RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/davidhornik/obamas-courting-of-the-mullahs/

It turns out that soon after taking office, President Obama tried to make friends—totally—with the mullahs’ regime in Iran.

The aim was to start with the opening of interest sections in Washington and Tehran, then progress to “full diplomatic ties, including U.S. and Iranian embassies and ambassadors in each other’s capitals, security cooperation…, [and] direct flights between the U.S. and Iran….” All this amity, it was presumed, would get Iran to give up its nuclear program.

So, at least, reports the Israeli daily Maariv (Hebrew original here; English report in The Times of Israel here), basing itself on “two Western diplomats very close to the administration.”

Maariv says that, beginning in summer 2009, there were at least two U.S.-Iranian diplomatic meetings in this context. The second was between Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and chief Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili in Geneva in October 2009, on the sidelines of nuclear talks between Tehran and the P5+1 countries.

But Tehran, as they say, wasn’t into it. An Israeli source told Maariv that the regime “opposed any sign of normalization with the U.S., and refused to grant a ‘prize’ to the Americans.”

On Obama’s part, all this would have been in the spirit of his holiday video greeting to Iran in March 2009—and, more generally, his wooing of the Islamic world and apologizing for America’s supposed sins, most notably in his June 2009 Cairo speech.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
The story of how the Obama Administration failed to secure a US consulate and then failed to send in support while it was under attack may turn out to be the biggest scandal of this administration. But that will only happen if Benghazigate is the subject of a thorough and rigorous investigation. And that means basing stories on facts or on reliable reports, rather than on speculation and internet rumors that no one would take seriously in any other context.

I have received dozens of emails in the last few days claiming that General Ham was fired for trying to go ahead with a rescue operation. The story appeared in the Washington Times. The source for the Times’ story was an anonymous comment on Tiger Droppings, a forum for LSU football fans, from someone in Louisiana working in “Self Employed/Restaurants/Catering” who claimed that the story came “from someone inside the military”.

Now for all I know this story is true, but an anonymous comment on a football fan forum is not enough to run with a major story. It’s certainly not enough to start treating it as an established fact.

That comment has gone beyond the Washington Times and is being sourced in various outlets all of whom are reporting a story based on an anonymous comment on an internet forum.

On October 20th, Clare Lopez wrote a column raising various questions about Benghazi and suggesting that Ambassador Stevens may have been involved in a weapons smuggling operation moving Libyan weapons into Syria. Lopez’s column raised some questions, a lot of them, but provided no proof and no truly credible connection between Stevens and the transfer of Libyan weapons to Syrian Jihadists. Nor did that theory come with a motive for why the consulate was attacked.

Nevertheless large numbers of people have now taken it as a fact that Stevens was involved in running Libyan guns to Syria without any actual evidence to verify that as a fact. Many repeat Lopez’s suggestion that the warehouses behind the consulate stored guns meant for Syria as a statement of fact. To many people, it seems “right” and it may be true, it may not be true. The difference between the two is actual evidence.

I am not attacking Lopez, she was doing what many of us were doing in the days and weeks after the attack. I have run plenty of speculative pieces, some that were right, some that were wrong, it’s in the nature of the business to do that. The problem only begins when a speculative piece is treated as fact and when speculations begin to be used as evidence when they are only questions, not answers.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/questions-for-white-house-over-benghazi-just-beginning/

Incompetence. Abandonment. Treason.

We have two likely possibilities for what occurred, plus a subplot involving arms to al-Qaeda, which could be treason.

It has been a sickening few days for those of us who have closely followed the revelations coming out about the Benghazi terror attack that killed not only Ambassador Chris Stevens and diplomat Sean Smith, but also CIA operators (and former SEALs) Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, who died undertaking a rescue mission — unauthorized — to save the rest of the consulate staff.
We’ve learned about the incredible heroism of a CIA force that repeatedly called for help for as it was being attacked. Disturbingly, we learned that this force had been told to “stand down” twice by their chain of command, and that they violated direct orders to conduct this rescue mission. Our consulate staff was left to die.

Let me say that again: our consulate staff was to be abandoned and left to die.

left to die.

We’ve also heard claims about why Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi to begin with: some sources suggest this was part of an Obama administration plot to arm Syrian rebels.

We should tackle each of these related issues separately.

For starters, we now know that not a single American life should have been lost. Trucks with with the Islamist cell’s logo and with heavy machine guns mounted on them took up blocking positions around the consulate no later than 8:00 p.m., according to Libyan eyewitnesses. These so-called “technicals” did not let anyone in or out for one hour and 40 minutes, until the attack began at 9:40 p.m. local time.

In that time, air assets based in Italy, Sicily, and the Mediterranean Sea could have easily dispatched the forces preparing for an attack, using precision weapons to destroy these logo-identified blocking vehicles. There is every reason to believe that the timely launch of air assets would have destroyed the attacking force as they prepared for their assault, without the loss of a single American life. For reasons as yet unknown, these easily identifiable enemy assets massing for an attack on the U.S. consulate were met with indifference by U.S. forces.

Our CIA assets, which seem to have been composed of former SEALs and other special operations personnel, conducted an unsupported rescue mission under fire. They saved the lives of the remaining consulate staff and recovered the body of Sean Smith, whom they then escorted back to their safehouse a mile away.

Once there, they came under fire again — including fire from a terrorist team armed with mortars. Then something truly extraordinary and troubling took place:

At that point, they called again for military support and help because they were taking fire at the CIA safe house, or annex. The request was denied. There were no communications problems at the annex, according to those present at the compound. The team was in constant radio contact with their headquarters. In fact, at least one member of the team was on the roof of the annex manning a heavy machine gun when mortars were fired at the CIA compound. The security officer had a laser on the target that was firing, and repeatedly requested back-up support from a Spectre gunship, which is commonly used by U.S. special operations forces to provide support to special operation teams on the ground involved in intense firefights.

After reading this, I was simply stunned. According to the article, an American CIA agent had a laser on a target and was attempting to call in close air support — and was denied. While this article never explicitly says so, some have suggested that the “security officer” in the article was Ty Woods, soon to be killed by that same mortar. Let’s unpack this.

In this context, there are two ways to “lase” a target. One is simply using a visible laser designator/laser sight to point out the target’s location. The second is the use of a laser target designator (LTD), which is a far more sophisticated device. An LTD uses coded pulses of a band of light not visible to the human eye, and these pulses communicate and synchronize with an aircraft-mounted module to direct a finite and fairly exclusive family of air-launched guided weapons.

If the CIA officer was lasing a target with the laser designator/laser sight on his weapon, one might argue (and some have) that this was an act of improvisation — a hope that the visible lasing would convince the mortar team to flee their position in fear of being bombed. This position is not without merit but overlooks two salient facts. The first is that these security officers lasing the target were manning a heavy machine gun, which presumably would have the reach and power to eliminate the mortar team, or at least suppress it, without air support. It also overlooks the fact that the article directly states that the target was being lased for a specific asset, a “Spectre.”

Airborne gunships have been around since the Vietnam war, when C-47 transport planes were first equipped with port-side mounted miniguns for close air support missions, becoming AC-47s.

Incompetence. Abandonment. Treason.

It has been a sickening few days for those of us who have closely followed the revelations coming out about the Benghazi terror attack that killed not only Ambassador Chris Stevens and diplomat Sean Smith, but also CIA operators (and former SEALs) Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, who died undertaking a rescue mission — unauthorized — to save the rest of the consulate staff.
We’ve learned about the incredible heroism of a CIA force that repeatedly called for help for as it was being attacked. Disturbingly, we learned that this force had been told to “stand down” twice by their chain of command, and that they violated direct orders to conduct this rescue mission. Our consulate staff was left to die.

Let me say that again: our consulate staff was to be abandoned and left to die.

left to die.

We’ve also heard claims about why Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi to begin with: some sources suggest this was part of an Obama administration plot to arm Syrian rebels.

We should tackle each of these related issues separately.

For starters, we now know that not a single American life should have been lost. Trucks with with the Islamist cell’s logo and with heavy machine guns mounted on them took up blocking positions around the consulate no later than 8:00 p.m., according to Libyan eyewitnesses. These so-called “technicals” did not let anyone in or out for one hour and 40 minutes, until the attack began at 9:40 p.m. local time.

In that time, air assets based in Italy, Sicily, and the Mediterranean Sea could have easily dispatched the forces preparing for an attack, using precision weapons to destroy these logo-identified blocking vehicles. There is every reason to believe that the timely launch of air assets would have destroyed the attacking force as they prepared for their assault, without the loss of a single American life. For reasons as yet unknown, these easily identifiable enemy assets massing for an attack on the U.S. consulate were met with indifference by U.S. forces.

Our CIA assets, which seem to have been composed of former SEALs and other special operations personnel, conducted an unsupported rescue mission under fire. They saved the lives of the remaining consulate staff and recovered the body of Sean Smith, whom they then escorted back to their safehouse a mile away.

Once there, they came under fire again — including fire from a terrorist team armed with mortars. Then something truly extraordinary and troubling took place:

At that point, they called again for military support and help because they were taking fire at the CIA safe house, or annex. The request was denied. There were no communications problems at the annex, according to those present at the compound. The team was in constant radio contact with their headquarters. In fact, at least one member of the team was on the roof of the annex manning a heavy machine gun when mortars were fired at the CIA compound. The security officer had a laser on the target that was firing, and repeatedly requested back-up support from a Spectre gunship, which is commonly used by U.S. special operations forces to provide support to special operation teams on the ground involved in intense firefights.

After reading this, I was simply stunned. According to the article, an American CIA agent had a laser on a target and was attempting to call in close air support — and was denied. While this article never explicitly says so, some have suggested that the “security officer” in the article was Ty Woods, soon to be killed by that same mortar. Let’s unpack this.

In this context, there are two ways to “lase” a target. One is simply using a visible laser designator/laser sight to point out the target’s location. The second is the use of a laser target designator (LTD), which is a far more sophisticated device. An LTD uses coded pulses of a band of light not visible to the human eye, and these pulses communicate and synchronize with an aircraft-mounted module to direct a finite and fairly exclusive family of air-launched guided weapons.

If the CIA officer was lasing a target with the laser designator/laser sight on his weapon, one might argue (and some have) that this was an act of improvisation — a hope that the visible lasing would convince the mortar team to flee their position in fear of being bombed. This position is not without merit but overlooks two salient facts. The first is that these security officers lasing the target were manning a heavy machine gun, which presumably would have the reach and power to eliminate the mortar team, or at least suppress it, without air support. It also overlooks the fact that the article directly states that the target was being lased for a specific asset, a “Spectre.”

Airborne gunships have been around since the Vietnam war, when C-47 transport planes were first equipped with port-side mounted miniguns for close air support missions, becoming AC-47s.

By 1967, a desire to improve upon the concept involved replacing the aged twin-engine C-47 base aircraft with the four-engine C-130, which had greater speed, more fuel, and a greater capacity for weapons and ammunition. These AC130s carried various nicknames, including “Spooky” (inherited from the AC-47) and “Spectre,” the latter of which has been the most publicly recognizable name of these powerful ground support aircraft.

If the CIA operators were using an LTD, it additionally means that air assets were not in Italy or Sicily on the ground. It means that strike aircraft were overhead, and were denied permission to fire from someone in the chain of command. LTDs must sync with overhead aircraft; they have no deterrent effect since they use a spectrum of light we cannot see and can only communicate with craft overhead.

I will caution that this is highly speculative, but an LTD would presumably not be used for just any variant of the C-130-based gunships. While we did have AC-130 gunships based close to Benghazi, they would not make the best use of targets lit by an LTD. The AC-130 uses guns, not guided weapons.

The same cannot be be said of another “Spectre” variant, the MC-130W.

The MC-130W is built to use precision-guided weapons, including the GBU-44/B Viper Strike glide bomb and the AGM-175 Griffin missile. Both are laser-guided weapons that can be directed using a ground-based LTD. Both are weapons designed to be highly accurate, with small warheads to greatly reduce the danger of collateral damage. They are precisely the kind of weapon an experienced CIA operator would call in if they wanted to reduce the threat of collateral damage, like the kind of damage that might be caused by firing an HMG from a rooftop.

If this is what occurred, it seems that even in weapon selection, the primary concern of the HMG operator was saving innocent lives.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443768804578034172542214016.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

Much as it would please me to blame this on Obama….this trend of doctors opting out of insurance plans started long before when government got increasingly involved in healthcare. While Medicare initially afforded all seniors- without any form of means testing-access to advanced tests and technology- under President Clinton, the government and medicare began to engage in price controls and restraint of trade by setting the reimbursement rates for physicians and blocking “medi-gap” plans from independent payments…….rsk

Traditional primary-care doctors are finding themselves, and their patients, squeezed by the government and the marketplace.

I call my cousin Irene regularly. She is 90, frail, living alone in New York in an apartment in Queens, and I worry about her. This time there is distress in her voice:

“I just don’t know what I’m going to do. I got a letter from my doctor, the one I’ve been seeing for a long time. It said she was making some changes to her practice. I had to go to a reception at a hotel in Manhattan where the details would be explained. I have such a hard time getting into the city, so I called her office to see if someone couldn’t just tell me over the phone.”

Irene was crying now. “No, they said, I needed to come to the reception. So I paid a car service to take me there and back.”

What Irene learned was that her internist was converting her fee-for-service office into a “concierge practice.” For a yearly retainer of $2,200 (in addition to the usual charges that would still be billed through Medicare and supplemental insurance), Irene would receive “value-added” services. These include same-day appointments, electronic access to her medical records and lab reports, shortened waiting times, and other “frills” that Irene said her doctor always provided anyway.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203880704578086843521337254.html?mod=opinion_newsreel The brain trust behind President Obama’s re-election campaign has a new idea, and what a revelation it is. A week from Election Day, Mr. Obama has disclosed to the voters that in a second term he’ll create more private jobs by creating . . . one more government job. Specifically, and all of a […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203335504578086450730075938.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Yesterday’s man of destiny is today’s peddler of spent ideas.

On the eve of the U.S. presidential election four years ago, educated people nearly everywhere understood that China was the country of the future, green was the energy of the future, and Barack Obama was a man of destiny. How quaint it all seems now.

In a remarkable piece of investigative journalism last week in the New York Times, reporter David Barboza identified assets worth $2.7 billion belonging to various members of the family of Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, including his 90-year-old mother, a retired schoolteacher named Yang Zhiyun.

“The details of how Ms. Yang, a widow, accumulated such wealth are not known, or even if she was aware of the holdings in her name,” Mr. Barboza reports. “But it happened after her son was elevated to China’s ruling elite, first in 1998 as vice prime minister and then five years later as prime minister.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/real_leaders_dont_promote_dependency.html While campaigning in Colorado on Sept. 2 en route to the Democratic National Convention, President Obama boasted: “You know, he [Romney] calls it ObamaCare. I like the name. I do care. I guess you call his plan ‘Romney doesn’t care.’” As with all liberals vying for votes during the past 35 years, Mr. Obama […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/331866

In the most scurrilous ad of a scurrilous campaign, President Obama’s allies at the Democratic super PAC Patriot Majority have released a new ad denouncing Mitt Romney as an “economic traitor” — their actual words — while the president identifies his own policies as the “new economic patriotism.” Of course it is not patriotism but nationalism, albeit nationalism of a funny sort — nationalism for people who do not regard the nation itself as anything particularly remarkable.

At issue is an automotive-sensor plant located in Illinois. The plant had been owned by Honeywell, which in 2011 sold its automotive-sensor operators to Sensata, a worldwide manufacturer that had never intended to keep the Illinois plant open and had made no secret of the fact. The Massachusetts-based Sensata manufactures all over the world, but 75 percent of its automotive business is in Asia, and so it is consolidating the related manufacturing there — hardly an unexpected decision, especially given that Illinois is one of our least competitive and most highly taxed states. Jesse Jackson of course was immediately on the scene, and Sensata employees and other protesters began attempting to occupy the plant, leading to two dozen arrests and causing the company to consider shuttering the facility ahead of schedule. Leave it to Jesse Jackson to conclude that if a particular location is economically uncompetitive, the natural solution is a mini-riot.

http://www.wnd.com/2012/10/secret-u-s-iranian-meetings-to-continue/

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/secret-us-iranian-meetings-to-continue-obama-said-to-need-diplomatic-victory-badly-after-benghazi?f=must_reads

The United States and Iran are moving forward with secret negotiations, despite denying earlier meetings took place, according to a source highly placed in the Islamic government.

The source, who remains anonymous for security reasons, added that teams from both sides will resume the talks in the coming days with the hope of reaching agreement to announce a breakthrough before the U.S. elections.

The source said the Obama administration seems to need a diplomatic victory before the elections in the wake of the attack in Libya that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans because the administration failed to adequately protect the Benghazi consulate.

If President Obama is not re-elected, however, the source contends any agreement reached after the elections will be announced and enforced while he is still in office, once Iran’s supreme leader receives written guarantees from Obama.

The source adds, on a related note, that President Obama chose not to destroy the American, sensitive-technology RQ-170 stealth drone, which was captured by the Iranian forces after it crashed in Iran in December of 2011, because he feared jeopardizing the ongoing secret negotiations.

The negotiations to date have reportedly gone beyond the Iranian nuclear program to include such issues as South America, the Persian Gulf and Syria. On the latter issue, the U.S. has already stepped back from its demand that President Bashar Assad be removed. The source added that both parties have agreed on a broad range of incentives that have been offered to the Islamic regime and which will be revealed in time.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-welfare-state-of-mind
I was recently advised by my office manager, who was responding to the building manager’s office receipt of complaints, that I could not smoke outside near a side entrance to our office building, as I had been for years, because it offended non-smokers who were coming and going and who claimed to be super-sensitive to smoke, and also that somehow the smoke was also getting inside the building where the slightest trace of smoke also bothered them. I was advised to use the designated smoking area on the other side of the building. The catch was that this area, too, is subject to the same conditions.

I cite this incident because it underscores a phenomenon I have watched grow over five decades, from the first time I began to observe and evaluate men’s behavior to my current and far more incisive cogitations, which is how quickly and easily men submit to government authority and the consensus of the collective, and how inured they can become to being taken care of and protected. The anti-smoking campaign that has been waged for decades is merely one facet of the phenomenon. I suspect that much of the anti-smoking stances adopted by non-smokers is feigned and likely psychosomatic. Having been patronized and protected and legislated for by way of lobbies and pressure group warfare, they are amenable to more of the same.

My gut response to the advice could have been any one of the following: They don’t own the air. Shall I wear a Star of David, too, so that non-smokers can better identify and avoid me? What are they going to do about it? Beat me up? Call the Green Police? Behave like picture- and video- and insult-maddened Muslims? Pressure my employer to fire me if I don’t cave in? Ask the police to ticket me?

But the welfare state is not just laws or legislative acts that encourage individuals to become dependent on the State. The welfare state is first and foremost a “state of mind.”

A welfare state would not work if it did not inculcate, either by education, by mandated indoctrination, by incessant propaganda, or by cultural osmosis, the proper “state of mind” in a population, that is, to instill in men an individual’s alleged duty or obligation to submit to a consensus propagated by a variety of authorities, especially government authorities. A welfare state would evaporate almost immediately without first having pulled a fraud on the electorate. However, a welfare state could not establish itself without the overt or tacit approval of a large component of a country’s population. This consensus requires as well the consensual sanction or silence of the targets of a welfare state and its vanquished, ill-informed, or willing population and electorate. And if the opponents do not consent, they are simply ignored.