15 September 2012
Attacks in Libya, Egypt Likely Pre-Planned for 9/11
September 13, 2012
The controversial film that Islamists in Egypt and Libya sited as the reason for their violet attacks on U.S. diplomatic missions yesterday was most likely a hoax. In addition, reports are emerging that the attacks were pre-planned to coincide with the anniversary of 9/11 as opposed to a spontaneous reaction to the release of the film’s trailer on YouTube.
The U.S. ambassador to Libya, along with three other Americans, was killed in the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. In Cairo, the wall surrounding the U.S. embassy was breached, its American flag torn down and the black flag of Islamic jihad raised in its place, as thousand participated in the attack.
CNN quotes a former top member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group Noman Benotman, currently with the Quilliam Foundation in London, as saying, "An attack like this would likely have required preparation. This would not seem to be merely a protest which escalated.
"According to our sources, the attack against the consulate had two waves. The first attack led to U.S. officials being evacuated from the consulate by Libyan security forces, only for the second wave to be launched against U.S. officials after they were kept in a secure location." Benotman said.
He also said that the group claiming responsibility for the attack, the Imprisoned Omar Abdul Rahman Brigades “prepared for a military assault; it is rare that an RPG7 [Rocket-Propelled Grenade] is present at a peaceful protest."
In addition, the attack immediately followed
CNN reports that U.S. sources agree with this assessment and that the protest was merely a diversion used to launch the attack.
Meanwhile, it has emerged that in the film trailer that was used as the pretext for the attacks, the words denigrating Mohammed and Islam were clearly dubbed over. Actors in the film claim that they were told they were participating in a film called “Desert Warrior,” set in an era 600 years before the birth of Mohammed.
The “Jewish, Israeli-born director/scriptwriter,” Sam Bacile, as well as the $5-million budget for the film donated by “Jewish businessmen” also appeared to be non-existent.
The Jerusalem Post reported quotes a high-ranking Israeli official in Los Angeles who said that after numerous inquiries, it appeared that no one in the Hollywood film industry or in the local Israeli community had ever heard of him.
Steve Klein, a self-described militant Christian activist in Riverside, California who was involved writing the script of the film, told The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg that Bacile was not the director's real name, and that he was not Israeli and probably not Jewish either. "I would suspect this is a disinformation campaign," Klein said.
The Wall Street Journal reported that on Wednesday, a records search done in the entire United States turned up no references to any man by the name Sam Bacile.
Israel also reports that there is no Israeli citizen with that name.
Tuesday night, a man saying he was Sam Bacile, identifying himself as a 52 year-od real-estate developer in California, said he had made the film in a telephone interview with The Wall Street Journal. He identified himself as an Israeli-American backed by Jewish donors. The cell phone number used in that call has been traced to a man by the name of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, who identified himself as an Egyptian Coptic Christian who was concerned about the treated of the Copts by the Muslims. When located, Nakoula said he managed the company that produced the film.
As for the trailer itself, there is reason to doubt that it is part of a larger film. Judging from the shoddy quality of the film, it appears nowhere near the claimed $5 million budget.
The trailer was uploaded to YouTube in July. However, it wasn’t until September 6, when it was promoted by Morris Sadek, an Egyptian-American Coptic activist living in the Washington, D.C., area, that it received any attention when Sadek sent an email to journalists around the world promoting a Sept. 11 event held by the Rev. Terry Jones. Jones is famous for burning the Quran. In the email, Sadek linked to the trailer.
The trailer was then translated by Egyptian journalists into Arabic and broadcast in Egypt.
Response by Islamists government to the attacks has been shocking to U.S. officials. Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi refrained from condemning the attacks. Rather he condemned the video while “affirming” his commitment to protect foreign diplomatic missions in Egypt.
His remarks angered U.S. Congressmen who note that America is currently in the process of forgiving $1 billion in Egyptian debts. In addition, America’s annual $1.3 billion aid package has also been approved. Some have suggested suspending that aid as well as security cooperation.
The secretary-general of the Morsi-affiliated Muslim Brotherhood, Mahmoud Hussein, also refrained from condemning the attacks. Rather, he called on Egyptians to hold peaceful protests against the film after the traditional Friday prayers.
However, senior officials in the Obama administration said the aid would continue and that it was in the long-term interest of the United States to provide assistance to “emerging governments.”
"We are as committed today as we have ever been to a free and stable Libya," a senior U.S. official was quoted as saying. "We are going to continue to help them get the future that they deserve."
Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai also refrained from condemning the attacks or calling for restraint but made a point of condemning the video.
Meanwhile, YouTube has decided to block the video in Libya as well as Egypt, which is said to be the most popular location of the video’s viewers.
CNN reports that the U.S. has dispatched two Navy destroyers, dozens of Marines, federal investigators and intelligence assets to Libya to protect Americans and help hunt for the perpetrators of the attacks.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blamed a “small, savage group” for the attacks but maintained that the U.S. "mission in Libya is noble and necessary … and will continue."
The last American ambassador killed by hostile forces was in 1979, when the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan was murdered in Kabul.
The attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya was the second this year.
14 September 2012
The Abhorrent Vacuum
National Review's Happy Warrior
September 11, 2012
In the breast of the Western media, hopes of Arab Spring spring eternal. First we were told the Muslim Brotherhood would contest only a third of the seats in the Egyptian parliament, just to ensure they had some representation in the legislature among all those students, women, and Copts. Then we were told it would be half the seats, but don't worry, they had no plans to contest the presidency. Next we were told they were taking a run at the presidency, but most unlikely to win compared with all those far more appealing time-serving hacks from transnationalist bureaucracies like the Arab League and the International Atomic Energy Agency who were itching to jump in the race. And finally, after the Brothers took the presidency and swept the parliament, we were assured that they could govern only in a finely calibrated balance of power with the secularist military.
Inevitably, within a few weeks of taking the oath of office, President Morsi fired the head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, purged the top brass, including the chief of staff and the heads of the air force and navy, and reversed such restraints on his power as they'd imposed. Equally inevitably, the view from Washington was that this was no more than "a generational change in military leadership." It is true that General Sisi is a younger man than Field Marshal Tantawi. However, the fact remains that, in his first month in office, Mohamed Morsi has accomplished what it's taken the post-Kemalist regime in Turkey its first decade to pull off: the end of the army's role as constitutional guardian.
Indeed, he seems to have ended the constitution, such as it is. No piece of paper gives him the unilateral power to revoke Article 25 of the constitution, but he did. No piece of paper gives him the authority to dismiss the Supreme Council's constitutional declaration on parliament, but he did. Whatever new piece of paper eventually emerges will be written by men appointed by him alone. And why stop there? The independent newspaper al-Dustour ("The Constitution," indeed) has just had a print run seized for "harming the president through phrases and wording punishable by law." In whatever lucid moments he still enjoys in his prison cell, the unloved ex-"Pharaoh" must marvel at that CNN coverage of the "Facebook Revolution": As Zvi Mazel wrote in the Jerusalem Post, "Morsi now holds dictatorial powers surpassing by far those of erstwhile president Hosni Mubarak."
Last year, an hour after Mubarak's resignation, I was interviewed on Fox News and said that this was the dawn of the post-Western Middle East. The modern Middle East was created by the British and French in the power vacuum left by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Now another great power is waning — America — and in its own vacuum competing successors are jostling, as London and Paris did, for regional advantage: the Muslim Brothers taking power in the secular kleptocracies; a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran, reluctant to let go of its client regime in Syria; and an ever more Islamized Turkey with neo-Ottoman ambitions in its old vilayets.
You don't have to be an uncovered woman or a Coptic Christian to recognize that King Farouk to Mubarak to the Muslim Brothers is a pretty perverse notion of progress. After 9/11, we chose to fight a war on "terror" — to campaign against the means rather than the ends. A decade later, men who share largely the same ends as al-Qaeda — the same view of society — control the second-biggest recipient of U.S. aid. Turkey is supposedly governed by "soft Islamists," although Mr. Erdogan can butch it up when he wants to: "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers." And, whatever nuanced differences one might detect, both Egypt and Turkey are now in the hands of conventional Islamic imperialists: As Erdogan told cheering crowds after his last election, "Believe me, Sarajevo won today as much as Istanbul, Beirut won as much as Izmir, Damascus won as much as Ankara, the West Bank and Jerusalem won as much as Diyarbakir!"
That's quite a sphere of influence he's claiming. If Iran didn't have compelling reasons to defy the West and go nuclear before the Arab Spring, it does now: The prototype Islamic Republic finds itself with rival models in Cairo and Ankara, and, in a contest for regional hegemony, imposing your nuclear umbrella on the Saudi monarchy and Gulf emirates is a relatively simple method of brand differentiation. I doubt the rivalry between the Sunni Brothers, the Shia ayatollahs, and the neo-Ottoman Turks can resolve itself peacefully, even before the nukes change the equation.
In an American election year, the Middle East is a side issue in a nation ever broker and, in large part, weary of global responsibilities it never sought. But, to modify Trotsky, you may not be interested in Islam, but Islam is interested in you. Would Morsi have moved so far so fast against a military bankrolled by U.S. taxpayers if he had thought Washington would push back? Probably not. But he read the Obama administration and correctly concluded he could do what he wanted and pay no price — as did Erdogan, a nominal NATO ally, when he all but formally broke off relations with Israel. As do the mullahs, daily. All three look at Washington and see a late Ottoman sultan: soft, pampered, decadent, weak, lounging on his cushions, puffing his hookah, but unable to rouse himself to impose his will. After Qaddafi, Hillary Clinton offered the following clunker of a sound bite: "We came, we saw, he died." In reality, we're gone, they saw, and the post-American world is being born.
[ed. They must be truly amazed we have allowed, even abetted, their stated quest to gain power across the globe. This won't end well...]
When President Obama intervened in Libya last year, he claimed that “it’s in our national interest to act” to remove a tyrant who — in response to Bus
September 9, 2012
When President Obama intervened in Libya last year, he claimed that “it’s in our national interest to act” to remove a tyrant who — in response to Bush’s invasion of Iraq — had just given up his weapons of mass destruction and pledged to be America’s BFF.
Apparently Gadhafi neglected to also tell Obama, “I’ve got your back.”
Obama said: “We must stand alongside those who believe in the same core principles that have guided us through many storms … our support for a set of universal rights, including the freedom for people to express themselves and choose their leaders; our support for the governments that are ultimately responsive to the aspirations of the people.”
The Libyan mob was the equivalent of our founding fathers! (If you overlook the part about it being a murderous Islamic mob.)
Meanwhile, Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden unit, said: “The people we are fighting for in Libya, the backbone of that movement, are former mujahedeen from around the world.” We are “enabling people who may not be formally aligned with al-Qaida but who want the same things to grasp ever closer to power.”
Scheuer said the media had taken “a few English-speaking Arabs who are pro-democracy and a few Facebook pages out of the Middle East and extrapolated that to a region-wide love of secular democracy,” adding, “It is as insane a situation as I’ve ever encountered in my life.”
No wonder Obama’s running for re-election on his foreign policy expertise!
Among Republicans, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum all called for aggressive action against Gadhafi, including enforcement of a no-fly zone.
Santorum cited Reagan’s 1986 bombing of Libya (after Gadhafi had killed American servicemen in Berlin), saying, “If you want to be Reaganesque, it seems the path is pretty clear.”
Gingrich took all sides, first demanding: “Exercise a no-fly zone this evening. We don’t need to have the United Nations. All we have to say is that we think that slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable and that we’re intervening. This is a moment to get rid of him. Do it. Get it over with.”
Then, two weeks later, he said: “I would not have intervened.”
Only Mitt Romney and Haley Barbour resisted calling for aggressive action against Gadhafi, with Romney merely criticizing Obama’s deer-in-the-headlights response, and Barbour stating more directly, “I don’t think it’s our mission to make Libya look like Luxembourg.” No offense, he said, “but it is not ever going to look like what we’d like.”
The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman exulted that the Arab peoples “have come up with their own answer to violent extremism and the abusive regimes we’ve been propping up. … It’s called democracy.”
The Washington Post’s David Ignatius praised Obama’s major shift in strategy in seeing the Libyan uprising as a “positive development” and refusing to provide aid to the embattled dictator. “My own instinct,” he said, “is that Obama is right.”
French liberal blowhard Bernard-Henri Levy announced that “Libya will go down in history as the anti-Iraq. Iraq was a democracy parachuted in by a foreign power in a country which hadn’t asked for it. Libya was a rebellion which demanded help from an international coalition.”
The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette editorialized: “Most of the world is rejoicing because of the historic success in Libya. We’re glad it was accomplished by Libya’s people, not by a U.S. invasion ordered by right-wing American politicians.”
I note that the American ambassador in Iraq has not been murdered and his corpse dragged through the streets. I also recall that, a few years ago, when Muslims around the globe erupted in rioting over some Dutch cartoons, one Muslim country remained utterly pacific: George W. Bush’s Iraq.
Apparently U.S. invasions ordered by right-wing American politicians are the only ones that work in the Middle East. Fake uprisings orchestrated by Muslim fanatics are less propitious.
Learn your history, Americans. The American Revolution was not the revolt of a mob. It was a carefully thought-out plan for a republic, based on ideas painstakingly argued by serious men in the process of creating what would become the freest, most prosperous nation in world history.
The much-ballyhooed “Arab Spring,” with mobs of men gang-raping American reporters, firing guns in the air and murdering their erstwhile dictators, is more akin to the pointless bloodletting of the French Revolution.
That godless antithesis to the founding of America is the primogenitor of the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution, Hitler’s Nazi Party, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s slaughter and America’s periodic mob uprisings, from Shays’ Rebellion to today’s union thugs in Madison, Wis., and Occupy Wall Street.
Americans did win freedom and greater individual rights with their revolution. By contrast, the French Revolution resulted in bestial savagery, a slaughter of all the revolution’s leaders, followed by Napoleon’s dictatorship, followed by another monarchy, and then finally something resembling an actual republic 80 years later.
Violent mob uprisings have never led to a functioning democratic republic.
13 September 2012
Barroso's EU "federation" will render Britain's EU membership irrelevant, and British politicians need to catch up with events
by Andrew Lilico
September 12, 2012
Over the long haul, the most politically significant speech made by any policy-maker in the past couple of weeks is unlikely to be those from the US presidential conventions or Draghi's announcement of the ECB's bond-buying attempt to save the euro. Instead, it will probably be European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso's state of the union address to the European Parliament. In that speech Barroso calls for an outright political union of EU members, which he refers to as a "federation of nation states".
You think you've heard this before, some vague long-term goal without immediate relevance? No! Barroso states that, in advance of the 2014 European Parliament elections - so in potentially little more than a year - the European Commission will produce explicit plans for the introduction of a new Treaty to formally establish such a federation. The aim appears to be to make the details of the new federation a central issue in the 2014 European Parliament elections - to give us all the chance to debate.
Barroso explicitly states that "This is not just a debate for the Euro area in its present membership. While deeper integration is indispensable for the Euro area and its members, this project should remain open to all Member States....No one will be forced to come along. And no one will be forced to stay out. The speed will not be dictated by the slowest or the most reluctant." Translation: If the British want to leave, that's fine with us.
For, in truth, the process of deeper integration, always inevitable flowing from the underlying principles of the European Union but significant accelerated by the euro crisis, is already rendering Britain's EU membership irrelevant. By December 2011, when Cameron sought some very minor repatriation of powers, Eurozone members, focused upon their own real problems, considered Britain's concerns irrelevant. It isn't even really that they disagree with us, any more. We aren't important enough to disagree with. There is no point in debating things with us to try to work out a common position. We simply don't matter to them.
Whereas in the 1980s and 1990s Britain was a key intellectual driving force in the establishment of the Single Market, in the devising of competition and trade rules, in the development of the Single Market in financial services - whereas then we steered events, now we are barely even passangers. By 2014 we will be watching the car go by.
The only real sense in which these events are a threat to Britain is that they mean we have totally missed the opportunity to renegotiate our position within the EU. The only real questions are whether (a) we'll be kicked out; (b) we'll leave; or (c) our EU membership will rapidly become so irrelevant that no-one will think it worth formally kicking us out and we won't formally bother to leave - we'll instead just have an odd semi-detached status. Perhaps, under the (c) scenario we might even be able to draw in other countries as partners with our same status? Maybe Canada could acquire the same status, relative to the Federation of European States, as Britain or maybe Britain and Canada could combine themselves in some relevant way (e.g. via a customs union) that then shared co-jointly in Britain's current EU status? There are many possibilities.
Either way, it now appears that comfortably before a 2015 General Election there will be concrete proposals, including a draft Treaty, to establish the EU formally as a confederacy. What status Britain wants, relative to that confederacy, is not an issue that the major parties will be able to avoid debating at the 2015 General Election. Indeed, there is every chance that that will be the single biggest political issue of the election. Will there be some referendum, for example, regarding our relationship with the European confederacy?
Yet British politicians are way behind the play. At Prime Minister's Questions, yesterday, there was not one single question on Barroso's potentially epochal proposals. Indeed, David Willetts declared, in response to Barroso's speech: "My heart sinks when I hear this…the last thing we need is another agonising debate on all this theology." As if what Barroso is proposing is some airy-fairy thing when what really counts are some "concrete", "practical", "day-to-day", "bread-and-butter" issues. What Barroso is proposing is what is absolutely essential if the Eurozone is not to disintegrate inducing depression and perhaps even revolutions and civil wars across half of Europe. It doesn't get much more "real world" and "practical" than that.
This is not some irrelevant abstraction, or a matter for decades hence that won't affect the politics of our lifetime. This is something that, unless the euro collapses, is coming to a cinema near you within eighteen months, and certainly well in advance of the next General Election. Our politicians need to think about how we should respond, debate it, and tell us where they stand. Well before the next General Election - indeed, probably before the 2014 European Parliament elections, only a year and a half away - the major parties will have to tell the British public their answers to the following:
- When there is a Federation of European Nations, will we want to cling on to semi-detached EU membership (assuming we won't be kicked out)?
- If we do, will we try to bring in others with us (e.g. Canada)?
- If we do not, and we leave the EU, how do we do it - e.g. do we need a referendum, or do we just leave?
- And if and when we leave - as we probably now shall, in the next Parliament - what should we do next?
Danger is always present, say three former diplomats
Daniel P. Finney
Sep 13, 2012
The attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya on Wednesday brought back haunting memories for Ken Quinn, the World Food Prize president and Dubuque native.
The year was 1997. Quinn, a U.S. Foreign Service member for 32 years, was ambassador to Cambodia. A rocket hit his home. Machine-gun fire ringed the house. Quinn and his wife piled their children on the floor and covered them with their bodies. The shooting went on for two hours.
The couple were “praying that the bullets that came in would hit us, not (the children),” Quinn said. He and his family survived that attack unscathed. Many friends and colleagues were not so lucky.
Wednesday, four people — including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens — were killed in an attack in Benghazi, Libya. The killings served as a painful reminder of the dangers faced by Foreign Service members in posts around the globe.
Quinn said he was either “wounded, shot at or under death threat under every foreign assignment I had. I woke up in Cambodia every day and my first thought was, ‘Who is going to try to kill us today? Who is going to blow up my embassy today?’ And that was my last thought at night.”
He added, “I’m not sure people know how widespread the threat to our people is. It’s everywhere. It’s immediate, and it’s very, very significant.”
Earlier in his career, Quinn served in Vietnam and the Philippines. He is the only civilian to earn the U.S. Army Air Medal for his combat helicopter missions in Vietnam. He received the U.S. Secretary of State Award for Heroism and Valor for his efforts to protect American citizens exposed to danger in Cambodia and for the four lifesaving rescues in which he participated in Vietnam.
What Quinn remembers most about his service, however, is those who didn’t make it home.
“What has the most impact is remembering the people that you knew who were killed that way — the people who served with you and were there one day and gone the next,” Quinn said in the aftermath of Wednesday’s tragedy in Libya. “There’s this sense of, ‘Oh, my gosh, if I had gone down the street at that time, that could have been me.’ You sort of wonder why I’m still here and that person is gone.”
The popular culture depiction of diplomats in fancy clothes at cocktail parties is dead wrong, even for ambassadors at low-threat posts such as Barbados, said Mary Kramer of West Des Moines, who served there as ambassador from 2004 to 2006.
Kramer, a former Republican state legislator and self-described unlikely diplomat, was appointed to the Barbados post by President George W. Bush. She spent most of her public service career in the Iowa General Assembly and a variety of Chamber of Commerce and economic development posts.
“I didn’t grow up through the Foreign Service,” she said. “It was a steep learning curve, and I felt more obligation to achieve than anything I’ve ever done.”
She cited the sign that President Harry Truman kept on his desk: “The buck stops here”
“When you are the ambassador,” she said, “if you’re not going to get it done with your team, it’s not going to get done.”
One of the most surprising aspects of ambassadorship, she said: learning security. Kramer, a native of Burlington who grew up in Iowa City, was used to going wherever she pleased whenever the spirit moved her.
As an ambassador, Kramer had a driver and rode in armored cars. She checked in at every destination and gave a full accounting of who was in her company. U.S. Marines and guards patrolled the grounds of her residence. Her bedroom was a fortified safe room. The U.S. built a new embassy during Kramer’s service, and security was a top priority.
“It is still a pleasure for me to this day … to be able to go into my garage and get into my car and drive myself wherever I want to go,” Kramer said. “I realize how much I missed that when that was not the way I was living my life.”
A low-threat post should not be mistaken for a “no-threat” post, said Chuck Larson, a political consultant from Cedar Rapids and former U.S. ambassador to Latvia. Larson served there in 2008, after a yearlong Army deployment to Iraq in 2004 and 2005 in a legal services role.
“The tentacles of terrorism reach throughout the world and into countries that one would assume would not be impacted by terrorism,” he said. “They can be more vulnerable targets.”
At the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C., are a series of big, black marble pillars. Fastened to the edifices are plaques with the names of those who died abroad while in the service of their country. The dates predate the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Causes of death include being lost at sea, suffering from malaria and being killed by Barbary pirates.
On one visit to the nation’s capital, Quinn studied the plaques and noted a disturbing trend.
“From 1775 to 1965, the list of the dead filled up maybe half a plaque,” he said. “From 1965 to today, that plaque is filled, and another plaque is filled and they’re working through a third plaque. So many people have now been killed in these insurgencies, in terrorism and all of the fighting. (Foreign service) has become incredibly dangerous.”
After Wednesday, the plaques will have four more names.
