for liberal democracy. Yet those tendencies were present all along.

n 2010, when Poitras began work on her film, Assange’s four-year-old website, WikiLeaks, had just become the conduit for hundreds of thousands of classified American documents revealing how we prosecuted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including a graphic video of American soldiers in an Apache helicopter mowing down a group of unarmed Iraqis, as well as for some 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables. All had been uploaded to the WikiLeaks site by an army private named Bradley—now Chelsea—Manning.

The genius of the WikiLeaks platform was that documents could be leaked anonymously, with all identifiers removed; WikiLeaks itself didn’t know who its sources were unless leakers chose to reveal themselves. This would prevent anyone at WikiLeaks from inadvertently, or under pressure, disclosing a source’s identity. Assange’s goal was to hold power—state power, corporate power, and powerful individuals—accountable by offering a secure and easy way to expose their secrets. He called this “radical transparency.” Manning’s bad luck was to tell a friend about the hack, and the friend then went to the FBI. For a long time, though, Assange pretended not to know who provided the documents, even when there was evidence that he and Manning had been e-mailing before the leaks.

Though the contradictions were not immediately obvious to Poitras as she trained her lens on Assange, they were becoming so to others in his orbit. WikiLeaks’s young spokesperson in those early days, James Ball, has recounted how Assange tried to force him to sign a nondisclosure statement that would result in a £12 million penalty if it were breached. “[I was] woken very early by Assange, sitting on my bed, prodding me in the face with a stuffed giraffe, immediately once again pressuring me to sign,” Ball wrote. Assange continued to pester him like this for two hours. Assange’s “impulse towards free speech,” according to Andrew O’Hagan, the erstwhile ghostwriter of Assange’s failed autobiography, “is only permissible if it adheres to his message. His pursuit of governments and corporations was a ghostly reverse of his own fears for himself. That was the big secret with him: he wanted to cover up everything about himself except his fame.”

Meanwhile, some of the company he was keeping while Poitras was filming also might have given her pause. His association with Farage had already begun in 2011 when Farage was head of UKIP. Assange’s own WikiLeaks Party of Australia was aligned with the white nationalist Australia First Party, itself headed by an avowed neo-Nazi, until political pressure forced it to claim that association to be an “administrative error.”

Most egregious, perhaps, was Assange’s collaboration with Israel Shamir, an unapologetic anti-Semite and Putin ally to whom Assange handed over all State Department diplomatic cables from the Manning leak relating to Belarus (as well as to Russia, Eastern Europe, and Israel). Shamir then shared these documents with members of the regime of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who appeared to use them to imprison and torture members of the opposition. This prompted the human rights group Index on Censorship to ask WikiLeaks to explain its relationship to Shamir, and to look into reports that Shamir’s “access to the WikiLeaks’ US diplomatic cables [aided in] the prosecution of civil society activists within Belarus.” WikiLeaks called these claims rumors and responded that it would not be investigating them. “Most people with principled stances don’t survive for long,” Assange tells Poitras at the beginning of the film. It’s not clear if he’s talking about himself or others...

I've never liked nor respected Assange, who I consider an enemy.

But note how Halpern gets the basic background wrong: That "graphic video of American soldiers in an Apache helicopter mowing down a group of unarmed Iraqis" was actually a video of anti-American journalists embedded with Iraqi insurgents armed with RPGs. The Apache took them out in self-defense, following strict rules of engagement. That story's been totally debunked. But as with most other things in the news, the initial lie becomes the official truth for the radical left. That's why you can never let your guard down.

Keep reading, FWIW.