Posted on 09/09/2014 5:39:29 PM PDT by SoFloFreeper
.....Obama is constructing a strategy for an increasingly complex war he never wanted to enter. And allies in the region are skeptical....
The reluctance of crucial countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia exposes a big flaw in Obama's plan: He can't "degrade and destroy" ISIS without going into Syria but the U.S. can't beat ISIS in Syria without a ground force....
"The U.S. and the West have avoided the Syrian conflict for two years, essentially permitting the conditions that spawned ISIS," said Clint Watts, counterterrorism expert at the Foreign Policy Institute.
The Obama administration's nominal partner on the ground in Syria is the Free Syrian Army, which Obama has repeatedly disregarded as "an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists, and so forth."
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Who is the victim?
I don't know.
However, the photo appears to be of a victim of the Argentine Dirty War of 1976 to 1983. See this early appearance in Le Monde in 2008.
The leftards are fond of using it uncaptioned to illustrate screeds against the CIA, Cheney, Bush, etc. It's posted with file names such as condiricetorturecrime.jpg or cia-torture.jpg, the implication being that it depicts torture by or on behalf of the CIA in special rendition prisons overseas.
Pope Benedict XVI delivered a lecture at the University of Regensburg in Bavaria, in his 2006 speech, simply titled “Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections,” Benedict characteristically took up a knotty concept — the interplay of faith and reason. He wanted to show how reason untethered from faith leads to fanaticism and violence.
To illustrate that case, Benedict dug up a 14th-century dialogue between a long-forgotten Byzantine Christian emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, and a Persian scholar about the concept of violence in Islam.
“Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached,” Benedict quoted the emperor as saying to his Islamic interlocutor.
In Islamic teaching, Benedict said, “God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.”
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