…a senior Army official told me court-martialing Bergdahl would “make the president look bad.” In spite of damning evidence against him, the official expects Pentagon brass to separate him from the military with a less-than-honorable discharge, sparing Obama total embarrassment….
(New York Post) Three and a half months have come and gone and the Pentagon has offered no clarity on what happened to alleged Army deserter and Taliban collaborator Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. Fellow soldiers and other critics fear the military’s now-delayed investigation is shaping up to be a whitewash.
The case has become a political powder keg for President Obama.
Since he traded five imprisoned Taliban leaders for Bergdahl, the US Government Accountability Office has declared the swap illegal, and nearly two dozen House Democrats have joined Republicans in officially condemning the move for making “Americans less safe.” (more…)
(Reuters) – Eight bodies, including those of three journalists, were found after an attack on a team trying to educate locals on the risks of the Ebola virus in a remote area of southeastern Guinea, a government spokesman said on Thursday.
“The eight bodies were found in the village latrine. Three of them had their throats slit,” Damantang Albert Camara told Reuters by telephone in Conakry.
However, Guinea’s Prime Minister Mohamed Saïd Fofana, speaking in a television message that had been recorded earlier, said 7 bodies of 9 missing people had been found. (more…)
We had a strong suspicion Denis McDonough and Valerie Jarrett selected General John Allen (retired) for the ISIS campaign, because the White House knew Allen could be leveraged and easily controlled. The embarrassing files on Allen (retained for such a purpose) allow the administration to strong-arm compliance.
President Obama appears to have a singular goal in Syria, remove Bashir Assad.
(Wall Street Journal) The president hasn’t yet given the green light for an attack on Islamic State militants in Syria, but the U.S. military campaign against the group there is being designed to allow President Barack Obama to exert a high degree of personal control–going so far as to require that the military obtain presidential signoff for strikes.
The requirements for the strikes will be far more stringent than those targeting Islamic State in Iraq, at least at first. U.S. officials say it is an attempt to limit the threat the U.S. could be dragged more deeply into the Syrian civil war. (more…)
Just in case anyone was fuzzy on the alliances here, or the motivations of Turkey. Qatar, under pressure from the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Gulf Council to stop the terror support, exiled the first group of Muslim Brotherhood extremists. Erdogan, Obama’s NATO BFF, lays down the red carpet welcome….
TURKEY– Turkey would welcome senior figures from Egypt’s outlawed Muslim Brotherhood after they were asked to leave Qatar under pressure from other Gulf Arab states, Turkish media quoted President Tayyip Erdogan as saying late on Monday.
A senior Brotherhood official based in London said on Saturday that Qatar had asked seven senior figures from the movement to leave the country after its neighbors pressed it to stop backing the Islamists.
Senior Brotherhood figures would be welcome to come to Turkey if they wished to do so, Turkish television stations quoted Erdogan as telling reporters on his plane back from an official visit to Qatar on Monday.
Qatar and Turkey were the only regional countries to back the Brotherhood after Egypt’s army toppled Islamist President Mohammad Mursi last year following mass protests against him. (more…)
See, dear leader does have a plan for boots on the ground…. Washington (AFP) – US President Barack Obama will on Tuesday seek to “turn the tide” in the Ebola epidemic by ordering 3,000 US military personnel to West Africa and launching a major health care training and hygiene program.
The White House said Obama will travel to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta to meet US health chiefs and make the announcement, meant to spur a global effort to fight an outbreak that has already killed 2,400 people.
The announcement comes amid increasing alarm about the worst-ever outbreak of the disease which has spread through Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Most of the new US effort will be concentrated in impoverished Liberia — the most badly affected nation. (more…)
While the Obama administration fawn praise upon Qatar, quite the opposite is happening from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and UAE who are turning up the heat on the Qatari willful blindness to extremist Islamists. Egypt’s Fattah El-Sisi is like a wolverine on the hunt of the Muslim Brotherhood. In a surprisingly honest article from the Associated Press, they outline not only the current round of Brotherhood members leaving, but also the Al Jazeera reporters and another possible 120 extremists being expelled. In the irony of the article note the direction of flight for the extremists: Malaysia, Turkey and, wait for it, Great Britain. CAIRO (AP) — Egypt will hunt down exiled Muslim Brotherhood leaders and seek their arrest, a top official said Sunday, after Qatar ordered them to leave its territory despite initially hosting group members following the ouster of Egypt’s Islamist President Mohammed Morsi last year.
The tiny Gulf nation’s expulsion of the Brotherhood, branded a terrorist organization by Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, signals it is moving to mend a diplomatic rift triggered by its support of the group. Analysts described the move as a political victory for Egypt’s current leadership.
Minister of Interior Mohammed Ibrahim said that Qatari authorities gave Brotherhood leaders one month to leave the country, and reporters for the Doha-based Al-Jazeera Egypt channel two months to leave. It was not immediately possible to confirm the ultimatum with Qatari officials, who rarely comment on the issue. (more…)
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge ruled Monday that a Florida woman can pursue her lawsuit alleging the government invaded her privacy in the scandal over former CIA director David Petraeus.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said Jill Kelley of Tampa can move ahead with claims that the FBI and Defense Department violated her privacy when officials leaked information about her to the news media.
The ruling does not deal with the merits of the case, but as the lawsuit proceeds, it could reveal more about the role various government agencies played as the scandal unfolded two years ago.
In 2012, Kelley complained to the FBI when an unknown person sent her harassing emails. Her complaint triggered a criminal investigation that led agents to Paula Broadwell, who was Petraeus’ biographer and had been having an affair with him. (more…)
What are the odds this mysterious weekend described is the long Thanksgiving weekend of 2012? If Raymond Maxwell is describing “Sunday” of that specific Thanksgiving weekend then a whole lot of other dots connect….
(Via Sharyl Attkisson) As the House Select Committee on Benghazi prepares for its first hearing this week, a former State Department diplomat is coming forward with a startling allegation: Hillary Clinton confidants were part of an operation to “separate” damaging documents before they were turned over to the Accountability Review Board investigating security lapses surrounding the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.
According to former Deputy Assistant Secretary Raymond Maxwell, the after-hours session took place over a weekend in a basement operations-type center at State Department headquarters in Washington, D.C. This is the first time Maxwell has publicly come forward with the story.
At the time, Maxwell was a leader in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, which was charged with collecting emails and documents relevant to the Benghazi probe.
“I was not invited to that after-hours endeavor, but I heard about it and decided to check it out on a Sunday afternoon,” Maxwell says.
He didn’t know it then, but Maxwell would ultimately become one of four State Department officials singled out for discipline—he says scapegoated—then later cleared for devastating security lapses leading up to the attacks. Four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were murdered during the Benghazi attacks. (more…)
There’s definitely something new afoot with how the western liberal media are selling the Kerry goes to Egypt narrative.
It’s an odd dynamic to think about President Peace Prize Obama needing to put together a coalition of support for his poll tested non-war war on terror; to fight the Non-Islamic Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (NI-ISIS) terror group.
However, the bizarro world is the 2014 new normal.
We are witnessing what happens when the U.S. Sunni President, and 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner, needs to put a non-combat fighting team together to give the appearance of military attacks for optical publication in globally liberal Western newspapers.
The #hashtag campaign didn’t work.
Turkey has already said they will not support fighting against NI-ISIS because, well, essentially they have been supporting NI-ISIS for the past two years with weapons, intelligence and logistical support. So why would they start attacking a group they helped create and are continuing to fund?
Following his visit to Turkey, where he must have reduced the request to: ‘just don’t go on record against us and we’ll keep up appearances for you‘, John Kerry enters Egypt.
Now, keep in mind Egypt already has it’s hands quite full.
In the Northern Egyptian peninsular Egypt’s president, Fatah el-Sisi, has been fighting ISIS (Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis) for well over a year. Unlike Obama who calls ISIS “non islamic“, el-Sisi has been willing to call Islamic Extremists, well, Islamic; and not only call them Islamic he’s been fighting them on four fronts. (more…)
