Transterrestrial Musings

1. 
   B Lewis

   November 16, 2012, 5:03 pm | #

   Questioning the president’s honesty be raciss.
2. 
   Gregg

   November 17, 2012, 5:48 am | #

   If course Obama knew. And at one point he argued that he told everyone it was terrorism ….until he told us it was not.

   Their basic technique is to give squishy statements that can be interpreted in a myriad of ways…and even brazen self-contradiction because they know that with a slave press, they can get away with it.

   • 
     ken anthony

     November 17, 2012, 8:20 am | #

     Even those in the media that would like to pin him down are falling for it. At what point do we call BS? “You Lie, Mr. President.”
3. 
   T.L. James

   November 17, 2012, 10:26 am | #

   But, but…Bush! WMD!

   Squirrel!
4. 
   Dave

   November 17, 2012, 4:00 pm | #

   “The recently resigned spy chief explained that references to terrorist groups suspected of carrying out the violence were removed from the public explanation of what caused the attack so as not to tip off the groups that the U.S. intelligence community was on their trail, according to lawmakers who attended the private briefings.

   “Petraeus also said it initially was unclear whether militants infiltrated a demonstration to cover their attack.”

   I fail to see a scandal here.

   • 
     Paul Milenkovic

     November 17, 2012, 7:22 pm | #

     Your remark reminds me of David Hackworth publishing a US Army manual on Viet Cong tactics to see a “Classified” label slapped on it that he couldn’t get it out the troops in Vietnam.

     “Why is this classified? To hide this from the enemy? The Viet Cong already knows what its tactics are!”

     Yeah, yeah, the “secret” is that our people know what their people know about the tactics to fight our people, and we don’t want them to know that we know what they know about what we know.

     All I know is that all of the spy tradecraft bugged the heck out of the combat-boots-on-the-ground. It wasn’t just Colonel Hackworth. Robin Olds in “Fighter Pilot” expresses much of the same frustration, of the Intelligence people knowing stuff that they wouldn’t share with the combat pilots lest they somehow tip off the enemy that we know what they know, only the enemy already knows what they know, and our own pilots are ignorant and get shot down and taken prisoner or end up dead.

     That’s the scandal, and as for failing to see it, I guess some people can’t be helped.

     • 
       Dave

       November 18, 2012, 5:53 pm | #

       To bring it back to the story at hand: Do you think Patraeus is a liar, incompetent, or both? What he says seems to explain how the narrative of this story evolved over time.
   • 
     George Turner

     November 18, 2012, 11:29 am | #

     Along with what Paul said so well, why would our government be afraid that the people who pulled off the attack would suspect that we suspect that they’re terrorists? The attackers are sipping mango juice and talking to the New York Times about how they don’t care what we know becuase they know we can’t touch them, which we proved by not touching them even when they all massed together into a big wad and danced around in our burning consulate for seven hours. In the aftermath, they got to watch two airliners full of CIA people fly out instead of fly in.

     As excuses and justifications go, this ranks right up there with all the overwhelming and clever victories the Axis dealt the Allies all through 1944 and 1945. “We’re luring their armies to their doom!”

     Perhaps our government didn’t want to call attention to the importance of the weapons transfers that were probably getting arranged in Benghazi, but how would all the militants and terrorists not know about those since they’d be dealing with the same local arms suppliers, and in some cases probably would be the local arms suppliers? Perhaps we didn’t want to tip off Al-Qaeda militants to the fact that we’re the ones supplying them with weapons, or perhaps we didn’t want the American public to realize that we’re arming the same kind of people who just torched our consulate. Who knows?
5. 
   Dave

   November 18, 2012, 6:14 pm | #

   Along with what Paul said so well, why would our government be afraid that the people who pulled off the attack would suspect that we suspect that they’re terrorists?

   Beats me. It’s what Patraeus said. Is he a liar or incompetent?

   • 
     ken anthony

     November 20, 2012, 4:10 am | #

     See Peter Principle. He was a good general, but obviously not the right choice for the CIA. So why did Obama put him there? For his own purpose obviously.

     It is hard to untangle lies, isn’t it?

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