Tag Archive for: Osama bin Laden

Columbia University’s President on 9/11 Attacks : ‘Terrorism is a Form of Protesting’

Who hired her? Why hasn’t she been fired?

The leftist/Islamic cabal, a.k.a. Red/Green Alliance, has hijacked every major institution, government agency, and legacy media outlet in the cause of America’s ruin and destruction.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Columbia University’s current president, Minouche Shafik, sparked controversy by referring to terrorism as ‘a form of protesting’ during an event just two months later.

This statement has ignited a heated debate on social media, with various users questioning the implications of such a characterization and expressing a range of opinions from outrage to support. The discussion has touched on broader themes of terrorism, its victims, and the perception of protest in the context of violent acts.

WATCH: Columbia’s president Minouche Shafik call the 9/11 attacks a ‘form of protest’ just two months after thousands of Americans were killed.

AUTHOR

RELATED ARTICLE: France: Young Jewish Girl Kidnapped, Raped Migrant Messaged Her Mother That He Was Going to Prostitute Her “For Palestine”

RELATED VIDEO: Qatari official explains the intention to murder the world’s Jewish population

POST ON X:

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Either Get Rid of TikTok or Just Surrender to China

“TikTok is undoing all of that. It’s crazy to watch in real time.”

In its latest social experiment, Communist China decided to test an algorithm to see if it could get social media influencers and idiot kids under its control on TikTok to come out for Osama bin Laden.

Worked pretty well.

Now that the test is over, TikTok announced that the Osama trend has been shut down. But it was successful.

TikTok’s hot new social-media influencer is . . . Osama bin Laden. Yes, the terrorist who plotted 9/11 went viral this week, and not in a good way. Users have been posting videos to the Chinese-owned app, urging their followers to read bin Laden’s 2002 “letter to America,” while suggesting he was on to something. “I will never look at this country the same,” one user said.

Giving Hollywood and public school teachers control of our kids was a bad idea. Giving Chinese Communist algorithms control over our kids is a much worse idea.

A TikTok influencer went viral this week for promoting Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America.”

Online personality and pro-Palestinian activist Lynette Adkins urged her over 175,000 TikTok followers on Tuesday to read the words of the terrorist mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks.

“I need everyone to stop what they’re doing right now and go read- It’s literally two pages. Go read ‘A Letter to America,” Adkins said the video. “And please come back here and just let me know what you think because I feel like I’m going through, like, an existential crisis right now and a lot of people are, so I just need someone else to be feeling this.”

Another TikTok user raeyreads posted the entire letter on her page which received over 640,000 views despite having only 1,300 followers.

“We’ve been lied to our entire lives,” raeyreads wrote Monday. “I remember watching people cheer when Osama was found and killed. I was a child, and it confused me. It still confuses me today. The world deserves better than what this country has done to them. Change must be made.”

Change must be made. It begins with prying Communist China off our phones and away from our kids.

A forced sale or a ban on TikTok is elementary national security. Trump went ahead with it. And yet once there were efforts at passing legislation, TikTok executives managed to buy up AOC, and leftist and some fake right-wing influencers who started screaming that unless we give China access to our phones and kids, we’ll lose our rights.

Commenters who had never commented before here showed up screaming in defense of TikTok.

And you know the rest of the story. TikTok survived. I’m not sure America will.

Giving our leading geopolitical foe direct access to much of our population and the opportunity to program our kids in real time is a hell of a move.

“TikTok is going to save this generation,” Adkins said. “The amount of things that we’ve learned on this app in this past month alone that other people in other generations I tried to talk to them about it, they don’t understand. They don’t get it because they’ve been literally so programmed to think a certain way TikTok is undoing all of that. It’s crazy to watch in real time.”

What’s crazy is that we’re letting them do this.

If we can’t ban TikTok, then why bother fighting? Forget standing up for Taiwan, the South China Sea or Hawaii. We can’t even manage to stand up for our kids and our country. And the moment we do, some paid influencers will take a few hundred bucks to take a break from pushing Osama bin Laden to warn that Chinese Communist spyware must be protected from government interference.

AUTHOR

POST ON X:

RELATED ARTICLES:

ERICK ERICKSON: We Would All Be Better Off If This Widely Popular Social Media Platform Disappeared

FBI top dog Wray: War ‘has raised the threat of an attack against Americans in the US to a whole other level’

Diversity in Ireland: ‘We will do to you what happened on October 7th again and again. Allahu akbar.’

Mostly Peaceful ‘Ceasefire’ Protester Arrested for Punching Female Officer in the Face

Jordan: Major coffee chain sells ‘Holocaust coffee’ featuring burned Star of David marshmallows

UK and Germany, Unlike Canada and France, Are Standing Firm in Support of Israel

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Biden is Paying Osama bin Laden’s Old Airline to Fly Out Afghans

The Taliban are getting rich from the immigration business. And we’re paying for it.

Ariana Afghan Airlines used to fly Al Qaeda terrorists from Afghanistan to the Middle East. As a sideline, it also flew guns and drugs on behalf of the Islamic terrorist organization. While Ariana was controlled by Osama bin Laden, it was allegedly coordinated by Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer whom Biden has offered to trade for pothead WNBA player Brittney Griner.

But these days Ariana has a new mission and we’re the ones paying for it.

The Biden administration is buying bulk tickets on the Taliban airline, according to a congressional report, and paying “approximately $300,000 per flight to a Taliban controlled airline in order to allow U.S. citizens and Afghan allies to continue evacuating.”

Taliban Air flies Afghans to Qatar, a close ally and state sponsor of Islamic terrorists, and then they go on to America. With tens of thousands to over a hundred thousand Afghans in the pipeline, the Taliban could see over $100 million in payments from Biden for its airline.

Ariana Afghan Airlines, notorious for its terrorist connections and its poor safety record (the Europeans banned it some years back and it’s ranked as one of the most dangerous airlines in the world although face masks and probably burkas are compulsory), is once again under the control of the Taliban. And it’s a crucial part of the Taliban business model.

The Taliban sabotaged Biden’s retreat, keeping Americans and Afghans with visas trapped behind enemy lines to profit from their evacuation. And they’ve been doing just that. While the media has been shy about covering what’s going on, the Taliban have been quite open.

Taliban officials have boasted of handing out over 700,000 passports to collect $50 million.

“We are issuing up to 4,000 passports daily and we aim to increase the number to 10,000,” Shirshah Quraishi, deputy director of Afghanistan’s passport department, bragged.

It’s a myth that the Taliban are not allowing Afghans to leave. They’re happy to facilitate the trip for the right price. They’re also willing to let Americans and other foreigners visit since “the Taliban leadership also made more than $1 million in visa fees paid by more than 4,100 foreign nationals who have visited Afghanistan over the past year.” Many if not most of those visitors are involved in humanitarian aid organizations which the United States is also financing.

The Taliban profit from the Biden administration buying bulk tickets on its terrorist airline, they profit from issuing the visas to Afghans leaving the country and they profit from them once they come to America. A Los Angeles Times profile of a family of Afghan refugees describes them getting welfare payments and then sending money back home to Afghanistan.

Such remittances are a commonplace reality among immigrants and a major incentive for mass migration. A number of Latin American economies depend on remittances leading them to encourage mass migration to America. The Taliban have done the same thing in Afghanistan.

In 2020, total Afghan international remittances were estimated at $780 million making up 4% of the failed state’s GDP. Between the mass migration and the collapse of Afghanistan’s economy, the numbers fell, but will likely rebound to become much higher in the coming years.

Much of this money is sent through the Islamic ‘Hawala’ system often used by terrorists.

The Biden administration deliberately insulated remittances from sanctions on the Taliban and Al Qaeda’s Haqqani network going so far as “authorizing transactions involving the U.S.-blacklisted Taliban or Haqqani Network that are incident and necessary to the transfer of noncommercial, personal remittances to Afghanistan.”

Biden had created a massive loophole for funding Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Afghans in America are collecting welfare and sending cash back home. Some of it may be going to their family members while other payments may end up in the hands of the terrorists. Either way, the Taliban and Al Qaeda will take their cut.

And the flow of remittances will make the Taliban Air flights and the visa payoffs seem minute.

Taliban financial institutions break up remittances into installments, thereby potentially profiting from interest rates (despite the formal Islamic stricture against it), charge fees and peg payments to their artificial exchange rate against the dollar which has little connection to reality.

The Taliban profit in three separate ways from just the payments alone, and will profit in many more ways as the money is injected into an economy that they control. That’s why they want to hand out 10,000 visas a day if they can. The more Afghans come to America, the more money the terrorists make when they send payments back home. It’s also why so many of the Afghan migrants are young military-age men. They were never refugees, but guest workers meant to move to America, get jobs, collect aid and send the money back to the Taliban terror state.

The flow of military-age men also helps disguise a terrorist infrastructure allowing Taliban, ISIS and Al Qaeda to inflitrate America, build criminal and terror cells to provide more cash and plot attacks among the huge number of undocumented migrants flown out by Biden in the last days.

The Afghanistan refugee crisis is actually a deliberate effort by the Taliban to create a sustainable funding model for their failed terrorist state through humanitarian aid, passports, flights and remittances. And Americans are footing the bill at every stage of the scam.

Under Osama bin Laden, Ariana Afghan Airlines was a system for transporting terrorists. Under the Taliban, it will play that role once again. Even the Clinton administration had sanctioned Ariana, while Biden is funding Ariana flights, allowing the terror airline to maintain its legitimacy and finance its operations. On September 11, Al Qaeda infiltrated our nation and flew airplanes into our buildings. Now, the terrorists are inflitrating their cash cows and terrorists into America.

And we’re paying their airline for the tickets.

AUTHOR

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Video: This Week in Jihad with David Wood and Robert Spencer

France: Muslim migrant threatens cops, ‘I will find you, you questioned a Muslim, you will go to hell’

France: Muslim confesses to killing man because he was Jewish, authorities discount confession and search for motive

Canada’s spy agency CSIS accused of ‘smuggling’ UK teens including Shamima Begum to the Islamic State

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

Bin Laden’s niece: ‘It’s very worrying that the left has aligned itself with people who share’ jihad ideology

The main story here is interesting enough, but there is something else going on here that is just as interesting. The New York Post says: “‘You look at all the terrorist attacks that have happened in Europe over the past 19 years. They have completely shaken us to the core … [Radical Islam] has completely infiltrated our society,’ bin Ladin continued. ‘In the US it’s very worrying that the left has aligned itself completely with the people who share that ideology.’”

What did Noor bin Ladin really say in the place where the New York Post has “Radical Islam” in brackets? It may be possible, since there is an ellipsis right before this, that Noor bin Ladin identified what she was talking about in a part that the Post didn’t quote and just said “It has completely infiltrated our society.” However, if she had said the words “Radical Islam,” with something else in between, the Jon Levine could easily have quoted her as saying “Radical Islam…has completely infiltrated our society.” So what did she say? “Jihad”? “Islam”? With Sohrab Ahmari and John Podhoretz on their staff, it’s highly likely that the New York Post is engaged in a cowardly sanitizing of Ms. bin Ladin’s language that they consider “Islamophobic.”

“Osama bin Laden’s niece says only Trump can prevent another 9/11,” by Jon Levine, New York Post, September 5, 2020:

Another 9/11-style attack may be just around the corner if Joe Biden is elected president, warns Noor bin Ladin, the niece of Sept. 11 terror mastermind Osama bin Laden.

“ISIS proliferated under the Obama/Biden administration, leading to them coming to Europe. Trump has shown he protects America and us by extension from foreign threats by obliterating terrorists at the root and before they get a chance to strike,” bin Ladin, 33, told The Post in her first-ever interview.

Bin Ladin (whose branch of the family has always spelled their name differently than her infamous uncle) lives in Switzerland but said she considers herself “an American at heart.” A full size US flag hung in her childhood room at age 12 and her dream vacation is an RV trip across America.

The stunning, Swiss-born bin Ladin says she is all in for Trump in 2020, calling the election the most important in a generation.

“I have been a supporter of President Trump since he announced he was running in the early days in 2015. I have watched from afar and I admire this man’s resolve,” she said. “He must be reelected … It’s vital for the future of not only America, but western civilization as a whole.”

“You look at all the terrorist attacks that have happened in Europe over the past 19 years. They have completely shaken us to the core … [Radical Islam] has completely infiltrated our society,” bin Ladin continued. “In the US it’s very worrying that the left has aligned itself completely with the people who share that ideology.”

While Trump has long been a polarizing figure in the United States, he is even more toxic in Europe, where views of US leadership have often plummeted since he took office. A 2018 Gallup poll found just 18% of Swiss citizens approved of his job performance.

Noor, who said she regularly wears a “Make America Great Again” hat (and occasionally a Trump bedtime onesie), has had to confront many Trump-haters on her side of the Atlantic. During a recent trip to the grocery store while wearing the iconic red cap, Noor was accosted.

“I am minding my own business and this woman in her late 50s charges toward me and starts speaking very loudly and aggressively to me,” she recalled. “She’s yelling at me and saying how can I be wearing this and Trump is the worst president ever and she’s basically dumping on my beloved president … She told me three times, ‘You’re stupid.’ I kept my cool, and needless to say I kept my hat!”…

“You do have a situation now in America where you have people like Ilhan Omar who actively hate your country,” bin Ladin said, noting how Omar had urged “compassionate” sentences for 13 ISIS recruits busted in her home state of Minnesota.

“It’s an honor to be able to go and live in the United States and make the most out of all the opportunities,” bin Ladin said, choking up. “If she hates it so much why doesn’t she leave.”…

RELATED ARTICLES:

The Assassin Who Helped Create the Deep State

UK’s ‘complete humiliation’: 416 more illegal Muslim migrants arrive in one day, 5600 so far this year

September 6, 1955: Turkey’s Kristallnacht

France: Macron defends ‘right to blaspheme,’ vows to crack down on ‘Islamic separatism’

RELATED VIDEO: Robert Spencer and David Wood on the Return of the Muhammad Cartoons: The Charlie Hebdo Massacre Trial

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Islamic State links its origins to the killing of Osama bin Laden and U.S. withdrawal from Iraq

Obama’s most significant legacy is the Islamic State. Its rise is the most important accomplishment of his Administration.

Islamic State Links Its Origins To Killing Of Bin Laden,” Investor’s Business Daily, August 17, 2015 (thanks to Anne Crockett):

Killing Osama bin Laden may have won President Obama re-election in 2012, but the price was the rise of the Islamic State. At least according to IS itself.

The secret 32-page IS manifesto and strategy plan, written in Urdu and just uncovered from remote Pakistan by the American Media Institute, is titled “The Caliphate According to the Prophet.”

Beyond its headline-grabbing reference to Obama as “Mule of the Jews,” the IS dossier blames the president for the organization’s rise to power in a whole new way.

Obviously, Obama’s cut and run of U.S. troops from Iraq left the welcome mat out. But the manifesto boasts that IS ruler Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in avenging the killing of Osama bin Laden, engineered car bomb and IED attacks in cities across Iraq.

“The losses inflicted upon Americans, apostates and heretics were unprecedented,” the IS document stated. “This state of affairs forced Mule of the Jews, U.S. President Obama, to announce an exit plan.”

There is a chilling irony here. When Obama, interviewed by the New Yorker a year and a half ago, dismissed IS as just “a jayvee team,” in the same breath he downplayed their importance because IS lacked “the capacity and reach of a bin Laden.”

The IS strategy document reveals that the new caliphate is already taking steps to unite Pakistani and Afghan Taliban factions, then launch a war on India. And then finally confront America….

RELATED ARTICLES:

Chicago jihad suspect accused of assaulting inmate over Muhammad cartoon

Spanish music festival bans Jewish performer for being pro-Israel

Revealed: Obama carefully orchestrated lie about al-Qaida demise to win re-eelction

Former New York City Mayor Rudi Giuliani started a firestorm with his assessment that President Barack Obama does not love America. The liberal progressive media came down on him and the guilt by association trick was launched. Even a 12-year-old Georgia fella named CJ Pearson came to the defense of America’s mayor – and was smacked down by Facebook. And during a Fox and Friends Sunday interview with Tucker Carlson I was asked the same question. I gave a simple response — you don’t lie to someone you love. And from the lips of this president, sadly, there have been many instances of such.

And here’s yet another example as reported by Fox News via the Wall Street Journal: “On May 2, 2011, a small team of American military and intelligence professionals landed inside the high white walls of a mysterious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The team’s mission, code-named Operation Neptune Spear, had two primary objectives: capture or kill Osama bin Laden and gather as much intelligence as possible about the al-Qaida leader and his network. A bullet to bin Laden’s head accomplished the first; the quick work of the Sensitive Site Exploitation team accomplished the second.”

“It was quite a haul: 10 hard drives, nearly 100 thumb drives and a dozen cellphones. There were DVDs, audio and video tapes, data cards, reams of handwritten materials, newspapers and magazines. At a Pentagon briefing days after the raid, a senior military intelligence official described it as “the single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever. The United States had gotten its hands on al-Qaida’s playbook—its recent history, its current operations, its future plans.”

Now, you’d think that with this “treasure trove” of actionable intelligence data, the United States under the Obama administration would have embarked on a series of strike operations to bring the bin Laden terrorist network to its knees. It would be a time when we could rally behind the young community organizer from Chicago, and maybe he’d find the courage to go on offense against the Islamic jihadist enemy that brought the most horrific attack against the United States. Yes, you would have thought…

What happened is completely the opposite, and is now being fully revealed.

“Nothing was done. The analysis of the materials—the “document exploitation,” in the parlance of intelligence professionals—came to an abrupt stop. According to five senior U.S. intelligence officials, the documents sat largely untouched for months—perhaps as long as a year. In spring 2012, a year after the raid that killed bin Laden and six months before the 2012 presidential election, the Obama administration launched a concerted campaign to persuade the American people that the long war with al-Qaida was ending. In a speech commemorating the anniversary of the raid, John Brennan , Mr. Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser and later his CIA director, predicted the imminent demise of al-Qaida. The next day, on May 1, 2012, Mr. Obama made a bold claim: “The goal that I set—to defeat al-Qaida and deny it a chance to rebuild—is now within our reach.”

And that was as close as we ever got — within reach. The sad reality was that politics was more important to the Obama administration than destroying the enemy. What happened was yet another deception — a great deception indeed.

“The White House provided 17 handpicked documents to the Combatting Terror Center at the West Point military academy, where a team of analysts reached the conclusion the Obama administration wanted. Bin Laden, they found, had been isolated and relatively powerless, a sad and lonely man sitting atop a crumbling terror network. It was a reassuring portrayal. It was also wrong. And those responsible for winning the war—as opposed to an election—couldn’t afford to engage in such dangerous self-delusion.”

The American people were told in 2012 that Osama bin Laden was dead. We were told al-Qaida was on the run and decimated. We were led to believe that Islamic terrorism had been defeated. I think we can all come to a consensus at this point in time that we were lied to — unless the intoxicants in the kool-aid are still active.

ISIS is not a jayvee team. Al-Qaida in Iraq has resurrected itself, is reconstituted, and is now being engaged by an Iraqi Army backed by Iran. Please, do not just take my words to heart, but hear what the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, LTG Michael Flynn has to say: “The leadership down at Central Command wanted to know what were we learning from these documents,” says the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, according to the transcript of an interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier for a coming Fox News Reporting special.”

“We were still facing a growing al Qaeda threat. And it was not just Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iraq. But we saw it growing in Yemen. We clearly saw it growing still in East Africa.” The threat “wasn’t going away,” he adds, “and we wanted to know: What can we learn from these documents?”

Here is the truth. As President Obama was campaigning on the imminent death of al-Qaida, those with access to the bin Laden documents were seeing, in Bin Laden’s own words, that the opposite was true. Says Lt. Gen. Flynn: “By that time, they probably had grown by about—I’d say close to doubling by that time. And we knew that.” Sadly, the American people did not know that.

What was true was this: “Lt. Gen. Flynn says bin Laden was giving direction to “members of the wider al-Qaida leadership team, if you will, that went all the way to places like West Africa where we see a problem today with Boko Haram and [al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb], all the way back into the things that were going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Bin Laden advised them on everything from specific operations in Europe to the types of crops his minions should plant in East Africa.”

Osama bin Laden was killed back in May 2011, going on four years and 1.5 million documents were captured during Operation Neptune Spear. To this day, only two dozen have been revealed to the public. Sure, if there is still actionable intel data, it should be kept classified, but I tend to believe that window of opportunity has long since closed.

“Mr. Harvey, the senior DIA official, believes that the documents should be declassified and released to the public as soon as possible, after taking precautions to avoid compromising sources or methods. Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, inserted language in the 2014 intelligence authorization bill requiring just that.”

The Wall Street Journal writes, “one letter, dated July 2010, the brother of Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s current prime minister, sought to strike a peace deal with the jihadists. The letter also shows that Pakistani intelligence was willing to negotiate with al Qaeda. Al Qaeda’s network in Iran is also described in bin Laden’s letters. The Iranian regime held some senior al-Qaida leaders, eventually releasing them. One letter recounts a plan, devised by Yunis al Mauritani, one of bin Laden’s senior lieutenants, to relocate to Iran. Once there, Mauritani would dispatch terrorists to take part in operations around the world.”

This has been a very revealing week for America. We now know that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used her private email from a private server in her personal home to conduct official diplomatic business for four years.

We now know President Obama has obstructed access to the Bin Laden raid materials by intelligence professionals in order to manipulate the political dialogue and messaging.

Now we are facing a potential non-transparent negotiation with a nuclear Iran.

We have little knowledge about why four Americans were abandoned to die in Benghazi.

We ask ourselves, how and why was ISIS allowed to grow and fester like a malignant cancer right under our nose?

These are troubling times in the Republic — but what is more troubling, who will stand up to this absolute lawless tyranny and deception?

Administration Fails to Recognize the Threat of Global Jihad?

As a Former Army Intelligence officer, we were trained to evaluate the credibility of sources and then delve into the Intel they were providing. We were also trained that if you didn’t identify the threat doctrine of your enemies then you couldn’t formulate a winning strategy, let alone protect your forces. The Obama Administration has been evading the capabilities of military intelligence echelons to assist it  in fashioning a winning strategy in the war against Global Jihad. One would have thought that when the members of Seal Team Six killed  the late Osama Bin Laden and scooped up disk drives and documents that the West Wing would have considered it a treasure trove. The vital raw intelligence would have determined the aims and global strategy of so-called “core Al Qaeda” and its burgeoning affiliates across the Muslim Ummah and the West. (Groups like AQAP, AQIM, al Nusrah, Al Shabaab and Boko Haram.)  Unfortunately, as this Weekly Standard article by Fox News ‘Special Report’ panelist, Stephen F. Hayes illustrates, President Obama  may have evaded  his oath of office as Commander in Chief, Former Defense Intel Chief Blasts Obama.

Former DIA head Gen. Flynn’s cautionary tale.

Gen Michael Flynn

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (ret.) former DIA Head.

Hayes uses a speech by former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) chief, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn to fellow intelligence professionals to illustrate why the Administration cannot be trusted.  Flynn retired after being brushed off by the National Security team in the West Wing and the politicized CIA. He was seeking to deploy his resources at the DIA to evaluate and derive meaningful intelligence on Al Qaeda its aims and strategies from the treasure trove of Obama bin laden computer files captured during the Seal Team Six assault. This would have enabled the Commander in Chief and his national security team to articulate the threat of global radical Islam and fashion a strategy that would protect our forces engaged in a war against Islamic Jihad. Instead the Administration myopically evaded its responsibilities opting to promote the meaningless and opaque threat as “violent extremism.” Instead Flynn and his team of military intelligence analysts were brushed off after having unearthed the goals of “core Al Qaeda” and its network of empowered affiliates

Here are excerpts from the Hayes Weekly Standard article that illustrates these points:

Lt. General Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, [said], “The dangers to the U.S. do not arise from the arrogance of American power, but from unpreparedness or an excessive unwillingness to fight when fighting is necessary.” The Obama Administration doesn’t understand the threat, Flynn said, noting that the Administration refuses to use “Islamic militants” to describe the enemy.

“You cannot defeat an enemy you do not admit exists,” he said.

The administration, he continued, wants “us to think that our challenge is dealing with an undefined set of violent extremists or merely lone-wolf actors with no ideology or network. But that’s just not the straight truth.”

[…]

The failure to exploit the captured Bin Laden file.

The CIA was responsible for the first scrub of the collection of more than 1 million documents and retained “executive authority” over the cache when it was completed. But the CIA stopped analyzing or “exploiting” the documents after that first quick and incomplete assessment and the Agency made no attempt to systematically examine and codify all of the intelligence included in the intelligence haul.

Flynn assembled a team at the DIA to do exactly that, but the CIA initially refused to share the documents. After a lengthy bureaucratic battle, DIA analysts were given limited access to the bin Laden documents and undertook an exhaustive exploitation. The documents provided the U.S. government with its best look at al Qaeda and its operations and challenges—from the inside. There were letters between Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders, plans for future attacks, details about fundraising successes and failures, descriptions of relationships between al Qaeda and governments in the region. The documents remain unexploited to this day.

Derek Harvey, a senior DIA official and former director of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Center of Excellence at CENTCOM, led the DIA team that exploited the documents. He recently told TWS that the U.S. government hasn’t “done anything close to a full exploitation.”

And what was Flynn’s overall assessment?

In classified analyses based heavily on the documents, the DIA directly challenged the Obama administration’s claims that the threat from al Qaeda was diminished or fading. Flynn hinted at this in an interview he gave to James Kitfield of Breaking Defense shortly after he left government. “When asked if the terrorists were on the run, we couldn’t respond with any answer but ‘no.’ When asked if the terrorists were defeated, we had to say ‘no.’ Anyone who answers ‘yes’ to either of those questions either doesn’t know what they are talking about, they are misinformed, or they are flat-out lying,” Flynn said.

Enter former CENTCOM Commander Marine General Zinni on the lack of a Strategy.

Gen Anthony Zinni

Gen. Anthony Zinni, former CENTCOMM commander. Source: Pensacola News Journal.

Recently, we heard former CENTCOMM Commander, Four Star Marine Gen. (ret.) Anthony Zinni talk about the lack of a meaningful Obama Strategy in the war against the Islamic state.  See; Pensacola News Journal article, “General discusses ‘Situation in the Middle East.

Among those gathered to hear him were former colleagues at CENTCOMM. He was introduced by Marine Lt. Gen. Duane Thiesen, president and CEO of the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. Zinni shared his insights gained from long experience serving in the Middle East and his engagement in strategic defense studies about terrorism and stability or the lack thereof in the Arab World. He opened up his speech with an anecdote about a conversation with two Arab leaders in the UAE on the day when the US-led coalition invaded Iraq in 2003. His two interlocutors said this was a disaster, because” it would unleash the Persian threat and ignite a religious war between Sunni and Shia.” Zinni had disagreed with the Bush strategy that without overwhelming force to seal the borders of  Iraq, that sectarian fissures and conflicts would arise and that victory would not be achieved. In his remarks referring to the current situation he said, “Obviously, it’s the rise of the extremists – their ability to recruit now and reach out globally having bases from which they can operate.” He was dismissive of regional and bi-lateral initiatives saying that “the nation’s leaders need to take a strategic look at the world. “This globalization is connected by a network” A network according to Zinni including space, cyberspace, sea, air, land communications and trade resulting in global impact.

Before his talk I chatted with him briefly and gave him my question for the Q+A:

We are now several months into Operation Inherent Resolve – a US led coalition “to degrade and destroy”, the Islamic State, formerly ISIS. What is your current assessment of the conduct of this Operation and what in your view could be done to achieve the ultimate objective?

He smiled and said,  “The short answer is we should not be afraid to put boots on the ground.”

When the question was posed to him by the Tiger Bay moderator, Zinni differentiated between, a strategy for Iraq versus one for Syria. He suggested that perhaps two US brigades, coupled with Kurdish Peshmerga and both Iraqi Special Forces and Sunni militias with meaningful air support would enable the recovery of Mosul and Anbar province. He cautioned that the US now finds itself in the odd situation where Iran’s Quds Force is on the same side in Iraq. He noted this is part of a strategy by the Islamic Regime in Tehran to surround the Arabian Peninsula.That is illustrated by the US failure in Yemen, with the Houthi Shia rebels toppling the central government, the Shia majority in Bahrain, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Assad clinging to control in Syria. A Shia crescent cutting across the Gulf stretching as far as the Mediterranean coast. It is a hegemonic strategy that includes state sponsored terrorism and achievement of nuclear breakout, further destabilizing the region and threatening the Saudi Kingdom. As regards the Houthi uprising in Yemen, despite the death of King Abdullah and succession of King Salman, Zinni contended that the Saudis might move troops into Yemen. He suggested that US drone campaign against Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula  would not aid in saving the failed state. He was dismissive of direct involvement in Syria as there are too many disparate sectarian forces both within the Sunni majority and among the minority Alawites, Christians, Druze and Kurds. As illustrated by the US coalition strategy in the four months struggle that succeeded in freeing  the embattled city of Kobani on the Turkish border, the Kurdish YPG and Peshmerga Forces were the”boots on the ground.” His assessment  is reflected in a recent Wall Street Journal article depicting the failure of CIA training of opposition Sunni militias in Syria. He believes that the map of the modern Middle East, created in the wake of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and by the WWI Sykes Picot Agreement, may not survive.

Both Gens. Flynn and Zinni decry the failure of strategic thinking by the Administration frozen in the headlights of an oncoming Global Jihad that it refuses to acknowledge as a threat to the West.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

Obama Did Not Order Bin Laden Raid

Major General Paul Valley, U.S. Army (Ret.)

According to Family Security Matters (FSM), “Stand Up America research team has learned from a senior and sensitive intelligence community source and official that President Obama did not know of the raid in Abbottabad to kill Osama Bin Laden on May 1st, 2011 until after the helicopters with SEAL TEAM 6 had crossed into Pakistani airspace.

FSM notes, “The US’s most sophisticated deception techniques were used to make this very dangerous penetration into Pakistan without Pakistan knowledge. The President was notified at the golf course and called off the golf course which is why he was sitting in the strange sitting position in the picture that documented the White House operation room event.”

“Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Leon Panetta was the key player who organized and supported this daring raid. He signed the “Execute Orders” with only a few people aware: Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, Secretary of Defense William Gates, Admiral Bill Mullen and General David Petraeus,” reports FSM.

The FSM source states, “The White House was closed out of the decision because the President through Valarie Jarrett had turned down two or three other earlier proposals. The Deputy of Central Intelligence (DCI) and his covert planning team were extremely frustrated at all the denials, so saw the opportunity slipping away as implausible as it seems.” This scenario has been previously reported by others here, here and here.

The specter of bin Laden hangs over the White House even today as Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, a 21 year old Muslim with ties to Al Qaeda, tried to blow up the New York Federal Reserve building in the name of Islam.

Is the White House narrative unraveling given the revelations in the book No Easy Day by former Navy SEAL Mark Owen and now this story?

Read the full Family Security Matters story by going here.

Tom Trento interviews MG Valley on WNN AM 1490 and discusses the story on the President not knowing about the raid until after the SEAL helicopters were already in Pakistan (at 11:40 minutes) and the Benghazi embassy attack (at 38:40 minutes) and the Muslim Brotherhood in Turkey (at 50:00 minutes):

Major General Paul Valley, U.S. Army (Ret.) and Tom Trento analyse this new information about exactly when President Obama was informed about the raid to the bin Laden compound. President Obama according to White House documents, a highly placed confidential source and Mark Owen’s book was not notified until the SEAL helicopters were already in Pakistani airspace, the point of no return.

This new revelation may have a major impact on the narrative of a strong President making a “gutsy decision”.

The third and final Presidential debate is on Monday, October 22nd. The debate topic is foreign policy. Will this come up?

Watchdog Wire will be live streaming pre and post debate commentary from “boots on the ground” implementers of our foreign policy globally.

Click here to watch starting at 7:00 p.m. EST on Monday, October 22, 2012.