Operation Anaconda was a plan devised in February of 2002 to trap al Qaeda fighters who were attempting to gather their forces near the 10,000-foot Shah-I-Kot mountains of eastern Afghanistan. They had taken a severe drubbing at Kandahar and elsewhere and sought the security of remote areas to regain their strength. They were observed gathering in Shah-e-Kot Valley near Gardez.

In December of 2001, other al Qaeda fighters had managed to survive the bombing of Tora Bora and escape. This time the United States was determined to put about American-trained Afghan soldiers and as many as 200 highly trained special forces from Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, and Norway into the area. These troops were to rouse the al Qaeda and force them to retreat to a point where American forces of the 101st Airborne and 10th Mountain Divisions held key positions, along with special operation forces.

The entire operation was planned and led by Major General Franklin L. Hagenback, who believed it would take about seventy-two hours to accomplish what he termed a “classic hammer and anvil” maneuver.

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February 27, 1968, Walter Cronkite reported on his recent trip to Vietnam, following the Tet Offensive.

To say we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.

To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism.

To say that we are mired in a stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.

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CP Note: Feb 23, 2012, Salon.com reported :

In 2010 WikiLeaks released a file named insurance.aes256 and on Wednesday released another “insurance” file with an “aes” name.  AES-256, a currently unbreakable encryption scheme, appears to keep the files scrambled until a password is published. Assange has said little about them, but he did say “insurance files” would be released in a certain scenario: “if something happens to me or to WikiLeaks.”

February 27, 2012, Wikileaks announced it had begun publishing  “The Global Intelligence Files, over five million e-mails from the Texas headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor.” 

Richard Torrenzano and Mark Davis share more information about insurance.aes256 and the direction in which hacking and cyber crime are moving.

It’s called “insurance.aes256.” It is a 1.4-gigabyte file large enough to hold hundreds of thousands of pages worth of information. It is protected by a 256-bit key encryption code. . . . [More...]

In Baghdad’s Green Zone, an Iraqi scientist is murdered just before he can reveal the secret that Saddam Hussein took to his grave: the location of the Palace of Death—home to a devastating chemical weapon quietly developed by Islamic militants.

The assassination is the work of a mysterious sniper called Juba, who was trained by the British but now works with a twisted mastermind determined to steal control of the terrorist world from Al Qaeda. When he tests the new weapon by killing hundreds of people at a British royal wedding in London, the devastation is all too real.

Kyle Swanson, once the top sniper in the Marine Corps and now the key member of a secret special operations team known as Task Force Trident, is assigned to hunt down his old special ops rival. A new reign of global terror can be stopped only by a confrontation between the two best snipers in the world, a duel in which the first shot wins—most of the time…

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There’s a distinct crack when a real shot goes off.  The “snap” from the bullet breaking the sound barrier is hard to recreate. The SEALs-Bandito Brothers match-up delivered for the SOF community by doing such scenes right. Act of Valor (AOV) is the most technically sound film about Special Operations.

From a Call of Duty couch, the life of a SEAL or SOF Operator seems exciting. But in the real world the bullets rip flesh from your body and there are real consequences. Lives are at stake.

Act of Valor nails it.

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Read and view:

* a photostat of the Zimmerman telegram;

* the February 24, 1917, telegram from U.S. Ambassador Walter Page to President Woodrow Wilson, conveying a translation of the intercepted Zimmermann telegram;

* the February 26, 1917, telegram from Acting Secretary of State Frank L. Polk to the American Embassy in Mexico City;

* and a partial decode of the Zimmermann Telegram made by Edward Bell of the American Embassy in London, sent to the State Department, March 2, 1917.

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From the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum:

On Friday, February 21, 1947, the British Embassy informed the U.S. State Department officials that Great Britain could no longer provide financial aid to the governments of Greece and Turkey.

American policymakers had been monitoring Greece's crumbling economic and political conditions, especially the rise of the Communist-led insurgency known as the National Liberation Front, or the EAM/ELAS.

The United States had also been following events in Turkey, where a weak government faced Soviet pressure to share control of the strategic Dardanelle Straits.

When Britain announced that it would withdraw aid to Greece and Turkey, the responsibility was passed on to the United States.

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February 22, 1732, marked the birthday of President—and Commander in Chief—George Washington.

This reading and viewing list features articles, books, and original documents by, and about Washington.

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April 12, 1793, handwritten letter from George Washington to Thomas Jefferson,regarding the neutral role of the United States in the War Between Great Britain and France.

From Washington: " . . . give the mature mature consideration." [More...]

If Congress had had a difficult time meeting its expenses even during the war, how might it now finance its debt—meaning make the interest payments—and handle its ongoing operating expenses?

Alexander Hamilton, Robert Morris, and others favored permanent indebtedness as an instrument of policy.

As far as they were concerned, if the U.S. government did not extinguish its debt, there would always be public creditors. Those creditors, who would come from among the wealthiest Americans, would support the U.S. government. The Union would thus be cemented.

Madison cooperated closely with Hamilton and Morris on several financial issues in the early months of 1783.

Hamilton in particular pushed for greater power to be lodged in Congress, and Madison—long distraught over the inability of that body to meet its obligations—found him a welcome ally. As Madison put it on the floor of Congress, “the idea of erecting our national independence on the ruins of public faith and national honor must be horrid to every mind which retained either honesty or pride.”

His plea was that Congress must be granted a revenue source independent of the state governments. The subject under consideration was the army’s petition to be paid arrears, and Madison judged that absolutely essential.

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An American general is captured in the Middle East by terrorists who threaten to behead him in days. Moments before rendered unconscious, he hears his captors speaking American English. Who are these people?

Gunnery Sgt. Kyle Swanson, a top Marine sniper, is vacationing on a yacht in the Mediterranean when he receives orders to mount a top-secret mission to rescue the general. But as Swanson and the Marines prepare to land in the Syrian desert, they unwittingly fly into an ambush. How did the enemy have details of a mission known only to a few high-level American officials?

Now Swanson—the sole survivor among his men—must journey into the dark heart of the desert to achieve his mission. But soon he will encounter the most dangerous enemies of all: His fellow Americans. Their sworn enemy: The captured general whose fate now rests in Sniper Swanson’s hands…

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The Iran-Hezbollah-Syria axis became evident when swift and decisive help came to Syrian dictator Bashir Al-Assad after an uprising erupted against him.

The first reports of Iranian and Hezbollah intervention were from Daraa, a city of some 75,000 in southwestern Syria—a region suffering from a prolonged drought. Together with the provincial cities of Hama and Homs, it soon became a center of the antiregime protests.

Protestors said they heard southern Lebanese accents and Farsi, the language of Iran, spoken among many pro-regime forces who attacked them, indicating they may have been from Hezbollah and Iran. The opposition Reform Party of Syria similarly claimed that Iran’s notorious Revolutionary Guard had taken over a military base in Homs. One of the party’s leaders claimed Syrian forces were even being commanded by the Revolutionary Guard. “Syria has become the thirty-second province of Iran,” he declared.

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