http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=5026 October has come and gone with no surprise, with just a slow, plodding accumulation of signs and portents suggesting that “the One” who has come will soon be gone. The polls are tight and the numbers are steady, but it begins to feel like 1980 again, when a tight race between President Jimmy Carter […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3429/palestinian-authority-free-speech Harb said that the decision to summon him for questioning was in the context of the Palestinian Authority leadership’s campaign to intimidate Palestinian writers and journalists and stop them from discussing internal issues. International human rights groups and countries that fund and support Abbas’s authority have yet to sound their voices. Failing to hold […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3426/islam-overtaking-catholicism-france Meanwhile, the Socialist government in France recently inaugurated a new mega-mosque in Paris as a first step toward “progressively building a French Islam.” A majority of people in France, according to a new poll, believe that Islam is too influential in French society, and almost half view Muslims as a threat to their national […]
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/oct/29/obamas-perfect-storm/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS
Barack Obama faces not one but two perfect storms. He actually may be grateful for the meteorological one if it predictably helps obscure the political one at least for the next week. Hurricane Sandy is, of course, a disaster no one would welcome. Untold numbers of Americans are having their lives endangered, or at least severely disrupted, and the potential economic harm is unimaginable at this point.
The president could nonetheless see a silver lining in this horrific “weather event.” For one thing, he gets to posture as the leader of the nation in a terrible time of testing, the one to dole out federal emergency assistance and the great consoler around whom we instinctively rally in such circumstances.
Perhaps more importantly for Team Obama, many voters are going to have many other things on their minds for the next few, critical days instead of thinking about the evidence that their commander in chief was seriously derelict regarding the murderous attack in Benghazi, Libya. The president’s re-election bid cannot afford in the closing days of a putatively very close election to have his fraudulent claim to successful stewardship of the national security portfolio become as exposed as his dismal economic record.
It remains to be seen, however, if Frankenstorm Sandy will do more than simply defer the day of reckoning for Mr. Obama. Whether it occurs on Nov. 6 or afterward, the rising popular revulsion at what happened in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012, and the Obama administration’s dissembling, deflections and outright lies in the weeks that followed should blow this presidency away. Consider a sample of the damning information that has come to light so far:
As the attack was under way, the president knew what was going on. Thanks to two unmanned drones, real-time intelligence was being fed to as many as eight different critical civilian and military nodes — including the White House. Published reports indicate that Mr. Obama himself and his senior subordinates were exposed to those video feeds.
DANIEL GREENFIELD
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/obama-vows-to-shrink-government-by-making-government-bigger/
A former Biden aide said that Obama was “financially illiterate”, but he may just be plain old illiterate.
Obama’s current economic plan for the next four years is to “break” Republicans and force them to do everything he wants by threatening to use sequestration to wreck the country and the military. This makes Clinton’s government shutdown look good by comparison.
Once Obama has pulled that off, he’s going to raise taxes and cut Medicare. And then he will, in his own words, “Be able to shrink government and create jobs through infrastructure projects, like building roads.”
Not only is this the same exact proposal from four years ago, which he made a mess of, even with a Democratic majority in Congress, but he doesn’t appear to understand the definition of the word, “shrink” and his job growth plan is more of the same “shovel ready” jobs and stimulus plans that ran us into trillion dollar deficits.
Other words that Obama doesn’t understand include, “Debt” when he says, “‘If we’re spending 17% of our GDP on health care, and every other country is spending 11%, and their outcomes are better, that difference is 6%, that’s our deficit and our debt.”
It’s actually neither of those things. Nor is every country spending that much. The numbers vary widely by country. The problem is not the demand on services, that Obama would like to meet with rationing, but the growth of a vast bureaucracy surrounding health care. ObamaCare is a template of the kind of policies that lead to runaway spending and the government bureaucracy that eats up most of the money then begins rationing care and killing the elderly to protect its own structure.
If you liked the last four years, then you’ll love a second term of the same thing.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/paul-schnee/pat-caddell-speaks-at-the-wednesday-morning-club/
During has talk about “November 6th: What to Expect” given at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Wednesday Morning Club on October 25th, Pat Caddell demonstrated his gift for political punditry as well as his disgust at what he believes is superficial and biased reporting on the part of the mainstream media. Caddell was a life-long Democrat who worked for 5 Democratic presidential candidates. His electioneering expertise was believed to have been essential in securing Jimmy Carter’s victory in 1976. A grateful Carter awarded Caddell with a good deal of influence in his White House, but not enough of it to protect him from a humiliating defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980. Unfortunately for Barack Obama, Caddell is of the opinion that, like Jimmy Carter, our 44th president will be denied a second term.
Since retiring from political advocacy, Caddell has served as a consultant to various films and television shows, written for various publications, including The Wall Street Journal, and he appears regularly on television as a Fox News contributor.
Noting that it is impossible for Obama to run on his record, Caddell observed that the position of the Democrats seems to be that people should vote for Obama because of what Clinton did when he was president. He also said that there are three teams in this race: the Obama team, the Romney team and the media team. The media, said Caddell, will try to block Romney every chance they get and he said that inexplicably the Republicans won’t challenge the media. In late September, he contended, the Romney campaign was slipping badly but the first debate changed the course and had a dramatic effect by showing people that Romney was not the ogre he had been portrayed as by Team Obama. Still, Caddell said, the Republicans have failed to frame the national debate. States being run by Republican governors are doing well and that is the message the Republicans should be telling. The huge electoral gains in November of 2010 were due to the fierce opposition to Obamacare and, so far, the Republicans have failed to build on that. He lamented that Romney didn’t start to tell his own story early enough.
Caddell said that it’s a mistake for either party to think that there is only an election in seven states. Moving numbers in swing states is a hard slog. Hardly a penny has been spent in Minnesota, Michigan or Pennsylvania but Obama has spent $60 million in Ohio on negative advertisements. He knows Ohio hates Obamacare. President Bush lost Ohio by a narrow margin in 2004 and Romney has almost closed the gap there this time. Obama, he said, is running scared in Pennsylvania.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-innocence-of-obama-2/print/
Why an anti-Islam filmmaker is in jail and Benghazi terrorists are free.
Ten years ago most left-thinking liberals were constantly worried about the erosion of civil liberties under the War on Terror, though they could rarely name an instance where an American citizen had actually experienced such an erosion.
This was, after all, before the days when naked scanners and drone strikes had entered the vocabulary, and the best they could do was to haul out Jose Padilla, aka Abdullah al-Muhajir, ACLU’s choirboy of the month, a Brooklyn-born convert to Islam who was being held in jail for no reason at all except aiding terrorists and plotting to build a dirty bomb.
Ten years later the lefty civil liberties types were proven right. The War on Terror did erode our civil liberties, and America’s first political prisoner in generations has spent a month in jail for making an inconvenient movie at an inconvenient time.
When Charles Woods, the father of Tyrone Woods, one of the Navy SEALS who died fighting in Benghazi, met with Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State assured him that “We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.” And they got him, officially on charges of violating parole, unofficially on charges of violently offending violent Muslims.
The woman whose policy had overthrown the Libyan government and then placed a barely defended consulate in the middle of a city of jihadists did not promise the grieving father that his son’s killers would pay. She promised him that the man who offended his son’s killers would pay. Not only would his son be the first casualty of that appeasement policy, but the Constitution that his son had sworn to support and defend would be the second casualty.
Mark Basseley Youssef is not the first filmmaker to have been sent to prison by a Democrat in the White House for making the wrong kind of movie and interfering with his foreign policy. That would be Robert Goldstein who made the The Spirit of ’76, a movie about the American Revolution, at a time when Woodrow Wilson was trying to get Americans deeper into World War I.
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.
