I am thinking of recent casket transfer ceremonies that have taken place at Dover Air Force Base, where senior administration officials have used the solemn occasions – Benghazi, the shoot-down of Extortion 17 – less to comfort grieving families than to lay blame, to establish a narrative, to lie.

Think of Sean Smith’s mother. Think of Tyrone Woods’ father. After the Obama administration’s hugs came the Obama administration’s stonewalling. They still don’t have answers about what happened in Benghazi on the night of Sept. 11, 2012.

We don’t either.

We still don’t know who in the U.S. government gave the order not to rescue Americans under fire for eight and a half hours, and how and why such an unconscionable order was given. We still don’t know who convinced senior White House officials to tell grieving parents meeting their children’s caskets that a video-maker, not jihad against the West, was to blame for the assault that took four American lives – or what the political motivation was.

This is a national disgrace.

But before Benghazi, there was Extortion 17, the call sign of a Special Operations mission in Afghanistan on Aug. 6, 2011. Three months after the strike on Osama bin Laden, 30 Americans – including 15 from the bin Laden strike-team unit, Navy SEAL Team 6, and two other SEALs – were killed in the costliest single-day loss for the U.S. military in the Afghanistan war, and the largest SEAL loss ever. A “lucky shot” in the dark brought down the old CH-47 Chinook helicopter attempting to land them in the middle of an ongoing battle in Wardak Province. Or so the U.S. military claims. The families are not so sure.

Then again, they’re not sure about anything. The runaround, the lies, the callous disregard they have received at the hands of the government and military is similar to Benghazi, maybe worse.

“We go to Dover to see bodies, and we’re all in the hangar down there,” Charles Strange, father of slain SEAL Michael Strange, recalled last week before a rapt audience at the National Press Club, where several Extortion 17 families gathered to call on Congress to investigate. “And President Obama comes up to me and he says, ‘Mr. Strange’ – and he grabs me by the shoulders – ‘Michael changed the way America lives.’ I grabbed Mr. President by the shoulders and I said: ‘I don’t need to know about my son, I need to know what happened, Mr. President.’

Strange continued. “The Secret Service guys grabbed me. I’m crying. He went to give me a hug. I whispered in his ear: ‘Mr. President, Is there going to be a congressional inquiry?’ And Mr. President whispered in my ear – and I could feel his lips touch – and he said, ‘Mr. Strange, we’re going to look into this very, very, very deep.’ Well, I haven’t heard nothing.”

Nothing that makes sense, anyway. A military investigation led by then-Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Colt (since promoted to major general) tells us there was no “eye in the sky” that night. Why not? No forces had been sent in to prepare the area. Why not?

More sickening was the fact that rules of engagement prevented suppressive fire from being aimed at the tower firing on the Chinook. Billy Vaughn, father of slain SEAL Aaron Vaughn, recalled how a three-star admiral explained this breach to the grieving families: U.S. forces couldn’t fire back, the admiral said, because “we want to win hearts and minds.” As Mr. Strange later put it: “What about my heart? What about my mind?”

American hearts and minds don’t count with this U.S. government – and that is our national tragedy until we change the government.

What commander is responsible for assembling so many SEALs in one inadequate aircraft, for this particular landing site, for a mission many believe was in fact unnecessary? Extortion 17 took off three months after the strike on bin Laden, three months after the Obama administration blew SEAL Team 6′s cover in the bin Laden raid, three months after intelligence indicated the Taliban were out for revenge. “The chain of command” was responsible, the families were told. Who were they? No answer.

Why was there no gunship escort that night? What happened in the final minutes of Extortion 17? The black box was never recovered, the military insists. Really? What about the seven Afghan soldiers who joined the mission at the last minute, replacing Afghans previously scheduled to fly? No one knows the identities of this last-minute group, or why they flew that day. More troubling still, military investigators didn’t interview Afghan commanders to find out.

Why not? To win their “hearts and minds,” too? The word for that is “submission.” Such submission also explains the appalling inclusion of an imam at the casket transfer ceremony in Afghanistan – a ceremony preceding the transport of the dead bodies, American and Afghan, to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where they would finally be identified. (This makes families wonder whether American sons lay in caskets draped with the Afghan flag.) There, in the midst of an otherwise ecumenical ceremony (devoid of any mention of Jesus Christ), the imam invoked Allah, while establishing that Muslims reside in heaven and non-Muslims reside in hell.

Standard Islamic fare, to be sure, but this is the same supremacist basis of the jihad that killed the men of Extortion 17. No wonder the families are doubly outraged.

As should we all be. Congress must investigate Extortion 17 and find out exactly what happened, and who bears responsibility. It is the very least we can do for our people.

The Texas Republican was addressing the three State Department “whistleblowers” who testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. The three witnesses were Mark Thompson, acting deputy assistant secretary of state for counterterrorism; Greg Hicks, former deputy chief of mission in Libya; and Eric Nordstrom, former regional security officer in Libya.

When Farenthold introduced this crucial subject into the hearings, he also opened a window into Benghazi that shone light not only on disastrous Western support for “Arab Spring,” but also on the core crisis in U.S. foreign policy.

Farenthold: “Mr. Nordstrom, can you tell me the role of February 17 Martyrs Brigade in protecting the consulate in Benghazi?”

Nordstrom: “Certainly. That was the unit, for lack of a better term, that was provided to us by the Libyan government.”

This already was news to me: The Libyan government provided known jihadists to guard U.S. interests?

On second thought, there is nothing fantastic about this when – or, rather, if – we consider that the U.S. government supported an army of known jihadists in its revolution against Libya’s anti-jihadist former leader Moammar Gadhafi. I say “if” because I don’t expect even the members of the committee to see the “Arab Spring” this way. Uncle Sam’s open support for jihad is an epic scandal that is never even acknowledged.

Farenthold: “Were you aware of any ties by that militia to Islamic extremists?”

Nordstrom: “Absolutely. Yeah, we had that discussion on a number of occasions, the last of which was when there was a Facebook posting of a threat that named Ambassador Stevens and Sen. (John) McCain, who was coming out for the elections. That was in the July (2012) time frame. I met with some of my agents and also some (CIA) annex personnel, and we discussed that.”

More news: Nordstrom seems to be saying that the February 17 Martyrs Brigade actually threatened both the U.S. ambassador and a U.S. senator – and still served as U.S. security guards. This is shocking to read in black and white, although, again, when it becomes clear that Uncle Sam supported the same, exact jihad in Libya that al-Qaida supported, it makes, if not sense exactly, then certainly a pattern.

Farenthold: “Mr. Hicks, you were in Libya on the night of the attack. Do you believe the February 17 militia played a role in those attacks, was complicit in those attacks?”

Hicks: “Certainly, elements of that militia were complicit in the attacks. The attackers had to make a long approach march through multiple checkpoints that were manned by February 17 militia.”

More news: Most media accounts identified al-Qaida-linked Ansar al-Sharia (“Supporters of Shariah”) as the militia manning the checkpoints around the compound that horrible night. Of course, Libya militias seem to be loose organizations with overlapping membership. More important, though, as John Rosenthal, author of “The Jihadist Plot: The Untold Story of Al-Qaeda and the Libyan Rebellion,” puts it, virtually all of them “sympathize” with Ansar al-Sharia. “In fact,” Rosenthal said in a recent interview with me, “in the literal sense of the term, virtually all of the Eastern Libyan militias are ‘Ansar al-Sharia’ – that is to say ‘supporters of the Shariah.’”

February 17 Martyrs Brigade is no different. Its Facebook page has displayed a photo featuring the black flag of al-Qaida, and more important, the brigade demonstrated for Shariah in Benghazi last summer.

In March 2013, Rosenthal reported at Newsmax.com that the brigade’s Facebook page also featured “a graphic celebrating Jabhat al-Nusra,” the U.S.-designated terrorist offshoot of al-Qaida in Iraq fighting Syria’s Bashar Assad.

“In defiance of the U.S. designation,” Rosenthal wrote, “the Arabic on the graphic declares, ‘We are all Jabhat al-Nusra.’”

“We” were also U.S. security guards.

Farenthold: “I’m stunned that the State Department was relying on a militia with extremist ties to protect American diplomats. That doesn’t make any sense. How does that happen?”

For me, Nordstrom’s reply was the most candid moment in the hearings. Out came the man’s evident frustration at serving a country gone mad in crippling alliances with jihadist enemies everywhere.

Nordstrom: “You mean like in Afghanistan, where Afghanis that are working with our military … turn on them and shoot them? Or in Yemen, where our embassy was attacked in 2008 by attackers wearing police uniforms? Or in Saudi Arabia, in Jeddah, we had an attack in 2004. The Saudi National Guard that was protecting our facility reportedly ran from the scene and then it took 90 minutes before we could get help.”

It felt as if Nordstrom could have continued, but the congressman, perhaps mindful of the clock, jumped back in.

Farenthold: “There’s pretty high unemployment in the United States. I would imagine there’s some Americans that’d be willing to take jobs overseas.”

Nordstrom: “We couldn’t agree with you more. But unfortunately, as I said earlier … that was the ‘best’ bad plan. That was the unit that the Libyan government had initially designated for VIP protection. It was very difficult to extract ourselves from that.”

If Americans ever learn how and why this is so, why our government is making common cause with jihadist groups everywhere, they will realize that Uncle Sam has himself joined the jihad. Let’s hope we learn before it’s too late.

“But this is hard stuff,” President Obama tried to explain in this week’s press conference. “Because of the pressure that we put on al-Qaida’s core, because of the pressure that we’ve put on these networks that are well-financed and more sophisticated and can engage in and project transnational threats against the United States, one of the dangers that we now face are self-radicalized individuals who are already here in the United States – in some cases, may not be part of any kind of network, but because of whatever warped, twisted ideas they may have, may decide to carry out an attack. And those are in some ways more difficult to prevent.”

More difficult to prevent? Ridiculous. But this is also a disgraceful thing to say under these circumstances. What Obama describes is the Keystone Cops case because he decided, as a matter of “Muslim outreach,” to shut his eyes to the motivation of such attacks – Islam, jihad, Allah’s law (Shariah) – and ordered our security agencies and military to shut their eyes, too.

It is a fact that in concert with the Oct. 19, 2011, demands of an array of Islamic advocacy groups, including government-identified Muslim Brotherhood front groups (the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America, for example), the Obama administration subsequently ordered the “purge” of any training materials and trainers still teaching the history and doctrine of jihad at government security agencies and throughout the military. This unconscionable act of eliminating our first line of defense – in effect, shutting down national security’s eyes and ears, and, worse, logic itself – is what accounts for the successful cycle of jihad that marks our era of decline. To be fair, it is not all Obama’s fault. The current administration’s see-no-Islam policy is an extension and amplification of the see-no-Islam policy initiated by President George W. Bush.

When a handful of House Republicans led by Michele Bachmann of Minnesota last summer raised the see-no-Islam “purge” and related issues with justified alarm, these remnant patriots in Congress were crucified as “Islamophobes” and scorned as lunatics. And now? No one in that Bachmann lynch mob (Obama administration, media and, profiles in courage, GOP leadership) wants us to put things together now. They don’t want us to realize that those two vicious bombs that exploded in Boston last month might well have been prevented had Bachmann & Co.’s warnings been heeded.

How? On government order, the FBI doesn’t know – can’t know – that it is actually fighting Islamic jihad and Shariah subversion. The kind of review Bachmann hoped for could possibly have saved fact-based analysis at the FBI and related agencies. To grasp the stupefying impact of the see-no-Islam status quo, imagine the FBI of the Cold War era officially denying and suppressing the role Marxism played in animating subversives. No communist espionage rings would ever have been stopped.

Such blindness is the official rule today. An examination of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Analytical Lexicon, which was published in 2008 at the end of the Bush administration, shows that the words “Islam,” “Muslim,” “jihad,” “Muslim Brotherhood,” even “al-Qaida” – all of which appear in the 9/11 Commission Report – have disappeared entirely from the lexicon of FBI analysis. Instead, agents must focus on the literally meaningless concept of “violent extremism.” As if that’s not mentally paralyzing enough, the FBI definition of violent extremism includes this: “An analytical judgment that an individual is a ‘violent extremist,’ ‘extremist,’ or ‘radical’ is not predication for any investigative action or technique.”

Another way to view such a security shambles is to say, as the president did, that the FBI performed well in the run-up to Boston 4/15. “The FBI investigated that older brother,” he said. “It’s not as if the FBI did nothing. They not only investigated the older brother, they interviewed the older brother. They concluded that there were no signs that he was engaging in extremist activity.”

This makes perfect sense – in the government’s see-no-Islam world. FBI agents, operating by the book, might well have tagged Tamerlan Tsarnaev a “violent extremist,” and then, also operating by the book, done nothing. Ka-boom. Having de-Islamized counterterrorism techniques, Obama could then say: “Based on what I’ve seen so far, the FBI performed its duties, the Department of Homeland Security did what it was supposed to be doing.”

According to U.S. government’s see-no-Islam policy, Obama is correct. In fact, for meritorious achievement leading up to the Boston bombing, special commendations for all U.S. security personnel up to and including Cabinet secretaries from Justice, Homeland Security and the Pentagon are in order. The Obama team effort may not have stopped terrorism, but it sure made Islam disappear.

That same day, law enforcement searched Alharbi’s Boston-area apartment for seven hours, leaving with bags of evidence at around 2 a.m. on Tuesday, April 16. On Tuesday afternoon, a sub-agency of the Department of Homeland Security created what is called an “event file” on Alharbi, calling for his visa to be revoked due to ties to terrorism. That same afternoon, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper would inform the Senate Intelligence Committee that Alharbi was now merely a “witness.”

This exonerating designation pulled the public eye off of Alharbi, but only temporarily. On Wednesday night, April 17, Steven Emerson refocused our attention on Alharbi when on Fox News’ “Hannity” show, the terrorism expert broke the news that Alharbi was scheduled to be deported on “national security grounds.”

Since then, it has been a struggle to keep this sensational story in sight. The administration has categorically dismissed it, and the media have followed suit – which is better than anything the Saudi dignitaries sweeping through Washington after the Boston bombing could have hoped for.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has done her overbearing best to discredit even elected officials with the temerity to ask questions about it. In an April 18 exchange with Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., Napolitano exploded when Duncan, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, asked why the Saudi witness, apparently connected to terrorism by his deportation order, was slated to leave the country when the Boston investigation was just beginning? Calling the premise of the congressman’s question a “rumor,” Napolitano replied: “I’m not going to answer that question. It’s so full of misstatements and misapprehensions that it’s just not worthy of an answer.”

Really?

Maybe Her Secretary-ness was relying on alterations to the original Alharbi file that, The Blaze would later report, were made on the evening of Wednesday, April 17, “to disassociate him (Alharbi) from the initial charges.”

But it was too late – and here’s where the story gets really juicy. Glenn Beck and The Blaze have now reproduced a copy of a page from the original April 16 file on Alharbi. In terse government lingo, this document makes clear that 1) Alharbi was a terrorism risk to the public, and 2) federal authorities who permitted him into the country were negligent. No matter what Napolitano says, this story is no rumor.

Let’s examine the document, one line at a time. It first tells us: “Subject is an exact match to NO FLY TPN# 1037506192.”

In other words, Alharbi’s name and particulars show up on the no-fly list.

“Derogatory information reviewed by (Watch Commander) Mayfield and (Chief Watch Commander) Maimbourg was found to be sufficient to request Visa revocation. NTC-P is requesting revocation of Foil No. e3139541.”

A “foil” number is a visa number. “NTC-P” is the acronym for National Targeting Center – Passengers. This is a sub-agency of Homeland Security charged with providing intelligence in order to prevent terrorists and criminals from entering the country – or, in this case, ejecting them from it.

“Subject is inadmissible to the U.S. under INA 212(a)(3)(B)(i)(II).” This red-hot “3B” designation specifically connects Alharbi to terrorism.

“SAO was not completed prior to Visa issuance.” SAO stands for Security Advisory Opinion. The U.S. requires SAO background security checks on visa applicants suspected of being national security risks, and visa applicants who have links to state sponsors of terrorism (Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Syria) or “the list of 26″ Islamic countries, including Saudi Arabia.

Basically, we now know we have had an unwelcome Saudi on the loose, who, Beck would also report, the Alharbi “event file” also indicated to be “armed and dangerous.” Alharbi’s student visa, by the way, permitted him to study in Ohio. Meanwhile, he was living in Boston.

Remember Hani Hanjour, who crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon? In 2000, the 28-year-old Saudi was admitted on a student visa to study in Oakland. He joined his al-Qaida cell in San Diego instead. Hanjour was one of about 5,500 Saudis enrolled in the U.S. at the time.

Thanks to a reckless agreement to boost Saudi enrollment in the U.S. (why?) between George W. Bush and Saudi Arabia in April 2005, Alharbi is one of roughly 35,000 – an increase since 9/11 of more than 600 percent! How many other Saudi students are here despite SAOs that remain incomplete?

We don’t know. We don’t even know Alharbi’s current status or whereabouts. The government is mum. The media are AWOL – even after Beck published the proof of Alharbi’s “3B” terrorism designation. Naturally, part-Saudi-owned Fox News, where the deportation story broke, isn’t following the story. Hannity, too, appears to have let it drop.

The last scrap I read about Alharbi’s current activities actually came from the Saudi newspaper Okaz (translated by Walid Shoebat), which, freakily, reported that first lady Michelle Obama paid an April 18 visit to 3B-Alharbi in the hospital. Equally alarming is the fact, uncovered by the blog therightscoop.com, Alharbi has visited the White House several times since 2009.

Four GOP members of the House Homeland Security Committee have requested a classified briefing on the Saudi case from Napolitano – Duncan, Peter King of New York, Candice Miller of Michigan and Chairman Michael McCaul of Texas. They are still waiting for a reply.

Napolitano did, however, ‘fess up to something new about Alharbi this week. He was, she explained in a very convoluted way to the Senate Judiciary Committee, placed on the terrorism watch list, briefly, after the Boston bombing.

And then what happened?

Came the dawn I heard that terrorism expert Steven Emerson had dropped a bombshell Wednesday night on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program. Emerson reported that Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi, the Saudi national first identified as a “person of interest” and then downgraded, like a tropical storm, to “witness,” would be deported from the United States “on national security grounds.” This, Emerson added, “is very unusual.”

Yes. But also no. Amid similar conditions – a terrorist attack, an ongoing investigation and Saudi diplomatic pressure – we have seen Saudi nationals spirited out of the country en masse in the past rather than be exposed to any part of an investigative process.

I refer, of course, to the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, when, following a private meeting on Sept. 13 between President George W. Bush and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, “something strange began to happen,” as former Florida Sen. Bob Graham writes in his 2004 book “Intelligence Matters.” (As Senate Intelligence committee chairman, Graham co-chaired the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11.)

“Although the FAA had ordered all private flights grounded, a number of planes began flying to collect Saudi nationals from various parts of the United States.” Within a week, Graham continues, 140 Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family, had been flown out of the country without ever having to answer a single question about anything.

What’s almost worse is that for nearly three years, as Graham reports, “the White House and other agencies insisted that these flights never took place.” Bush lied, Saudis flied.

It seems beyond question that such Saudi collusion will be omitted from the archives at the George W. Bush library, which opens later this month in Texas – thanks to $500 million from anonymous donors.

But such collusion was just the beginning of the perfidious role the Bush administration played to strong-arm and block the investigation of Saudi involvement in 9/11 – a role that now makes me deeply regret voting for President Bush, particularly in 2004. The Bush administration cover-up would climax with the redaction of a 28-page chapter of the 9/11 Commission report regarding foreign, particularly Saudi, support for some of the al-Qaida hijackers.

We, the People, still can’t read those redacted pages – and, as Bob Graham wrote last Sept. 11 in a plea to re-open the 9/11 inquiry, they “represent only a fraction of the evidence of Saudi complicity that our government continues to shield from the public.”

I return to this unhealed wound in our recent past to make a point. The attacks of 9/11 and the Boston bombing may prove to have nothing to do with each other – except insofar as tearing our civilizational fabric in ways that can never be mended. But once again, the Saudi hold over the U.S. government has been exposed.

Eerie parallels with 9/11 go beyond the very special treatment seemingly accorded to 20-year-old Alharbi, who, as Walid Shoebat has reported at his essential website, Shoebat.com, comes from a Saudi clan that proudly claims many al-Qaida members and Gitmo prisoners to its name.

It was Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal who, the New York Times reported, “hurriedly” flew to Washington in 2003 to meet with President Bush over Saudi concerns that classified sections of a released congressional report linked senior Saudi officials to the 9/11 attacks. As noted, these sections and more remain under government lock-and-key.

This week, it was Prince Saud again, at age 73 still foreign minister, who was visiting Washington. His photo-op with Secretary of State John Kerry, scheduled for the Tuesday morning after the Boston bombings, was abruptly canceled due to “scheduling” concerns – an alibi openly derided during a State briefing by the Associated Press’ Matt Lee. A closed meeting, however, took place. “Let me provide a readout of the meeting for all of you,” State spokesman Patrick Ventrell schoolmarmishly intoned, likely driving Lee’s acid skepticism.

Later that same day, Alharbi, whose startling clan ties alone bear painstaking scrutiny, went from “person of interest” to “witness.”

On Wednesday, Reuters reported that President Obama held an unscheduled meeting with both Prince Saud and Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir at the White House.

That night, Emerson dropped his bombshell about Alharbi’s hasty deportation.

I can’t connect these dots. I can’t predict whether Alharbi will be deported in the end. But I lay them out there for posterity before they vanish in the rush to the next story, because the fact remains we seem to be reliving disturbing patterns from our past, even down to some pretty unusual details.

After 9/11, there was a lethal (still unsolved) anthrax attack. After the Boston bombings, two ricin-laced letters were intercepted en route to Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi and President Obama. (A suspect, Paul Kevin Curtis, has been arrested.)

After 9/11, Mohamed Atta’s father made the news by attesting to his son’s non-participation in the attacks, even insisting that he was still alive. Yesterday, Alharbi’s father made news by criticizing the media for reporting that his son had come under suspicion.Another coincidence: Both attacks were preceded by intensive efforts in Washington to legalize illegal aliens. Of course, in 2001, we were talking about 3 million illegal aliens, and in 2013 the baseline is 11 million. This surge is largely because Bush never secured the border (another reason I wish I hadn’t voted for him).

All coincidence aside, there is a crucial question our recent experience compels us to ask: Is a Saudi cover-up happening again?

Van Meter, a contributing editor at Vogue and New York Magazine, had worked diligently on this New York Times Sunday Magazine cover story – multiple interviews with Weiner and Abedin, both as a couple and separately. On some level, the prurient banality of what he was writing about must have gotten to him.

As he described listening to Weiner discuss the “original behavior” that culminated in the elected official, husband and father-to-be sending a photo of his own torso “wearing gray boxer briefs and an obvious erection” to 45,000 Twitter followers (rather than privately to a 21-year-old college student in Seattle), Van Meter writes: “I startled myself that day when, after two hours of listening while he unburdened himself, I heard these words come out of my mouth: ‘Maybe we should stop there for now.’ Never has an interview felt so much like a therapy session.”

And there were still 3,000 words and a crying outburst (Weiner’s) to go. This last event took place over the “enormous root-beer float” Weiner ordered after dinner, as opposed to his more restrained tearing-up over breakfast.

Abedin broke down, too, or so she ‘fessed up to Van Meter, two days after the scandal went public. As a top adviser to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Abedin was en route to Africa when a supportive phone call came in from the White House.

“With tears streaming down her face, she turned to (Clinton staffers) and began talking about some issue that was on the Africa agenda. ‘They just totally went with it and got down to work. There was no attention paid to my tears. And I was like, “Thank you for just responding like that.”‘”

Like Van Meter, maybe we should stop there for now, too. Never has reading the newspaper felt so much like a therapy session. But how little these confessional torrents seem to have to do with genuine healing.

Under a headline describing the power couple’s “post-scandal playbook,” this extended peep behind the scenes and into the mental boxers with Weiner & Wife seems to be all about voter-vaccination.

Weiner, as he told Van Meter at that first, slightly moist breakfast interview, is now running for mayor of New York City. His political action committee has already spent $100,000 on polling and research that revealed New Yorkers might give him a second chance at public office depending on what they thought of his behavior, or lessons learned, after his disgrace.

“By agreeing to be interviewed,” Van Meter writes, “Weiner and Abedin would seem to be trying to give voters what they want – and gauge public reaction.”

The cynicism is breathtaking, but to be expected from a pair of proteges of Bill and Hillary Clinton, who long ago proved they would exchange their souls to keep the motorcade running. But maybe the cynicism (or incompetence) of the New York Times trumps all.

In 8,000 words, the paper “of record” could find no room to mention Abedin’s far more significant scandal in her own right. I refer to Abedin’s extensively documented familial and professional ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

These ties start with Abedin’s parents, who were recruited by Abdullah Omar Naseef, a leading Muslim Brotherhood figure and later financier of the al-Qaida terror network, to run a Saudi-supported think tank in Jeddah. The think tank produces a publication called the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs.

Having studied the inter-relationships among the Abedin family, the Saudi government and the Brotherhood in depth, former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy explains the academic concept of “Muslim minority affairs” – which, in effect, constitute the Saudi-funded, Brotherhood-supervised Abedin family business – as “shorthand for a long-term, high-priority policy to spread Islam until, finally, it comes to dominate the non-Islamic nations of the world.”

To be sure, this is a giant red flag over the background of someone whom Van Meter describes as the secretary of state’s “senior adviser.”

Meanwhile, he writes, “Clinton is a mother figure to Huma.” Bill officiated at the Abedin-Weiner wedding. How can anyone with insight into Abedin’s jihad-network connections – which includes her own long association with jihad financier Naseef – not wonder whether Muslim Brotherhood influence subverted the secretary of state’s policy-making during the “Arab Spring”? A less superficial investigation of the Abedin-Clinton relationship might help explain why the U.S. calamitously supports Muslim Brotherhood efforts to come to power across the Middle East.

As Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., discovered last summer, however, asking a responsible question about this apparent national security scandal is taboo. We finally accept that Alger Hiss was a Soviet agent executing Communist strategy through the secretary of state’s office in the 1940s, but we ignore evidence of global Islamic influence inside the U.S. government today. We find ourselves benumbed by sex-scandal details – the ultimate diversion from truly grave issues of fitness for office.

The fact is, if Abedin’s Muslim Brotherhood connections compromised the secretary of state, they would compromise her husband’s mayoral run in New York City – and, come to think of it, her “mother figure’s” run for the White House.

First, though, I’d like to suggest that anyone reading this column in a local newspaper or news site pat the editor on the back for publishing what in our neo-medieval world of fear amounts to a “forbidden” column.

Yup, I am about to say something about the Great Barack Obama Identity/Eligibility Scandal again. I know that this is one rich and urgent topic that doesn’t see the light of day in certain so-called news outlets – and I say that from the experience of watching my own syndicated columns fail to appear when covering news of the White House press conference where the president’s long-form birth certificate was unveiled, news of courtroom proceedings in various states on Obama’s ballot eligibility and news of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s investigators presenting evidence that the online Obama birth certificate is a forgery.

So be it. This was, as noted, the last straw.

I refer to something radio host Sean Hannity said on his show this week. He was speaking in rebuttal to a Democrat arguing that racism was a problem among conservatives. As evidence, the Democrat brought up the “birther issue” – the label used to encapsulate any topic related to Obama’s identity documents and constitutional eligibility. Erroneously, it is a label that narrowly connotes, and derisively so, only the belief that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States.

In fact, the whereabouts of Obama’s nativity is in no way the main bone of “birther” contention, despite the blinkered focus on it by the enforcers of silence. Of far greater concern to me, for starters, is the purportedly original documentation President Obama belatedly provided the American people to attest to his identity.

I refer to the electronic image of a long-form 1961 Hawaiian birth certificate posted at the White House website. After studying various evidence and demonstrations (which I’ve written about in previous “forbidden” columns), I’ve concluded that this online image is in all probability a forgery.

So has Sheriff Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse out in Maricopa County, Ariz. So, too, has the Israel Science and Technology website, a national database and directory of science- and technology-related sites in Israel established by Benjamin Netanyahu’s former science adviser, molecular biologist Israel Hanukoglu, Ph.D.

If these investigations are correct, we are looking at the greatest fraud in modern history as put over by the flimflam administration and enabled by armies of accessories practically everywhere else.

There is a second issue to consider that also has nothing to do with what is commonly meant by the “birther” issue. Having weighed the arguments, it seems to me that by virtue of having a British subject for a father, Barack Obama Jr. is constitutionally ineligible to be president of the United States, no matter where he was born.

With a British father, Obama cannot meet the constitutional requirement of having been “natural born,” which is a different and more restrictive category than “native born.” Similarly ineligible, I would add, are Republican Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and, alas, Ted Cruz of Texas, both of whom have parents who were not citizens when they were born.

So, getting back to the Obama case, tell me where the “racism” is in these concerns. Where is it? Identity theft per se is hardly a pathology of black America. Meanwhile, British paternity, even if it does, in Obama’s case, come via Africa, is the very disqualifier the founders had in mind on crafting the “natural born” criterion more than two centuries ago to guard against a president with divided loyalties. Where is the racism in trying to address these weighty matters of the Constitution, law and state?

Nowhere. “Racism” is simply a buzzword to further stymie the already strangled “birther” issue.

So how did Hannity reply to the argument that conservatives were “racist” due to broaching the “birther” argument?

He challenged his interlocutor: “Name three prominent conservatives who were advancing the birther issue.”

With this reply, Hannity accepted the charge that the whole subject is “racist,” and the argument that this “racist” subject is also baseless. It was the last straw.

Which means what exactly? Nothing. Hannity is right. Aside from Alan Keyes, a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and a Republican candidate for the Senate and the presidency, no prominent Republican – from John McCain to Mitt Romney to John Boehner to Ron Paul – and no prominent conservative, from William Bennett to Sarah Palin to Rudy Giuliani, ever faced or raised the issue.

Similarly, no think tank, no committee in Congress, no judicial body, no civic group and no mainstream media organization has advanced any responsible inquiry into these troubling questions. And forget about the Electoral College.

We’re supposed to pretend the questions don’t exist, that the dodgy doc floating on the White House website is the real deal – and I haven’t even mentioned other discrepancies in the Obama narrative. Silence, the conventional wisdom tells us, combats racism.

What chance does any free society in such deep denial have to continue? Not much. How tragic and frightening to realize that this same denial is evidence that our attachment to freedom and the Constitution vanished long ago.

Judging by your recent coming-out party at a University of Southern California dinner to honor the military – your first public foray since you disappeared in a cloud of Paula Broadwell – whatever advice you’ve been buying seems to be working. You came, you apologized, you received a standing ovation. The media melted all over again into a puddle of admiration, further obscuring the real reasons you should not be apologizing before a gala crowd, but rather testifying before the American people: those national scandals you have so far successfully left in your dust.

I have previously addressed such scandals and will do so again: lying to the House Intelligence Committee about Benghazi twice; causing death and dismemberment of U.S. forces by directing them to walk the IED-packed roads of Afghanistan as part of a counterinsurgency, or COIN, strategy to win Afghans’ “trust”; and your see-no-Islam COIN strategy itself. For the moment, though, as you seek and already seem to have received public forgiveness, there is something else to consider: What you can do to give meaning to your words.

It’s not enough to time your first public address in five months to coincide with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this week to make the case, in subtext, that it’s not just your own next act that concerns you but also the plight of some 3 million returning veterans who may find themselves, as you write, at the bottom of the corporate ladder, underemployed or in dead-end jobs. In conclusion, you write, “Now it is our turn to do our part to help (veterans) build promising futures for themselves and their families.”

Here’s an idea – gratis – to make us trust the sincerity of your call to help veterans and their families build those promising futures. Take that apparently bulletproof reputation of yours and use it to seek clemency for the so-called “Leavenworth 10.”

This tag refers to a group of American soldiers now serving long prison terms mainly at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., for “crimes” committed on your COIN battlefield in Iraq, and also Afghanistan. Across time and space, from desks in orderly offices peering into ghastly battlefields, obsessed military prosecutors have been able to see “murder” and even “premeditated murder” in the eyes of these soldiers who were blinded by the densest fog of war.

Since it was you who ordered these young men into the hostile urban combat zones in Iraq to win “hearts and minds,” since it was you who set them up, unable to tell friend from foe, to earn “trust and confidence” amid hostile outposts in Afghanistan, it should now be you who leads them out of their living hells. Long after the U.S. government has released tens of thousands of insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan – including Hezbollah mastermind Musa Daqduq, for example – it is time for you, the leading general in these wars, to declare that these young Americans, these American prisoners of COIN, have been punished enough.

I refer, for example, to 1st Lt. Michael Behenna, the elite Army Ranger whose last-ditch interrogation of an al-Qaida terrorist ended when, as forensic evidence indicates, he killed the detainee he was questioning in self-defense. Michael has served roughly four years behind bars, but that’s only a dent in his 15-year sentence.

There is Pvt. Corey Clagett, the most junior and the only imprisoned member of an Army squad implicated in following direct orders to shoot captured Iraqi insurgents in Operation Iron Triangle. Corey was sentenced to 18 years; cruelly and unusually, he has already spent nearly seven years in solitary confinement.

There is Sgt. Evan Vela, the first-tour Army sniper whose commander ordered him to kill a captured Iraqi struggling to blow the squad’s cover behind enemy lines. He was sentenced to 10 years. There is also Sgt. Derrick Miller, an Army National Guard veteran of Afghanistan, who, during a harsh interrogation, killed in self-defense an Afghan who had penetrated his squad’s defensive perimeter. He received life in prison, with the possibility of parole in 10 years.

There are more such men whose names you should know – Marine Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins (sentenced to 11 years), Army Master Sgt. John Hatley (sentenced to 40 years) – whose tragic stories should in truth keep you awake at night, whose families will need your help if ever they are to get a chance to build those “promising futures” you glibly wrote about.

All of these young Americans marched into the crosshairs of COIN, the place where your “hearts and minds” strategy blew up, the place where living among, loving, respecting and bribing Iraqis and Afghans according to COIN’s see-no-Islam tenets became life-or-death propositions. These men managed to stay alive. According to COIN, that’s their main offense.

You, Gen. Petraeus, could go a long way to change that by pleading for their clemency in the name of healing, even as you plead your own. The war is over in Iraq; it is winding down in Afghanistan. Such humbling efforts would represent a new beginning for them – and for you.

The problem was how to do so without unduly alarming the poor thing. My favorite kinds of questions might be distressing to VIMPs who never ask them, or even seem to think of them. I didn’t want to scare off her (or him) without eliciting an answer. I had to consider carefully while my VIMP remained at hand in a perpetual state of high-definition recognition.

There was no doubt about what was uppermost on my list: Had this journalistic personage ever had the curiosity to download and examine the online document posted at the White House website that purports to be President Obama’s long-form birth certificate? Had he (or she) ever weighed any analysis or investigation that concludes the online document is a digitally created forgery? Or did this exemplar of the Fourth Estate simply take the White House at its word?

Speaking of taking the White House at its word, a second subject I hoped to introduce concerned the many unanswered questions about the Benghazi attack. Did she (or he) consider the Obama administration adequately transparent about Benghazi and its many-layered cover-up? Maybe I should say many-layered “aftermath” so as not to be too shocking.

From the ongoing chatter, it became clear such topics would have the allure of stink bombs. So much conventional wisdom flowed about A-list topics such as “Obama and Boehner” and “what would Israel do about Iran?” that I felt as if I were in a rerun of a Sunday news show. At one point, the timing of the killing of Osama bin Laden came up. Why, after knowing the al-Qaida leader’s whereabouts for eight or nine months, did Obama suddenly order a strike on May 2, 2011? It was all-around baffling.

At this point, I might have introduced my topic of interest. I could have noted that the death of bin Laden erased the birth certificate issue from the news, where, thanks to Donald Trump and author Jerome Corsi, it actually was commanding new levels of scrutiny that had prompted the White House to release its online document at a press conference on April 27, 2011. A few days later, boom – bin Laden was dead. Wasn’t that a little bit interesting? Imagining in response the cold, revolted stare reserved for unwelcome bugs, I said nothing.

I knew it would be hard to launch such a conversation without any context, which too often describes the condition of public discourse on the many issues that go uncovered or incompletely covered. In this instance, I was once again struck by the fact that my own local outlet, the soon-to-be-defunct daily Washington Examiner, had followed a blanket policy to reject any column I wrote about the Obama eligibility issue. Accordingly, the paper refused to run the column I devoted to that April 2011 press conference that the White House called exclusively to mark the release of Obama’s online birth certificate. In the here and now, I would have to explain everything. I could never claim his (or her) attention for so long, so I let the moment pass.

Rather amazingly, a question did come up as to whether this in-the-know VIMP had ever seen Obama’s college records. “No, why?” the VIMP replied, as if the question concerned looking at instructions for using a doorknob. Later, the VIMP’s tradecraft became evident: “I don’t think anything matters about Obama before the day he began serving as president.” Here, most likely, was the answer to my question: No, the VIMP wasn’t interested in eyeballing Obama’s online identity artwork. Rich man, poor man, beggar man, fraud, it didn’t matter. Nothing pre-presidency did – not even, I was told, consideration of Obama’s mentors, beginning with communist Frank Marshall Davis, and not even when it came to trying to parse Obama’s political ideology.

OK, so what about Benghazi? The Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, during which four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed, definitely took place on Obama’s watch as commander in chief. Did my VIMP believe there was any journalistic spadework still to be done to unearth the facts about what was happening in Washington during and after our Benghazi compound was attacked?

In a word, no. Blaming the fiasco on “negligence,” this leading journalist declared there was no more to be seen, heard or spoken about. In so doing, this VIMP gave a pretty good impersonation of the three monkeys of oblivion who together symbolize blindness, deafness and dumbness. “It’s not important.” Naturally, if it’s not important, administration lies and cover-up become wasted efforts not worth spending time on.

Richard Nixon would have really liked this character.

Back in 2008, candidate Barack Obama went off his teleprompter and added a couple of sentences to the text of a speech about expanding the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps. Over rolling applause, the soon-to-be president of the United States said: “We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”

At the time, Joseph Farah of WND.com wrote a column calling on you to help shine a light on what this shocking statement really meant. In a permanent state of vapors over Obama’s candidacy, you were of no use when it came to extracting anything but press releases from Team Obama.

Nearly five years later, it hardly matters that candidate Obama’s promise to double the Peace Corps and the rest has come to naught. But the president’s unscripted determination to empower a civilian national security force is a different story. As far as you’re concerned, though, it’s also a nonstory.

This complacency or complicity has to stop. During the last 10 months, the Department of Homeland Security has purchased 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition, including millions of hollow-point bullets. The department also has purchased 7,000 fully automatic assault rifles, and it has overseen the retrofitting of more than 2,000 light tanks, which, of course, were originally designed to resist the mines and ambushes of the battlefield. Why does DHS need such offensive and defensive firepower?

Remember, DHS stands for Department of Homeland Security, and “homeland,” just to be extremely clear, means the USA. Obama must be asked against which domestic enemy he is arming nonmilitary forces. It sounds incredible, to be sure, but are we watching administration battle plans take shape against American citizens on the streets of Your Town, USA?

That’s where you in the mainstream media come in. This story has been burning up the “alternative press” of our Internet age – Drudge Report, Infowars.com, WND.com – for months, even years. As noted by Natural News, another “alternative” source, it’s only this week that the story is finally showing up in the mainstream media. Leapfrogging off a very thin Associated Press story of Feb. 15, Forbes.com contributor Ralph Benko made quite a splash (664,581 views) this week with a more substantive piece acknowledging these same menacing stockpiles and calling for a “national conversation.”

We the People seem ready for such a conversation – just think of all those story views. (By contrast, the next most popular Forbes.com story garnered 87,384 views.) You, the media, need to make sure the administration doesn’t get away with stonewalling.

That’s what we get now, if we get anything. Government spokesmen, when they’re not trying to make 1.6 billion bullets sound like a frugal, Costco-style bulk purchase, will tell you it’s all about target practice. Really? I hear that U.S. Army newbies soon to deploy to Afghanistan are training with blank cartridges. Why the priority for arming domestic forces, not military ones?

Even the liberal-minded “debunking” site Snopes.com confirms that the Social Security Administration has procured 174,000 hollow-point bullets for 300 special agents. Meanwhile, the National Marine Fisheries Service, which is tasked with “protecting fish stocks from depletion,” has procured 46,000 hollow-point bullets. Spokesman Scott Smullen explained, straight-faced, I am guessing, that 63 fisheries service “enforcement agents” will be using the so-called cop-killer bullets for “target qualifications.”

And that’s nothing. Last month, Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars.com reported that DHS purchased 21.6 million more rounds of ammunition, including 10 million hollow-point bullets. The latter, of course, are prohibited by the rules of war.

Commentators who have done the math tell us the feds’ ammo dump includes enough bullets to fight the war in Iraq for 27 years, or enough bullets to shoot every American citizen five times over.

Ridiculous? Conspiracy theory? Sorry to pop that bubble of well-being, but we have only blind faith to convince us that any of this is ridiculous, even that any of this is a conspiracy. The evidence, so far, is in the ammo. The whoppers and the stonewalling come from the government. You, the mainstream media, can restore balance with attention and exposure.

You might start with Watson’s coverage last month for Infowars.com of Law Enforcement Targets Inc. (LET), a Minnesota-based manufacturer that has received $2 million in unspecified contracts from DHS in the last three years. Recently, Watson writes, the company began selling cardboard cutout targets designed to “desensitize police” to “nontraditional threat targets,” as the online catalog called them. These targets included very pregnant women, children and other civilians in home, playground or other neighborhood settings. All hold guns. Public outrage over Watson’s online reports was such that LET apologized on Facebook for the company’s “No More Hesitation products” and removed them from its website.

In its apology, LET insisted these heinous civilian targets weren’t the company’s idea. “This product line was originally requested and designed by the law enforcement community. …”

I asked a friend with a long career in state and local law enforcement if he’d ever seen the like. He replied: “No. Hell, no. The targets I was trained to fire upon depicted people who really looked like armed criminals. No pregnant women. No kids. No old people. … I could have shot three armed men during my career and been justified. Right or wrong, I didn’t shoot them. These no-hesitation targets are disgusting.”

What branch of law enforcement requested and designed them? DHS? Fisheries? Social Security? Who exactly is planning for the kind of action that requires all those bullets? Is the government, as some suggest, depleting ammunition stocks as a means of gun control? Then why light tanks, too? We don’t know the answers to any of these questions.

That’s where you come in. Start asking around. It’s been awhile, I know, but you could actually do some good for a change. Maybe even boost your circulation.