On Thursday, President Barack Obama appeared in the White House press room to reveal that a US strike in January on an Al Qaeda compound had killed two hostages held by the terrorist group, Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian, and Warren Weinstein, an American. He offered his condolences to their families for the mistake that led to their deaths.
It's remarkable that Obama spoke of this at all. The US targeted killing program is shrouded in secrecy, and the president had never before issued a statement like this about people accidentally killed by US drone strikes. (He did not use the word "drone.") One such death that stands out is that of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old American citizen who was killed in a US drone strike.
Abdulrahman was the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical cleric turned Al Qaeda propagandist. The father was killed in a drone strike that targeted him in Yemen in September 2011. The son was killed weeks later in a separate strike in Yemen. According to his family, the attack was on a restaurant. Attorney General Eric Holder later said that this strike did not "specifically" target the young man.
The US government has never said that Abdulrahman was involved in terrorist activities. In 2012, I asked Obama during a Reddit AMA what he thought about the teen's death, and...
Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, says it is “outrageous” that so few people have been held accountable at the Department of Veterans Affairs after the Obama administration promised action would be taken against those found responsible for manipulating wait times at VA hospitals.
Internal documents obtained by the New York Times show that despite claims by the department that at least 14 people had been fired, only three actually have lost their jobs.
“It is outrageous that the Obama administration has not held people accountable for manipulating wait times in VA hospitals after promising to take action against those implicated in the scandal,” said Perry.
The documents reveal that the department punished only eight of the 280,000 employees. According to the Times, “one was fired, one retired in lieu of termination, one’s termination is pending, and five were reprimanded or suspended for up to two months.”
This falls far short of claims by VA officials.
Secretary Robert A. McDonald, who was appointed in the wake of the scandal, asserted...
Much More Serenity Is HERE
I predicted it way before many even knew who she was... HERE
None other than the New York Times is going after them (the Clinton Foundation) now so make sure their pick, Elizabeth Warren will win the nomination.
More Lefty Love And Righty Disdain For Elizabeth Warren:
MoveOn.org preparing million dollar ‘draft Elizabeth Warren’ campaign
The Obama Administration continues to show complete
incompetence in dealing with ISIS. Case in point: It’s decided that Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province in western Iraq, is expendable—thereby showing it understands nothing about the value of the city or even its own capacity to defend it.
The reason? According to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey, Obama is emphasizing defending a refinery in the same province to protect the oil supplies. As if we couldn’t do both—and then some.
For the past eight months, the Administration has settled for little more than jabs when it could have landed flurries of punishing roundhouse blows. According to the latest 24-hour report Defense Department report, the U.S. launched just 36 airstrikes against ISIS in both Iraq and Syria. That’s actually much higher than normal. But nevertheless equals about one per fighter-bomber aboard the U.S. carrier normally stationed in the Persian Gulf, each of which can fly several sorties daily.
Now add in the vast numbers of area ground-based F-16s, F-15s, F-22s, A-10s, B-1 heavy bombers, helicopters, and Reaper and Predator drones among U.S. forces, plus aircraft of 11 other coalition nations. The day before there were only 13 airstrikes,fewer than a single Reaper can perform on one mission.
Cruise missiles are also in theater, and the U.S. can hit with heavy B-52 and B-2 bombers from anywhere in the world. Yet with this massive armada and with assets on the ground to help identify targets, the administration seems unable to find and strike more than a handful of targets daily. A machine gun here, a truck there. There’s been little effort to translate success in pinpoint assassination efforts,such as that which at least temporarily has knocked ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi out of the fight, into a war-fighting effort.
Which brings us back to Ramadi—a city that’s no big deal, says Dempsey. “It has no symbolic meaning.” That’s an incredible statement: The city’s meaning is both...
As the war in the Middle East against ISIS drags on, the fighters seem to be getting younger and younger. A couple of weeks ago, we showed you the latest ISIS terrorist school for Jihadist that is training the next generation to hate Christians and how to behead them. Here is the other side of the story.
This little girl looks about six or seven years old. She chats away with an off-camera adult, who asks her how many Islamic State fighters she has killed. “Four hundred!” she says, speaking in a Kurdish dialect local to Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq. Then the little girl leans over a machine gun bigger than she is, and using both hands, she fires away into the distance. As the shots echo across the desert, the man behind the camera eggs her on: “Kill! Kill!”
The footage this picture is taken from appears to have first surfaced in mid-January on a Facebook page devoted to pro-Kurdish videos, and shortly thereafter it cropped up on a YouTube channel called “Kurdish YPG”. The YPG, or People’s Protection Units, are the armed wing of the...
