Andy McCarthy: Too bad Obungler is More Worried about Palestinian Borders than Arizona's

Andrew McCarthy has written a masterful book based on his years as a prosecutor detailing the collusion between the US hard left and Islamic terrorists. He writes in The National Review about the fact that:

There was less fanfare about this latest Obama oration on the future of the Middle East, staged at Foggy Bottom, than there was about his 2009 Cairo speech. It was, however, every bit as delusional, and twice as treacherous.

As for the delusional, “Arab Spring” devotees are thrilled that the president has morphed into his predecessor on the Democracy Project — the enterprise in which future generations of American taxpayers go deeper into hock as our tapped-out government borrows more Chinese billions in order to stimulate the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the few shovel-ready projects President Obama has managed to find (and as a union, the Brothers make the SEIU look like the Jaycees). There is cruel irony in the Arab Spring hallucination, though, evidenced by this bit of rhetorical flourish: “Through the moral force of nonviolence, the people of the region have achieved more change in six months than terrorists have accomplished in six years.”

McCarthy illuminates just how delusional and silly this jumped-up "community organizer" is without a bullhorn to blast his BS across the entire Middle East.

As the president utters his paeans to nonviolence, Egyptians and Iraqis continue slaughtering their religious minorities, and Bashar Assad, the “reformer,” murders his Syrian subjects in the street with the help of his friends at Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist organization whose day job is running the Lebanese government. The democracy fetish that gave Hezbollah and Hamas thugs the patina of political legitimacy is about to place Egypt under the thumb of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is itching to deep-six the treaty that has kept peace with Israel for 30 years. Speaking of Israel, it is recovering from a weekend in which thousands of “peaceful protesters” stormed four of its borders. Meanwhile, Iraq, which is touted by Arab Spring enthusiasts — and now even the Obama Left — as a Democracy Project success story, just announced that it will show its gratitude to American soldiers and taxpayers by expanding military ties with Iran, the world’s leading facilitator of Islamist terror. Pakistan, when not holding memorial services for Osama bin Laden, is exploding in bloodshed. The Obama administration is pleading with the Taliban to come to the negotiating table; you may recall that the Taliban is the reason our troops are still in Afghanistan preventing the collapse of its fragile “democracy” and the reopening of a safe haven for al-Qaeda. And al-Qaeda’s current safe haven, Yemen, is the site of a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. So much for nonviolence.

As a State Dept. trained Arabist who speaks and reads that language [formerly] at a close to fluent level, I have to nod in agreement with McCarthy when he points out something so obvious that only a cadre of left-wing nutjobs could miss it:

The president stumbled into a bracing truth when he compared the change achieved by the people in the region, on the one hand, and by terrorists on the other. The change both are seeking is the same: the creation of sharia societies. Obama and Democracy Project promoters like to frame the Arab Spring as the ultimate rejection of al-Qaeda. But it is, at most, a discovery that there are better tactical routes to the promised land than al-Qaeda’s crude brutality. That promised land is not Western liberalism; it is Islam in all its repression of free speech, religious liberty, and equality — American principles the president spoke of his boundless determination to promote, while avoiding a single mention of Islam or sharia, which make achieving those principles a pipedream in this region.

Speaking of the promised land, the real one, Israel, is apparently getting smaller. This was Obama’s news-making treachery, and its ramifications are impossible to predict, other than that they bode ill.

McCarthy's book on how the insane Islamists and treasonous Dems are forging a satanic coalition is absorbing reading. But the Obungler's latest piece of chutzpah takes the cake:

For the first time in history, an American president explicitly called for a settlement of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict premised on the 1967 borders — i.e., the 1949 armistice line, the tenuous state of play before Israel captured the West Bank (actually, Judea and Samaria), the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights in the Arab war of aggression to destroy the Jewish state. To be sure, Obama said that there would also have to be territorial “swaps” to satisfy security concerns. This caveat, though, is cold comfort for Israel, America’s only true ally in the region.

To begin with, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to point out, the 1967 borders are “indefensible.” That is why they have never been the starting point of U.S. policy, even though they always hover over negotiations. In its implacable hostility to Israel, the “international community” chooses to forget how and why the Arab side first grabbed, then lost, the territory in question. For nearly a half century since the adoption of U.N. Security Council resolution 242, the Washington Institute’s Robert Satloff explains, American administrations of both parties have called for eventual Israeli withdrawal to “secure and recognized” borders, a phrase interpreted as “not synonymous with the pre-1967 boundaries.”

Read the rest of this disturbing article about our disturbed POTUS and in 2012, let's remove him from office.

Baghdad Newt Just Can't Stop the Hilarity

"you're covering something that happens once or twice in a century"

James Taranto riffs in the Wall Street Journal about the amazing inability of Newt Gingrich to slow down, take a deep breath, and stop the insane hysterics of trying to top his last gigantic pile of doodoo with an even higher mountain of Shit.

Gingrich said he isn't surprised by the rough start to his campaign. . . .

"My reaction is if you're the candidate of very dramatic change, it you're the candidate of really new ideas, you have to assume there's a certain amount of clutter and confusion and it takes a while to sort it all out, because you are doing something different," Gingrich told reporters after he opened an intense three-day campaign swing in Iowa. . . .
"This campaign is very alive and very well with lots of grass-roots support,"

Gingrich told the crowd.
It gets better:

He said reporters covering his campaign must adjust their thinking.

"It's going to take a while for the news media to realize that you're covering something that happens once or twice in a century, a genuine grass-roots campaign of very big ideas," said Gingrich. "I expect it to take a while for it to sink in."

"Sink in" might not be as appropriate as "stink up the joint."

Taranto may have found the ultimate rented mule to beat with the hapless, feckless, clueless Newt:

How bad is Gingrich as a candidate? He doesn't even have John Kerry's comic timing. The stuff he says is so crazy and outrageous that one quickly becomes desensitized to it.

The stuff he's saying now is objectively hilarious, but that's a perilous oxymoron, because it's not nearly as funny as yesterday's material about sheep and the liar's paradox. Even someone who is as much of a genius as Newt can't possibly outdo that.

By contrast, Kerry, the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat who by the way served in Vietnam, never stops being funny. He has the hat to this day! Kerry's secret is that he has just enough self-restraint to maintain an illusion of dignity among those who sympathize with him politically. That they take him seriously only adds to the humor.

Gingrich would be funnier if he could find other people to say with a straight face things like, "This is something that happens once or twice a century." But good luck with that.

Newt is already becoming a new version of Dan Quayle almost overnight to comics on the left. But Dennis Miller and the "Red Eye" crowd are also beginning to plumb the possibilities of Newt's relentlessly uncontrollable motor mouth. This is actually Newt's second aborted kick-off or roll-out of his campaign this year, as the first sank soundlessly without most reporters realizing that back in March the feckless eff-up from Georgia was trying to jump-start his endless rounds on the cable talk circuit into a campaign for POTUS. Maybe he should retire to a monastery and try to exercise his new-found Catholic belief into a meditation on silence---becoming a Trappist for a couple of months might actually stop that drunken monkey between his ears from hopping like a frog on a red-hot frying pan.

Why Obama Is Either a Traitor or an anti-Semite, but not a Racist

Andrew Malcolm of the LA Times tries to figure out just when and how Obungler makes sense on foreign policy, by a long list of his many warnings to the various states in the Middle East undergoing the Arab Spring.

In the meantime at Cannes, Peter Fonda called this doofus in the White House a "traitor," so obviously Peter is a racist. Now that Andrew Malcolm is calling this doofus in the White House a doofus, though couched in more respectful language, Andrew will also be a "racist," though for a completely different reason. Just like Obungler's many warnings to Syria & Libya and Bahrain & Yemen & Mubarak, all the Middle East leaders who don't agree with his warnings will be branded "racist," even though many of them are of African descent & heritage.

So confusing when the journalists in the USA have a hard time sorting out who's a worse racist, Fonda or Malcolm or, say, Mubarak.

And now that Obungler has officially announced himself as an anti-Zionist which is really a code word for "anti-Semite," the Norah O'Donnell, Chris Matthews, Lawrence O'Donnell Irish mafia will have to sort out who's worse, the racists or the anti-Semites, and why opposition to Obungler makes his opponents into one or the other or on rare occasions, "racist anti-Semites."

Clifford Geertz: Common Sense is Good. Peggy Noonan Concurs

The Wall Street Journal along with about every Republican has had their fill of Newt Gingrich, who is so politically maladroit that he totally botched an earlier attempt to declare his candidacy this year because no one was sure he was declaring. This time he did it on Twitter. I guess that means he's serious.

Peggy Noonan today has a column in the WSJ, however, that tells us everything we should know now about Gingrich, namely, that he's a damn fool and simply unaware of his enormous limitations. An unchecked ego with a mouth much faster than its attached brain.

Everyone knew Newt Gingrich was combustible, that he tended to blow things up, including, periodically, himself. He was impulsive, living proof that people confuse "a good brain" with "good judgment." He had bad judgment, which is why he famously had a hundred ideas a day and only 10 were good. He didn't know the difference and needed first-rate people around to tell him. But the best didn't work with him anymore, because he was unsteady, unreliable, more likely to be taken with insight-seizures than insights.

He was the smartest guy in the room, who didn't notice the rooms had gotten smaller. So he was running his own show. Boom.

In his famous "Meet the Press" interview, he was trying to differentiate himself from the field. He was likely thinking he'd go for the Mike Huckabee vote now that Mr. Huckabee is gone. That vote is populist-tinged, socially conservative but generally supportive of big-government programs. Newt's party and competitors support Paul Ryan's budget-cutting plan. Newt didn't think all aspects of that plan would go over with the American public.


Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute on pols behaving badly: Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

If he'd said that, he would have been fine, and there were lots of ways to say it. Such as: "The Ryan plan is serious and courageous. But I oppose changes in the delivery system of Medicare and think we should go another route, so I do not support that aspect of it."

Instead he used slashing, dramatic language and seemed to damn the entire enterprise. The Ryan plan isn't flawed, it's "right-wing social engineering." It's "imposing radical change."

After the firestorm he went on a political perp walk, more or less denying he'd said what he said, and then blaming it on others. This was followed by reports he had been in hock to Tiffany's—Tiffany's!—for up to half a million dollars. This is decidedly unpopulist behavior, and to Republicans sounded too weird, too frivolous, flaky and grand.

I said last week I had yet to meet a Gingrich 2012 voter. Now I won't have a chance to.

People in journalism are surprised. But they wouldn't have been surprised if they'd been paying attention to what they know: that Newt blows things up, including himself.

Now GOP voters are going to be punished for the next year by this Blagdojevich or Kucinich of the Republican Party---discredited and disgraced, but unable to appreciate that fact. Indeed, he'll be chirping out ideas at a continuous endless tape for a year with nobody with enough gumption to just cut his mike and shut him up.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn is another case entirely. He was a time-bomb waiting to explode [again] in the wrong place.

But what is most startling about the story is not the charge that a powerful man did a dreadful thing. It is the utter and profound difference between the U.S. response to the story and the French response.

America was immediately sympathetic to the underdog. The impulse of every media organization, from tabloid to broadsheet to cable to network, was to side with the powerless one in the equation. The cops, the hotel's managers, the District Attorney's office—everyone in authority gave equal weight and respect to the word of the maid. Only in America (and not always in America) would they have taken the testimony of the immigrant woman from Africa and dragged the powerful man out of his first-class seat in the jet at JFK.

In France, the exact opposite. There, from the moment the story broke, DSK was the victim, not the villain. It was a setup, a trap, a conspiracy. He has a weakness for women. No, he loves them too much. Hairy-chested poseur and Sarkozy foreign-policy adviser Bernard-Henri Levy sneeringly referred to "the chambermaid," brayed about DSK's high standing, and called him "a friend to women." Jean Daniel, editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, sniffily asked why "the supposed victim was treated as worthy and beyond suspicion."

As someone who worked as a US Vice Consul in Lyon France, I think most Lyonnais would agree that DSK is just another Parisian gonfle. an inflated gasbag of the type that Charlie Rose likes to have as guests on his ass-kissing marathons of snobbery. There are only three million Parisians, but most appear convinced that they are preordained to rule the continent of Europe even though they admit that Germany really calls the shots. But after two world wars, the French are now just a carbuncle on the northern end of the European peninsula, a beautiful country with snobbish people in Paris and the rest of the country exiled to the beautiful provinces, which is what I love abot the country. Still, Noonan is right when she sees they have totally devolved today

Today they are great talkers, but for all their talk of emotions, and they do talk about emotions, they need, on this story at least, an attitude adjustment. They need to grow a heart. If the charges are true, this isn't a story about sex, romance and the war between men and women, it is about violence, and toward a person who is almost a definition of powerlessness.
Their mindless snobbery is unworthy of them.

Noonan ends with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has covered himself with disgrace:

The scandal surrounding him this week is not precisely a public concern. He is not now holding office, and if he had plans or further ambitions in that area they are over. The story is not shocking—he has admitted bad behavior in the past, there have been longtime rumors, "Everyone knows." But still it took you aback. Why? The level of creepiness and the nature of the breach. The mother of the former governor's child worked for him, for them, for 20 years—another unequal power arrangement—meaning 20 years of fiction had to be maintained. "In my home!" as Michael Corleone said in "Godfather II." "Where my wife sleeps . . . and my children play with their toys." The rotten taste of this story will not fade soon.

I guess the moral of these three stories is: Expect the expected.

"Justice"? I Spit on Your "Justice"

"Well Done!"

Iowahawk demonstrates that there is funny and then hilarious and finally Bernard Henri-Levy, a short snail-devouring millipede of missteps whose condescension cannot be piled high enough for accurate moral measurement, but certainly for comic potential:

[ed note: Found! Under a hors d'oeuvres tray at a Tina Brown cocktail party, the first draft of Bernard Henri-Levy's Daily Beast "cri de coeur" on behalf of his ami Dominique Strauss-Kahn]

Monday morning.

I do not know what actually happened Saturday, the day before yesterday, in the room of the now famous Hotel Sofitel in New York.

I do not know — no one knows — because can there or cannot there be such a knowing? I do not know. All is but existential abyss. For who is to know this mocking mime which taunts us by its cruel appellation, "reality"? Even reality itself cannot know, because have been no leaks regarding the declarations of the man in question, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. We have only the leaks regarding the leaks of his so-called "DNA." Was he was guilty of the acts he is accused of committing there, or if, or at which why, as was stated, he was having a mud bath in Baden-Baden with his daughter? Reality, you are a cruel mistress.

I do not know—but, on the other hand, it would be nice to know, if knowing were indeed a matter of conceptual possibility—how a mere proletarian chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a “cleaning brigade” to remove to the myriad of empty Dom Perignon bottles and half-smoked Gauloise crushed into beignets they should have expected from one of the most closely watched figures on the planet. In protest I have written to the Michelin guide and demanded they be demoted to 3 stars.

And I do not want to entertain the considerations of dime-store psychology that claims to penetrate the mind of the subject, thrusting remorselessly and without consent into his libido, observing, for example, that the number of the room (2806) corresponds to the date of the coming liberation of France by the Socialist Party (06.28), in which he is the uncontested favorite to storm the Normandy beaches, march triumphantly into Paris, free it from its Sarkozian captors, seduce to the grateful lovesick coquettes with his Hershey bars, and thereby concluding that this is all a Freudian slip, a subconsciously erotic role-play, and blah blah blah. Sometimes a baguette is only a baguette.

What I do know is that nothing in the world can justify a man being thus thrown to a ravenous pack of dogs, a breed of which has neither been obedience trained nor clipped in the proper poofs.

What I know is that nothing, no suspicion whatever (for let’s remind ourselves that, as I write these lines, we are dealing only with suspicions, comingled up with a few blue-lighted Speedos), permits the entire world to revel in the spectacle, this morning, of this handcuffed figure, this magnificent avatar of Continental sophistication, this giant of Gallic philosophic chivalry, his features blurred by 30 hours of detention and questioning, his face criminally unmoisturized. But there he stood, proud and unbroken, like his dignified and noble hyphen.

What I know as well is that nothing, no earthly law, should also allow another woman, his wife, admirable in her love and courage, to be exposed to the slime of a public opinion drunk on salacious gossip and driven by who knows what obscure mob prejudice against the Gallic woman's proud spirit of laissez-affaire. I cannot even bear to consider how this indignity torments his many proud and loving and courageous mistresses.

And what I know even more is that the Strauss-Kahn I know, who has been my friend for 20 years and who will remain my friend, bears no resemblance to this monster, this caveman, this insatiable and malevolent beast now being described nearly everywhere. Charming, seductive, yes, certainly; always quick with a flirtatious wink, obviously; and ready with a ball gag and bondage ropes, naturally. But this brutal and violent individual, this wild animal, this primate? It is absurd. In any civilized country that recognizes the natural purity of philosophical genius, the case would be dismissed on the grounds of absurdity.

This morning, I hold it against the jejune American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, dared treat this man of nobility as subject to the justice of the peasant.

I am driven to ennui by a system of justice modestly termed “accusatory,” meaning that anyone can come along waving a stained hotel towel and accuse another fellow of any crime— even when the one accused has a pied-a-terre on the Left Bank and sits on several film prize juries.

I resent the New York tabloid press, a disgrace to the profession, that, without the least precaution and before having effected the least verification, has depicted Dominique Strauss-Kahn as a sicko, a pervert, borderlining on serial killer, a psychiatrist’s dream. In Europe such tabloidists would be thrashed, their backs writhing and glistening with sweat and blood from each stinging kiss of Dominique's beloved cat-o-nine-tails, until they had learned not to jump to such salacious conclusions.

I am angry with all those in France who jumped at the occasion to settle old scores or further their own little affairs. All this jumping and scoring and affairs is distracting.

And I hold it against the commentators, pundits, and other minor figures of a French political class overjoyed at this divine surprise who immediately, indecently, and at the very first opportunity commenced with their de Profundis drivel by talking about a “redistribution of the cards” or a “new deal” at the center of this or of that. But I must stop here, for it makes me nauseous. And strangely aroused.

I am back now after my shower. Where was I? Oh yes. I’m angry with, to name one, the French M.P. Bernard Debré, who comes right out and denounces a man he calls “disreputable,” one who “wallows in sex” and has conducted himself, for a long time now, like a “scoundrel.” Monsieur Debré, you are no longer welcome at Maxim's.

I hold it against all those who complacently accept the account of this other young woman, this one French, who pretends to have been the victim of the same kind of attempted rape, who has shut up for eight years but, sensing the golden opportunity, whips out her old dossier and comes to flog it on television. Two can play at that game, Mlle. Rape Accusation: when you are on the television, I hold "it" against the television and do my own flogging.

And I am, of course, dismayed at the political impact of the event.

The French left that, if Strauss-Kahn were really out of the arena, would lose its champion.

The French unions, that have lost innumerable televised strike opportunities.

The French 5-diamond resorts and brothels, that have lost one of their most ardent customers.

France itself, that has twice voted him Hyphenated Intellectual of the Year .

And Europe, which is to say the world, that is indebted to him for contributing, for the past four years at the head of the IMF, to avoiding a world unmanaged by French Post-Modern economic theory.

On one side, there were the hardline ultraliberals, partisans of mathematics, without modulation or nuance, unwilling to compromise on their silly and tyrannical addition and subtraction axioms, and on the other, those who, Dominique Strauss-Kahn at their head, had begun to implement rules of the game that were less lenient toward the nauseatingly powerful bourgeois, more favorable to the benighted proletarian nations and, among the latter, their delightfully amusing potentates. And now the world's little brown peoples have tragically lost their beloved financial champion, who was lifting them from poverty and capitalist oppression, expecting in return only the occassional Porsche or villa in Provence.

Enough is enough, I say. I will not stand idly by as the uncultured puritanical prudes of Les Etats-Unis and their mad inspector Javerts hound another hero of the French nation — as they did Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Ira Einhorn, and Theodore Bundy — for the mere sin of intellectual virility, and listening to the "oui" in a woman's eyes instead of the "non" in her screams of ecstasy.

J'Accuse America - with your filthy cheeseburgers, and your stupid tailfins, and your unnuanced medieval notions of "rape." Until, and unless, my friend Dominique Strauss-Kahn is freed from his political bondage, I refuse to provide you another paragraph of philosophy.

Bye-Bye, Miss Americaine-Pie. You can drive your Chevy to this Levy, but this Levy is dry.

Bernard-Henri Lévy is one of France's most famed philosophers, a journalist, and a bestselling writer. He enjoys long walks along the Lido and langorous afternoons at the Closerie de Lilas discussing international affairs and existential angst over a full-bodied calvados. If you would like to pose for one of his etchings, send candid photos to philosopherking@personals.paris.craigslist.fr."

If you send candid photos and wish them returned, send a return self-addressed envelope and BHL just may consider returning them to you with appropriate stains for posterity.

Queen Visits Ireland for First Time Since Independence

QE II visited Dublin and laid a wreath on the remembrance memorial of the patriots killed in the 1916 Easter Rebellion, something I'd never thought would happen in my lifetime.

Last summer, my wife, daughter & I arrived in Dublin on June 16th, "Bloom's Day," and was intrigued to see that the British had opened the dossiers of the Royal Commission back in the '70s which had covered up British commando complicity in the cold-blooded murders of the Derry Sunday massacre. Now the Queen arrives 100 years since the last 1911 visit of King George V to Dublin.

As an illuminating sidenote: Way back in the day, I was Political Officer at the US Embassy in Saudi Arabia at the Fourth of July bash where both the British and American Ambassadors were of Irish heritage, both being born near Dublin. When I mentioned this to my Indian counterpart, he shared with me the interesting fact that the Easter Rebellion had so impressed Indian Independence non-violent 'fighters' that after Independence in 1947, India adopted the Irish legal and court system of justice out of respect and honor.

DSK [Dominique Strauss-Kahn] Stuck in Deep Pile of Donkey DooDoo

La Belle et Le Bete

Fox News has some more of the details on the brutal rape that DSK allegedly committed on a 32-year old hotel maid who followed all rules of protocol in entering DSK's room AFTER the noon check-out time [My spouse & I were in Miami at the Oriental Mandarin at virtually the same moment checking out at 1255PM]. Her blood is on the bedsheets where she was raped the first time and then he dragged her, allegedly, to the bathroom where he attempted oral rape a second time. To say that a man who has an agreement with Air France to get on one of their planes without a reservation at the last minute and get a First Class seat is a flight risk goes without saying. Although his long-time Socialist colleagues are defending him back in France, he is being kept without bail until a May 20th arraignment.

One former Socialist colleague NOT defending DSK's behavior is his second wife's goddaughter Tristane Banon who described the Maurice Chevalier manque's technique thusly:

The 62-year-old head of the International Monetary Fund, who was tipped to become the President of France next year, ‘vigorously’ denies the claims made by an unnamed American chamber maid.
But now Tristane Banon, the 31-year-old god-daughter of Strauss-Kahn’s second wife Brigitte Guillemette, said he attacked her almost a decade ago.
Ms Banon will now tell French detectives about the alleged attempted rape, which took place in an anonymous studio flat in Paris in 2002.
Strauss-Kahn lured the then 21-year-old trainee journalist to the property under the promise of an interview, and then started to rip her clothes off, it is claimed.
‘I kicked him, I called him a rapist, he didn’t seem to care,’ said Ms Banon in earlier interviews, in which she also described Strauss-Kahn as acting like a ‘rutting chimpanzee’.
Ms Banon’s mother, Anne Mansouret, said the only reason she did not press charges at the time was because 'she was just starting out in journalism' and was afraid of being 'defined by the story' of being attacked by a senior politician.

Yes, it does look like curtains for DSK's forthcoming presidential ambitions, but the disgraceful hyena Chirac was almost as abrupt, rumor has it, in his own straightforward bodice-ripping approach to young females.

And the beauteous young Tristane wasn't the only object of DSK's unrequited affections, as it turns out:

Aurelie Filipetti, a respected French Socialist MP, said in 2008 that she was groped by Strauss-Kahn and would 'forever make sure' she was never 'alone in a room with him'.
In the same year Strauss-Kahn admitted to a sexual relationship with one of his subordinates, Piroska Nagy.
He was cleared of harassment, favouritism and abuse of power following an inquiry - but kept his job, while Ms Nagy moved on.

The old IMF wrist-slap, always works to keep the reputation from too much tarnish.

The Socialist Guardian doesn't think the incident helps socialism, But I for one believe that DSK has brought the socialist ideals of "entitlement" to a whole new level of intensity.

And DSK famously said that he'd never be president because of his wealth, his Jewishness, and "the fact that I love women." Looks like DSK's kind of "love" is now going to help Marine Le Pen get her party into the one-to-one presidential race.
UPDATE YThe New York Post has the single most damning detail:
[

Defense Attorney] Brafman tried to convince the judge that Strauss-Khan -- who faces four felonies, including attempted rape and criminal sexual acts -- was far from a flight risk.
"This isn't someone who was about to flee the jurisdiction . . . He . . . has four children, and being accused of being a rapist is something he wants resolved," Brafman said of his 62-year-old client.
He asked the judge to free him on $1 million bail -- Strauss-Kahn's loyal, New York-born wife, Anne Sinclair, had already wired the entire amount in cash, he said.
The white-haired, debonair dad would even stay with his 26-year-old daughter, Camille, a married poli-sci student at Columbia University while awaiting hearings, Brafman said.
Camille and her husband arrived about halfway through the hearing to support her father. The pair, both grim-faced and dressed in jeans, said nothing as they stood in the back of the courtroom.
But Chief Assistant District Attorney Daniel Alonso, the second-in-command in the office, who had demanded that Strauss-Kahn be remanded without bail, scoffed at the idea.
"It's just like Roman Polanski -- it's the same, exact situation," Alonso warned Jackson, referring to the movie director who was charged with a sex act involving a child in California in 1977 and fled to France to dodge prosecution for more than 30 years.
France has no extradition agreements with other countries, and Strauss-Kahn faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.

Yep, Roman Polanski, another Jewish pig who now sits in Eurotrashland a POS free from extradition because of Frog trash. We will take care of this particular Frog POS ourselves. Consider it payback for Frog sex fiend protection of Polanski.
UPPERDATE Tristane Banon's version and Matt Welch's Hit And Run hilarious DEMOLITION of "public intellectual" Bernard Henri-Levy are both worth looking into.

Pakistan and India: Comparison of Allies

Lawrence Wright's insightful piece in The New Yorker on India & Pakistan's role reversals in our foreign policy universe blames our foreign aid for producing preposterous contradictions in Pakistan which has helped the state to implode into its warring configurations---mainly the north/south divide between Punjab and Sindh & the east/west gulf between those two and the Baluchi/NWFP outliers in the Hindu Kush hinterlands.

Actually, Wright does nothing of the sort, but he does demonstrate conclusively that the huge amount of US aid is being disbursed to terrorist entities which strengthen Pakistan against India & support the Taliban fighting the US troops in Afghanistan, inferentially:

One day in March, 2004, when I was in Peshawar, in northern Pakistan, a firefight broke out in the tribal areas nearby. The newspapers said the Army was fighting Al Qaeda, and had surrounded Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy. Zawahiri escaped, but the troops captured a number of Al Qaeda fighters, including Zawahiri’s son Ahmed. The next day, a newspaper bore the headline “AHMED’S TALKING!” Yet Zawahiri doesn’t have a son named Ahmed. After that day, nothing more was said about Ahmed, but I kept puzzling over that tricked-up episode. I began to wonder, What would happen if the Pakistani military actually captured or killed Al Qaeda’s top leaders? The great flow of dollars would stop, just as it had in Afghanistan after the Soviets limped away. I realized that, despite all the suffering the war on terror had brought to Pakistan, the military was addicted to the money it generated. The Pakistani Army and the I.S.I. were in the looking-for-bin-Laden business, and if they found him they’d be out of business.
A number of investigative reports have suggested that the I.S.I. diverted American money designated for fighting terrorism to the Taliban. According to a 2007 document released by WikiLeaks, U.S. military interrogators at Guantánamo implicitly acknowledged this problem when they placed the I.S.I. on an internal list of “terrorist and terrorist-support entities.”

For myself, personally, one of Wright's paras had personal irony:
I

n 2009, Senators Richard Lugar and John Kerry, recognizing that American military aid had given the Army and the I.S.I. disproportionate power in Pakistan, helped pass legislation in Congress sanctioning seven and a half billion dollars in civilian assistance, to be disbursed over a period of five years.

This brought me back to the days in the mid-'80s when I was in charge of raising money for Pakistan while a lobbyist in Denis Neill's shop in DC, a firm hired by Charlie Wilson of the eponymous best-seller fame who I learned later was the chief Democrat in charge of the secret war in Afghanistan. I had raised around $50,000 and Denis Neill told me to hand-walk a check to the DNCC---specifically the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee HQ on Capitol Hill where I handed a check to John Kerry's assistant---JK was the Senate Campaign Cte Chief that election cycle of '86---and afterwards, Charlie Wilson & Denis Neill personally congratulated me because that $50K had switched Kerry & Dodds' votes on the Foreign Rel Cte to give Pakistan $450 million in direct assistance. I got a big glass of single-malt scotch and a Cuban cigar as a reward at the Christmas Party that year. Wright goes on:

Another retired general on the podium, Talat Masood, responded that the losses Pakistan had suffered in the “so-called war on terror” amounted to more than forty billion dollars. “So please don’t harp on the eleven billion,” he said.
Pakistan has indeed suffered for its official alliance with the U.S. In 2006, there were six suicide bombings in the country; the next year there were fifty-six, with six hundred and forty people killed. Last year, twelve hundred people were murdered by suicide bombers. More than three thousand Pakistani soldiers and officers have been killed in the war, including eighty-five members of the I.S.I. Yet many of these wounds have been self-inflicted, for the military and the I.S.I. created and nurtured the very groups—such as the Taliban—that have turned against the Pakistani state. And the money used to fund these radical organizations came largely from American taxpayers.

Again, I had dinner at Talaat Masood's house in 'Pindi back in the mid-eighties on a trip for a company trying to sell Gulfstream Jets to the government and also met him in NYC during a visit by President Zia to the UN much later. He is not the most effective apologist for Paki pleas for more money, as he does have a tendency to want a personal cut of the pie, but that is part of the landscape in a country where personal and public interests are virtually indistinguishable. His claim of losses of over $40 billion from "terror" sound wildly inflated, for instance, and much more has been lost by peculation and corruption from public officials, particularly the army and the intelligence services---not to mention the losses of brave young American soldiers killed by conniving Paki kickbacks and direct aid to the Taliban which in turn arm their insurgency. The bitter fruits of the treachery of the so-called Paki allies has presented the US policy makers with a Hobson's choice:

Many foreign-policy experts maintain that America cannot, at this juncture, cut off military aid to Pakistan—even if elements of the I.S.I. turn out to have harbored bin Laden. There are two prongs to this argument. One is that America needs Pakistan’s support in order to defeat the Taliban. If the U.S. withdraws aid, it is argued, Pakistan might insist that we can no longer fly drones over tribal areas. But Pakistan has covertly supported the drone program for years, in return for the U.S.’s targeting of Taliban forces that it cannot vanquish on its own. Without U.S. aid, the Pakistani military will need drone assistance more than ever.
The more pressing concern is that radical Islamists will somehow get their hands on a nuclear bomb, either through covert means or by actually coming to power. “The military is playing on this fear,” a Pakistani reporter, Pir Zubair Shah, told me.
As much as half of the money the U.S. gave to the I.S.I. to fight the Soviets was diverted to build nuclear weapons. The father of Pakistan’s bomb, A. Q. Khan, later sold plans and nuclear equipment to Libya, North Korea, and Iran. A month before 9/11, Pakistani nuclear scientists even opened a secret dialogue with Al Qaeda. The government of Pakistan has denied knowledge of what Khan and his associates were doing.

The irony of the situation is even more pathetic when Wright exposes the deep hole that the Paki military has dug itself into:

Not only has American military aid been wasted, misused, and turned against us; it may well have undermined the Pakistani military, which has feasted on huge donations but is far weaker than its nemesis, the Indian military. If the measure of our aid is the gratitude of the Pakistani people and the loyalty of their government, then it has clearly been a failure. Last year, a Pew Research Center survey found that half of Pakistanis believe that the U.S. gives little or no assistance at all. Even the Finance Minister, Hafiz Shaikh, said last month that it was “largely a myth” that the U.S. had given tens of billions of dollars to Pakistan. And if the measure of our aid is Pakistan’s internal security, the program has fallen short in that respect as well. Pakistan is endangered not by India, as the government believes, but by the very radical movements that the military helped create to act as terrorist proxies.

And the Pakistani business community has more reason to get the US to drop textile barriers which prevent the massive importation of "bar wipes," for instance, of which Pakistan is the leading producer in the world, and other lowly commodities mass-produced but subject to high tariff barriers.

Eliminating, or sharply reducing, military aid to Pakistan would have consequences, but they may not be the ones we fear. Diminishing the power of the military class would open up more room for civilian rule. Many Pakistanis are in favor of less U.S. aid; their slogan is “trade not aid.” In particular, Pakistani businessmen have long sought U.S. tax breaks for their textiles, which American manufacturers have resisted. Such a move would empower the civilian middle class. India would no doubt welcome a reduction in military aid to Pakistan, and the U.S. could use this as leverage to pressure India to allow the Kashmiris to vote on their future, which would very likely be a vote for independence. These two actions might do far more to enhance Pakistan’s stability, and to insure its friendship, than the billions of dollars that America now pays like a ransom.

In the meantime, the head of the army Kayani must resort to bluster and strutting about to save face which his preposterous incompetence has exposed him as a complete military dunce and nutcase, if not an out-and-out traitor:

Within the I.S.I., there is a secret organization known as the S Wing, which is largely composed of supposedly retired military and I.S.I. officers. “It doesn’t exist on paper,” a source close to the I.S.I. told me. The S Wing handles relations with radical elements. “If something happens, then they have deniability,” the source explained. If any group within the Pakistani military helped hide bin Laden, it was likely S Wing.
Eight days before Osama bin Laden was killed, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the head of the Pakistani Army, went to the Kakul military academy in Abbottabad, less than a mile from the villa where bin Laden was living. “General Kayani told the cadets, ‘We have broken the backbone of the militants,’ ” Pir Zubair Shah, the reporter, told me. “But the backbone was right there.” Perhaps with a touch of theatre, Hamid Gul, the former I.S.I. chief, publicly expressed wonder that bin Laden was living in a city with three army regiments, less than a mile from an élite military academy, in a house that appeared to have been built expressly to protect him. Aside from the military, Gul told the Associated Press, “there is the local police, the Intelligence Bureau, Military Intelligence, the I.S.I. They all had a presence there.”

I wonder why "wonder" is what Gul expressed. There is something wonderful about the comeuppance of imbeciles and double-dealing frauds whose cover stories now seem to be sillier than even a movie script writer could ever put over on an audience.

Gilles Kepel Explains Jihad After the Arab Spring

Kepel is an excellent scholar of the French school, long versed in the intricacies of Islam with its myriad spirals and tendrils of the mind. Some of his thoughts on the Ikhwan, which he has written about extensively, and the possibility of a revolution in Syria.

Does he fear like many, including this writer, that the Muslim Brothers are in a strong position to, if not take power, than at least have a central role in any elected government?

“The Brothers themselves are utterly divided along ideological and generational lines,” Kepel said. “Now some say those tensions are superficial, that they are going to reconcile, and they are all going to vote for the same people. The dice is not cast yet.”

“I don’t think that they are already in a capacity to hijack it,” he explained further, referring to the Egyptian revolution. “Much will depend on the strength of the other forces.”

But does he view the liberal forces opposing the Brotherhood as strong?

“No, for the time being, they are totally disorganized,” he conceded. And with parliamentary elections coming in September, the “ones that are organized are either remnants of the Ancien Regime and the Brothers” and they “will be able to get the best part of it, whereas the small parties are totally disorganized for the time being.”

Though revolutions have succeeded in overthrowing long entrenched regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, Kepel is unsure whether the revolution currently raging in Syria will ultimately bring down the brutal Assad dynasty.

In Syria “you have an army which is not at all like the Egyptian and Tunisian armies because the Egyptian and Tunisian top brass decided that both Ben Ali and Mubarak were embarrassments and you had to throw them away,” he explained. “In Syria, the army, or the part of the army that is efficient, which is well equipped and the like, is largely Alawi,” he said, referring to the Shia-sect from which the Syrian ruling elite derive, including Syrian President Bashar Assad. “So they know they fight with their back on the wall. They know that everybody in the Sunni majority remembers vividly the 20,000 dead in Hama in 1982 plus the innumerable people that disappeared.”

But, Kepel said, he is not convinced the Sunni elite have yet gotten behind revolution out of fear that the overthrow of the regime could result in civil war.

“I believe that the Sunni bourgeoisie in Damascus and Aleppo is still hesitant as to throwing its weight in the battle because they fear that Syria might turn out to be Lebanon or Iraq,” he said. “You know, it is a Levant country which is fraught with divisions and there might be civil war.”

As far as Al Qaeda as a worldwide brand name, Kepel believes that AQ went with OBL. And Kepel thinks Egypt is losing its tradition of centralized authority.

“Al-Qaeda was already dead politically before bin Laden was terminated physically,” Kepel argued when asked how big a blow the loss of bin Lade was to al-Qaeda. “And, you know, it had been killed by the Arab revolutions and the reason those revolutions could take place was precisely because bin Laden and his ilk lost their appeal and it had become clear to everyone that they could not mobilize the Muslim masses.”

When asked whether Al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri could fill the shoes of his predecessor, Kepel said he didn’t think so.

“He lacks the charisma of bin Laden. He lacks his bravado. And I am not sure that he has the charismatic ability to bring most people under his wing,” Kepel said. “What I foresee is rather that now that the big name has disappeared, the franchising will lose its attraction because, you know, whenever you wanted to bomb something, if you said, ‘I am the Islamic Front for whatever in Kenya or Algeria,’ no one gave a damn. When you say, ‘I am al-Qaeda in Algeria,’ you make the headlines all over the world. This is something you could do as long as the big man was around. Now that he has been not only killed, but also that is image has been erased, it is not the same case.”

TheDC asked Kepel, who had just gotten back from a two-week tour of Egypt, about what he thought the future holds for that country post-Mubarak?

“Egypt is in real turmoil and as of now what is striking is that the state has receded tremendously,” he said. “It is not that visible in Cairo, but it is very visible in the countryside where the police has entirely disappeared.”

The Daily Caller's interlocutor didn't know enough to ask about the fate of the Egyptian Copts, six million Christians in a sea of barbaric nasties who've always been jealous of the Coptic business skills and ability to make money.

Why Should We Trust Pakistan?

Bruce Riedel was the CIA chief for the Middle East when I worked with Jefferson Waterman on some projects. One time, Charlie Waterman was going to see him and asked if I wanted to come along. I forget why I couldn't go, but I certainly wanted to go, because along with Reuel LNU, Riedel was a member of elite Middle East analyst/operatives who were a legend in Langley.

Pakistan is the most dangerous country in the world, but also one of the most complicated. There are basically two possible explanations for the relationship between al Qaeda and the Pakistani army: the army manipulates the jihadis or the jihadis manipulate the army. Both are terrifying. The first is awful, the second is much more frightening. Both are true.

Riedel goes on to mention that Pakistan has only had one military victory in the 60 years since its inception---except of ourse for its victories over constitutional government several times over its mottled history.

Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, in some ways the Pakistani equivalent of West Point. He started his career as a fundraiser for the Pakistani army's only military success in its 60-plus years—the war against the USSR in Afghanistan. He worked side by side with the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency, then. He helped create the army's jihadist Frankenstein masterpiece: Lashkar-e-Taiba—the army of the pure—which attacked Mumbai and which has mourned him more than any one else. Lashkar leader Hafez Saed has openly eulogized bin Laden, but Saed is also a regular feature at rallies attended by senior army officers.
And yet al Qaeda's other ally in Pakistan, the Pakistani Taliban, was with the army. Together al Qaeda and the Taliban have killed hundreds of Pakistani soldiers, even attacking their headquarters and cantonments. They have killed senior officers and declared their intention to kill chief of army staff General Kayani. Al Qaeda's new boss, Ayman al-Zawahri, has written a book on why Pakistan needs an Islamic revolution. Its most effective operator, Muhammad Ilyas Kashmiri, was trained by the ISI but now regularly hunts it. He has killed several senior commanders, and has even tried to eliminate former dictator Pervez Musharraf.

Does anyone get the impression that ISI has a confused mission statement? And today, the pathetic retards in the senior brass are making more nukes than any country in the world---after A.Q. Khan spread nuclear secrets to Iran, N. Korea, and other rogue nations like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

So how is the army both at war with al Qaeda and in bed with it? The answer is the army is riddled with jihadist sympathizers. For decades, the officer corps has been told India is the enemy, America is unreliable and rapacious, and that Islam is the answer. Even those officers who appreciate American support (the country has received billions in aid since 9/11) resent it too. Like all Pakistanis, they also believe America is closer in values and interests to India. They are right.
The Pakistani army, the fifth largest in the world, is a maze of contradictions and complexities. Meanwhile it steadily builds more nuclear weapons faster than any other country in the world today.
The syndicate of terror in Pakistan is not a monolith. It has no single leader. Its fluidity is a strength, because it is so complex and multi-layered. Now it is clear it has put its agents deep in the Pakistani military. Obama was right not to trust it on Osama.
The Pakistani army, the fifth-largest in the world, is a maze of contradictions and complexities. Meanwhile it steadily builds more nuclear weapons faster than any other country in the world today. It has close ties to China and Saudi Arabia and troops deployed to back up monarchies like Bahrain and Oman.
It is easy to be confused and angry about Pakistan. But that is not a strategy. The right course calls for engagement, with tough redlines, backed by unilateral operations when needed.

Pakistan has one great enemy in its own confused "mind," if that's what foreign observers call the paranoid fantasies that Islamabad regularly entertains about it giant and PROSPERING neighbor, India. Pakistan sent the US stealth helicopter parts to the PRC immediately so as to curry favor, like the teaboys the top Pak brass are, in order to keep India from completely overwhelming these third-rate religious freaks.

Sadly, when Bruce Riedel talks about "engagement, with tough redlines, backed by unilateral operations when needed," he means treating a mad dog like it should be handled, without any sort of mollycoddling.

Enhanced Interrogation Worked to Find/Kill Osama

Osama bin Laden would still be in his room plotting 10th Anniversary Attacks if GWB & his team of interrogators not applied harsh interrogatory techniques on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other perps of AQs top echelon.

Consider how the intelligence that led to bin Laden came to hand. It began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information—including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.

That regimen of harsh interrogation was used on KSM after another detainee, Abu Zubaydeh, was subjected to the same techniques. When he broke, he said that he and other members of al Qaeda were obligated to resist only until they could no longer do so, at which point it became permissible for them to yield. "Do this for all the brothers," he advised his interrogators.

Abu Zubaydeh was coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of 9/11. Bin al Shibh disclosed information that, when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydeh, helped lead to the capture of KSM and other senior terrorists and the disruption of follow-on plots aimed at both Europe and the United States.

Another of those gathered up later in this harvest, Abu Faraj al-Libi, also was subjected to certain of these harsh techniques and disclosed further details about bin Laden's couriers that helped in last weekend's achievement.

The harsh techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of these techniques.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations. The Bush administration put these techniques in place only after rigorous analysis by the Justice Department, which concluded that they were lawful. Regrettably, that same administration gave them a name—"enhanced interrogation techniques"—so absurdly antiseptic as to imply that it must conceal something unlawful.

The other-worldly buffoon who ultimately used to fruits of these intelligence gems disdains to admit doing so. Former Atty. Gen Mukasey continues his explanation.

The current president ran for election on the promise to do away with them even before he became aware, if he ever did, of what they were. Days after taking office he directed that the CIA interrogation program be done away with entirely, and that interrogation be limited to the techniques set forth in the Army Field Manual, a document designed for use by even the least experienced troops. It's available on the Internet and used by terrorists as a training manual for resisting interrogation.

In April 2009, the administration made public the previously classified Justice Department memoranda analyzing the harsh techniques, thereby disclosing them to our enemies and assuring that they could never be used effectively again. Meanwhile, the administration announced its intentions to replace the CIA interrogation program with one administered by the FBI. In December 2009, Omar Faruq Abdulmutallab was caught in an airplane over Detroit trying to detonate a bomb concealed in his underwear. He was warned after apprehension of his Miranda rights, and it was later disclosed that no one had yet gotten around to implementing the new program.

Yet the Justice Department, revealing its priorities, had gotten around to reopening investigations into the conduct of a half-dozen CIA employees alleged to have used undue force against suspected terrorists. I say "reopening" advisedly because those investigations had all been formally closed by the end of 2007, with detailed memoranda prepared by career Justice Department prosecutors explaining why no charges were warranted. Attorney General Eric Holder conceded that he had ordered the investigations reopened in September 2009 without reading those memoranda. The investigations have now dragged on for years with prosecutors chasing allegations down rabbit holes, with the CIA along with the rest of the intelligence community left demoralized.

Immediately following the killing of bin Laden, the issue of interrogation techniques became in some quarters the "dirty little secret" of the event. But as disclosed in the declassified memos in 2009, the techniques are neither dirty nor, as noted by Director Hayden and others, were their results little. As the memoranda concluded—and as I concluded reading them at the beginning of my tenure as attorney general in 2007—the techniques were entirely lawful as the law stood at the time the memos were written, and the disclosures they elicited were enormously important. That they are no longer secret is deeply regrettable.

The completely politicized criminal-lite AG Holder continues to push his absurd agenda of racist protection of the "New" Black Panthers and the terrorists who would do great harm to the US.
The Wall Street Journal editorializes that this coddling of criminals has got to stop:
This week the Associated Press reported that the name of bin Laden's courier may have come from CIA interrogations of Khalid

Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libi, who received "harsh" interrogation at CIA prisons in Poland and Romania. On Tuesday, Mr. Holder said the information came from a "mosaic of sources."

Incidentally, there will be no attempt here to establish whether CIA interrogations did or did not lead to the bin Laden courier, who led our commandos to a bedroom in Abbottabad. Just as there will be no attempt here to resolve the fastidious debate unfolding over whether the Navy Seals' shooting of an unarmed Osama bin Laden was "legal." We'll leave that to the endless grinding wheels of the law journals.

If Mr. Holder has evidence of an egregious crime, he should step forward and announce it. If not, he should use this moment to put an end to the Durham investigation. Mr. Durham is not an independent counsel, whose hallowed status makes attorneys general loath to interfere. He is a special prosecutor, appointed by the attorney general and under his authority.

On June 18 last year, Mr. Holder said in a Washington speech that Mr. Durham was "close to the end of the time that he needs and will be making recommendations to me." But nothing has happened. Asked this week about the status of this investigation, a Justice Department spokesman for Mr. Durham, whose office is in Connecticut, said the project is "still ongoing."

Ironically, the CIA's contribution to bin Laden's end may ensure that its people will remain under this cloud. With President Obama elated over the success of his call to take down bin Laden, his poll numbers rising and his re-election campaign insulated from charges of Democratic softness on national security, what are the chances that his attorney general would wash away all that by announcing his intention to indict the men whose work may have sent his boss into Abbottabad, guns blazing? It is zero.

Eric Holder has taken a lot of flak over his handling of various terror issues. The point here is not to put him in the dock over another but to hope he'll make a good call. Times change. In his statement Sunday, Mr. Obama described 10 years of "heroic" work by "our counterterrorism professionals." But he also noted that the remarkable sense of national unity after 9/11 "has at times frayed." It might be truer to say it was our ever-ragged politics that frayed, not our people.

President Obama will be at Ground Zero in Manhattan today to lay a wreath. This is the same Ground Zero that on Monday morning was surrounded by young people chanting "USA" and singing "God Bless America (land that I love)." Some have asked whether Monday's chanters, barely teenagers on 9/11, were too celebratory or were in bad taste.

Was it too celebratory Monday when 35-year-old David Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox and the Dominican Republic stopped after hitting a home run to hug Army Ranger Sgt. Lucas Carr, who'd been leading the Boston crowd in "USA" chants? Mr. Ortiz said it was just about "love." That's right. Those outpourings were about love of something bigger in America than our frayed politics or even making "our values" a function of our legal procedures.

After 9/11, when the fraying started, George W. Bush passed through a seven-year political minefield of media leaks and lawsuits over the Patriot Act, surveillance, renditions, Guantanamo and CIA interrogations. Now bin Laden is dead, and Barack Obama's got the credit. We're all fine with that, just as we're fine with people chanting "USA" over the dead terrorist who tried to kill us. Now how about letting those CIA interrogators come in from the cold and join the celebration?

It's obvious that Mr. Durham is dragging his feet and that Holder now is holding a very poor political hand. But Eric is the criminal-lite who recommended to the impeached BJ perjuror that he pardon Marc Rich, who through his wife Denise had contributed millions to the Clinton Library.

And this clown also dropped a case concerning the New Black Panthers' intimidating voters in Philly with automatic weapons.

When Traitors rule the land, none dare call it treason.

First Fruits of Neptune's Spear Treasure Trove of Intelligence

ABC News just announced that

A new bulletin issued tonight by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security and obtained by ABC News describes the terror organization's chilling desire to derail a train.

"As of February 2010, al-Qa'ida was allegedly contemplating conducting an operation against trains at an unspecified location in the United States on the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001," the document reads, using an alternate spelling for bin Laden's terror group. "As one option, al-Qa'ida was looking into trying to tip a train by tampering with the rails so that the train would fall off the track at either a valley or a bridge."

"You can't guard hundreds of miles of track," said ABC News consultant and former White House counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke. "And if they can get to one location that is not well guarded and put explosives on it or do something to cause the train to derail that's a lot easier than going after an aircraft."

ABC also noted that all three women at the home were Osama's wives, so bin Laden as a trigamist beat out Obama's dad as a bigamist. The one dead wife might have been the one he pushed at the SEALs as a human shield. Typical Arab male hyena.
UPDATE:Deputy Minister Mansur Al-Turki

said in a statement Wednesday that Khaled Hathal Abdullah al-Atifi al-Qahtani contacted the security authorities from an undisclosed country and expressed his wish to come home," the Associated Press reports.
"Al-Qahtani was reunited with his family and his surrender will be taken into consideration while looking into his case, Al-Turki said."

The Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman did not indicate when Khaled al-Qahtani gave himself up, but many members of the group's Yemeni wing, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), have recently fled from Yemen, the AP writes.
As the US Embassy Political Officer, I used to see Al-Turki every time I went to Riyadh back in the late '70s when the Embassy was still in Jidda. He is the most reliable Saudi I met and never BS'd me like the others in the Ministries did.

The unrest in Yemen means that the very "effective" AQAP base may be in jeopardy of a raid by SEAL team six or Delta Force. Or just a lot of danger because of the uncertain circumstances---my guess is that bribes paid to officials now in danger of losing their jobs may mean forging a whole new set of relationships.

My guess is Al-Qahtani read the handwriting on the wall when he heard bin Laden's computers and discs and thumb-drives were all picked up by the SEALs. Expect a lot more Al-Q operatives to turn themselves over to the MinInt in Saudi because Prince Nayif, the IntMin, is a huge Salafist and will pardon them quickly.

Operation Neptune's Spear

Neptune's Spear
is the trident and the symbol of the Navy SEALs. The Operation to get Bin Laden was successful, but that doesn't mean that the work is over:

Evidence seized from the compound is said to include 10 cell phones, five to 10 computers, 12 hard drives, at least 100 "computer disks" (including thumb drives and DVDs), handwritten notes, documents, weapons and "an assortment of personal items."[93][180][70]
A special CIA team has been tasked with combing through the digital material and documents removed from the bin Laden compound.[181] The material is being stored at the FBI Laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, where forensic experts will analyze fingerprints, DNA and other trace evidence left on the material.[180]
Intelligence analysts will also study call records from two phone numbers that were found to be sewn into bin Laden's clothing.[180]

Reports are coming out now that are unconfirmed that before the Osama couriers took over the house, it had been used as a "safe house" by Inter-Services Intelligence [ISI]. I once had a onetoone meeting with the Deputy ISI in Islamabad, who was about as uninformative as it is possible to be.

But somebody in the ISI den of thieves has a lot of explaining to do, especially to India, which knows that the ISI is giving shelter to the Mumbai massacres' perps of last year. If India asks for US assistance, shall we give it?

News Corp Cable TV Divsion up 13% Revenues, 25% PROFITS

MessNBC & The Communist News Network are getting creamed [as is NBC parent network just acquired by CimCast] at the same time as Fox is beating the living daylights out of the bottom line.

And News Corp.'s largest earnings generator, its cable networks, once again recorded strong growth, boosting operating profit 25 percent on a 13 percent revenue gain.

ComCast had better do something to revive its lagging TV properties.

Obama Gets Osama: Goodbye Vietnam

It's now coming out from insiders in the White House that Obama had to be dragged kicking and screaming that the DoD & CIA were disturbing his golf game and that he had to "sleep on" the decision for 16 hours. Maybe he did a "flash poll" like Billy Jeff did as to whether or not he should grow a set. Only BJ did one on whether to lie to the US public, which he did for eight months.



Someone should tell this third-rate hack Fineman that his Vietnam natterings show just how hard he's trying to suck up to the DNC & Soros. Maybe he's having credit card troubles?
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Obama a Shoo-In for Re-Election?

Obama and his "victory lap" are recounted by Dana Milbank, house moron for the WaPo. I am so happy that OBL got sent to Hell missing half of his skull that I will forgive Obama a bit and allow him a couple of times around the track. [I studied Arabic in Jidda at King Abdul-Aziz University while Osama was a student there, but never remember seeing a 6'5" fellow among the thousands of students.] I am happy that this degenerate fanatic has been frog-marched by US SEALS to his death.

But now, as Andrew Malcolm sardonically notes, Obama is taking credit because he only got nine rounds of golf in this weekend.

Obama and his coterie of cowards, physical cowards who are brave telling others to risk their lives, think that they have a smooth path toward re-election, as does ditz-in-chief Baba Wawa and her coven of crones [Hasselbeck excepted] on The View.

Crones like Behar, Goldberg and the ancient fossil Baba herself aren’t clever enough to remember how George H. W. Bush was a shoo-in after the tremendous victory in 1991, twenty years ago.

How’d that work out again?

Once again, it’s okay to gloat a bit, but will the lamestream MSM have any sense of shame or perspective on this good choice by Obama to go after the monster and kill the dog without a trial? I have a feeling that these imbeciles and moral lepers on the left have lost all sense of balance and coherence when in comes to advancing their nanny-state agenda.

Obama's Handlers Attempt to Make Him a Glorious Hero, Coll Scores Paki Two-Faced Perfidy, & Hertzberg Kisses BHO Ass

Looking a Little Under the Weather, Osama!

Andrew Malcolm has a problem with the sycophantic drones and crones among the White House pressies.

Sunday was, Brennan revealed to his eager audience, "probably one of the most anxiety-filled periods of times in the lives of the people assembled here." Poor poor bureaucrats. Extra Tums all around. Did someone order dinner?

There may have been a little anxiety aboard those combat choppers. Who knows? We can't hear from them. And, as every day, anxiety in the kitchens, hearts and mind of thousands of military families who put up with the terrifying uncertainty of the dangerous deeds their loved ones have volunteered to secretly do for their country. During his 49 minute presentation Brennan did squeeze in one reference to the mission's "very brave personnel."

But the emphasis, with 2012 just around the calendrical corner, was on the boss' valor. "There was nothing that confirmed that bin Laden was at that compound," Brennan related as if such uncertainty is uncommon in war.

"And, therefore," Brennan continued, "when President Obama was faced with the opportunity to act upon this, the president had to evaluate the strength of that information and then made what I believe was one of the most gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory."

According to early reports of the incident, detailed here in The Ticket, 24 SEALs rappelled down ropes from hovering Chinooks in post-midnight darkness Monday Pakistan time with Osama security forces shooting at them. Brennan didn't have much time to go into all that today, the goal is to elevate the ex-state senator to at least a one-star commander-in-chief.

The White House Press Corps, with a few honorable exceptions like Jake Tapper, are a peanut gallery or a chorus of trained seals clapping on command whenever Jay Carney or BHO's other flunkies throw them a peanut or a fish.. "Most gutsiest" is a good grammatical lapse to describe the dysfunction of a White House that believes that BHO did the heavy lifting of cutting short his weekend to nine holes of golf. Actually, with the cumulative intelligence that the brave and brilliant CIA humint types had amassed, there was a ninety percent chance the compound held Osama or at least a very high-value inmate. So much for gutsiest. I will give him credit for having far more courage than the cowering coward BillyJeff Clinton had when he vetoed a kill-shot assault in Afghanistan in the late nineties. Michael Scheuer said he was happy Osama was gone, but despised BJ's cringing that "killed eight or nine of my friends later on down the road" because of presidential cowardice.

Here's something else that didn't get much recognition in all the street celebrations or all-hail-Obama briefings:

The trail to Monday morning's assault on Osama's Pakistan compound began during someone else's presidency. That previous president authorized enhanced interrogation techniques which convinced folks like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to give up, among many other things, the name of their top-secret courier, now deceased. His travels ultimately led the CIA back to Osama's six-year-old suburban home.

funny about that, with all the lies and garbage thrown at GWB over enhanced interrogation by chicken-squat cowardly treasonous members of the professional left, it was the waterboarding that may have got the name of the "trusted courier" or at least scared the bejesus out of equally-scaredycat terrorist inmates.
UPDATE Steve Coll of New Yorker fame has the following indictment of our treasonous ally:

Abbottabad is essentially a military-cantonment city in Pakistan, in the hills to the north of the capital of Islamabad, in an area where much of the land is controlled or owned by the Pakistani Army and retired Army officers. Although the city is technically in what used to be called the Northwest Frontier Province, it lies on the far eastern side of the province and is as close to Pakistani-held Kashmir as it is to the border city of Peshawar. The city is most notable for housing the Pakistan Military Academy, the Pakistani Army’s premier training college, equivalent to West Point. Looking at maps and satellite photos on the Web last night, I saw the wide expanse of the Academy not far from where the million-dollar, heavily secured mansion where bin Laden lived was constructed in 2005. The maps I looked at had sections of land nearby marked off as “restricted areas,” indicating that they were under military control. It stretches credulity to think that a mansion of that scale could have been built and occupied by bin Laden for six years without its coming to the attention of anyone in the Pakistani Army.
The initial circumstantial evidence suggests that the opposite is more likely—that bin Laden was effectively being housed under Pakistani state control. Pakistan will deny this, it seems safe to predict, and perhaps no convincing evidence will ever surface to prove the case. If I were a prosecutor at the United States Department of Justice, however, I would be tempted to call a grand jury. Who owned the land on which the house was constructed? How was the land acquired, and from whom? Who designed the house, which seems to have been purpose-built to secure bin Laden? Who was the general contractor? Who installed the security systems? Who worked there? Are there witnesses who will now testify as to who visited the house, how often, and for what purpose? These questions are not relevant only to the full realization of justice for the victims of September 11th. They are also relevant to the victims of terrorist attacks conducted or inspired by bin Laden while he lived in the house, and these include many Pakistanis, as well as Afghans, Indians, Jordanians, and Britons. They are rightly subjects of American criminal law.
Outside the Justice Department, other sections of the United States government will probably underplay any evidence of culpability by the Pakistani state or sections of the state, such as its intelligence service, I.S.I., in sheltering bin Laden. As ever, there are many other fish to fry in Islamabad and at the Army headquarters, in nearby Rawalpindi: an exit strategy from Afghanistan, which requires the greatest possible degree of coöperation from Pakistan that can be attained at a reasonable price; nuclear stability; and so on.
Pakistan’s military and intelligence service takes risks that others would not dare take because Pakistan’s generals believe that their nuclear deterrent keeps them safe from regime change of the sort under way in Libya, and because they have discovered over the years that the rest of the world sees them as too big to fail. Unfortunately, they probably are correct in their analysis; some countries, like some investment banks, do pose systemic risks so great that they are too big to fail, and Pakistan is currently the A.I.G. of nation-states. But that should not stop American prosecutors from following the law here as they would whenever any mass killer’s hideout is discovered.
Of course, Mullah Omar and Al Qaeda’s No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, probably also enjoy refuge in Pakistan. The location of Mullah Omar, in particular, is believed by American officials to be well known to some Pakistani military and intelligence officers; Omar, too, they believe, is effectively under Pakistani state control. Perhaps the circumstantial evidence in the bin Laden case is misleading; only a transparent, thorough investigation by Pakistani authorities into how such a fugitive could have lived so long under the military’s nose without detection would establish otherwise. That sort of transparent investigation is unlikely to take place.
On who was living with Bin Laden:
The early reports suggest that he was living with his “youngest wife.” Bin Laden, who was fifty-three years old when he died, had always lived surrounded by family and children, so it is not surprising that he had managed to do so even as a fugitive. He is known to have married at least four times. His first wife was a cousin from Syria. His second and third wives were highly educated Saudi women. His fourth wife was a kind of mail-order teen-age bride from Yemen, whom he married while living in Afghanistan during the nineteen-nineties, according to the account of bin Laden’s former Yemeni bodyguard. Bin Laden’s Syrian and Saudi wives were said to have gone home before or immediately after the September 11th attacks, and the Saudi wives were said to be living in the kingdom, without contact with Osama. When I visited Yemen in 2007, to conduct research on the bin Laden family, Yemeni journalists told me that his youngest wife had returned home and was living in the region either of Tai’zz or of Ibb, significant cities to the south of Sanaa, the capital. It seems that she may have found her way to Pakistan to live with her husband. My own guess had been that bin Laden would have accepted informal divorce from his older wives on the ground of involuntary separation, and would have remarried a local woman or two while in hiding in Pakistan, perhaps a daughter presented by one of his Pathan hosts. That is at least conceivable as well. Apparently, one of his adult sons was killed in the raid. Osama has more than a dozen sons. Some have returned to Saudi Arabia, but others have appeared in videos with their father, vowing to fight alongside him. It is conceivable that one of his sons could make a claim on Al Qaeda leadership in the years ahead.
On what bin Laden’s death means for Al Qaeda:
On the constructive side: The loss of a symbolic, semi-charismatic leader whose own survival burnished his legend is significant. Also, Al Qaeda has never had a leadership succession test. Now it faces one. The organization was founded more than twenty years ago, in the summer of 1988, and at the initial sessions bin Laden was appointed amir and Ayman al-Zawahiri deputy amir. It is remarkable that, for all the No. 3s who have been killed, and for all the ways in which it has been degraded since September 11th, Al Qaeda had retained the same two leaders, continuously, for so long. Zawahiri is famously disputatious and tone-deaf. His relatively recent online “chat” taking questions about Al Qaeda’s violence did not go well. Bin Laden was a gentle and strong communicator, if somewhat incoherent in his thinking. Zawahiri is dogmatic and argumentative, and has a history of alienating colleagues.
On the other hand: Al Qaeda is more than just a centralized organization based in Pakistan. It is also a network of franchised or like-minded organizations, and an ideological movement in which followers sometimes act in isolation from leaders. The best guesstimates are that Al Qaeda has several hundred serious members or adherents in Pakistan, along the Pakistan side of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and perhaps up to a hundred scattered around Afghanistan. Just last week, the German government disrupted a cell near Dusseldorf in which one of the members, of Moroccan origin, had allegedly travelled to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, where he received explosives training from an Al Qaeda contact. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, based in Yemen, appears to be just as potent. Dan Benjamin, the State Department counterterrorism coördinator, gave a speech last week at New America that provided a very good, up-to-date summary of Al Qaeda and its affiliates worldwide, their capabilities and connections to one another.

On the hunt itself:
After President Obama took office, he and the new Central Intelligence Agency director, Leon Panetta, reorganized the team of analysts devoted to finding Osama bin Laden. The team worked out of ground-floor offices at the Langley headquarters. There were at least two-dozen of them. Some were older analysts who had been part of the C.I.A.’s various bin Laden-hunting efforts going back to the late nineteen-nineties. Others were newer recruits, too young to have been professionally active when bin Laden was first indicted as a fugitive from American justice.
As they reset their work, the analysts studied other long-term international fugitive hunts that had ended successfully, such as the operations that led to the death of the Medellín Cartel leader Pablo Escobar, in 1993. The analysts asked, Where did the breakthroughs in these other hunts come from? What were the clues that made the difference and how were the clues discovered? They tried to identify “signatures” of Osama bin Laden’s life style that might lead to such a clue: prescription medications that he might purchase, hobbies or other habits of shopping or movement that might give him away.
The Langley analysts were one headquarters egghead element of the hunt. Similar analytical units, at Central Command, in Tampa, and at the International Security Assistance Force, in Kabul, sorted battlefield and all-source intelligence, designated subjects for additional collection, and conducted pattern analysis of relationships among terrorists, couriers, and raw data collected in the field. Detainee operators in Iraq, in Afghanistan, at Guantanámo, and at secret C.I.A. sites also participated. Apparently, the breakthrough started several years back from detainee interrogations; it’s not clear yet how or by what means the information about the courier who led to the Abbottabad compound was extracted.
Overseas, C.I.A. officers in the Directorate of Operations and the Special Activities Division—intelligence officers who ran sources and collected information, as well as armed paramilitaries—carried out the search for informants from bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Units from the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, which includes the Navy Seals, Delta, and other specialized groups, joined in. Often, Special Operations and the C.I.A. worked in blended task-force teams deployed around Afghanistan, and, more problematically, as the Raymond Davis case indicated, around Pakistan.
These teams searched not only for bin Laden but also for other “high-value targets,” as they are legally and bureaucratically known inside the U.S. government. My understanding is that, as of this spring, there were approximately forty legally designated, fugitive high-value targets at the top of the wanted-list system. If there were forty, I suppose there are now thirty-nine.

UPPERDATE: Obsequious Toady and Serial :Suck-Up Rick Hertzberg's analysis can be boiled down to one paragraph. After analyzing the difference between Carter's failed 1980 Rescue Attempt and Obama's Killing of Osama:

The biggest difference, of course, is that the 1980 mission failed, whereas the 2011 raid has succeeded. Spectacular failure in Iran pretty much guaranteed President Carter’s defeat in his campaign for reëlection. Spectacular success in Pakistan makes Obama’s defeat markedly less likely.

Yeah, Rick, that's what they said about George H. W. Bush in 1991 after the blitzkrieg victory over Iraq. How'd that turn out again?

MayDay MayDay a Day of Joy Forever...!

If I'd known you were coming, I'd have got ready....

The Always Brilliant Mark Steyn reports in the National Journal:
T

he Pakistani papers are one of my favorite reads. Before the Big Announcement, this intriguing story turned up:

Chopper Crashes, Three Blasts Heard Near PMA Kakul

The most significant fact to emerge from bin Laden’s death so far is that he was not living in a smelly cave in the tribal badlands but in a mansion in the heart of the Pakistani establishment round the corner from the Military Academy on the Kakul Road.

UPDATE: Mr Sohaib Athar from Abbottabad:

I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.

UPPERDATE: It looks like Osama had been living there for at least a year, and maybe much longer.As I said last night, hiding in plain sight – with the connivance of Pakistani high-ups. Sunday brunch at the Lahore Hilton?

The Jazeera TV commentator said that Osama's residence is "less than a kilometer" from Pakistan's most prestigious military academy and that neighbors wondered about the huge, almost uninhabited mansion with only two people ever seen entering or leaving. Plus he mentioned that the only tie with the outside world was a man who came to this million-dollar mansion every day with fresh bread and a chicken. Just one for how many inhabitants, over a dozen at least.

Talk about iron rations....!

OBL might as well have been living in a cave---though the couriers came and went with his instructions to a world-wide evil empire of terror. Sort of like the "Old Man of the Mountain" who would send his Hashish-high couriers to kill his enemies---OBL probably got the idea from Muslim history [The Old Man lived on a mountain in Persia.]
UPDATE:Jake Tapper has this timeline:

Tensions were thick in the White House Situation Room after two choppers full of Navy SEALS left Afghanistan to storm a Pakistani compound and kill Osama bin Laden.

The President wasn’t 100% certain bin Laden was in the compound. No one was. The operation was a surgical raid by a small team designed to minimize collateral damage and pose as little risk as possible, to Pakistani civilians in the neighborhood, senior administration officials said.

The SEALS raided the compound. A firefight ensured. Bin Laden fired back, as did others in the compound.

After 40 minutes of fighting, bin Laden, two couriers, and one of bin Laden’s adult sons were killed, as was a woman used as a shield by one of the male members of al Qaeda. Two other women were injured.

During the raid one helicopter was lost due to mechanical failure. The aircraft was destroyed by the crew.

Carrying bin Laden’s dead body, the SEALS boarded the remaining helicopter to exit the compound.

White House national security staffers had been in the Situation Room since 1pm ET. At 2:00pm the President met with the Principals to review final preparations.

At 3:50pm the President was told bin Laden had been tentatively identified.

There was jubilation in the White House once the helicopter returned to Afghanistan.

At 7:01 pm President Obama was told there was a “high probability” bin Laden was dead.

“The death of Osama Bin Laden marks the single greatest victory in the US-led campaign to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda,” an official said.

The operation had been in the works for years. Since 9/11, the CIA gathered leads on those in bin Laden’s inner circle, including personal couriers. During interrogations and questioning, various detainees flagged individuals who may have been providing support to OBL and Zawahiri. One courier in particularly was identified by detainees as one of the few al Qaeda couriers who had bin Laden’s trust. He was identified as a “protégé” of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and a trusted assistant of Abu Faraj al –Libbi, the former #3 of al Qaeda, who was captured in 2005. There were even indications the courier may have been living with bin Laden.

In 2007, intelligence officers discovered his identity. In 2009, intelligence officials identified areas in Pakistan where the courier and his brother operate – but they were still unable to pinpoint precisely where.

In August 2010 came a big break. Intelligence identified a compound that aroused their suspicion – eight times larger than other homes in the area, built in 2005, on a property valued at $1 million. But access to the compound was severely restricted, with elaborate security and 12 to 18 foot walls topped with barbed wire. Incongruently, the compound has no phone service or televisions. The main building had few windows and a seven foot wall for privacy. Residents burned their trash.

Intelligence officials concluded that unit was “custom built” to hide someone. A third family was identified as living there – and the size and makeup matched the bin Laden family members most likely with him. The location and design of compound were consistent with what experts expected his hideout might look like. Their final conculsion: there was a strong probability that this was bin Laden’s hideout.

While he publicly downplayed the importance of capturing or killing bin Laden, on June 2, 2009 President Obama had signed a memo to the director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, stating “in order to ensure that we have expanded every effort, I direct you to provide me within 30 days a detailed operation plan for locating and bringing to justice Usama Bin Ladin…”

Beginning in September of 2010 the CIA began to work with the president on a set of assessments that led him to believe that in fact it was possible that bin Laden may be located at that compound. The president was was told it contained “a key al Qaeda facilitator appeared to be harboring a high-value target.”

The president directed action to be taken “as soon as he concluded that the intelligence case was sufficient.”

By mid February, though a series of “intensive” meetings at the White House and with the president, administration officials determined there was a “sound intelligence basis” for pursuing this “in an aggressive way” developing course of action in pursuit of bin Laden at this location. By the middle of March the president began a series of national security meetings that he chaired to pursue again the intelligence that had been developed and a course of action.

The president chaired no fewer than five national security council meetings on this topic – on March 14th, March 29th, April 12th, April 19th and April 28th.

“When a case had been made that this was a critical target we began to prepare this mission in conjunction with the US military,” a senior administration official said.

At 8:20am on Friday, April 29th in the Diplomatic Room, President Obama met with National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, White House chief of staff William Daley, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan and deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough and gave the order for the operation.

Officials said only a very small group of people knew about the operation beforehand. “That was for one reason and one reason alone, we believed that it was essential to the security of the operation and our personal,” an official said. “Only a very small group of people inside our own government knew about this operation in advanced.” Shortly after the raid, U.S. officials contacted senior Pakistani officials to brief them on the results of the raid. They also contacted a number of close partners and allies in the world.

Officials say the administration is ensuring bin Laden’s body is being “handled in accordance with Islamic practice and tradition.”

“In the wake of this operation there may be a heighted threat to the homeland and to U.S. systems and facilities abroad,” an official cautioned. “Al Qaeda operatives and sympathizers may try to respond violently to avenge Bin Laden’s death and other terrorist leaders may try to accelerate their efforts to strike the United States. But the United States is taking every possible precaution to protect Americans here at home and overseas.”

Asked if U.S. officials are hearing of specific threats against specific targets, the officials said, “no.”

The State Dept. has sent guidance to embassies worldwide and a travel advisory has been issued for Pakistan.

Of course, ninety-percent of the kudos and props go to the CIA and SEAL and other military and intelligence infrastructure that moved the long-shot inferential evidence into the sphere of actionable intelligence. Only satellite photos and humint were used, evidently, to close the net on this terrorist-in-chief and mega-criminal. Orders were given to shoot the Arab dog dead even though the black helicopters began the flight still unsure the compound contained the hog-on-ice Osama himself.

Savannah Guthrie says the Situation Room was following the entire raid real-time with pictures on Morning Joe, to which House Dumb Blonde Mika said "Oh pictures, i wonder if they'll release them later...!" No one on the panel was smart enough or had the nerve to point out that such pictures shown on the international media would perhaps reveal aspects of American technological prowess that could be somehow developed by hostiles who could deduct from the presentation's evidence just how the technology functioned. And build [or steal] their own version to the detriment of US national interests. I doubt if birdbrain Mika knows much about American Interest and her daddy was also on showing how this clears the deck for Israel to come to terms with the Palestinians, just to demonstrate that dementia hits every libtard sooner or later.

Another creep on Morning Joe started blathering about how wonderful Obama was for having pulled this off and how it gave him "gravitas." Scarborough didn't contradict the straphander, but did point out the operation was four-plus years in the making and almost completely the success of the CIA & Navy Seals. Obama deserves credit for greenlighting an all-out effort to kill the monster, just when the Arab dog probably thought he was invulnerable.

Finally, Michael Scheuer throws the cold water of reality in our face with a reminder that Osama was in our crosshairs in '98 when BillyJeff Blowjob lost his nerve and vetoed a hit-squad on the ground from killing this monster. This followed BillyJeff's decision not to take OBL into custody after Sudan wanted him extradicted to Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis demurred. Another stain on the Blowjob King's splotchy copybook, full of blots the lamestreamers have forgiven him for. Responding to a query on Fox News, Michael said pointedly that yes, he was happy to see Osama dead, but that eight or nine of his friends would be alive today had BillyJeff okayed the hit. [Honorable mention for treasonable malfeasance must go to Jamie Gorelick, who famously erected a "firewall" between the CIA & FBI in chasing the terrorists responsible for the '93 WTC attack by KSM's nephew. This only exacerbated a turf war that was bad enough, but the crypto-Commie Gorelick ramped this rivalry up tenfold.