October 22, 2009

Obama Effect already working to embargo Fox News story

Yesterday, Fox News reported the hearings held by Senator Joe Lieberman with cabinet officials concerning a shortage of flu vaccine.  I'm sitting in Afghanistan not getting much broadcast TV news.  I wanted to find out more, so I searched G...

October 8, 2009

AQ weak in Afghanistan? Really?

Al Qaeda has been dramatically weakened, or so leaks the Obama administration, in an effort to extract the president from the hole he has dug himself on Afghanistan.Tony Blankley has an interesting column saying that the White House is floating the t...

May 13, 2009

How's Obama's foreclosure policy working out?

It has been nearly three months since a newly sworn in President Obama stepped forward with a plan to rescue underwater homeowners from foreclosure. Now, we learn that the President's $275 Billion foreclosure fix has floundered and failed. The profes...

September 20, 2008

Iraqi women step up to the plate to protect their country

Isnt it odd that while the Iraqis are now handing female police officers guns our own media detests Palin because of her "gun-toting" ways?  ...

August 7, 2008

The case against Dr. Ivins

The FBI has laid out its evidence in the case against army scientist Dr. Bruce Ivins. Although I initially doubted the FBI theory that Dr. Ivins was the sole source of the 2001 anthrax attack, I mused when writing about it a few days ago that I hoped...

August 2, 2008

Suicide of an Anthrax Suspect

David Willman of The Los Angeles  Times  reported yesterday that long time anthrax researcher Dr. Bruce Ivins committed suicide, quite possibly as a result of pending charges related to the 2001 anthrax attacks in the US. The FBI has n...

July 28, 2008

Taliban fractures

Back in June I  wrote about the situation in Pakistan and the Taliban fractionalization we had predicted at the American Thinker last year: We predicted that some Taliban tribes would split from al Qaeda and jockey for position to align with the...

July 24, 2008

Obama trip press frenzy backfires

Many observers considered the press frenzy over the Senator Obama trip as one more data point of evidence about media bias in favor of Obama. The shear number of references to the"historic" or "unprecedented" trip have been sicken...

July 21, 2008

The bias gets even more blatant

The Drudge Report and Fox News are reporting today that the New York Times has denied an opinion piece from Senator John McCain after publishing Senator Barack Obama's op-ed last week. The Drudge link provides the background and full text of the op-e...

July 20, 2008

Hawks need to back off from Bush over Iran talks

Word in recent days of planned talks between the Iranian government and high level State Department officials has provoked calls of flip-flops from the left and hoots from hawks on the right. There's not much to worry about in the cutesy political ca...

July 16, 2008

Can Senator Obama Avoid His Iraq Trap?

One of the most persistent and pernicious myths about the Iraq War, proffered by leading Democrats and propelled by the media, is the accusation that the President and his top aides  "won't listen to the generals." Both President Bush ...

July 12, 2008

A brave man who exposed Saddam's nuclear secrets

"Sammi", the coauthor of our book Both In One Trench: Saddam's Secret Terror Documents is coming out of the shadows to do a book signing: Sunday July 13th from 1:30 to 4:30 PMHard Bean Coffee & Booksellers36 Market Space, Annapolis...

July 11, 2008

Torture redefined

Three burly men in military uniform forced me to don a mask. I could barely see through the slits in it. But what I could see made me shudder. I was in a dark room barely lit via an observation window. Cool grins that I could only detect by pointed c...

May 22, 2008

Report: Taliban to disarm in NWFP Pakistan

Recent reporting from Pakistan has discussed an impending peace accord between the Pakistan government and Taliban forces near the Swat Valley of the North West Frontier Province. A report from the Associated Press of Pakistan states that the agreeme...

May 20, 2008

Obama and the Black Media

Senator Barack Obama tries to be all things to all people with his vague language of change and hope. But sometimes he makes the mistake of promising something, only to see it turn out to be an inconvenience when it comes time to actually perform....

April 24, 2008

DOD puppy parade

Since the atrocious video surfaced of a Marine presumably in Iraq tossing a puppy off a cliff,  a myriad of soldier-dog photos are appearing on DOD websites. The message is clear from the DOD: "we love dogs". I think it is a smart...

April 10, 2008

The Afghanistan success story

Most of the American media have continuously misreported the NATO mission in Afghanistan as a disaster unfolding, beginning before the effort even began, with warnings of the "brutal Afghan winter." More recently, the media are...

March 11, 2008

What Did Pelosi Know about Amgen's Woes and When Did She Know It?

The Speaker of the House has been very good to Amgen. And vice-versa.The year 2007 kicked off with expectations of good market news for the California-based biotech firm. It was expected to surge 27 percent on its share value that year according...

March 6, 2008

Pelosi's ETHA bill and Amgen (updated)

Previously, we reported the suspicious timing of Amgen executives making large donations to Speaker Pelosi's campaign just before she submitted a bill that would likely increase that company's bottom line. The Early Treatment of HIV Act (ETHA) w...

March 1, 2008

The friends of Nancy Pelosi

Guess who Nancy Pelosi's biggest donor was last year. If you want to know why this matters, read this article about all the money involved. Of course, the major media does not think this is the least bit worthy of note....

February 28, 2008

Interventionism, Obama-Style

Can you imagine the international outcry if a President of the United States went to the United Nations and demanded that a UN military force invade a hostile, sovereign country? Sure you can; we already lived through that over Iraq. Now imagine that...

February 28, 2008

France, Norway to join the fight in Afghanistan

It appears France is going to get in the fight in Afghanistan, which goes directly against MSM reporting that the NATO force in Afghanistan was crumbling. Reuters reports:France may send hundreds of ground troops to east Afghanistan where NATO-led fo...

February 27, 2008

Optimism on Iraq from surprising sources

The Addison Independent, published in very liberal Vermont, surprisingly reports a message that implies support for troops staying in Iraq -- from a BBC bureau chief, Adi Raval who delivered it at a local speech. Neither Vermont nor th...

February 22, 2008

Speaker Pelosi and the New York Times' Blind Eye

Since the 2006 Congressional victory by Democrats, The New York Times has ignored a highly questionable situation involving Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi among other leading Democrats, instead focusing on alleged Republican offenses.On August 2nd...

February 13, 2008

The Obama Cult of Nonthreatening Personality

Barack Obama strikes nearly everyone as a nice guy. Part of that appeal is a distinct absence of aggression. Normally, when we think about charismatic political leaders, the mind conjures up dynamism, vocal modulation. He doesn't need them. Perhaps t...

February 11, 2008

Winning in Afghanistan

Another top NATO general is going on the record about our success in Afghanistan, though you are unlikely to hear about such things from the mainstream media that prefer a narrative of failure.Last week I reported that comments from Army Gen. Da...

February 8, 2008

Media Spins Success in Afghanistan as Failure

American and Coalition forces have taken the initiative in Afghanistan, and have the Taliban on the run. Yet major American media outlets, to the extent they cover fighting in Afghanistan, are portraying the Taliban as "resurgent". Going on...

February 8, 2008

Detailing the defeat of Al Qaeda in Iraq (updated)

Al Qaeda appears to be crumbling in Iraq, a spectacular victory in the War on Terror. A senior leader has bared his soul to Amit R. Paley of the Washington Post, painting a vivid picture of what the surge has done to al Qaeda in Iraq. Here are s...

January 31, 2008

Taliban 'resurgence' sign of desperation not increased capability

An Associated Press report in response to President Bush's recent State of the Union speech argues that while the president was accurate on his statements regarding Afghanistan, he is misleading about the resurgence of the Taliban. It provides a good...

January 27, 2008

Spanish appeasement backfires

A new al Qaeda plot set in Spain and involving other European targets was recently disrupted, as reported by Reuters. The attack was set to occur shortly before a general election, much like the previous horrendous attack carried out in 2004. That at...

January 11, 2008

Al Qaeda on the ropes in Pakistan

Open tribal warfare in remote areas of Pakistan has the potential of scoring a major success in the War on Terror. As pointed out here at AT yesterday, indicators point to the beginning of the civil war between Taliban tribes predicted here at t...

January 11, 2008

AQ leadership in peril?

From the Daily Times of Pakistan: Stratfor says Qaeda deflecting attention from Pakistan, despite major successes, to protect its leadershipStratfor believes that Al Qaeda "prime" is headquartered in Pakistan. With Washington's focus shifti...

December 28, 2007

The War on Terror Comes to Pakistan

As the world digests the news of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, claims by an alleged al Qaeda spokesman that it is behind the political mass murder cannot be idly dismissed. For the War on Terror has come to Pakistan, and AQ has been losing. Ou...

December 14, 2007

Manufacturing Dissent: An Odd Poll Raises Questions

A recent Los Angeles Times/ Bloomberg poll which has been carried in most major media outlets claims that President Bush has lost the support of military veterans and their families over the war in Iraq. The LA Times writes, "Families with ties ...

November 30, 2007

CNN/YouTube Questioner Kicked Romney 'off my property'

It was bad enough that CNN handed the microphone over to an official, Gen. Kerr of a Hillary Clinton campaign committee to conduct an extended rebuttal of Republican candidates. But bloggers are continuing to dig in to and are exposing some pret...

November 9, 2007

Startling implications of a Jihadi letter

New light is being shed on the 2001 anthrax attacks in a fascinating open letter to Ayman al Zawahiri of al Qaeda, written by a jihadi living in London. Numan Bin Uthman, a former leader of an armed Islamic group in Libya, provides yet more evidence ...

November 2, 2007

Al Qaeda's Taliban Troubles

The signs of al Qaeda's downward spiral are accumulating. If the media were as anxious to find signs of victory as signs of failure in our war with al Qaeda, the incipient crumbling of its support in South Asia would already be noted. But of course t...

October 18, 2007

New Republic Author Gets it Backwards on Al Qaeda

Critics of President Bush's leadership continue to maintain that the War on Terror is failing, despite accumulating evidence to the contrary. Peter Bergen's attention-grabbing article in the New Republic, War of Error, is itself in error on...

October 18, 2007

New Republic Author Gets it Backwards on Al Qaeda

Critics of President Bush's leadership continue to maintain that the War on Terror is failing, despite accumulating evidence to the contrary. Peter Bergen's attention-grabbing article in the New Republic, War of Error, is itself in error on...

October 15, 2007

Confirming a quiet triumph over al Qaeda

More evidence accumulates that we are winning against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A report written by intelligence experts at the the United States Military Academy confirms the signs of the major success that I reported rece...

October 4, 2007

Phoniness In and Out of Uniform

So Rush Limbaugh called troops who oppose the war in Iraq "phony soldiers"? That's not what I heard, and I was listening to his program that day. To me it sounded like he was talking about seminar callers who pretend to be soldiers and peop...

October 1, 2007

Speaker Pelosi and the Missing Ramadan Spike

This year, for the first time since our troops have been in Iraq, the Ramadan Spike has failed to materialize. Few events in Iraq were as predictable as the yearly rise in causalities it signified. In 2004, 2005, and 2006, shortly before and during t...

September 29, 2007

Al Qaeda's Man in Saddam's Iraq

Then-Secretary of State Collin Powell made the case in 2003 in front of the United Nations that Saddam was providing al Qaeda safe haven in Iraq. As evidence he alleged that Abu Mus’ab Al Zarqawi was an al Qaeda operative in northern Iraq. For ...

September 28, 2007

A Quiet Triumph May be Brewing

There are signs that the global Islamic jihad movement is splitting apart, in what would be a tremendous achievement for American strategy. The center of the action is in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the very territory which is thought to harbor Usama, ...

September 22, 2007

Tales from the NRA convention (updated)

The National Rifle Association conference yesterday in Washington, D.C. drew lots of media attention because of the high powered presidential candidates invited to speak. McCain got in a line on a protester, Thompson got in a line on Bill Clinton, an...

September 21, 2007

Dick Morris doesn't like Fred Thompson

The onetime ultimate D.C insider, Dick Morris recently brandished the allegation that Fred Thompson is awkward in answering questions. What a hoot coming from the guy that Chris Matthews kicked off the air and out of the Hardball studio -- probably t...

September 6, 2007

The 'Ramadan spike'

The coming month is expected to be pivotal in determining the course of the war, owing to the impending briefing before Congress by the senior military leader and ambassador in Iraq. Over the days of summer it began to look like the death ledger...

July 20, 2007

Who is TNR's mysterious author 'Scott Thomas'? (Updated)

The New Republic is running a sensational pseudonymously-authored article entitled Shock Troops, which TNR claims is written by a soldier currently serving in Iraq. The article provides candid portrayals of rough and ugly humor among the troops and h...

June 23, 2007

Engage with Hamas?

The Washington Post delivered the jihadist propaganda goods with the bizarre ranting of Ahmed Yousef in a piece earlier this week entitled Engage With Hamas: We Earned Our Support. The article mirrors the recent blathering of Jimmy Carter (who possib...

June 16, 2007

Fred Thompson and Plain Speaking

Fred Thompson is a small town guy who made it from the agricultural communes of south-central Tennessee to Capitol Hill and our TV sets. And while we admire the accomplishments of this distinguished lawyer, Senator and actor, we admire the man even m...

May 31, 2007

The Jihad Fracture Widens

Despite the impression created by the dominant media, global jihad is showing signs of serious trouble. Bad news always tends to crowd out the good, of course, and this natural tendency is magnified when the press is as politicized and one-sided...

May 16, 2007

More Evidence of Saddam-al Qaeda Ties

An al Qaeda document newly released by the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) of the United States Military Academy provides an extraordinary new connection to a previously reported order by Saddam Hussein to support al Qaeda attacks upon US force...

May 13, 2007

Kosovo, Albania and Jihad

I don't know Patrick but I read his AT article "Kosovo and Antijihad Bigotry" and I have to say, he is spot on. I deployed to Kosovo with the 101st on Valentine's Day, 2000 as part of the first unit rotation in country after the initial US ...

May 8, 2007

More evidence of media bias

Bernard Goldberg, renowned author and commentator on media bias (based on his 20 years as a journalist) once wrote:"Bias in the media isn't just about what they cover; it's also about what they don't cover. Sherlock Holmes once solved a particul...

May 4, 2007

The Democrats' unilateral war policy

It wasn't too long ago that the Bush Administration suffered the barbs of Democrat leaders who decried US "unilateralism" in Iraq. As recently as April 23, 2007 Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) "painted the president's war policy as unila...

May 1, 2007

Petraeus vs. Hagel

Gen. David Petraeus recently returned from Iraq to brief the leaders of our government about the war there. Perhaps most notably, he took direct aim at the "Iraq is in a civil war" mantra of the media and Democratic leaders by stating that ...

April 26, 2007

Media Lynch Mob

Jessica Lynch was on Capitol Hill to talk about her experience in Iraq as a POW and subsequently as a media darling. This article from the Charleston Daily Mail typifies the coverage given to this topic by the media for years now. It portra...

April 18, 2007

Pelosi has a Sheehan of Her Own

It was in the summer of 2005 that the Bush Administration began to lose the support of the American public for the war in Iraq. A principal catalyst of this momentous transformation was the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq. Casey Sheehan's mother C...

April 16, 2007

Levin out the facts

In the op-ed pages of the Los Angeles Times, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) challenges  the assertions of the Vice President of the United States Richard Cheney regarding the cooperation of the Saddam regime and al Qaeda. The Senator relies on "...

April 12, 2007

Terror-sponsoring Syria takes comfort from Dems

Speaker Pelosi claimed that her trip to Syria would "establish facts, to hopefully build the confidence" between the U.S. and Syria. Everyone in the Department of State, Defense, and CIA should take note of the ‘no-confidence vote' th...

April 9, 2007

Cheney is Absolutely Correct

On the Rush Limbaugh radio program, VP Cheney restated his position that Saddam had ties to al Qaeda. The Vice President is completely correct. Specifically, he spoke of Abu Mus'ab al Zarqawi's presence in Iraq before the start of Operation Iraqi Fre...

April 7, 2007

America's Broken-Down Media

According to Mark Thompson, writer for Time magazine, America's army is broken. While it can not be argued that the military can possibly maintain the same state of readiness in war time as it does in peace time, broken has a certain specific ring to...

March 20, 2007

De-legitimizing the Troops: Update

A few weeks back, I chronicled the media's effort to de-legitimize the United States' fight to secure democracy in Iraq. I mentioned that the one true bastion of support for our effort in Iraq is the implementers, our troops. Since most of the Americ...

March 12, 2007

Has the Global Islamic Jihad Movement fractured?

Even as the leadership of the Democrats sets timetables for withdrawal from Iraq, the sands have shifted and leaders of the Global Islamic Jihad Movement are displaying signs that their own alliance has fractured. Some pundits have described the Demo...

March 6, 2007

A key arrest goes unnoticed

The arrest last week in Pakistan of a man dubbed the Defense Minister of the Taliban, Mullah Obaidullah Akhund has received far too little attention. Not only is he the highest ranking Taliban commander in custody, he may well be able to supply intel...

February 15, 2007

De-legitimizing the Troops

The claim of the anti-war left that they "support the troops" is getting threadbare. The next phase of anti-war playbook: De-legitimize the soldiers.It is no coincidence that NBC reporter Richard Engle, who has long offered slanted reportin...

January 30, 2007

Bell's folly

Thanks to Rush Limbaugh for once again pointing out the obvious to the oblivious. Rush recently brought attention to the Los Angeles Times op-ed piece by Professor David Bell in which he raises the question, was 9/11 really that bad? Besides Mr. Bell...

December 9, 2006

Response and responsibility: AP's editor speaks

Kathleen Carroll, executive editor and senior vice president of The Associated Press has addressed the rising cacophony of bloggers and pundits insisting that the AP substantiate its recent reporting of six Sunnis being burned alive in Baghdad. They ...

November 23, 2006

Iraq doesn't need Iran and Syria; it needs a King

Several media reports indicate that the Iraq Study Group chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker is close to revealing proposed strategies for dealing with Iraq. One of the expected policy shifts is expected to be a move towards diplomacy wi...

November 10, 2006

First Order of Business for Democrats: The Draft

On January 8th of 2003, Congressman Charles Rangel [D—NY] began an extensive campaign to bring back the military draft. He repeatedly submitted legislative bills to begin a military draft and compel all American men and women up to the age of f...

November 8, 2006

NYT's Blatant Double Standard on Classified Documents

The New York Times disclosed last week that some Saddam regime documents had been declassified that should not have been. The article then proceeded to knock everybody who advocated the release of these documents and implied they had given nuclear se...

November 3, 2006

Seymour Hersh's Other Reality

Seymour Hersh reportedly has claimed  at a recent speaking event in Montreal that, 'In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation,' he said. 'It isn't happening now, but I will tell you ...

October 22, 2006

Saddam's Poisonous Papers

Just days before the anthrax attacks of 2001 started in the United States, the Saddam regime appears to have received intelligence of an impending attack on its own government. According to a newly translated memorandum, Saddam's office issued a secu...

October 14, 2006

Fallujah: Baathist and Wahhabist cooperation

It has become 'common knowledge' in America that Saddam Hussein's Iraq would never work with Islamic terrorists because of ideological differences. In a recent report, the Senate Intelligence Committee codified this theory by quoting Saddam Hussein, ...

October 6, 2006

The Real Story Behind the Niger Affair?

So what were Niger, those sixteen words, and Joe Wilson's outrage all about? They were connected to the 'Bush lied!' claim. Is the mystery of how the President came to claim Iraq was searching for uranium in Niger solved? I think I may have put toget...

August 23, 2006

UK Airliner Bombing Plot Bust Questioned

Larry Johnson, a reputable terrorism expert, has published an essay in which he assails Bush and Blair for the revelations concerning the UK Sky Bombing Plot. He says, to put it succinctly, that the plot was not mature and that the move to stop the t...

August 21, 2006

The Fog of Peace

The end of hostilities across the Lebanese—Israeli border now necessitates a considered after action review to determine the lessons learned. The first determination that needs to be made is the end state. During conflict we hear the term 'fog ...

August 8, 2006

AP Writer Ignores Evidence of Iraq WMD

Aаrecentаarticle by Pulitzer—winning AP writer Charles Hanley entitled "Half of U.S. still believes Iraq had WMD" builds a not so subtle argument: those who believe Saddam Hussein still had WMD need to get fitted for tin foil hats.а He begins t...

February 26, 2006

The Damage to al-Qaeda

Recently I wrote about a newly released study from the West Point Combating Terrorism Center. The CTC just released documents associated with a study on al—Qaeda. One of them was a letter described here. As I read the letter, I couldn't help b...

February 21, 2006

More Evidence of Saddam's Links to al-Qaeda

Many people and institutions have a stake in the conclusion that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had no connection to al—Qaeda and the attacks on the United States, culminating (so far) in the destruction of 9/11. One spokesman coming to the fore of late...

February 20, 2006

Saddam and al-Qaeda

The proof has been right in front of you the entire time. Documents available on the internet, which pass the smell test and are probably genuine, show the link between Saddam and al Qaeda. On October 11th, 2004 an online news service called CNSnews ...