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Author and Marine veteran Philip Klay on Thursday expressed concern about the role that Trump Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth played in lobbying him to pardon war criminals during his first term in office. Writing in the New York Times, Klay highlights Hegseth's efforts on behalf of 1st Lt. Clint Lorance, a convicted war criminal whom Trump pardoned in 2019.

On the morning of July 2, 2012, in the most dangerous warzone in the world, Lieutenant Clint Lorance took command of his small band of American paratroopers at the spearhead of the American War in Afghanistan. Intelligence reports that morning warned of a Taliban ambush against Lorance's platoon. Fifteen minutes into their patrol, three military-age Afghan males crowded on a motorcycle and sped aggressively down a Taliban-controlled dirt road toward Lorance's men. Three weeks earlier, outside the massive American Kandahar Airfield, Taliban terrorists struck by motorcycle, riding into a crowded area, detonating body-bombs and killing twenty-two people. Sixty-three days before...

After spending six years at Ft. Leavenworth, Clint Lorance is pardoned by Pres. Trump and now speaks to Blue about the injustices of the legal system What is your personal worst-case scenario as a law enforcement officer while on duty? The first answer is most likely getting shot and killed by a suspect. Then there are other tragedies; getting into a serious car accident during a high-speed pursuit, being held hostage in a prison riot or having a human being (God forbid a child) die in your arms. Those are all tragedies that could occur, and we pray that they...

An Iranian Revolutionary Guards general and eight other Iranians have been arrested by Afghan forces and handed over to U.S. authorities, an Afghan politician said Saturday. Izzatullah Wasafi said the officer, whom he identified as a Gen. Razavi, was leading an Iranian group clandestinely distributing money and arms to allies in western Afghanistan when they were seized by Afghan forces last Tuesday. A day later, at a midnight meeting with Wasafi and others, the governor of Kandahar province abruptly decided to hand the men over to the U.S. military when he learned they were Iranians, Wasafi said. A U.S. military...

After 9/11, Nasrina Bargzie, an Afghan Muslim immigrant, was interviewed by law enforcement over troubling comments on the War on Terror reported by her friends. Today she’s the Deputy Counsel to Vice President Kamala Harris. After coming to America from a wealthy family in Kandahar, later a stronghold of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Nasrina Bargzie was raised in Concord, CA, one of the state’s hubs for Afghan migrants, and quickly got involved in anti-American and pro-terrorist activism. In 2001, while attending college, she was interrogated by the FBI about comments she had made to her friends. It’s unknown what...

Campus Watch Research Originally published under the title "Georgetown University Whitewashes Islamism and Smears the West (again)." [Caption] Erdoan Shipoli (l) and John Esposito (r) of Georgetown Univ. use their positions to whitewash Islamism and attack Western civilization. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was former President George W. Bush's "teacher at Yale," stated Erdoan A. Shipoli at an April 27 Georgetown University webinar. While Rice was indeed a child prodigy on the piano, her intellectual prowess was not quite so grand as to land her an Ivy League teaching position as an adolescent. Born in 1954, she was only...

A sizable blast has occurred in the Emam Bargha Ptima mosque in Kandahar, Afghanistan, The Washington Post reported. The explosion, caused by a suicide bomber, left at least 32 dead, a local health official said. Hafiz Abdul Hai Abbas, the director for provincial health directorate, told The Washington Post that the attack also wounded 45 others. “Dead bodies remain under the ruined mosque,” Abbas said, noting that the death toll is expected to rise. The bombing took place during Friday services, when the mosque would be at its most crowded. No group has yet taken responsibility for the incident. However,...

(CNN)Hundreds of people protested in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar Tuesday, against what they say are Taliban orders for citizens to leave their homes on the eve of winter. Protesters marched in front of the governor's office in the city after 3,500 people living in a government-owned residential area were given three days to leave, two protesters told a local journalist working for CNN over the phone. The protesters, who are also residents of the area, said they were not given reasons for the expulsion order....

<p>In recent days, Taliban representatives began telling gatherings of villagers in the southern province of Kandahar, one of the country’s main opium-producing regions, that the crop—a crucial part of the local economy—would now be banned.</p><p>This followed a statement by Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid at an Aug. 18 news conference in Kabul that the country’s new rulers won’t permit the drug trade. Mr. Mujahid at the time didn’t offer details of how the Islamist group intends to enforce the ban.</p>

CARLSON: So on its way out of Afghanistan, the Biden administration left behind nearly $90 billion in military equipment. How much is that? Well, only two countries on the planet have a military budget larger, China and the United States. So, the Taliban now have the best-equipped military of its size in the history of the world. According to The Times of London, the Taliban just received more than 22,000 Humvees, more than 50,000 trucks, and other armored vehicles, as well as a sizable Air Force. It comes with four C-130 transport planes, dozens of other fixed-wing aircraft, and up...

A team of Special Air Service soldiers who were surrounded by Taliban hordes in Kandahar have been rescued in a dramatic desert operation. Around 20 elite SAS troops were left stranded in the province hundreds of miles from friendly forces when the militants took over. As enemy fighters closed in they sent an SOS request to Special Forces bosses back in Britain calling for immediate extraction....

The Taliban executed some 900 people in six weeks in just one province as its fighters overran government troops, a police chief has claimed Targets included police officers, tribal elders, civil activists, and even a popular comedian who were dragged from their homes and killed in southern Kandahar province, the region's former head of police Tadin Khan said. Islamist fighters have now recaptured much of the province and have laid siege to the regional capital - also named Kandahar - as they push to retake control of the country following US troop withdrawal.

Rumours have been circulating for years that the American military killed a creature which was “three times” the size of a normal man. The beast was supposedly shot dead after taking “multiple hits” in the Kandahar region when troops were looking for a missing patrol. This outlandish claim, which has been denied by the US administration, has recently resurfaced on social media. It was first featured in a YouTube documentary produced by filmmaker and blogger L.A. Marzulli that was released two years ago. Two self-proclaimed ex-special ops soldiers recalled the encounter with a a supposed mythical monster. They alleged that...

A mystery plane crashed Monday in Taliban-held territory in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province, south of the capital, Afghan officials said. It was not immediately clear how many people were on board the plane. Ariana Afghan Airlines denied reports that it was one of its passenger jets that had come down. Provincial government spokesman Arif Noori told CBS News’ Ahmad Mukhtar the plane appeared to have been a flight between the southern city of Kandahar and the capital Kabul, about 200 miles to the north. Ghazni province is between those two locations Noori said the body of two pilots was found at...

Country music star Lee Greenwood was especially proud to be an American over the holiday weekend, after working with a nonprofit to provide a specialized home for an Afghanistan war veteran who lost his legs overseas. Greenwood teamed up with Helping a Hero to provide wounded warrior Matt Deatherage with a home equipped for him to live independently, and the two men appeared on "Fox & Friends" on Monday to talk about the new house and the organization that made it happen. ..." The Army veteran was deployed to Kandahar, Afghanistan in 2010, and stepped on a land mine in...

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The three top officials in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province were killed when their own guards opened fire on them at a security conference Thursday, the deputy provincial governor said, and a Taliban spokesman said the target was Washington’s top general in Afghanistan, Gen. Scott Miller, who escaped without injury, according to NATO. Agha Lala Dastageri, Kandahar’s deputy provincial governor, said powerful provincial police chief Abdul Raziq was among the dead, along with Kandahar Gov. Zalmay Wesa, who died of his wounds at a nearby hospital. Dastageri said provincial intelligence chief Abdul Mohmin also died inside the governor’s...

Fifty people have died in an attack at a market bazaar and a school near Kandahar airport that began late Tuesday, Afghan officials said.... .....The Taliban took responsibility for the attack. The assault occurred hours after a "Message to Obama" was posted to a video site, purportedly of Taliban suicide attackers warning that U.S. troops would not be safe in Afghanistan.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Dec. 9 (UPI) -- A Taliban assault on Afghanistan's Kandahar International Airport has so far left 37 civilians and Afghan security forces dead and another 35 injured. Nine Afghan Taliban militants have died. Several people, including women and children, were taken hostage in Tuesday's attack. Some degree of fighting continued Wednesday, but it is unclear if the Taliban threat has ended. The headquarters for the joint NATO and Afghan military effort is in the airport. The Taliban militants wearing suicide vests breached the front gate of the facility in what a pro-Taliban website referred to as an attack...

Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, whose real name was Ali Mohammed al-Fakheri, 46, took his own life in his prison cell, according to the Libyan newspaper Oea. Information gained from the interrogation of al-Libi was cited on several occasions by the Bush administration as justification for the war in Iraq. He told his CIA interrogators that al-Qaeda had sent two men to Iraq to seek training in chemical and biological weapons in December 2000. Classified documents added that the men did not return, so al-Libi did not know whether the training took place, and that, in any case, he was probably "intentionally...

On this 14th anniversary, I'm struck by how 9/11 seems something woozy and remote to almost anyone under 25 - in the way that, say, Pearl Harbor or D-Day, the Blitz or the Battle of Britain most certainly were not to those who were children in the late Forties, Fifties and Sixties. One obvious reason is the event's all but total absence from popular culture - which is curious for a day that played out on TV screens, at least in part, like a movie. But, as it turned out, there would be more films addressing the great cultural clash...