RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. (AP) — President Barack Obama is spending a long Father’s Day weekend in the California desert oasis of Rancho Mirage.
The president and first lady arrived at the Palm Springs airport Friday night after visiting an Indian reservation earlier in the day.
President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama, are greeted on the tarmac by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., second from left, and her husband Stewart Boxer, left, as they arrive on Friday, June 13, 2014, in Palm Springs, Calif.
They are staying with White House decorator Michael Smith and his partner, U.S. Ambassador to Spain James Costos, at their vacation home. (more…)
Alarming to YOU, but not necessarily to the White House fundraising team headed to Palm Springs.
Against the videos of thousands of Iraqi troops being road-marched by ISIS islamists fighters, new reports outline 1,700 of them may have ended with a mass execution:
Screenshot official ISIS account that claims they executed 1700 Shiite soldiers. They surrendered in #Tikrit ystrdy pic.twitter.com/7QyMnEuAAo
Additionally WND is reporting the U.S. security contractors in Baland Air Force Base are surrounded by thousands of the islamists and are fighting them amid the chaos. (more…)
It’s always the “also attending’s” that tell the story:
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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)
Back in 2011, amid the discussions of withdrawal from Iraq, and the debate over how many troops would be needed to maintain a stable environment, two influential names rose to the surface, Tom Donilon and Denis McDonough. Both Donilon and McDonough overrode the Pentagon advice, and advised President Obama to dismiss the military and heed their counsel instead.
In August [2011], after debates between the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House, the Americans settled on the 3,000 to 5,000 number, which was reported in August. According to two people briefed on the matter, one inside the administration and one outside, the arguments of two White House officials, Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser, and his deputy, Denis McDonough, prevailed over those of the military.
Intelligence assessments that Iraq was not at great risk of slipping into chaos in the absence of American forces were a factor in the decision, an American official said. (link)
IRAQ – The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad is preparing contingency plans to evacuate its employees if necessary now that one of the deadliest Islamic militant groups in the region has taken control of large swaths of Iraq, a U.S. official told TheBlaze.
The State Department also warned U.S. citizens against traveling to Iraq, following several days of bloody clashes between insurgents with the Al Qaeda-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and Iraqi military forces.
ISIL has taken control of Mosul, Tikrit and Fallujah and aims to create an Islamic state across the Iraq-Syria border. (read more)
“Hey I’d really like to stay and have lunch with you guys but, ..um, .. well, I’ve seen how this ends before.” – “But, hey, thanks anyway”….. “TTFN”
(Via FOX News) The terrorists who attacked the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 used cell phones, seized from State Department personnel during the attacks, and U.S. spy agencies overheard them contacting more senior terrorist leaders to report on the success of the operation, multiple sources confirmed to Fox News.
The disclosure is important because it adds to the body of evidence establishing that senior U.S. officials in the Obama administration knew early on that Benghazi was a terrorist attack, and not a spontaneous protest over an anti-Islam video that had gone awry, as the administration claimed for several weeks after the attacks.
Eric Stahl, who recently retired as a major in the U.S. Air Force, served as commander and pilot of the C-17 aircraft that was used to transport the corpses of the four casualties from the Benghazi attacks – then-U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, information officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods – as well as the assault’s survivors from Tripoli to the safety of an American military base in Ramstein, Germany.
In an exclusive interview on Fox News’ “Special Report,” Stahl said members of a CIA-trained Global Response Staff who raced to the scene of the attacks were “confused” by the administration’s repeated implication of the video as a trigger for the attacks, because “they knew during the attack…who was doing the attacking.” Asked how, Stahl told anchor Bret Baier:
“Right after they left the consulate in Benghazi and went to the [CIA] safehouse, they were getting reports that cell phones, consulate cell phones, were being used to make calls to the attackers’ higher ups.”
A separate U.S. official, one with intimate details of the bloody events of that night, confirmed the major’s assertion. (more…)
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…)
