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.

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."

After Fighting Islamic State, Civilian Life Takes Toll

At the Los Angeles Times, "Two buddies survived fighting Islamic State, but for one civilian life was too much":

Please read this story. I’m hoping it makes you think about those at risk who we can all help. I’ve never covered a story like this. https://t.co/wLfCX26ovj

— Molly Hennessy-Fiske (@mollyhf) June 20, 2019

He was dashing up the mountain into darkness, chasing a friend armed with a shotgun.

Taylor Hudson yelled for his friend to wait, to stop.

They had rushed together toward danger so many times before on the battlefields of Syria. They had protected each other, made it home safe.

Cactus pierced Hudson’s sides as he scrambled up to save his buddy.

Then he heard the gunshots.

Hudson had met Kevin Howard three years earlier in eastern Syria, where they discovered they both had volunteered for the French Foreign Legion.

Hudson, 35, was an idealist raised in Pasadena, a lanky college dropout and ironworker kept out of the Marines because of a wrist tattoo he unsuccessfully tried to burn off with battery acid.

Howard, 27, was his opposite: short, with a blond crew cut and tattoos up to his eyebrows. Adopted at birth, he’d been rejected by his new parents at 12, then raised in a San Francisco orphanage. He left at 17 to join the Marines, trained at Camp Pendleton and served from 2006 to 2010, deploying twice to Iraq as an anti-tank missileman.

The men had both joined the French Foreign Legion for adventure, Howard training as a sniper, Hudson as a medic. They adopted noms de guerre: Howard chose Kane Harlly; Hudson became Paul “Doc” Hetfield. Howard had the title of the legion’s anthem tattooed above his right eyebrow: “Rien n’empeche.” Unstoppable.

But they became disillusioned as superiors confined them to southeastern France and enviously followed news of the war raging in Syria. In 2016, each joined U.S.-allied militias to fight Islamic State.

“The war was like a sanctuary, as crazy as that sounds,” Hudson said as he sat in his spare Tucson ranch house. “It was black and white, good and evil, the most pure fight in modern times. That feels so good to be with people in a righteous cause. When that’s over, what has meaning in civilian life?”

A month after Hudson arrived in eastern Syria, he met Howard. Howard served with a poorly outfitted group of Kurdish fighters, who had stopped to visit Hudson’s unit bivouacked in the cow shed of an abandoned cheese factory. Hudson noticed Howard’s camouflage legionnaire pants and struck up a conversation.

The pair soon began working as a team: Howard as a sniper; Hudson, his lookout.

“I knew we were always going to stick together,” Hudson said.

They shifted to an allied Christian militia, the Syriac Military Council. Before an important battle, their commander left and the unit voted unanimously for Howard to replace him. Hudson became chief medical officer. They were reluctant leaders, Hudson said, but “sometimes you find yourself in situations where you know you have a responsibility.”

In summer 2017, the unit moved to the outskirts of Raqqah, capital of Islamic State’s caliphate, for the start of a siege. They remained holed up in abandoned, bombed-out buildings for months.

That July, during an interview in a crumbling house they had converted into a sniper’s roost, Howard and Hudson appeared weary but committed. They pointed out Islamic State strongholds a few yards away and warned that drones sometimes buzzed nearby, dropping bombs.

They never felt safe. Their fellow fighters had scant training and could be careless with guns. The pair looked out for each other, sleeping in shifts.

Howard recalled his time as a Marine, battling Muslim extremists in Kurdish northern Iraq. He had tried returning to civilian life, but “it just didn’t work out.” Staying home as a war raged felt wrong, he said.

He divided western volunteers in Syria into four groups: politically motivated anarchists and socialists; “starry-eyed” dreamers; those fleeing their past; and the “legitimately crazy.”

Hudson noted that his friend hadn't classified himself, and Howard laughed.

Hudson took breaks from the front lines, staying with a Christian Syrian couple. He fell in love with their daughter, got engaged and started planning a future.

Howard had two words tattooed on his knuckles: “love” and “lost.” He stayed in Raqqah and embraced the Assyrian Christian cause, including a new nom de guerre: Hawro, or “Brother,” Christian.

“They are arguably the most oppressed people in the world right now,” Howard said. “I believe in staying and helping them fight because it’s what I’m good at.”

In time, both men soured on the militia.

Hudson, wounded by shrapnel and a drone bombing, left the front line to get treatment. His fiancee broke off their engagement. Commanders refused to allow him to return to battle, he said, even as they pushed Howard south toward the worsening battle in Dair Alzour.

Each of the men heard the other had been killed. When they were reunited weeks later, they decided it was time to leave the militia — and Syria.

Eventually, Howard and Hudson returned home after harrowing months detained by their own militia. Howard was also held by authorities after crossing the border into Iraq, released only after U.S. officials intervened.

Years would pass before they reunited.

*****

Howard floundered in the U.S., stripped of his gun, his unit and his cause.

He visited friends in California and Idaho; reconnected with his birth mother in Grants Pass, Ore.; worked oilfield jobs in North Dakota and west Texas. For a time, he ran with the Hells Angels in Oakland.

Last year, he became homeless in the Dakotas, unable to claim veteran’s disability benefits because he couldn’t find the necessary paperwork until he asked friends to help.

Hudson had built an extra room in his house for Howard, and urged him to visit. Howard initially demurred. Then one day he texted Hudson a photo of pill bottles, threatening suicide. Hudson wired him plane fare. Howard flew to Arizona the next day.

There Hudson helped him rent a nearby house, a life goal Howard had written on a list he carried in his pocket.

Howard went to doctor’s appointments at the Department of Veterans Affairs for post-traumatic stress disorder and got a caseworker. He adopted a cat. He met a woman. Three months ago, at an iconic mountain west of downtown known as Sentinel Peak, he proposed. She said yes.

Hudson thought his friend was healing.

But after Howard’s girlfriend moved in, the couple fought. He suspected her of cheating. His caseworker knew he had been drinking too much and tried to get him into rehab.

Howard told friends he missed Syria.

Hudson understood how Howard felt: “That was where we belonged. That was our place and our time in history. We were motivated and focused and knew what we had to do. That’s what’s missing when you get home, that mission-oriented way of thinking.”

Half of their former unit was fighting alongside rebels in Ukraine. But Howard didn’t want to join them.

“It wasn’t really his fight,” Hudson said. “He did love the lifestyle — the camaraderie, the guys. But he wasn’t willing to join a cause he didn’t believe in.”

Howard considered going back to Syria, or joining rebels in Myanmar. Hudson found that odd.

“He didn’t even know what side he was going to fight on,” Hudson said. “It made him seem suicidal, like, ‘I’m just going to roll the dice.’”

Howard admitted he still contemplated suicide. So the two friends made a pact: If one decided to kill himself, he would call the other first...

Excellent piece.

Keep reading.

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.

Syria Withdrawal and Push for Border Wall Demonstrate Trump's 'America First' Worldview

Leftist media outlets have been slobbering all over themselves the last 24 hours, with a concatenation of news events they hope will damage the White House.

Actually, a lot of this is good news. The Mattis resignation isn't out of the ordinary at all. The economy's actually strong and markets are betting on the future, especially Federal Reserve moves that could dampen growth. Fact is, final 3rd quarter numbers show the economy humming along at 3.5 percent growth. Travel numbers for the season are at record numbers and it should be a booming Christmas shopping season.

For the leftist establishment take on Mattis see NYT, via Memeorandum, "Defense Secretary Jim Mattis Resigns, Rebuking Trump's Worldview."

And for the America First viewpoint, make sure you're following Diana West on Twitter:

There is nothing to win in the Islamic world and everything to lose at home. https://t.co/398cEasuM7

— Diana West (@diana_west_) December 21, 2018

And at the Los Angeles Times, "Trump's decision to withdraw from Syria and build a border wall instead marks a key moment for his 'America first' view":

Trump's decision to withdraw from #Syria and build a border wall instead marks a key moment for his '#AmericaFirst' view: #ThankYouTrump #SyriaWithdrawal https://t.co/15SlZSdHwM @diana_west_

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) December 21, 2018

President Trump, in a pair of tweets Wednesday summarizing his worldview, justified his decision to order American troops withdrawn from Syria while promising that the military would instead put resources into building the wall he’s long espoused along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” Trump tweeted, shortly before his press secretary announced that “we have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign.”

That declaration from Trump came shortly after another Twitter missive in which he declared that “because of the tremendous dangers at the Border, including large scale criminal and drug inflow, the United States Military will build the Wall!”

The joint tweets offered perhaps the clearest distillation to date of Trump’s “America first” policy: a simple and abrupt vow to disengage from one of the world’s most nettlesome conflicts, with a potentially premature declaration of victory over the militants of Islamic State, also known as ISIS, coupled with an unlikely promise that the world’s most sophisticated fighting force would be deployed to build a literal fortification around the homeland.

The order to withdraw the roughly 2,000 troops currently in Syria provided the latest example of how Trump’s instinct to turn inward, whatever the risk and costs to the United States’ influence and reputation abroad, may clash with the views of the generals and foreign policy experts who serve inside and outside his administration.

Defense Secretary James N. Mattis, for example, a retired four-star general who once commanded American forces in the Middle East, was pushed aside by President Obama for advocating more forceful engagement in the region. Pentagon officials over the last two years have repeatedly clashed with Trump’s desires to limit the kind of muscular U.S. role in the Mideast that Mattis has advocated in the past.

Trump’s announcement raised fears among national security professionals that he might follow the Syria decision with a troop drawdown in Afghanistan, something he has long wanted to do.

Either exit involves a strategic gamble by Trump and could also cost the president politically if Islamic State violence resurges or the region destabilizes during the 2020 election campaign.

“It is a major blunder,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). “If it isn’t reversed, it will haunt this administration and America for years to come.”

As is often the case, many officials worked Wednesday to mitigate the immediate impacts of Trump’s declaration, by slowing the withdrawal timeline and following his instructions only approximately. Others who have grown accustomed to Trump’s splashy promises and the fluidity of his decision-making cautioned that Wednesday’s announcement may not come immediately to fruition or could be tempered by the time the military implements it.

Trump’s about-face came only weeks after some of his own advisors said U.S. troops would remain in Syria until Iran, a key backer of Syrian President Bashar Assad, agreed to remove its own troops from the country. That expanded mission appeared to reflect the wishes of anti-Iran hard-liners, including national security advisor John Bolton, rather than Trump’s views.

A senior administration official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity put the matter bluntly. Asked about the cascade of recent statements by Bolton and others vowing to stay in Syria as long as Iran remained engaged, the official said that Trump is doing what Trump wants to do.

“The issue here is that the president has made a decision,” the official said. “He gets to do that. It’s his prerogative.”

The official conceded that the Islamic State threat has not been eliminated from the region beyond Syria’s borders, even if the militants have been significantly hobbled inside.

Some of Trump’s closest allies in the Republican Party oppose his plan...

Still more.

The Case for Spending More to Help Israel (VIDEO)

This is excellent.

It's U.S. Gen Chuck Wald, for Prager University.

Supreme Court Upholds President Trump's Travel Ban

I'm positively giddy with today's decision out of SCOTUS.

I'm especially pleased because it's a huge defeat for the radical left.

At USA Today, "Supreme Court upholds President Trump's travel ban against majority-Muslim countries":

WASHINGTON — A deeply divided Supreme Court upheld President Trump's immigration travel ban against predominantly Muslim countries Tuesday as a legitimate exercise of executive branch authority.

The 5-4 ruling reverses a series of lower court decisions that had struck down the ban as Illegal or unconstitutional. It hands a major victory to Trump, who initiated the battle to ban travelers a week after assuming office last year. It was a defeat for Hawaii and other states that had challenged the action, as well as immigration rights groups.

Trump hailed the decision as vindicating his controversial immigration policies, after first tweeting seven simple words: "SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS TRUMP TRAVEL BAN. Wow!"

"In this era of worldwide terrorism and extremist movements bent on harming innocent civilians, we must properly vet those coming into our country," the president said. "This ruling is also a moment of profound vindication following months of hysterical commentary from the media and Democratic politicians who refuse to do what it takes to secure our border and our country."

The president had vowed to ban Muslims during the 2016 presidential campaign and continued his attacks on Twitter after his election. But the high court said those statements did not constitute evidence of religious discrimination.

Chief Justice John Roberts issued the opinion, supported by the court's other four conservatives — a majority that has held through a dozen 5-4 cases this term. He said the ban's restrictions are limited to countries previously designated by Congress or prior administrations as posing national security risks. And he noted that Trump's latest version followed a worldwide review process by several government agencies.

"The proclamation is squarely within the scope of presidential authority," the chief justice said. Claims of religious bias against Muslims do not hold up, he said, against "a sufficient national security justification."

However, Roberts said, "We express no view on the soundness of the policy." And Justice Anthony Kennedy, in a brief concurring opinion, referred obliquely to the potential relevance of Trump's statements about religion.

"There are numerous instances in which the statements and actions of government officials are not subject to judicial scrutiny or intervention," Kennedy wrote. "That does not mean those officials are free to disregard the Constitution and the rights it proclaims and protects."

The court's four liberal justices dissented, and Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor read excerpts from the bench, a rare occurrence. Breyer, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, found "evidence of anti-religious bias" that he said was worth a second go-round at the federal district court level.

Sotomayor's dissent was lengthier and more strident, and she spoke in court for some 20 minutes. Quoting extensively Trump's words during and after the 2016 campaign, she wrote: "A reasonable observer would conclude that the proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus." She was joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

"What began as a policy explicitly 'calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States' has since morphed into a 'proclamation' putatively based on national-security concerns," Sotomayor said. "But this new window dressing cannot conceal an unassailable fact: the words of the president and his advisers create the strong perception that the proclamation is contaminated by impermissible discriminatory animus against Islam and its followers."

Keep reading.

It turns out Sotomayor was absolutely furious, as were leftist outrage mobsters on Twitter:

Without audio of today’s announcement, there is no way to replicate Sotomayor’s fury in a 20-minute dissent from the bench re: today’s travel ban decision

— Nina Totenberg (@NinaTotenberg) June 26, 2018

Heartbroken over what is happening in our country. What are we becoming as a nation under Trump? We must all fight for our values, and for heavens sake, get everyone you know to the polls!

— Amy Siskind (@Amy_Siskind) June 26, 2018

Oh, were we having a little chat about civility? Because the Supreme Court upheld the Muslim ban with a seat that was unabashedly stolen by Republicans.

— Lauren Duca (@laurenduca) June 26, 2018

Separating black and brown families is the policy of this administration. Whether it be stripping babies from their mothers at their border or implementing travel bans - it all hurts. It’s all despicable. #NoMuslimBanEver #StandWithMuslims #EndFamilySeparation

— Linda Sarsour (@lsarsour) June 26, 2018

Nine Journalists Among Dozens Killed by Kabul Bombs

Susan Page tweets AP:

This is a blow to our hopes for Afghanistan's future. May the journalists and the other victims of this bombing not be forgotten. https://t.co/KHfWyJyrnU

— Susan Page (@SusanPage) April 30, 2018

Nine journalists were killed today in a double suicide bombing in Kabul. The reporters had flocked to the scene of the first explosion. Then a terrorist in their midst, pretending to be a fellow journalist, detonated another bomb. https://t.co/9EOIBvcRN6

— Tricia L. Nadolny (@TriciaNadolny) April 30, 2018

And at the BBC, via Memeorandum, "Kabul bombings: Photographer Shah Marai among 25 dead."

ICYMI: W. August Mayer, Islamic Jihad, Cultural Marxism, and the Transformation of the West

At Amazon, W. August Mayer, Islamic Jihad, Cultural Marxism, and the Transformation of the West.

More Than 16 Years After 9/11, Some Americans Say It’s Time to Reevaluate Our Foreign Military Deployments

From Rukmini Callimachi, et al., at the New York Times, "‘An Endless War’: Why 4 U.S. Soldiers Died in a Remote African Desert":

What started as a training mission of 40, grew to a presence of 800 and ended up killing 4 soldiers in an outrageous chain of tactical & strategic blunders. Incompetence at its worse. https://t.co/LdinVOhfxu

— Weddady (@weddady) February 18, 2018

An important - and exclusive - read: Dogged reporting and empathetic writing on the U.S. government’s mistakes that lead to an Oct. 4 ambush in Niger that killed 4 American soldiers. @rcallimachi @helenecooper @EricSchmittNYT @alanblinder @Tmgneff @NYTimes https://t.co/EeFDV8Biyc

— Lara Jakes (@jakesNYT) February 18, 2018

KOLLO, Niger — Cut off from their unit, the tiny band of American soldiers was outnumbered and outgunned in the deserts of Niger, fighting to stay alive under a barrage of gunfire from fighters loyal to the Islamic State.

Jogging quickly at a crouch, Staff Sgt. Bryan C. Black motioned to the black S.U.V. beside him to keep moving. At the wheel, Staff Sgt. Dustin M. Wright tried to steer while leaning away from the gunfire. But the militants, wielding assault rifles and wearing dark scarves and balaclavas, kept closing in.

Sergeant Black suddenly went down. With one hand, Sergeant Wright dragged his wounded comrade to the precarious shielding of the S.U.V. and took up a defensive position, his M4 carbine braced on his shoulder.

“Black!” yelled a third American soldier, Staff Sgt. Jeremiah W. Johnson, checking for the wounds. Sergeant Black lay on his back, motionless and unresponsive.

Cornered, Sergeant Wright and Sergeant Johnson finally took off, sprinting through the desert under a hail of fire. Sergeant Johnson was hit and went down, still alive.

At that point, Sergeant Wright stopped running. With only the thorny brush for cover, he turned and fired at the militants advancing toward his fallen friend.

These were the last minutes in the lives of three American soldiers killed on Oct. 4 during an ambush in the desert scrub of Niger that was recorded on a military helmet camera. A fourth American, Sgt. La David Johnson, who had gotten separated from the group, also died in the attack — the largest loss of American troops during combat in Africa since the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” debacle in Somalia.

The four men, along with four Nigerien soldiers and an interpreter, were killed in a conflict that few Americans knew anything about, not just the public, but also their families and even some senior American lawmakers.

The deaths set off a political storm in Washington, erupting into a bitter debate over how the families of fallen soldiers should be treated by their commander in chief. In a call with one of the families after the ambush, President Trump was accused of diminishing the loss, telling the soldier’s widow that “he knew what he signed up for.” Mr. Trump angrily disputed the claim, leading to a public feud.

But beyond the rancor, dozens of interviews with current and former officials, soldiers who survived the ambush and villagers who witnessed it point to a series of intelligence failures and strategic miscalculations that left the American soldiers far from base, in hostile territory longer than planned, with no backup or air support, on a mission they had not expected to perform.

They had set out on Oct. 3, prepared for a routine, low-risk patrol with little chance of encountering the enemy. But while they were out in the desert, American intelligence officials caught a break — the possible location of a local terrorist leader who, by some accounts, is linked to the kidnapping of an American citizen. A separate assault team was quickly assembled, ready to swoop in on the terrorist camp by helicopter. But the raid was scrapped at the last minute, and the Americans on patrol were sent in its place.

They didn’t find any militants. Instead, the militants found them. Short on water, the patrol stopped outside a village before heading back to base the next morning. Barely 200 yards from the village, the convoy came under deadly fire.

Four months later, tough questions remain unanswered about the chain of decisions that led to American Special Forces troops being overwhelmed by jihadists in a remote stretch of West Africa.

How did a group of American soldiers — who Defense Department officials insisted were in the country simply to train, advise and assist Niger’s military — suddenly get sent to search a terrorist camp, a much riskier mission than they had planned to carry out? Who ordered the mission, and why were the Americans so lightly equipped, with few heavy weapons and no bulletproof vehicles?

More broadly, the deaths have reignited a longstanding argument in Washington over the sprawling and often opaque war being fought by American troops around the world. It is a war with sometimes murky legal authority, one that began in the embers of the Sept. 11 attacks and traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was expanded to Yemen, Somalia and Libya before arriving in Niger, a place few Americans ever think of, let alone view as a threat.

The ashes of the fallen twin towers were still smoldering on Sept. 14, 2001, when Congress voted overwhelmingly, with virtually no debate, to authorize the American military to hunt down the perpetrators. It was a relatively narrow mandate, written for those specific attacks, but it has become the underpinning of an increasingly broad mission around the globe. For more than 16 years since that vote, American service members have been deployed in a war that has gradually stretched to jihadist groups that did not exist in 2001 and now operate across distant parts of the world.

The result has been an amorphous and contested war that has put Navy SEALs in Somalia and Yemen, Delta Force soldiers in Iraq, and Green Berets in Niger in harm’s way...

More.

Republicans Abandon Traditional Goal of Balanced Budget

Following-up from Sunday, "U.S. Budget Deficit Could Balloon to $1 Trillion This Year."

It's kinda like when you've lost the battle over waist-size: You say screw it and start wearing sweats all the time. You're never going to lose all those pounds you've packed on over the last few of years. You let yourself go.

That's what it is with the budget. America has let go. Of course, if something can't go on forever it won't. At some point America's going to have a budget reckoning. Bills are coming due. It's going to be a nasty political blowout at that time. We'll all be Mel Gibson in the "Road Warrior" at some point.

At WaPo, "Trump plan will drop GOP’s traditional goal of balancing budget within 10 years":

President Trump is remaking the Republican economic playbook in his own image, abandoning ideological consistency in ­favor of a debt-busting strategy that will upend how Washington taxes and spends trillions of dollars each year.

On Monday, Trump is slated to announce a new budget plan that will no longer seek to eliminate the deficit over the next decade, forfeiting a major Republican goal, according to three people familiar with the document. The plan will call for a range of spending cuts that reduce the growth of the deficit by $3 trillion over 10 years, but it will not attempt to balance the federal budget, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the proposal before its official release.

The decision to relinquish the deficit goal comes after Trump pushed a $1.5 trillion tax cut through Congress late last year and signed a two-year budget deal last week that lifts federal spending limits by $500 billion, suspends for one year the ceiling on the national debt and is expected to lead to $1 trillion annual budget deficits.

The Republican turnaround on economic policy stands in sharp contrast to the party’s opposition to President Barack Obama’s stimulus program during the Great Recession. At that time, Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), now the speaker of the House, warned of a “debt crisis” and said that “spending is the problem.” Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, then a congressman from South Carolina, derided Obama’s spending plans as a “joke” and backed a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget.

Now, GOP leaders are largely silent on the two issues that had preoccupied them for the past decade — total spending and the growth of federal entitlements — while Trump has signed legislation that will lavish cash upon both defense and domestic programs far beyond what he had earlier proposed.

On Sunday, amid a backlash from conservative groups, Mulvaney defended the decision, while acknowledging that ballooning deficits are “a very dangerous idea” and that he wouldn’t have voted for the legislation if he were still in Congress. In an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” he said that his job now is “to get the president’s agenda passed,” which included Pentagon funding that Democrats would allow only if the administration accepted big domestic spending increases.

On the same show, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the leader of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said the bargain was unacceptable. “The swamp won,” he said. “And the American taxpayer lost.”

A month and a half before signing the spending legislation, Trump demonstrated similar ideological flexibility with his tax cut, shelving his campaign promise to focus on the “forgotten men and women” and signing a bill whose biggest benefits flow to corporations and the wealthy.

As Trump turns next to plans to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure and overhaul U.S. trade policy, his disregard for the traditional Republican economic catechism will again be on display Monday with the release of his detailed spending plan...

More.

Also,  from Matt Kibbe, at Reason, "The Tea Party Is Officially Dead. It Was Killed by Partisan Politics."

U.S. Budget Deficit Could Balloon to $1 Trillion This Year

I've long ago given up any hope that the political system, regardless of which party's in power, will get a handle on our perpetual budget deficits, and concomitantly, the national debt.

But a projected $1 trillion deficit for this year does seem like some apocalyptic milestone, my god.

At Forbes, "Trump's Federal Budget Deficit: $1 Trillion and Beyond."

And while I'm still in the neocon camp, I'm definitely in favor of winding down the Afghanistan deployment these days. It's just gone on too long. No once can say the U.S. didn't make an effort there, or at least some kind of effort. Perhaps a different strategy, or different historical circumstances (like no Iraq war in 2003), would have made things better.

In any case, I give props to Rand Paul on discussing the budgetary drawbacks of endless wars. A few years ago I would have blown off such talk. But not now. It'll be 17 years this November.

From Face the Nation this morning:

Iran's Revolution of National Dignity

From Sohrab Ahmari and Peter Kohanloo, at Commentary, "An Iranian Revolution of National Dignity":

“After nearly four decades of plunderous and fanatical Islamist rule, Iranians are desperate to become a normal nation-state once more, and they refuse to be exploited for an ideological cause that long ago lost its luster.” https://t.co/zTJ2UZe8Ju pic.twitter.com/mSfhaEM1Bp

— Peter Kohanloo (@PeterKohanloo) January 1, 2018

Iran is convulsing with the largest mass uprising since the 2009 Green Movement. Demonstrations that began last week in the city of Mashhad, home to the shrine of the eighth Shiite imam, have now spread to dozens of cities. And while the slogans initially addressed inflation, joblessness, and graft, they soon morphed into outright opposition to the mullahs. As we write, the authorities have blocked access to popular social-media sites and closed off subway stations in the capital, Tehran, to prevent crowd sizes from growing. At least 12 people have been killed in clashes with security forces.

What is happening in the Islamic Republic?

After nearly four decades of plunderous and fanatical Islamist rule, Iranians are desperate to become a normal nation-state once more, and they refuse to be exploited for an ideological cause that long ago lost its luster. It is a watershed moment in Iran’s history: The illusion of reform within the current theocratic system has finally been shattered. Iranians, you might say, are determined to make Iran great again.

Their movement is attuned to the worldwide spirit of nationalist renewal. From the U.S. to India, and from South Africa to Britain, political leaders and the voters who elect them are reaffirming the enduring value of the nation-state. Iran hasn’t been immured from these developments, as the slogans of the current protests indicate. No longer using the rights-based lexicon of votes and recounts, Iranians are instead demanding national dignity from a regime that for too long has subjugated Iranian-ness to its Shiite, revolutionary mission.

It’s notable, for example, that protestors chant “We Will Die to Get Iran Back,” “Not Gaza, Not Lebanon, My Life Only for Iran,” and “Let Syria Be, Do Something for Me.” Put another way: The people are tired of paying the price for the regime’s efforts to remake the region in its own image and challenge U.S. “hegemony.” Some have even taken to chanting “Reza Shah, Bless Your Soul,” expressing gratitude and nostalgia for the Pahlavi era, which saw the modern, pro-Western nation-state of Iran emerge from the shambles of the Persian Empire.

Iran’s Islamist rulers have never had a comfortable relationship with Iranian nationalism. In the early post-revolutionary days, Ayatollah Khomeini’s followers set out to rip the pre-Islamic threads that formed the tapestry of national identity: pride in the Persian New Year, the architectural glories of Persepolis, and the epic poetry that has long shaped the national soul–all these things were deemphasized if not altogether forbidden.

More recently, however, the regime has sought to harness its ideological and regional ambitions to national pride and memory. Qassem Soleimani, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander spearheading the war effort in Syria and Iraq, was increasingly presented as a latter-day Cyrus the Great. The regime claimed that it had to fight the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq lest Iran be forced to defend itself at home, and the idea even gained currency among many secular, middle-class Iranians. Meanwhile, some regime figures, such as former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, tried to present an idea of “Iranian Islam” that was both pure and consistent with a nationalistic vision.

But as the uprising underway now suggests, that project has utterly failed. No amount of propaganda and revisionism could mask the regime’s constitutional hostility to talk of nationalism and nationhood. Nor could it mollify Iranians who saw their national wealth squandered on adventures in Arab lands that didn’t concern them; “Gaza” was an abstraction to the vast majority. Nor, finally, could this regime-led nationalist push uplift Iranians, whose daily lives were marked by poverty, repression, and isolation from the rest of the world.

The current uprising, then, poses a far more potent threat to mullah power than its previous iterations, because nationalism is a far more potent force than liberal-democratic aspiration. If enough Iranians come to view their regime as an obstacle to national greatness, the Islamic Republic’s days will be over–an outcome that is squarely in the U.S. national-security interest.

The new Iran that could emerge from such an uprising may not be a liberal state, as the West understands the concept. But its calculations about the country’s place in the region and the world are far more likely to be driven by normal, nation-state priorities. The people who are making the revolution, after all, are tired of serving someone else’s messianic cause...

More.

Josh Meyer Gets an Echo Chamber Beat-Down

This is really good:

Twitter mob attacks by a name-calling scrum of mid-level bureaucrats, “security correspondents” for instant news outfits like Buzzfeed, interns at various NGOs and their self-credentialed “expert” bosses, partisan bot herders, and their Lord of the Flies puppet-masters are part of the price of doing journalism these days. Write something negative, and you’ll get dirtied up—and maybe some of the dirt will stick, who knows. These attacks are intended to be punitive. Brave or foolhardy reporters who deviate from the party line—the party in question being the Democrats, of course, since the representation of conservatives in newsrooms is generally reported to be somewhere in the single digits—and especially their colleagues watching from the sidelines, are meant to absorb a simple but all-important lesson: Get on the team, or else shut up. Watching even seasoned pros succumb to this kind of adolescent pressure game and publicly suck up to bullying flacks while throwing shade on members of their own profession is a depressingly normal occurrence, which shows that the two once-separate professions—partisan flackery, and reporting the news—have merged into a single, mindless borg.

Obama derailed secret fight against Hezbollah for Iran Deal... https://t.co/XZglS6kSNx

— DRUDGE REPORT (@DRUDGE_REPORT) December 18, 2017

That's the thing @Tvietor08 your echo chamber keeps saying my @politico piece is wrong but offer zero specifics. I'm gonna take the high road and not respond further until you do. Meantime, happy holidays y'all. Btw, don't you supporters of Iran Deal also have "an obvious POV"? https://t.co/suI1dxnr2G

— Josh Meyer (@JoshMeyerDC) December 21, 2017

Why journalists joined a Twittermob of former mid-level Obama bureaucrats and intel officers to attack a journalist for doing journalism @tabletmag https://t.co/sYKeovN7fF

— Lee Smith (@LeeSmithDC) December 27, 2017

Jews Targeted in Sweden (VIDEO)

Ezra Levant, at the Rebel:

Terror Attack in New York City Near Port Authority Bus Terminal (VIDEO)

At the New York Times, via Memeorandum, "New York Explosion Empties Port Authority; Suspect Is in Custody."

Michelle Malkin tweeted:

Here he is: the Bangladeshi-born Brooklyn botched bus bomber ==> https://t.co/UzZiExgeIe

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) December 11, 2017

A Brooklyn man has been arrested after allegedly detonating a homemade pipe bomb inside the Port Authority https://t.co/JdHgIez0Fe pic.twitter.com/QuNAxQRGv8

— New York Post (@nypost) December 11, 2017

And at CNN:



Expect updates.

In Afghanistan, American Airstrikes Escalate — Again

Well, I'm not too upset about it, actually. If the security situation requires more airstrikes, the strike away. I'll be upset if Trump starts getting a the kind of flak over this from the media that Obama never got.

At LAT, "U.S. airstrikes rise sharply in Afghanistan — and so do civilian deaths":

U.S. airstrikes rise sharply in Afghanistan — and so do civilian deaths https://t.co/NXnAQsCfLP pic.twitter.com/Qpg2OgzVcv

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) December 4, 2017

As U.S. warplanes flew above a cluster of villages where Islamic State militants were holed up in eastern Afghanistan, 11 people piled into a truck and drove off along an empty dirt track to escape what they feared was imminent bombing.

They did not get far.

An explosion blasted the white Suzuki truck off the road, opening a large crater in the earth and flipping the vehicle on its side in a ditch. A teenage girl survived. The 10 dead included three children, one an infant in his mother’s arms.

The lone survivor of the Aug. 10 blast in Nangarhar province, and Afghan officials who visited the site, said the truck was hit by an American airstrike shortly before 5 p.m. Relatives expressed horror that U.S. ground forces and surveillance aircraft could have mistaken the passengers, who included women and children riding in the open truck bed — in daylight with no buildings or other vehicles around — for Islamic State fighters.

“How could they not see there were women and children in the truck?” said Zafar Khan, 23, who lost six family members, including his mother and three siblings, in the blast.

In a statement after the incident, the U.S. military acknowledged carrying out a strike but said it killed militants who “were observed loading weapons into a vehicle” and “there was zero chance of civilian casualties.”

Pockets of Nangarhar remain inaccessible to outsiders because of fighting, making it impossible to independently determine the cause of the fatal explosion. What is not in question is that in the 17th year of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, American airstrikes are escalating again, along with civilian casualties.

Operating under looser restrictions on air power that commanders hope will break a stalemate in the war, U.S. fighter planes this year dropped 3,554 explosives in Afghanistan through Oct. 31, the most since 2012.

American officials say the firepower has curtailed the growth of Islamic State’s South Asia affiliate — known as ISIS-Khorasan, which they believe numbers about 900 fighters, most of them in Nangarhar — and enabled struggling government forces to regain ground against Taliban insurgents in other provinces, such as Helmand, where a Marine-led task force has helped coordinate a months-long offensive.

But innocent Afghans are asking: At what cost?

The United Nations mission in Afghanistan documented 205 civilian deaths and 261 injuries from airstrikes in the first nine months this year, a 52% increase in casualties compared with the same period in 2016. Although both U.S. and Afghan forces conduct aerial attacks, preliminary data indicate that American strikes have been more lethal for civilians.

In the first six months of 2017, the U.N. said, 54 civilians died in international air operations, compared with 29 in Afghan strikes. Twelve additional deaths could not be attributed to either force, the U.N. found.

In the case of the blast in Nangarhar province in August, U.S. officials have continued to assert that the American airstrike that day struck only militants. But they have since offered an alternative explanation for the civilian deaths. Responding to questions from The Times, coalition officials said that a passenger vehicle — presumably the Suzuki truck — hit a roadside bomb planted by Islamic State militants slightly more than a mile from where the airstrike killed the militants. It was the roadside bomb that resulted “in multiple enemy-caused civilian casualties,” said Navy Capt. Tom Gresback, a spokesman for coalition forces in Kabul.

Afghans vigorously dispute that account. The district police chief, Hamidullah Sadaqat, said there was only one deadly explosion in the area that afternoon. Rozina, the 17-year-old survivor, said her memory was clear...

Hundreds Dead in Egypt Mosque Massacre (VIDEO)

Well, that's not going to be good for those Thanksgiving memories.

At the Telegraph U.K., "Egypt mosque attack: At least 235 killed as militants shoot at fleeing worshippers after detonating bomb":

Egypt was last night reeling from the bloodiest terror attack in its history after suspected Isil fighters slaughtered at least 235 people during prayers by detonating explosives inside a Sinai mosque and then killing the worshippers in a hail of gunfire.

The terrorists struck a mosque in the remote town of Bir al-Abed in northern Sinai where hundreds of people had gathered for traditional Islamic prayers on Friday afternoon.

The attack began with a powerful explosion at the al-Rawdah mosque and gunmen leapt out of four off-road vehicles to kill people as they fled. Security officials and witnesses said the attackers used their vehicles to cut off escape routes and opened fire on ambulances as they reached the scene. More than 100 were wounded.

The gunmen appear to have escaped from the scene after the massacre before Egyptian security forces could arrive.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack but suspicion fell on the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant's (Isil) affiliate in the Sinai desert, which has waged a bloody insurgency against the Egyptian military and the country’s Christian minority.

The worshippers at the al-Rawdah were mainly Sufis, who adhere to a mystic form of Islam. Isil considers Sufis to be heretics and has threatened them in the past.

The town of Bir al-Abed is home to around 2,500 people, all members of the Sawarka tribe. In conservative rural areas of Egypt it is usually only men who attend Friday prayers. With an attack so large it is believed that a significant portion of all the men in the village were either killed or wounded on Friday.

Abdel Qader Mubarak, a man originally from the village, said his entire family had been killed in the slaughter. "I can't talk, all my family are gone," he told The Telegraph.

The massacre is the worst terrorist attack on civilians in modern Egyptian history, and its death toll outstripped the 224 deaths caused when suspected Isil militants blew up a Russian airliner shortly after it took off from Sharm el-Sheikh in 2015.

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Egypt’s president, promised to respond with “brutal force” against the attackers.

“We will remain steadfast and will fight back with an iron fist. This attack will only add to our persistence on overcoming the tragedy and we will win the battle against the forces of evil,” Mr Sisi said.

"The army and police will avenge our martyrs and return security and stability with force in the coming short period.”

Despite Mr Sisi’s pledge, the security forces have struggled to contain the jihadist insurgency in Sinai and suffered heavy casualties...

More.