Showing posts with label War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label War. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

How Much Does President Obama Hate Israel?

You would think that even a hardened ideologue like Barack Obama would grudgingly approve of the one peaceful, diverse, civilized, tolerant, multi-ethnicity, multi-cultural garden spot in the Middle East known as Israel.

But then you'd be wrong.

Two days after [Obama snubbed its defense minister], the Israeli government announced the construction of 1,000 new housing units in so-called East Jerusalem, including 600 new units in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood that was the subject of a 2010 row with Joe Biden. Happy now, Mr. Vice President?

The real problem for the administration is that the Israelis—along with all the other disappointed allies—are learning how little it pays to be on Barack Obama’s good side. Since coming to office in 2009, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has agreed, against his own inclination and over the objections of his political base, to (1) recognize a Palestinian state; (2) enforce an unprecedented 10-month settlement freeze; (3) release scores of Palestinian prisoners held on murder charges; (4) embark on an ill-starred effort to reach a final peace deal with the Palestinians; (5) refrain from taking overt military steps against Iran; and (6) agree to every possible cease-fire during the summer’s war with Hamas.

In exchange, Mr. Kerry publicly blamed Israel for the failure of the peace effort, the White House held up the delivery of munitions at the height of the Gaza war, and Mr. Obama is hellbent on striking whatever deal the Iranians can plausibly offer him.

Oh, and Mr. Kerry also attributes the rise of Islamic State to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Maybe if the Israelis grovel a bit more, Mr. Obama will oblige them by recognizing a Palestinian state as his parting act as president. Don’t discount the possibility.

And now it's down to petty insults.

A "senior administration official" (Valerie Jarrett, anyone?) called Israeli PM -- and former special forces operator -- Benjamin Netanyahu a "chickens***". I kid you not.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Saturday, October 25, 2014

3 Headlines That Explain Barack Obama's Foreign Policy

See if you can deduce Dear Leader's strategy for dealing with a hostile world.

Obama will bypass Congress on Iran sanctions if nuclear deal is reached

In another example of the White House bypassing Congress to avoid a vote it would lose, the Obama administration will not to seek congressional approval to suspend sanctions against Iran if a deal on the Islamic republic’s nuclear program can be reached, The New York Times reported Sunday night.

According to the report by David Sanger, citing American and Iranian officials, Iran has agreed in principle that a “suspension” of sanctions would be enough for them to take away from the negotiating table.

Israeli Minister: Israel-US relations in 'crisis'

"There is a crisis with the Americans and it needs to be addressed as a crisis," Finance Minister Yair Lapid said Saturday after ongoing tensions between Washington and Jerusalem led US officials to block Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon from meeting with senior administration officials during his current US visit.

Friday, October 24, 2014

ISIS Begins Realizing Its "See You In New York" Threat

By Investor's Business Daily

Terrorism: An ax attack on two New York City cops by a Muslim convert with jihadi postings on his Facebook page is yet another reminder of the prophetic warning by the leader of the Islamic State.

Some pundits are downplaying any connection between Zale Thompson, who attacked two New York City cops with a hatchet, and the Islamic State, which has issued a call for such actions by sympathizers in the West. This is an "isolated case," they say, an act by a "nut job" and not by a terrorist conspirator.

The Islamic State is perhaps the world's largest collection of nut jobs. How sane can someone be, taking joy in sawing off the heads of infidels like Steven Sotloff and James Foley, or delighting in kidnapping and gang-raping the Yazidi women of Iraq because they worship a different god? How sane can young women be who leave the West to journey to Syria in the hopes of being incubators for future jihadis?

In the Soviet era, we might have called the likes of Zale Thompson sleepers — individuals hidden in our free society waiting for the call to fulfill their destiny.

The current bevy of homegrown jihadis beheading office workers in Oklahoma and killing policemen and soldiers in Canada may not have been planted here by the Islamic State. But in the age of social media, they have heard their master's voice and responded accordingly.

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Is Ebola Being Used as a Biological Weapon Against the U.S.?

By Scott Stewart

Over the past few weeks, I've had people at speaking engagements ask me if I thought the Islamic State or some other militant group is using Ebola as a biological weapon, or if such a group could do so in the future. Such questions and concerns are not surprising given the intense media hype that surrounds the disease, even though only one person has died from Ebola out of the three confirmed cases in the United States. The media hype about the threat posed by the Islamic State to the United States and the West is almost as bad. Both subjects of all this hype were combined into a tidy package on Oct. 20, when the Washington Post published an editorial by columnist Mark Thiessen in which he claimed it would be easy for a group such as the Islamic State to use Ebola in a terrorist attack. Despite Thiessen's claims, using Ebola as a biological warfare agent is much more difficult than it might appear at first blush.

The 2014 Outbreak

In the past, there have been several outbreaks of Ebola in Africa. Countries included Sudan, Uganda, the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and several comparatively small outbreaks occurred in Gabon as well. In most cases, people who handled or ate animals infected with the disease started the outbreaks. "Bushmeat," or portions of roasted meat from a variety of wild animals, is considered by many to be a delicacy in Africa, and in a continent where hunger is widespread, it is also a necessity for many hungry people. After several months of medical investigations, epidemiologists believe the current outbreak most likely began when a two-year-old child in Guinea touched or perhaps ate part of an infected animal such as a bat or monkey.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

The Metropolitan Opera's "Death of Klinghoffer": An Insane Attempt to Justify Terrorist Savagery

By Investor's Business Daily

Politics: Only the insane political correctness of the left could try in an opera in the city attacked on 9/11 to humanize and justify the murder by Palestinian terrorists of 69-year-old, wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer.

We don't do opera reviews, but the opening of the Metropolitan Opera of New York's production of the "Death of Klinghoffer" is as much a political event as it is an artistic one.

In a particularly grotesque way, it tries to create a moral equivalence between a group of terrorists and their victim by explaining the "reasons" for their criminal and terrorist act.

For those who may have forgotten, as well as members of the liberal left, the opera attempts to dramatize the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro by four members of the Palestinian Liberation Front, a faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization led by Yasser Arafat.

Before the hijacking was over, the terrorist hijackers shot and killed Klinghoffer, an American Jew, then pushed him and his wheelchair overboard.

The opening of the opera by American composer John Adams predictably sparked protests in New York City.

Friday, October 17, 2014

The Naked Karl Rove

By The HayRide

Eli Lake at the Daily Beast has a piece out which is quite interesting as a follow-up to the New York Times’ expose earlier this week on the undisclosed massive chemical weapons finds in Iraq during the Bush presidency.

Lake has several sources who answer the question of why, if our troops were finding chemical weapons in significant quantities in Iraq as early as 2004 and some were becoming injured as a result of contact with those weapons, the Bush administration didn’t trumpet the discoveries as proof it wasn’t lying about Saddam Hussein’s weapons-of-mass-destruction program.

The answer? Because Karl Rove didn’t want to fight that battle anymore.

To people familiar with the issue, both inside that administration and outside, the blame for the coverup falls on one particular set of shoulders: Rove’s.

From the perspective of Rick Santorum, a Republican senator from Pennsylvania who lost his seat in 2006, some of the weapons of mass destruction President Bush promised would be in Iraq before the 2003 invasion of the country began turning up as early as 2004.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Santorum said he and his staff began receiving photographs of discarded sarin and mustard-gas shells from U.S. soldiers in 2004. Two years later, when he was up for re-election, Santorum even went public with some of this information in a press conference disclosing a Pentagon report that found 500 chemical-weapons shells had been found in Iraq.

One might think a politically vulnerable Bush White House would’ve seized on Santorum’s discovery. After all, Bush and his subordinates famously accused Iraq of having active weapons of mass destruction programs.

But at least in 2005 and 2006, the Bush White House wasn’t interested. “We don’t want to look back,” Santorum recalled Rove as saying (though Santorum stressed he was not quoting verbatim conversations he had more than eight years ago). “I will say that the gist of the comments from the president’s senior people was ‘We don’t want to look back, we want to look forward.’”

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Déjà vu all over again: Clinton henchman Cheryl Mills reportedly hid incriminating Benghazi documents

The invaluable Sharyl Attkisson has the scoop.

To Sonya Gilliam, a recent account of improper sorting of Benghazi-related documents at the State Department brought back vivid memories of her own encounters with high-level government officials who withheld, deleted or destroyed public records.

And one name stood out for its familiarity: Cheryl Mills.

A former deputy assistant secretary of state had told The Daily Signal that Mills was present during an after-hours document operation in a basement room of the State Department in October 2012. Mills was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The purpose of the session, former State Department official Raymond Maxwell said, was to “separate” documents damaging to Clinton before records were turned over to an independent review board probing the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Mills declined to comment on Maxwell’s account to The Daily Signal.

“My stomach dropped,” Gilliam says about hearing the allegation last month that Mills was involved in Benghazi document sorting:

I said to myself, oh my gosh, here we are, 14 or 15 years later, [and] Cheryl Mills is still in charge of document ‘production’—I’ll use that term loosely.

Gilliam, now retired, was responsible for Commerce Department responses to Freedom of Information Act requests during the Clinton administration.

Back then, Mills was deputy White House counsel to President Clinton. At the time, multiple probes sought to determine whether the administration was fundraising illegally by selling seats on Commerce Department trade missions.


You can read the entire report here.

Reason #4,032 that I penned an open letter to Rep. Michele Bachmann asking her to get to the bottom of these Clinton scandals once and for all.

After all, what difference does it make?


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Obama Survival Manual, Intl. Edition

Bret Stephens, writing at the Wall Street Journal, offers the definitive survival guide for the next 25 months or so. There's a subscription required to read the whole thing -- well worth it, by the way -- but the key graphs follow to offer you but a taste.

So Paul Krugman, who once called on Alan Greenspan “to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble”; who, a few months before the eurozone crisis erupted, praised Europe as “an economic success” that “shows that social democracy works”; who, as the U.S. fracking revolution was getting under way, opined that America was “just a bystander” in a global energy story defined by “peak oil”; and who, in 2012, hailed Argentina’s economy as a “remarkable success story”—this guy now tells us, in Rolling Stone magazine, that Barack Obama has been a terrific president.

Which can only mean that the next two years are going to be exceptionally ugly. How to get through them?


I ask the question not as an exhortation to subscribe to Survivalist magazine, stock up on tuna fish and Zithromax, and master the arts of homolactic fermentation. In fact, if you’re a resident of the U.S., you’ll probably be OK. What Americans call a recession is what the rest of the world considers affluence. What we call disaster is what others know as existence.

Stephens asks us to consider what the Caddy-In-Chief means for the President of Estonia (or any other territory in Putin's cross-hairs), or a student protester in Hong Kong, a Kurd guerilla fighter defending his village against ISIS, or any other number of putative allies abandoned by President Jarrett.

Leaders in Russia, Moldova and Saudi Arabia have all described U.S. foreign policy under Obama as "complete chaos".

Monday, October 13, 2014

BENGHAZI ILLUSTRATED: Is THIS What Really Happened in the White House on 9/11/2012?

Based on input from ex-Secret Service agent Dan Bongino and others, Biff Spackle illustrates what he think happened in Washington as the Benghazi terror attack unfolded.


DUDE: One Possible Replacement for the Hummer Makes the Batmobile Look as Tame as a Kia

Not that there's anything wrong with a Kia, mind you. Just that they're relatively... tame.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency last week posted a video of an advanced concept ground vehicle under development in its Ground X-Vehicle Technologies (GXV-T) program... It's not clear whether the vehicle in question is a light armored car or a tank, but DARPA wants to give it improved survivability through the use of advanced technologies.


The technologies might include visualization systems to provide high-definition, wide-angle views of external conditions for a closed cockpit; path planning, which would display optimal routes to take; terrain classification, which would evaluate the surroundings for optimal travel surfaces; sensors using various technologies to visualize the surroundings and identify and track friends and foes; and autopilot capabilities that would let the driver focus on more-strategic activities.

Friday, October 10, 2014

The Penultimate Indictment of Barack Obama

By Investor's Business Daily

Leadership: The former president on whose watch Americans were taken hostage and the mullahs rose to power in Iran gets it right in condemning the current president's failed handling of Syria and the Islamic State.

We've often referred to Jimmy Carter as our worst president. But considering the recent IBD/TIPP poll showed 53% of Americans labeling Barack Obama's presidency a failure in just its sixth year, the incumbent may soon claim the title. It's one thing to make mistakes out of gullibility, quite another to foul up the world out of gross incompetence.

It is said that Carter's presidency literally crashed and burned in the Iranian desert with the failed Desert One Delta Force mission that was sent to rescue our embassy hostages from the clutches of the mullahs he had naively helped to power. But as we have noted, at least Carter tried a rescue, as President Obama failed to do at Benghazi as he rested up for a Las Vegas fundraiser.

Carter at least acknowledged and belatedly learned from his mistakes. As James Jay Carafano of the Heritage Foundation points out, Carter, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, declared the "Carter Doctrine" and warned the Soviets that the U.S. would defend its interests in the Middle East "by force if necessary." That, presumably, included the threat of boots on the ground.

JUDICIAL WATCH: "It appears that top officials of the Obama administration are lying about ISIS terrorist activities on our border"

By Judicial Watch

There are times when all of us hate to say, “I told you so.” And the latest news from Judicial Watch on the apprehension of ISIS terrorists on the U.S.-Mexico border is certainly one of them.

In late August, you may recall, JW broke the story that Islamic terrorist organizations are operating in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez where they plan to stage attacks against the U.S. In response to this threat, agents in the departments of Homeland Security, Justice and Defense had all been placed on alert and told to work to counter the imminent threat. Two days after our initial report, Fort Bliss, the massive installation in El Paso, increased its security in response to this international terrorist threat.

But then the Obama spin machine cranked up. A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security officially denied the report, telling the London Daily Mail, “we are aware of absolutely nothing credible to substantiate this claim.” The DHS official duplicitously added, “In Mexico? I haven’t seen that at all.”

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest also responded, telling the newspaper that “the most detailed intelligence assessment that I can offer from here is that there is no evidence or indication right now that [the Islamic State group] is actively plotting to attack the United States homeland. That’s true right now.”

At Judicial Watch, we pulled no punches in standing by our story. We told the Daily Mail that JW’s sources were “golden,” and that the government’s denial constituted a “non-denial denial.” As I pointed out, the words “credible” and “specific” were rhetorical loopholes that one “could drive a truck bomb through,” the paper reported.

Thursday, October 09, 2014

WHAT ELSE WOULD YOU EXPECT? Obama FBI says it will "track" -- but not arrest -- returning ISIS fighters

By Investor's Business Daily

War On Terror: Though they've given material assistance to terrorists by fighting for the Islamic State, which is a federal crime, the FBI director says American jihadis are "entitled" to come home and move about freely.

FBI Director James Comey told Scott Pelley on CBS' "60 Minutes" Sunday that we know who the dozen or so Americans fighting with the Islamic State are, but we can't do much more than follow them around if they decide to return to the U.S.

In the aftermath of 9/11, and in the face of IS atrocities and threats, this is an appalling statement.

"Ultimately, an American citizen, unless their passport's revoked, is entitled to come back," Comey said. "So someone who's fought with ISIL, with an American passport, who wants to come back, we will track them very carefully."

Presumably we will do a better job than we did with the Tsarnaev brothers, who bombed the Boston Marathon after Tamerlan Tsarnaev spent time in the terrorist-infested Russian republic of Dagestan.

Tuesday, October 07, 2014

ISIS Threatens Mass Slaughter After Planting Black Flag In Kobani

By Investor's Business Daily

War On Terror: While hitting a truck here or a tank there, the administration blows another chance to shatter Islamic State forces in open country as they plant their black flags on NATO's doorstep in the Kurdish city of Kobani.

One of the benefits of being a superpower is that you have super power. But power is effective only if you use it, something President Obama is loathe to do.

We have commented before on the administration's video-game air campaign against ISIS, designed to score points with the electorate even as ISIS relentlessly advances.

CNN reports that over the weekend "allied airstrikes destroyed two ISIS tanks, a bulldozer and another ISIS vehicle," likely one of those white pickup trucks ISIS is fond of. We're sending expensive high-tech fighters to fire laser-guided weapons at solitary bulldozers. This is beyond pathetic.

A week ago we warned of the Islamic State advance on Kobani, and the desperate pleas from the Kurds for something more than token airstrikes as they struggled to survive an ISIL onslaught complete with tanks, armored personnel carriers and even heavy artillery.

It was an advance through the wide-open northern desert of Syria that could have been stopped with a sustained around-the-clock air campaign that targeted more than bulldozers.

It would have been a shooting gallery for our B-1 and B-2 bombers. Even a single B-52 might have done more to "degrade and destroy" advancing ISIS forces in one pass than we have accomplished since Obama's anemic air campaign began.

Now it may be too late to do anything as house-to-house fighting in Kobani is under way.

OPERATION ANNOY ISIS

By Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D

On August 7, 2014, Barack Obama announced "Operation Annoy ISIS," ordering U.S. aircraft to drop humanitarian supplies to tens of thousands of Yezidi refugees fleeing the terrorists of the Islamic State. He also ordered U.S. combat aircraft to be ready to launch airstrikes to protect Americans in Erbil, Iraq, and to lift the siege of the Yezidis.

The airstrikes began on Aug. 8, 2014, when two F/A-18 aircraft dropped 500-pound laser-guided bombs on a mobile artillery piece near Erbil, the capital of Iraq's Kurdistan region.

On September 10, 2014, Obama declared his intention to degrade and ultimately destroy ISIS, while precluding a combat mission for American ground forces in Iraq.

As of October 7, 2014, 60 days into the air campaign against ISIS, a total of 376 airstrikes have been conducted, 266 in Iraq and 110 in Syria, the vast majority targeting vehicles, equipment and buildings, not terrorists.

Supporters of the Obama Administration's approach to the ISIS threat cite the 1999 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) air campaign in the Kosovo War as an example of how air power alone can end wars.

On the night of 24 March 1999, NATO launched Operation Allied Force in response to Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians. The violence had already taken the lives of more than 250,000 people by 1995, and when the conflict continued to escalate, the United Nations Security Council warned of an "impending humanitarian catastrophe" if action was not taken.

During the 78-day campaign, NATO aircrews flew 38,004 sorties, 10,484 of which were strike sorties. Overall, the U.S. Air Force flew 30,018 sorties, including 11,480 airlift, 8,889 fighter, 322 bomber, 6,959 tanker, 1,038 Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR), 834 Special Operations, and 496 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) missions.

Monday, October 06, 2014

CHANGE: ISIS Mortars Land in Green Zone

Jimmy Carter and the rise of Iran's genocidal clerics. Bill Clinton and the ascent of Al Qaeda. Now, Barack Obama has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq.

After weeks of sustained air strikes in Iraq, Islamic State fighters have reportedly hit Baghdad’s international zone with mortars on Monday.

The so-called “Green Zone” is in the heart of the city and lies along the Tigris River. The U.S. Embassy is located there, along with several Iraqi government buildings.

CNN’s Ben Wedemen, reporting from Baghdad, said several mortar rounds landed in the Green Zone late Monday. Officials with U.S. Central Command did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Defense One. Several news outlets said the Islamic State is now operating in Abu Ghraib, a city just west of Baghdad and only a few miles from the Baghdad International Airport, where U.S. troops are positioned. It’s possible the mortar attacks were launched from Abu Ghraib, based on the proximity of its location. Pro-Shiite militias are also operating in the area.

The GOP may be the Stupid Party, but Democrats represent the Party of Weakness. And weakness gets Americans killed.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Sunday, October 05, 2014

Fear and Loathing in Manhattan

By Jim Quinn

I live only a two hour drive from New York City, but it is a world apart from my daily existence. I’ve visited the Big Apple probably a dozen times in my life, but never for longer than two or three days. I have a soft spot in my heart for NYC because it is where I proposed to my wife on a bitterly cold December evening in a horse drawn carriage ride in Central Park, twenty five years ago. But, I can honestly say that I never feel comfortable in the city.

Last week we had an opportunity to get away for a long weekend. My wife had gotten tickets to the Jimmy Fallon Show for Thursday afternoon and we decided to get a hotel room for one night and then drive directly down to Wildwood for the remainder of the weekend. My mother-in-law agreed to watch the kids, so we had ourselves a mini-vacation. I anticipated a more laid back trip than our visit to Occupy Wall Street a few years ago, that led to one of my most read articles.

A couple years ago I was shocked to receive an email from David Stockman, complimenting me on a particular article I had written. When a former Reagan budget director, founding partner of the Blackstone Group, and world renowned financial mind takes notice of something you’ve written it really boosts your morale. We have had a periodic email dialogue ever since. When he created his own website earlier this year, he asked me to be a contributor. He also told me that if I ever make it to NYC, let him know and we would meet for a drink.

I was reluctant to bother such a busy man, but during a recent email exchange I mentioned I’d be in New York. He suggested we meet after the Jimmy Fallon Show for a drink. I told him to pick a place convenient for him. He emailed back, the morning we were leaving, to meet him and his wife at the Carlyle Hotel bar at 5:00 pm. I immediately googled the hotel and realized I should pack some nicer clothes. This was no Shamrock bar in Wildwood. It was on Seventy Sixth & Park Avenue. My uneasiness had begun.

TRUE HOLLYWOOD STUPID: The Many Faces of a Bentard

Summer intern @BiffSpackle illustrates the hilarious dips***tery of yet another left wing Hollywood crackpot.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Saturday, October 04, 2014

INTRIGUING: North Korean General Photographed While Smiling

Good catch by John Jay at Winter Soldier:

i don't care what anyone writes about all of this. it is all nonsense, unless you recognize one singular fact... the north korean general who is in charge of the north korean military, sat as a table with south korean political and no doubt intelligence people across from him, and smiled.

he smiled.


i am 66 years old. in my entire life, i have never seen a north korean military officer and/or official smile.

you can read a lot of things about all of this. none of it will talk about anything as significant as that smile. that smile sent chills up and down the spines of rooskie and chinese officials, everywhere: they know what it means.

As Jay notes, during the entire Korean confict, DPRK officials always sat motionless and never, ever, ever smiled.

So a public smile might indeed confirm rumors that the fat, inbred war criminal running North Korea may be incapacitated or -- better yet -- dead.


Friday, October 03, 2014

GUN-RUNNING: Andrew Tahmooressi vs. Eric Holder

By Investor's Business Daily

Veteran Neglect: A Navy and Marine Corps veteran asks a House panel why an administration that says it leaves no one behind has let a soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder sit in a Mexican jail for six months.

From the famous "latte salute" to the Marine holding the presidential umbrella, President Obama's respect for our men in uniform has been open to question. Unless, of course, they desert their post in Afghanistan to try to join the Taliban, like Bowe Bergdahl. Then you have the parents to the White House and trade the Taliban general staff to obtain their release. After all, we leave no one behind.

Except, maybe, for Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi.

Jill Tahmooressi, Andrew's mother, has never been invited to stand by the president on the White House lawn. Nor has she ever received a phone call from President Obama, as she testified Wednesday before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee. Presidential calls of support are reserved for basketball players like Jason Collins, whom Obama called to say "he was impressed by his courage," according to a White House spokesperson, for announcing that he was gay.

For our part, we are impressed by the courage of Sgt. Tahmooressi, who served two tours of duty fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, and his mother. Her son fought the enemy instead of trying to join them. And for making a wrong turn into Mexico while carrying legal American firearms in his trunk as he journeyed to San Diego for treatment of his PTSD, he now sits in a Mexican jail ignored by the country he risked his life for.