In the small hours of Sunday morning, June 12, Omar Mateen used his cell phone to dial 911 in Orlando, Florida. When he was put through to a police operator, Mateen swore allegiance to the Islamic State and told the dispatcher that he was about to enter a bar called The Pulse.
As the White House hails a breakthrough in its diplomatic effort to curb Iran’s nuclear program, several under-reported facts cast a shadow over any real, or imagined, success. President Obama’s assurance that “every pathway to a nuclear weapon is cut off” for Iran flies in the face of reality.
Over the weekend, the normally stolid New York Times published an almost hysterical screed targeting the operators of the Navy’s SEAL Team Six. The article accused them of a variety of war crimes, including the unprovoked murder of civilians, the summary execution of enemy combatants, the mutilation of corpses and the use of snipers to kill little girls.
Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece, American Sniper, has shattered box office records and touched a chord in movie audiences across the country. The film has also unleashed an unbecoming waft of snarkiness from a pair of Hollywood insiders— Seth Rogan and Michael
The massacre of the staff of Charlie Hebdo takes its place among the despicable crimes committed in the name of Islamic fundamentalism. As the nation of France and the world come to terms with both horror and grief, details are emerging about the perpetrators of this atrocity and the means by which it was carried out.
BILOXI, MISSISSIPPI– Few will remember that thirty-one years ago today, the United States received its baptism of fire in the Middle East. On October 23, 1983, at 6:20 on a Sunday morning, a Mercedes truck smashed through the gates of
President Obama’s pledge to dismantle ISIS, drive it from Iraq, and to strike at its bases in Syria has Secretary of State John Kerry embarking on a coalition-building tour of Gulf and Arab capitals. Kerry’s task is complicated not only
Sobering new details have emerged about a recent Taliban assault on a sensitive US facility at the Kabul air base. Fighting erupted in the pre-dawn hours of July 17th, after heavily armed insurgents penetrated the airfield’s outer defenses to strike
The Republican National Committee passed a resolution Friday demanding an investigation into what it called the “gross infringement” of Americans’ civil rights by the National Security Agency. The resolution states that “the mass collection and retention of personal data [by
(Bagram, Afghanistan) On a grey-brown December morning, an Afghan Air Force C-208 taxis and holds short of runway two-nine at Kabul International Airport. Its mission isn’t glamorous: a liaison flight from the capital to the NATO Base at Bagram, up
Another sad chapter in the Benghazi saga will open on June 26, when retired Army General Carter Ham, the former leader of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), will respond to questions from the House Armed Services Committee. General Ham was
Nineteen years ago, a failure to support US troops in combat led to the resignation of the Secretary of Defense. Will history repeat itself? Blackhawk Down— the words continue to chill, nineteen years after heavily armed terrorists shot down two
It has taken weeks to establish what happened on the ground during the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi — and longer still to discover who knew what in Washington in the hours during and after the attack. On
It has taken more than four weeks, but the facts of the assault on the American consulate in Benghazi are slowly emerging. It is now known that on the evening of September 11, 2012, Ambassador Christopher Stevens conducted a scheduled
Winston Churchill said that “history is written by the victors,” and that maxim is as correct today as it was in 1945. But in order to write history, one needs access to the facts–the accounts of eyewitnesses, or, at the