Associated Press: South Korea said that North Korea on Saturday test-fired what appeared to be a submarine-launched ballistic missile off its eastern coast.
Not A Muslim
Operation Empty Chair
The US is handing out $18,000 XM2010 sniper rifles to Syrian rebels. How long until they are in hands of jihadists? https://t.co/GkJy5BremZ
— Bill Roggio (@billroggio) June 29, 2016
The Benghazi Report
“Now, I simply ask the American people to read this report for themselves, look at the evidence we have collected, and reach their own conclusions. You can read this report in less time than our fellow citizens were taking fire and fighting for their lives on the rooftops and in the streets of Benghazi.”
Those Moderate Muslims!
Why the lone wolf terrorist is a myth.
Operation Empty Chair
U.S. spy drones had no trouble spotting the Taliban fighters. There were more than 20 figures snaking through sparsely wooded hills, trying to outflank the Afghan government commandos in the village below.
In the starry darkness overhead, American helicopters loitered armed with precision-guided missiles, along with a flying gunship capable of drenching the area with cannon-fire. It would have been a hard shot to miss.
But before they could fire, the Americans knew they would have to get past the lawyers.
In the amorphous twilight of the Afghan war, it isn’t enough to draw a bead on the enemy. Before they shoot, U.S. troops have to navigate a tricky legal and political question: When is it OK for them to kill Taliban?
The operation late last month in Elbak, a flyspeck village in Kandahar province, exposed the complexity of implementing President Barack Obama’s Afghan strategy in the mud-brick villages, steep mountains and vast poppy fields where the combat takes place. With their Afghan allies walking into a possible ambush that night, U.S. commanders, monitoring video feeds and radio traffic miles from the front, had to judge whether enemy fighters who weren’t actually fighting constituted an imminent threat.
Mr. Obama, who campaigned on a promise to extract the U.S. from its long wars, has declared an end to the American combat mission in Afghanistan and set guidelines for when the remaining 9,800 U.S. troops, many of them in elite special-operations units, may use lethal force.
He’s on the other side.
Not A Muslim
Obama administration releases new images showing 9/11 to be a simple construction accident. (h/t @CaptYonah ) pic.twitter.com/rMQEYhdYfI
— Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) June 20, 2016
Update: DOJ backpeddles.
Forward!
The Mind Of The President: Two recent devastating profiles–one of President Barack Obama by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic and the other of Obama’s communications chief Ben Rhodes by David Samuels in The New York Times Magazine–have revealed a kaleidoscope of mendacity so sophisticated, creative, consuming, and substantively boundless as to give rise to a sense that something essential has changed in the relationship between truth and falsehood, between the actual policies of an administration and its efforts to sell them.
Grab a coffee. (h/t Peter)
Operation Empty Chair
On their heels: The Taliban now hold more ground in Afghanistan than at any point since 2001
Global Test
Secretary of State John Kerry this week acknowledged twice that the Islamic State and the threat of terrorism around the world is bigger threat than climate change, even though he has insisted in past years that climate is the bigger threat.
The world is in the very best of hands.
Operation Empty Chair
Leaders in the Baltic countries and Poland fear the force NATO plans to deploy on their territory is too small and symbolic to deter an attack by Russia, whose 2014 annexation of Crimea is fresh in the memories of the former Soviet-bloc states.
(h/t Colonialista)
Operation Empty Chair
Obama’s strategy to thwart China in South China Sea showdown ‘almost entirely meaningless’
Operation Empty Scare
Red Lined, April 22nd – Brexit would put UK ‘back of the queue’ for trade talks – Obama
Red Faced, June 30th – after Britain’s 52-48 vote to leave, the State Department has signaled over the last 24 hours that Obama’s threat was empty.
Pivot To Asia
Operation Empty Chair
The classified details behind Iran’s treatment of several U.S. sailors who were captured by the Islamic Republic during a tense standoff earlier this year are likely to shock the nation, according to one member of the House Armed Services Committee, who disclosed to the Washington Free Beacon that these details are currently being withheld by the Obama administration.
Rep. Randy Forbes (R., Va.) told the Free Beacon in an interview that the Obama administration is still keeping details of the maritime incident under wraps. It could be a year or longer before the American public receives a full accounting of the incident, in which several U.S. sailors were abducted at gunpoint by the Iranian military.
Related: Why Hasn’t Obama Fired Ben Rhodes?
h/t Colonista
A Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb For Iran
I spent more than a decade interviewing people all over the world, sometimes on the phone and via email, but most of the time in person on the other side of the world. I’ve interviewed every type of person imaginable, from military commanders and heads of state to war refugees and homeless people who sleep outside in slums.
Trust me on this: government officials are almost always the worst sources and interview subjects. That’s true everywhere in the world. They live in rarefied bubbles. They lie. They leave things out, sometimes because they want to and sometimes because they have to. They’re often incompetent and even more often shockingly ignorant. Everyone has opinions, and lots of people have agendas, but nobody has an agenda the way government officials have agendas.
It has never even occurred to me to an interview a government official in one country about what’s happening in another country.
There are exceptions. Occasionally I’ve been delighted by government officials in the most unlikely places, including in Cairo. In general, though, they’re the least interesting and the least reliable.
The last person you should be talking to, in other words, is Ben Rhodes.
Is There Nothing That Obama Can’t Do?
A good piece, as always by Richard Fernandez;
President Obama is not like a fictional president, he is a fictional president. When Obama described himself as a blank screen on which anyone was free to project his fantasies, the public should have listened. What makes the present absurd situation possible is that a critical mass of voters have agreed to go along with the make-believe.
Metaphor For A Presidency
The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire
“ISIS Is Not An Existential Threat”
Romulus Augustus couldn’t have said it better himself.