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1 Bob Dillon  Sat, Oct 20, 2012 8:23:29pm

When Petraeus chimes in it will be more interesting. If he does.

2 Gus  Sat, Oct 20, 2012 8:24:51pm

re: #1 Bob Dillon

When Petraeus chimes in it will be more interesting. If he does.

Petraeus is running this show. We should feel confident. He helped save the Iraq war.

3 Bob Dillon  Sat, Oct 20, 2012 8:48:14pm

re: #2 Gus

Bingo. Now if he will.

4 Gus  Sat, Oct 20, 2012 8:49:25pm

re: #3 Bob Dillon

Bingo. Now if he will.

It would be awesome.

5 maryatexitzero  Sat, Oct 20, 2012 8:50:09pm

At this point both parties have settled into trench warfare and each side will stick to their stories no matter what, but it's worth noting that on September 12th, Reuters reported that:

"Libya's Deputy Interior Minister Wanis Al-Sharif said U.S. staff were rushed to a Benghazi safe house after the initial attack on the consulate and an evacuation plane with U.S. commando units then arrived from Tripoli to evacuate them from the safe house.
It was supposed to be a secret place and we were surprised the armed groups knew about it. There was shooting," Sharif said. Two U.S. personnel were killed there, he said. Two other people were killed at the main consular building and between 12 and 17 wounded."

It was supposed to be a secret place, yet the armed groups knew about it. This is an indication that the attack was planned with inside or stolen information. Add to that:

1. the fact that the Embassy in Cairo was also attacked (Salafists like to coordinate their attacks)

2. The United States announced that it was planning to designate the Haqqani network (the mafia/terrorist group that works with corrupt sunni regimes to manage and profit from al qaeda) as a terror network

3. The Haqqani network and al Qaeda said that they planned to retaliate for this (without mentioning this stupid movie)

4. Attacks occurred as promised.

I hope that we are working on a proper retaliation against the people who launched this attack and their friends. It's not likely that we are because this election has been the media's only priority for more than a year (If there was a Earth-destroying meteor hurtling towards us the media would ask how it affects the Romney and Obama campaigns) but if we did actually care about what's happening abroad, the Obama administration would have reasons to keep some things quiet. Unfortunately, I can't see any way in which this muddle-headed response to these attacks helps anyone.

Proof that it was planned, information about the motives behind this attack was published and read around the world on and before September 12th. Doesn't Ambassador Rice read the news?

6 Gus  Sat, Oct 20, 2012 8:52:20pm

re: #5 maryatexitzero

Actually. The CIA corroborates Rice's account. Which is expected.

7 maryatexitzero  Sat, Oct 20, 2012 8:55:33pm

Well, she's making them look like dopes, but I guess they want to keep their jobs..

8 Tiny Alien Kitties are Watching You  Sat, Oct 20, 2012 11:33:37pm

re: #5 maryatexitzero

Apparently the safe house was not really all that difficult to find, its only a mile and a half from the consulate and an entire convey of vehicles going there in the middle of the night from the consulate is what brought the attackers attention to it.

The attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was just the beginning of a terrifying night for the Americans inside. Libyan officials told us their forces helped evacuate 32 Americans out of the consulate as the attackers torched and stormed the compound.

A Libyan commander told CBS News that a convoy of 22 vehicles, two of them armored, raced from the U.S. consulate down a road to a safe house a mile and a half away...

...CBS News asked the deputy interior minister how the attackers apparently knew where the safe house was. His answer was there are spies everywhere. He admitted there was a possibility of spies within his own security forces. But he added a convoy of 22 vehicles moving through Bengahzi that night at high speed would not have gone unnoticed.
More...

The convoy was not "high speed" as stated above though, and it came under assault even during the mile and a half trip, as has been stated by the reports from the security field agents present.

Agents pile into an armored vehicle with Smith’s body and leave through the main gate. They face immediate fire. Crowds and groups of men block two different routes to the security compound. Heavy traffic means they are traveling only about 15 mph and trying not to attract attention. On a narrow street they reach a group of men who signal for them to enter a compound. They sense an attack and speed away, taking heavy fire from AK-47 machine guns at a distance of only 2 feet and hand grenades thrown against and under the car. Two tires are blown out.

They speed past another crowd of men and onto a main street and across a grassy median into opposing traffic. The agents drive against traffic, eventually reaching their compound. Security gets into firing positions around the compound and on the roof. They take more gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades intermittently for several hours.
More...

The evacuation convoy led the attackers directly to the "safehouse" which was already most likely known to the attackers anyway because it housed the 7 man quick reaction security force, the CIA annex security team (it's kind of hard to really hide an American security team in the middle of an Libyan city).

The safehouse was under sporadic attack almost from the moment the evacuees from the consulate arrived, and then came under concentrated attack when the evacuation team and Libyan militia forces arrived and sought to evacuate them. The attackers did not want to let our people get away, or failing that, to at least inflict some casualties amongst them.

No nefarious plot by Al-Qaeda is needed to explain anything that happened that night and neither is a lot of advanced planning. Reading the news is one thing, understanding what you have read enough to parse out the speculation and inevitable first round mistakes by the media is another.

9 researchok  Sun, Oct 21, 2012 12:24:45am

Whatever happened, it wasn't the way anyone would have us believe.

Time will tell- maybe.

10 maryatexitzero  Sun, Oct 21, 2012 5:42:22am

re: #8 Tiny Alien Kitties are Watching You

From the article you linked above:

Just as the U.S. extraction team of commandos arrived to take the Americans to the airport, the house came under heavy fire. It was intense, deadly and accurate.
Everywhere you look on this rooftop, there's evidence of what must have been a ferocious fight. There's damage from automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, and even mortars.
The precise mortar strikes on the house suggest those who launched them knew exactly where to aim.
Clearly, Americans fighting back from this rooftop were hit. Our escort, Libyan commander Abdu Salam, gathered two bloodstained American flak jackets and a helmet to handover to U.S. investigators for evidence.
Libyan officials say it's clear from the second assault on the safe house that those behind the attack were determined that no Americans made it out alive.

You say: “The attackers did not want to let our people get away, or failing that, to at least inflict some casualties amongst them.”

Well, if you’ve brought rocket propelled grenades, mortars and automatic weapons to a your ‘spontaneous’ protest, I suppose you might want to prevent our people from getting away.

About the ‘spontaneous’ protests around the Middle East. They were, like the cartoon riots, incited by the usual suspects

Not only is the movie unwatchable, it was barely watched when its 14-minute “trailer” (which may or may not be the whole movie itself) was first uploaded to YouTube in June. But then along came a Saudi sheikh, Khaled Abdullah, who decided to broadcast it on September 8th on the Saudi state-owned Salafist TV station Al Nas, which is carried on the Egyptian state-owned satellite network NileSat. Were it not for Abdullah, as Jess Hill of the Global Mail put it, the video “would have remained an unwatched piece of trashy propaganda.” But of course Abdullah must have known that in advance.

Within about 48 hours of the Al Nas broadcast, the protests kicked off, first in Cairo, where 350 Egyptians—most of them football hooligans mixed with self-declared Bin Ladenists—stormed the US Embassy, tore down the Stars and Stripes and replaced it with a black flag bearing the Muslim Shahada creed—a flag often associated with jihadists. The crowds were implicitly cheered on (in Arabic) by the newly elected Muslim Brotherhood even as its representatives condemned the violence (in English). There also appears to have been some collusion between the rioters and the Brotherhood. Mahmoud Salem, a popular Egyptian blogger and early Mubarak opponent, says a friend of his who works at the US Embassy noticed that at 4 p.m. on September 11th, “the police and the army forces protecting the embassy had vanished, followed by the attack that you all watched on your plasma TV screens.” Worth noting, however, is how small the original Egyptian demonstration was: only about 2,000 in a country where many times that number easily fill the capital streets for political protests.

Libya was a different story. There, a cheap piece of Orientalist minstrelsy became a smokescreen for al-Qaeda-linked Salafists to strike the US Consulate in Benghazi, killing four American diplomats including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, in what US officials are calling an opportunist terrorist attack, if not a pre-planned mission.

After Egypt and Libya, “rage” rallies rippled from Bangladesh to London. Among the worst hit was the US Embassy compound in Tunis, which was raided, its windows broken and trees set on fire. Again, the US flag was replaced by the black Shahada flag.

11 Obdicut  Sun, Oct 21, 2012 5:43:30am

re: #10 maryatexitzero

Why are people getting so fixated on the word 'spontaneous'?

12 maryatexitzero  Sun, Oct 21, 2012 5:45:19am

"No nefarious plot by Al-Qaeda is needed to explain anything that happened that night and neither is a lot of advanced planning."

It wasn’t an al Qaeda plot because the Saudi/Salafist/Haqqani network isn’t al Qaeda any more. The franchise has been rebranded as Ansar al Sharia.

There is a new trend sweeping the world of jihadism. Instead of adopting unique names, groups increasingly prefer to call themselves ansar, Arabic for "supporters." In many cases, they style themselves Ansar al-Sharia -- supporters of Islamic law -- emphasizing their desire to establish Islamic states. Yet despite the fact that these groups share a name and an ideology, they lack a unified command structure or even a bandleader like the central al Qaeda command (or what's left of it), thought to be based in Pakistan...

...The rise of these Ansar al-Sharia groups points to an end of al Qaeda's unipolar global jihad of the past decade and a return to a multipolar jihadosphere, similar to the 1990s.

If the party in power wants to stay in power, they need to respond to these attacks, apologize for wasting our time with this transparent spin and keep up with their multipolar jihadosphere news...

13 maryatexitzero  Sun, Oct 21, 2012 5:46:52am

re: #11 Obdicut

Irony?

14 Obdicut  Sun, Oct 21, 2012 5:49:34am

re: #13 maryatexitzero

Irony?

No, seriously, you're talking about 'spin' and the like, and I'm just really baffled by where you see it, and why you're parsing words half to death.

Like the way you just sailed past the rebuttal to your conspiracy story that the safehouse was hard to find and therefore that shows that this attack was deeply planned-- there was a big convoy of vehicles that went towards the safehouse, and they were attacked en route, so there's no conspiracy story necessary to explain the attack on the safehouse.

It's kind of like you didn't read the article at the top, either.

15 maryatexitzero  Sun, Oct 21, 2012 6:13:43am

re: #14 Obdicut

Most of our news outlets represent partisan viewpoints. Fox news is openly right, MSNBC is openly left and others (moderately or not-so moderately) lean to one side or the other. These news outlets don't usually directly lie about the facts, but they usually publish the half of the facts that will support their partisan viewpoint. So, if you only read MSNBC, you only get half the news. Same for Fox.

When these news outlets disagree with each other, they present their half + generally agreed upon talking points and the other side does the same thing. They then spend hours/days/months/years arguing past each other, which isn't bad work if you're paid for it, but if you're not, it's a waste of time.

I can say that you sailed past proof that the new Salafist Ansar franchise is a worldwide organization that has a long history of arranging these sorts of attacks using these sorts of weapons and I can point out that the Libyan people themselves were so enraged by this organized attack that they stormed the Salafist headquarters (which was probably a more effective response than anything we've done so far) but we probably would still be arguing past each other.

16 Obdicut  Sun, Oct 21, 2012 6:27:22am

re: #15 maryatexitzero

I have no idea what your post has to do with mine.

You conjectured that the attack must have depended on some deep intel because they knew where the safehouse was. It was pointed out to you that a convoy of 22 vehicles went to the safehouse, and were attacked en route. This is an easy and simple explanation for why the safehouse was attacked.

I completely agree that it was an organized bunch of militants who launched this attack. I don't see why there is incredulity that the attack was launched in response to a video that insulted Islam and Mohammed-- that's generally the kind of thing that violent Islamic terrorists do, is respond to free speech with violence.

There seems to me to be a really bizarre fascination with semantic debate on this, on whether Rice saying 'spontaneous' is some huge fuckup. I don't get it. First of all, she was talking about the intelligence the CIA gave her-- it's not because they want to keep their jobs, it's in their talking points for the day that she read-- and second of all she said that a demonstration was hijacked by organized Islamists.

17 maryatexitzero  Sun, Oct 21, 2012 6:44:30am

re: #16 Obdicut

I'd guess that people object to using the word 'spontaneous' to describe these attacks because we've known for years that these protests are manufactured and produced by Sunni-Salafist interests. If a movie or burning Koran doesn't already exist, they will make one up. The "World Affairs" article I linked to (above) describes this industry pretty well.

[Link: www.worldaffairsjournal.org...]

18 Obdicut  Sun, Oct 21, 2012 6:48:31am

re: #17 maryatexitzero

Spontaneous for the people they incite, not spontaneous for them, then. Still don't get why this is some big deal, when Rice clearly said that organized militants were involved.

And again: Do you get that there is no need to invent a conspiracy theory about how the militants found the safehouse? That a convoy of 22 vehicles driving the wrong way down the street is pretty easy to follow, or have someone tell you where they went?

19 maryatexitzero  Sun, Oct 21, 2012 5:57:52pm

It's hard to spontaneously follow even a large convoy when you have to assemble, carry and fire (with extreme accuracy and ferorcity) automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and even mortars.

The fact that Ansar/al Qaeda organizes coordinated terrorist attacks against American targets can hardly be called a conspiracy

20 garhighway  Mon, Oct 22, 2012 8:09:56am

re: #19 maryatexitzero

It's hard to spontaneously follow even a large convoy when you have to assemble, carry and fire (with extreme accuracy and ferorcity) automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and even mortars.

The fact that Ansar/al Qaeda organizes coordinated terrorist attacks against American targets can hardly be called a conspiracy

How hard is it to grab your AK47 and cellphone, hop on your motorbike, and trail a convoy?


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