The Black Rod

If you blinked you missed it. Starring Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett and screen veteran Robert Redford, the movie titled "Truth" came and went and nobody noticed. Despite opening in more than 1100 theatres, this certified stinkeroo, which cost $9.6 million to make, has grossed barely $2.5 million. So why mention it? Because its the celluloid apologia for Rathergate, the infamous scandal where CBS tried to influence the 2004 American presidential election by smearing George Bush with a phony story on 60 Minutes (Wednesday edition) hosted by Dan Rather.   When the documents used by Rather to attack George Bush proved to be fraudulent, show producer Mary Mapes was fired and Dan Rather's career was over.   The only thing left behind was the mantra adopted by bad reporters everywhere: the evidence is false, but the story is true. The real heroes of Rathergate were the bloggers and internet commenters who rose up together to take the false story apart, line b...

After too many months on hiatus from The Black Rod's weekly War in Afghanistan feature, we were still playing catch-up last week, but already we were shocked and dismayed by what we found. The only sign of a real war is the drone war in Pakistan. Unmanned U.S. aircraft delivered a rain of missiles Tuesday on insurgents in North Waziristan, a section of Pakistan's tribal region bordering Afghanistan. The single attack saw 18 missiles launched on a car or truck and into tents containing armed men. At least 14 insurgents were killed. It was the second strike in 3 days. More than 30 drone attacks have been recorded this year, almost all in North Waziristan, the stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban. The intense air attacks have killed many of the Taliban leadership and cast a pall of terror over the insugents. They have stopped using cell phones, because they fear their location can be pinpointed, which has disrupted communication between members who hav...

It's been quite a while since our last War in Afghanistan report so we've got a lot of catching up to do before we can get back into the rhythm of our weekly reviews of events. So let's start with the broad strokes. 1. Victory in Iraq. Even the most ardent defeatists now admit it. We won. We, as in the West, but particularly the United States and its allies in the Coalition. Al Qaeda was sent packing. Their terror tactics failed. A new Iraq is climbing out of the rubble left behind by Saddam Hussein and the Islamic terrorists who saw in his defeat an opportunity to confront and humiliate the United States. Instead, it was they who were humiliated by being forced to run for their lives, run back to Afghanistan whence they came. It's important to collect the names of those who wanted to quit in the darkest days, who wanted to surrender to the terrorists, who wanted to give up the fight for freedom and democracy once the fight got hard. We ...

The Western press can't decide if the Taliban is resilient (bouncing back, recovering strength) or resurgent (rising again). Regardless of the adjective, the message is the same---the West has failed again. The terrorists are back as strong as ever. As proof, reporters invariably mention that the number of coalition dead in Afghanistan is greater than the casualty total in Iraq for the nth month in a row. What they carefully fail to explain is---why? The answer is painfully obvious. WE WON. That's right. Al Qaeda has been defeated in Iraq. It took several years but the terrorists are on the run in Iraq. They're being driven out by a determined coalition of Iraq soldiers trained to fight a new kind of war, the local populace that got tired of being cannon fodder for the terrorists and American forces that refused to give up. And they're running back home to Afghanistan. What's more important, is they're making the exact same mistakes in Afghanistan that caused th...