Daily Archives: 24 October 2012

Weasel Words

Posted on by
Reply

Or breathtaking incompetence.

Fox News is reporting that the Obama administration is changing, again, its story about what happened to our Libyan consulate in Benghazi.   Now they’re reverting to insisting that the terrorist attack was a response to, and spread of, the Cairo riots at our Egyptian embassy and the burning of our American flag flying above it.  These are riots which Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s minions also are laying off to a YouTube video.

Now the White House is saying that the video sparked the planned, organized, coordinated, three-pronged assault on our consulate.

All the while acknowledging, given the evidence that’s been released since that attack, that

there was no actual protest in Benghazi at the time of the attack and that “extremist” elements were likely involved.

So now Obama’s folks are trying to manufacture an amalgamation of, on the one hand, the…flawed…account our UN Ambassador Susan Rice gave on five Sunday talk shows and which Obama frequently repeated through his Press  Secretary Jay Carney at his noon press conferences that the attack was a “spontaneous” response to a video and, on the other hand,  real-time and within-24-hours reports, Senate testimony by National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew G Olsen in mid-Sep, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s later claim that it was a coordinated terror attack.

Now it’s…what…an organized and fairly complex terrorist attack ginned up in response to a video and “rioting” elsewhere?

The intelligence official who spoke to Fox News about this on condition of anonymity (because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly (which raises its own questions about his integrity and the reliability of his claims)) said that that everything is subject to change.

You bet.

It Doesn’t Get Any Clearer Than This

Posted on by
Reply

Ustad Ahmad Farooq, al Qaeda’s spokesman for Pakistan, has issued a statement, addressed to his “beloved Pakistani brothers and sisters.”  That statement says, in part,

Nobody spoke up for thousands of such Malalas who became victims of military operations, and nobody protested for them on the roads.  But these circles made so much noise when we targeted this girl who made of fun of jihad, the veil and other Islamic values on behest of the British Broadcasting Corporation. … I may ask why? Why is Malala’s blood more important than those killed by the army?  The attack on Malala has been termed a national tragedy, but no one pays any attention when…the army targets gems of the Ummah who come to Khorasan to wage jihad from Arab lands and other places of world.  Why these double standards?

I’ll ignore the…inaccuracy…of the BBC’s role in Malala Yousufzai’s push for educating herself and educating other girls, and women, generally.

Threat Matrix (the above link) also cites SITE Intelligence Group‘s translation of Farooq’s statement as including Farooq’s “puzzlement” over why “these circles” ignore women who die due to poverty and those women (and children) killed during military operations.

In civilized nations, though (and here I include Pakistan), the people and their governments work hard to alleviate that poverty so that all—women, children, men—can lead safer, more confortable lives.  In civilized nations, the people, their military, and their governments work very hard to minimize deaths from collateral damage, as well as work very hard to minimize collateral damage to real estate and other facilities when battles are fought.  They mourn the deaths, they hold accountable those responsible for the collateral damage and deaths that could have been avoided with more careful targeting.

These are accidental, and they are generally within our power to minimize, if not to avoid altogether.  They are not the result of deliberate acts.

But al Qaeda (in Pakistan, and everywhere else) insists, through Farooq, that the deliberate murder of a particular child, on the one hand, is of a piece with these accidents and conditions that civilized peoples work tirelessly to alleviate, and on the other hand is entirely justifiable as a deliberate act.  Al Qaeda insists, through Farooq, that those who “come to Khorasan to wage jihad”—that is who go to Khorasan for training in the techniques of murdering the Mulalas and any other innocents they can reach, for training in the mass murder of Americans, Spanish, British, Pakistanis, Afghanis, of anyone—are not legitimate targets: we are not to defend ourselves.

Can any civilized person have any doubt left that al Qaeda—that terrorist gangs everywhere—must be destroyed?