Columnist.
TAMPA, Fla. -- This is the hometown of U.S. Special Operations Command -- at nearby MacDill Air Force Base. This headquarters dispatches our military's special operators -- Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines -- on missions in the most difficult and dangerous places on earth. It's also the place where "action officers" are burning the midnight oil -- but not necessarily planning new targets for our Navy SEALs. Apparently, a "good number" of SOCOM's staff members are busy preparing responses to the batches of inquiries about what really happened in Benghazi, Libya -- before, during and after the terror attack on the night of Sept. 11-12 that resulted in four dead Americans. Answers have been slow in coming. Three days after the assault, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the FBI would investigate the attack as a criminal matter, not as an act of war. For reasons left to our imagination, the FBI didn't move fast enough, so the Obama administration appointed a special review board to develop a "full picture" of all that transpired at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.
WASHINGTON -- When Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman sat down to draft the Declaration of Independence, they began with a "Bill of Particulars" against King George III. They accused the monarch of "repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States." Now, 236 years later, "We the People" are about to decide whom we should hire as our chief executive and commander in chief. It's an appropriate time to review the grievances of our Founding Fathers -- and examine the offenses committed by our present head of state. Jefferson and his colleagues determined that the king had "refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public Good." That's certainly relevant to the incumbent administration, which repeatedly has rejected all efforts by Congress to pass a budget as required by our Constitution.
WASHINGTON -- For better than a month, the Obama administration has been dodging and weaving over what actually transpired in Benghazi, Libya, on the night of Sept. 11-12. Questions have been posed about why Ambassador Christopher Stevens was there and not at his embassy post in Tripoli. Congressional investigators have asked why he had no security detail, why the State Department decided not to send in U.S. Marine embassy security guards when they were offered months before, why contingency plans were not in place on the anniversary of 9/11 and why the O-Team insisted for so long that the attack on our U.S. diplomatic post was a "spontaneous event" and not an act of terrorism. By now, all should realize that truthful answers to these inquiries will not be furnished by the White House or State Department until after the presidential election on Nov. 6. But there is an even more important question that should be asked and answered now: Once the White House knew about the attack in Benghazi, what action did the president take to protect or save the lives of Americans?
HELMAND PROVINCE, Afghanistan -- "Don't either of them even know we're still fighting over here?" That question was posed by one of the U.S. Marines with whom we have been keeping company in southwestern Afghanistan. His query followed this week's presidential debate at Hofstra University, during which the word "Afghanistan" was uttered only once during the 90-minute exchange between the two men bidding to be commander in chief. Last year when we were in this part of Helmand province, there were four Marine battalions providing security and mentoring Afghan soldiers and police. Now there is just one -- 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment -- the last Fleet Marine Force unit in which I served. I admit to bias in favor of these young Marines, with whom I share a special bond.
WARDAK PROVINCE, Afghanistan -- "If you leave here like you left Iraq, I am a dead man," says the blunt-speaking district governor. His district chief of police, a newly appointed civil judge and the chief of the Afghan Local Police detachment all nod their heads in assent. None of them is smiling. We are reminded by the commander of the special operations unit with whom we are living not to broadcast names or faces of Afghan security force personnel. The local district governor is speaking through an interpreter. He doesn't pull any punches: "You must not abandon us again. You helped us expel the Soviets and then left us to the Taliban and al-Qaida. Look what happened to you. When you came back, we put our lives and our families at risk because you told us you would help us rebuild our country. But now you are leaving before the job is done. We have enemies to our east and west. They are your enemies, as well. But your deadline means we are dead."
HELMAND PROVINCE, Afghanistan -- When our Fox News team left for Afghanistan last week, there was a palpable sense of imminent calamity in the air. Gloom and doom news from here is now a staple in our so-called mainstream media. Reports of "green-on-blue," or insider, attacks by our Afghan allies against American and NATO troops are depicted as a sure sign of mission failure and portend of worse to come. Commentaries, columns and "analysis" from "experts" urging our political and military leaders to "get out now" routinely grace our print and broadcast outlets. The terms "betrayed," "cut our losses" and "minimize failure" appear regularly in the press, and "lost cause" is now the media watchword for Afghanistan.
EN ROUTE TO AFGHANISTAN -- Dear Gov. Romney, It seems as if every pundit, campaign consultant and professor of political science has been on the air or in print lately, offering advice on how you can "jump-start," "turn around" or "reset" your presidential campaign. Most of them say that your best chance of "regaining momentum" will be during the upcoming presidential debates. Seeing as I will be in Afghanistan keeping company with our American heroes while you're debating their current commander in chief, this seems like a pretty good time to send you some of what I have heard them say.
WASHINGTON -- Ever since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2012, the Obama White House has sought to lay blame for deadly and destructive anti-American attacks in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and more than two dozen other countries on someone else. The O-Team -- and the perpetrators -- have had a lot of help from the "useful idiots" in the mainstream media. The disinformation campaign being waged by the Obama administration over the cause of this violence would be comedic but for the fact that six Americans have been killed and dozens have been injured. From the perspective of many "covering this story," the global jihad we're witnessing is mostly the fault of an incompetent "filmmaker," and the "spontaneous outrage" is over a "provocative video." Notably, the same is being said about protests against French diplomatic posts in the Middle East because "obscene cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad" were published in a French magazine. What's really obscene is the way all of this has been covered by the potentates of the press -- particularly the events in Cairo, Benghazi and Afghanistan.
WASHINGTON -- The storming of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and the brutal murders of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, produced chaos this week in the so-called mainstream media. Instead of asking about how the heck this could happen in the aftermath of the Obama administration's Arab Spring euphoria, "reporters" started looking for scapegoats. The potentates of the press first focused their ire on something few of them even had seen -- a puerile Internet video titled "Innocence of Muslims" -- and then they turned their guns on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. As usual, the O-Team's media cheerleaders got it all wrong.
WASHINGTON -- According to the pundits and politicians, this election is all about the economy. We're all supposed to know that -- because we're not stupid. That's why the Republicans had a "national debt clock" over their convention floor in Tampa, Fla., and the Democrats didn't have one in Charlotte, N.C. To no one's surprise, the Dems didn't remind anyone in the Charlotte Convention Center that our national debt topped $16 trillion on the opening day of their conclave -- a 50 percent increase during the Obama presidency. The so-called mainstream media played along and focused instead on the change of venue for Barack Obama's outdoor acceptance speech from the 74,000-seat Bank of America Stadium -- echoing O-Team claims that the move was weather-related. Republicans said the change was precipitated by fears of empty seats.
MY LIVING ROOM COUCH -- It was the political convention that almost wasn't. In the run-up to the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., Democrats and their fellow travelers in the so-called mainstream media claimed that the GOP was waging a "war against women," depicted Mitt Romney as a heartless felon responsible for the death of a woman who lost her health insurance and blasted Romney for choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate. They then tried to define Ryan as a heartless ideologue who would eliminate Medicare and throw grandmothers off a cliff. And then a tropical storm-turned-hurricane named Isaac threatened to blow the entire convention away. As Isaac churned through the Gulf of Mexico, Republican leaders and the Romney campaign revised the entire convention schedule and postponed the proceedings by 24 hours. That wasn't good enough for the potentates of the press. The GOP was castigated for going ahead with its convention while "a terrible storm" was "causing so much death and destruction." We were reminded repeatedly that Isaac had hit the Louisiana and Mississippi coastlines on "the seventh anniversary of Katrina." One commentator, a former ABC and PBS political director, reporting for Yahoo News from the convention hall, said Republicans "are happy to have a party with black people drowning."
WASHINGTON -- Americans following this year's presidential campaign would never know it from mainstream media coverage, but the commander in chief we hired four years ago has set the United States on a course for unilateral disarmament. The following people hope you won't notice until after Nov. 6: Vladimir Putin, Liang Guanglie, Kim Jong-un, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Sayyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, A.Q. Khan and of course, Barack Obama. The 10 individuals above share a common fascination: nuclear weapons. Vladimir Putin, Russia's modern czar; Liang Guanglie, minister of national defense for the People's Republic of China; Kim Jong-un, North Korea's "Great Successor;" and Pakistan's Chief of Army Staff, Gen. Kayani, already have such weapons of mass destruction in their hands, the means of delivering them and are racing to build more. Messer's Khamenei -- Iran's supreme leader; Gen. al-Sisi, Egypt's new defense minister; Turkey's Prime Minister Erdogan; Saudi Crown Prince Salman and Pakistan's "nuclear physicist for hire" A.Q. Khan -- are all aspirants to the exclusive nuclear weapons club -- and engaged in various stages of building many more such devices. As for Barack Obama -- he just wants to get rid of all nuclear weapons -- starting with ours.
WASHINGTON -- In December 2009, our commander in chief went to West Point and proclaimed that he would withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by 2014. Since then, he has proudly emphasized that "We are on a course to end this war responsibly." Now U.S. and NATO troops and loyal Afghan soldiers and police officers are reaping the bitter harvest of the seeds that Barack Obama planted with those words. Over the last 10 days, in five separate incidents, seven American military personnel were killed in what used to be called "green on blue attacks" -- where Afghan soldiers or police have assaulted their U.S. and NATO counterparts. Thus far this year, 37 coalition troops and civilians have been killed in 29 incidents of what the Pentagon now calls "insider attacks." According to figures released by the NATO command in Kabul, there were 11 such events in all last year, resulting in 20 deaths.
WASHINGTON -- According to the pollsters and the so-called mainstream media, as of the dead of summer, the presidential contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is a dead heat. We also are told this race is all about the "economy" or "jobs" or "middle-class taxes" or "repealing Obamacare." Or not. Supposedly, we're turned off by negative campaign ads, but we also want to know whether Romney really caused the death of an unemployed woman a half-dozen years ago -- as alleged by a Democratic super PAC commercial. And of course, we all are looking forward to poring over every tax return ever filed by Romney and the hidden papers, test scores and college transcripts of young Obama. Or not.
Washington, D.C. -- This week's revelation about the president's authorizing covert action in Syria should not have come as a surprise to anyone. On Wednesday, August 1, CNN carried a breathless report sourced to "U.S. officials" that our beloved Nobel Peace Prize recipient in the Oval Office "has signed a covert directive authorizing U.S. support for Syrian rebels battling President Bashar al-Assad." According to the story, which was picked up by dozens of other outlets within hours, "The secret order, referred to as an intelligence 'finding,' allows for clandestine support by the CIA and other agencies." Given the torrent of self-adulatory leaks since the O-Team arrived in Washington three and a half years ago, this should have been the non-story of the month. But the mainstream media fell for it faster than Missy Franklin could swim 100 meters. That's just what the O-Team wanted -- and has come to expect.
GEORGETOWN, S.C. -- When Alexander the Great died at the age of 32 in 323 B.C., his once unbeatable army began a 2,900-mile withdrawal from India and headed home to Macedonia. As they retreated, the empire they had created collapsed behind them. To prevent pursuit, Alexander's royal cavalry and infantry dealt viciously with all internal dissent, destroyed cities and burned bridges. The Russians employed a similar scorched-earth tactic against Napoleon in 1812, as did the Red Army when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. It's a maneuver now being employed both domestically and internationally by Barack Obama. The re-elect Obama-Biden machine has less sanguinary methods for dealing with discord in the ranks than the Macedonian army used 2,335 years ago. There are no goblets of poisoned wine, no toxic darts -- but the Obamians and Bidenites are no less effective. It took just hours for Democrats Cory Booker -- mayor of Newark, N.J. -- and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein to recant after they had the temerity to criticize our Nobel laureate.
GEORGETOWN, S.C. -- Taking a dozen grandchildren on vacation means that we buy cereal by the ton and milk in multiple gallons. I was in the cereal aisle, squinting at the list of ingredients on a brightly colored box of "high-fiber multigrain something," when a fellow shopper put the question to me: "So, Col. North, what's the 'October surprise' for this election?" I almost said, "High-fructose corn syrup" -- the ingredient I had been instructed to avoid -- but settled instead for this: "Syria. Bashar Assad is likely to go down before we go to the polls, and that will change everything in the Middle East." My response seemed to satisfy my interlocutor, but on reflection, it didn't suit me. That's because the first "October surprise" in a presidential campaign I recall affected me personally. It was 1968. Richard Nixon vs. Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Nixon had campaigned on a promise to end the war in Vietnam, and I was a newly minted U.S. Marine infantry second lieutenant with orders sending me to the widely unpopular fight shortly after the election.
GEORGETOWN, S.C. -- Here in the Carolina Lowcountry, there are few things lower in the esteem of American citizens than the United Nations. While filling the tank of my SUV this morning, I noted the following about the pickup truck at the pump ahead of me: a South Carolina license plate, a U.S. Marine Corps decal, a National Rifle Association decal, a gun rack in the rear window, a sticker reading "Armed Infidel" and another that said "Get US Out of the UN" on it. The owner, it turned out, was a medical doctor on his way to visit a patient. Apparently, down here, doctors still make house calls. Our brief conversation went something like this...
PURCELLVILLE, Va. -- As is our custom, millions of Americans celebrated Independence Day this year with family, friends and neighbors. Here in Purcellville, there was an old-fashioned parade down Main Street, followed by a barbecue, a church service to pray for our nation -- and fireworks. For many here in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia, it was also day five without electricity -- and very hot. The hardships caused by last week's powerful storms and power outages are real. More than a dozen of our countrymen have died. The oppressive temperatures remind me that nearly halfway around the world, tens of thousands of young Americans are experiencing heat and fireworks of a different kind -- where our country's enemies are trying to kill them. Afghanistan isn't the only place with a summer "fighting season." It turns out that patriotic young Americans have spent many Independence Days fighting for "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" ever since 56 of our Founding Fathers signed "The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America" in Philadelphia 236 years ago.
WASHINGTON -- It's been a week of big decisions in our nation's capital. The Supreme Court's 5-4 verdict on Obamacare was the biggest story for politicians, pundits and the so-called mainstream media. That the justices reaffirmed the constitutional authority of Congress to levy taxes -- even when the tax is called a "mandate" -- should not have surprised anyone. The second-place decision of the week was the unprecedented 255-67 vote in the U.S. House of Representatives to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for his unwillingness to respond to congressional subpoenas for information on the Obama administration's notorious "Fast and Furious" gunrunning scheme. Both of those decisions will provide countless hours of debate, commentary and fuel for political fundraising over the next four months. Though neither matter will be completely resolved until after Americans go to the polls Nov. 6, at least the Supreme Court and the House of Representatives have proved that they can make decisions -- and we know how they were made. Though the Supremes always debate in private, their determination is explained in depth -- and by reading their decision, we know the thinking of each member of the court. The House debate and vote on holding Holder in contempt was conducted in the open for all to see.
