Tag Archives: foreign policy

Obama on Israel

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Ann Bayefsky, writing for Fox News, has some thoughts on this.

President Obama told Jewish leaders in July 2009 that he was deliberately adopting a policy of putting daylight between America and Israel.

President Obama made Israeli settlements the key stumbling block in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Starting in 2009 he chose to castigate Israel publicly, often, and in extreme terms at the General Assembly and the Security Council.

President Obama treated Israel’s Prime Minister to a series of insulting snubs during his visit to the White House in March 2010.

President Obama cut a deal with Islamic states at a May 2010 meeting of parties to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty…agreed to help convene a 2012 international conference intended to pivot attention towards disarming Israel….

President Obama suggested in May 2011 that Israel use the 1967 borders as a starting point for negotiations—knowing full well that Israel considers those borders to be indefensible, and that agreements require the border issue to be determined by the parties themselves.

President Obama created a “global counter-terrorism forum” in September 2011 and invited eleven Muslim states to join—on the grounds that they were “on the front lines in the struggle against terrorism.”  At the insistence of Turkey, he then denied entry to Israel.

President Obama told French President Nicolas Sarkozy in November 2011—when he thought he was off-mike—that he regretted having to deal with Israel’s Prime Minister.

In August, Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dempsey said: “our clocks are ticking at different paces” and he wouldn’t be “complicit” in an Israeli effort to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.

In [Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s] words, the Iranian threat is “existential” only for Israel;  only Israel is “right in the bull’s eye.”   President Obama’s “pro-Israel” policy, therefore, is to wait past the point that the intended victim of the planned genocide believes is safe.

President Obama denied Prime Minister Netanyahu’s request to meet with him in September, despite the Iranian peril.

[O]n Monday night, at the final debate, Governor Romney answered the question he was asked about what poses the greatest threat to our national security with “a nuclear Iran,” while President Obama responded “terrorist networks.”

RTWT.

Weasel Words

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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.

Sometimes

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It’s important to note that the last two Americans to die in the terrorist attack on our Benghazi consulate weren’t killed until several hours after the attack started.  Gary Bernsten, retired CIA officer, had this on our real-time response to the attack (i.e., while our State Department officials were listening to the attack-in-progress*) and this administration’s decision to take no meaningful response during the several hours it was going in:

You find a way to make this happen.  There isn’t a plan for every single engagement.  Sometimes you have to be able to make adjustments.  They made zero adjustments; they just stood and they watched, and our people died.

It’s also sometimes necessary to act entirely ad hoc.  But it takes a measure of courage and a willingness to run risks and a willingness to step into the unknown to do these things.

 

*This is from the State Department brief on 9 Oct:

I neglected to mention from the top that that agent from the top of this incident, or the very beginning of this incident, has been on the phone. He had called the quick reaction security team, he had called the Libyan authorities, he had called the Embassy in Tripoli, and he had called Washington. He had them all going to ask for help. And he remained in the TOC.

And from the Chicago Sun-Times:

We now know that the State Department had real-time communications with Benghazi during the attack….

Three Things

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In preparation for tonight’s third Presidential debate, this time focusing on foreign policy, James Rosen, of Fox News fame, suggested via The Wall Street Journal, three questions to be explored concerning the Benghazi fiasco during which an American Ambassador and three of his fellows were murdered in a terrorist attack.

Rosen’s first question is this:

[T]he facts of the “pre” period before the attacks will tell us how high up the chain, and in which agencies, fateful decisions were made about security precautions for the consulate and annex in Benghazi.  We also stand to learn how the planning for the attacks could have been put in motion without being detected until too late.

We know that the Obama administration has claimed ignorance of the facts (in Vice President Joe Biden’s case, explicitly so).  We know, also, that Charlene Lamb, the Assistant Secretary of State for International Programs, Bureau of Diplomatic Security, in sworn testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, averred that the right amount of security was in place “as agreed” prior to the attack.  We also know from security correspondence, from the late Ambassador Stevens’ correspondence, and from the sworn testimony before that same House committee by the in-country security leadership that multiple requests for enhanced security had been rejected in the months and weeks just preceding the attack.

Rosen’s second question is this, concerning the hours of the attack itself [link added]:

A State Department briefing on Oct 9 offered an account that was riveting but incomplete.  When all of the facts of these hours are compiled, we will have a truer picture of the tactical capabilities of al Qaeda and its affiliates in North Africa.  We will also learn what really happened to Ambassador Stevens that night….

We know, for instance, that there was no crowd of protestors, much less rioters, near the consulate in the hours preceding the terrorist attack, both from that 9 Oct briefing and from video taken from the consulate.  Yet, in addition to Rosen’s capabilities question, there arises the matter of the administration, for two weeks, insisting that the attack was the result of rioting over a YouTube video, even though information to the contrary was available, both during and within hours after the attack.

Rosen’s third question is this, concerning that period of days following the terrorist attack:

[The time frame] stretches eight days—from 3:40 pm on Sep 11, when the consulate was first rocked by gunfire and explosions, through the morning of Sep 19, when Matthew G Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, publicly testified before the Senate that Benghazi was a terrorist attack.

We have the above strong indications—from on-scene—that the attack was a terrorist assault, and we have Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s false claim of having termed it so the day after in a Rose Garden speech.  We also have his UN Ambassador Susan Rice four days later going on five different Sunday talk shows and claiming that the attack was a protest against that video and not a terrorist attack.  This claim was repeated by various members of Obama’s immediate staff over the next several days, and it was even repeated by Obama himself at his UN speech nearly a week after Olsen’s testimony.

It’ll also be interesting to see whether, in the aftermath of Candy Crowley’s interference in the second debate, the moderator of this debate, Bob Schieffer, will allow the questions to be explored, and if so, whether Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney will do so (and if so, whether he’ll do so with less of the clumsiness he displayed in the second debate).

Lies of the Democrats, Part 5

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This is Part 5 of my series on the lies told by Democrats during the present administration’s term in office.  As I said earlier, I’m not concerned with his broken campaign promises so much as I am with the dishonesty while in office.

There’s this from State in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on our Consulate in Benghazi that included the murders of our Ambassador to Libya and three of his staff.  Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice on 16 Sep, five days after the attack:

Putting together the best information that we have available to us today, our current assessment is that what happened in Benghazi was in fact initially a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired hours before in Cairo, almost a copycat of the demonstrations against our facility in Cairo, which were prompted, of course, by the video….

Yet we know from sworn testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee the day prior to the Vice Presidential debate last Thursday that the intel community had concluded that it was a terrorist attack within 24 hours—four days before Rice’s claim.

Next, in that Vice Presidential debate, Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate Joe Biden said in all seriousness that the reason security for the Ambassador, or for the consulate in Benghazi, had not been beefed up was because no such requests for added support had been made.

Yet we know from sworn testimony at that same hearing that repeated requests for additional personnel and equipage had been repeatedly denied.  LtCol Andrew Wood, former head of our Tripoli embassy’s military security, expressed his frustration at not only not getting the additions he’d been requesting but getting the assets he already had materially reduced:

We were fighting a losing battle. We couldn’t even keep what we had[.]

Eric Nordstrom, erstwhile head of regional security for State, testified that he asked for a team of 12 diplomatic security agents to replace departing commandos, but he was told “you’re asking for the sun, the moon, and the stars,” and his request was denied.

Now, assume Biden is telling the truth on this, that he wasn’t lying.  What does that say about how isolated from what’s actually happening in—forget the world—Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s own administration that his Vice President can be so uninformed?