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Powerline: “Chaos at the State Department”
I spoke with a well-placed journalist last night whose sources describe the situation at the State Department in one word: “Chaos.” The working assumption is that several American embassies may have been penetrated, or are vulnerable to attack, because so many of them rely on local residents for staff needs at the embassy, and as such may be in a position to breach security if they have been recruited by Al Qaida. Moreover, the full story of the attack on the Benghazi consulate is much worse than we have been told (except by the Independent newspaper report John and I linked to here on Thursday).
The consulate in Benghazi was an interim facility, with only a standard door lock for security, and worse, Ambassador Stevens was traveling with only a light security detail, rather than in the heavily armed convoys our diplomats in the region usually employ. The attack on the Benghazi was no mere target of opportunity spurred by reaction to the “Innocence of Muslims” film; the film is just a pretext. The killing of Amb. Stevens was a premeditated hit, planned and carried out as retaliation for the recent drone strike that killed the number two Al Qaida operative in Afghanistan recently. The vulnerability of Stevens at the Benghazi compound was scouted out carefully. All the other embassy protest activity is just covering theater.
Fox: “Diplomatic, western posts targeted repeatedly in Benghazi in run-up to deadly assault”
While the Obama administration says there was no “actionable intelligence” foreshadowing the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya, there were at least four attacks on diplomatic and western targets in Benghazi leading up to the murder of the U.S. ambassador.
“This (the U.S. Consulate) was a place that was targeted months before with an IED (improvised explosive device),” Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House intelligence committee who has been briefed on the attack and investigation, told Fox News. “It’s clearly a target that they wanted to hit and they wanted to cause casualties. … It’s just too many coincidences here”
On June 6, an IED was thrown at the perimeter of the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. On June 11, the British ambassador’s motorcade came under attack by a rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG. Two security personnel were injured. Seven days later, on June 18, armed gunmen attacked the Tunisian consulate and burned its flag. And on Aug. 5, five weeks before the assault on the U.S. Consulate, the International Committee of the Red Cross building in Benghazi was also struck by RPGs.
On Friday, the chairman and ranking members of the Senate homeland security committee, Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins, sent a letter to the State Department inspector general requesting an investigation into the U.S. Consulate’s security posture at the time of the attack. The letter specifically references the previous attacks in June on the consulate and the British ambassador’s convoy, adding:
“Does the risk assessment process consider the capacity or lack thereof of the host country to provide security? Did the Libyan government request or suggest that security could be improved at the Benghazi facility prior to September 12th, 2010?”
And a chaser, Sullivan from late 2007
What does [Obama] offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its inherent weaknesses in Iraq, and its profound limitations in winning a long war against radical Islam. The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.
Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.
[...]
…if you sense, as I do, that greater danger lies ahead, and that our divisions and recent history have combined to make the American polity and constitutional order increasingly vulnerable, then the calculus of risk changes. Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.
We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama.
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- Apparently it was a “bridge too far” for the Wonce.
Arabs care much more about balls and backbones than faces. In Bumblefucks case they would probably make him wear a burka.
What we need is for every good cartoonists or pshopper on the right to start cranking out “Where’s Obama” bits with Jugears face instead of Waldo.
They already look enough alike, take away the glasses, darken the skin, change the hair, bingo.
In a universe that made sense, the GOP presidential candidate would announce that if elected:
* John Bolton would be the nominee for Secretary of State
* The State Department would receive a complete housecleaning – every standing Ambassador and State Department employee would be fired, stripped of security clearances (and ideally pensions) and prohibited from working in any government agency or for any company that contracts with the government.
* And finally, a team of Special Prosecutors would be appointed to determine cases where actual criminal prosecution is required.
But, hey, that’s if the GOP had a spine these days…
“WHAT… is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?”
“Is it an African swallow or a European swallow?”
eCurmudgeon, I’ve been thinking that Santrorum would be a fearsome SOS.
The howling of the press would make it all the sweeter.
“Where the fuck is Obama?”
Not bad. But can he say “I have altered the deal – pray I do not alter it further” with conviction?
Still believe it’s more important to root out the State Department down to the lowest file clerk first, though…
I feel so much better knowing that hatey hating christer with his third century religious convictions is in the custody L.A.P.D. I’ll sleep easier knowing that because we won’t be giving them any more pretexts for attacking us they won’t do it anymore.
Lie low so you don’t get hurt folks!
But can he say “I have altered the deal – pray I do not alter it further” with conviction?
Heh. You know he can. The muzzies will mess themselves.
Yesterday we lost an embassy to al-Qaeda. Yesterday 4 murdered Americans’ remains were repatriated. Yesterday the State Department declared it wasn’t talking about those murdered Americans any more. Last night the POTUS went to New York to chill with Beyonce and Jay-Z.
OT, but maybe not:
I was hitting my bindweed with RoundUp™ just now and saw a bit of movement.
A snake! A cute little bitty snake! Maybe 8 inches long, kinda like this one. Twelve years I’ve been here and this is the first snake I’ve seen in my yard.
Man, I love dem gize! More! More bitty snakeses!
Not bad. But can he say “I have altered the deal – pray I do not alter it further” with conviction?
Regis, the famed moustache, could do it.
Independently of its owner.
It is stunning wrongness like Sullivan’s — there for all to see, but ignored by all those who bought it back when he was peddling it, lest they themselves are forced to admit their own stunning wrongness — that is rewarded with high profile punditry gigs and book deals and lots and lots of links in and out, driving up traffic, driving up profile, and driving up influence.
Hence, we have Obama. And on the other side, Romney.
Steyn shine:
“Where the fuck is Obama?”
I’m torn between outrage that POTUS would be so cavalier and neglectful about his primary duties and relief that he’s not actually trying to do what he would do.
IOW, do you really want HIM on the job? Or his crew?
Any of them?
do you really want HIM on the job? Or his crew?
Any of them?
No. I want him to keep on partyin’ like a rock star so even the boneheaded among us finally get a frickin’ clue.
Sullivan makes his bread chewing his mustache at great length (or maybe someone else’s mustache but I digress). It’s all appearances.
It’s all the appearance of great and subtle nuance, issued in that I’m-so-fair-I’m-deep bipartisan style of his. And at length and with perfect journalistic pace.
It’s friendly, pretty bullshit, and it has just the — as he would put it — potential of a controversial point or barb in it to lend it that certain gravitas.
But mostly, if this sorry piece is any indication, it vends appearances and subjective opinion and that great soap opera of dramatic, even assessment that goes down so easy when you’ve limited your perspective and inputs by your partisanship.
For a guy who says Barry’s color shall defuse the world’s ills — and that the great Bill Clinton says is fit to transit the Bridge to Tomorrowland — it’s really hard to take that or any other of his fallacies seriously.
Sully today
Judas priest…
- OSU pulled out a win over a tough Cal team, and the lap-dog media continues to cover Obama’s useless ass and thumb its nose in the face of Anerica with a broadside of pure agitprop bullshit.
More Sully from recently
His emphasis.
This, people, is that vaunted nuance we’ve heard so much about.
Hahahaha.
…..so even the boneheaded among us finally get a frickin’ clue.
- They’re not showing any signs of “getting a frickin’ clue”. They’re panicked, and circling the wagons, and the entire Left cult is in full fleged excuse mode.
- You beowse through the comments to all the “get Romney” bullshit over at HuffPoop and 95% of them start with the word “Romney”.
- They know they’re totally fucked if they even try to talk about the truth of whats going on, so they can’t even try to do anything but attack.
They did, and transferred the Vanguardship to the CPUSA before 1989. We can’t use nukes to attack or SDI to defend against the now internal “Vanguard of the Proletariat.”
Stocks, meanwhile have doubled in value since Obama took office
- Someone should point out to him that since every other fawcet of the economy is in total drpression what he’s bragging about means the only people who are benefitting from Obama presidency is the 1%.
- You beowse through the comments to all the “get Romney” bullshit over at HuffPoop and 95% of them start with the word “Romney”.
And over here everything starts with Obama.
The problem with both candidates is their only selling point is they aren’t the other.
“Stocks, meanwhile have doubled in value since Obama took office”
GM Bond holders on the other hand…
Romney is never going to get a better chance to broadside the press as this. He either starts fighting back now or just bend over and grab them.
- Someone should point out to him that since
every other facet of the economy is in total depression what he’s bragging about means the only people who are benefiting from Obama presidency is the 1%the dollar is worth half what it was, stocks haven’t doubled at all.- I see what you’re saying Moe.
- I guess the Left has a perfect right to push-back and point out all the mistakes made by the Romney administration.
Strangely and unexpectedly absent from Sullivanmindthought.
I guess the Left has a perfect right to push-back and point out all the mistakes made by the Romney administration.
Not saying that, I am saying that Romney needs to get up on his hind legs and go after the media right now. Jugears is a puppet, times like these make that obvious. The press are helping pull the strings, also obvious, but who is going to shine a spotlight on these fucking cretins?
Romney is perfectly poised, they can’t ignore him and it will never be any easier to expose.
Instead he seems to have barked a couple times then ran back in his house like a good little boy.
- Yep, and if he waits much longer he’s going to lose, umless things go even further South, something like Israel acting, and thats being played by the WH also.
- The Bummblefuck politiburo thinks they can curry favor with the Mulims, and at the same time slow Israel down by distancing American support.
- As usual, the Left is wrong on both counts. The world doesn’t give a fuck about Kumbiyu politics outside the beltway and Harvard
How many more burning Embassies and dead Ambassadors need to be broadcast before it becomes clear that “Muslim Outreach” is a fool’s errand?
So has gas. How very progressive of Obama.
Strangely and unexpectedly absent from Sullivanmindthought.
Sullivan was told there would be no math.
Umm, Mark, they may wonder, but I’m pretty sure their elderly former KGB masters know the reason why they’re wondering that just now.
Why do you think Obama gets so butthurt that, other than Warren Buffett, they aren’t eager to do more for him (by, say, paying a fairer share) when he’s been so good to them? Ingrates.
Man, I love dem gize! More! More bitty snakeses!
Bayyybeee Snaa-aa-akes!
Bitty snakes can grow up to be bitey snakes.
No thanks.
Bitty snakes can grow up to be bitey snakes.
As long as it’s not a pit viper, it’s cute.
Constrictors only think they can bite you.
Snarky link to a photo of a constrictor that can draw blood with its bite in 3… 2…
I wonder if what you found was a type of rough-earth snake. I used to catch them often when I would mow the lawn at my house in San Antonio. They’re completely harmless.
Nope. More like the photo in my original snakepost, with markings and stuff. Kinda like this one.
I do not like the snakes.
We have water moccasins here (they like to chill under our dock), corn snakes, garter snakes and the occaisional copperhead. A few years ago, we had a great deal of rain and apparently it was a bumper breeding season for the snakes. They were everywhere. In the garden. Hanging onto the side of the house. In the trees. Hiding in the vegetable garden and the woodpiles. And of course, hanging around the boatdock.
Hubs was down checking the dock for damage and was moving some rocks that had washed up onto the rail system when a water moccasin reared up and looked him in the eye. Hubs jumped straight up and backward about six feet, then dashed into the house and retrieved a rifle. He camped out on the lakefront for an hour or so and finally, convinced that the snake had had his fun, came back up in the house.
Price is not value. Econ 101.
Inflation, caused by running printing presses overtime. The money is worth less per unit.
And Jug Ears has just violated his oath of office.
Surprised?
FACT: Water moccasins are WAY WAY bigger when they are chasing you than when they are sitting still and haven’t noticed you yet .
True words. How do they do that?
leigh, I’d recommend a shotgun instead of a rifle. Or a pistol loaded with snakeshot rounds.