This should not come as a surprise.   Think about it.   If one of our air assets was shot down by a U.S. stinger missile – the administration would be in a real conundrum.

WASHINGTON (WSJ) —President Barack Obama decided against immediate air strikes on marauding Sunni extremists in Iraq, opting instead to pursue strategies such as providing intelligence to the Iraqi military, addressing the country’s political divisions and seeking support from regional allies.
Mr. Obama will convene a White House meeting Wednesday with Republican and Democratic leaders from the House and Senate to brief them on what officials call this new comprehensive approach. (more…)

There is a MASSIVE amount of speculation about the actual capability of ISIS to engage effectively in combat operations.

It is prudent to pause for a moment.

While we certainly don’t know the composition of the forces that might now be aligned with ISIS, it’s a bit of a stretch to say they would be capable of effectively using advanced technological military weaponry; the key word is “effectively”.

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It’s always the “also attending’s” that tell the story:

Click to SuperSize  😉

President Barack Obama convenes an Oval Office meeting with his national security team to discuss the situation in Iraq, June 13, 2014.

Seated with the President from left: Lisa Monaco, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Robert Cardillo, Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Intelligence Integration; Vice President Joe Biden; National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice, and Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns.

Also attending the meeting were Chief of Staff Denis McDonough; Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; Tony Blinken, Deputy National Security Advisor; and Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

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This video from yesterday shows the Iraqi Army being marched by ISIS out of Tikrit.

What fate awaits these Iraqi Troops?

-warning graphic imagery below-

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Mass beheadings reported in northern Iraq as al-Qaeda forces take Mosul and Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s home town – LIVE LINK UPDATES HERE

Tikrit, Iraq (AFP) – Militants took control of the Iraqi city of Tikrit and freed hundreds of prisoners on Wednesday, police said, the second provincial capital to fall in two days.

“All of Tikrit is in the hands of the militants,” a police colonel said of the Salaheddin provincial capital, which lies roughly half way between Baghdad and Iraq’s second city Mosul which fell on Tuesday.

A police brigadier general said that the militants attacked from the north, west and south of the city, and that they were from powerful jihadist group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

A police major said the militants had freed some 300 inmates from a prison in the city. (more…)

Um,… how bout’ NO !

We’ve already seen the inability of this administration to identify ideology of “rebels” when they armed al-Qaeda in Libya.   We’ve already seen the inability of this administration to identify the U.S. best interests when they supported the “Muslim Brotherhood” in Egypt.

Now the same group of R2P groupies want to use U.S. Military personnel to train Syrian’s?

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is close to authorizing a mission led by the U.S. military to train moderate Syrian rebels to fight the regime of Bashar al-Assad and al Qaeda-linked groups, a move that would expand Washington’s role in the conflict, U.S. officials said.

A new military training program, if implemented, would supplement a small train-and-equip program led by the Central Intelligence Agency which Mr. Obama authorized a year ago.

U.S. officials said the new military program would represent a significant expansion of Washington’s public efforts. U.S. officials don’t discuss the CIA’s limited training program because it is covert. (more…)

This is an addendum to the article we posted yesterday with the history of the missing Libyan shoulder fired missiles.

Via Sharyl Attkisson – Some of you missed this article that I wrote a year ago about the fate of MANPADS left over from the Qaddafi regime in Libya. According to a well-placed source, hundreds of the missiles had already been tracked as having gone to Al Qaeda Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and thousands are unaccounted for.

Before his overthrow and death in the fall of 2011, Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi was believed to have purchased 15,000-20,000 Soviet MANPADS. Concern over the whereabouts of the missiles – and the possibility that terrorists could buy them on the black market and even use them to shoot down American passenger jets – drove a U.S. effort to recover as many as possible. But only about 2,000 were accounted for prior to the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on Benghazi, Libya, according to the source. He describes those working to locate the missiles as “beside themselves” and “frustrated.”  (read full article)

If Eli Lake leaves the Daily Beast you will see this level of exposition stop immediately.  Despite his leftist leanings on the subject of Libya and Islamic extremism Mr. Lake is perhaps the most accurate of all reporters on the specifics.  We  give him props for swimming against the tide of his colleges and outlining the falsehoods present in the Obama ‘head-in-the-sand’ hypocrisy around Islam.  -SD

(Via Eli Lake – Daily Beast) In 2012, the Obama administration produced a draft National Intelligence Estimate that reached a surprising conclusion: al Qaeda was no longer a direct threat to America. That classified assessment, which has never before been publicly disclosed, was in keeping with the message coming from the White House. President Obama rode to re-election in 2012 partly on the success of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. At rallies and in press conferences, the president and top officials publicly said al Qaeda was on the run.

But some senior U.S. intelligence officials, like Defense Intelligence Agency Director Gen. Michael Flynn, fought hard against that assessment, which amounted to an official pronouncement of the American intelligence community’s collected wisdom. Flynn and his faction won a partial victory, striking the judgment that the terrorist group no longer posed a threat to the homeland. “Flynn and others at the time made it clear they would not go along with that kind of assessment,” one U.S. intelligence officer who worked on the al Qaeda file told The Daily Beast. “It was basically: ‘Over my dead body.’” (more…)

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Middle East – The Iranian regime has banned access to the WhatsApp messaging site, a popular site for many to communicate both inside and outside the country, stating that a Jewish “American Zionist” owns the site.

The announcement came some two months after Facebook bought the company for a stunning $19 billion, and a regime official connected the move directly to the founder of Facebook.

“The reason for this is the assumption of WhatsApp by the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is an American Zionist,” Abdolsamad Khorramabadi, head of the country’s Committee on Internet Crimes, stated.

One Iranian blogger told FoxNews.com the regime in Tehran is terrified of the power of social media. (more…)