Good Bye, Florida

Except to fans of the Philadelphia Eagles and the New York Giants  (video below)*, it's called "the fumble," when a ball dropped by a Cleveland running back cost the Browns the 1987-1988 AFC championship game against the Denver Broncos.  President Obama's handshake with Raul Castro Tuesday at the funeral for Nelson Mandela probably will not become known as "the handshake," but it won't be for any lack of effort by John McCain.  Talking Points Memo reports

It gives Raul some propaganda to continue to prop up his dictatorial, brutal regime, that's all," McCain said of the handshake between the two world leaders that took place at a memorial service for Nelson Mandela.

When asked if Obama should have extended his hand, McCain was quick to respond.

"Of course not," the senator said. "Why should you shake hands with somebody who's keeping Americans in prison? I mean, what's the point?"

Then, after a slight pause, McCain went there.

"Neville Chamberlain shook hands with Hitler," he added.

He should have taken a longer pause.  The point, as McCain should know, is that two men see each other at a funeral and they shake hands.   It happens every day, no doubt even in Arizona.

At least McCain never shook hands with a despot.  Oops:

Or at least Gaddafi didn't institute a regime of jailing individuals because of their political views.  Oops again:

Muammar Gaddafi kept his brutal regime in place for more than four decades by layering security agency on top of security agency to create a vast network for monitoring ordinary Libyans. No one could be sure that a chat on the phone or a conversation in a café wasn’t being overheard or recorded by regime informers. Citizens could be nabbed from their homes because of the slightest suspicion of anti-regime activity and disappear for years.

McCain obviously is concerned that President Obama may be on the verge of appeasing Castro. Fortunately, the Arizona senator always has stood steadfast against giving concessions to foreign dictators.  But during that visit (in which he was accompanied by Senators Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman) to Gaddafi in August of 2009, McCain assured Libya's National Security Adviser

that "the United States wanted to provide Libya with the equipment it needs for its security," the official notes of the meeting reveal. McCain called the U.S.-Libya military relationship "strong" and said any frustrations on the Libyan side should be weighed against the "officer training" Libyan military brass were receiving "at U.S. Command, Staff, and War colleges."

The morning after his handshake, he tweeted

McCain's remark Tuesday was yet another in the Repub practice of making inappropriate and inaccurate analogies to Munich.  The website of the United Kingdom's National Archives reminds us

The Treaty of Versailles, made in 1919 at the end of the First World War, was intended to make a lasting peace. Many people felt that the Treaty had caused terrible resentment in Germany on which Hitler had been able to play in order to achieve power. The government believed that Hitler and Germany had genuine grievances, but that if these could be met ('appeased') Hitler would be satisfied and become less demanding.

Hitler was open about his refusal to accept many of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Soon after he became Chancellor of Germany in 1933 he began to re-arm the country, breaking the restrictions placed on the German armed forces. In 1936, he sent German troops into the Rhineland and in March 1938 he joined Germany and Austria. Czechoslovakia was the logical next step for his aggression and German Nazis in the Sudetenland were told to stir up the trouble that led to the crisis examined here. Edvard Benes, the leader of Czechoslovakia, was concerned that if Germany was given the Sudetenland, most of the Czech defences (sic) would be handed over to the Germans and they would be left defenceless (sic).

Chamberlain's flight to Berchtesgaden was followed by another to Godesberg a week later and then another to Munich on 29 September. At Munich, Chamberlain got an international agreement that Hitler should have the Sudetenland in exchange for Germany making no further demands for land in Europe. Chamberlain said it was 'Peace in our time'. Hitler said he had 'No more territorial demands to make in Europe.' On 1 October German troops occupied the Sudetenland: Hitler had got what he wanted without firing a shot.

The Sudetenland once had been a part of Germany and while a part of Czechoslovakia remained (obviously) adjacent to Germany- or, as the Nazis (and Germans beforehand) put it, the "Homeland."  Alaska was once part of Russia but is thousands of miles from Raul Castro's Cuba.  Florida, however, is only 90 miles from Cuba- which, if Senator McCain is prescient, means that American travelers to Disney World may soon find themselves subjects of Havana.   Bone up on that Spanish, folks.














*Fullback Larry Csonka is in the Hall of Fame and was a superstar on the last unbeaten NFL team (Miami Dolphins, 1972 ).  So Bob Gibson and Joe Pisarcik take the blame.


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Susan? Susan Who?

In a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Thursday, Hillary Clinton demonstrated that her sharp political instincts were not dulled by trips to Laos, Mongolia, France, Afghanistan, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Egypt, Israel, and Burma... and at least 101 other countries.  Her exchange with Senator Ron Johnson (transcript below) produced some dramatic video:


JOHNSON: Madame Secretary, do you disagree with me that a simple phone call to those phone call to those evacuees to determine what happened wouldn't have ascertained immediately that there was no protest? I mean that was a piece of information that could have been easily, easily obtained.

CLINTON: Well, Senator -

JOHNSON: Within hours if not days.

CLINTON: Senator, I - when you're in these positions, the last thing you want to do is interfere with any other process going on.

(CROSSTALK)

JOHNSON: I realize that's a good excuse. CLINTON: Number two, well, no it's the fact. Number two, I would recommend highly you read both what the ARB said about and the classified ARB, because even today there are questions being raised.

Now, we have no doubt they were terrorists, they were militants, they attacked us, they killed our people, but what was going on and why they were doing what they were doing is still - 

JOHNSON: No, no. Again. We were misled that there were supposedly protests and then something spread out of that - an assault sprang out of that. And that was easily ascertained that that was not the fact - 

(CROSSTALK)

JOHNSON: And the American people could have known that within days and they didn't know that.

CLINTON: With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest? Or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they would go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator. Now, honestly I will do my best to answer your questions about this, but the-the fact is that people were trying in real time to get to the best information. The I.C. has a process, I understand, going with the other committees to explain how these talking points came out.

But, you know to be clear, it is from my perspective, less important today looking backwards as to why these militants decided they did it, than to find them and bring them to justice, and then maybe we'll figure out what was going on in the meantime.

The Wisconsin Republican then concluded with "OK, thank you, Madame Secretary," spurring Steven Colbert to remark "'Thank you, Madame Secretary?' 'Thank you, Madame Secretary?' She just spanked you, Ron! I don't understand! Unless 'Thank you, Madame Secretary' was your safe word" (when Clinton) "slapped these guys around and walked out of there with their nuts in her attache case."

Yes, Mrs. Clinton, as it could be described less colorfully, took those guys, ate them up and spit them out by admonishing them (roughly speaking) "What's the point? What's done is done.  Let's move forward."   Along the way, however, the outgoing Secretary of State might have answered the question from Senator Johnson.

It's not as if it was a difficult question. Johnson had charged "We were misled that there were supposedly protests and then something spread out of that- an assault sprang out of that. And that was easily ascertained that that was not the fact."

But in fact there were "protests"  The New York Times reported on September 12 that the attack on the consulate in Libya "followed by just a few hours the storming of the compound surrounding the United States Embassy in Cairo by an unarmed mob protesting the same video. On Wednesday, new crowds of protesters gathered outside the United States Embassies in Tunis and Cairo."

It initially appeared that the assault perhaps "sprang out of that."  The Times observed
It is unclear if television images of Islamist protesters may have inspired the attack in Benghazi, which had been a hotbed of opposition to Colonel Qaddafi and remains unruly since the Libyan uprising resulted in his death. But Tuesday night, a group of armed assailants mixed with unarmed demonstrators gathered at the small compound that housed a temporary American diplomatic mission there.


The following Sunday, UN Ambassador Susan Rice was sent out to do the rounds, appearing on This Week, Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday, Meet the Press, and State of the Union. Most famously, she explained on the NBC show

Well, let us– let me tell you the– the best information we have at present.  First of all, there’s an FBI investigation which is ongoing.  And we look to that investigation to give us the definitive word as to what transpired.  But putting together the best information that we have available to us today our current assessment is that what happened in Benghazi was in fact initially a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired hours before in Cairo, almost a copycat of– of the demonstrations against our facility in Cairo, which were prompted, of course, by the video.  What we think then transpired in Benghazi is that opportunistic extremist elements came to the consulate as this was unfolding.  They came with heavy weapons which unfortunately are readily available in post revolutionary Libya.  And it escalated into a much more violent episode.  Obviously, that’s– that’s our best judgment now. We’ll await the results of the investigation.  And the president has been very clear–we’ll work with the Libyan authorities to bring those responsible to justice.

Bob Somerby points out

Rice issued a double caveat. She said they didn’t have information at present which led them to conclude that there had been premeditation. 

Note to the slow: This doesn't mean that Rice rejected the idea that there was premeditation or planning. And the specific question to which she responded involved the possibility that the attack had been planned “several months ago.” 

It was in that context that Rice made her provisional statement about premeditation. To this day, is there any evidence of prior planning extending back several months? We don’t know the answer to that.

But we do know, as Somerby suggests, that Rice did not exclude the possibility of premeditation, nor the possibility of involvement by terrorists.  We know, too, that the text of the C.I.A. talking points, which determined Rice's response on the five Sunday talkies, read

The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi and subsequently its annex. There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.

This assessment may change as additional information is collected and analyzed and as currently available information continues to be evaluated.

The investigation is ongoing, and the U.S. government is working with Libyan authorities to bring to justice those responsible for the deaths of U.S. citizens.

Hillary Clinton knows that, also, and could have played it any of four ways.  She might have defended Ambassador Rice by noting that the intelligence community had supplied her with information later revealed to be misleading.  Or she might have defended Rice by noting that the Ambassador never said terrorists weren't involved and had cautioned that intelligence was preliminary. Or she might have argued that Rice had in fingered "opportunistic extremist elements" who "came with heavy weapons."   Fourth option:  avoid defending U.S. Ambassador Rice in any way and instead summon righteous indignation.   Responding "Was it because of a protest? Or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they would go kill some Americans? " implies that the pivotal response- which Rice delivered that Sunday- really wasn't important.  But it was a darned good performance.

As of this writing, Mrs. Clinton is due to continue her exploration of a possible race for President in 2016 by appearing in a few minutes on CBS' 60 Minutes with President Barack Obama.  Perhaps Obama will extend the same courtesy to his Vice-President, who more than once has pulled his fat out of the fire in negotiations with Congress. Or perhaps not.



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Off The Mark



Senator John McCain has vowed to try to block any nomination of Susan Rice to head the Department of State.   On November 14, South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham, as with McCain a member of the Armed Services Committee, argued “I think she was a political choice, telling a political narrative, and either she didn’t know the truth about Benghazi—so she shouldn’t have been on T.V.—or she was spinning it.” Graham said. He said he wouldn’t “promote” anybody involved in the “Benghazi debacle.”   Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina initiated a letter dated November 19, addressed to President Obama and signed by 97 Repub members of the U.S. House of Representatives, in which critics of the Administration have claimed "Ambassador Rice is widely having viewed as having either willfully or incompetently as having misled the American people in the Benghazi matter."

The third ranking House Democrat, Jim Clyburn of South Carolina (South Carolina again?), is not amused.  On November 20,  appearing on CNN's Turning Point, he maintained

You know, these are code words.   We heard them during the campaign. During this recent campaign, we heard Senator Sununu calling our president lazy, incompetent—these kinds of terms that those of us, especially those of us who were grown and raised in the South, we would hear these little words and phrases all of our lives, and we’d get insulted by them.

Following Obama's debate performance in Denver, when the President was widely viewed as detached, Romney surrogate Sununu charged "What people saw last night, I think, was a president that revealed his incompetence, how lazy and detached he is, and how he has absolutely no idea how serious the economic problems of the country are, and how he has failed to even begin to address them."

There is little reason to accuse President Obama of being "lazy," other than that it reinforces a traditional stereotype of whites toward blacks.   "Detached," however:  not so much.   When Caucasians get together in a locker room lacking ethnic diversity, "detached" is not the characterization that frequently springs to many minds, or lips, to refer to blacks.

Republicans really ought (which means they won't), however, to knock off using variants of the term "incompetent."     When their nemesis is unskilled, unqualified, or inefficient (rough synonyms for "incompetent"), they ought to say so, rather than resorting to the vague, imprecise charge of lacking competence.

This is one of the problems with the G.O.P. charge against Ambassador Rice and, less significantly, Clyburn's criticism.   Clyburn uses a scattershot approach, accusing Rice's critics- McCain, Graham, the U.S. Representatives, maybe even your next-door neighbor - of racial prejudice by using code words.  But accusing black people of lacking trustworthiness or competence is qualitatively different than accusing them of laziness, which someone chronologically challenged as is Clyburn would recognize.    

The GOP, though, is guilty of two sins. The following is the relevant portion of the interview with Bob Schieffer in which Susan Rice offended so many Republicans:

RICE (9/16/12): Well, Bob, let me tell you what we understand to be the assessment at present. First of all, very importantly, as you discussed with the president, there is an investigation that the United States government will launch, led by the FBI that has begun.

[...]

So we’ll want to see the results of that investigation to draw any definitive conclusions. But based on the best information we have to date, what our assessment is as of the present is in fact what— It began spontaneously in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo, where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy sparked by this hateful video.

But soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that effort with heavy weapons of the sort that are, unfortunately, readily now available in Libya post- revolution. And that it spun from there into something much, much more violent.

[...]

SCHIEFFER: Do you agree or disagree with him that al Qaeda had some part in this?

RICE: Well, we’ll have to find out that out. I mean, I think it’s clear that there were extremist elements that joined in and escalated the violence. Whether they were al Qaeda affiliates, whether they were Libyan-based extremists or al Qaeda itself, I think is one of the things we’ll have to determine.

As Bob Somerby (from whom the transcript above is taken) has noted (emphasis his)

Quite plainly, she didn’t say the deadly attack “was not a terrorist attack.” In response to Schieffer's question, she explicitly said that it might have been the work of “al Qaeda itself!” 

She didn’t say the deadly attack was the result of spontaneous demonstrations in Egypt (although it may have been, in some sense). She said the evening’s events began as a reaction to Cairo, after which the extremist elements joined in with their heavy weapons. On two other programs, she said they "hijacked" ongoing events.

The Republican critics (with, perhaps, a couple of exceptions), then, are wrong.   But they are worse than wrong.  They are cowardly in their criticism.

Certainly, John McCain, especially, is not a coward as an individual, possessing a superlative war record.  But some of these fellows are knowingly targeting the wrong individual.  

They should not be assailing President Obama, either, despite the latter's testerone-infused, alpha male challenge to Rice's critics:   “If Senator McCain and Senator Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me. And I’m happy to have that discussion with them... But when they go after the U.N. ambassador apparently because they think she's an easy target, then they've got a problem with me."

That was good politics, good theater, and good chivalry- but, unfortunately, beside the point.  Obama, though, did note Rice "had nothing to do with Benghazi and was simply doing a presentation based on information she had received."   CBS News 

has learned that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) cut specific references to "al Qaeda" and "terrorism" from the unclassified talking points given to Ambassador Susan Rice on the Benghazi consulate attack - with the agreement of the CIA and FBI. The White House or State Department did not make those changes...

An intelligence source says the talking points were passed from the CIA to the DNI, where the substantive edits were made, and then to FBI, which made more edits as part of "standard procedure."

The head of the DNI is James Clapper, an Obama appointee. He ultimately did review the points, before they were given to Ambassador Rice and members of the House intelligence committee on Sept. 14. They were compiled the day before.

Brennan says her source wouldn't confirm who in the agency suggested the final edits which were signed off on by all intelligence agencies.

CBS learned the details only this week.  But members of Congress, Republicans included, have known for some time that Rice's remarks were "talking points," meant to convey to the public only that information which the intelligence community, given the needs of national security, wanted released.

One unnamed official explained "Because of the various elements involved in the attack, the term extremist was meant to capture the range of participants."   But much of the criticism is misguided not only in content.   Susan Rice has been attacked not because she is black or a woman, but because she is part of the Democratic administration.  And most of all, she has been attacked because she is not part of the intelligence community which, it would appear, is immune from all criticism, as well as oversight.

*******************************************************************************



Wishing you a happy Thanksgiving in an off-beat manner:

"As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."









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And Now A Rice Has To Pay The Price?



They seem deadly earnest- but could John McCain and Lindsey Graham really be serious?   Or is this just some kind of joke?

On CBS' This Morning on Wednesday, the Arizona senator asserted "the American people deserve the truth" because the "consulate in Benghazi was turned into a death house and somebody has to be held responsible."   He pledged to block any nomination of U.N. ambassador Susan Rice to head the Department of State, accusing her of "not being very bright, because it was obvious that this was not a 'flash mob' and there was additional information by the time she went on every news show...in America."

Graham also addressed yesterday Rice's possible appointment, maintaining during a press conference

Somebody has got to start paying a price around this place.   I don't think she deserves to be promoted. There are a lot of qualified people in this country the president could pick, but I am dead-set on making sure we don't promote anybody that was an essential player in the Benghazi debacle.

Acceptance of blame.   Responsibility. Accountability.  Thank goodness some people are looking out for these virtues.

The pair, joined to the hip in foreign policy, are new to the game.    When in 2005 President Bush nominated National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to be Secretary of State, McCain charged

Also, I thought that some of the remarks — and I’m not going to mention my colleagues’ names — some of the remarks aimed at her during the hearings challenged her integrity. We can disagree on policy and we disagree on a lot of things, but I think it is very clear that Condoleezza Rice is a person of integrity. And yes, I see this, some lingering bitterness over a very tough campaign. I hope it dissipates soon.

When Minnesota Senator Mark Dayton identified Ms. Rice as a "liar," Graham responded "Yes, that's even more unfair. Because it was all in terms of weapons of mass destruction and misleading us about the war and what was in Iraq. Well, every intelligence agency in the world was misled. And to connect those two to say that she's a liar is very unfair, over the line."

Oh, how easily they forget- or at least pretend to.      In his State of the Union address in January, 2003, President Bush- as part of the ongoing effort to gin up support for the attack on Iraq- infamously claimed "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."   With the White House likely aware that the British intelligence was inaccurate, Bush's remark was probably a lie. Moreover  

Then-Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet said on July 11, "These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the President .This was a mistake." On July 22, Deputy National Security Advisor Steven Hadley said that he deleted a reference to Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium in Africa from President Bush's October 7, 2002 Cincinnati speech based on a telephone call from DCI Tenet and two CIA memos sent to himself-one of which was also sent to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Hadley said that this second memo detailed some weakness in the evidence, the fact that the effort was not particularly significant to Iraq's nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already had a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory. The memorandum also stated that the CIA had been telling Congress that the Africa story was one of two issues where we differed with the British intelligence . . . based on what we now know, we had opportunities here to avoid this problem. We didn't take them . . . having been taken out of Cincinnati, it should have been taken out of the State of the Union.

(Sarcasm Alert) Ever forthright, Rice in April of 2007 "rejected, on grounds of executive privilege, a House subpoena regarding the prewar claim that Iraq sought yellowcake uranium from Niger."

In her post-conservative but pre-Huffington Post Days, Arianna Huffington noted on Salon

Condoleezza Rice has been the worst offender. Now that we know that Tenet personally warned Rice’s deputy, Steve Hadley, not to use the yellowcake claim back in October, and the role NSC staffers played in manipulating the State of the Union, Rice’s widely publicized claim that at the time of the State of the Union, “maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery” has been revealed for what it is: A bald-face lie.

And even now as the truth comes flooding out, Rice continues to play fast and loose with the facts — and stand by her man. “The statement that he made,” she said on Sunday, speaking of the president, “was indeed accurate. The British government did say that.”

Condoleezza was a liar and terrible foreign policy official in the Bush administration.  Susan Rice, fortunately, has a long way to go before living down to the record of the other Rice.




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Roots Of Benghazi Political Strategy



On September 11 (timeline, from The New York Times, here), preceding the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya that left four Americans dead, the Embassy in Egypt issued the following statement:

The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.

That night (the following morning, in the Middle East) GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney

I'm outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It's disgraceful that the Obama administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.

This statement was released 14 minutes after Politico reported it had been told by an Administration official "The statement by Embassy Cairo was not cleared by Washington and does not reflect the views of the United States government."    Politico noted also the statement (issued two minutes before the Politico article) from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton concluding "There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind."

At the time, however, few if any noted that Romney's hyper-partisan, opportunistic, and irresponsible remark represented a critical tactic in his political strategy.   In the second presidential debate, Romney was slapped down by Candy Crowley and Obama for his Libyan myth making and at the third debate took a pass on the issue.   But now, longtime Democratic strategist Mark Shrum has noted that Romney previously

had pursued the exploitative path he had foreseen in a little-noted part of the notorious “47 percent tape.” After referring to Jimmy Carter’s failed hostage-rescue mission, in which eight U.S. service members died, he told the assembled plutocrats: “If something of that nature occurs, I will work to find a way to take advantage of the opportunity.” I suspect his last round of debate prep included the warning that the president could clock him with that quote if he renewed his push on the Libyan issue, which had stunningly embarrassed him a week before when moderator Candy Crowley had told him he was wrong—that the day afterward, Obama had called the killing of the American ambassador a “terrorist act.”

At the time pursuing the Repub presidential nomination, Mitt Romney assured the assembled millionaires at the famous Palm Beach fundraiser

And yet, in that election, in the Jimmy Carter election, the fact that we have hostages in Iran, I mean, that was all we talked about. And we had the two helicopters crash in the desert, I mean that's—that was—that was the focus, and so him solving that made all the difference in the world. I'm afraid today if you said, "We got Iran to agree to stand down a nuclear weapon," they'd go hold on. It's really a, but…by the way, if something of that nature presents itself, I will work to find a way to take advantage of the opportunity.

There is nothing like a tragedy- ideally, a terrorist attack- to fuel Republican campaigns.  It worked in 2004 for George W. Bush and Romney figured it would work for him in 2012.    In this case, it bought the GOP nominee a lot of grief- but it did draw greater attention to a terrible incident which could be exploited by a candidate who really, truly wants voters to believe that President Obama is endangering the security of the United States.   And it further raises the question of why Barack Obama has gone nearly mum on a tape which fully, and uniquely, reveals the nature of his opponent.



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An Open And Shut Case To An Open And Shut Mind



In his 2010 book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, Mitt Romney accused President Obama of continually apologizing for the nation.  Now shamelessly exploiting the recent attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Romney on September 11 told reporters "I think it's a terrible course for America to stand in apology for our values, that instead when our grounds are being attacked and being breached, that the first response of the United States must be outrage at the breach of the sovereignty of our nation.  An apology for America's values is never the right course." At the second presidential debate, the Repub candidate claimed "the president's policies throughout the Middle East began with an apology tour and pursue a strategy of leading from behind, and this strategy is unraveling before our very eyes."

Romney's claim at Hofstra that "it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror," as well as the "apology tour" he imagines, have been thoroughly debunked, the latter even by Politifact.   His contention, however, that "the administration indicated this was a reaction to a video and was a spontaneous reaction," is not completely ludicrous, given that there were conflicting statements from administration officials in the weeks following the attack.

But the charges that all the violence there was assiduously planned, and that the Administration therefore did not with one voice immediately and consistently label it as nothing more than a terrorist plot for nefarious political purposes, are way over the top.      David D. Kirkpatrick of The New York Times reports

To Libyans who witnessed the assault and know the attackers, there is little doubt what occurred: a well-known group of local Islamist militants struck the United States Mission without any warning or protest, and they did it in retaliation for the video. That is what the fighters said at the time, speaking emotionally of their anger at the video without mentioning Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or the terrorist strikes of 11 years earlier. And it is an explanation that tracks with their history as members of a local militant group determined to protect Libya from Western influence.

“It was the Ansar al-Shariah people,” said Mohamed Bishari, 20, a neighbor of the compound who watched the assault and described the brigade he saw leading the attack. “There was no protest or anything of that sort.”

To the simplistic Republican mind (but I repeat myself), angry Muslims were involved, and any suggestion of spontaneity is tantamount to apologizing for America.   But the Muslim world- especially- Islamists but including the 'Arab street'- have complaints (legitimate or otherwise) against the U.S.A., including the Iraq War, U.S. support for Israel, and the Administration's extensive use of drone attacks, causes Mitt Romney is hardly critical of.

Arguably, the attack was of a terrorist nature but precipitated by the video; unarguably, intelligence was imperfect. Initial intelligence reports suggested the likelihood that the militants had reacted to the distasteful and offensive anti-Muslim video.  But counter-terrorism veteran extraordinaire Richard Clarke cautions

I dealt with scores of incidents and military operations over 30 years in the Pentagon, State Department and White House. I never saw a case where there was initial and accurate clarity about what happened.

In the case of TWA 800, the FBI thought for months that it had been shot down by a missile, only to learn much later that it was a maintenance problem that caused the fuel tank to explode. When the destroyer Cole was attacked in Yemen, it took the CIA director weeks to decide that the attackers were from Al Qaeda . The Iranian hand in the attack on the U.S. Air Force barracks at Khobar, Saudi Arabia, did not emerge for months.

News media and members of Congress may want instant answers when something explodes, when Americans die, but national security professionals know that “first reports are always wrong.” That is why, when pressed by reporters to say what had happened, UN Ambassador Susan Rice qualified her response by saying that the investigation was ongoing. She then said what the intelligence community had reported to her at that time.

The Washington Post's David Ignatius writes

“Talking points” prepared by the CIA on Sept. 15, the same day that Rice taped three television appearances, support her description of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate as a reaction to Arab anger about an anti-Muslim video prepared in the United States. According to the CIA account, “The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate and subsequently its annex. There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.”

It would never occur to Mitt Romney, who blasts the Administration for not definitively and consistently laying the blame entirely on "terrorism," to question the nation's primary agency responsible for gathering intelligence, upon which the Administration relied.   Its head, tellingly, is David Petraeus, and one never is to question the sainted General.

The Times' Kirkpatrick concludes

United States intelligence officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, have said they intercepted boastful phone calls after the fact from attackers at the mission to individuals affiliated with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. But they have also said that so far they had found no evidence of planning or instigation by the group. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, described the participation of individuals “linked to groups affiliated with or sympathetic with Al Qaeda” — acknowledging, at best, a tenuous or indirect link.

“It is a promiscuous use of ‘Al Qaeda,’ ” Michael Hanna, a researcher at the Century Foundation, said of those charging that Al Qaeda was behind this attack. “It can mean anything or nothing at all.”

The Cold War, with the United States on one side and the Soviet Union, is over, a situation little understood by Mitt Romney, who maintains that Russia and not terrorism, Iran, or nuclear proliferation is the greatest threat to world peace.    Contemporary world affairs is complicated and confusing to a lot of us, but we don't have the temerity to present ourselves as fit to be leader of the Free World.





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Starving The (Security) Beast

In a memorandum (text, here) yesterday, staff to the minority on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee wrote Democratic members "The fast pace and lack of clarity surrounding the attacks leads some to wonder if Republican Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa and his majority are prioritizing election-year gains over uncovering the truth behind the violence in Libya."

Do you really have to wonder?    The House committee chaired by Representative Issa (R-Ca) today began its hearings into the recent attack on the American consulate which left Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans dead.   Issa has promised an investigation conducted on a "bipartisan basis" but

The Chairman and his staff failed to consult with Democratic Members prior to issuing public letters with unverified allegations, concealed witnesses and refused to make one hearing witness available to Democratic staff, withheld documents obtained by the Committee during the investigation, and effectively excluded Democratic Committee Members from joining a poorly planned congressional delegation to Libya.

The staff to the Democrats on the Committee explained that funding for security had been cut by the GOP-controlled House, with a portion of the reduction restored by the Democratic Senate.   As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote yesterday

For fiscal 2013, the GOP-controlled House proposed spending $1.934 billion for the State Department’s Worldwide Security Protection program — well below the $2.15 billion requested by the Obama administration. House Republicans cut the administration’s request for embassy security funding by $128 million in fiscal 2011 and $331 million in fiscal 2012. (Negotiations with the Democrat-controlled Senate restored about $88 million of the administration’s request.) Last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that Republicans’ proposed cuts to her department would be “detrimental to America’s national security” — a charge Republicans rejected.

Ryan, Issa and other House Republicans voted for an amendment in 2009 to cut $1.2 billion from State operations, including funds for 300 more diplomatic security positions. Under Ryan’s budget, non-defense discretionary spending, which includes State Department funding, would be slashed nearly 20 percent in 2014, which would translate to more than $400 million in additional cuts to embassy security.

Even now, Republicans are loathe to admit they made a mistake in exposing American diplomatic personnel to a terrorist attack.  Asked by CNN's Soledad O'Brien whether it (is) true that you voted to cut the funding for embassy security," Utah's Jason Chaffetz responded

Absolutely.  Look we have to make priorities and choices in this country.   We have... 15,000 contractors in Iraq.  We have more than 6,000 contractors, a private army there, for President Obama, in Baghdad.  And we're talking about can we get two dozen or so people into Libya to help protect our forces.  When you're in tough economic times, you have to make difficult choices.  You have to prioritize things.

That's quite a sacrifice for Republicans- supporting private contractors in a combat zone to supplement a war begun and waged by a Republican President.   They're doing it "for President Obama" as something of a favor to him.

But provide security for living human beings- worse yet, public employees?  That, we cannot have.

The FBI or Issa's witch hunt committee may uncover serious malfeasance on the part of State Department employees on some level.  Meanwhile, the GOP gets its wish, a government which failed to prevent a tragedy and thereby opened the public sector to criticism, which Republicans will gleefully exploit to cut essential government spending further.



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And Now, Libya


In an interview on ABC's This Week With George Stephanopoulos shortly before assuming the Presidency, Barack Obama asserted "a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” signaling the policy of giving a pass to the abuses of the Bush Administration. Asked to comment, former Bush White House lawyer Bradford A. Berenson remarked "the last thing a new administration wants to do is spend its time and energy rehashing the perceived sins of the old one."

Senator Barack Obama had said of whistleblowers, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out, "Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled." Asked in a December, 2007 interview with the Boston Globe about Iran, presidential candidate Obama stated "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation....”

Reporting in The New Yorker last month about the prosecution for violation of the (1917) Espionage Act of Thomas Drake, a former senior executive at the National Security Agency (the government’s electronic-espionage service), Jane Mayer wrote

When President Barack Obama took office, in 2009, he championed the cause of government transparency, and spoke admiringly of whistle-blowers, whom he described as “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government.” But the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. Including the Drake case, it has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks—more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined. The Drake case is one of two that Obama’s Justice Department has carried over from the Bush years.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, a conservative political scientist at the Hudson Institute, who, in his book “Necessary Secrets” (2010), argues for more stringent protection of classified information, says, “Ironically, Obama has presided over the most draconian crackdown on leaks in our history—even more so than Nixon.”

Later in her article, and more broadly, she added

Jack Balkin, a liberal law professor at Yale, agrees that the increase in leak prosecutions is part of a larger transformation. "We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national-surveillance state," he says. In his view, zealous leak prosecutions are consonant with other political shifts since 9/11: the emergence of a vast new security bureaucracy, in which at least two and a half million people hold confidential, secret, or top-secret clearances; huge expenditures on electronic monitoring, along with a reinterpretation of the law in order to sanction it; and corporate partnerships with the government that have transformed the counter-terrorism industry into a powerful lobbying force. Obama, Balkin says, has "systematically adopted policies consistent with the second term of the Bush Administration."

Remaining consistent with adopting policies of the prior presidency, Barack Obama appears to have reversed himself on the Executive's war-making authority. The War Powers Resolution mandates "Whenever United States Armed Forces are introduced into hostilities," the President submit a report to Congress, after which "the President shall terminate any use of United States Armed Forces" unless Congress has declared war or specifically authorized such military action.

But not this President. According to the New York Times' Charlie Savage

President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.

Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.

But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team — including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh — who argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.” Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.

Presidents have the legal authority to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice, but it is extraordinarily rare for that to happen. Under normal circumstances, the office’s interpretation of the law is legally binding on the executive branch. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Balkin explains that President Obama's decision borrows from that of his immediate predecessor

who sought legal justification for his decision to engage in waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques," which constituted torture. Bush wanted above all to be able to deny that he was violating the anti-torture statute and other laws and treaties. So he found a small group of lawyers in the OLC, headed by John Yoo, and asked for their opinions. This short-circuited the usual process through which the OLC collected views from various agencies and then used them to develop legal opinions for the executive branch. That is, Bush (assisted by his Vice-President, Dick Cheney) arranged matters so that decisions about waterboarding and enhanced interrogation techniques would be in the hands of lawyers he knew would tell him yes; the normal process of collating opinions was short-circuited and other lawyers were effectively frozen out.

Obama's practice is different, but it has disturbing similarities. Normally, Obama would have asked the OLC for its opinion, and as noted above, the OLC would have polled legal expertise in various agencies, consulted its precedents, had long discussions, and then come up with a scholarly opinion that is normally binding on the executive branch. Instead, Obama routed around the OLC, asking for opinions from various lawyers, including the White House Counsel and the Attorney-Advisor for the State Department. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that from the outset Obama was prospecting for opinions that would tell him that his actions were legal, and once he found them, he felt comfortable in rejecting the opinion of the OLC.

Obama's strategy, like Bush's, also short circuits the normal process of seeking opinions from the OLC; it simply does so in a different way.

Clearly, Bradford Berenson was right- President Obama does not want to "rehash" old "perceived sin," as long as it took place under the eye of the prior President. (John Edwards should be so lucky.) Imagine how much easier it would be for a prosecutor or District Attorney not to have to "rehash perceived sins," such as embezzlement or armed robbery, which had taken place a few years earlier.

But Berenson was wrong when he suggested that Obama would let bygones be bygones because "the president himself doesn’t seem to share that bloodlust" of the silly left demanding accountability. It appears, instead, that President Obama declined to challenge the sins of the past because it would have been uncomfortable to be investigating that behavior at the same time he engaged in the same tactics.

Civil libertarian and war critic Glenn Greenwald notes "it should also go without saying that a belief in the morality of this war is not an excuse for waging it illegally." The Administration's contempt for Congress and the law is unrelated to the wisdom (or lack thereof) of conducting what are, to anyone with an I.Q. reaching into the double digits, "hostilities."

Demonstrating skill as both a legislator and comedian, Al Franken stated-or quipped- of the President's rationale, "you know, whatever it is, I don't agree with it." The President can relax, however. He may have, as Greenwald observed in January, invoked due-process-free assassination hit lists of American citizens, sweeping executive power and secrecy theories used to justify it, the multi-tiered, "state-always-wins" justice system for detainees, a vastly more aggressive war on whistleblowers and press freedoms, and new presidential immunity doctrines. But he has not tweeted a body part, committed adultery with his campaign's videographer, or lied to a grand jury about sex. The important things.

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A Thought about Steve King (R.- Iowa)

It's hard to resist commenting on the remarks made by Representative Steve King. During the tour announcing his bid for a fourth term in the U.S. House of Representatives, the Iowa Republican noted his support for the election of John McCain and contended in part:

I don't want to disparage anyone because of their race, their ethnicity, their name -whatever their religion their father might have been. I'll just say this: When you think about the optics of a Barack Obama potentially getting elected President of the United States -- I mean, what does this look like to the rest of the world? What does it look like to the world of Islam?.... Additionally, his middle name (Hussein) does matter. It matters because they read a meaning into that in the rest of the world. That has a special meaning to them. They will be dancing in the streets because of his middle name. They will be dancing in the streets because of who his father was and because of his posture that says: Pull out of the Middle East and pull out of this conflict.

The bigotry implicit in these remarks doesn't interest me; King cannot compete with Reverend John Hagee. Neither does the reference to Obama having an unusual middle name; I'm aware that if the Illinois senator is nominated, there will be plenty of references to Obama's middle name by Republicans, probably each time McCain declaring how shocked, or offended, he is by such tactics.

Instead, I'm intrigued at 1)the (probably intentional) misunderstanding of the Middle East policy of a candidate who says that if there is actionable intelligence that Osama bin Laden (in whom Republicans once were interested) is in Pakistan and that government doesn't take action, he would- a position about which the Repub candidate for president has expressed skepticism; and 2) that Barack Obama's background, be it African-American or misrepresented as Muslim, does matter. This is a notion, I think, held by many Americans, including many supporters of Obama (and, incidentally, by Don Imus, who loves and supports John McCain, but who believes a President Obama's background, however he interprets it, would improve our image abroad.) It's a perspective held by many on the right, and by many on the left. And it is wrong. An American president named Barack Obama, or Barack Hussein Obama, born of a father from Kenya and having lived in Indonesia and the island of Hawaii, would be fascinating and perhaps heartening to much of the world. For about 15 minutes. Thereafter, each regime would get on with looking out for its national interest, positively or negatively, and react as necessary to the conduct of American foreign policy.

Consider Libya. On December 19, 2003 Prime Minister Blair of England and President Bush announced that the government of Moammar Gadhafi had agreed to dismantle its nuclear weapons program and permit inspections by international agencies. As wrongheaded- and inept- as George W. Bush has been in conducting foreign affairs, this appears to have been a victory for the west- won because the action Libya took was in its national interest.