Murder Of Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi Libya
What Are President Obama and The Speaker of The House of Representatives, John Boehner, Really Covering Up?
It is traditional in U.S. politics for the President to brief The Speaker in ultra-sensitive matters, regardless of colors. It has always been accepted that National Security, defense and foreign policy transcend local politics, which, as we see at present, can get infantile. For this reason, a sensitive operation to, say, supply America's foes in the Syria, through Turkey (the difficult to seal Kurdistan border region) or Saudi Arabia, with advanced weapons, would be a subject the President would not want Members to address in Congress. One way to ensure this would be to fully keep Representative Boehner 'in the loop'. Nobody could anticipate that such an operation could have ended the way that it did. The fact is that it resulted in carnage inside the Benghazi Embassy (I have always called it an Embassy because when The Ambassador is present in an official capacity and conducting affairs of State from within, it is no longer a Consulate.)
There is no blame being ascribed to either The President or Representative Boehner but both need to come clean about exactly why, on several occasions, rescue teams from different locations were repeatedly told, in the ensuing hours while the Ambassador and his team bravely held out against the butchers of Benghazi (a Salafist Jihadi militia linked with Al Qaeda), to stand down.
There is no evidence to suggest that such a rescue operation could have been successful. Even the best planned operations - as we saw with the Iran hostage rescue attempt by President Jimmy Carter - can result in disaster through sheer unpredictable events. There may well have been a whole series of miscalculations - that the Ambassador was being held as a hostage and that he and his Staff could be released through rational negotiations. (One thing I have learned is that when dealing with religious fanatics, rational negotiations should be the last option to consider.) The fact that it was still unknown exactly who had taken Embassy Staff hostage may have added to the indecision. Whatever the case, the American public, and the world, should be told the truth.
Are there batches (not one or two but a batch or batches) of Stinger surface-to-air missiles in the hands of both Sunni and Shia militants in Syria and Iran respectively, and now active, having been reprogrammed? Has control been lost of one or two or even an entire batch? If so, how did this happen?
Not long after 9/11 when discussing events with an individual, I said that civilian air transportation as we know it will come to an end on the day several airlines are brought down simultaneously and worldwide with surface-to-air missiles by terrorists. (I repeated another similar scenario with regard to usage of surface-to-surface missiles to a Staff member at the British Embassy in Berlin about eight years later when I was a transient guest with a visiting delegation, mindful of how just a rudimentary (surface-to surface) version had almost assassinated the (then) British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, at her Official Residence, 10 Downing Street.)
The President and Speaker Boehner need to reassure a worried planet that U.S. foreign policy actions have not, knowingly or unwittingly, brought this day closer. And if they have what steps are they taking to redress the situation? A missile or batch originally supplied with intent for other purposes could well be used to bring down civilian airlines tomorrow if foreign policy decisions have resulted in arsenals being held at unknown locations by terrorists.
Patrick Emek