Captain Richard Phillips, who had been held hostage several days by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean, was freed today. As Michelle Malkin notes, it appears that Captain Phillips escaped a second time and this time, the US Navy moved in and killed at least three of the pirates.

Word is one of the pirates was captured. No word on whether or not he will be waterboarded (or worse).

It turns out Captain Phillips had basically allowed himself to be captured to buy time for his crew to lock themselves into a cabin and avoid capture themselves. What a hero.

I’m surprised Barack “America is not a Christian nation” Obama allowed this to happen. I won’t be surprised if when he tries to take credit for the rescue, though.

The United States plans to offer more than $900 million to help rebuild Gaza after Israel’s invasion and to strengthen the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, U.S. officials said on Monday.

The money, which needs U.S. congressional approval, will be distributed through U.N. and other bodies and not via the militant group Hamas, which rules Gaza, said one official.

“This money is for Gaza and to help strengthen the Palestinian Authority. It is not going to go to Hamas,” said the official, who asked not to be named as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton planned to announce the funding at a donors’ conference in Egypt next week.

What’s in your wallet, Obama? I can tell you what’s in my wallet: change you can’t believe in.

Now, my question is, how’d it get to their training camps? Was it they themselves who were experimenting with it and it went bad (thankfully)? Or… something else?

Who knows, but at least for once it got the right targets. According to the Sun, the terrorists are running scared now:

The al-Qaeda epidemic began in the cave hideouts of AQLIM in Tizi Ouzou province, 150km east of the capital Algiers. The group, led by wanted terror boss Abdelmalek Droudkal, was forced to turn its shelters in the Yakouren forest into mass graves and flee.

The extremists supporting madman Osama bin Laden went to Bejaia and Jijel provinces — hoping the plague did not go with them.

A source said: “The emirs (leaders) fear surviving terrorists will surrender to escape a horrible death.”

Serves them right! Gitmo’s beginning to look REAL good now, huh boys?

I know a young man who is in desperate need of help. His name is PFC Hunter Levine. He is 20 years old and hails from Houston, TX.

He was in my company and was wounded on 9 May, 2008 while conducting combat operations in East Baghdad. He received a very serious injury to his face, resulting in the loss of his entire bone structure, mouth, nose, and vision.

He was evacuated to Walter Reed Hospital where the doctors performed numerous surgeries to repair his face. I was fortunate enough to attend a Purple Heart Ceremony at Walter Reed while I was home on leave in June. I was also able to meet with Hunter’s father Beau.

PFC Levine is now in the VA hospital in Palo Alto California, but he’s seriously depressed. A care package, card, or letter would be nice. Find out how to help at the very excellent ParentsZone blog for military families.

Hat tip (and happy birthday) to Michelle Malkin.

Army Specialist Stephen Fortunato gave his life a few weeks ago fighting the bad guys in Afghanistan. He blogged when he had some spare time and his mother released his August 30, 2008 entry to the Boston Globe (I know, I was shocked too that they’d actually publish it).

Here’s an excerpt:

I am a proud American. i believe that my country allows me to live my life more or less however i want to, and believe me, i have seen what the alternative of that looks like. i also believe that our big scary government does way more than it has to to help complete [expletive deleted]-ups get back on their feet, a stark comparison to places where leaders just line their own pockets with gold while allowing the people who gave them their power and privilage to starve. I have chosen my corner. I back my country, and am proud to defend it against aggressors. Also, if you dare accuse us of being inhumane, or overly aggressive because we have rolled into someone else’s country and blown some [expletive deleted] up and shot some people, let me remind you of just how inhumane we COULD be in defending ourselves. Let me remind you that we have a warhead that drops multiple bomblets from the stratosphere which upon impact, would turn all the sand in Iraq to glass, and reduce every living thing there to dust. Do we use it? No. Instead we use the most humane weapon ever devised: the American soldier. We send our bravest (and perhaps admitably craziest) men and women into enemy territory, into harms way, to root out those whom we are after and do our best to leave innocent lives unscathed.

There’s a lot more where it came from on the Boston Globe or Michelle Malkin’s blog (which, by the way, I give a tip of the hat to for putting this out there).

A growing al Qaida-backed insurgency, combined with the Pakistani army’s reluctance to launch an all-out crackdown, political infighting and energy and food shortages are plunging America’s key ally in the war on terror deeper into turmoil and violence, says a soon-to-be completed U.S. intelligence assessment.

Yep, a nuclear power with al Qaida types all over the place is descending into a violent, chaotic cesspool. Makes you sort of pine for the days of Pervez Musharraf, doesn’t it.

Equally scary is this part of the article:

Six U.S. officials who helped draft or are aware of the document’s findings confirmed them to McClatchy on the condition of anonymity because NIEs (National Intelligence Estimate) are top secret and are restricted to the president, senior officials and members of Congress.

So much for “top secret” when we have not one, not two, not three, but SIX intelligence officials blabbermouthing to the media about a draft intelligence report.

Islamic radicals may have been plotting attacks in Barcelona, Spain’s Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said on Saturday, after police found bomb-making materials and arrested 14 South Asians.

Rubalcaba told a news conference civil guard police found explosives and other equipment during raids on five addresses in Spain’s second city, and arrested 12 Pakistanis and two Indians after receiving information from its own and other European intelligence agencies.

The group was almost ready to move forward with the attacks, apparently:

Rubalcaba said the group, which had stockpiled bomb-making materials including timers and ball-bearings, had been ready to act. Computers were also seized during the operation in the historic district of Raval just after midnight.

And here’s a choice factoid, buried in the article:

One of raided targets included a prominent mosque, media quoted local residents as saying.

Religion of peace, huh?

Asked why he thinks Gitmo should be closed, Admiral Mullen says: “I believe that from the standpoint of how it reflects on us that it’s been pretty damaging.”

Not mentioned by the MSM, nor presumably known by Admiral Mullen–nor by millions of Americans–is the reason why Gitmo has been “pretty damaging” to our image around the world, as stated in testimony before a Senate subcommittee by Debra Burlingame, former lawyer and sister to a 9/11 victim:

As I wrote in the Wall Street Journal, the Kuwaiti 12 case is a primer on the anatomy of a guerilla PR offensive, packaged and sold to the public as a fight for the “rule of law” and “America’s core principles.” Begin with flimsy information, generate stories that are spun from uncorroborated double or triple hearsay uttered by interested parties that are hard to confirm from halfway around the world. Feed the phonied-up stories to friendly media who write credulous reports and emotional human interest features, post them on a Web site where they will then be read and used as sources by other lazy (or busy) media from all over the world. In short, create one giant echo chamber.

The Wall Street Journal article mentioned by Ms. Burlingame goes into greater detail about the public relations campaign run on behalf of the Gitmo prisoners by high-priced PR firms in the US. It is an eye-opener, to say the least.

“Now we direct an urgent call to our militant brothers in Muslim Palestine and the Arab peninsula … to be ready to receive the Crusader slayer Bush in his visit to Muslim Palestine and the Arab peninsula in the beginning of January and to receive him not with flowers or clapping but with bombs and booby-trapped vehicles,” Gadahn, 29, said in Arabic.

Oh, but there’s more…

“The first questions Americans might ask is has America really been defeated? The answer is yes and on all fronts,” he added.

And more…

“In symbolic rejection of the American citizenship that honorable and decent and compassionate people are ashamed to carry, I will now proceed to destroy my American passport,” he said [as he tore apart his U.S. passport on camera].

Yep, sounds like he’d fit in perfectly with our left wing.

U.S. Army Lt. Col. William H. Steele, a senior commander of the Camp Cropper detention center west of Baghdad, has been transferred to Kuwait for the military equivalent of a grand jury proceeding, a military spokeswoman told The New York Times.

Steele faces nine possible charges, including aiding the enemy, “retaining classified material, conduct unbecoming an officer, for relationships involving an interpreter and another Iraqi female, failure to obey lawful orders” and “dereliction of duty” regarding government funds, Lt. Kyung Choi of the Navy, a spokesman at Central Command in Tampa, Fla., told the Times.