Ham testified in the classified session that there was some peripheral chat about a demonstration, but that he and other commanders were always clear, from the beginning, that Benghazi was a terrorist attack. That’s the word they delivered to President Obama and his top advisers including then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Ham has been consistent both in sworn testimony and in his public comments.
So that was always the military’s take. It was as we all know not President Obama’s take. He was selling the attack as a demonstration in response to a movie for weeks after the fact. Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sold the same line, and then hand-picked the Accountability Review Board to conduct a phony investigation into the attack.
Should it be taken over by the Navy? Space is more like the sea than like the air, and I argue in my book that a US Space Guard would be a better organization for many things currently being done (or neglected) by NASA, the Air Force and the FAA.
It’s looking like 2013 was the year that we lost it. But Obama and the Dems got what they wanted, an “end” to the war. They never want to win wars, except against their domestic enemies.
Rabid anti-Semitism coupled with an addiction to implausible conspiracy theories is a very strong predictor of national doom; Nazi Germany isn’t the only country to have followed these dark stars to the graveyard of history. Many liberal minded Americans (though loathing both anti-Semitism and chowderheaded conspiracy thinking themselves) don’t like to look this truth in the eye. It leads to some very uncomfortable reflections about the potential for democracy in many countries beyond Egypt, and casts a dark shadow over the prospects for the development of a stable and prosperous Palestinian state. It suggests that there are narrow limits on what we can expect from diplomacy with Iran.
There’s a lot of delusional thinking in the White House along these lines.