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Posts Tagged ‘obama’

Secret Joint Raid Captures Taliban’s Top Commander

by WrathofG-d ( 119 Comments › )
Filed under Afghanistan, Anti-Jihad, Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Middle East, Military, Politics, Terrorism, World at February 16th, 2010 - 12:00 pm

Sometimes you just have to give credit where it is due.  This is fantastic news, and excellent work by President Obama, and the U.S. Military.

WASHINGTON — The Taliban’s top military commander was captured several days ago in Karachi, Pakistan, in a secret joint operation by Pakistani and American intelligence forces, according to American government officials.

The commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, is an Afghan described by American officials as the most significant Taliban figure to be detained since the American-led war in Afghanistan started more than eight years ago. He ranks second in influence only to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s founder and a close associate of Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks.

His capture could cripple the Taliban’s military operations, at least in the short term, said Bruce O. Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer who last spring led the Obama administration’s Afghanistan and Pakistan policy review.

Details of the raid remain murky, but officials said that it had been carried out by Pakistan’s military spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, and that C.I.A. operatives had accompanied the Pakistanis.

The New York Times learned of the operation on Thursday, but delayed reporting it at the request of White House officials, who contended that making it public would end a hugely successful intelligence-gathering effort. The officials said that the group’s leaders had been unaware of Mullah Baradar’s capture and that if it became public they might cover their tracks and become more careful about communicating with each other.

The Times is publishing the news now because White House officials acknowledged that the capture of Mullah Baradar was becoming widely known in the region.

{The Article}

Keep up the good work!

Taliban Admit They Are Cowards

by Iron Fist ( 60 Comments › )
Filed under Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Politics at February 8th, 2010 - 7:00 pm

The Taliban admit they are cowards:

Taliban leader: We won’t fight GIs ‘face-to-face’
Militants plan to wait out looming offensive disguised as civilians

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – Taliban fighters plan to disguise themselves as civilians during a looming NATO offensive in southern Afghanistan, a militant commander told NBC News.

Minivans piled high with mattresses and clothing lined up at checkpoints Sunday as hundreds of civilians fled a Taliban-controlled area in Helmand province.

The U.S. military has not given a start date for the operation to clear insurgents from the town of Marjah, the biggest community in the south under insurgent control. But the military has said fighting will start soon and many residents weren’t taking any chances.

The militants, meanwhile, dug in for a fight, reinforcing their positions with rocket-propelled grenades and heavy weapons, according to witnesses.

‘We will shake their hands’
But a Taliban commander told NBC News’ Richard Engel that many insurgents would wait out the offensive.

“What, they will walk down empty streets?” the militant leader asked. “They (U.S. and coalition troops) will come in and announce that they have conquered the area. We will let them come in. They are welcome.

“They will ask, ‘Are there any Taliban in the area?’ We will say, ‘Yes, but they have left’,” the Taliban leader added.

“We will not fight them face-to-face,” he said. “We will shake their hands, as civilians. Then they will leave.”

Lovely, isn’t it. And Obama will declare victory and pull out, just as they are telling him they want him to. this isn’t war. This is kabuki theater. I hope I am wrong, but obama’s performance to date gives me little reason to.

Bernardine Dohrn & William Ayers vs Egypt

by Eliana ( 157 Comments › )
Filed under Egypt, Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Progressives at January 18th, 2010 - 3:30 pm

Egypt won. Bernardine Dohrn blames Israel.

Obama pals Bernardine Dorhn and William Ayers are up to mischief again and their target is Israel. So far, they aren’t doing very well, though.

As Caroline Glick tells the story…

Oh the shame of it all. Last month, 1,300 pro-Palestinian activists from the US and Europe came to the region in the name of peace and social justice to demonstrate their solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza. Led by the self-declared feminist, antiwar group Code Pink, the demonstrators’ plan was to enter Gaza from the Egyptian border at Rafah and deliver “humanitarian aid” to the Hamas terrorist organization.

But it was not to be. Led by Code Pink founder and California Democratic fund-raiser Jodie Evans, the demonstrators were not welcomed by Egyptian authorities. Many were surrounded by riot police and barbed wire as they demonstrated outside the US and French embassies and the UN Development Program’s headquarters. Others were barred from leaving their hotels.

Those who managed to escape their hotels and the bullpens outside the embassies were barred from staging night protests in solidarity with Hamas on the Nile. In the end, as the militant Israeli pro-Palestinian activist Amira Hass chronicled in Haaretz last week, all but 100 of them were barred from travelling to Gaza.

The lucky few allowed into the Strip included neither Evans nor her friends, former Weather Underground terror leaders Bernadine Dohrn and William Ayres. But they bore no grudge against Egypt. The Egyptians were mere puppets of the real culprit: Israel. As Evans said, “It’s obvious that the only reason for [Egypt’s treatment of the demonstrators] is to make Israel happy. Israel is behind the refusal [to allow the demonstrators into Gaza] – what other excuse could there be?”

Dohrn, the woman who has called for a “revolutionary war” to destroy the US, felt that the Egyptian authorities’ behavior was nothing but an unfortunate diversion from their mission. As she wrote in a blog post from Cairo, “We find ourselves unwillingly in Cairo, drawn into clashes with authorities and one another on side issues, when what we most want is to keep our eyes on the Palestinian people.”

Their goal was to break the “siege” on Gaza, but the 100 people who made it into Gaza couldn’t break the seige imposed on themselves by Hamas when they got there:

Unfortunately for the lucky 100 who were permitted to enter Hamastan, the diversions didn’t end at the Egyptians border. Hamas immediately placed them under siege. The Palestinian champions had planned to enjoy home hospitality from friends in Gaza. But once there they were prohibited from leaving the Hamas-owned Commodore Hotel and from having any contact with local Gazans without a Hamas escort.

Rather than being permitted to judge the situation in Gaza for themselves, they were carted onto Hamas buses and taken on “devastation tours” of what their Hamas tour guides claimed was damage caused by the IDF during Operation Cast Lead. And then these international protesters were forced to participate in a Hamas-organized march to the Erez crossing.

As [Amira] Hass tells it, in “a slap to many feminist organizers and participants,” no Palestinian women were allowed to participate in the march, which “turned into nothing more than a ritual, an opportunity for Hamas cabinet ministers to get decent media coverage in the company of Western demonstrators.”

Hamas probably didn’t mention to the Code Pink people that the Erez Crossing between Gaza and Israel is closed most of the time because Gazan terrorists try to blow it up when it’s open. An attempt happened again recently after Israel had been leaving it more open than usual.

The crossing is currently open on a limited basis. Last week, a Jewish woman and her four children escaped from Gaza and her Arab husband (the father of her children) who is currently in prison for his work on the smuggling tunnels. Her Arab brother-in-law threatened to kill her if she tried to escape Gaza, but her Jewish family arranged things with Israel’s Shin Bet (similar to the FBI) to get the woman and her four children through the crossing quickly if they could make it there via taxi and if they managed to fool Hamas into letting them go through the Hamas side of the crossing. It all worked! The woman and her children are FREE in Israel!

Not that an American Feminist organization like Code Pink would care about a woman’s and four children’s freedom when Code Pink has mass murderers to support.

[Militant Israeli pro-Palestinian activist] [Amira] Hass’s participation in the pro-Hamas propaganda trip is a bit surprising. In November 2008, she was forced to flee from Gaza to Israel after Hamas threatened to kill her. At the time, Hass appealed to the Israeli military – which she has spent the better part of her career bashing – and asked to be allowed to enter Israel from Gaza, after sailing illegally to Gaza from Cyprus on a ferry chartered by the pro-Hamas Free Gaza outfit.

Hass’s behavior is actually more revealing than surprising. The truth is that Hass and her fellow demonstrators were willing to be used as media props by Hamas precisely because it isn’t the Palestinians’ welfare that concerns them. If they cared about the Palestinians they would be demonstrating against Hamas, which prohibited local women from participating in their march to the Israeli border, and which barred non-Hamas members from speaking with them. It would offend their sensitivities that Hamas goons beat women for not covering themselves from head to toe in Islamic potato sacks. It would bother them that Hamas executes its political opponents by among other things throwing them off the roofs of apartment buildings.

The demonstrators did not come to Gaza to demonstrate their support for the Palestinians, but rather their hatred for Israel and for their own Western governments that refuse to join Hamas in its war against Israel. As one of the organizers told Hass as she sat corralled by Egyptian riot police outside the UNDP offices in Cairo, “In our presence here, we are saying that we are not casting the blame on Egypt. The responsibility for the shameless and obscene Israeli siege on Gaza rests squarely with our own countries.”

By happily collaborating with Hamas in its propaganda extravaganza, these demonstrators demonstrated that the rights of Palestinians are not their concern. Their concern is waging war against their own societies and against Israel. They are more than happy to have their pictures taken with the likes of Hamas terror master Ismail Haniyeh. And while they will never acknowledge that his organization’s terror war against Israel is illegal and immoral, or care that Hamas’s founding charter explicitly calls for the genocide of Jewry, they will demonstrate from today till doomsday against their governments’ recognition of Israel.

Dohrn & Ayers are old Obama pals, of course, and Code Pink is welcome at the White House too.

The last line of Caroline Glick’s artile is especially chilling:

Israeli authorities tend to treat groups like Code Pink and its Israeli allies as nothing more than nuisances. Since unlike Egypt and these self-proclaimed human rights champions themselves, Israel actually does care about human rights, it would never occur to anyone to treat these demonstrators as Egypt did. At the same time, the Egyptian authorities’ actions were clearly informed by their understanding that, with their ties to Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizbullah, Syria and Iran, Code Pink and its friends are active collaborators with the jihad war machine.

With their open ties to our jihadist enemies on the one hand, and their direct line to the White House on the other, Israel ignores them at our peril.

Caroline Glick’s article is here — Column One: Code Red on Code Pink