BEIRUT – Forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad retook a central district in the city of Homs on Thursday, driving a wedge between two isolated pockets of rebel resistance in Syria’s third largest city, fighters and activists said. (more…)

(Boston)  Two men from Kazakhstan and a man from Cambridge were arrested and charged today in the Boston Marathon bombings investigation, federal prosecutors said.

Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev, both 19 and of New Bedford, were charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice by plotting to dispose of a laptop computer and a backpack containing fireworks belonging to bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the US attorney’s office said in a statement. (more…)

Well I am not liberty to disclose the identity of the witnesses but I will just say what I have said previously which is it is going to be a very informational and instructive hearing. I would encourage you to follow it. Benghazi is warming up. It is not going away despite the efforts of this administration… You know that hearsay evidence is not so interesting. First hand accounts by eye-witnesses much more compelling. So I would again repeat for your audience and those who may be watching. Let me just say next week will be a good opportunity for us to hear non-hearsay accounts of what happened in Benghazi.“

Odd mixes of irony surrounding the Boston Bombers.   After information came out that taxpayers had funded their endeavors; providing welfare, food stamps, child care and housing assistance, tuition and possibly unemployment benefits, we now provide the best defense money can buy.

We know Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has the benefit of the most Islamist Sensitive Judge, Marianne Bowler, who has guest lectured in Kuwait 1997, and even in Egypt [2012] after the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and their candidate, now President, Morsi.

So it should come as no surprise the most skilled, well-versed, prolific and successful public defender of all things Jihadist would be hand-picked to represent Tsarnaev.

Associated Press […] The team that will be led by Miriam Conrad, the chief federal public defender for Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, got a major boost Monday with the addition of prominent San Diego lawyer and death penalty opponent Judy Clarke. Not that Conrad is considered any slouch.

“She is as tenacious as they come,” said Joshua Levy, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Boston who has gone up against Conrad in federal court. “I always found her to be very smart and focused on whatever she perceived as chinks in the armor in the government’s case. She would zone in on that.” (more…)

WASHINGTON DC – At least four career officials at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have retained lawyers or are in the process of doing so, as they prepare to provide sensitive information about the Benghazi attacks to Congress, Fox News has learned.

Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department official and Republican counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, is now representing one of the State Department employees. She told Fox News her client and some of the others, who consider themselves whistle-blowers, have been threatened by unnamed Obama administration officials.

“I’m not talking generally, I’m talking specifically about Benghazi – that people have been threatened,” Toensing said in an interview Monday. “And not just the State Department. People have been threatened at the CIA.” (more…)

(Via Doug Ross)   U.S. Had Assets That Could Have Saved U.S. SEALs

BAIER: The administration has insisted there was no help for the Americans under assault in Libya, none that could arrive in time to change the outcome in Benghazi. Tonight is the first of three exclusive reports charging that claim is just not true.

Because the Special Operator in this piece is fearful of reprisal, we have agreed to conceal his identity. Correspondent Adam Housley has the story.
HOUSLEY: Many Americans are asking indeed, I asked myself. How could this happen? In the seven months since the Benghazi attacks on 9/11, information from the administration has been incomplete at best.

Details and time lines provided by the State Department, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies had been contradictory and failed to answer many questions.

In December, a State Department review concluded: There simply was not enough time for U.S. military forces to have made a difference: Having said that, it is not reasonable nor feasible to forces at the ready to respond to protect every high risk post in the world.
But members of the military who are monitoring events in Benghazi disagree. (more…)

Obviously, yet oddly, the New York Times tells the truth of who the Syrian Rebels are.  Perhaps the intentionally mistaken reporting from Libya 2011/12 is giving them a few moments of painful reflection.   Indeed, over the past two plus years the mistakes from the Obama R2P doctrine are no longer a debate, they are a reality.

The same ideological components which benefitted from the U.S led U.N. Libyan intervention are in play throughout Syria.   al-Qaeda elements have played a brilliant game of getting the U.S. and the U.N. to destroy its adversaries.  Now they hope to deploy the same strategy in Syria….

The current administration is filled with foolish ideological globalists.  History will not write well of their consequences…  Despite their efforts, eventually freedom will win, it is the natural demand of the human condition.

CAIRO (NYT) – In Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, rebels aligned with Al Qaeda control the power plant, run the bakeries and head a court that applies Islamic law. Elsewhere, they have seized government oil fields, put employees back to work and now profit from the crude they produce.

Across Syria, rebel-held areas are dotted with Islamic courts staffed by lawyers and clerics, and by fighting brigades led by extremists. Even the Supreme Military Council, the umbrella rebel organization whose formation the West had hoped would sideline radical groups, is stocked with commanders who want to infuse Islamic law into a future Syrian government.

Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of. (more…)

WASHINGTON DC – Attorney General Eric Holder on Saturday defended the decision to read the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon terror bombings his Miranda rights.

Holder said the decision was “totally consistent with the laws that we have.”

He also pointed to the federal magistrate on the case.

“The decision to Mirandize was one that the magistrate made,” Holder told CNN as he arrived at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in Washington.

Early on Monday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler showed up at the hospital unannounced with a federal prosecutor and public defender while the suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was being questioned by the FBI. (more…)