U.S. ambassador to Libya killed in rocket attack - Page 43

On September 16 2012 22:36 Biff The Understudy wrote:

No you really don't get it.

First of all black people situation improved because they fought. It's not white people who started protesting because a minority of white people were oppressing the blacks. It's Martin Luther King, it's the Black Panthers, although their choice of violence was regrettable, and civil rights movements that made the situation change. Not your average "good" white man. White men didn't care for most of them.

So your analogy is not only bad, it's plainly revisionist. Anyway.

My point is simple. There are something like a billion Muslims in the world.

The fact that some fuckers belonging to a branch of Islam that you don't belong to, that live 10 000 km away from you in a post revolutionary country that you have never even visited killed an ambassador in a riot is none of your fucking problem if you are an average moderate Muslim.

Do you make a protest when Americans kill or torture people in Afghanistan or Irak?

Did you protest after the Abu Ghraib scandal?
Did you protest when we have seen these helicopter soldier shooting civilians for fun?
Did you protest when american soldiers pissed on dead bodies?
Did you protest about waterboarding and use of torture by american army?
Do you protest when Israel kill palestinian or demolish their house?
Do you protest ... etc?

No. And you are perfectly right.

Why? Because the fact that some christian or some white people kill someone is not your fucking fault and has nothing to do with you. You are not responsible for what some extremist that happen to be of the same religion / ethnicity / whatever than you do.


Oh and yeah, in my playbook, far right people are barbarians. Le Pen is a barbarian, Santorum is a barbarian, Wilder is a barbarian. Just like those salafist idiots are barbarians too.

To explain you why, I'll leave you with one comment from Levy Strauss:

"The barbarian is the one who believes in barbary." And if you see a paradox, think again.

On September 21 2012 07:27 NesquiKGG wrote:



you're my fu**in hero! thank god for you!

A Libyan Islamist militia was swept out of the eastern city of Benghazi in a popular protest against the armed groups that ran into the early hours of Saturday morning, Reuters witnesses said.

On September 22 2012 12:25 ticklishmusic wrote:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/22/us-protests-benghazi-idUSBRE88L02A20120922



I'm glad this happened. They went out of their way to prove there's some good in this shitty world.

Railways Minister Ghulam Ahmad Bilour told reporters that he would pay the reward for the "sacred duty" out of his own pocket.

"I announce today that this blasphemer who has abused the holy prophet, if somebody will kill him, I will give that person a prize of $100,000," the minister said.

Authorities in Libya have announced a decision to dissolve all militias and armed groups that did not come under the authority of the state after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, state media reports.

The announcement was made by Mohammed al-Megarief, the head of the Libyan national assembly, late on Saturday during a press conference.

"We're disbanding all the armed groups that do not fall under the authority of the government. We're also banning the use of violence and carrying of weapons in public places. It's also illegal to set up checkpoints. We've instructed the appropriate government agencies to ensure that these directives are implemented," he said.

The authorities also decided to put in place an "operations room" in Benghazi bringing together the army, forces of the interior ministry and defence ministry brigades comprising former rebels.

They have called on the army to impose its authority by putting its own officers at the head of brigades born out of the 2011 revolt, which escalated into civil war and toppled Gaddafi's government.

The announcement of the ban came hours after two armed groups said they would lay down their weapons and leave their bases in the eastern city of Derna.

Derna residents say five military camps are now empty, after Abu Slim and Ansar al-Sharia, the two main militias in the area, withdrew.

"Abu Slim had three camps and Ansar al-Sharia had two. So it's five. Empty. All empty," Siraj Shennib, a 29-year-old linguistics professor who has been part of protests against the militia, told the Reuters news agency by telephone.

The Abu Slim and Ansar al-Sharia decisions were said to have been motivated by events in Benghazi on Friday.

Prior to the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi late in the evening on Sept. 11, there was no protest outside the compound, a senior State Department official confirmed today, contradicting initial administration statements suggesting that the attack was an opportunistic reaction to unrest caused by an anti-Islam video.

In a conference call with reporters Tuesday, two senior State Department officials gave a detailed accounting of the events that lead to the death of Amb. Chris Stevens and three other Americans. The officials said that prior to the massive attack on the Benghazi compound by dozens of militants carrying heavy weaponry, there was no unrest outside the walls of the compound and no protest that anyone inside the compound was aware of.

In fact, Stevens hosted a series of meetings on the compound throughout the day, ending with a meeting with a Turkish diplomat that began at 7:30 in the evening, and all was quiet in the area.

"The ambassador walked guests out at 8:30 or so; there was nobody on the street. Then at 9:40 they saw on the security cameras that there were armed men invading the compound," a senior State Department official said. "Everything is calm at 8:30 pm, there is nothing unusual. There had been nothing unusual during the day outside."

The State Department says it never concluded that an attack that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya was simply a protest gone awry, a statement that places the Obama administration’s own foreign policy arm in sync with Republicans.

That extraordinary message, appearing to question the administration’s initial description of the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, came in a department briefing Tuesday — a day before a hearing on diplomatic security in Libya was to be held by the Republican-led House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The committee’s chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has accused the State Department of turning aside pleas from its diplomats in Libya to increase security in the months and weeks before Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans died in the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi. One scheduled witness Wednesday, Eric Nordstrom, is the former chief security officer for U.S. diplomats in Libya who told the committee his pleas for more security were ignored.

Briefing reporters Tuesday ahead of the hearing, department officials were asked about the administration’s initial — and since retracted — explanation linking the violence to protests over an American-made anti-Muslim video circulating on the Internet. One official responded, “That was not our conclusion.” He called it a question for “others” to answer, without specifying.

Senate Democrats joined Republicans Thursday in questioning the Obama administration's handling of the fatal Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya and why the administration refused for days to acknowledge that it was a terrorist attack linked to al Qaeda.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., circulated a bipartisan letter addressed to Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides, asking for an "accounting of the attacks against U.S. missions in Egypt, Libya and Yemen," according to a copy obtained by The Washington Examiner.

The lawmakers are also demanding to know whether the administration had any advance warnings of the Libyan attack and, if so, whether it had shared that information with U.S. personnel on the ground.

President Obama came under intense criticism because the administration's explanation for what happened at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi kept changing. For days, the administration insisted to the public and Congress that the attack was a spontaneous reaction to an American-made anti-Muslim video. As recently as Tuesday, in an address to the United Nations, Obama was blaming the video for inciting the attack.

But as evidence came to light showing that mortar rounds had been fired into the U.S. compound and that the attack had been carefully planned, the administration's explanation changed. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton first suggested in a high-level meeting at the U.N. that there could be a link between al Qaeda and "other violent extremists" and the attack in Benghazi.

On Thursday, the Pentagon confirmed that the attack was the work of a terrorist organization and not related to the anti-Muslim video.

"It was a terrorist attack," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said at a news conference.

The Obama administration clearly had been hoping that the Libya attack would fade in the public's consciousness, said James Carafano, a defense expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. With congressional Democrats now also questioning how events unfolded, however, that's not likely to happen.

"Their hope was that on Monday, when the facts started to come out, everyone would have moved on, and that was a miscalculation on their part," Carafano said. "The one thing you can't do is have people intentionally lying to Congress or withholding information from Congress and then think you are not going to pay a price for that."

The Obama administration's lies about the Benghazi attack continue to unravel. The President would like us to believe that he and his spokespeople have merely passed on the best intelligence they had as it evolved. But the State Department said yesterday that it never concluded that there was a protest outside the consulate.

For seven days after the attack, the Obama administration clung to its YouTube protest fiction. Then, the White House claimed to have received new information that the attack was terrorism, planned in advance and unrelated to a protest. Yesterday's State Department admission reveals this "evolving intelligence" claim to be yet another lie.

Within 24 hours of the attack, U.S. intelligence suspected that it was terrorism linked to Al Qaeda. At the time, the Obama administration was still claiming it was merely a spontaneous protest that got out of hand.

By September 13, the President had internally designated the attack an act of terrorism so that he would have the legal authority to mobilize military and intelligence assets. But, for the next five days, his spokespeople, most notably Press Secretary Jay Carney and U.N. Ambassador Rice, continued to insist that the attack started as a protest.

The State Department is now saying that, like the intelligence agencies, it never concluded that the attack grew out of a protest. So why did the Obama administration continue to tell the protest lie to the public for a week after the attack?

I'll tell you why.

The President would have been in a tough spot if he had admitted at the time of the attack and murder of a U.S. ambassador that it was Al Qaeda-linked terrorism. After all, he had, only five days earlier, boasted at the Democratic National Convention that "Al-Qaeda is on the path to defeat."

A disaster like the premeditated slaying of a U.S. ambassador would also call into question Obama's entire Libyan adventure. In truth, the very act of toppling Gaddafi made the region less safe, less stable, and less manageable. And responsibility for that lies solely with President Obama, since he failed even to ask Congress for authorization to attack Libya.

To avoid the indignity of being called to account for his own failed policies, the President and his staff concocted a lie. It was a plausible lie, though it rested on the absurd stereotype that Middle Eastern mobs carry mortars with them. But it was a lie and it was designed to direct the public's attentions away from Obama's own failures.

On October 19 2012 18:03 zalz wrote:
I don't entirely follow.

I thought it was already known that the attack was not connected to the protest? Are they suggesting there was no protest in the first place, only an attack?

Then who was dragging his corpse through the streets?

On October 19 2012 18:22 solidbebe wrote:

I think people were trying to get him medical attention, not dragging him around.

No you really don't get it.

First of all black people situation improved because they fought. It's not white people who started protesting because a minority of white people were oppressing the blacks. It's Martin Luther King, it's the Black Panthers, although their choice of violence was regrettable, and civil rights movements that made the situation change. Not your average "good" white man. White men didn't care for most of them.

So your analogy is not only bad, it's plainly revisionist. Anyway.

US security flaws exposed in Libya
The US Department of State has known for decades that inadequate security at embassies and consulates worldwide could lead to tragedy, but senior officials ignored the warnings and left some of America's most dangerous diplomatic posts vulnerable to attack, according to an internal government report obtained exclusively by Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit.

The report by an independent panel of five security and intelligence experts describes how the September 11, 2012, attack on the US Special Mission in Benghazi, Libya, which left Ambassador J Christopher Stevens and three other Americans dead, exploited the State Department's failure to address serious security concerns at diplomatic facilities in high-risk areas.

Among the most damning assessments, the panel concluded that the State Department's failure to identify worsening conditions in Libya and exemptions from security regulations at the US Special Mission contributed to the tragedy in Benghazi. Undersecretary for Management Patrick Kennedy approved using Benghazi as a temporary post despite its significant vulnerabilities, according to an internal State Department document included with the report.

NEW YORK -- Security officer Dylan Davies admitted this weekend that he lied to a superior in September 2012 about his whereabouts the night of the Benghazi attack. But Davies says his latest version of events, told on CBS' "60 Minutes" and in a new memoir, are true.

“I am just a little man against some big people here,” Davies told The Daily Beast in an interview published Saturday, suggesting he was the victim of a smear campaign.

Davies’ account of the night four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed in a terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi has been challenged since he appeared Oct. 27 on “60 Minutes,” in an interview CBS billed as “the first eyewitness account from a westerner” on the ground that night.

The Washington Post revealed on Thursday that Davies once provided a different account of the events. The Post reported that Davies previously claimed to have never reached the compound on the night of the attack, saying he only arrived the day after. But in the version he relayed on “60 Minutes,” as well as in a new memoir published under a pseudonym, Davies arrives at the compound as the battle rages on and tangles with a terrorist.

Davies' admission that he changed his story raises several questions for "60 Minutes." Did the program know Davies once told a superior that he didn't reach the compound? If not, will the network revisit the story? And if so, how did "60 Minutes" vet its eyewitness to be sure he's now providing an accurate version of events?

A spokesman for the program, Kevin Tedesco, stood by the Davies interview when reached by The Washington Post. Tedesco has not responded to repeated requests from The Huffington Post to discuss it.

In the possible first sign of a major climbdown, "60 Minutes" announced Thursday night that it is "reviewing" its controversial report on the Benghazi attacks after finding what reports say is further evidence that one of its main sources changed his account of events repeatedly.

The CBS program came under repeated criticism after it was revealed that the source—a security officer named Dylan Davies who provided correspondent Lara Logan with an eye-popping, made-for-TV account of the tragic events in Benghazi—had previously lied about his whereabouts on the night of the attack, throwing into question whether the story he told to "60 Minutes" could be trusted.

"60 Minutes" initially defended itself, with the show's executive producer Jeff Fager telling HuffPost's Michael Calderone that he was "proud" of the report and Logan attributing the scrutiny to political partisanship.

However, on Thursday night, the show issued a statement saying that it had found new information. Using Davies' pseudonym, Morgan Jones, "60 Minutes" said it was looking to see whether it had been lied to:

60 Minutes has learned of new information that undercuts the account told to us by Morgan Jones of his actions on the night of the attack on the Benghazi compound.
We are currently looking into this serious matter to determine if he misled us, and if so, we will make a correction.