The best indicator that the wingnuts are pulling out all the stops on Benghazi is that the corporate-funded glibertarians are getting into the act. Matt Welch:
Yesterday’s dramatic congressional testimony about the deadly Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on U.S. interests in Benghazi, Libya convincingly corroborated what was widely reported within days of the attack: that senior American officials on the ground knew immediately, despite the Obama administration’s storyline to the contrary, that the assault did not arise out of a “spontaneous” demonstration outside the U.S. Consulate in protest of an obscure YouTube trailer of a homemade anti-Islam movie called Innocence of Muslims.
Falsely assessing partial blame for the violence on a piece of artistic expression inflicted damage not just on the California resident who made it—Nakoula Basseley Nakoula is currently serving out a one-year sentence for parole violations committed in the process of producing Innocence—but also on the entire American culture of free speech. In the days and weeks after the attacks, academics and foreign policy thinkers fell over themselves dreaming up new ways to either disproportionately punish Nakoula or scale back the very notion of constitutionally protected expression.
If you want to talk artistic expression, the first sentence of that second paragraph is like a statue sculpted completely out of bullshit. Welch makes it sound like Nakoula’s noble struggle to make the film forced him to violate the clear terms of the parole, which forbade using the Internet and using aliases, and hints that Nakoula is some kind of strugging artist instead of a man convicted of cooking meth and committing bank fraud. Doug Mataconis has a good run-down of the other wingnuts who are getting in on this party, but suffice it to say that the American culture of free speech will survive.
(Thanks to reader J for sending this in.)
c u n d gulag
Matt Welch:
“Hitler! Now zere vas a painter! He could paint an entire apartment in von afternoon – TWO COAT’S!!!”
Schlemizel
Former DCI David Petraeus explained to Congress that the Intelligence Community deliberately omitted any public reference to any terrorist organizations that might have been involved in the Benghazi attack because they were protecting sources and methods.
The former spy guy 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. …
“There was an interagency process to draft it, not a political process. They came up with the best assessment without compromising classified information or source or methods. So changes were made to protect classified information.”
Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)
Wow. When Doug Mataconis is calling you out, you must have shit the bedghazi.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
“Falsely assessing partial blame for the violence on a piece of artistic expression…”
Wtf? Are you fucking kidding me? “Artistic expression”?
Suffern ACE
@Schlemizel: which doesn’t make me much happier. Yay! Methods and sources to protect the CIA!
JPL
ot.. This is the topic we should be discussing
http://blogs.ajc.com/mike-luckovich/2013/05/09/510-luckovich-cartoon-the-right-to-bear-arms/
Baud
The first sentence in the second paragraph is a word salad. It’s about as coherent as you would expect from a story about Benghazi.
rea
And you know, even if the movie was not the reason for the attack in Benghazi, it was very clearly the reason for the attacks that day in Egypt and Yemen.
Randy P
@Suffern ACE: It’s not about protecting the CIA. It’s about people who live there and are sources and will be shot in the head if found out. Who do you think a CIA gets information from?
Ash Can
Shorter Matt Welch: “LEAVE NAKOULA ALOOOOOOOOONE!”
@Schlemizel: So how long until the Republicans start calling him “General Betrayus”?
EconWatcher
Reason magazine wasn’t always this stupid. Or maybe I was just a lot dumber when I read it. (Yes, I went through a glibertarian phase in the 90s, but I’ve recovered.)
Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)
The very notion!
I often wonder (okay, only when I hear his name come up, like when he was pimping that gawdawful book he wrote a while back), whether Welch is as much of an insufferable douchebag in person as in writing. Like, does he double-dip his chips and stuff.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
They will continue to do this, of course. It’s not as if our FerengiMedia© is going to call them on it or anything…
Walker
@EconWatcher:
A friend got me into Reason in the early 2000s. They seemed okay at first, but I realized they were crap when they revealed themselves as climate denialists. Not “let us examine the ROI of various climate mitigation approaches”, but foll bore denialist.
So I think they have always been Brooks-style Republican propagandists.
Kay
I could (potentially!) be interested in Benghazi, but isn’t there a broad (if mostly undiscussed) agreement that there was CIA involvement in this whole thing? I heard that early on.
If we’re having an “investigation” where we’re only looking at two of three institutional actors, it kind of stops being about The Truth, doesn’t it? If that’s the case we’re definitely not getting to The Truth, because it looks like the parameters of the investigation were set by prior agreement. “Here’s who and what we’re investigating”. That’s my sense of it, anyway, I admit I stopped following it after the Susan Rice obsession didn’t make sense to me. I don’t think there was anything unusual about her response. I knew it was CYA, to a certain extent, and she used all the regular qualifiers.
I just have no patience with that. Either have an investigation or don’t have one, but don’t pretend you’re having one.
Patrick
I wonder why Mr Welch is so concerned about Benghazi, when I don’t recall Mr Welch showing the same concern when Bush lied our country into war against Iraq? Didn’t those lies inflict tremendous harm on our country, on our economy and on our reputation?
And for God’s sake, why are those people that perished in Benghazi so much more important than the thousands of US soldiers who died in Iraq? Or how about all the people that died in the embassy attacks during the Bush?
Why the hypocrisy? It is impossible to take these folks seriously when their are arguments are so utterly flawed. Couldn’t they at least try?
Patrick
@Kay:
I would have been interested if the objective was to figure out how to keep our embassy personnel more safe. There were 11 attacks during Bush and we now had Benghazi. Other countries don’t have these issues. We have a problem to resolve. Yet, instead of resolving the issue, the GOP, as you said, were obsessed with Susan Rice who had NOTHING to do with the damned thing. And all they seem interested in seem to be to artificially create a some kind of non-existent scandal to impeach Obama. It makes me wonder which side the GOP legislators/FoxNews really are on.
For example, not an ounce has been investigated as to what impact cutting $300 million in embassy security had (thanks GOP!).
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Patrick: That’s what makes this so infuriating, that all this is happening in the shadow of 9/11, which we had far more prior warning for, and Iraq (was “smoking gun” a “talking point on the Sunday shows”? I seem to recall it fucking was) even the general Reasonable Concession that the administration’s response was “incompetent”. Compared to fucking what?
Ash Can
@EconWatcher: From what I saw of it, Reason was pretty strictly Ayn-Rand-style libertarian in the 90s. It would set up ideological straw men for itself and then very proudly knock them down (because the writers and editors knew that if they stuck to real-world scenarios they’d all end up looking like asses). I think it was after 9/11 that it turned into just another right-wing GOP rag.
Kay
@Patrick:
Right. I wouldn’t really start there, “how do we fix this” because that’s (to me) absolving anyone who may have screwed up prior to an investigation, but I just don’t think one generally gets to The Truth by setting parameters at the outset.
By narrowing this at the beginning to “is Susan Rice a liar?” they effectively discredited their own investigation, because the entire inquiry surrounds appearances on Sunday shows. I just don’t think “appearances on Sunday shows” are vitally important or determinative. Was I shocked that she gave a non-answer full of qualifiers? No. Not at all. What does it mean that she did that? Well, I don’t know, and they don’t seem to know either.
Eric U.
@Patrick: I am pretty sure other countries have these same problems with their embassies, it’s just we don’t pay attention. Of course, many other countries fail to have such a visible role in the world as well.
Patrick
@Eric U.:
I could certainly be wrong, but I doubt there is any other country out there who has had 13 deadly embassy attacks in the last 12 years.
ETA: I found this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attacks_on_diplomatic_missions
The link shows that the US, by far, has been attacked the most in terms of embassies.
I do think you are right in that the problem is that we have such a visible role in the world (Iraq war…). Together with why the GOP cut embassy security, a good idea would be to have hearings as to what the downside is to have a such visible role (dumb wars).
Kay
@Patrick:
The Rice focus has a fake courtroom drama feel to me. “You were NOT wearing your glasses that day, Ms. Rice, despite what you told Jake Tapper!”
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to conclude based on this bombshell.
“Spokesperson made statement full of qualifiers and with deniability”? There’s a shocker. That never happens.
All it does it make me think they want me to conclude something or other.
They don’t sound like investigators, in other words. They sound like advocates.
Higgs Boson's Mate
Matt Welch’s solicitude for Nakoula is understandable when you consider that “Atlas Shrugged: Parts I & II” are the pinnacle of libertarian film making.
Svensker
Mssrs. Strunk & White would like to have a word with you, young Matt.
ericblair
@Eric U.:
We’re a big target. As far as embassy physical security worldwide, has anyone seen our new and renovated embassies? They’re fucking fortresses. The State Department’s mission is not to sit in concrete bunkers all year and ban all foreigners from the premises, and embassy and consular staff know this.
It’s a complicated tradeoff between access and security that’s going to be driven by local concerns and good intelligence. We’re not going to get anything out of these stupid hearings besides simian hooting, and anybody who thinks we can use these hearings to rise above the goopers and get actual work done hasn’t tried to reason with toddlers.
Kay
@Patrick:
It may also be as simple as “Issa is horrible at oversight”. Bad at it.
Has he ever found out anything true about anything, since he’s been in this role? What’d we end up with on the huge “gun walking” scandal? That one went completely off the rails and into a pure fantasy narrative. Fiction.
weaselone
@Suffern ACE:
Thing is that those individuals possessing gray matter figured that out within a few days of Susan Rice’s Meet the Press interview when the administration revealed she had essentially regurgitated a list of talking points supplied by the CIA.
While I can be irritated that this administration misled us as to whether this attack was carried out by radical Muslims pissed off by a movie trailer or radical Muslims pissed off because they wanted Sharia Law instituted in Libya, it hardly merits 9 congressional inquiries into the matter.
The spin itself did not lead to deaths or even conceal the responsibility that various US government officials might share for those deaths. If anything, these inquiries themselves have served as a cover up. Nobody has really asked, let alone answered to what extent Congress is to blame due to cuts it made to the State Department budget, or answered why given the volatility of the region that there weren’t military assets capable of responding in fewer than 5 hours. Instead the House Republicans appear to be attempting to distort spacetime by generating a black hole of stupidity and ignorance from which no rational thought can escape.
Citizen_X
Oh no, not the academics and foreign policy thinkers!
Remind me, again: how many grand juries do the academics and foreign policy thinkers have?
Michele C.
@Kay: @Patrick: I think the Susan Rice obsession was to get one of their own, a Senator even if a D, into the Secretary of State position and open up Kerry’s seat in the Senate. Yesterday, Fox News ran an article about how the seat is in play for the Republicans.
Also, yeah, seriously, what about the cuts to funding? My Facebook feed has had direct accusations of treason or “willful neglect” by Clinton because Benghazi didn’t have troops to swoop in from above and save the day. (1) The State Department has never had troops waiting to swoop in anywhere on a moment’s notice, (2) what @Patrick: said re: Bush and attacks under him, (3) this is one time where “both sides do it” in the sense that Congress cut funding and (4) the entire security budget is probably so tiny that any one pork project for any one of these jerk’s states would probably triple it (okay, I could look that up, but didn’t bother).
And now it’s about the art???
weaselone
@Kay:
Given Issa is a crook himself, one would figure he would be a natural at this. Most mean there is not there there.
Lee
@Walker:
I was the same. After they published a couple of full bore denialist articles in the span of about a week or two, I stopped reading completely.
Davis X. Machina
@Michele C.:
Not true for all values of ‘in play’.
Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)
@Kay:
Occam’s Razor.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
If you like to scream Benghazi!
Then you’re probably a Nazi
Who can stand having a black President.
Or a dimwitted reporter
for whom preserving the current order
of “both sides do it”
is your sole and only intent.
Michele C.
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: Lovely ditty. Someone needs to put it to music. :D
Persia
@weaselone: If anything, these inquiries themselves have served as a cover up. Nobody has really asked, let alone answered to what extent Congress is to blame due to cuts it made to the State Department budget, or answered why given the volatility of the region that there weren’t military assets capable of responding in fewer than 5 hours.
I suspect that’s more feature than bug.
Thinking Americanist
Not this goddamned libertarian.
See my post:
Please, read my blog posting on the subject, thanks.
This is nothing more than idiotic political partisan theater. Just like the Democrats with the whole, “The Iraq War is lost” stupidity that interestingly ended once Obama was in the White House.
It is the same damned moronic game that the GOP played in the 1990’s with the Clinton Administration. They lost then and they’ll lose now, if they exploit this tragic event.
The cute thing is, that the Hawkish neocons were the ones that said Obama should go into the Libya in the first damned place. Over the objections of the Paleocons, like me.
So, they can suck it, for all I care. They made the mess and now they’re trying to blame Obama for it. It’s a classical Washington D.C. Move.
El Cid
HOW THE FUCK WOULD ANY OF THEM BE ONE FUCKING GOD DAMN BIT ANY LESS FUCKING DEAD IF THE ARMED ATTACK HAD GROWN OUT OF PROTESTS VERSUS NOT?
HOW THE FUCK IS THIS RELEVANT?
AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHH!
Petorado
A classic use of the “Otter Defense”. Bravo Mr. Welch, your sense of high camp is outstanding.
Mnemosyne
@Thinking Americanist:
You do realize that the reason you don’t hear Democrats talking about the war in Iraq anymore is that Obama started withdrawing our troops within 6 months of taking office as per our agreement with the Iraqis, right?
Hoodie
Why would you even be irritated? Does Susan Rice have to keep you in the loop real time on all ongoing overseas operations? I have no particular problem with this type of short term operational public fib, even if it wasn’t particularly necessary, as long as there is some long term accountability. However, the current hyper-partisanship of the Republicans in Congress makes that nearly impossible. They’re acting like they were expecting to be briefed by a fucking Sunday talk show. It’s all contrived nonsense.
FlipYrWhig
@Hoodie: Agreed. It’s a bit like being irritated that the cops don’t give the media all the details of a crime when they ask the public for tips.
El Cid
@Hoodie: You know what suggested to me the likelihood of terrorist involvement?
It was a fucking gun & rocket grenade attack.
You know how much I cared whether or not that was related to a protest or not?
Zero.
This is the stupidest issue in the fucking universe. The entire ‘controversy’ is irrelevant to anything.
If there had been a mass protest, there is nothing magical about protests which either (a) prevent terrorists from attacking during the protest or (b) allows protesters to build guns & rocket grenades from their imagination.
Anyone who thinks that it is crucial to their understanding of this issue, the attack, and its context whether or not some administration spokesperson announced that what yes really looked like a terrorist attack was indeed a terrorist attack in some sense which would be different than a protest-spawned terrorist attack should shove their own heads further up their own asses and shut up about the matter publicly.
It is the stupidest fucking foreign policy non-issue I may have ever heard.
Nickws
@Thinking Americanist:
Heh, “You must admit Teh Surge worked!!11!!!”, that normally isn’t a theme advanced by neocon-phobic, latter day American Firsters.
catclub
@Citizen_X: “Remind me, again: how many grand juries do the academics and foreign policy thinkers have? ”
I think the mathematicians have many divisions.
belieber
Noted Palin fapper mistermux continues his “lets continue to talk about why the right continues to talk about Benghazi” shit show.
Mnemosyne
@El Cid:
I sometimes wonder if the Republicans are obsessing over the “it wasn’t really a protest!” thing because there really are some folks with conservative connections behind the “Mohammed” film and they’re trying to muddy the waters to prevent people from looking into how that whole thing came about.
But we aren’t allowed to look into that until we figure out exactly what time the president and SoS went to bed the night of the attack because their bedtime will determine their respective levels of personal responsibility for the murders.
El Cid
@Mnemosyne: Look, the investigation is just a way to detail what we already know to be true: Obama and Hillary hate America and want Americans dead at the hands of their jihadist friends.
The lamestream media has failed in their Constitutional duty to point that out, so the Benghazi investigation has to be carried out so as to offer details to prove this thing that we of course already know.
weaselone
@Hoodie:
The irritation comes from the lack of necessity and I’m not talking full blown firebagger fury here. It provided another thing for the media, my right wing Facebook friends and Issa and his merry band of idiots to whine about for months on end in addition to time traveling aircraft and special forces teams. Some of my irritation at the media and rightwing twits flows through to the administration. I can’t help it, I’m human.
weaselone
@FlipYrWhig:
No, it’s more like being irritated at a relative of the world’s most obnoxious child for gifting said child another toy to add to his arsenal of annoyance. The kid will be insufferable regardless, but there’s no reason to give him another set of drums to bang on.
DavidTC
No shit. We all _immediately_ knew it was a terrorist attack, because while random protesters in a mob might, in theory, overcome the walls wander around an embassy…that, uh, isn’t what happened. It was pretty clearly a fucking strike force. While everyone over there seems to have guns, I will assume that not everyone has RPGs, and ‘mob’ is not the correct way to describe the force that invaded.
That’s why I found it completely surreal that the GOP was running around saying that Obama hadn’t called it a terrorist attack. I was like ‘Huh? What is the alternative? It was clearly an attacked by trained forces, so the only way those forces aren’t terrorists is if they are…a state actor? Is the theory that he wanted us to think it was an actual armed embassy invasion by Libya?’ (Made all the more funny when I learned that he _did_ call it an act of terrorism.)
It’s like people steal money from the bank, and the next day a political party leaps on the local DA for not calling it ‘a bank robbery’. Uh, what? We sorta already knew it was a bank robbery, thanks. That was in the definition of what happened. (Also, the DA did call it a bank robbery.)
I especially loved the idea that he was trying to blame it on the video, instead of terrorism. Uh, guys? If a bunch of people, pissed off at something your country has done, show up and kill some of you…THAT’S TERRORISM. It is intending to _terrorize_ people.
And, uh, wouldn’t that conspiracy on the part of Obama make him look _worse_? It would imply that we have such shitty security at embassies that random mobs can turn into strike forces or something. I don’t even know what’s going on with that theory. (‘Those people who robbed the bank were not ‘bank robbers’ in the sense of being trained, they just picked up money we had laying around on the floor. Hence I had no bank robberies while I ran security for the bank!’)
Actually, I don’t really know what’s going on with any theory here. It’s all based, as far as I can tell, on the meth-addled idea that Obama doesn’t wish to make al Qaeda and other terrorists look bad.
Boots Day
Remember when Dick Cheney went on “Meet the Press” to talk about how Mohamed Atta had met with Iraqi emissaries in Prague, and Matt Welch demanded hearings into that? No, I don’t either.
The Other Chuck
As opposed to the writing and editorial staff of Reason Magazine.
Really. This is a magazine calling itself Reason that is throwing around “academic” and “thinker” as an insult. Welcome to this century’s right wing.
Opie_jeanne
@Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS): from what I understand he is nice in person. He just doesn’t seem to understand the need for expanding that to everyone else that he doesn’t know personally.
El Cid
@DavidTC: Also, people who give a shit might actually care about distinguishing between ‘terrorist’ groups and, say, rival local militias vying for local power, or whatever.
But it doesn’t matter, because ‘terrorist’ is a moral term, and it means whatever the right wants it to mean, and only they are allowed to use the term correctly, anyway.
DavidTC
Well, yes, in theory there are private groups that are not terrorists, but are not state actors _per se_, that could have attacked the embassy. (1)
I had the oddest discussion once trying to explain that while Hezollah attacking the barracks in Beirut in 1983 might have been an act of war, it was not an act of _terror_, as military barracks are, obviously, a _military_ target. Um, duh. I was like ‘Do you even know what a war _is_?’.
But as you pointed out, the right likes to pretend these do not exist, that all non-state actors are terrorists. (Unless they’re a militia we’re arming, in which case magically that’s fine and we’ll just pretending they’re a real military.)
I just feel completely baffled as to what they think the president was trying to imply with supposedly not calling it terrorism. I _think_ they’re trying to say he was implying that it was a mob that got out of control, which was complete and obviously not true from the start. Mobs do not have RPGs. Mobs do not form a strike team with half a dozen armed men, enter a secure compound, and go door to door hunting someone down.
You know, I just realized I failed to understand the ‘It’s _always_ projection’ concept. In this case, the _right_ would be stupid enough to fall for such an idiotic lie, so they think _we_ fell for that ‘lie’ somehow, and are completely baffled when they ‘expose’ that lie we’re all staring at them going ‘Yeah, we knew that already. No one thought that after watching more than ten seconds of reporting on the aftermath.’
1) I would actually argue that an armed militia that can wander around shooting people, unopposed by the government, has just as much claim of _being_ the government as ‘the government’. They don’t stop being ‘the state’ just because we recognize a different group that claims to be the state.