Category Archives: Terrorism

To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi: That’s The Question

Democracy, Democrats, Government, libertarianism, Media, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Republicans, Terrorism, The State, War, Welfare

“To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi; That’s The Question,” and that’s the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

The gist of a cable received by the Office of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on August 16 this year, summarized an emergency meeting convened a day before at the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, Libya.

The post could not be defended in the case of a coordinated attack. Such an attack was in the air, as Benghazi was home to “approximately ten Islamist militias” raring to go. The compound was small and understaffed. It lacked “the manpower, security measures, and weapons capabilities” to repel an all-out assault.

The cable laid out before Mrs. Clinton’s Emergency Action Committee what Fox News’ Catherine Herridge described, on Oct. 31, as “specific warnings” and “detailed intelligence.”

Fox News has been covering the Benghazi story wall-to-wall; the other cable news stations not at all. However, one specific snippet buried in the telegram was too fraught for the folks at Fox to probe.

In “liberated” Libya, the American outpost was also up against limited “host nation support.”

This was a coordinated attack on a despised presence, timed for the 9/11 anniversary. Living under de facto American occupation had enraged the occupied. Anathema to “free” Americans, this generic creature had evinced similar rage when he lived under Genghis Bush, in Iraq.

At first, the eminence grise of American opinion makers—left and right, Republican and Democrat—got behind the central conceit floated by the Obama Administration. The Arab world had once again erupted because of those of us who dared to insult Mohammad, Jihad’s muse. As the other set of despots used to intimate during its tenure in D.C., the perennial Muslim rioter resented the freedoms of our pole dancers, potty-mouthed entertainers, and loud, loutish politicians.

From the stuff that makes us “free,” these proxies for American power always exclude the IRS (Internal Revenue Service), authorized to hound us till end of the world, the alphabet soup of regulation agencies that prosecutes and regiments our best and brightest to the gills, the War on Drugs that assumes dominion over the most precious piece of real estate we own—our bodies—a welfare state that has been likened “not [to] a principality, but [to] a vast empire bigger than the entire budgets of almost every other country in the world,” and a warfare complex that gobbles up so much wealth and so many men, ours and others around the world.

As soon as it was discovered that these things—the accoutrements of a “wonderfully” messy democracy—could not be blamed for the attack on the Benghazi Mission, most media fell silent. …

The complete column is“To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi; That’s The Question.” Read it on WND now.

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To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi; That’s The Question

Barack Obama, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Republicans, Terrorism, War

Benghazigate is a minor issue in the grand scheme of American politics. The Dems and Republicans are arguing not over principles but over procedural mishaps. In other words: What happened? How did it happen? Who covered it up? How do we go back to doing what we did before IT happened. (“IT” being the Sept. 11 attack on the American embassy that left Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead.)

Viewed through the two-party prism, America wants to know how it can get diplomatic immunity from the dangers of occupation and interventionism. That’s all.

Likewise, the megalomaniacal media is not for peace; it’s for Barack Obama. They’ve depicted this war president as your good kind of killer; a thoughtful, great leader who agonizes over his kill lists with excruciating care.

Tomorrow’s final presidential debate at Boca Raton, Fla., will revolve around foreign policy. Unless Mitt Romney flip-flops to articulate a patriotic, non-interventionist policy; one that is antithetical to BHO’s—he’ll be playing second fiddle to Obama, as far as the American people are concerned (mainstream media already hates him).

It’s inevitable.

The other, more realistic strategy that might see Mitt Romney tied for the trophy is to go for the president’s jugular on Benghazigate. This might work for him.

Diplomatic Immunity From The Dangers Of Occupation

Barack Obama, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Government, Individual Rights, Islam, Just War, Terrorism, War

Our government’s only legitimate function is to protect American lives, one by precious one. Yet under “W,” ordinary Americans were regularly beheaded in the theaters of war Genghis Bush launched. None of their representatives stateside bargained for their lives or staged showy Congressional hearings to probe their forsaken security.

“President Bush sat bone idle, never lifting a bloodstained finger to haggle for his countrymen.”

The helpless faces in televised pleas of Americans such as Private First Class Keith Maupin, Paul Johnson, Nick Berg, and American engineers Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong; the depraved indifference of my countrymen to their plight—these haunted me throughout 2003-2004, documented in columns such as “AFTER THEIR HEADS ROLL, AMERICA’S DEAD REMAIN FACELESS.”

Now, Republicans are attempting to saddle a war president by any other name—Barack Obama—with the blame for the “resurgence” of terrorism in America’s occupied territories, when the same anger was evinced by the occupied under Bush, and it will persist under future Republican leaders.

One voice of sanity on foreign policy is “departing Congressman” Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio. Kucinich, who will be sorely missed, made a cameo today during the “House Hearing on Attack on U.S. Consulate in Libya,” where he asked about al-Qaida’s presence in Libya. Lt. Col. Andrew Wood said: ‘Their presence grows everyday. They are certainly more established than we are.'”

More from Kucinich via Reason:

Departing Congressman Dennis Kucinich said at today’s hearing on security failures in Benghazi that rather than engaging in partisanship Congress ought to look at its role in failing to curb American interventionism as what led to the terrorist attack in Benghazi on 9/11, saying extremists exist and are more powerful in Libya because the U.S. “spurred a civil war” there, “absent constitutional authority, might I add.”
Kucinich blamed “decades of intervention” on the rise of extremists in the region and asked why no lessons from Iraq were drawn on Libya.
“Interventions do not make us safer,” Kucinich said, “they are themselves a threat to America,” before asking how much more Al-Qaeda there is in Libya now than before the U.S. intervention (the only answer he got was that they have a bigger presence in Libya than the U.S. does.” He also asked how many surface-to-air missiles were still missing since the U.S. intervention. Between 10 and 20,000, according to one of the witnesses.

Talking Turkey

Foreign Policy, Media, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Terrorism, The West

Ever wonder what’s up between Turkey and Syria? Mainstream media is unlikely to talk turkey about the developing conflict between the two countries on their shared border.

Robert Fisk of The Independent fills in the blanks:

…Bashar al-Assad is a despot, his regime is awful … BUT. When it comes to international law, to moral compromise, to sheer hypocrisy, the Western powers take the biscuit. La Clinton raves on about Syrian depravity when Syrian shells slaughter a Turkish woman and her four children – which they did – but gives succour to the gunmen who torture and kill and suicide-bomb the regime’s supporters inside Syria.
…And another story that isn’t being told. Syrian shells exploding in Turkey are largely landing in the province of Hatay (Akçakale is further east), but what is not being reported is that until 1939, Hatay was part of Syria – and that Syria still claims this coastal province as Syrian territory. The real story – since it involves Europe and Hitler – should be told. For hundreds of years, this territory was Syrian. Alexandretta (now Iskenderun) was the finest port in Syria. But as the power of Nazi Germany grew in the 1930s, the French, who then held the League of Nations mandate for Syria, decided to hand the whole place over to the Turks – in the hope that Turkey would join the Allied side against Hitler.
A fraudulent referendum was held and the mass of Arabs in the province – tens of thousands of them Alawites, who form the backbone of Assad’s regime today – fled south, along with an almost equal number of Armenians who had survived the 1915 Turkish genocide. Today, the children and grandchildren of those Armenians tacitly support the Assad regime.

MORE.