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Countdown to the February 2nd Issa-Grassley hearing into Operation Fast and Furious is underway, and one of the biggest questions still unanswered is whether Congress will offer former AUSA Patrick Cunningham immunity for his testimony, and if Cunningham, so immunized, will shed any light on the parentage of an ATF operation that allowed roughly 2000 military-grade weapons to walk across the US-Mexico border and disappear, without a trace, into cartel arsenals.

Nobody seems to be holding his or her breath, but if Congress does pull an ‘Ollie North’ with Cunningham, or any of the witnesses it seeks to depose on Fast and Furious, expect the narrative to change. The irony alone, in a case that so closely resembles Iran-Contra, may provide the MSM with a much-needed jolt: Cunningham reprises North’s role when Congress, challenged by his close hold on the 5th Amendment, compels him to testify by granting him use or (less likely) transactional immunity.

Don’t remember the way it worked with North? Consider the following, pulled from court documents…

2012 could be the year that Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS) technology takes off and enters the public consciousness. And to highlight this, Altarock, the Seattle based geothermal energy developer, has recently announced plans to undertake field tests by 2012 on a volcanic site in Oregon, with expected support from the government department of energy and […]

This week COHA.org writer Natalia Cote-Munoz produced a great piece comparing and contrasting Mexico’s current drug war with Colombia’s historical drug conflict in order to differentiate between policies that should be applied to the two countries. Often parallels are depended upon in discussing the two countries and their internal drug conflicts, but with a lack […]

Standard and Poor’s rating agency has lowered the credit ratings of 9 eurozone members, including formerly AAA-rated France and Austria. The move is significant, affecting as it does the future of the eurozone’s bail-out fund, the French presidential election, the roll-over of existing European sovereign debt, and more. However, the downgrade is not really a […]

This week Iranian President Ahmadinejad toured Nicaragua, Cuba, Ecuador and Venezuela in a push to expand Iran’s international relationships as well as to establish Iran in America’s backyard. With recent tensions being ramped up exponentially between the US and Iran, world focus on any actions made by Iran receives a fair amount of attention. There […]

Last week I participated in a Department of Defense Bloggers Roundtable on President Obama’s new defense strategy with Captain John Kirby (USN), Deputy Secretary of Defense for Media Operations; and Dr. George Little, Pentagon Press Secretary. In support of the new strategy the Department of Defense published a paper called Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities […]

“First They Ignore You — Then They Ridicule You — Then They Fight You — Then You Win” Mahandas Gandhi Will technology fundamentally change the relationship between the nation state and citizens? Are hyper-connected citizens a threat to or opportunity for government? These are the kinds of questions that the political ruling class across the […]

In the end, Terry, Diaz and Meyer found themselves on the sharp end of the stick for their efforts: the US Department of Justice, agencies like DHS and the Department of State, and the usual entourage of corporate and political underwriters, including the government of Mexico, all had a hand in creating scenarios designed to transform good guys into villains, narratives that ended in Terry’s death at the hands of a cartel gunman, Diaz’s imprisonment for ‘exercising excessive force’ during the arrest of a suspected drug trafficker, and in Meyer’s case, the loss of a high-paying job with a multinational defense contractor, and blowback that now has this decorated young veteran on the ropes in the court of public opinion. Let me tell you something. The only ‘mental problem’ from which Meyer suffers is a chronic case of integrity, an inability to distort the truth to accommodate political reality.

Consider–if Terry, Diaz and Meyer had ‘occupied Wall Street’ instead of the killing zones along our SW border and in Afghanistan, they might have been poster boys for the March of History, and on top of it all, alive, free, and gainfully employed.

As is the custom for all FPA Bloggers with the year drawing to a close, it’s time for me to give my thoughts on how events fared in 2011. All in all there were a number of defense policy successes, with the most spectacular being the death of Osama Bin Laden, the continued dismantling of […]

In 1988 I was pulled out of an assignment in Hawaii18 months early and sent to Korea to be part of the U.S. Forces Korea staff. My job would be Chief, Combined Indications and Warning (I&W) Center, Intelligence Production Division. In civilian terms, I ran the newsroom. It was a 24/7 job and my folks […]

And you thought your biggest social media worry was being defriended. Last week, the New York Times published an interesting piece on the use of social media by terrorist groups.  They focused on a recent Twitter battle instigated by the Somalia-based, loosely al-Qaeda linked, al-Shabab.  Their target…African Union peacekeeping forces and the Kenyan army.  The […]

FPA Russia Blog Studios presents……Russia’s top box office hits of 2011 GOODBYE BREZHNEV As the traumatic events of the 90s send Mother Russia into a coma from which she takes a decade to recover, dutiful son Vova worries that any further shocks to her system might trigger a catastrophic relapse. Thus, he decides to dupe […]

In the wake of recent shocking cases of child abuse and neglect such as the Penn State cover-up scandal, the infamous Casey Anthony murder trial and the ongoing global abuse investigations of Catholic Priests, the issue has become headline news.  Sadly, most cases of abuse both across the globe and in the United States go unreported, or are reported […]

The online world has been all aflutter in recent weeks over the introduction of two pieces of legislation in Congress: the PROTECT IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives. As PROTECT IP already passed in the Senate, last week the focus shifted to the hearings […]

As iconic personalities Oprah Winfrey and Robert Deniro traveled to Haiti on parallel humanitarian and business missions, growing insecurity stole the headlines, threatening to crush the spine of Martelly’s administration, and the spirit of Christmas with it. Merely 15 days into December, two officers of the Haitian National Police (PNH  French acronym) succumbed to assassins’ […]