Religion of Peace watch: Woman burns own daughter alive

CBS News:

LAHORE, Pakistan -- A woman in Pakistan burned her 17-year-old daughter alive on Wednesday to punish her for marrying against the family's wishes, the latest in a series of so-called "honor killings" that claim the lives of nearly 1,000 women every year in the conservative Muslim country.

Police say Zeenat Rafiq's mother, Parveen, tied her to a cot and drenched her with kerosene before lighting her on fire. Neighbors in the congested, working-class neighborhood in the eastern city of Lahore came running when they heard the screams, but family members kept them from entering the house, said Nighat Bibi, who lives nearby.

The police eventually arrived and found the charred body near a staircase. They arrested the mother soon thereafter.

Islam's American apologists will tell you that this has nothing to do with Islam, it's merely a cultural thing, you see. But it's Islam all the way through. See my 2010 essay, "Honor, shame, the Middle East and the American left."

My 2008 predictions for this day

Exactly four years ago this day I posted, "Throwing it down," in which I said,

If you think things are bad now, you ain't seen nothing yet. Herewith I throw down on the status quo, 2008-plus-four:

So let's see how I did:
1. The national unemployment rate, as of Oct. 3, was 6.1 percent according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (The next release will be tomorrow.) As of early October 1012, I predict the unemployment rate will be at least two points higher, and probably close to 10 percent.

Near Hit: The October 2012 unemployment rate was 7.9 percent, or the October 2008 rate plus 1.8 percent. This does round to 2 percent, but I had set 8.1 percent as the low rate, so I claim an actual hit here.
But I was close.

2. The Gross Domestic Product will be lower than today, adjusted for inflation. The estimate for 2007's GDP is $13.78 trillion. Look for a GDP decrease of approximately $500-$700 billion.

Near Hit: GDP data are subject to revision, and since 2008, 2007's figure has been revised to $13.2 trillion. According to US Government Debt (a federal web site), here are the data (from the pages customizable charts and tables - pretty cool). The GDP for 2011 was $224 billion lower than 2007. (Interestingly, 2011's figure is $798 billion less than 2007's original figure.)

3. Tax revenues to the federal government, adjusted for inflation, will be lower than today. As the Bush-era tax cuts are allowed to expire and other tax rates are raised, productivity will decline as more capital is taken from the economy.

Exact Hit: Okay, the Bush-era tax cuts have not yet expired but a lot of taxes have been raised. So what has happened to revenue? These figures are not adjusted for inflation:

This year, income taxes and social security taxes are down from four years ago, even without adjusting for inflation/

4. That, in turn, means that the federal deficit will be much greater than today, and we're facing a trillion-dollar deficit next year alone.

Exact Hit: I hardly think I need to discuss this.

5. That in turn will drive the US public debt much higher. The public debt is today almost $10.6 trillion. 

Exact Hit: Near the bottom of the right column of this page is a running tally of the federal debt. As I type, it is almost 16.3 trillion.

6. Iraq will be effectively abandoned (see "Vietnam, South"). The key question is whether American security assistance will survive long enough to adequately finish training the Iraqis to defend themselves. My prediction: No. Al Qaeda in Iraq will be revived and the country will be embroiled in insurgency civil war.

Hit: There are almost no US troops in Iraq, even training Iraqis. Al Qaeda is operating nearly at will in western Iraq and much of the rest of the country. There is a domestic insurgency operating in Baghdad with numerous bombings there are elsewhere all this year.

7. Afghanistan: Obama has claimed that Afghanistan was the only legitimate target of US military response to 9/11. (Okay, he did say he would invade Pakistan, too.) This stance, of course, is proof of Obama's inability to think outside the box, especially on strategic issues. The war we are engaged in is not one against nations, but against ideology.

Obama's failure to understand the essence of the conflict will lead to severe mismanagement of operations in Afghanistan. Pakistan will become more radicalized and violence in Afghanistan will increase.

Hit: The Karzai government is one of the most corrupt on earth. Members of the Afghan security forces murder American and NATO troops. The surge there didn't work. The Taliban are not defeated nor are they even in retreat. Pakistan is becoming more radicalized militarily-Islamically and politically.

8. The Defense department's budget will be gutted of investments in major future-platform systems and high-technology programs. Current operations and maintenance accounts will be inadequate to sustain present force levels and equipment readiness (See "Carter, Jimmy."). The services' end strengths will be reduced. The armed services will face significant recruiting shortfalls as Obama's civilian-service corps are implemented and offer the same benefits as military service, but without the risks.

Hit: See "Sequestration," to take effect at the end of this year unless Congress and the president act to stop it. And they won't. Obama and the Democrats want it to happen. But even Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has warned strongly against allowing it to go forward. Won't matter.

What will be the result of a visibly weaker American defense establishment in global affairs? Look for an even-more expansive Russia and movements, though not outright invasion, of the Baltic countries and Ukraine. China will flex also, though I shrink from predicting actual military operations by the Chinese. Basically, Russia and China will spend the next four years watching America' economy and apparent national will decline. Moves, if they make them, will come in the spring of 2012, if they assess Obama will not be re-elected, or deep into Obama's second term if he is re-elected.

Hit: An expansive Russia? One, two, three. Russia and the Baltics, here. Ukraine? Doing pretty well, actually. China: more more assertive now than ever. especially with a modernizing navy and air force and cyberspace warfare capabilities.

That's the end of my 2008 predictions. I close with a comment left on the post on Nov. 16 that has turned out to be absolutely accurate:

Anonymous said...

It does not matter Rev. No matter what happens it will be Bush's fault. It will be Bush's fault in 2016. The major terrorist attack that occurs in 2015 will still be Bush's fault. The media will never ever be able to even question that the Messiah's programs might not be working, even when the unemployment rate is in the sevens or eights in two years and the defecit will be over a trillion. The mantra for the 2010 congressionals will be, "Well the Savior's plans just haven't had enough time to overcome the wreckage of Bush! He needs more time and more seats in Congress to accomplish this. I enjoyed your analysis and feel you may be dead on.

NOVEMBER 16, 2008 7:08 AM 

November 6, 2008 was three days after the election that year. I hold off making more four-year projections until we know who wins today - and that might take awhile.

How the bin Laden raid went down

DETAILED ACCOUNT OF THE BIN LADEN RAID Reveals How It Nearly Ended In Disaster:

Osama bin Laden mission was Bush's fault!

Osama bin Laden mission agreed in secret 10 years ago by US and Pakistan | World news | The Guardian

The US and Pakistan struck a secret deal almost a decade ago permitting a US operation against Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil similar to last week's raid that killed the al-Qaida leader, the Guardian has learned.

The deal was struck between the military leader General Pervez Musharraf and President George Bush after Bin Laden escaped US forces in the mountains of Tora Bora in late 2001, according to serving and retired Pakistani and US officials.

Under its terms, Pakistan would allow US forces to conduct a unilateral raid inside Pakistan in search of Bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the al-Qaida No3. Afterwards, both sides agreed, Pakistan would vociferously protest the incursion.

"There was an agreement between Bush and Musharraf that if we knew where Osama was, we were going to come and get him," said a former senior US official with knowledge of counterterrorism operations. "The Pakistanis would put up a hue and cry, but they wouldn't stop us."

Brilliant leak! Now if the net outcome of the raid turns negative, Obama can blame it all on
Bush!

Let there be - conspiracy theories!

Ding, dong, Osama's dead - or is he, really?

Via American Digest, I find this post by Cobb, "Because he's not dead yet:"

C'mon. You don't get your mitts on Bin Laden just to kill him, and you don't have 40 SEALs who are too slow to tackle the dude. There's is no picture because he's not dead yet. They're twisting him on a spit and slow roasting him until he's so tender the secrets just drip of the bones. They've got him simmering in pentathol. ...

He's certainly not free or missing, that's for sure. He's never going to see the light of day. But is he dead at this very moment? You will never know.

Which makes me wonder about the bogus death photos that got shown to some members of Congress.

A day after the White House said it will not release the official photo of Usama bin Laden’s body, many are wondering how a handful of lawmakers were duped into believing they saw it. ...

The announcement came after at least three U.S. lawmakers claimed to have seen what they believed was an authentic photograph of Bin Laden, shot in the face and chest during a CIA-led Navy SEALs operation Sunday at a secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
But those photos appear to have been doctored images sent by an undisclosed source or sources to members of Congress, including Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., who admitted Wednesday he’d been fooled into thinking the picture was real.
After telling reporters he had seen an image that confirmed Usama is "definitely dead," Brown later said "the photo that I saw and that a lot of other people saw is not authentic.

Let us take Cobb's conspiracy theory to its logical limit! I can conspiracy conspire with the best of 'em:

Q: Why did the White house dither so long on whether to release photos of bin Laden's corpse and then announce there would be no release?
A: There are no photos of bin Laden's corpse because bin Laden is not a corpse. He was snatched, not killed. The bogus photos that some Members received came from the CIA. They were trial balloons of deliberately faked photos. The "leak" was actually a test of the photos' credibility. It was only after they had been quickly debunked that the White House pulled the plug on using them as "official" photos.

Q: What about the burial at sea?
A: There was no burial at sea off USS Carl Vinson, some of whose officers and crew, including the captain, are part of the conspiracy. As for the SEALs and crews of the Army's 160th SOAR who flew the mission, they won't even tell you what they had for breakfast this morning, much less the respiratory status of a body brought out of a mission objective.

Q: So why the elaborate cover story that OBL was killed?
A: We don't want his successors in al Qaeda to know that OBL, having been waterboarded before 24 hours passed, has spilled his guts just as fully as 9/11's mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did after he was captured.

Q: Wait! Bin Laden was water boarded? I thought that Obama outlawed that!
A: Yeah, right. Remember, there's an election coming up in only, what 550 days or so. You think that not water boarding OBL is going to stand in the way of a second term? Just wait until the three months before November when we are incrementally fed through a thoroughly compliant media story after story of terrorist plots stopped by analyzing the intel info grabbed during the raid.

And stipulating that all Cobb proposes is true ... does the president know? Or does he really think that OBL is chatting it up right now with Luca Brazzi?

Think it couldn't happen? Remember that naval intelligence actually removed FDR from the distribution list of intercepted, decoded Japanese signals in the months before Pearl Harbor.

The problem with all this, of course, is that "three may keep a secret if two of them are dead." As Chuck Colson, who did prison time for being part of the Watergate coverup, put it, a conspiracy always gets blown, and the more people there are in it, the quicker.

This is exactly why I still insist that proof of OBLs' death must be made public. Not only will it dampen some (not all) of the conspiracy theories already abounding in Muslim lands, failure to do so will make it more likely that similar conpsiracy theories will start to gain credibility here. This must not happen.

For the record: I believe that the SOF operators went into the compound knowing that there was a high likelihood that OBL was there - but that killing or capturing him was not the highest priority of the mission, though high indeed it was. To repeat myself,

The real value of this raid is less the death of bin Laden, as emotionally satisfying as Americans find it, than the trove of materials gathered. ... What the raid did was retrieve enormously important al Qaeda hard drives and documents from Osama bin Laden's house, incidentally killing bin Laden as they did so.

Even if bin Laden had not been there, the raid would have been a smashing success because of the intelligence goldmine, the capture of which was surely of no lower priority than confronting bin Laden. But OBL was there. The SEALs killed him. Could they have captured him instead? We'll never know. But dead he is at the close-up hands of the US military. And what's even better, the US Congress authorized it.

Little gunfire during bin Laden raid

I speculated earlier today that there was probably not a lot of gunfire during the SEALs' raid on Osama bin Laden's Abottabad compound last Sunday.

There was not near the kind of firefight that we were told took place for the first 20 minutes of the raid. Since the official account of the sequence during the raid is about on it ninety-eleventh version, we do not know how much gunfire there actually was. Was there only one of the compound's residents armed, as one report says? Whatever, the compound was not an armed camp. While there might well have been 20 minutes elapse from the first to the last shot, it's hardly likely that firing was continuous or even frequent during that time. SEALs don't shoot a lot; they don't need to.

Just a few minutes ago, NBC Nightly News reported that there was only a little shooting inside the compound and almost all of it done by the SEALs. The only man who shot at the SEALs was a bodyguard, who promptly went to meet his 72 virgins.

The report also said that the SEALs encountered bin Laden's 19-year-old son on an interior stair and shot him dead. Osama himself peered down the stairs, saw the SEALs and ran back into his room, barely dodging a burst from a SEAL. The SEALs charged into the bedroom, where one shot bin Laden's wife in the leg. Another SEAL shot bin Laden once in the chest and once in the head. That was all the shooting. The rest of the 40 minutes the SEALs spent on the ground was taken up by piling as much material of intelligence value as possible into their grab bags.

The real value of this raid is less the death of bin Laden, as emotionally satisfying as Americans find it, than the trove of materials gathered. That's why I earlier wrote that what the raid did was retrieve "enormously important al Qaeda hard drives and documents from Osama bin Laden's house, incidentally killing bin Laden as they did so."

Did US shut down Pak electrical and comms in Abbottabad to raid bin Laden?

A very titillating tidbit is found in this ABC report:

Residents near the bin Laden compound told ABC News that just before the stealth helicopters arrived, all electricity and cellphone service was knocked out and then came back on right after the choppers left.

If true, this is a stunning report. It would indicate that US Special Operations Command has the ability to do something like an EMP - electromagnetic pulse - that is not a pulse, but a continuous, disabling stream of EM energy that can be turned on and off at will. Frankly, I'm skeptical because the power and transmission requirements for such a device would be enormous. Jamming cellphone frequencies would be of little challenge to signals specialists, but shutting down even part of an electrical grid by non-destructive, non-invasive means would be incredibly daunting.

But there are some interesting other sources: "Making sense of the Osama op through tweets."

There are also references in the tweets of a blackout in the town, roads being blocked, telephones going dead and sirens being sounded. It is not clear whether these things happened during the raid or after the US choppers had left with bin Laden's body.

Even so, the question is begged just why there was not even a Pakistani police response during the 40 minutes that US special ops were on the ground. The answer would seem to lead down two divergent trails:

1. There was secret Pakistani involvement in the raid who stopped Abbottabad authorities from responding. Regardless of what the Pak government's official, public stance is toward OBL or the raid, it may be that there was a level of cooperation that no one wants to talk about. In fact, to take this conspiracy theory all the way, might there have been a "rogue" cell within the Pak military of intelligence service that cooperated with no knowledge by, much less sanction of, the Pak government?

2. There was not near the kind of firefight that we were told took place for the first 20 minutes of the raid. Since the official account of the sequence during the raid is about on it ninety-eleventh version, we do not know how much gunfire there actually was. Was there only one of the compound's residents armed, as one report says? Whatever, the compound was not an armed camp. While there might well have been 20 minutes elapse from the first to the last shot, it's hardly likely that firing was continuous or even frequent during that time. SEALs don't shoot a lot; they don't need to. For that matter, special operators have silenced weapons that are not publicized. (In World War II, the OSS developed a pistol so silent that OSS Director Bill Donovan took it into the the Oval Office and fired several rounds into a small sandbag he had brought with him. Roosevelt, who was looking away while he dictated a letter, did not even turn around. This according to Donovan's deputy, Stanley Lovell, in his book Of Spies and Stratagems.)

The tweets from Abbottabad refer to how much noise the helicopters made in and over bin Laden's compound, although the choppers' approaches seem not to have been perceived very much. What gunfire sounds did come from the compound may have been overwhelmed by the machine noise.

Still, the lack or emergency response is more than a little curious. Forty minutes is quite enough time for at least a few police patrols to have reached the compound. Why didn't they? The US government is not asking, and the Pakistanis aren't saying.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Religion of "peace, fairness, tolerance" watch

Speaking this week to an Indian audience in Mumbai, President Obama said, "More than a billion people practise Islam and an overwhelming majority view their obligations to a religion that reaffirms peace, fairness, tolerance. I think all of us recognise that this great religion in the hands of a few extremists has been distorted by violence."

Asa Bibi, Christian, condemned to die by adherents of
"peace, fairness, tolerance" for not being
verbally respectful of Muhammad

You know, a few extremists like the jurists in Pakistan, who have just sentenced a Christian woman to death for defaming Muhammad.

Asia Bibi, a 45-year-old mother-of-five, denies blasphemy and told investigators that she was being persecuted for her faith in a country where Christians face routine harassment and discrimination. ...

The court heard she had been working as a farmhand in fields with other women, when she was asked to fetch drinking water.

Some of the other women – all Muslims – refused to drink the water as it had been brought by a Christian and was therefore "unclean", according to Mrs Bibi's evidence, sparking a row.

The incident was forgotten until a few days later when Mrs Bibi said she was set upon by a mob.
The police were called and took her to a police station for her own safety.

Shahzad Kamran, of the Sharing Life Ministry Pakistan, said: "The police were under pressure from this Muslim mob, including clerics, asking for Asia to be killed because she had spoken ill of the Prophet Mohammed.

"So after the police saved her life they then registered a blasphemy case against her." He added that she had been held in isolation for more than a year before being sentenced to death on Monday.

The blasphemy law in Pakistan is used routinely and regularly to persecute non-Muslims to make sure they know their place there as third-class citizens. This is not "extremism." It is a mainstream, government-sanctioned practice in one of the most populous Muslim countries in the world. And almost no Pakistani Muslims speak out against it.

Times Square bomber not as inept as our media

Having been focused on the flooding here in Tennessee (what, you didn't know?), I have not posted until now about Faisal Shahzad, a.k.a. the Times Square bomber. I won't cover the back story because I presume you're familiar with it.

One persistent theme in the media has been, as the CS Monitor put it, "Times Square bomber joins the growing list of inept terrorists."

Have Al Qaeda and associated Islamist terror groups become incompetent?

Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-born US citizen arrested and charged with the attempted attack, appears to have had little real training in explosives technique, according to US officials.

Well, not so fast. Let's consider first of all just how competent the media have been covering this attempted terrorist act man-caused disaster.

First up, Chris Matthews, courtesy of The Real Revo:

“I’m worried that the next time a terrorist will get through . . . . because, you’re gonna see the tea-partiers get strengthened”

Next, a grab of Gerard Vanderleun's Sideline feature:

A screen grab of the CBS headline is here. Greg Gutfield asks, Why Does Faisal Shahzad Hate Us?, but unlike other media commentators, he knows the answer:

It's only a mystery if you're in the media and really stupid. Everyone else pretty much understands why the terrorist left a fuel bomb in an area filled with families: He hates us, he wants us dead.

But the media — full of fragile egos and bubble-encased boobs — can't see that. In fact, it's kind of awesome how huge their blind spot toward radical Islam is. If only there could be other motives, so they'd never have to place blame on anything (other than America, of course).

Then we have Contessa Brewer of MSNBC, who is devastated that Shahzad is Muslim instead of a white, racist militia member (courtesy James Lileks):

“I get frustrated…” said Contessa Brewer. “There was part of me that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country. … There are a lot of people who want to use terrorist intent to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way or come from certain countries or whose skin color is a certain way. I mean they use it as justification for really outdated bigotry.”

The vid:



Certainly Shahzad's truck bomb was not nearly as well-assembled or equipped as his ideological allies of Hamas, al Qaeda or the Taliban. But it turns out, Shahzad's bombmaking may not have been as inept as first declared, according to STRATFOR.

[T]he materials present could have caused a substantial explosion had they been prepared and assembled properly.

The main threat was from 250 pounds of urea-based fertilizer, enough to cause "serious carnage" if it had detonated, and that without including the potential effects of the pressurized tanks of propane.

... urea-based fertilizer can be mixed with nitric acid to create urea nitrate, the main explosive charge used in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. (It is not known if the fertilizer in the Pathfinder had been used to create urea nitrate.) Urea nitrate is a popular improvised mixture that can be detonated by a blasting cap and does not require a high-explosive booster charge like ammonium nitrate does; 250 pounds of urea nitrate would be enough to destroy the Pathfinder completely and create a substantial blast effect.

What caused Shahzad's bomb to fail? STRATFOR says,

It appears that Shahzad made a classic “Kramer jihadist” mistake: trying to make his attack overly spectacular and dramatic. This mistake was criticized by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) leader Nasir al-Wahayshi last year when he called for grassroots operatives to conduct simple attacks instead of complex ones that are more prone to failure. In the end, Shahzad (who was probably making his first attempt to build an IED by himself) tried to pull off an attack so elaborate that it failed to do any damage at all.

He did not follow the KISS rule - "Keep It Simple, Stupid."

But the media's ineptitude extends not just to moral blindness, but to outright malfeasance:

Some of our primary tools of counterterrorism have been severely compromised by the American press. Consider two major counterterrorism initiatives launched by the Bush administration and continued by the Obama administration.

The first is the so-called warrantless wiretapping of international calls by the National Security Agency. The New York Times disclosed critical details of the program in December 2005, alerting al Qaeda to our ability to monitor a high volume of phone calls and emails, not only from points in the United States to points abroad or vice versa, but also between foreign cities. ...

[Second is} the revelation, published in the New York Times in June 2006 and followed immediately by the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, that the CIA and the Treasury Department, in the search for the movement of al Qaeda funds, were tapping into the enormous database of financial transactions operated by the Belgian clearinghouse known as SWIFT.

The Times story disclosing the SWIFT program itself noted that the monitoring had achieved significant successes, including providing information leading to the arrest of Hambali, the top operative in the al Qaeda affiliate Jemaah Islamiyah, who was behind the Bali bombing of 2002. In this instance even the Times’s own ombudsman, Byron Calame, concluded that the paper should not have run the story. ...

We are an open society that cannot be hardened against attacks like the one we just saw in Times Square. But a press that regards the First Amendment as a suicide pact and recklessly divulges operational counterterrorism secrets takes a very difficult problem and makes it far worse, placing us all at risk.

Yes indeed, "mainline media audience plummets, just why remains a mystery" - at least to the media themselves.

Pakistani Politics Provides Focus for Our Own

John G. Krenson
The devastating assassination of Benazir Bhutto on Thursday should make Americans aware of many things. One, those who are running for president of the United States must be thankful that they are running for that office in America. Another, we American citizens should be reminded that freedom is costly and that ours is not something to be taken for granted. And yet another is that the Bhutto assassination brings into sharper focus the candidates who are presenting themselves for that office here.

Our world is dangerous and now it is perhaps a bit more dangerous because of this tragic event. Today each US political party has only one candidate who, relative to the rest, is most prepared at noon on Inauguration Day to hit the ground running in this dangerous world. And these two also present a clear and distinct choice to Americans - just as it should be.

On the Democrat side that person is Hillary Clinton. Despite how “indirect” her own experience may be, the fact is that she has years of experience and familiarization around the top levels of state government and the federal government. She has participated directly in the highest elected body in the world – the US Senate. She knows foreign leaders and has faced crisis of immense proportions – both personal and political. She has a team of advisors that have been around her for years and whom she controls, not the other way around. And she has a well developed and defined vision of where she wants to lead our country. Her main competitors are naïve, inexperienced and subject to manipulation by their advisors. Neither has a well developed and defined track record of what they really might do in office.

On the Republican side it is John McCain. The man has the most direct experience in world affairs and domestic politics at the national level than all the rest of the Republican field combined. He has been in the fires of where he will lead young Americans. He too has long and well developed relationships with world leaders – he will need no introductions. He has been tested at the most extreme levels and has demonstrated how he will respond. His character is probably the greatest of any leader who has aspired to this office. Nobody seeks to control McCain (though the media in the past has had success at manipulating him; a lesson he seems to have learned and that also has bought him long term goodwill among the electorate). Alone among the entire presidential candidate field he is most likely to attract heavy independent votes and crossover votes from his rival party.

Not the most consistent conservative (Thompson can claim that mantle) McCain is more reliable than his chief rivals and he has the substance that Huckabee lacks and the traction that Thompson can’t seem to get; and the depth of experience and world network neither of them have . Thompson is my own philosophical favorite but I would follow McCain proudly.

Clinton and McCain. Two distinct choices with clear discernable and distinguishable visions. Both strong-willed. Both tested under pressure. Both with longstanding, well developed international networks and relationships in a dangerous world. Both know where they want to lead and have a track record to back it up. Whether you love one and despise the other, our nation is fortunate to have these two distinct and tested candidates. And we are fortunate that they are not running in the same environment as Pakistani politics.

John G. Krenson is the author of Crossfire: A Time for Peace, War and Love available at www.johnkrenson.com.

Obama threatens to invade Pakistan

reposted from donaldsensing.com, same date

Presidential candidate Barack Obama says that he will order combat missions inside Pakistan.

"Let me make this clear," Obama said in a speech prepared for delivery at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will." ...

Obama said that as commander in chief he would remove troops from Iraq and putting them "on the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan."

Good grief.

Here's a short blogosphere roundup:

Thomas Lifson: "Nothing is more dangerous than a naïve appeaser, other than a naïve appeaser who erratically takes rash steps in order to look tougher than he really is."

BCB: "To Heck With Our Enemies, Let’s Invade Our Allies": "[I]n a week or so we have had Obama say that stopping genocide was no reason to stay in Iraq, that he would personally meet with heads of rogue states and that he would invade a nuclear-armed ally."

Michelle Malkin, who has a link roundup of her own.