RUTHFULLY YOURS

While the mainstream media was occupying itself Wednesday decrying Mitt Romney’s forthright reaction to the carnage in Cairo and Benghazi, their putative bellwether, the New York Times, ironically was busy exposing the real story ^[1]. It’s clear now that if there is a disgrace in what happened at the Benghazi consulate, it has nothing at all to do with Romney and everything to do with our State Department, its chief Hilary Clinton, and her boss Barack Obama.

Here’s the NYT:

The wave of unrest set off by the video, posted online in the United States two months ago and dubbed into Arabic for the first time eight days ago, has further underscored the instability of the countries that cast off their longtime dictators in the Arab Spring revolts. It also cast doubt on the adequacy of security preparations at American diplomatic outposts in the volatile region.

Benghazi, awash in guns, has recently witnessed a string of assassinations as well as attacks on international missions, including a bomb said to be planted by another Islamist group that exploded near the United States Consulate there as recently as June. But a Libyan politician who had breakfast with Mr. Stevens at the mission the morning before he was killed described security as sorely inadequate for an American ambassador in such a tumultuous environment, consisting primarily of four video cameras and as few as four Libyan guards.

“This country is still in transition, and everybody knows the extremists are out there,” said Fathi Baja, the Libyan politician.

I’ll say. Everybody but our State Department, evidently.

A “string of assassinations”… “awash in guns” …planted bomb… something’s wrong here. It borders on criminal negligence, indeed it crosses that border, that Ambassador Stevens would be left with such paltry security in a country so unsettled and riddled with violence as Libya. The fact these events may now be tied to al-Qaeda ^[2] makes this negligence all the more unconscionable.

Furthermore, the level of naiveté this illuminates is extraordinary and makes a mockery of the media’s self-serving meme that Mitt Romney is a beginner in global affairs while President Obama is somehow now expert. As if.

We could ask why there wasn’t some kind of Green Zone à la Iraq for our diplomats in Libya, but that’s a remnant of the big, bad Bush era, so I’ll let it go.

The Times continues on to note that Obama vows justice for the killings (well, duh), but the implication is obvious. They were unnecessary.

What remains unclear is the provenance of the aesthetically challenged video that allegedly (very allegedly) instigated much of the mayhem in Egypt and Libya, not to mention raising the greedy ire of the execrable Karzai in Afghanistan and similar Islamo-gangsters. Much confusion has reigned. First (naturally) Israelis or Israeli Americans were accused. Then it was the Coptic Christians. That latter group is a possibility, of course. The Copts certainly have a beef about the way they have been treated in Egypt. But why such a wretched, amateurish production apparently reedited with voice-overs? Why did that attract even a second’s attention? At least some of the Danish cartoons were skillful. Okay, the Copts don’t have a reputation as filmmakers and a man identified as Sam Bacile ^[3], a Christian Arab said to have relatives in Egypt, has his fingerprints all over the video, but still.

Now I admit what follows is pure speculation, but we have to ask cui bono, who profits from violence of this nature driving the Arab world further from the U.S., Israel and the West. Well, al-Qaeda, of course, but I suspect they’re not that deep into the intelligence business that they’re fabricating movies, even of this crude nature. No, this seems to be the work of a country with an intelligence service, one that has the reach even to cross our borders to plot the assassination of a foreign ambassador ^[4], one that frequently works through cutouts and has a fair amount of expatriate citizens in Los Angeles ^[5], the capital of film (well, once upon a time).

You probably know the country I’m talking about, even if you haven’t clicked on the links. And you’re probably thinking “Oh, Simon, he always thinks it’s them.” Well, I do. You’re right. So I’ll leave it there.

One more thing, as the late S. Jobs used to say: Wouldn’t it be surreal if it turned out the State Department was asking us to apologize for Iranian disinformation?