“Debra Burlingame, the sister of Charles “Chic” Burlingame (pilot of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon) told Fox News Thursday that President Barack Obama turned his back on her during the 9/11 memorial when she attempted to engage him on the prosecution of the men who interrogated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Burlingame said she confronted Obama about Attorney General Eric Holder prosecuting the men, who likely produced intelligence leading us to bin Laden.

Burlingame describes the encounter with Obama: “As a former attorney I know you can’t tell the Attorney General what to do, he said, ‘No, I can’t.’ But I said ‘we — that shouldn’t stop you from giving your opinion. We wouldn’t be here today if they hadn’t done their jobs. Can’t you at least give them your opinion.’ And he said ‘no I won’t,’ and he turned around and walked away.”

http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/obama-burlingame-fox-911/2011/05/05/id/395342?s=al&promo_code=C364-1

“Two more security firms have won contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to build the State Department a private army in Iraq. The department confirms to Danger Room that longtime Iraq contractor Triple Canopy and newcomer Global Strategies Group will contribute to State’s planned protection force of 5,500 contractors.

In September, the State Department announced that eight security firms would share in a $10 billion contract to guard diplomats.”

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/two-more-merc-firms-get-big-iraq-contracts/

“Military dogs are awe-inspiring creatures, especially when attached to elite troops like the Navy SEALs. All day, the media have been in a frenzy over the fact that a military dog accompanied SEAL Team 6 on its mission to wax Osama bin Laden.

But let’s kill a misleading meme before it spreads further: Navy SEAL dogs don’t have titanium teeth.

A piece in The Daily took a good, detailed sniff around the German shepherds and Belgian Malinois that accompany special operations forces on patrol. But overshadowing all the cool radios and cameras strapped to the dogs is the claim that their “razor-sharp teeth are made of titanium,” at a cost of $2,000 per chomper. Getting bit by them “is like being stabbed four times at once with a bone crusher,” one dog trainer told The Daily.”

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/no-navy-seal-dogs-dont-have-titanium-teeth/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29

“Claude Choules, the only remaining male veteran of World War I and one of the last people to have served in both world wars, died May 5 at a nursing home near Perth in western Australia. He was 110, and no cause of death was reported.

The former seaman, who was underage when he signed up for duty, witnessed the surrender of the German Imperial Navy in 1918. He also watched as German sailors scuttled their own fleet at Scapa Flow, near Scotland, to avoid having the ships fall into British hands after the war.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/claude-choules-last-combat-veteran-of-world-war-i-dies-at-110/2011/05/05/AFxEdu0F_story.html

“One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread.

The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost.

The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water.”

– C.S. Lewis, Rehabilitations

Jason Overdorf

“Reacting to the news of the killing of Osama bin Laden “deep inside Pakistan” — in what I hear is a closely guarded town with a school for Pakistani military cadets — India’s home minister said that the final proof that the terrorist leader had been hiding in Pakistan only confirms India’s long-standing position that Pakistan actively harbors and supports terrorist groups.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/bric-yard/india-osama-death-underlines-our-concern-terrorists-find-sanct

A TV grab from the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera news channel dated June17, 2005, showing Al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri delivering a speech at an undisclosed location with a machine gun next to him. (Al Jazeera/AFP/Getty Images)

[Ayman al Zawahiri] “… is the likely successor to bin Laden, according to high-level national security officials both current and retired.

… the clear goal he has been actively pursuing is to carry out an attack on America using a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) or, as a so-called “dirty bomb” is often referred to, a Weapon of Mass Effect (WME).

Based on interviews with a half dozen counterterrorism officials and experts with deep knowledge of Zawahiri, a portrait emerges of a leader who has for at least three years been quietly and effectively building the groundwork — theological and scientific — for Al Qaeda to complete an attack using WMD.

In 2008, Zawahiri wrote a book which presented his own theological grounding for the deployment of a nuclear weapon in America, and Al Qaeda’s sense of the religious justification for killing as many people as possible.

The book is a glimpse inside the religious fervor of a leader who is in many ways more ambitious than bin Laden was in trying to produce a “spectacular” terrorist event that will exceed the death and destruction caused on Sept. 11.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/opinion/columnists/110503/zawahiri-osama-bin-laden-al-qaeda

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghanistan government escalated its criticism of Pakistan on Wednesday, publicly questioning for the first time how the Pakistanis could assure the security of their own nuclear weapons if they did not even know that Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted terrorist, had been hiding in a compound in a Pakistani military town less than an hour from their own capital.

“If the Pakistani intelligence agency does not know about a home located 10 meters or 100 meters away from its national military academy, where for the last six years the biggest terrorist is living, how can this country take care of its strategic weapons?” General Azimi said.

He added that if Pakistan’s intelligence did in fact know the whereabouts of Bin Laden, then “they are playing a double game.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/world/asia/05afghanistan.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss