RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/civilian-analysts-gained-petraeuss-ear-while-he-was-commander-in-afghanistan/2012/12/18/290c0b50-446a-11e2-8061-253bccfc7532_print.html
This is more proof of the mediocrity and incompetence of General Petraeus….rsk

Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, a husband-and-wife team of hawkish military analysts, put their jobs at influential Washington think tanks on hold for almost a year to work for Gen. David H. Petraeus when he was the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. Provided desks, e-mail accounts and top-level security clearances in Kabul, they pored through classified intelligence reports, participated in senior-level strategy sessions and probed the assessments of field officers in order to advise Petraeus about how to fight the war differently.

Their compensation from the U.S. government for their efforts, which often involved 18-hour workdays, seven days a week and dangerous battlefield visits?

Zero dollars.

Although Fred Kagan said he and his wife wanted no pay in part to remain “completely independent,” the extraordinary arrangement raises new questions about the access and influence Petraeus accorded to civilian friends while he was running the Afghan war.

Petraeus allowed his biographer-turned-paramour, Paula Broadwell, to read sensitive documents and accompany him on trips. But the entree granted the Kagans, whose think-tank work has been embraced by Republican politicians, went even further. The four-star general made the Kagans de facto senior advisers, a status that afforded them numerous private meetings in his office, priority travel across the war zone and the ability to read highly secretive transcripts of intercepted Taliban communications, according to current and former senior U.S. military and civilian officials who served in the headquarters at the time.

The Kagans used those privileges to advocate substantive changes in the U.S. war plan, including a harder-edged approach than some U.S. officers advocated in combating the Haqqani network, a Taliban faction in eastern Afghanistan, the officials said.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3504/uk-free-press-leveson Dig a little deeper and the trail leads back to Government. Lord Leveson’s proposal into the “ethics of the press,” submitted to the Parliament last week, puts the foxes in charge of the hen house and conceals the potential for a return to the dark days of the press censorship and state-regulation. Why should […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/nigerias-blood-cries-out-persecuted-nigerian-christians-seek-protection-against-islamist-terror?f=puball A delegation of Nigerian Christians visited the Washington, DC offices of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) this past Wednesday, December 12, 2012. Led by Dr. Musa Asake, the general secretary of the ecumenical Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), the Nigerians were in the American capital in order to discuss persecution of Nigerian […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/its-not-the-taliban-its-our-insults?f=puball I’ve been down this road before; down it so many times I can drive it with eyes closed. But just when I thought I had seen it all the Obama administration trumps itself. When the Ft. Hood terrorist shooting became “workplace violence”, after certain words such as “Radical Islam”, “terrorism” and “Jihadist” were removed […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/why-iran-won-the-last-middle-east-conflict Although the truce between Gaza and Israel didn’t lead to an unequivocal result, Israeli officials said they destroyed most rocket launchers and Gazan leaders maintain the settlement means they resisted the Israeli offensive and have been emboldened by their relative success. Is there a victor in this struggle? Despite the ambiguity and competing claims, […]

By Cindy Mindell and Judie Jacobson/Connecticut Jewish Ledger Newtown’s youngest victim is laid to rest, as the Jewish community comes together FAIRFIELD – Bunches of white balloons marked the entrance to the Abraham L. Green Funeral Home on Beach Road in Fairfield, CT, where 6-year-old Noah Pozner was eulogized three days after the Sandy Hook Elementary […]

http://politicalmavens.com/

Here are some words for the media to avoid in discussing unexpected death by violence, particularly mass murder: healing, closure and moving on. Whether these have been supplied by pop psychology, grief counselors or other types of do-gooders, they are insulting to the victims and their survivors and set up unrealistic, undesirable standards for the rest of us. Only one day after the Newtown massacre, newscasters, planted all over that devastated town, stood solemnly at attention with their ubiquitous microphones, talking about how the community was coming together to help each other move on. Within a few short days, the “c” word had surfaced and soon enough, the president of the United States flew in to personally console the grieving families – another media event. What happened in Newtown is profoundly tragic, made more so by the tender ages of these schoolchildren and by our lack of understanding of what caused it or how to prevent it from happening again. The appropriate response to such grief may be respectful silence at a time when no words can offer solace.

Those who have rushed to judge that the availability of guns in our society is the main culprit should be aware of how prevalent guns are in Newtown households and how very little crime exists in this community. Those who blame society for stigmatizing the mentally ill and not offering treatment for them should recognize that there was nothing in Adam Lanza’s behavior that even hinted at violence, that he was never a discipline problem at school, that Asperger’s Syndrome has zero correlation with violent behavior or mental illness. He was not a child who killed small animals or set fires at an early age. Unlike the shooters of Columbine, this young man kept to himself, did not appear to be bullied for it and gave no indication of dark thoughts involving murder and suicide. For those who feel that psychiatric intervention might have prevented this, there is the rejoinder that the murderers at Aurora and Virginia Tech were receiving such attention at the time of their rampages. And for those who blame our violence-riddled popular culture, we have no indication as yet that Adam Lanza partook of that. From the meager information that has been garnered so far, it would seem that far from being a member of a gang or a groupie for rappers, or addicted to video games, he was a representative of only his solitary self.

Why aren’t we listening to the Israelis’ war warnings? It’s a repeat of what Churchill called the “unwisdom” of the West in the 1930s.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/op-ed-wars-and-rumors-of-war/article/2516196

Of World War II, Winston Churchill wrote, “There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle.” Churchill’s great history of the Second World War is preoccupied with the fact that had Europe and America acted wisely, Hitler would never have been able to cause the deaths of so many millions.

Hitler — in “Mein Kampf,” in countless speeches and in his actions — gave the world warning after warning of what would come once he achieved power. But the West did what it does best — what it is doing now on Iran — and didn’t take the evil madman at his word.

The Iranian regime is evil but not mad, at least not in the context of its radical Shiite culture. Iran’s leaders, beginning with revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini, have stated again and again that Israel must “vanish from the arena of time.” Around Iran, the government has erected many billboards and signs like the one that decorated the headquarters of the terrorist Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which reportedly say, in English, that “Israel should be wiped out of the face of the world.” Iranian President Ahmadinejad last August said that Israel was a “cancerous tumor.” A month later, he told the U.N. General Assembly that Israel would “be eliminated.”

Since it came to power in 1979, the Iranian regime has pursued development of nuclear weapons. Only recently has the U.N.’s purblind nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, come to believe what has been evident since at least 1981: Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is serious. Iran will not be deterred or stopped by diplomatic action.

But the West is repeating what Churchill called the “unwisdom” of the 1930s. Israel, which is most immediately and directly affected by Iran’s nuclear ambitions, is preparing for what will be — because of the West’s unwisdom — its inevitable war with Iran.

Terror and school shootings sides of same coin
By Spengler

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/NL19Aa01.html

Consider two situations. First, a madman kills 20 schoolchildren in America for unexplained reasons. Second, Muslim terrorists kill 22 children in Israel (at Ma’alot in 1974), or 186 children at Beslan in the Russian Caucusus in 2004, for clearly stated reasons. What do they have in common?

The suicidal jihadi is the Doppelganger of the angst-ridden Westerner. The jihadi attempts to reconstruct a faux version of a
traditional society that cannot survive the bright light of modernity; the Westerner seeks distractions from the inevitability of death. What the jihadi does in practice, the jaded West does in its imagination – and occasionally in real life.

Slaughter of innocents is commonplace in many Muslim countries. In this morning’s news, we hear that 10 Afghan girls were killed by a roadside bomb, and that 27 Iraqis were killed by bombs near Mosul. The National Counterterrorism Center counts 79,766 terror attacks from 2004 through 2011, with 111,774 killed and 228,317 wounded. It does not report how many of the dead and injured were children.

Why are so many Muslims willing to kill themselves and others? It is an expression of cultural despair. Muslim civilization is disintegrating under the onset of modernity, as I argued in my 2011 book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too). The encroaching sense of social death motivates the most horrific sort of acts.

What kind of mind could walk into an elementary school and shoot 20 young children to death? Whatever it was that motivated the Sandy Hook killer, he had something in common with the Chechnyan and Arab terrorists who systematically murdered 186 school children during the 2004 Beslan massacre. That probably was the single most horrific act since the downfall of National Socialism.

The slaughter of children is sufficiently rare in the West that it overwhelms us with horror and grief. There have been five school shootings in Europe during the past 10 years with 10 or more dead, and two in the United States – the 2007 Virginia Tech incident and the Sandy Hook shootings. Despite its much stricter gun control, Europe has been the scene of more mass school killings than the United States. We Americans would be fooling ourselves to think that stricter gun laws would help.

My eagle eyed e-pal Max W……sent me this quote from Obama:

“IF THEY BRING A KNIFE TO THE FIGHT, WE BRING A GUN…..”

How about a Czar for “Rage Control?”