What Huma Abedin's Muslim journal claimed about Bill Clinton

"An article in the Muslim journal where Huma Abedin was assistant editor claimed Bill Clinton bombed Saddam Hussein to deflect from his Monica Lewinsky affair."

The claim made in an article published in the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, where Abedin was a member of the editorial board - the group of people who decide what is published in the academic journal.

It is the latest bombshell to emerge from the archives of the journal, whose editor-in-chief is Abedin's mother, Saleha Mahmood Abedin, an academic in Saudi Arabia.

Abedin, who is not an academic, has been Hillary Clinton's closest aide since spending time as an intern at the White House, at exactly the time the Monica Lewinsky scandal was unfolding. But the version of events published in her journal is one which is unlikely to be embraced by the presidential candidate, and especially not by Bill Clinton.

The article was written by Sina Ali Muscati who was the time described as a 'second year law student' at the University of Ottawa. His academic credentials were not declared.

Muscati wrote about the 1991 conflict and its aftermath, which saw Saddam Hussein remain in power throughout the 1990s, despite being bombed twice - in 1996 and in December 1998.

'The crisis with Iraq has also probably benefited Clinton, serving as a good deterrent of attention from personal crises, such as his campaign funding scandals, legislative failures, or the Monica Lewinsky affair,' he said.

'By occasionally bombing Iraq in the name of humanity, at least, he has been able to look strong and presidential.'

Clinton's bombing of Iraq in December 1998 was widely mocked as 'Monica's war'. He ordered four days of strikes by bombers and cruise missiles at the height of his impeachment trial, brought in the wake of his admission that he had had a 'not appropriate' relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

No Chappaqua thanks giving for you!

Poorly designed, Mosul Dam has always required vigilance, and now...

Excerpt:

"“The machines for [cementing the porous gypsum layer the dam rests upon] have been looted [by ISIS]. There is no cement supply. [The remaining workers] can do nothing. It is going from bad to worse, and it is urgent. All we can do is hold our hearts.”

At the same time as the bedrock is getting weaker and more porous, the water pressure on the dam is building as spring meltwater flows into the reservoir behind it. Giant gates that would normally be used to ease the pressure by allowing water to run through are stuck.

...“If the dam fails, the water will arrive in Mosul in four hours. It will arrive in Baghdad in 45 hours. Some people say there could be half a million people killed, some say a million. I imagine it will be more in the absence of a good evacuation plan.”"

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/02/mosul-dam-engineers-warn-it-could-fail-at-any-time-killing-1m-people

"Iraqis think the U.S. is in cahoots with the Islamic State, and it is hurting the war"

"On the front lines of the battle against the Islamic State, suspicion of the United States runs deep. Iraqi fighters say they have all seen the videos purportedly showing U.S. helicopters airdropping weapons to the militants, and many claim they have friends and relatives who have witnessed similar instances of collusion."

Ordinary people also have seen the videos, heard the stories and reached the same conclusion — one that might seem absurd to Americans but is widely believed among Iraqis — that the United States is supporting the Islamic State...

“It is not in doubt,” said Mustafa Saadi, who says his friend saw U.S. helicopters delivering bottled water to Islamic State positions. He is a commander in one of the Shiite militias that last month helped push the militants out of the oil refinery near Baiji in northern Iraq alongside the Iraqi army...

U.S. military officials say the charges are too far-fetched to merit a response. “It’s beyond ridiculous,” said Col. Steve Warren, the military’s Baghdad-based spokesman. “There’s clearly no one in the West who buys it, but unfortunately, this is something that a segment of the Iraqi population believes.” (read more)

"How did ISIS get WMD if Saddam had none and Assad destroyed his?"

"German intelligence confirms Isis used mustard gas in Iraq"

German daily Bild reported on Monday that BND intelligence agents collected blood samples from Kurds who were injured in clashes with Isis. It quoted the BND chief, Gerhard Schindler, as saying that the agency has “information that IS used mustard gas in northern Iraq”.

US defense department spokeswoman Commander Elissa Smith said: “While we will not comment on intelligence or operational matters, let us be clear: any use by any party ... of a chemical as a weapon of any kind is an abhorrent act. “Given the alleged behavior of Isil and other such groups in the region, any such flagrant disregard for international standards and norms is reprehensible.”

Must be that global warming again, causing the condiment to go bad.

"US military pilots complain hands tied in ‘frustrating’ fight against ISIS"

Making the world safe for ISIS...

U.S. military pilots carrying out the air war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria are voicing growing discontent over what they say are heavy-handed rules of engagement hindering them from striking targets.

They blame a bureaucracy that does not allow for quick decision-making. One Navy F-18 pilot who has flown missions against ISIS voiced his frustration to Fox News, saying: "There were times I had groups of ISIS fighters in my sights, but couldn't get clearance to engage.”

He added, “They probably killed innocent people and spread evil because of my inability to kill them. It was frustrating." (read more)

Meanwhile, The Free Beacon reports Al Qaeda in Syria is "Tweeting Jihad to Over 200,000 Followers"

Though al Qaeda’s ongoing operations have taken a backseat to the exploits of IS, the group founded by Osama bin Laden is thriving on Twitter, according to MEMRI.

“It should be noted that as Twitter’s removal of accounts on its platform linked to the Islamic State (ISIS) has gotten a lot of attention, accounts belonging to many other Designated Terrorist Organizations, notably to Jabhat Al-Nusra (JN), Al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria that was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department in December 2012, have not received any attention, and its many accounts, which have a total of over 200,000 followers, are thriving,” MEMRI wrote in a recent report.

“This is another reminder of Twitter’s failure to effectively address this issue and its lack of a true strategy for doing so,” the group concluded.

"My Son Died for Ramadi. Now ISIS Has It"

"Debbie Lee says she’s sickened that the city her son sacrificed his life defending has fallen—and furious at the Joint Chiefs chairman’s insistence Ramadi is ‘not symbolic in any way.’"

A continuing comfort to her is her son’s last letter, an email that arrived a fortnight before his death. She had been amazed by the depth and power of these words from the homeschooled son who had always needed extra nudging when a subject did not interest him.

“Language was not one of the strong ones,” she recalled on Monday.

His was now a soul seared to eloquence.

“You can feel the deep impact of being in Ramadi, being in the war zone,” his mother said.

In the letter, the son wrote of the elusiveness of glory and of the enormity of violent death.

“I have seen death, the sorrow that encompasses your entire being as a man breathes his last,” he said. “I can only pray and hope that none of you will ever have to experience some of these things I have seen and felt here.”

But amid the worst, he had seen the importance of kindness and decency, moments when America was at its shining best. He urged those back home to do their part in the struggle to make our country realize its full greatness:

Ask yourself when was the last time you donated clothes that you hadn’t worn out. When was the last time you paid for a random stranger’s cup of coffee, meal or maybe even a tank of gas? When was the last time you helped a person with the groceries into or out of their car?

Think to yourself and wonder what it would feel like if when the bill for the meal came and you were told it was already paid for.

More random acts of kindness like this would change our country and our reputation as a country.

It is not unknown to most of us that the rest of the world looks at us with doubt towards our humanity and morals.

I am not here to preach or to say look at me, because I am just as at fault as the next person. I find that being here makes me realize the great country we have and the obligation we have to keep it that way.

The 4th has just come and gone and I received many emails thanking me for helping keep America great and free. I take no credit for the career path I have chosen; I can only give it to those of you who are reading this, because each one of you has contributed to me and who I am.

However what I do over here is only a small percent of what keeps our country great. I think the truth to our greatness is each other. Purity, morals and kindness, passed down to each generation through example. So to all my family and friends, do me a favor and pass on the kindness, the love, the precious gift of human life to each other so that when your children come into contact with a great conflict that we are now faced with here in Iraq, that they are people of humanity, of pure motives, of compassion.

This is our real part to keep America free! HAPPY 4th Love Ya

Marc Lee

P.S. Half way through the deployment can’t wait to see all of your faces 

On August 2, 2006, Lee and his team got into a gun battle with a large force of insurgents in south-central Ramadi.

Hillary was not available for comment

PHOTOS: Residents flee #Ramadi after Islamic State overruns the city. http://t.co/qiVLcIPrE3 pic.twitter.com/YvR4sTeCfv

— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) May 19, 2015

American Sniper in Baghdad

I've seen links to this article several places so I went to have a look.  It reminds me of the reporting done on Iraq in the early years when we got blogs from Iraqis and from American soldiers that showed us the Iraqi (and Afghan) people as Real in a way that our media seldom does.   The Iraqi's interviewed have individual opinions.  Some think the movie is great.  Some don't like it but have seen it multiple times anyway.  Some are philosophical about a man's responsibility to serve his country.

Mohammed says one of the film’s opening scenes, when Kyle spots a woman and child who appear to be preparing to attack US troops during the initial invasion of Iraq, had the entire audience on the edge of their seats.

“When the sniper was hesitating to shoot [the child holding the RPG] everyone was yelling ‘Just shoot him!’” he said.

(...)

#AmericanSniper

I saw American Sniper yesterday with my son. The other half of my family expressed no interest in seeing it nor even hearing what we thought of it. That probably represents America in a way.

My first reaction afterwards was to call my mother to get some PTSD family stories straight. Her brother-in-law (my uncle) had served in WW II and had survived fierce hand-to-hand combat at Guadalcanal, and had had problems. I was way too young to remember anything about that or the aftermath and she's my only living link back now. I will let those stories be, as horrific as they were, out of respect for the dead and for the living as they still affect the next generation(s). I also wanted to know more about an older cousin who had fought on helicopter gunships in Vietnam. He was older than me by 10 years and so I never knew him well as a kid like I did other cousins. I do remember his going over there -- conscripted. And I thought about him during scenes of "American Sniper." He returned home to a small Wisconsin town --the same one where my parents grew up and which I knew as a kid. I remember hearing about how dynamite explosions at a local stone quarry used to give him the jitters. My mother told me some detail about how his later marriage dissolved that I had never heard. I will not repeat those stories either, out of respect for the living but suffice it to say it could not have been his fault.

"American Sniper" isn't supposed to be about those wars but it is somehow. It's supposed to be about the Iraq War.  I have no family who served there, but only a dearly loved neighbor who did two tours in Iraq as a Marine. I wrote about him here. I thought about him too.

I felt a jumble of other emotions: guilt, anger, pride.  The anger came from critics dissing this movie as "pro-war." I mean, WTF?  Another piece of residual anger comes from unresolved issues dating back to Vietnam and its aftermath. When I was 19, I saw members of a mayoral administration openly cheer the "anti-war" killers of an innocent man -- one of whom is still at large. I can never "unremember" that.  That story doesn't belong here and I already wrote about it here. I see the same attitude today. I cannot square it with reality. The guilt part is more complex and I'm not quite willing or able to confront that yet, let alone talk about it.  The pride part come from the sense that somebody can still make movies like "American Sniper."  See it -- I think it's supposed to disturb you.

"ISIS threatens to kill 2 Japanese hostages"

"A masked man in the latest video gives the Japanese government a choice to pay $200 million -- the same amount of money Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recently pledged for those "contending" with ISIS -- to free the Japanese men. That deal holds for 72 hours, which would seem to mean sometime Friday since the video appeared on social media Tuesday."

"Although you are more than 8,500 kilometers away from the Islamic State, you willingly volunteered to take part in this crusade," the masked man on the video posted Tuesday says, addressing his comments to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. (read more)

Video: ISIS Hostages were tortured.

"Iraq Pilots Mistakenly Gave Food, Ammunition to ISIS Militants"

“Some pilots, instead of dropping these supplies over the area of the Iraqi army, threw it over the area that is controlled by ISIS fighters,” said Hakim Al-Zamili, a lawmaker in the Iraqi parliament who is a member of the security and defense committee and acts as a security liaison for service members and commanders formed by anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. “Those soldiers were in deadly need of these supplies, but because of the wrong plans of the commanders in the Iraqi army and lack of experience of the pilots, we in a way or another helped ISIS fighters to kill our soldiers.”
 

"U.K. votes to approve air strikes as more allies join Islamic State fight"

"The coalition of nations participating in military action against Islamic State continues to grow – but so do worries about whether the campaign of air strikes has any hope of succeeding."

"Britain became the latest country to commit military resources to the fight, as its Parliament voted overwhelmingly on Friday to authorize air strikes against Islamic State targets inside Iraq. Prime Minister David Cameron told the House of Commons before the vote that the extremist group presented a genuine threat to the United Kingdom, and warned the fight against the self-declared caliphate would take “years” to win."




As to the efficacy of an air campaign alone strategy...

I guess I'm just going to have to trust that Obama and the Progressives know what they're doing here killing anything that moves.
— Dennis Miller Show (@DennisDMZ) September 25, 2014

NYT OpEd: "Obama’s Betrayal of the Constitution"

"PRESIDENT OBAMA’s declaration of war against the terrorist group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria marks a decisive break in the American constitutional tradition. Nothing attempted by his predecessor, George W. Bush, remotely compares in imperial hubris."

"Mr. Bush gained explicit congressional consent for his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In contrast, the Obama administration has not even published a legal opinion attempting to justify the president’s assertion of unilateral war-making authority. This is because no serious opinion can be written." (read the whole thing)

The last thing Obama wants to do is to put it on paper, he doesn't want to put the ring on the finger. Salient that after the speech declaring war, Obama's advisors took to the air waves to contradict it.

Thursday on CNN's "The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer," Obama White House National Security Adviser Susan Rice said the president's actions against ISIS are "very different" from America being at war.

Rice said, "I don't know whether you want to call it a war or sustained counterterrorism campaign. I think, frankly, this is a counterterrorism operation that will take time. It will be sustained. We will not have American combat forces on the ground fighting as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan which is what I think the American people think of when they think of a war. So I think this is very different from that. But nonetheless, we'll be dealing with the significant threat to this region, to American personnel in the region and potentially also to Europe and the United States. And we'll be doing it with partners. We'll not be fighting ourselves on the ground but using American air power as we have been over the last several weeks as necessary."

Is like after proposing to make Iraq and Syria his, Obama is going about doing everything he can to undermine it.

Meanwhile, reports of ISIS killings continue coming in from Iraq.

CNN: ISIS fighters have killed at least 80 men during an attack on a minority Yazidi village in northern Iraq, the Kurdish regional government and a religious Yazidi leader told CNN on Friday.

At least 100 women were also taken by ISIS from the village of Kojo, near Sinjar, to the northern city of Mosul and other areas, they said.

The news of the killings and abductions in the village come a day after U.S. President Barack Obama declared that an ISIS seige that trapped thousands of Yazidis in the Sinjar Mountains was over.

Pathetic

Obama adjusts Iraq narrative, now blames Bush for troop withdrawal.

He must believe we totally forgot when he said this..




Or maybe he forgot that he said it.  Or maybe he just lies about every damn thing he wants to lie about.

He uttered those (words) after three years, and a successful re-election campaign, in which the full removal of U.S. forces from Iraq was cast as this White House’s most significant foreign policy achievement and one Mr. Obama had promised all the way back to the earliest days of his first presidential campaign in 2008.

Now, however, with the terrorist force the Islamic State running roughshod through Iraq, capturing key territory, slaughtering Christians and promising to “raise the flag of Allah at the White House,” Mr. Obama has begun to adjust the narrative.

We are in for another round of Obama blaming Bush for failing to pick up a pen and put it in Obama's hand and help move Obama's hand so Obama could sign a Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq.  But Bush never picked up a pen and put it in Obama;s hand, so the SOFA didn't get signed and now Iraq is a bloody mess, over-run with end-of-the-worlders from ISIS.

Obama is a pathetic liar.  But hey, that's just me talking.  You might believe he is a truth-teller and a light-bringer.

Here's a golden oldie.

Drudge: "Pope blesses Iraq bombing strikes... "

"Fearing a genocide of Christians, the Vatican has given its approval to US military air strikes in Iraq -- a rare exception to its policy of peaceful conflict resolution."

The Holy See's ambassador to the United Nations, Silvano Tomasi, this weekend supported US air strikes aimed at halting the advance of Sunni Islamic State (IS) militants, calling for "intervention now, before it is too late".

"Military action might be necessary," he said.

While goggling for a 'pacifism' carton worthy of this here post, I came across an interesting, if not relevant, Wikipedia entry.

The Moriori, of the Chatham Islands, practiced pacifism by order of their ancestor Nunuku-whenua. This enabled the Moriori to preserve what limited resources they had in their harsh climate, avoiding waste through warfare. In turn, this led to their almost complete annihilation in 1835 by invading Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama Māori from the Taranaki region of the North Island of New Zealand. The invading Māori killed, enslaved and cannibalised the Moriori. A Moriori survivor recalled : "[The Maori] commenced to kill us like sheep.... [We] were terrified, fled to the bush, concealed ourselves in holes underground, and in any place to escape our enemies. It was of no avail; we were discovered and killed - men, women and children indiscriminately."

Al Arabiya: "ISIS burns 1,800-year-old church in Mosul"

"Militants from the radical jihadist group the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria have set fire to a 1,800-year-old church in Iraq’s second largest city of Mosul, a photo released Saturday shows."

"The burning of the church is the latest in a series of destruction of Christian property in Mosul, which was taken by the Islamist rebels last month, along with other swathes of Iraqi territory."

ISIS burned down 1,800-year-old Syriac Catholic Archdiocese in Mosul

Tony Blair: Syria conflict is to blame for current Iraq crisis

The Independent: In a 3,000-word essay, Mr Blair rejected claims that he was to blame, saying that if the West had not rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein, the crisis in the Middle East would be worse.

"We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that 'we' have caused this. We haven't. We can argue as to whether our policies at points have helped or not; and whether action or inaction is the best policy and there is a lot to be said on both sides. But the fundamental cause of the crisis lies within the region not outside it," he wrote. Mr Blair added that it is a "bizarre reading of the cauldron that is the Middle East today, to claim that but for the removal of Saddam, we would not have a crisis". (read more)

NYT Cut and Paste: As Iraq falls back, our fight here is over control of the narrative

As the threat from Sunni militants in western Iraq escalated last month, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki secretly asked the Obama administration to consider carrying out airstrikes against extremist staging areas, according to Iraqi and American officials.

But Iraq’s appeals for a military response have so far been rebuffed by the White House, which has been reluctant to open a new chapter in a conflict that President Obama has insisted was over when the United States withdrew the last of its forces from Iraq in 2011. (read more)

***

I used to be a polemicist. I was an editorial cartoonist, and wrote what I called “artist’s statements” to accompany my cartoons each week, which over the two terms of the George W. Bush administration lengthened and sharpened from rants into something more like essays. I became practiced at using language as a weapon. My role models were hilarious, elegant and brutal humorists from Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken through Hunter S. Thompson and Matt Taibbi, who raised American invective to an art form. This is a fine and honorable tradition when practiced with a certain amour-propre and panache, but in the last couple of decades it’s become our dominant mode of public discourse, degraded by hacks and amateurs who ape its cruelty but are rhetorically illiterate and tone-deaf to humor. They’re just parroting talking points with profanity.

I’m no longer an active combatant in that fight. As the grim, endless decade of the War on Terror dragged on I began to get a bad aesthetic conscience about my screeds, and grew concerned that I might be doing cirrhotic damage to what let’s call, for old times’ sake, my soul. I found a second career as an essayist, and made a conscientious effort to be more intellectually honest, fair-minded and empathetic, to get out there and try to help instead of just cheerfully jeering from the bleachers. (read more)