This week's syndicated column:

Some thoughts about Army Pfc. Bradley Manning’s pretrial hearing, which concluded this week.

Manning, of course, is charged with leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the website WikiLeaks and, at his trial in March, will be pleading guilty to certain charges while rejecting the military’s contention that he “aided the enemy” in doing so.

Manning was in court this month seeking dismissal on the grounds that since his arrest in May 2010, he has been subjected to unlawful pretrial punishment. Certainly the conditions Manning and his civilian lawyer David E. Coombs described in often dramatic testimony were inhumane, especially for someone not convicted of anything – two months in a dark “cage” in Kuwait; nearly nine months in solitary confinement in Quantico, Va.; orders to stand for inspection naked.

Oddly, the mainstream media and conservative...

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Ali Sait Akin, Turkish Consul General in Benghazi

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Recently, I asked the Turkish Consul General in Benghazi, Ali Akin, what he could tell me about the night of September 11, 2012. Ali Akin, according to the State Department timeline of events that night, was the last person to meet with the late Amb. Christopher Stevens before the US compound in Benghazi was attacked at 9:40 pm.

As the State background briefer put it on October 9:

About 7:30 in the evening, he [Stevens] has his last meeting. It is with a Turkish diplomat. And at – when the meeting is over, at 8:30 – he has all these meetings, by the way, in what I call Building C – when the meeting is over, he escorts the Turkish diplomat to the main gate. There is an agent there with them. They say goodbye. They’re out in a street in front of the compound. Everything is calm at 8:30 p.m. There’s nothing unusual. There has been nothing unusual during the day at all outside.

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Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) has told Breitbart News yesterday that the State Department has "thwarted" his efforts to visit American survivors of Benghazi, some of whom are still recovering from injuries sustained during the attack.

“My understanding is that we still have some people in the hospital. I’d like to visit with them and wish them nothing but the best but the State Department has seen it unfit for me to know who those people are—or even how many there are,” Rep. Chaffetz said. I don’t know who they are. I don’t know where they live. I don’t know what state they’re from. I don’t even know how many there are. It doesn’t seem right to me.

“This is so patently different...

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The Wall Street Journal reports this week about a new draft handbook for US troops in Afghanistan designed to prevent their Afghan "partners" from murdering them. (And yes, we've seen this same material before.)

The problem, according to the Army, is "ignorance of, or lack of empathy for Muslim and/or Afghan cultural norms" on the part of US troops.

The solution, according to the Army, is for troops to accept these same Muslim and/or Afghan norms -- or else be killed. In effect, then, Uncle Sam is ordering Americans to submit to Islam or die -- exactly the choice offered to infidels vanquished by jihad. As far I can tell, the main difference is Uncle Sam will require them to salute while submitting.

I simplify, of course, but I do not exagerate. Say, Joe American hears about boys being sodomized by Afghan Army personnel. Such pederasty is in accordance with...

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The Death of the Grown-Up (2007) was written just before texting became ubiquitous to the point of further short-handing human relations -- and certainly before "sexting" further short-circuited human development ... in children. If I ever update Chapter 5, "Sophisticated Babies," this report on an investigation into "sexting" among British 13- and 14-year-olds in the Daily Mail goes in:

Boys and girls as young as 13 routinely swap explicit pictures of themselves, a disturbing investigation reveals today.

Children are now so sexualised the practice has become ‘mundane and mainstream’. One girl told researchers: ‘I get asked for naked pictures at least two or three times a week.’

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