Category: Libya

When Lies Succeed

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Has America become indifferent to truth?

The events in Benghazi seem to fit the description of a general-interest non-partisan disaster for the Administration. But, for now at least, as galling as it is, it’s hard not to give the Obama Administration (and the other villain of the tale, Hillary Clinton) points for managing the public’s reaction to the (possibly preventable) murder of a United States ambassador and the flurry of lies that followed it.
Why does this work? Or, alternatively, does it work?
My concern here is that our side tends to look at something utterly indefensible like this — “controversializing” a genuine news story — and say, “This won’t work.” Or: “This shouldn’t work.” Or: “This wouldn’t work if we all kept Tweeting about it.” But for now, at least, it’s working. Why? . . .

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

 

Four U.S. Troops Released in Libya

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The post-“Arab Spring” anarchy continues:

Four American military personnel assigned to the United States Embassy in Tripoli, Libya, were detained Friday and then released after being held for hours by the country’s Interior Ministry, American officials said.
The four were believed to have been reviewing potential evacuation routes for diplomats when they were detained, according to the initial reports received by officials in Washington. . . .
After running into a problem at a checkpoint — many of which are run by local militias — they were detained and later moved to the Ministry of the Interior . . .
The buzzing sound of drones filled Tripoli’s sky for hours as rumors spread through the capital that four Americans were missing.

So, the U.S. helps Libyans overthrow their dictator, and now our troops are getting hassled by “local militias” at a checkpoint? This is a persistent problem in the Third World: A shortage of gratitude.

Kevin D. Williamson once described Bush’s War on Terror as an ill-conceived “program to make Anglo-Saxon republicans out of obscure desert savages.” Obama’s policy is no less ill-conceived.

 

The Old ‘Ongoing Investigation’ Trick Is Being Used to Hide Benghazi Truth

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The Lonely Conservative:

The cover up continues. The State Department and the DOJ are blocking Congress from having access to survivors of the Benghazi attack. They blame it on the ongoing investigation.

This is a very familiar method of truth-suppression in D.C.: “I can’t comment because of the ongoing investigation.” Understand that when the federal government is investigating the federal government, denying information to Congress is a de facto cover-up.

Meanwhile, Rowan Scarborough of The Washington Times reports:

Masked from public view, two of the U.S. military’s elite special operations commandos have been awarded medals for bravery for a mission that further undercuts the Obama administration’s original story about the Benghazi tragedy. . . .
[S]ources directly familiar with the attack tell The Washington Times that a unit of eight special operators — mostly Delta Force and Green Beret members — were in Tripoli the night of the attack, on a counterterrorism mission that involved capturing weapons and wanted terrorists from the streets and helping train Libyan forces.
When word of the Benghazi attack surfaced, two members of that military unit volunteered to be dispatched along with five private security contractors on a hastily arranged flight from Tripoli to rescue Americans in danger, the sources said, speaking only on the condition of anonymity because the special operations forces’ existence inside Libya was secret.
The two special operations forces arrived in time to engage in the final, ferocious firefight between the terrorists and Americans holed up in the CIA annex near the ill-fated diplomatic mission in Benghazi, the sources added.
The two special operators were awarded medals for valor for helping repel a complex attack that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stephens, another American diplomat and two former Navy SEALs, but spared many more potential casualties.

So here we have Green Berets getting medals for their bravery in a battle that the administration refuses to tell Congress anything about, because “ongoing investigation.” Next we’ll be told that Obama can’t say anything about Benghazi, because “national security.”

Remember the administration repeatedly claimed that Benghazi was a “spontaneous demonstration” inspired by a YouTube video.

They’re Democrats. Their first instinct is always to lie.

Now? “Phony scandal!” And whatever happened to Nakoula?

 

CBS: ‘Hey, Benghazi Is a Real Scandal’

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Here’s the headline at Legal Insurrection:

60 Minutes confirms Benghazi is a
real scandal, and you’ve been lied to

No surprise to anyone who has actually paid attention, of course, but the Obama administration and its media sycophants have spent months issuing excuses and manufacturing distractions — “Squirrel!” — in an effort to delay disclosure of the whole cover-up.

What has happened is essentially a repeat of what happened with the Lewinsky scandal: First, the flat-out lie, then months of carefully shifting the narrative so that when the truth becomes known, the political impact of the revelation is negligible, because people have relegated the incident to the category of Something That Already Happened. If the full truth had been known at the outset, the political result would have been different, but Democrats can survive scandals that would destroy any Republican in similar circumstances, simply because the mainstream media are sympathetic to Democrats and are therefore eager to assist them in perpetrating falsehood.

 


Did Terrorists Defeat Navy SEALs?

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That’s what an article in the Christian Science Monitor suggests:

A commando unit from the US Navy’s Seal Team Six launched an amphibious raid on a Somali town, but failed to confirm a capture or kill of their Al Shabab target, suspected to be linked to Nairobi’s Westgate mall terror attack.
The operation could have opposite its intended result of discouraging further attacks. Analysts warn that even earlier successful targeted strikes against Al Shabab, a Somalia-based Islamist militant group, failed to curb the group’s capacity to carry out international terror attacks, and that failed missions could in fact bolster its support and recruitment.

You can read the whole thing, but I’m not buying this argument. Unsuccessful operations are just part of the calculus of anti-terror strategy and, while commanders never plan for a mission to fail, no military force in history has ever been 100% successful. Even an unsuccessful mission can have strategic benefits, e.g.,  keeping the enemy off-balance, forcing them to take defensive measures for their own security.

If this failed Somalia raid should have the short-term result of aiding Al Shabab recruitment (which is merely possible, not certain), that just means more targets for our guys to kill. Go grab an AK-47, idiots, and see how that works out when we get the crosshairs on you.

Even while the SEALs were attacking in Somalia, meaning, in Tripoli “members of the elite U.S. Army Delta Force captured Abu Anas al Libi, an al Qaeda operative wanted for his role in the deadly 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.”

Delta Force? Best of the best. Fort Bragg, N.C.

Hooah.

 

 

Ace Keeps Killin’ It Every Day

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Honestly, every other blog is at risk of becoming redundant:

US Companies: You Must Pass Comprehensive
Immigration Reform So We Have the Workers to Fill
the Jobs Whose Former Holders We Laid Off

Once Ace does a headline like that, the story itself is almost an afterthought, and what more can I add, really? People are like, “Stacy, what’s up with the tangents, huh? I mean, WTF, Alex Pareene?”

Today is 9/11 and the first anniversary of the Benghazi attack, and I know I should be blogging about that stuff, but it’s demoralizing even to try, because Ace is always so much better at it:

If it’s true — as it certainly seems to be — that the US had a fairly important arms supply line running from Benghazi and Triopli to Syria (via Qatar, Jordan, and Turkey), it at least suggests the White House should have had more security in the area to protect its people.
The main thing I think this article advances is the Phony Scandal Cover-Up motive. That is, why are the media so determined to label Benghazi a “Phony Scandal”? Apart from their reflexive need to praise their Hero God, I mean.
I have long thought that, behind the scenes, the Administration was telling reporters, sotto voce, “Well, you know we had a major CIA operation going on in Benghazi. And those darned Partisan Republicans just want to expose it, Because They Hate America.”
And then reporters, feeling all Trusted and Respected by their Boyfriend, dutifully run out to say, “Phony Scandal!”

That is in reference to a John Sexton’s Breitbart.com article about the real reasons for all the hush-hush on Benghazi. This is, as I said last month, “The Big Benghazi Secret,” except it isn’t really secret. Plenty of reporters have had the basic story (or part of it) for months.

Anyway, I’m sorry if it seemed like I was ignoring the news, but sometimes the media bias — Our Patiently Brilliant President, isn’t he so special? — is such a Hoover Dam bulwark against truth that I don’t even feel like complaining about it anymore.

What difference, at this point, does it make?

Then I check in over at AOSHQ, and the dude is just killin’ it — knocking it out of the park like A-Rod in roid-rage mode — and I feel ashamed of myself for not at least trying to add something.

OK, so I tried. And now go read AOSHQ, because I do, every day.

 

Real Fall Guy for a ‘Phony Scandal’

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Charles C. Johnson of the Daily Caller has a nice story about Nakoula (a.k.a., “Sam Bacile”), the guy whose YouTube video provided the Obama administration’s alibi for the Benghazi terror attack.

We have only recently begun to learn more about the CIA’s Libyan gun-running operation that the administration was covering up, and we’ll learn more this fall when Congress returns and begins its next round of hearings on this shabby fraud that the Democrat-Media Complex foisted on the American people last fall.

Nakoula doesn’t seem a particularly heroic person, but the real villains in this story are the journalists who lacked the basic curiosity to ask, “What is the motive for this particular lie?” It was apparent within a few days of last September’s attack on the Benghazi consulate that the administration was just flat-out lying, and the natural question was why? But nowadays most “reporters” in D.C.  (e.g., Alec MacGillis) are just Democrat Party political hacks, and re-electing Obama was Priority One. You can’t possibly hate those people as much as they deserve to be hated.

The Big Benghazi Secret

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In May, we began to learn the truth about what the Benghazi cover-up was all about: The State Department had a secret program to provide weapons to the Libyan insurgents who overthrew Gaddhafi. Once the dictator was gone and it became apparent that some of the “insurgents” the U.S. had armed were, in fact, dangerous radicals with ties to al-Qaeda, there began an effort to disarm these groups.

It was these negotiations that brought U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens to the Benghazi consulate on Sept. 11, 2012, in what appears to have been a carefully planned trap by the radical groups the U.S. was trying to disarm. It seems quite likely that the ambassador and three other Americans were killed with U.S.-supplied weapons. The fact that Benghazi was crawling with CIA operatives is something the Obama administration doesn’t want to talk about, for reasons that should be obvious enough. Jonathan Tobin writes at Commentary:

If Benghazi is a “phony scandal,” Americans are entitled to ask why the government is behaving so suspiciously. . . .
At this point with so many unanswered questions about Benghazi, the administration should be facilitating the investigation of the attack rather than actually impeding it. We don’t know whether the code of omerta being imposed on CIA personnel is merely a function of bureaucratic inertia or a far more sinister attempt to prevent Congress and the public from finding out more about the failures of both the agency and the State Department. No one should make assumptions about wrongdoing, but given the unwillingness of the administration to apply its supposed belief in transparency to this question, it is, at the very least, reasonable to conclude that something is amiss here.

“Something amiss” is putting it rather mildly. It stinks to high heaven. The administration has been lying since Day One, and what they’re trying to do now is to run out the clock, to delay as long as possible — if they cannot entirely prevent — disclosure of the truth, so that they can then dismiss it as, “old news.” And this is really the scandalous part of it: What if the American people had known in fall 2012 what we know (or at least think we know) now?

The absurd claim that what happened in Benghazi was a “spontaneous” demonstration inspired by a YouTube video was a deliberate lie, part of a cover-up, the initial purpose of which was to deflect blame from the administration during the presidential election campaign. In truth, the Benghazi attack was a direct consequence of President Obama’s embrace of the “Arab Spring,” four Americans died as a result, and the administration is still trying to conceal the facts because Hillary Clinton was deeply implicated in this debacle.

John Hinderaker gives heed to rumors that weapons were being shipped from Libya to Syria. I’ve heard nothing about that, but I was impressed by Joe Curl’s reaction to the CNN item:

Here’s my thing: I don’t really have a problem with shadowy CIA operations. I understand considerations of foreign-policy realism and I know that sometimes it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. But when you screw up — and I’d say a dead U.S. ambassador counts as screwing up — you can’t stonewall and lie and claim it’s all a “phony scandal.” Not if you’re the president who promised America the “most transparent administration in history.”