Free Republic

Inside the RingBy Bill Gertz - The Washington Times Wednesday, December 21, 2011 **SNIP** INSIDE OCCUPY D.C. People monitoring the Occupy D.C. movement tell Inside the Ring that the two encampments are fast becoming health hazards. Numerous protesters also recently were sickened with unusual respiratory illnesses. The major emerging problem for the leftists camped out in tents at McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza is rats. The rodents appear to be moving into the area by the hundreds, and their numbers are increasing daily. The McPherson camp appears be where more radical leftists are based. An observer familiar with the McPherson...

Defense officials are criticizing what they say is the failure to capture or kill top al Qaeda leaders because of timidity on the part of policy officials in the Pentagon, diplomats at the State Department and risk-averse bureaucrats within the intelligence community. Military special operations forces (SOF) commandos are frustrated by the lack of aggressiveness on the part of several policy and intelligence leaders in pursuing al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his top henchmen, who are thought to have hidden inside the tribal areas of Pakistan for the past 6½ years. The focus of the commandos' ire, the...

An Army judge advocate general (JAG) temporarily banned Army and Marine Corps snipers from using a highly accurate open-tip bullet. The JAG, we are told, mistakenly thought the open-tip round was the same as hollow-point ammunition, which is banned. The original open-tip was known as Sierra MatchKing and broke all records for accuracy in the past 30 years.

Fallujah post-mortem     Some Marine units moved through Fallujah in November with Arabic translators. The infantrymen wanted to be able to eavesdrop on the terrorists' radio net.     A Marine told us that, roughly translated, one terrorist was heard to say: "We are fighting. But the Marines keep coming. We are shooting, but the Marines won't stop."     The Marines, backed by Army tanks, captured Fallujah in 11 days and with it the last large base for Abu Musab Zarqawi.