FDD

Dispatches from the Danger Zone: "America Has Lost a True Patriot"

My old friend Smith Hempstone, the swashbuckling and adventurous writer and blunt-talking diplomat, died the other day at age 77 in Washington.  America has lost a true patriot. 

I became friendly with Smith in Africa about 15 years ago when he was the US ambassador to Kenya and I was ambassador to the Seychelle Islands, 1000 miles out from Mombassa in the Indian Ocean.

I had lunch with Smith a few times at Nairobi’s legendary Muthaiga Club where we would kill a couple of bottles of South African wine gabbing at a table near a stuffed moth-eaten lion in a glass case. Smith had a short, white beard and a face like red shoe leather.  He was witty and hard-drinking and, in his safari vest and khaki trousers, seemed like a character from Kenya’s past; more a white hunter chum of Denys Hatton Finch than a swallow-tailed diplomat. 

Dispatches from the Danger Zone: Castro's Cuba

I had responsibility for Radio Marti into Cuba for six years during the cold war.

We broadcast a line of sight signal from a tethered aerostat balloon off Marathon Island in the Florida Keys into Cuba bringing honest news and information to an island dictatorship with no free press and no information beyond what Castro personally wanted his citizens to have.

The Left in Congress and in the Public Policy Think-Tank World, then still in the throes of their long homo-erotic love affair with Fidel Castro (and the mega- loser Che Guevara,) hated Radio Marti and worked hard to undermine it. 

These were often the same people who talked frequently about human rights and press freedoms but never demanded them for the captive people of Cuba because they wouldn’t criticize Castro.

“No enemies on the left,” was their motto and that of their friends in the mainstream press, who were always fawning on Fidel. 

Castro was only 32 when he came to power. 

He has ended up as the world’s longest-serving leader, the media keeps reminding us. The man who outlasted nine US presidents.  Although as Buckley Carlson pointed out to me those American leaders had to contend with the annoying inconvenience of being democratically elected.

Danger Zone Available for Podcast

August 13th's episode is now available for download.

Dispatches from the Danger Zone: "Try not to let the facts get in the way of a good story"

U.S. Bloggers really hung the news agency Reuters out to dry – and about time.

They caught them doctoring a photograph of downtown Beirut after an attack by the Israeli air force.   

Reuters had added an extra amount of smoke and a few extra buildings to make the bombing look more serious and more severe than it really was.

Reuters has admitted the doctoring, done by computer software, and blamed the photographer, one Adnan Hajj, who now has been fired.

He is the same Reuters cameraman who was accused of doctoring photos after an Israeli air attack on the Lebanese town of Qana.   

That picture showed a man, standing in rubble, holding a dead girl, a small child, aloft for the camera lens. A picture taken at 7:21 am shows the dead girl being held above an ambulance.   A picture three hours later, at 10:25am, shows the same girl being loaded in the same ambulance.   Another photo, taken 20 minutes later, shows the same child being carried by a Lebanese rescue worker, no ambulance in sight.

This propaganda, aided by news photographers, is typical of Hezbollah and their friends.  When they report civilian casualties in Lebanon they invariably double the actual figure. 

Dispatches from the Danger Zone: Israeli Intelligence

The Israeli Air Force has been unable to employ targeted killings in the fight against Hezbollah to any significant degree because of a shortage of real-time intelligence, a high-ranking IDF officer told the Jerusalem Post.

The good news is that this has caused the three Israeli intelligence agencies- the Mossad, the Shin Bet and Military Intelligence - to work together in an almost unprecedented way, Israeli’s are saying. Of course, The universal competitiveness of every government’s bureaucratic agencies is both their strength and their weakness and, of course, it is always more difficult to gather intelligence during a war than before the fighting begins.

Danger Zone Available for Podcast

August 6th's episode is now available for download.

Dispatches from the Danger Zone: Lest we Forget

Lots of talk about Hezbollah these days and some mention of the lethal attacks they have made on Americans in the past:

• the Khobar Towers attack in Saudi Arabia
• the Marine barracks attack in Beirut back in 1983,
• the kidnappings and killings in Beirut of CIA station Chief Bill Buckley and US Marine Colonel Rich Higgins
• the murder of navy Diver Robbie Stethem when Hezbollah hijacked a TWA flight in 1985.

What seldom, if ever, gets mentioned though are some of the other atrocities against Americans committed by Hezbollah –all of which have gone unpunished. Let me refresh the record with mention of a few of them.

Dispatches from the Danger Zone: "A Tough Week"

At his weekly briefing, the spokesman for coalition forces in Iraq, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, said progress is being made to restore order to the streets of the Iraqi capital but acknowledged that it had been "a tough week."

In one 24 hour period last week Police in Baghdad recovered 38 bodies in the city. All showed signs of terrible torture.

5,800 civilian deaths occurred in Iraq in May and June alone.

These are Muslims killing Muslims, and in the most cowardly, sneaky, dishonorable ways. What is wrong with these people? What animals the so-called "insurgents" are.

Also, this week's Danger Zone radio lineup is here and last week's podcast is here.

Danger Zone Available for Podcast

July 23rd's episode is available for download.

Danger Zone Available for Podcast

July 16th's episode is available for download.