We were embedded with the 24 MEU, (Marine Expeditionary Unit) in Southern Afghanistan.

Charlie Company was involved in a fire fight with a Taliban insurgents hold up in a Madrassa just down the road. Cameraman Malcolm James (left) and I dodged bullets whizzing past, a rocket propelled grenade detonated a couple hundred feet away, and marines from Charlie Company were ducking and returning fire with a 50 cal machine gun.

Now picture this … it’s in the middle of nowhere. Seriously, nowhere. No power. Just a lot of dust and dirt and searing hot temperatures as the fighting is going on.

From our backpacks, Mal and I pulled out what are known as a stream box and BGAN terminal, two little lap top computer sized gizmo’s that changed the way you saw TV this week (below).

Keep Reading …

A Marine captain sweats. I could see it plainly but maybe his troops didn’t.

They were nervous and he didn’t want to show them he was too. Captain John Moder was more than sweating a little when he called his men together to give them a “pre” battle pep talk in the middle of the desert in Helmand, Afghanistan.

This young Marine had a lot on his mind. It was his first combat mission as a commander of the Charlie Company of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit. It was his first combat mission of a company of soldiers, period.

That “pre” mission rally with a prayer by the Chaplin is more than just talk. For a young captain, you see, the weight of command weighs more than the hundred pound packs the marines carry in one hundred degree weather. The weight is if he make a bad call, one of his men potentially doesn’t come home alive.

Mission - clear an area called Garmsir of Taliban.

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In the last six months the U.S. Coast Guard along with the U.S. Navy have found 42 submersibles headed north towards the United States and off the coast of Central America.

That is double the number found in the previous five years combined. These subs can carry as much as 10 tons of drugs or even weapons and some of the latest models can move 15 knots. This is obviously troubling and makes our war on the cartels that much more difficult.

We are currently at Coast Guard Island in Alameda California, where the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Sherman is located. The ship has recently returned from operations off of Central America, where finding these subs is proving difficult. They are primitive but effective and built similar to the subs used in the civil war. Usually about six inches or so sticks above the water, which is almost impossible to spot.

During the day the subs sit, preserving their cover for movement at night. Here is some great raw video provided by the U.S. Coast Guard.

By Malini Bawa

I spent part of last week at COP Callahan, a small U.S. Army outpost on the edge of Sadr City, home to the 1-68 Silver Lions.

They set up shop in an abandoned shopping mall, with chipped marble staircases and crumbling escalators.

It’s not all rubble and ruins. The areas where the soldiers live and work are fairly clean and comfortable. But they’re definitely roughing it, compared to the relative luxury of life on a large base.

Late Monday, I got a tip from one of my contacts. It was one of those tips where a little negotiating went on. I couldn’t air the story right away, but I could “go with it” after midnight. So I am writing this story around 5 with the idea it will go up on the Web in about seven hours. I will also do an “as-live” that is TV speak for a taped report that “looks live” for the overnight headlines.

The new report, obtained by FOX News, claims that cigarette smuggling is generating big bucks for terror groups overseas. The total terror funding is estimated to be in the millions of dollars annually.

The ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, Peter King, who called for the investigation said, “This is a very serious homeland security issue, one that has gone unnoticed for far too long. Cigarette smugglers are able to generate millions of dollars in illegal profits with a great deal of this wealth being sent to terrorist groups overseas – groups that would like nothing more than to inflict devastating harm on our country and its citizens.” The fifteen page report, obtained by FOX, includes intelligence from law enforcement sources as well as New York State’s Department of Taxation and Finance. The report reads in part:

“Historically, the low-risk, high profitability of the illicit cigarette trade served as a gateway for traditional criminal traffickers to move into lucrative and dangerous criminal enterprises such as money laundering, arms dealing, and drug trafficking. Recent law enforcement investigations, however, have directly linked those involved in illicit tobacco trade to infamous terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas and Al Qaeda.”

One of the key issues, according to the report, is what maybe a fundamental flaw in New York state policy. In that state, according to the Congressman King’s office, there is a policy of “forebearance,” or refusing to collect on sales of Native American tax-free cigarettes to non-Native Americans. Critics of the policy say it has effectively created a safe haven for smugglers. In some cases, the report claims that a well-organized operation can generate up to $300,000 per week with a loss of up to $576 million in tax revenues to New York State.

According to the report, citing federal and New York state law enforcement sources, nearly 60 percent of all convenience retail outlets in New York City are now Arab-owned, primarily families of Lebanese, Yemeni, Jordanian and Palestinian descent. While the vast majority of retailers are operating above board, some are not, seeking their supplies from Native American reservations. The benefits of tax-free cigarettes are obvious.

As a reminder and as we have reported recently, the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights has been lobbying Mexican President Felipe Calderon to pull his troops out of Mexican cities in favor of police forces, many of which have either been corrupted by the drug cartels, or depleted due to fear. Now this.

Seventeen Mexican drug gang members were killed near the U.S. border on Saturday, their bodies scattered along a road after one of the deadliest shootouts in Mexico’s three-year narco-war.

Rival factions of the Arellano Felix drug cartel in Tijuana on the Mexico-California border battled each other with rifles and machine guns in the early hours of the morning, police said.

Fourteen bodies were lying in pools of blood on a road near assembly-for-export maquiladora plants on the city’s eastern limits. The corpses were surrounded by hundreds of bullet casings and many of their faces were destroyed. Keep Reading …

One interesting nugget came out of the briefing with senior intelligence officials which did not make air for time reasons.  That is often the case on these stories; so much information, not enough time. I, frankly, don’t know how the network people do it, but that IS another story…

We were told that Israel’s decision to strike the Syrian Al-Kibar nuclear reactor in September 2007 was made on its own.  “No green light was given by the U.S. … no one asked for permission and none was given.”

According to senior intelligence officials, Israel saw the Syrian facility “as an existential threat.”

As for North Korea’s motivation, senior intelligence officials said it was cash-driven, not an effort to get nuclear fuel.

While senior intelligence officials were forceful in their conclusions it was a nuclear reactor, it will take time for outside analysts to digest the material and there is certain to be questions raised in the coming days by some foreign nations who may fear similar treatment.  Do you believe the evidence? Especially after WMD? There is clearly more pressure on the intel community to make their case as strongly and as openly as possible now.

Check out this letter that was sent by CIA Director Mike Hayden to CIA employees re: North Korea and Syria.  See the bold sections:

At our town hall meeting in January, I praised the outstanding work of our officers in tackling a very sensitive counter-proliferation issue, one that I could not identify at the time because it was highly compartmented.  As of today, some aspects have been declassified and will be publicly released this afternoon, so I can share with you the highlights of this extraordinary story.

Last spring, we acquired information confirming that a building in eastern Syria was a covert nuclear reactor using North Korean technology.  We had suspected the two nations were cooperating on nuclear technology as early as 2001, and although imagery had revealed the existence of the building, it lacked features associated with a nuclear installation.  The new information included photographs of the interior and exterior that offered our first unambiguous indication that the building was a nuclear reactor.  Moreover, the reactor would have been capable of producing plutonium for nuclear weapons, was not configured to produce electricity, and was ill-suited for research.

On the morning of 6 September 2007, the reactor was destroyed as it was nearing completion, but before it had been operated or charged with uranium fuel.  Syrian efforts to dismantle the ruined building and remove every trace of the incriminating equipment-largely conducted at night or under tarpaulins for concealment-further underscored Damascus less than benign intent for the facility. A video presentation summarizes our analysis of the Syrian reactor project and North Korean involvement in greater detail.

Our team effort on the Al Kibar reactor is a case study in rigorous analytic tradecraft, skillful human and technical collection, and close collaboration with our Community colleagues and liaison partners.  Our officers put in long hours on this issue for many months, and their hard work paid off by directly advancing our nations security and that of our allies.  To everyone who contributed to this success, my congratulations on a job well done.  

QUESTION: Do you think the pictures are the “Smoking Gun?”

“I’m Jonathon Cote, I’m from Buffalo, New York, I’m being treated well. I can’t be released until the prisoners from the American jails and the British jails are released”