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FORT HOOD — The past few days have featured harrowing testimony from witnesses and victims who described the gruesome, blood-soaked scene inside the medical processing center where Maj. Nidal Hasan killed 13. Yesterday columnist Ken Herman sat in the courtroom and described the scene in today’s Statesman: In a day of often harrowing testimony — “It was squirting across the room,” victim Mick Engnehl testified when asked how he knew he was bleeding — I found the most disturbing moments to be the silent ones, when prosecutors, in advance of offering them as evidence, handed Hasan small containers holding bullets...

The kidnapping of the two Syrian Orthodox archbishops in Syria is an act of retaliation on the part of terrorist Chechen jihadists who are fighting with anti-Assad rebels over the killing of one of two Chechens responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings and the arrest of the other, by U.S. police forces, Turkish newspaper Sabah reported this morning. The two prelates, the Syrian Orthodox Archbishop of Aleppo, Yohanna Ibrabhim and the Greek Orthodox bishop Boulos Yaziji were taken hostage on Monday, 30 kilometres from the Turkish border, as they were returning by car to Aleppo. Their driver was killed by...

The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack, according to U.S. officials familiar with the interviews. --------------snip------------------------------ The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation, said Dzhokhar and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed by police as the two attempted to avoid capture, do not appear to have been directed by a foreign terrorist organization. Rather, the officials said, the evidence so far suggests they were “self-radicalized” through Internet sites and U.S....

War On Terrorism: We have a medal for those who remotely operate drones, but the Pentagon claims awarding the victims of the 2009 shooting with Purple Hearts would jeopardize the shooter's chance at a fair trial. We recently noted that the Obama administration's shameful designation of the Nov. 5, 2009, rampage at the Army base in Killeen, Texas, by Major Nidal Hasan as "workplace violence" had denied survivors benefits they would have been entitled to had the attack been properly labeled an act of terror. For example, Staff Sgt. Shawn Manning was shot six times but was denied benefits that...

CORPUS CHRISTI -- Many parents check their children's school work to make sure they're getting good grades, but how often to you check the content of those lessons? One mother of a child in Flour Bluff ISD says when she did, she was shocked that lesson taught her son to blame the United States for the 9/11 attacks. Kara Sands posted the test on her facebook page and it began to spread like wildfire. The test covers content watched on a video in class. What bothered her most is question #3 on the test. It asks why the U.S. may...

American television nertworks, Fox News Channel among them, have decided that the attempted assasination of a leading critic of Islam in an American ally is unworthy of attention, so we must look northward for our information. Danish historian and journalist Lars Hedegaard was interviewed by Canadian Sun TV's Michael Coren for the third time since Hedegaard survived an assassination attempt in early February, ostensibly for his criticism of Islamic supremacism, and was forced into protective seclusion. During this interview (Monday 3/18/13), Hedegaard observed, Anyone who stands up and criticizes Islam is fair game. It's like Mao said, "Kill one and...

March 3, 2013 Report: FBI Benghazi Survivor Interviews Delivered to Senate Intel Committee Kerry Picket (Excerpt) A source told CBS News that FBI transcripts of interviews with Benghazi survivors were turned over to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday........ The documents that came from the White House is the second set to be sent to Congress. The initial set of documents related to the attack were considered “insufficient” due to massive redactions.... The documents that were sent on Thursday had fewer redactions. They show that e-mail correspondence reveal “talking points” that were sent around the White House, the FBI, and...

President Obama declares that, “We are not at war with Islam,” but the Islamic Quran and Sharia command that Muslims conduct jihadist war against non-Muslims to spread the religion and Sharia law worldwide. The question is why Obama maintains we are not at war with Islam, when Islam is clearly at war with the U.S.? President Barack H. Obama proclaims that the U.S. is not “at war with Islam.” The president then proceeds to draw an imaginary line between “moderate” and “radical” groups of Muslims that does not exist within the reality of Islamic “theology.” Obama claims that that there...

The new judge in the Fort Hood shooting rampage case faces a controversial decision next week: whether to spare Nidal Hasan a possible death sentence and let him plead guilty in the worst mass shooting on a U.S. military installation. Hasan wants to plead guilty to 13 counts of premeditated murder, Army rules prohibit a judge from accepting a guilty plea in a death penalty case...

We've given up on changing the world. The pragmatic (and brutal) approach to beating terrorism is the only way Is being an international terrorist like being a Page 3 model? By which I mean, when Mokhtar Belmohktar, 40, from Algeria, is pictured in our newspapers, his one eye staring flintily into the camera, clutching his gun like these people always do, is this really what it is all about? Maybe he'll buy lots of copies, clip them out, post them to friends and keep one stuck to the fridge for ever. Or maybe not. Maybe it's all about Allah;...

The Washington Post reports today that al Qaeda’s successful attack on the Algerian natural gas plant has greatly boosted al Qaeda’s prestige in Africa. Along the way, the Post notes rather casually: The assailants were well-trained and armed with what appear to have been weapons from the late Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi’s arsenal. The overthrow of Moammar Gaddafi has turned out to be a terrible blunder. It has empowered radical Muslims, led directly to the Benghazi debacle, and scattered Gaddafi’s armory among terrorist elements, including al Qaeda. There has been, of course, no accountability for the Libya decision, either with...

Algerian bomb squads scouring a gas plant where Islamist militants took dozens of foreign workers hostage found "numerous" new bodies on Sunday as they searched for explosive traps left behind by the attackers, a security official said, a day after a bloody raid ended the four-day siege of the remote desert refinery. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation, said the bodies were badly disfigured and difficult to identify.

(Reuters) - Islamist fighters seized dozens of Western and Algerian hostages in a dawn raid on a natural gas facility deep in the Sahara on Wednesday and demanded France halt a new offensive against rebels in neighboring Mali. Three people, among them one British and one French, were reported killed, but details were sketchy and numbers of those held at Tigantourine ranged from 41 foreigners - including perhaps seven Americans as well as Japanese and Europeans - to over 100 local staff, held separately and less closely watched.   What is clear is that with a dramatic counterpunch to this...

An Egyptian magazine claims that six American Islamist activists who work with the Obama administration are Muslim Brotherhood operatives who enjoy strong influence over U.S. policy. The Dec. 22 story published in Egypt's Rose El-Youssef magazine (read an IPT translation here) suggests the six turned the White House "from a position hostile to Islamic groups and organizations in the world to the largest and most important supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood." The story is largely unsourced, but its publication is considered significant in raising the issue to Egyptian readers. The six named people include: Arif Alikhan, assistant secretary of Homeland...

"A flag bearing a crescent and star flies from a flagpole in front of the World Trade Center, next to a Christmas tree and a menorah." New York Times, 1997 In 1997, Mohammed T. Mehdi, the head of the Arab-American Committee and the National Council on Islamic Affairs, lobbied to have a crescent and star go up at the World Trade Center during the holiday season. His wish was granted, despite the fact that Mehdi had been an adviser to Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. In the name of diversity and political correctness, an adviser to the religious leader behind the...

Four Inland Empire men were arrested Monday in connection to a terrorist plot that was foiled by federal officials. Sohiel Omar Kabir, 34, an Afghanistan native and former resident of Pomona; Ralph Deleon, 23, of Ontario and a native of the Philippines; Miguel Alejandro Santana Vidriales 21, of Upland; and Arifeen David Gojali, 21, of Riverside, a United States citizen, were arrested with plotting to join Al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan in hopes of killing Americans. According to the complaint that was filed in U.S. District Court in the Central District of California, the four conspired to provide material...

In a blockbuster report, John Solomon, the former Associated Press and Post reporter, has ferreted out the president's daily brief that informed him within 72 hours of the Sept. 11 attack that the Benghazi attack was a jihadist operation.Citing officials directly familiar with the information, Solomon writes in the Washington Guardian that Obama and other administration officials were told that "that the attack was likely carried out by local militia and other armed extremists sympathetic to al-Qaida in the region."He adds: The details from the CIA and Pentagon assessments of the killing of Ambassador Chris [Stevens] were far more...

A top Iraqi diplomat urged Arab states to “use the weapon of oil” against the United States because of its alliance with Israel, raising more questions about the Middle Eastern nation's allegiance to the nation that freed it from a ruthless dictatorship.

Already facing intense scrutiny for its shifting narrative about the assault on the U.S. Consulate in Libya, the Pentagon now says it will not reclassify the Fort Hood shootings as a terrorist attack over concern about biasing the case against the gunman — an argument that is getting a mixed review from legal experts. Late Friday, after 160 victims of the Fort Hood shooting called on the Pentagon to label the attack terrorism instead of workplace violence as it has for the past three years, the Department of Defense said it would not reclassify the attack. In rejecting the victims...

The outrage and the violent protests organised by Islamists across the world have nothing to do with the supposed desecration of religion. Instead, these incidents are calibrated attempts by so-called religious leaders to firm up their politics, even at the cost of people’s lives Even before the crowd from the previous protest had returned home, a new mob had gathered on the streets. It had been gaining strength throughout the day as hundreds arrived loaded in trucks and buses, and more people from the outside kept pouring in. Over the next couple of hours, the crowd swelled in numbers and...