Murphy's law: Did US approved arms aid Benghazi attack?

U.S.-Approved Arms for Libya Rebels Fell Into Jihadis’ Hands
Excerpt:

The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and foreign diplomats.

No evidence has emerged linking the weapons provided by the Qataris during the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to the attack that killed four Americans at the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in September.

But in the months before, the Obama administration clearly was worried about the consequences of its hidden hand in helping arm Libyan militants, concerns that have not previously been reported. The weapons and money from Qatar strengthened militant groups in Libya, allowing them to become a destabilizing force since the fall of the Qaddafi government.

Comment: Just asking the question. (NYTimes reporting .... )

The next time the MSM mentions "Binders of Women" ...

'
If four Americans get killed, it's not OPTIMAL': Obama's extraordinary response to security fiasco after Benghazi massacre
Excerpt:

President Barack Obama, during an interview to be shown on Comedy Central, has responded to a question about his administration's communications after the Benghazi attack, by saying: 'If four Americans get killed, it’s not optimal.' Obama was speaking to Jon Stewart of The Daily Show for a programme to be broadcast tonight. Stewart, a liberal whose audience of young voters is prized by the Obama campaign, asked the president about his handling of the aftermath of the Benghazi attack.

Comment: The President as "Joker"

Libyan misadventure - What hath Obama Wrought?

Obama's New Libya - November 23, 2011
Excerpt:

In a chilling possible foretaste of what awaits Libya, the flag used by Al Qaeda has been flown by the leaders of the revolution there backed by Obama. On November 2, 2011, an article was published in the Daily Mail with the title "Flying Proudly Over the Birthplace of Libya's Revolution, the Flag of Al Qaeda". The pictures accompanying the article show on the roof of a building two flags, one a black flag emblazoned with the moon and Arabic script reading "There is no God but Allah". This black flag, the acknowledged banner of members of Al Qaeda, is pictured flying next to the Libyan national flag on the top of the courthouse in Benghazi. The Libyan National Transitional Council denies that they are responsible for the presence of the Al Qaeda flag, and the length of time it appears is in question, but the photographs clearly show that above the building where the forces in rebellion against Muammar Gaddafi centered their first media and governing activities flies the flag of Al Qaeda. While not widely reported in the press, this event highlights the unpredictable nature of the new government of Libya and the risk taken by President Obama when he actively supported the rebel forces in their attacks on the government of Gaddafi.

Officials say embassy attack in Libya was coordinated Excerpts:

Sources have said they believe it was a planned operation and have pointed out several developments that seem to support the possibility. The incident does not appear to be a random mob scene, but rather an opportunity that militants seized, sources say. The attackers used a rocket-propelled grenade, a weapon not traditionally carried by protesters, but commonly used by terrorists. The attack is believed to have come in two waves. The first wave got inside of the compound, and a second wave penetrated a secure room inside the building. This fact raises questions about how the attackers knew the location of the rooms inside, sources say. On Sept. 11, al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri put out a video eulogizing Abu Yahya al-Libi, an Islamist terrorist and high-ranking al-Qaida member, who was killed in a drone attack in June. Sources have said they believe the Libyan incident might have been revenge for the death of al-Libi.

Comments:  Images from: Screen grab from Drudge, Daily Mail article, and screen grab from WTOP. Obama does not understand the agenda of the Islamists!

Pandora's box in Libya: 20,000 SAMs

Nightmare in Libya: 20,000 Surface-to-Air Missiles Missing

Excerpt:

U.S. officials had once thought there was little chance that terrorists could get their hands on many of the portable surface-to-air missiles that can bring down a commercial jet liner.

But now that calculation is out the window, with officials at a recent secret White House meeting reporting that thousands of them have gone missing in Libya.

"Matching up a terrorist with a shoulder-fired missile, that's our worst nightmare," said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D.-California, a member of the Senate's Commerce, Energy and Transportation Committee.

The nightmare has been made real with the discovery in Libya that an estimated 20,000 portable, heat-seeking missiles have gone missing from unguarded Army weapons warehouses.

The missiles, four to six-feet long and Russian-made, can weigh just 55 pounds with launcher. They lock on to the heat generated by the engines of aircraft, can be fired from a vehicle or from a combatant's shoulder, and are accurate and deadly at a range of more than two miles.

Comment: I wouldn't want to be flying internationally in light of this!

Obama on Libya: "a matter of days not weeks" (March 18th)

Comment: That was in March! MONTHS! Billions!

That pesky War Powers Act

Libya and the Potemkin alliance

Excerpt:

Some people, who know better, insist that although the WPR is a 38-year-old law — passed over Richard Nixon's veto — it is somehow a "dead letter." Their theory is that any law a president considers annoying, or Congress considers inconvenient, or some commentators consider unwise, is for those reasons nullified.

Comment: More on Nato:

Although this war has no discernible connection with U.S. national security, it serves the national interest, in three ways. It is awakening some legislators to their responsibilities. It is refuting the pretense that the United Nations sets meaningful parameters to wars it authorizes — or endorses, which is quite different. And it is igniting a reassessment of NATO, a Potemkin alliance whose primary use these days is perverse: It provides a patina of multilateralism to U.S. military interventions on which Europe is essentially a free rider.

...

Obama, a novel kind of commander in chief, explained in passive syntax that "it is our military that is being volunteered by others to carry out missions." These "others" would rather finance their welfare states than their militaries, so they cannot wage war for 10 weeks without U.S. munitions and other assets.

Last month, this column noted that NATO was created in 1949 to protect Western Europe from the Soviet army; it could long ago have unfurled the "Mission Accomplished" banner; it has now become an instrument of mischief, and when the Libyan misadventure is finished, America should debate whether NATO also should be finished. Defense Secretary Robert Gates had another purpose — NATO's revival — but he recently fueled that debate when, in Brussels, he predicted "a dim, if not dismal future" for the military alliance unless its members reinvest in their militaries.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. military spending has more than doubled, but that of NATO's 27 other members has declined 15 percent. U.S. military spending is three times larger than the combined spending of those other members. Hence Gates warned that "there will be dwindling appetite and patience in" America for expending "increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense." Already, U.S. officers in Afghanistan sometimes refer to the NATO command there — officially, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) — as "I Saw Americans Fighting."

After a recent NATO attack on a tented encampment where Gaddafi has met foreign leaders, the New York Times reported: "The desert strike appeared to show the alliance's readiness to kill Col. Gaddafi. A NATO statement described the target as a ‘command and control facility.' But apart from small groups of soldiers lurking under trees nearby with pickups carrying mounted machine guns, reporters taken to the scene saw nothing to suggest that the camp was a conventional military target."

In March, Obama said that U.S. intervention would be confined to implementing a no-fly zone: "Broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake." By May, Obama's Bushian mission was to make Libyans "finally free of 40 years of tyranny." After more than 10,000 sorties, now including those by attack helicopters, NATO's increasingly desperate strategy boils down to: Kill Gaddafi.

Then what? More incompetent improvisation, for many more months.

Disgust with this debacle has been darkly described as a recrudescence of "isolationism," as though people opposing this absurdly disproportionate and patently illegal war are akin to those who, after 1938, opposed resisting Germany and Japan. Such slovenly thinking is a byproduct of shabby behavior.

Time to exit Afghanistan?

The small footprint that eliminated bin Laden

Excerpts:

Many salient facts about the tracking of terrorism’s most prolific killer to his lair — some lair: not a remote cave but an urban compound — must remain shrouded in secrecy, for now. But one surmise seems reasonable: bin Laden was brought down by intelligence gathering that more resembles excellent police work than a military operation.

Granted, in nations as violent as Afghanistan and Pakistan, the line between military operations and police work is blurry, and military and other forms of intelligence gathering cannot be disentangled. Still, the enormous military footprint in Afghanistan, next door to bin Laden’s Pakistan refuge, seems especially disproportionate in the wake of his elimination by a small cadre of specialists.


Jim Lacey of the Marine Corps War College notes that Gen. David Petraeus has said there are perhaps about 100 al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. “Did anyone,” Lacey asks, “do the math?” There are, he says, more than 140,000 coalition soldiers in Afghanistan, or 1,400 for every al-Qaeda fighter. It costs about $1 million a year to deploy and support every soldier — or up to $140 billion, or close to $1.5 billion a year, for each al-Qaeda fighter. “In what universe do we find strategists to whom this makes sense?”

Comment: George Will also comments on Libya:

And the more we couch our thinking in military categories, the more we open ourselves to misadventures like the absurd and deepening one in Libya.

There, our policy — if what seem to be hourly improvisations can be dignified as a policy — began as a no-fly zone to protect civilians from wanton violence. Seven weeks later, our policy is to decapitate the government by long-distance assassination and to intensify a civil war in that tribal society, in the name of humanitarianism. What makes this particularly surreal is that it is being done by NATO.

Unpack the acronym: North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO was created in 1949 to protect Western Europe from the Red Army. Its purpose was, in Lord Ismay’s famous formulation, “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.” NATO, which could long ago have unfurled a “mission accomplished” banner, has now become an instrument of addlepated mischief.

This is an episode of presidential malpractice. Obama has allowed NATO to be employed for the advancement of a half-baked doctrine (R2P — “responsibility to protect”), a quarter-baked rationalization (was it just in March that Hillary Clinton discovered that a vital U.S. national interest required the removal of Moammar Gaddafi because he “is a man who has no conscience”?) and an unworthy national agenda (France’s pursuit of grandeur on the cheap).

Final comments: I'm sure that we should not be in Libya and I think it is time to plan our exit strategy from Afghanistan

Mission Creep in Libya

Putin: Libya coalition has no right to kill Gaddafi

Excerpt:

Putin said the coalition had gone beyond the bounds of a U.N. Security Council resolution authorising intervention to protect civilians and suggested Gaddafi's actions did not justify foreign interference, let alone attempts to remove him.

"They said they didn't want to kill Gaddafi. Now some officials say, yes, we are trying to kill Gaddafi," Putin said on a visit to Denmark. "Who permitted this, was there any trial? Who took on the right to execute this man, no matter who he is?"

Putin was speaking as Britain and the United States discussed stepping up military pressure on Gaddafi, who has survived more than a month of NATO air strikes.

"The country's whole infrastructure is being destroyed, and in essence one of the warring sides is attacking under the cover of aircraft," Putin said at a news conference after talks with his Danish counterpart Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen.

"When the entire so-called civilised community falls upon a small country with all its might, destroys infrastructure created over generations -- I don't know, is that good or not?" Putin said. "I don't like it."

Shortly after Putin spoke, Libyan state news agency Jana said Libya had urged Russia to call an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council to discuss "Western aggression."

In Moscow, Russia's Foreign Ministry said nobody was available to comment on the report.

Putin called Gaddafi's Libya "crooked" but said that did not justify intervention.

"Look at a map of this region of the world. ... What, is it full of Danish-style democracies? No, there are monarchical states all around. This overall answers to the mentality of the population and the practices that developed there," he said.

"Is there a lack of crooked regimes in the world? What, are we going to intervene in internal conflicts everywhere? Look at Africa, what's been happening in Somalia for many years. ... Are we going to bomb everywhere and conduct missile strikes?"

Putin has often criticised U.S. and NATO intervention in the affairs of sovereign states.

He said the resolution authorising intervention in Libya was "a call for everyone to come and do whatever they want."

Comment: Mission Creep

Qaddaffi: Dear Barak .... Butt Out

Text of Gadhafi letter to Obama

Excerpt:

You - yourself - said on many occasions, one of them in the UN General Assembly, I was witness to that personally, that America is not responsible for the security of other peoples. That America helps only. This is the right logic.

Comment: I find myself agreeing with Qaddaffi on this point

Libya: No "actual or imminent threat to the United States"

Defense Secretary: Libya Did Not Pose Threat to U.S., Was Not 'Vital National Interest' to Intervene

Excerpt:

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that Libya did not pose a threat to the United States before the U.S. began its military campaign against the North African country.

On “This Week,” ABC News’ Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper asked Gates, “Do you think Libya posed an actual or imminent threat to the United States?”

“No, no,” Gates said in a joint appearance with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “It was not -- it was not a vital national interest to the United States, but it was an interest and it was an interest for all of the reasons Secretary Clinton talked about. The engagement of the Arabs, the engagement of the Europeans, the general humanitarian question that was at stake,” he said.

Gates explained that there was more at stake, however. “There was another piece of this though, that certainly was a consideration. You've had revolutions on both the East and the West of Libya,” he said, emphasizing the potential wave of refugees from Libya could have destabilized Tunisia and Egypt.

“So you had a potentially significantly destabilizing event taking place in Libya that put at risk potentially the revolutions in both Tunisia and Egypt,” the Secretary said. “And that was another consideration I think we took into account.”

During his campaign for the Presidency, in December, 2007, Barack Obama told The Boston Globe that “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

Earlier in 2007, then-Senator Hillary Clinton said in a speech on the Senate floor that, “If the administration believes that any -- any -- use of force against Iran is necessary, the President must come to Congress to seek that authority.”

Tapper asked Clinton, “Why not got to Congress?”

“Well, we would welcome congressional support,” the Secretary said, “but I don't think that this kind of internationally authorized intervention where we are one of a number of countries participating to enforce a humanitarian mission is the kind of unilateral action that either I or President Obama was speaking of several years ago.”

“I think that this had a limited timeframe, a very clearly defined mission which we are in the process of fulfilling,” Clinton said.

Comment: One wonders!

Farce Force Libya

Libyan rebel commander admits his fighters have al-Qaeda links

Excerpt:

In an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, Mr al-Hasidi admitted that he had recruited "around 25" men from the Derna area in eastern Libya to fight against coalition troops in Iraq. Some of them, he said, are "today are on the front lines in Adjabiya".

Mr al-Hasidi insisted his fighters "are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists," but added that the "members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader".

His revelations came even as Idriss Deby Itno, Chad's president, said al-Qaeda had managed to pillage military arsenals in the Libyan rebel zone and acquired arms, "including surface-to-air missiles, which were then smuggled into their sanctuaries".

Antiwar Senator, War-Powers President

Excerpt:

President Barack Obama has again flip-flopped on national security—and we can all be grateful. Having kept Guantanamo Bay open, resumed military commission trials for terrorists, and expanded the use of drones, the president has now ordered the U.S. military into action without Congress's blessing.

Imagine the uproar if President Bush had unilaterally launched air attacks against Libya's Moammar Gadhafi. But since it's Mr. Obama's finger on the trigger, Democratic leaders in Congress have kept quiet—demonstrating that their opposition to presidential power during the Bush years was political, not principled.

The Speech Obama Hasn't Given - What are we doing in Libya? Americans deserve an explanation.

Excerpts:

It all seems rather mad, doesn't it? The decision to become involved militarily in the Libyan civil war couldn't take place within a less hospitable context. The U.S. is reeling from spending and deficits, we're already in two wars, our military has been stretched to the limit, we're restive at home, and no one, really, sees President Obama as the kind of leader you'd follow over the top. "This way, men!" "No, I think I'll stay in my trench." People didn't hire him to start battles but to end them. They didn't expect him to open new fronts. Did he not know this?

He has no happy experience as a rallier of public opinion and a leader of great endeavors; the central initiative of his presidency, the one that gave shape to his leadership, health care, is still unpopular and the cause of continued agitation. When he devoted his entire first year to it, he seemed off point and out of touch. This was followed by the BP oil spill, which made him look snakebit. Now he seems incompetent and out of his depth in foreign and military affairs. He is more observed than followed, or perhaps I should say you follow him with your eyes and not your heart. So it's funny he'd feel free to launch and lead a war, which is what this confused and uncertain military action may become.

...

Which gets me to Mr. Obama's speech, the one he hasn't given. I cannot for the life of me see how an American president can launch a serious military action without a full and formal national address in which he explains to the American people why he is doing what he is doing, why it is right, and why it is very much in the national interest. He referred to his aims in parts of speeches and appearances when he was in South America, but now he's home. More is needed, more is warranted, and more is deserved. He has to sit at that big desk and explain his thinking, put forward the facts as he sees them, and try to garner public support. He has to make a case for his own actions. It's what presidents do! And this is particularly important now, because there are reasons to fear the current involvement will either escalate and produce a lengthy conflict or collapse and produce humiliation.

Comment: Incompetent in foreign policy!

Libya: The friend of our friend is our enemy?

Al Qaida commander backs Libyan rebels in message

Excerpt:

A senior member of al Qaida urged Libyan rebels to continue their fight against Muammar Gaddafi and warned of the consequences of defeat, in a videotaped message posted on Jihadi websites, the Qatar-based Gulf News reported on Sunday.

The message from Libya native, Abu Yahya al-Libi, marked the first time a top ranked al Qaida commander had commented on the uprising in Libya. Gaddafi has repeatedly blamed al Qaida for inciting the unrest against him.

"The Libyan people have suffered at the hands of Gaddafi for more than 40 years ... He used the Libyans as a testing ground for his violent, rambling and disgusting thoughts,” Abu Yahya stated.

Comment: Meanwhile Obama is vacationing in Rio!

On Libya: Who are the rebels? Are they worthy of our support?

On Libya, too many questions

Excerpts:

• The world would be better without Gaddafi. But is that a vital U.S. national interest? If it is, when did it become so? A month ago, no one thought it was
  
• But how is imposing a no-fly zone - the use of military force to further military and political objectives - not military intervention?
  
• The Economist reports Gaddafi has "a huge arsenal of Russian surface-to-air missiles" and that some experts think Libya has SAMs that could threaten U.S. or allies' aircraft. If a pilot is downed and captured, are we ready for the hostage drama?
  
• [Is] it wise for U.S. military force to be engaged simultaneously in three Muslim nations?
  
  
  

Comment: And my question: Who are the rebels? Are they worthy of our support?

Gates again: "Let's just call a spade a spade"

West Cools on No-Fly Zone

Excerpt:

The U.S. and allies have discussed the prospect of imposing a no-fly zone over the North African country to prevent Col. Gadhafi from using air forces to strike at protesters. But Mr. Gates on Wednesday made clear the U.S. military would have to launch pre-emptive strikes to destroy Libya's air defenses if President Barack Obama ordered the imposition of a no-fly zone,

"Let's just call a spade a spade," Mr. Gates said. "A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya."

Mr. Gates's words were the strongest public indication of skepticism within the administration about establishing a no-fly zone, especially without broad international support.

In recent days, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has spoken supportively of a no-fly zone. Asked about the apparent contradiction between Mr. Gates's comments and Mrs. Clinton's remarks, Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, said Wednesday that the no-fly zone is being "actively considered."

Comment: Not our fight. We already have two wars. If we start bombing air defences, we will become entangled in that mess.