Congress is asking if the Pentagon manipulated U.S. intelligence on Afghanistan

I'm annoyed by this news because it's been open knowledge for at least six years that intelligence, and outright evidence, about the role of Pakistan's involvement in Taliban attacks in Afghanistan was routinely suppressed by the American military and civilian commands. 

How many Americans and Afghans were killed or maimed for life because of this; how many Indians and Europeans and British were also killed and maimed, I don't think will ever be established. But it was a great many when you add up all the tallies from attacks that were clearly launched by 'Taliban' groups well known to be directed by Pakistan's ISI and/or military.     

So now Congress wants to inquire. I do not believe the inquiry will go anywhere near the issue of intelligence on Pakistan because that not only involves the highest levels of American government and ranking members of Congress but also NATO and its "ISAF" allies. And it very greatly involves the Saudi and British governments and Washington's attempts to please both while pursuing a cold war against Russia that greatly harmed the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. 

This is a government that has shown itself to be completely unable to do war anymore; battles, yes, war no. The penalties for failure at war are simply too weak, and the lure of mixing warfare with a foreign policy that plays 1000 ends against the middle is too strong.    

 

With that said, some congressional inquiry is better than nothing. 

   

Did the Pentagon Cook the Books on Its Afghanistan Intel?

by San De Luce

November 19, 2015

Foreign Policy magazine

The military has been accused of fudging the numbers in the fight against the Islamic State. Congress wants to know if it did with the Taliban too.

Lawmakers are probing whether senior U.S. military officers skewed intelligence reports about Afghanistan, raising new questions about whether policymakers can trust the accuracy of the Pentagon’s assessments of the nation’s wars.

The investigation, which has not been reported previously, adds a new dimension to the politically explosive scandal hanging over the military’s Central Command, where top officers stand accused of deliberately skewing their analysis of the campaign against the Islamic State to exaggerate successes while downplaying serious setbacks.

The allegations of the Pentagon cooking the books about both Afghanistan and the Islamic State will be at the center of a new congressional probe led by the leaders of three of the most powerful committees on Capitol Hill. Rep. Devin Nunes of California, the Republican head of the House Intelligence Committee, told Foreign Policy that he and the chairmen of the House Armed Services Committee and Defense Appropriations Subcommittee are forming a task force “to investigate numerous allegations of the manipulation of intelligence by Centcom officials.”

The congressional inquiry likely will involve visits to Centcom headquarters in Tampa, Florida, to interview officials and officers handling intelligence, staffers said. The lawmakers will be posing tough questions to Maj. Gen. Steven Grove, head of intelligence at Centcom since June 2014, who hascome under intense scrutiny since the allegations first came to light.

The two-star general is “a strong personality,” according to one former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) official, but he has not earned a reputation previously for meddling with intelligence analyses.

The new probe comes just months after the senior intelligence analyst on Iraq at Centcom, Gregory Hooker, backed up by dozens of equally disgruntled analysts, told the Defense Department’s inspector general that intelligence assessments about the Islamic State were being distorted and watered down by top officials and officers. The analysts went to the inspector general after trying and failing to resolve the problem within the command.

Now, according to people familiar with the matter, there is mounting concern that intelligence reports about Afghanistan were also deliberately slanted. The Pentagon’s annual assessments of Afghanistan, mandated by Congress, have consistently been far more optimistic about the state of the war effort against the Taliban than the classified reports produced by the CIA, according to people familiar with both sets of reports. The differences have led to years of high-level tension between senior military officers and their counterparts at Langley, these people said.

A former senior intelligence officer who maintains contact with his former colleagues said many analysts at Centcom are frustrated over what they see as inappropriate interference by senior leaders in their assessments of Afghanistan and other topics.

“A lot of the analysts at Centcom feel the high command has been sugarcoating their assessments,” the former senior intelligence officer said.

The allegations carry some uncomfortable parallels with the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, in which President George W. Bush’s White House was accused of misusing intelligence and hyping the threat posed by dictator Saddam Hussein. Barack Obama as a presidential candidate slammed the Bush administration over the issue.

The case is raising serious questions about whether the military or theObama administration tried to present an unrealistic picture of progress on the battlefield and whether the independent role of the intelligence community has been undermined. The complaints from intelligence analysts have come amid growing criticism of Obama’s war strategy against the Islamic State, with some lawmakers accusing the White House of refusing to acknowledge that the military campaign has largely failed to dislodge the group from its strongholds in Syria and Iraq.

Spokespeople for the Pentagon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Central Command declined to comment about the new Afghanistan-related allegations. But Centcom’s Col. Patrick Ryder said that the command takes all allegations about the handling of intelligence “very seriously” and that it is cooperating with both the inspector general and congressional inquiries. He reiterated that Centcom looks at a range of sources as part of an assessment process that “guards against any single report or opinion unduly influencing leaders and decision-makers.”

Since the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies have clashed repeatedly about claims of progress in the war, the potency of the insurgency, and the strength of Afghan security forces. In 2010, a National Intelligence Estimate contradicted upbeat appraisals by the military’s top brass, concluding there was a limited chance of achieving success in Afghanistan due to insurgent sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan.

But the latest allegations about Centcom would mean military officers are trying to actively suppress negative intelligence reports about the outlook in Afghanistan.

Lawmakers from both parties have voiced serious concern about the allegations against Centcom and have vowed to watch the case closely, though they had held off on launching their own inquiries while the Pentagon’s inspector general gathers information.

That’s now changing, with Nunes, Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.), the chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, forming a joint task force to probe the case while the Defense Department watchdog continues its own work.

Democrats on the three House committees have not signed on to the inquiry, and the relevant committees in the Senate have no plans to start investigations of Centcom. Instead, House Democrats and Senate Republicans plan to wait for the results of the inspector general’s probe, congressional staffers said.

Obama administration officials have privately tried to downplay the allegations, saying that they appear to boil down to a clash of personalities operating in a high-pressure atmosphere at the military’s most powerful command. In any case, the officials insist that the president receives unvarnished intelligence and that whatever has occurred at Centcom would not have affected the flow of information to the White House from the country’s spy agencies.

But current and former analysts from the country’s spy agencies are sensitive to any hint of tainted intelligence reporting. The legacy of flawed and politicized intelligence surrounding the invasion of Iraq more than a decade ago led to soul-searching at the spy agencies and reforms designed to ensure that dissenting views were given more prominence.

The senior DIA analyst who blew the whistle at Centcom, Hooker, has been following events in Iraq since the 1990s and has not shied away from challenging authority in the past. In 2005, in a research article for a Washington think tank, Hooker publicly clashed with the Bush administration over what he called its “amateurish and unrealistic” invasion plans for Iraq.

There is a long history of disagreement and tension between the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, with “can-do” uniformed officers more inclined to emphasize positive signs and intelligence analysts tending to convey a bleaker outlook.

But the allegations about Centcom suggest that senior officers may have crossed a boundary beyond the customary tension between the military and spy agencies, the former DIA official said.

“If the analysts were told to take this line out, that’s a huge problem. That would be unacceptable,” the ex-official said.

One former intelligence analyst who spent several years focused on Afghanistan and who served multiple tours there said there was a constant friction between military commanders and the DIA analysts, reflecting different training and mindsets. But he said he never saw evidence of outright manipulation of intelligence reports by Centcom.

“I don’t want to say it’s malfeasance. But it’s true there’s cultural tension,” said the retired analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It’s not like they’re fabricating information. But it’s how they assess what’s going on.”

Military officers are often in the difficult position of having to defend the performance of Afghan security forces, while intelligence analysts are more ready to point to the weaknesses and shortcomings of the Kabul government’s army, he said.

And the officers overseeing the intelligence analysts are keen to find information that shows that their mission objectives are being fulfilled, he said.

“If you have an assessment that undermines the commander’s objectives, that’s not going to go well for that J2,” said the former analyst, referring to the designation for a military intelligence chief.

The current clash at Centcom is aggravated by strong passions developed by analysts who have spent years studying a particular region and who have deployed alongside troops in the field, he said.

“These are not just guys sitting in cubicles who have never been there,” he said.

FP reporter Elias Groll contributed to this report.

[END REPORT]

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Syrian President Assad Talks Turkey to the French

The following exchange is from President Bashar al-Assad's interview today (in Syria) with journalists at the French magazine Valeurs Actuelles. SANA has the complete transcript of the interview, which was conducted without a translator. Al-Assad is fluent in French (as well as English and Arabic). 

[...]

Question 10: We talked about Qatar and Saudi Arabia, but we didn’t talk about Turkey, and they let go [into] Europe hundreds of thousands of refugees, and it seems that they let go [into] Syria jihadists. So, what is the role of Turkey?

President Assad: The most dangerous role in the whole situation, because Turkey offered all kinds of support to those terrorists, and all the spectrums of the terrorists. Some countries support al-Nusra Front, which is Al Qaeda, some other countries support ISIS, while Turkey supports both, and other groups at the same time. They support them with, how to say, human resources, they recruit. They support them with money, logistics, armaments, surveillance, information, and even the maneuvers of their military through their borders during the fights in Syria.

Even the money that’s being collected from the rest of the world passes through Turkey, and the oil that ISIS sells is through Turkey, so Turkey is playing the worst part of our crisis.

Second, that’s related directly to Erdogan himself and Davutoglu, because they both reflect the real ideology that they carry in their hearts, which is the Muslim Brotherhood ideology.

Question 11: You think he is Muslim Brotherhood?

President Assad: Not necessarily to be organized, but the mentality, a hundred percent. He cares a lot about politicized Islam which is the opportunistic part of Islam which is not Islam actually. That’s how we look at it, because you shouldn’t politicize religion.[1] So, it’s related directly to him, to his will to see the Muslim Brotherhood governing in the rest of the Arab world so that he can control them as a sultan, but actually more as an imam, not a sultan. That is what Turkey is playing.

Question 12: You know we are in a situation right now, yesterday night and before, Charlie Hebdo, and before and before. You said that, but I want your confirmation; you think that France cannot fight terrorism if it stays with its links with Qatar and Saudi Arabia?

President Assad: Yes. In addition, you cannot fight if you don’t have relations with the power that’s fighting ISIS or terrorism on the ground. You cannot fight terrorism while you follow or pursue the wrong policies that, at the end, in the end result, support terrorism directly or indirectly. If you don’t have all these things, no, you cannot, and we don’t think that they can, so far.

[...]

1) This is also the position of Syria's Grand Mufti, the country's highest authority on Islamic law.

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Saudi Arabia tries to pick the cabinet for Syria's transitional government

Say what?! Saudi Arabia Imposing Own Plans of New Government on Syria
November 19, 2015 - 14:00
Sputnik

There are both government and opposition representatives on the list of figures for the new Syrian government proposed by Saudi Arabia, according to Randa Kassis, leader of the Movement for a Pluralistic Society.

Saudi Arabia is trying to impose on Syria its own plan for the transitional government, Randa Kassis, leader of the Movement for a Pluralistic Society, said Thursday.

According to her, currently there are four lists of potential candidates to the Syrian opposition delegation for talks with the Syrian government.

"There are four lists, including one proposed by Russia, one proposed by Egypt, one by Saudi Arabia, and one by the US. Saudi Arabia did not submit its proposals, but it gave the names of the people it wants to be in the new government, including representatives of both the current authorities and opposition," Kassis said at a press conference hosted by Rossiya Segodnya information agency in Moscow.

"Of course, Saudi Arabia is a significant player, but the Syrian people cannot let any other country – like Saudi Arabia – impose on us the entire cabinet," she underscored.

Participants of the international meeting on Syria in Vienna on Saturday agreed that the next round of talks between the government and opposition should take place before January 1, 2016.

Within the next few months, the Syrian government and opposition should agree on the national unity government, and within 18 months the country should hold elections in accordance with a new constitution. UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said in Vienna that participants of the talks would help the Syrian opposition form a delegation for further talks with the government

Syria has been engulfed in an armed conflict since March 2011. According to the UN, over 220,000 people have been killed. Government forces have been fighting against various militant groups, including the Islamic State (ISIL) terrorist group and al-Nusra Front.

[END REPORT]

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem

He looks like a hard bargainer

Next Meeting of Syria Support Group Could Be Held in Late December
November 18, 2015 - 20:44 

Sputnik

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Next meeting of the International Syria Support Group could be held in late December — early January in Paris, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said Wednesday.

The last round of international meetings on a Syria settlement took place in Vienna on Saturday and was devoted to defining a political solution in the country's civil war. According to the agreement reached in Vienna, formal talks between the Syrian government and the opposition must take place by January.

"According to the Vienna agreements, the next meeting has been scheduled within a month, that is why it is expected to be held in late December — early January in Paris," Bogdanov told RIA Novosti.

According to Bogdanov, the same delegations that took part in Vienna talks will attend the upcoming meeting.

"Participation of Damascus delegation is not planned," Bogdanov added.

Since 2011, Syria has been mired in a civil war with government forces fighting a number of militant groups and opposition factions. During the previous round of Vienna talks in late October, international mediators worked out a nine-point plan on ending the Syrian civil war, including a definition of national unity, the defeat of extremist groups and assistance to refugees.

[END REPORT]

See also Syrian Foreign Minister to Visit Russia Next Week; 18 Nov, Sputnik

He'll be meeting with Lavrov. "The talks will focus on fight against terrorism and the progress in political reconciliation on the basis of the Geneva Communique and Vienna agreements."

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Western leaders have countenanced such evil in Syria they're suffering from disassociation

Dissociation is a mental process that causes a lack of connection in a person’s thoughts, memory and sense of identity. Dissociation seems to fall on a continuum of severity. Mild dissociation would be like daydreaming, getting “lost” in a book, or when you are driving down a familiar stretch of road and realize that you do not remember the last several miles. A severe and more chronic form of dissociation is seen in the disorder Dissociative Identity Disorder, once called Multiple Personality Disorder, and other Dissociative Disorders.
The Associated Press report, With Islamic State Targeted, What Happens to Syria's Assad?, published at the New York Times site today, is almost a clinical study of the phenomenon of disassociation. although it's certainly not intended as such. Instead, the AP reporters chronicle the thinking among Western officials about what the World Community is to do with Assad now that it seems, in the wake of 11/13, he's going to be around a while longer while everyone is busy dispatching Islamic State.

Not once in the discussions is there mention of the role played in Syria by Gulf kingdoms, Turkey, France, and the United States and other NATO countries. But nobody wants 'another Libya' -- meaning the devastation wreaked on Libyans by the same foreign interventionists, who then disassociated themselves from the horrors they created in that country, as if they were a toddler walking away from a collapsed tower of blocks he'd built.

Barack Obama is so disassociated from what happened to Syria that he is still urging Saudi Arabia's King Salman to support the "moderate" Syrian opposition. This as he approved $1.29 bn in sale of bombs to Saudi Arabia. 

Everything is blamed on Assad, who is now likened to Josef Stalin by the Western leaders trying to decide what they should do with him. If he hadn't been a tyrant, he would've allowed them to install a moderate government in Damascus that would meet with the approval of the World Community and the moderate government of Riyadh and its moderate Wahhabi clerics or the moderate government in Doha and the moderate Muslim Brotherhood.      

As to what happened because he refused to step down -- it was Assad who inflicted all that mess on Syria, not the proxy armies that killed tens of thousands of Syrian troops by the reckoning of Stratfor's George Friedman and God only knows how many civilians, reduced large parts of the country to rubble, set up the Islamic State in a caliphate supported by a cut-rate oil trade, and made it possible for hundreds (some say thousands!) of Qaeda-affiliated groups to establish themselves in the country.     

As to who appointed these foreign powers emperor of Syria, there is not a single national government in the world that doesn't know the answer by now. It was a situation that appointed them, the situation being that Syria didn't have nuclear weapons. So every government now knows: somehow get nukes; buy them off the shelf from Pakistan or North Korea, if you have to. It's the only way to deal with governments that can get away with anything simply because they know they can.

However, there is a better way. Have you noticed something odd about the Syrian situation? The more the foreign powers wreak havoc in the country, the worse their own situations become. 

Now how did that happen? 

Here I'm reminded of a story Mr Gurdjieff told although I read it so long ago I don't remember every detail. The gist is that after he arrived in a town, probably somewhere in Central Asia, he saw that the train station master engaged in a mysterious ritual. The man turned to the east and solemnly uttered the most awful curses. Then he would turn in the next direction and repeat the performance until he'd addressed all four directions.

Because the man seemed otherwise sound of mind, Mr Gurdjieff asked him if he could explain the meaning of the ritual. The station master replied that it was his responsibility to activate a piercing whistle at 3:00 every morning, to signal that a freight train was coming through the station. Because there was no way to sleep through the whistle, every morning residents of the town would curse him before going back to sleep. So every day he made sure to return the curses, and in this way had survived without undue troubles.

There actually is a world community although not the kind in the syrupy descriptions of the globalist totalitarians. And as I explained on the very first day of this blog in the "Not Clockwork Orange Century" post, it's ever harder for governments to get away with things that during the Cold War could be easily accomplished. For this reason I urged it had become very important for governments to play it straight. But if some readers expected me to draw stick figures to elaborate, they've had to wait a long time, haven't they?        
         
With Islamic State Targeted, What Happens to Syria's Assad?

By Jon Gambrell and Adam Schreck
NOV. 19, 2015 - 12:58 A.M. E.S.T.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The tide of global rage against the Islamic State group lends greater urgency to ending the jihadis' ability to operate at will from a base in war-torn Syria. That momentum could also force a reevaluation of what to do about President Bashar Assad and puts a renewed focus on the position of his key patrons, Russia and Iran.

The Syrian leader has lost much of the country to IS and other groups in the four-year war; half the population has been displaced, many areas have been leveled, and masses of refugees are flooding Europe. Along the way, Assad's brutal military response has made him persona non grata in most of the world.

Portraying himself as the only viable alternative to jihadi rule, Assad has labeled all his enemies "terrorists" — a designation that, in the wake of the recent attacks on civilians by IS, may find greater resonance.

Cutting a deal with Assad would be the "lesser evil," Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo said Wednesday.

"If we want peace, we have to find a way of getting along with Assad, at least in a transition period. ... Roosevelt didn't like Stalin, but he had to get a deal with him in order to defeat the Nazis, who were the greater evil," Garcia-Margallo said.

Britain's former military chief, Gen. David Richards, echoed that sentiment, saying in a BBC interview that a cease-fire in Syria could allow Assad and his military to take a leading role in battling IS.

The fact remains, though, that the United States and its allies don't want to see Assad benefit from any effort to dislodge IS from territory it controls in Syria — unlike in Iraq, where the Baghdad government is considered legitimate by the world community.

A temporary reprieve is starting to seem more possible, setting the stage for what some observers suggest may be an arrangement in which Assad is part of a transition government that has a role in the priority of defeating IS — but then quietly makes way.

Russia and Iran would have to be a big part of engineering such a solution — but they have leverage.

Assad might well have fallen if not for the support of Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy militia based in neighboring Lebanon whose efforts in the past two months has been joined by an active Russian bombing campaign.

Both Iran and Russia are difficult to read and predict — and until now, both have backed Assad's insistence that he stay in power through the rest of his official term, which runs until 2021.

But there are hints that Russia's support may be wobbling even as it ramps up airstrikes against his enemies: Moscow made clear earlier this month it is not crucial that he stay.

A Syrian opposition figure familiar with the Russian position said Moscow's military campaign aims to facilitate a diplomatic track by strengthening Assad's position and weakening the rebels enough that they all agree to come to the table.

He said the Russians have come to the conclusion that there can be no long-term solution for Syria while Assad remains in power. The question, he said, is how to let go of Assad while safeguarding state institutions and the capital of Damascus. The Russians have yet to answer that, said the opposition figure, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to damage relations with Russia.

Russia has its own interests, wanting to keep its small naval facility at Tartous on the Mediterranean and remaining a player in greater Mideast affairs.

Iran, another major ally, wants to maintain a counterbalance to Israel and keep another Shiite ally in the region.

Iran has sent more advisers to Syria in recent weeks, as well as again reportedly dispatching Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who heads the elite Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guard. The country also has suffered increasing casualties from the war.

This week, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian reiterated Tehran's support for the Syrian president, saying that "only Assad himself can decide on his participation or non-participation in (future) elections (and) it is only the people of Syria who can say whether they will vote for him or not," according to the semi-official Fars news agency.

In a more ambiguous statement referencing Assad, Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said that "limiting the regional crises to one person is a strategic mistake."

For now, Iran believes anger over the Islamic State group will force the world to stick with Assad, said Karim Sadjadpour, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. However, Sadjadpour said Iranian officials also realize how much the civil war has stoked Sunni extremism.

"Syria has been a Pyrrhic victory for Iran," he said. "They've succeeding in keeping Assad in power, but their desire to be the vanguard of the Islamic world has been irreparably damaged. Their image in the Sunni Arab world will likely be tainted for decades to come."

The wheels are in motion for a process that could possibly usher Assad out. Foreign ministers of 19 countries met in Vienna after the Paris attacks and set a Jan. 1 deadline to start negotiations between Assad's government and opposition groups for ending a conflict that has killed more than quarter of a million people. Diplomats hope to have a transitional government six months later, with U.N.-supervised elections within 18 months, although previous efforts have failed.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told the BBC on Tuesday that pushing Assad out "has to be part of a transition if you're going to end the war."

The Russians don't "want to see Iraq, they don't want to see Libya; they don't want to see the leader go down or leave, and then there's chaos afterwards," Kerry said. "So we are all united in our desire to keep the institutions of governance in Syria whole, but that doesn't mean Assad."

But Assad is not likely to go willingly anytime soon. In an interview shown Wednesday night on Italian state television, the Syrian president said that no political process can begin while "terrorists" occupy his nation.

"Nothing can start before defeating the terrorists who occupy parts of Syria," he said, adding that if Syria's people want presidential elections "there will be no red line" against holding them.

Joshua Landis, a Syria expert and the director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, isn't so sure Russia and Iran are prepared to see Assad go.

Iran and Russia "can't separate the Assad family from this regime," he said. "The regime has been built around loyalty to the Assads. If you get rid of them, everything collapses."
___

Schreck reported from Cairo. Associated Press writers Barry Hatton in Lisbon, Portugal, Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran, Zeina Karam in Beirut and Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this report.

Follow Jon Gambrell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jongambrellap. Follow Adam Schreck on Twitter at www.twitter.com/adamschreck.

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Military's soft coup in Pakistan to bring order hasn't changed its proxy war in Afganistan

The military's bloodless takeover was aided by its improved use of social media. See also 5 Ways Social Media Helps Dictators.

Pakistan Military Expands Its Power, and Is Thanked for Doing So
By ROD NORDLAND

NOV. 17, 2015
The New York Times

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The most popular man in public office in Pakistan does not give speeches on television, rarely appears in public and rejects news interviews.
He is Gen. Raheel Sharif, the Pakistani Army chief, who has presided over the country’s armed forces at a time when they are riding high after curbing domestic terrorism and rampant political crime.

Aided by a new-media publicity campaign, the military command’s popularity has helped it quietly but firmly grasp control of the governmental functions it cares about most: security and foreign affairs, along with de facto regulatory power over the news media, according to interviews with Pakistani officials and analysts.

In a country with a long history of military coups, the current command has gotten what it wants, edging aside the civilian government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who is not related to General Sharif, without the messiness or the international criticism a complete takeover would bring. And it is being thanked for doing it.

“I wouldn’t describe it as a soft coup, but I would definitely say the civilian leadership has yielded space to the military — for their own survival and because there were major failures on their part,” said Talat Masood, a retired lieutenant general and military analyst.

General Sharif, known as General Raheel here, took over the military command late in 2013. He was appointed to the post a few months after the new civilian government was inaugurated, and the country was in trouble. There were suicide bombings, political party killings, rampant crime and violence in its big cities, and assassinations of political leaders. Some politicians were calling for negotiations with the Pakistani Taliban as military efforts to set the militants back appeared to have stalled.

Then the Pakistani Taliban carried out a cruel attack on a school for army families in Peshawar last December, killing 145 people — including 132 schoolchildren methodically gunned down in their classrooms. Supported by a huge public backlash against terrorism, the army ramped up its crackdown on some of the militant groups sheltering in the country’s northwestern tribal areas, especially in North Waziristan.

Capital punishment was restored, and the military was handed new power, starting its own counterterrorism court system alongside the badly backlogged and compromised civilian justice system.

This year, the Pakistani Taliban have managed to carry out only a single major suicide bombing. The army’s success against the Taliban emboldened it to take on violent political parties and criminal gangs in the country’s biggest city, Karachi, through a paramilitary group known as the Sindh Rangers. Despite complaints of human rights abuses in Karachi, and millions of internally displaced people from the tribal areas, most Pakistanis were simply relieved to see the violence hugely reduced.

Through it all, General Sharif’s public appearances have been less ostentatious than those of some of his predecessors. But at the same time, his face has become ubiquitous on social media, after giving a free hand to the officer commanding the Inter-Services Public Relations office, the military’s media arm, to modernize that service.

The ISPR had long been headed by lower-ranking officers, and it remained decidedly lodged in the analog era. But by this year, the leader of the office, Asim Saleem Bajwa, had been promoted to lieutenant general — a three-star rank normally reserved for corps commanders — and his agency had become an impressively slick machine.

General Bajwa’s Twitter account has more than 1.5 million followers, and the agency’s Facebook account has more than 2.8 million likes. A film division is pumping out offerings for television, as it had long done, but it has added short videos tailored to YouTube-style platforms.

he social media accounts show in daily detail the commander’s movements — visiting the front lines in Waziristan or reviewing troops. Video links showed army units in combat, sometimes the same day it occurred, and troops helping earthquake victims. Professionally produced martyr-style videos show, for instance, a mother mourning a son killed in the field, who returns from the dead to present her with his beret.

The ISPR declined to comment for this article unless a draft of it was submitted to the office for advance review, according to a spokesman for the agency.

The Pakistani news media is clearly reflecting the shift in influence. When Prime Minister Sharif visited Washington on Oct. 22, for instance, the visit did not get nearly the attention of General Sharif’s current five-day visit to Washington.

In recent weeks, General Sharif has seemed less circumspect about the new pecking order. The military press office noted, for instance, that at a meeting of army corps commanders last Tuesday, the general was “concerned” that the civilian government was not doing enough to follow up the military’s success at clearing out the frontier areas with effective governance. The clearly implied scolding sent shock waves through the political establishment, but few dared to criticize the military — something even opposition parties rarely do now.

The Pakistani news media, in particular, has largely stopped open questioning of the military’s increased power. Pakistani journalists say the military no longer has to bring intimidation to bear, as it long had, because most of the criticism has gone quiet. At the military’s insistence, a government watchdog body has ordered broadcast media to stop airing anything that could be viewed as support for terrorist groups — a notably broad definition.

Even some of the military’s critics in the news media now say the relative peace has been a trade-off nearly everyone supports.

“My honest opinion is that most of the pressure now is from within ourselves,” said Rana Jawad, the news director at GEO, a leading private television network. “One of the reasons why there’s no effort to counter the claims of ISPR is that the situation on the ground has improved drastically. It’s a big thing for me: I used to report on 50 dead, 40 dead, 30 dead almost every day, and there’s nothing of this sort now.”

Mr. Jawad is no apologist for the military, however. He was on a cellphone call in 2014 with the channel’s news anchor in Karachi, Hamid Mir, when an attacker shot Mr. Mir six times. “It was terrible; I could hear his screams and helplessness and the shots,” Mr. Jawad said.

GEO journalists blamed the military’s powerful intelligence arm, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, and the channel even broadcast a picture of the agency’s leader at the time, Lt. Gen. Zaheer ul-Islam, which some saw as an implication that he had been behind the attack. That led to legal action against the channel that continues, and some local cable operators have refused to carry GEO.

“We suffered a lot from the military,” Mr. Jawad said. “We were beaten, hounded, brought to our knees by the powerful military, so we know.” Nonetheless, he added: “I see a marked improvement in the security environment in Pakistan, fewer and fewer Pakistanis dying unnecessarily, and I cannot reject this.”

The military’s triumphant crackdown on militants has had little effect on the war next door in Afghanistan, however, and the command still appears to be playing a double game when it comes to using some militants as proxies.

In particular, military analysts said, the pressure does not extend to the Afghan Taliban, many of whose leaders live openly in the Pakistani city of Quetta. And the military has avoided tangling with the Haqqani network, a close Afghan Taliban ally whose members have carried out some of the deadliest attacks in Afghanistan but are mostly based in remote districts of Pakistan near the border.

The double standard led to the blocking of one American military aid payment of $300 million to the Pakistani military this year, under a congressionally mandated requirement to certify progress in fighting the Haqqanis. An additional $1 billion in military aid under a separate program this year was not affected by that requirement, however.

Amid the Pakistani command’s clearly ascendant streak, Mr. Masood, the military analyst and former lieutenant general, worries that the military may go too far, preventing the country’s still-immature democratic institutions from developing.

“Success speaks for itself. They did clear Waziristan, and General Sharif does get credit for that,” he said. “But success can change. If they overplay the military card and continue to build an inflated image, it could boomerang. They need to allow civilians their space. But I’m afraid the lust for power is such that they don’t always understand that.”

[END REPORT]

********

11/13 mastermind dead: I guess Alllah didn't choose to blind the Crusaders this time

From Long War Journal, 16 November, Key suspect in Paris attacks has been featured in Islamic State propaganda

Abaaoud mocked Western intelligence services for failing to prevent him from entering Belgium and establish a cell, and then later failing to capture him after the Verviers raid.

“Allah blinded their vision and I was able to leave and come to Shām despite being chased after by so many intelligence agencies,” he stated.

“All this proves that a Muslim should not fear the bloated image of the crusader intelligence. My name and picture were all over the news yet I was able to stay in their homeland, plan operations against them, and leave safely when doing so became necessary.”

The Washington Post's sources at the U.S. Department of State are very good, so I'm reasonably assured the anonymous tipsters are reliable: 

 
Suspected architect of Paris attacks is dead, according to two senior European officials
By Souad Mekhennet, Anthony Faiola and Missy Ryan

November 18 at 3:56 PM EST

PARIS — The suspected ringleader of the Paris attacks was killed Wednesday in a massive predawn raid by French police commandos, two senior European officials said, after investigators followed leads that the fugitive militant was holed up north of the French capital and could be plotting another wave of violence.

More than 100 police officers and soldiers stormed an apartment building in the suburb of Saint-Denis during a seven-hour siege that left at least two dead, including the suspected overseer of the Paris bloodshed, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, officials said. Abaaoud, a Belgian extremist, had once boasted that he could slip easily between Europe and strongholds of the Islamic State militant group in Syria.

[LIVE updates from Paris and elsewhere]

Paris prosecutor François Molins, speaking to reporters hours after the siege, said he could not provide the identities of the people killed at the scene. A French security official declined to confirm or deny that Abaaoud had died.

But two senior European officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said they received confirmation from the French that Abaaoud was slain in the raid.

It was not immediately clear how Abaaoud died — whether in police gunfire, by his own hand or in a suicide blast triggered by a woman in the apartment.

After the raid, forsenics experts combed through the aftermath — blown-out windows, floors collapsed by explosions — presumably seeking DNA and other evidence.

Molins said a discarded cellphone helped identify safe houses used by attackers to plan Friday’s coordinated assaults, which killed 129 people and wounded more than 350 across Paris.

Molins said police launched the raid because they believed that Abaaoud was “entrenched” on the third floor of the apartment building. He said that neither Abaaoud nor another wanted suspect, Salah Abdeslam, was among eight people who were arrested at the apartment and other locations on Wednesday. Three people were arrested in the raid on the apartment, he said, one of whom had a gunshot wound in the arm.

Molins said the safe houses indicated “a huge logistics plan, meticulously carried out.”

The death of Abaaoud closes one major dragnet in the international search for suspects from Friday’s carnage.

But it raised other worrisome questions, including the apparent ability of Abaaoud to evade intelligence agencies while traveling through Europe and whether other possible Islamic State cells could be seeking to strike again.

It also left no doubt that other potential threats remained.

The raid on the apartment building appeared to be linked in part to plans to stage a follow-up terrorist attack in the La Defense business district, about 10 miles away, two police officials and an investigator close to the investigation said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief media.

As security forces closed in, a woman set off a suicide blast — possibly an explosive-rigged vest or belt — after opening fire. The eight people who were arrested Wednesday in Saint-Denis, a teeming district with a large immigrant population, included seven men and one woman, Molins said.

French media identified the suicide bomber as Hasna Aitboulahcen, a cousin of Abaaoud’s. The 26-year-old French citizen is a former manager of Beko Construction, a company in Epinay-sur-Seine, a town north of Saint-Denis. The company was closed in 2014.

[...]

Molins, the Paris prosecutor, told reporters that the operation was launched after authorities received information — potentially tips or intelligence information — that Abaaoud was in the area.

Abaaoud, an ardent Islamic State supporter linked to several other terrorist attempts, was believed to be in Syria earlier this year. But some officials speculate that he could have returned to Europe, perhaps passing undetected among the flood of asylum seekers pouring into Greek islands from Turkey.

The siege appeared to have been aided by another potential breakthrough in the probe: the discovery of a mobile phone in a garbage can near the Bataclan concert hall, the site of one of Friday’s assaults.

The phone’s data contained a map of the music venue, French media reported, along with a chilling text message sent shortly after the first gunmen entered: “Let’s go, we’re starting.”

[...]

The information on the phone opened fresh leads, including to an apartment southeast of Paris in Alfortville, according to Mediapart, a French news outlet.

French officials have cast a wide net in the hunt for suspects in Friday’s attacks, which took place at Bataclan, several bars and restaurants, and a soccer match. Across France, 118 additional raids were conducted overnight on Tuesday, yielding at least 25 arrests. That brought to 414 the number of raids launched throughout France since Friday, the Interior Ministry said.

After Friday’s assaults, which laid bare the shortcomings of European intelligence agencies’ ability to prevent militant attacks, officials across the continent have remained on high alert.

In Copenhagen, a terminal at the Danish capital’s international airport was briefly evacuated after “an overheard conversation about a bomb,” police said in a Twitter post. The terminal was later reopened.

Countries, including Sweden and Italy, raised terror alerts. Extra security was posted in St. Peter’s Square, where Pope Francis addressed pilgrims.

French authorities, meanwhile, issued a pan-European bulletin asking people to watch for a Citroen Xsara car that could be carrying Salah Abdeslam, a French militant also accused of having a direct role in the attacks, the Spanish news site El Español reported Wednesday.

On Tuesday, authorities in Hanover, Germany, abruptly called off a friendly soccer match between Germany and the Netherlands that Chancellor Angela Merkel had planned to attend. One target of Friday’s attacks was a friendly soccer match between France and Germany at a crowded stadium north of Paris — not far from the Saint-Denis raids. No explosives were found at the German site.

[...]

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"Far-right party skyrockets to top 3 in German polls amid refugee crisis"

“If the refugee issue were to be solved, then the central reason why people are saying they’d vote for them would also disappear.”

Would it? Once the box is opened not so easy to get the lid back on. A reader wondered why I was so worried about Pegida. It wasn't Pegida but that Pegida was opening the box.....

Far-right party skyrockets to top 3 in German polls amid refugee crisis
Published time: 18 Nov, 2015 06:23

RT

Anti-refugee rhetoric has propelled the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party to third place in the country, a fresh poll has revealed.

According to a weekly survey by INSA, AfD would have received 10.5 percent of the vote if an election was held Wednesday.

This means that the ultranationalist party has surged ahead of left-leaning parties the Greens and Die Linke (Left Party), which both registered 10 percent support.

Support for AfD appears to have skyrocketed in recent months, as they had only 3 percent in the polls as recently as August.

READ MORE: Migrant crisis pushing Germany towards ‘anarchy and civil war’

It is also the best result for the party, which was established in 2013 as a Eurosceptic group, but then switched to criticizing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policies.

One of the party’s key figures, Björn Höcke, has made headlines with hardline nationalist rhetoric. Some of its slogans, such as: “Germans! Three thousand years of Europe, 1,000 years of Germany,” have been compared to Nazi propaganda.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling alliance, comprising the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) remains top of the polls with 35 percent, followed by the Social Democrats (SPD) on 23.5 percent, the poll showed.

The left has blamed the CSU for creating the conditions for the growth of the AfD, saying that the conservative Bavarian party made “xenophobic slogans socially acceptable.”

The Christian Social Union has recently called for the building of border fences in response to hundreds of thousands of refugees coming to Germany from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The AfD is also profiting from the impression that people in need could overwhelm a rich country like Germany – but this is a fictitious emergency,” Katja Kipping, chair of the Left Party, told The Local. “The relevant authorities at the federal level didn't react quickly enough to the predictable rise in refugee numbers.”

Hermann Binkert, the head of the INSA polling agency, said that the rise of the AfD can be explained by its more “authentic position in terms of refugees and migration.”

“Voters who don’t agree with [Merkel’s] CDU go to the AfD because all the other parties stand for the Willkommenskultur [Germanys’ welcoming policy toward refugees],” he said.

But Binkert was reluctant to predict whether, in the long term, the AfD would maintain its current popularity, which he said was closely tied to the refugee crisis.

“If the refugee issue were to be solved, then the central reason why people are saying they’d vote for them would also disappear,” he said.

[END REPORT]

Muslim man rants at Islamic State in video that's gone viral. Cover your ears.

From yesterday's Daily Mail:

"If you don't like this country, why the f*** did you come here?" 

Muslim man's impassioned speech decrying ISIS for trying to impose Sharia law on the West takes social media by storm.

• Muslim man launches into three-minute verbal attack on violent extremists
• He said that Islam 'teaches you to be tolerant and to respect other faiths'
• During the tirade, he asks "Do you have the right to kill? F*** you, you don't"
• Do you know who the man is? Email julian.robinson@mailonline.co.uk

[...]

***

The video is posted at the Daily Mail website. First time I've heard a Muslim cuss like that. We need many more Muslims in the West like him.   

******** 

Police siege of Paris attack suspects UPDATED 4X, last update 4:22 AM EST

UPDATE 4:22 AM EST
Okay; this is from Sputnik  timestamped 07:05 am 18.11.2015 (updated 11:44 am [local time]:

French Police Kill Three Terror Suspects, Arrest Five in Paris Suburb

At least four policemen sustained wounds during a special operation in the northern Paris suburb Saint Denis conducted over the terror attacks in the capital. Two suspects are reportedly surrounded.

French police special forces have killed three suspected terrorists during a special operation in the Parisian suburb of Saint Denis, and arrested five others, according to local media.

One of the suspects managed to escape, French RTL radio said.

Seven or eight alleged grenade explosions were heard near the place where the two suspects are hiding, according to BFMTV.

A group of 50 military has been deployed to facilitate the operation.

"A woman with an explosive belt that has not been activated was shot," two RTL radio security correspondents reported, corroborating previous reports of three deaths and two arrests in the raid.
The three-hour siege reportedly targets Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the alleged mastermind of the terrorist acts, previously thought to have been in Syria, as well as Salah Abdeslam and a potential ninth assailant. Abdeslam is thought to have rented a vehicle used in the massacres.

[END REPORT but lots of Tweets in the report, if you're a fan of the genre]

All right; that really is the last update. Signing off for the rest of the day.  
UPDATE 4:00 AM EST
The Washington Post is reporting as of 3:50 AM EST that 2 suspects are dead in the police raid, so we're back to 2. And I haven't read the entire report so I don't know whether WaPo has news about the present state of the siege. 

I hate posting on breaking news stories.  All right, that's the absolute last update.  

UPDATE 3:51 AM EST
Report from NBC News, which has video of the siege. At this point suspect deaths from the police raid reduced from 2 to 1, at least in this latest from NBC. Also, from witnesses interviewed by NBC, the time of the police assault began 2 hours earlier than the Irish Times report (below) stated.

The problem with the NBC report is that it doesn't explain whether the siege is ended; it doesn't seem that would be the case, from the Irish Times report.  The NBC report wanders off into related news while leaving us hanging about the siege.  [eyeroll]  

Well, there will be plenty of other 'breaking news' reports later this morning on the situation.  But this is the last update I'm doing.  

BREAKING NEWS
PARIS TERROR ATTACKS
NOV 18 2015, 3:14 AM EST

Paris Attacks: 1 Dead, 5 Arrested During Saint-Denis Raid

by NANCY ING, CASSANDRA VINOGRAD, RICHARD ENGEL, BEN PLESSER

and MARC SMITH

PARIS — A woman blew herself up as elite French police raided an apartment early Wednesday near Paris targeting high-level terror suspects involved inlast week's attacks, officials said.

Four men and another woman were also arrested during the operation in the northern suburb of St-Denis. Heavy gunfire was reported for several hours.

A woman detonated her suicide vest as the apartment was stormed, according to the Paris Prosecutor's Office.

Officials confirmed that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian jihadist who is suspected of being a lynchpin in the assaults that killed 129 people in Paris on Friday, was one of several people targeted by the raid. However, it was not immediately clear whether Abaaoud was among those arrested.

GALLERY: Gunfire Erupts in Paris Suburb

Several explosions could be heard around 7:30 a.m. local time (1:30 a.m. ET), about three hours into the operation. Officials said it was ongoing as of 8:25 a.m. local time (2:25 a.m. ET).

Veronique Haounoh, 43, was holed-up in an apartment across the street from the operation with several neighbors and heard "explosions at irregular intervals."

"We heard so many booms," she told NBC News. "I'm shaking. We are very scared, I can't stop crying."

Witness Abdel Nour al Jazaeri, an unemployed Algerian immigrant, told NBC News that he saw police raiding a building and heard intense gunfire beginning at 4:30 a.m.

A local resident who lives nearby said that he heard "lots of shots" between 4:30 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. local time.

"I was sleeping," said the man, who identified himself only as Alexandre. "I heard the noise — the shots. I said, 'That's not fireworks'."

Saint Denis is a low-income area that's close to the Stade de France, a 81,000-seat venue which was targeted by three suicide bombers during a game involving the national team and Germany on Friday.

A spokesperson for the prosecutor's office said the police operation — which the involved France's elite RAID units — was planned.

Authorities have been searching for two more suspects believed to have directly participated in the series of bombings and shootings in Paris Friday that killed at least 129 people. Seven attackers were killed, most in suicide bombings, officials said.

[...]

UPDATE 2:47 AM  EST -- number of arrested now at 3.  News of the third arrest is from AFP's Twitter page.  AFP Twitter is probably the best source for the very latest news on the siege

******
Initial post on the siege:

Here is the Irish Times summary of the siege, report timestamped 6:12 AM BST. See the IT website for photos of the siege action. From the report it looks as if the remaining suspects were holed up with enough firepower to hold out for awhile; around 6:30 army units arrived:  

The dead include one woman, who is believed to be a suicide bomber who blew herself up.

Two more people have been arrested following the shootout in north Paris, AFP has reported.

It is also understood that police have been injured during the shootout in a Paris suburb in an operation believed to be linked to the terror attacks in the city.

Swat teams launched a pre-dawn raid in Saint Denis, just north of the capital, and the area's deputy mayor Stephane Peu told French television it was not a "new attack".

Reports suggested the several suspects were hiding in an apartment building and police have blocked off the area around Place Jean Jaures. Several officers have been injured.

The suspected mastermind of the Paris attacks Abdelhamid Abaaoud is believed to have barricaded himself inside an apartment at the scene, police have said.

They say they believe he has at least five heavily armed men inside with him.

Shortly before 6.30am French army units arrived at the scene - they were called in after police experienced 'unexpectedly violent resistance'.

At least seven explosions were heard at the scene of the stand-off.

French media are reporting two people have died - including a woman they report detonated a suicide vest.

Baptiste Marie, a 26-year-old journalist who lives near the scene of the stand-off, said: "It started with an explosion. Then there was second big explosion. Then two more explosions. There was an hour of gunfire."

Amin Guizani, 21, says: "There were grenades. It was going, stopping. Kalashnikovs. Starting again."

Riot police were clearing the streets, pointing guns at curious residents to move them off the roads.

Authorities are searching for two extremists suspected of taking part in last Friday's attacks, which killed 129 people.

News of a second unidentified terrorist thought to be directly involved in the Paris terror attacks emerged after CCTV indicated there were three extremists involved in the attack on a bar in the city.

It would take the total number of attackers to nine, with seven dead and the eighth surviving gunman, Salah Abdeslam, the subject of an international manhunt.

Authorities evacuated about 20 people from the building and brought to city hall for protection. The stand-off was taking place on rue du Cornillon, in the heart of the historic, multi-cultural town.

Saint Denis is one of France's most historic places. French kings were crowned and buried through the centuries in its famed basilica. Today it is home to a vibrant and very ethnically diverse population and sees sporadic tension between police and violent youths.

Online Editors

[END REPORT]

********

Victor Davis Hanson barks at the caravan, Stephen F. Cohen reports from the caravan

Victor Davis Hanson was on the John Batchelor Show last night (podcast, last segment Hour1) explaining that Hollande was going to plead with Putin not to invade Estonia and just concentrate on whumping Islamic State in Syria. He presented no evidence or intelligence or even a 'theory' that Russia's government plans to invade Estonia. Nor did he explain why Russia would want to invade.

This from a man who was once a professor of the classics. Today he's a right-wing hack who inflicts his politics on peoples who've been dead for thousands of years, and in his spare time spins for the Get Russia crowd. The crowd is not going quietly into the night. They're sitting on their haunches yipping and yowling as the world -- the world outside the United States of America -- moves on.

Also last night, Stephen F. Cohen, an American scholar of Russian history and one who doesn't twist history to fit his political views, gave his weekly report to Batchelor's audience. He gave an update on the Ukrainian situation, discussed the fast-changing relationship between Russia and Europe, the fall from grace of Angela Merkel, and implications of Russia's entry into the Syrian war. 

He also made a point that I think is a first for the John Batchelor Show: If Assad falls, there goes the Syrian Army, which as of now is the only viable ground force against Islamic State and the rest of Terror, Inc. in Syria. 

That's right. 

Here's the podcast for the discussion.

********

German stadium bomb might have been a false alarm

Still a fog of war situation.  From a New Zealand website  AFP is reporting on Twitter that there were no explosives found at the stadium. See the website for details.  

It's almost a moot issue whether the bomb was just a scare. People in Europe are scared and very jumpy and for good reasons. I too am jumpy; I live in Washington. D.C. And the 9/11 attacks messed up my commuting route. To this day I don't hear a low-flying jet without freezing for a few seconds.

*******        

Memo to Europe's Muslims: Stop whining and start yelling at Jihadi Crazies

Yes yes I understand you're victims of Islamophobia. I'm so goddamn understanding I'm thinking of incorporating as Understanding, Inc. But now you listen to me and listen good. You're all going to end up in internment camps. Then you can wave your U.K. and European passports at human rights attorneys from behind barbed wire.  

Don't think this isn't on the way. You need to study what happened to Japanese-American citizens during World War II. I think 99.9 percent of those citizens were completely innocent of any collaboration or sympathy with Imperial Japan. And there were Japanese-Americans who joined to fight on the U.S. side. 

Didn't matter. Civilians, including women and children, were rounded up and put in internment camps for the duration of the war. 

That's the way things are, and if this upsets you go complain to human nature.

Now get out there in town squares, mosques, and city parks and yell that violent jihadis aren't true Muslims and what's more they're all going straight to hell. 


If you get approached by any Saudi or any Muslim cleric offering you money to shut up, tell him to shove the money up his ass. If you get threatened, run to the nearest police station then to the nearest public venue and shout out that you were threatened.

Yeah, I know it's tough. Go ask the Sicilians what they went through when they stood up to organized crime, which at the time completely ran the government and every single aspect of society. I won't sugar coat it; many were murdered, many very good and courageous people and their relatives were murdered. Yes. Right there in Europe in the modern era. 

Or go ask the Mexicans who stand up to the crime cartels about what happens to them.  

That's the way things are when you put up with evil for so long the only choice left is to risk everything you hold dear, including your life. 

Now is your time to stand up for what's right -- and to stand up for every reason that drew you or your relatives to Europe in the first place. 

Get it straight; this is not a dress rehearsal. This is your life, your future. and the future of your family. And this is your country you're fighting for. If you don't consider it your country, get the hell out.          
   
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