We received this account via email – from a reliable source.  However, we have no way to actually authenticate the first hand account and out of an abundance of caution we will not publish the author.   Presented as received:

My wife and I are on Oahu for our annual Hawaii trip with good friends and two granddaughters enjoying the hospitality of the Hawaiian people on this lovely Island. Being retired military allows us the privilege of using the military facilities and especially the highly desirable golf  courses.

Yesterday , Jan 4, we had a tee time of 12:04 to play golf at Kaneohe Marine Corps on Oahu. We arrived early because we were advised the President was possibly going to play but also that he was leaving to fly back to D.C. that same day.

We checked in and were second off and waiting for carts when we were advised that he really may be coming but there was no count of when or how many in the party. We then got body scanned, our golf bags searched and briefed on the proper behavior expected. He and his party finally arrived at 1:00 and he then hit balls on the range and then drove right in front of us on his way to the first tee hollering Happy New Year to the small group( 50 or so) golfers waiting to play. (more…)

You Can Read It HERE !

Really Mr. Gates?    Really?    You were surprised and disturbed by this?

…. Out from the shadows.

(Via Stars and Stripes) The U.S. military secretly deployed a small number of trainers and advisers to Somalia in October, the first time regular troops have been stationed in the war-ravaged country since1993, when two helicopters were shot down and 18 Americans killed in the “Black Hawk Down” disaster.

A cell of U.S. military personnel has been in the Somali capital of Mogadishu to advise and coordinate operations with African troops fighting to wrest control of the country from the al-Shabab militia, an Islamist group whose leaders have professed loyalty to al-Qaida, according to three U.S. military officials. (more…)

In the excerpt below you see exactly why political progs, like Jake Tapper, don’t understand the military and disrespect the soldier.

Tappers’ inherent issue is with the command decision – the politics and subsequent political arguments of war. But in typical prog fashion, reflecting a profound disrespect for the military members who carry out orders, he questions the tip of the spear for the decision of the spear thrower.

(more…)

[…]  “The temptation to stand up, slam the briefing book shut and quit on the spot  recurred often,” Gates writes. “All too frequently, the exit lines were on the  tip of my tongue: ‘I may be the secretary of defense, but I am also an American  citizen, and there is no son of a bitch in the world who can talk to me like  that. I quit. Find somebody else.’

It was, I am confident, a fantasy widely  shared throughout the executive branch. And it was always enjoyable to listen to  three former senators — Obama, Biden and Clinton — trash-talking Congress.” (more…)

We’ve come a long way from Obama’s “open hand” Cairo speech in 2009.

(CNN) – From around Aleppo in western Syria to small areas of Falluja in central Iraq, al Qaeda now controls territory that stretches more than 400 miles across the heart of the Middle East, according to English and Arab language news accounts as well as accounts on jihadist websites.

Indeed, al Qaeda appears to control more territory in the Arab world than it has done at any time in its history.

The focus of al Qaeda’s leaders has always been regime change in the Arab world in order to install Taliban-style regimes. Al Qaeda’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri acknowledged as much in his 2001 autobiography, “Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet,” when he explained that the most important strategic goal of al Qaeda was to seize control of a state, or part of a state, somewhere in the Muslim world, explaining that, “without achieving this goal our actions will mean nothing.” (more…)

As we have continued to outline “The Real Libyan Story” serendipity has risen and provided affirmation for over three years’ worth of research and presentations. 

In his soon to be released book “Duty” Robert Gates specifically outlines the influence of Samantha Power in establishing U.S. policy.   A policy of complete failure which has given rise to al-Qaeda’s growth.

Perhaps against the backdrop of a USA Today article published yesterday showing the rise of al-Qaeda, the sheer weight of empherical evidence is going to overwhelm the false claims of Team Obama/Clinton.

(Washington Post)  [S]imilarly, in a battle over defense spending, “I was extremely angry with President Obama,” Gates writes. “I felt he had breached faith with me . . . on the budget numbers.” As with “don’t ask, don’t tell,” “I felt that agreements with the Obama White House were good for only as long as they were politically convenient.”

Gates acknowledges forthrightly in “Duty” that he did not reveal his dismay. “I never confronted Obama directly over what I (as well as [Hillary] Clinton, [then-CIA Director Leon] Panetta, and others) saw as the president’s determination that the White House tightly control every aspect of national security policy and even operations. His White House was by far the most centralized and controlling in national security of any I had seen since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ruled the roost.” (more…)

(NBC News) U.S. Navy officials have issued an apology for their response to a News4 reporter’s request for materials related to the September 2013 Navy Yard shooting rampage.

In an email to News4’s I-Team reporter Scott MacFarlane, Navy administrator Steve Muck asked MacFarlane to “accept [his] apologies” for an internal memo sent to MacFarlane by a Navy Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) officer.

[scribd id=197203890 key=key-250g966izjx29de2ebfm mode=scroll]

In the memo, a Navy FOIA officer details a strategy to reject and stymie MacFarlane’s request for emails, photos and memorandums related to the Navy Yard shooting, in which 12 people died.

Another Navy official acknowledges the memo was sent to MacFarlane by mistake. (more…)

(Via Washington Post)   Gates offers a catalogue of various meetings, based in part on notes that he and his aides made at the time, including an exchange between Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that he calls “remarkable.”

He writes: “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . . The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”  (continue reading)