Dead militiamen found in Benghazi

It sounds like the people of Benghazi are not interested in seeing the extremists have their way in the area. The Guardian:

The Libyan city of Benghazi was tense after the bodies of six militiamen apparently executed after the storming of a base on the southern outskirts were discovered in a field.

The bodies were found the day after crowds marched on three militia bases, including that of Ansar al-Sharia, blamed by many in the city for the murder of the US ambassador, Chris Stevens, earlier this month. Funerals were held for nine protesters killed when crowds tried to force their way into the Rafallah al-Sahati militia base early on Saturday morning.

The militia was the only one of three to fire back when demonstrators swarmed over their bases, following a rally on Friday in which 30,000 people vowed to retake the streets of the city.

Read the rest of this post...

Media now criticizing Obama for mentioning capture of bin Laden

During ABC's This Week yesterday, there was an unfortunate back and forth - several times in fact - in which PBS' Gwen Ifill and ABC's Jonathan Karl seemed to criticize the President, and his surrogates, for noting that President Obama finally captured Osama bin Laden. (Tapper simply made a quick jest about the fact that the campaign was obviously pushing the issue, he's done good reporting on this - the other two seemed actually critical of the campaign's decision.)

This was disturbing on numerous levels.

First, the Romney campaign has been mocking the President for a while on this point, suggesting that the President has nothing to be proud of (because Romney thinks President's don't matter during wartime, the military runs itself - that admission is a frightening window into a future Romney administration). So it's disturbing that the media would play into a false Romney talking point.

Second, I'm disturbed because capturing and killing Osama bin Laden was a huge deal. It is clearly on a par with saving the economy from a Great Depression and passing health care reform. And at the very least, it's easily the President's number one foreign policy victory.

So why exactly are Democrats supposed to now stop talking about the President's number one foreign policy victory?

It's not entirely clear. Read on:

WESLEY CLARK: I do disagree, because I think this is a consistent Republican narrative that Democrats are soft on defense, but we've a Democratic president who's been strongest on national security. He's completely taken the foreign policy and national security argument away from the other side.

He reinforced in Afghanistan. He got us responsibly out of Iraq. We took Osama bin Laden. He's been firm. He's been visionary. He's been tough. He's decisive.

GWEN IFILL: Not much immediately. But, you know, I find it really interesting, Jake, that a week ago we were post-convention and we were completely consumed with what we talked about at those conventions, not foreign policy, not at either convention, unless you count every Democrat talking about Osama bin Laden. Other than that...

JAKE TAPPER: You caught that?

IFILL: ... nobody really -- I picked up on that. I picked up on that.

CLARK: Actually, I don't think we are weaker. I think the whole point of going into Afghanistan in 2001, which President George W. Bush articulated, was Osama bin Laden, wanted dead or alive. And it was Barack Obama who really put the pressure on and got him.

IFILL: There it goes again. Once again, Osama bin Laden.

(LAUGHTER)

(CROSSTALK)

CLARK: But I think it's a huge -- it was a huge marker. It was a presidential decision in the -- and he was very much aware of President Carter's problem with Desert One. And he did against the advice...

(CROSSTALK)

JONATHAN KARL: Are you at all uncomfortable, though, with how political that -- I mean, that at the -- at the national political convention, that this military operation is used as a -- as a political talking point over and over again?

(CROSSTALK)

CLARK: But here's the -- here's the...

(CROSSTALK)

KARL: The vice president talking about putting him on bumper stickers?

CLARK: We've had, since the Vietnam War, the consistent refrain has been Republicans are the daddy party, Democrats are the mommy party, Republicans are strong, robust, Democrats are soft and weak and want to negotiate, want to apologize. It's simply not true.

We're stronger. We're safer. Barack Obama has been a very robust, muscular -- has a very robust, muscular foreign policy. And as George said earlier, what's happened in the Middle East has lots of factors and lots of causes underneath. It has nothing to do with rhetoric from Washington.

Why exactly should Democrats be "uncomfortable," at a political convention for the upcoming election, talking about our number one foreign policy success, when that is exactly what conventions are about, talking about the policy successes of the nominee?

Funny how the Republican bear hug of September 11, going so far as to hold their convention in NYC in 2004, after they had berated Democrats for holding their convention in NYC in the 90s, didn't bother the media.  It didn't bother them when Rudy "A noun, a verb, and September 11" Giuliani incessantly brought up 9/11, whether to help his own personal business or his party (or both).  More from the Washington Post, back in 2004:

Republican officials said Sunday that they plan to make Sept. 11 a focus of the week in a convention that is also intended to soften some of the party's ideological edges and broaden Bush's appeal to the political middle.

"How you approach the world after September 11th is a factor in this election," Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie said at a lunch with reporters Sunday. Noting that Democrats at their convention last month also spoke about the attacks, Gillespie said ignoring them would be like "a convention in 1864 that didn't take into account the Civil War."

Then there was the Bush campaign ad campaign around September 11.

President Bush's day-old reelection advertising campaign generated criticism and controversy yesterday, as relatives of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist strikes charged that television commercials using images from the attacks were exploiting the tragedy for political gain.

But when Democrats mention their number one foreign policy success when talking about whether their president has, or has not, been a foreign policy success, Democrats are very bad people who must be mocked and silenced.

I'm not entirely sure why Ifill and Karl find this objectionable.  But for a lot of us, killing Osama bin Laden was a huge deal.  Emotionally, for starters.  And you'd better believe that when George Bush called off the hunt for bin Laden only six months after September 11, and Barack Obama then caught the bastard, Democrats are going to talk about it.  And they should.

What other top successes of the Obama administration is President Obama not permitted to talk about when asked about whether his administration was a success?

And finally, just imagine what the Republicans would have done had they caught bin Laden.  We'd never hear the end of it for the next 30 years.  And the media would say nothing about it.

PS I've noticed that often when I post any media criticism I get some responses about how all journalists suck.  They don't.  And Tapper, in particular, has been excellent over the years.  I've worked with him a long time, he's one of the good guys in terms of really doing his job well and accurately.  That doesn't mean we can't from time to time post a critique when things go south.  It also doesn't mean that the folks we're critiquing are bad people, or even bad journalists.  Some are.  Many aren't.  Remember: Conservatives want to destroy the media, liberals simply want it to do its job. Read the rest of this post...

Remembering 9/10: How the GOP hated NYC until it was politically expedient to love it

On September 10, 2001 -- the day before we were attacked -- New York City was a long-reviled place in the hearts of Republicans, right along with Chicago, San Francisco and the District of Columbia.

While today we see Republican Southerners and Midwesterners oddly invested, and stomping mad, about things like lower Manhattan zoning issues ("they're going to build a mosque on scared ground!" -- even though it's not a mosque at all, and it's blocks away), on September 10, 2001 they largely dismissed the metropolis as a worthless sewer representing all that was wrong with America.

Perhaps Republican Vice President Dan Quayle -- the Sarah Palin of his time -- put it best in 1992, when Democrats chose New York City as the site of their convention:

"In so many ways, the liberal Democrats chose the perfect site for their convention," Vice President Dan Quayle said last month, homing in on the theme. "Almost as if they feel a strange compulsion to return to the scene of the crime."

Quayle's derision for New York City wasn't an aberration.  Fast forward to Braves pitcher John Rocker in 1999, only two years before September 11.

When Rocker gave voice to this "I Hate 'Queer with AIDS' New York" assessment, nearly 30,000 fans in Atlanta leapt to their feet in a rapturous standing ovation. He would later receive standing ovations in places like Toledo, Ohio where like minded fans would bring homemade signs reading "Rocker for President".

What exactly did Rocker say that struck a chord with so many? In a 1999 interview with Sports Illustrated, where the admitted steroid-user mocked Asian women and called a black teammate a monkey, Rocker was asked whether he'd consider playing for the Yankees or Mets:

"I'd retire first. It's the most hectic, nerve-racking city. Imagine having to take the 7 Train to the ballpark looking like you're riding through Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time, right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It's depressing... The biggest thing I don't like about New York are the foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?"

When George W. Bush visited New York before 9/11 he was asked if he enjoyed being in the city, and he simply gave a knowing smirk. Complimenting the multicultural mecca wouldn't have played well with the base that adored his Texas brush clearing swagger.

His father wasn't any better in 1992:

The Republicans are already well into their campaign to tar New York as proof of what went wrong with Democratic liberalism. Just last Friday, the Bush campaign sent a video news release to thousands of local television stations around the country explaining that delegates would not be seeing "the real New York," because the city has deployed thousands of police officers on overtime to create a sanitized shimmer.

But as we always hear, 9-11 changed everything. It was like the prior decades of disdain never happened, and we've all pretty much played along.  Suddenly Republicans loved New York City so much, they even decided to have their convention there in 2004.

Of course everything didn't really change, and some of those good old fashioned disses still bleed through, now that 9/11 has become less effective as a political cudgel for Republicans to wield -- so they're back to hating New York again.

While speaking in Las Vegas earlier this year, Newt Gingrich blasted "New York elites who live in highrises and ride the subway," and Rick Santorum said only people outside of New York and Los Angeles have values:

“I kept saying, you just stick with us, you go out and vote for your values and trust what you know, because you don’t live in New York City. You don’t live in Los Angeles. You live like most Americans in between those two cities, and you know the values you believe in.”

Obviously Republicans haven't evolved since jumping to their feet in denunciation of immigrants, foreign languages, "queers", or mass transit. And New York certainly hasn't become less of a decidedly blue international city.

I can't look inside one's heart, but I can observe actions and listen to words. When Republicans cheer and wave plastic flags for a tough-talking president standing on a smouldering debris pile, but yawn or grumble when those responsible are finally killed by a different president, I think it's fair to outright dismiss their proclaimed love for New York and its people, among other things.

Ideologues used the wound of a national tragedy as an excuse to rush in like an opportunistic infection and push their agenda. I'd bet money many teabaggers -- whether caterwauling about where the city's "mosques" are built, or in a blind rage over plans to include (shudder) ethnic faces on a 9/11 statue -- couldn't even identify Manhattan on a map.

9/11 was a moment where we all came together, but when hacks like Sarah Palin talk about "the real America," Fox News personalities actually seem to encourage terrorists to attack San Francisco, and the Republican nominee for president regularly disparages our third largest city, we see that for Republicans, September 10th is far more relevant, far more self-defining, than September 11th will ever be.

And that, I will never forget.

@EmperorAndoe Read the rest of this post...

Enough already. I don't need anyone's help remembering 9/11.

Basta.

I'd almost forgotten - for the first time ever - that we're approaching the 9/11 anniversary.

I've never been raped, so I hesitate to use that analogy.  But I have been mugged - my attackers, with no weapons, hanging out at a 7-Eleven, apparently thought it would be neat to jump and strangle a complete stranger.  So they did.

This was a year after September 11.  I didn't really need the extra drama/trauma in my life.  I'd already spent 9/11 in Washington, DC, alone, watching the smoke from the Pentagon drift across the sky from my living room window. It wasn't a very pleasant experience worrying if we were all going to die, and not having the concern even begin to fade for a good two months.

The view from my apartment window on 9/11.
The smoke is from the Pentagon.

I didn't do so well after September 11.

For years, any time I'd hear a loud noise I'd become totally frazzled.  I'll never forget the time, a few years later, when a waiter dropped a tray of dishes behind me.  I suddenly felt myself choking up, and then breaking into tears, in the middle of dinner with friends, and had no idea why.

For me at least, "remembering September 11" is like someone ripping a scab off a wound that's never completely healed, and never will.  It's like someone insisting that I dredge up my mugging again, remember how it felt not being able to breathe, totally helpless on the ground in the dark, because they're concerned that there's a chance I might have forgotten what it felt like to think I was going to die.

Thanks for the concern.

One of these years, I wish the media (and forget the politicians - the Republicans see 9/11 as the ultimate political cudgel, and Democrats, always afraid of seeming under-patriotic, are happy to climb on board the ongoing GOP terror-fest) would sit back and think about how it feels to the nearly 300 million of us or so who were around on that day, terrorized that day and those months, and who, rather than needing to remember September 11, have been trying for eleven years to forget.

Read the rest of this post...

Remember the time Romney said he wouldn't have ordered the raid on bin Laden?

Mitt Romney thinks we
shouldn't be proud for
having caught Osama.
(WTC via Shutterstock.)

If Mitt Romney were president, Osama bin Laden would still be alive today.

Mitt Romney said in 2007 that he wouldn't have ordered the raid on bin Laden's compound, the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

And now Romney is upset that President Obama is proud that American troops, under his command, killed Osama bin Laden.

The question isn't why President Obama is proud of killing Osama bin Laden.  The question is why Mitt Romney isn't.

What's next, a Romney apology to Al Qaeda?

Mitt Romney has repeatedly shown a reckless lack of understanding of foreign policy and military matters.

Americans are proud that we got bin Laden.  Maybe John Sununu can help Mitt Romney learn how to be a proud American too. Read the rest of this post...

More on DHS domestic terror office that was shut down by GOP pressure

Amy Goodman interviews Daryl Johnson, former Dept of Homeland Security analyst who authored a key report on domestic terrorism in 2009 - a report that the Republicans went nuts over, and effectively shut down the report and the office that was studying the domestic terror threat.

Apparently, Republicans in Congress were congress that a few too many of their supporters might be classified as domestic terrorists - which, if true, means that the report is either too broad, or the Republican base is a tad too crazy.

Here's an excerpt of the interview:

AMY GOODMAN: How did your report get picked up? How did it get disseminated in the media? What was the trajectory it took?

DARYL JOHNSON: Well, basically an anonymous person sent the report out. Obviously they didn’t agree with its findings, and sent it out to Roger Hedgecock out in southern California who is kind of a conservative radio shock jock who really banters the immigration issue a lot. He is credited with disclosing publicly this report which was not meant for public distribution.

AMY GOODMAN: And so what happened to you, Daryl Johnson, and your unit within the Department of Homeland Security that was looking at domestic terror threats and particularly at white supremacy and neo-Nazi groups?

DARYL JOHNSON: What happened was quite shocking actually. I never anticipated that the Department of Homeland Security, my employer, would actually clamp down on the unit and stop all of the valuable work we were doing. Leading up to this report, and I will talk about this at length in my book, my team was doing a lot of good things throughout the country. We received numerous accolades from law enforcement, intelligence officials, talking about the great work we were doing in the fight against domestic terrorism. Then in lieu of the political backlash, the department decided to not only stop all of our work, stop all of the training and briefings that we were scheduled to give; but they also disbanded the unit, reassigned us to other areas within the office and then made life increasingly difficult for us. Not only did they stop the work that we were doing, but they also tried to blame us for some of the attacks that were occurring.

AMY GOODMAN: And so you lost your job.

DARYL JOHNSON: I didn’t lose my job. They just made it a very difficult environment for me to continue working there so I, on my own recognizance, sought employment elsewhere and started my own consulting company.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m looking at a quick piece from Wired which says, “Since Johnson released his ill-fated report, the Witchita, Kansas, abortion doctor, George Teller, was assinated. A security guard was killed when a gunman with neo-Nazi ties went on a shooting spree at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, the FBI arrested members of a Florida neo-Nazi outfit tied to drug dealing and motorcycle gangs, a man was charged with attempting to detonate a weapon of mass destruction at a Spokane, Washington, march commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday and several mosques around the country have been vandalized or attacked, including a Missouri mosque that burned to the ground on Monday, which had been attacked before. Were you surprised by the attack on the Sikh temple and all that has taken place since?

DARYL JOHNSON: Unfortunately, Amy, I was not shocked. In fact, I was sitting in my living room with my wife and immediately when I saw the news coverage, I turned to her and said that this was likely a hate motivated crime against Sikhs perpetrated by a white supremacist who may have had military background.

AMY GOODMAN: It is interesting also that President Obama spoke yesterday in Denver with Sandra Fluke who introduced him, the Georgetown University law student who was speaking out for contraception and was targeted by Rush Limbaugh and others, and was talking about women’s health and women’s rights in this country. The neo-Nazi movement, along with the anti-choice movement, do you see links? I’m talking about the extremist wing.

DARYL JOHNSON: There’s definitely links between white supremacists and the anti-abortion issue. That is one of the causes that they rally around and use as a recruitment tool to bring people into the movement. I wouldn’t necessarily say it is strictly neo-Nazi. It could be, also, the Christian Identity Movement, it could be skinheads, it could the Ku Klux Klan.

Read the rest of this post...

GOP forced DHS to stop studying white supremacist terror threat

Oops.  From ThinkProgress:

The gunman in the shooting at a Sikh temple over the weekend has been labeled a potential domestic terrorist — defined as one who incites politically-motivated violence against his or her own country. In Wade Michael Page’s case, that political motivation was likely white supremacy, a growing problem in the United States.

But when, in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security reported that white supremacy is the US’s biggest threat for domestic terror, it was met with harsh criticism. Conservatives blasted the department for defining terror threats too broadly, instead of focusing on potential Islamic terrorists. Then-House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) was one of those who berated DHS, saying that they weren’t focusing on the real threats the US faces.

One Democrat's "terrorist" is a Republican's "freedom fighter."

What's even worse, I reported last year that Homeland Security gutted the department looking into domestic terror, particularly white supremacists, after the Republicans complained:

Daryl Johnson, who headed the DHS unit responsible for analyzing security threats from non-Islamic domestic extremists, was the principal author of the April 7, 2009, report "Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment."

Johnson, who was interviewed for the upcoming summer issue of the SPLC’s Intelligence Report, said that following the controversy, the DHS dismantled the intelligence team that studied the threat from right-wing extremists and that the department no longer produces its own analytical reports on that subject. When the 2009 report was written, there were six analysts in the unit, including Johnson. Today, he said, there is one.

"DHS stopped all of our work and instituted restrictive policies," said Johnson, who has since left the department. "Eventually, they ended up gutting my unit. All of this happened within six to nine months after the furor over the report. Since our report was leaked, DHS has not released a single report of its own on this topic. Not anything dealing with non-Islamic domestic extremism – whether it’s anti-abortion extremists, white supremacists, 'sovereign citizens,' eco-terrorists, the whole gamut."

Not unlike how George W. Bush gutted the CIA office in charge of hunting down bin Laden so that Bush could instead those resources to force an invasion of Iraq (note: It took a Democrat to finally have the balls to actually catch America's biggest mass murderer, the Republicans simply weren't interested - remember, the GOP talks tough about national security and love of country, but they don't really care about either when it comes to actually doing something about it).

The Republican party, with the help of religious extremists and gun nuts who now control the GOP, stopped Homeland Security from investigating the domestic terror threat.  And now people are dead, again.

So, we let the Republicans, the religious right and the gun nuts yet have their way, and they proved themselves yet again incapable of stopping nutjobs from getting access to guns and killing innocent Americans.  How long do we have to keep doing this the GOP/NRA way before people simply admit that the Republicans and the NRA have failed to keep America safe?

And what's Mitt Romney, who just held a fundraiser three days ago with the head of the NRA, have to say about all of this? Read the rest of this post...

The long history of scapegoating the Sikhs

From my friend Sunny Hundal, one of the top British lefty bloggers, writing in the Guardian:

A little-known fact: the first victim of retaliatory violence following the 9/11 attacks was a Sikh man. On 15 September 2001, 52-year-old Balbir Singh Sodhi, a gas-station owner in Arizona, was shot five times by Frank Roque. While Sodhi died instantly, Roque went on to shoot at other ethnic minorities before going to a local bar and boasting: "They're investigating the murder of a turban-head down the street."

Yesterday, a gunman opened fire on a Sikh congregation in Wisconsin, killing six people in what is now being treated as an act of "domestic terrorism". Some witnesses say the shooter had a tattoo marking the September 11 attacks, though this is not confirmed by the authorities.

While the "war on terror" that followed September 2001 badly affected Muslim families in the west, it is sadly less well-known that Sikhs have also faced significant harassment as a consequence. The Sikh Coalition of Washington said yesterday that Sikhs in the US have faced more than 700 such incidents since 9/11; authorities still do not officially collect data on religious hate crimes against them.

More closer to home, my own brother – an observant Sikh with a turban and beard – faced frequent low-level harassment with people shouting "Taliban" at him or worse.

Read the rest of this post...

Admiral who oversaw killing of bin Laden praises Obama's role

Oops.

You see, the Republicans, who praise anything and everything the military does, suddenly found fault with the raid to kill Osama bin Laden. It was no big deal, they said. (Probably because their guy, George Bush, couldn't kill bin Laden and he had eight years to do it.)

Anyway, Admiral Bill McRaven, the man who oversaw the bin Laden operation, had nothing but praise for President Obama's role that the GOP incessantly mocks.  From Politico:

"At the end of the day, make no mistake about it, it was the president of the United States that shouldered the burden of this operation, that made the hard decision," McRaven said during an on-stage interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer that served as the kickoff session of the Aspen Security Forum.

"The president of the United States is fantastic," the admiral said. "I'm not a political guy. I've worked in both [administrations,] very much enjoyed working with President Bush and I very much enjoy working for President Obama. This isn't about politics. This is about a Commander in Chief who I have the opportunity to engage with on a routine basis."

"I'm not a political guy, but I’ll tell you as an interested observer of this, they were magnfiicent how they handled the start-to-finish," McRaven said. "The president asked all the right questions…The president gave me ample time to prepare once the conversations were through."

Read the rest of this post...

Convicted Lockerbie bomber dies

Obviously while sick, he wasn't quite as sick as everyone was led to believe when he was released in 2009 by the British government. Whether the release was a deal related to oil drilling rights for British companies or the sometimes debated issue of innocence is not yet clear. British PM David Cameron has rejected calls for an inquiry so it may be a number of years until we fully know the truth.

As it stands today, a convicted murderer was wrongly released. Megrahi, while very sick, enjoyed the luxury of living out his final years in the comfort of his own home rather than rotting in prison. The 259 people aboard the Pan Am flight never had such an opportunity and were then sold out by the political class.

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the former Libyan intelligence official who was sentenced to life in prison in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, has died, the Libyan government said on Sunday. He was 60.

The bombing of the Dec. 21, 1988 Pan Am transatlantic flight to New York from London as it flew over Lockerbie, Scotland killed 270 people--259 people on board and 11 people on the ground--making it the world's deadliest act of terror until the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

Megrahi, the only person convicted in connection with the bombing, had long maintained his innocence. He was sentenced to life in a Scottish prison in 2001. Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, another Libyan intelligence official charged in the bombing, was found not guilty.

Read the rest of this post...

DHS finally admits TSA porno-scanners have problems

Smile!

Gee, who would have guessed that the porno-scanners may not be as effective as they keep insisting they are? Oh that's right, there have been one or two published reports about those ever-so-small issues that suggest the machines can easily be defeated.

What is bizarre about this latest story is that nobody in Washington really cares about the wasteful spending. For a bunch of politicians who kick and scream so much about spending, they've willingly gone along with this security theater for years now without question. From afar, it looks like the spending complaints only apply if it's about money to the poor or so-called "entitlement" programs like Social Security that is not an entitlement program since it's paid for via taxes. Interesting how these Washington debates work.

More on the DHS report via Wired.

Exactly how bad the body scanners are is not being divulged publicly, but the Inspector General report made eight separate recommendations on how to improve screening.

The news comes as authorities are examining an underwear bomb, allegedly seized by the CIA in Yemen as it allegedly thwarted an Al-Qaida plot to destroy a U.S.-bound airplane, according to The Associated Press. Authorities are now looking to determine if the bomb could have passed through airport screeners without being detected.

Meanwhile, an unclassified version of the Inspector General report, unearthed Friday by the Electronic Information Privacy Center, may give credence to a recent YouTube video allegedly showing a 27-year-old Florida man sneaking a metallic object through two different Transportation Security Administration body scanners at American airports.

Read the rest of this post...

How Romney should have handled the Bin Laden raid

The Romney camp really needs to get some competent spin doctors. So far their approach to the anniversary of Bin Laden's death has only succeeded in making their candidate look weak, whiny and shallow.

Romney's attack might have cost Obama some votes by reminding liberals and progressives that Obama's foreign policy has been a continuation of the same crypto-colonial approach that has been in place since Eisenhower. But Romney will undoubtedly have lost rather more votes to independent voters, and even Republicans, who would prefer a competent neo-con foreign policy than another clown show like the one delivered by the Bush administration.

Whether Romney likes it or not, most US voters consider eliminating Bin Laden to have been a success that President Obama deserves credit, and praise, for. Attempting to persuade them otherwise is a fool's errand, but what could the Romney camp have done instead?

Rather than trying to dismiss the attack as a decision that any US president would make, Romney should have done the opposite. Romney's biggest problem as the challenger is to demonstrate that he understands the job of President better than the incumbent. This week he had an opportunity to demonstrate that he is not just an empty suit with an eight figure going on nine bank account. Romney should have praised the President for taking a big risk, and backed it up with historical context to remind people that even though this particular raid succeeded, many similar raids that have failed.

Instead, Obama is getting to make those points [NBC]

“I did choose the risk,” the president said in an exclusive interview with Rock Center Anchor and Managing Editor Brian Williams. “The reason I was willing to make that decision of sending in our SEALs to try to capture or kill bin Laden rather than to take some other options was ultimately because I had 100 percent faith in the Navy SEALs themselves.”

Obama is not the first President to have authorized a raid on Bin Laden. Bill Clinton ordered a cruise missile attack in 1998. That is the attack Bush II referred to derisively saying "I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt."  The Clinton Administration considered a second attack but did not go through with it. There was even an attacked planned by the Bush administration in 2005, which Rumsfeld called off.

The Republican camp is currently busy trying to swiftboat Obama with fake stories about Navy SEALs angry with the Commander in Chief for taking credit for 'their' work. It is the same old Rovian strategy of trying to turn a weakness into a strength. They did it with Al Gore, with the fabricated story that he claimed to have invented the Internet, and then they did it by attacking John Kerry for his purple hearts, and now they are trying it against Obama for finally doing what a Republican president could do, kill bin Laden.

In fact, the bin Laden raid was a team effort, and even if a president has 100% faith in their commando team, no president can or should ever have the same degree of confidence in their intelligence service. The intelligence services might have got the wrong house or miss-judged the Pakistani air defenses or made any one of a hundred other missteps that could have led to catastrophe.

That is the reason that the raid was a team effort, and that team was not just SEAL Team 6 -- according to what we know today it included at least the CIA, the NSA and the State department. Claiming that 'any' President would have authorized the raid is nonsense.  The raid might have had to be called off for any one of hundreds of operational reasons.

In claiming that this was a decision any President would have made, Romney demonstrates that he does not understand that it was a decision that only a President could make. Read the rest of this post...

If Mitt Romney had his way, Osama bin Laden would still be alive

I'm paraphrasing George W. Bush.

The Republicans have a problem with President Obama taking credit for Osama bin Laden's death.  But they had no problem with George Bush taking credit for capturing Saddam, and on September 11 no less.

From USA Today on September 11 (no less) of 2004:

In a harsh new attack on rival John Kerry, President Bush said Friday that if the Democratic presidential candidate "had his way," Saddam Hussein's regime would be running Iraq and threatening the safety of other nations.

The newest wrinkle is that Sen. Kerry has now decided we are spending too much money in Iraq even though he criticized us earlier for not spending enough," Bush said. "One thing about Sen. Kerry's position is clear ... if he had his way, Saddam Hussein would still be in power and would still be a threat to our security and to the world."

As I pointed out in the earlier post, Mitt Romney didn't want us going into Pakistan to catch bin Laden, which is in fact where we got him. Good thing Mitt Romney didn't win the presidency in 2008 or Osama bin Laden still might be alive. Read the rest of this post...

Obama calls out Romney for chickening out on going after Osama bin Laden

Meow.  Now that's the guy I voted for. Here's Obama today:

As far as my personal role and what other folks would do, I'd just recommend that everybody look at people's previous statements in terms of whether they thought it was appropriate to go into Pakistan and take out bin Laden.

I assume that people meant what they said when they said—that's been at least my practice. I said that I'd go after bin Laden if we had a clear shot at him, and I did. If there are others who have said one thing and now suggest they would do something else, then I'd go ahead and let them explain it.

Here's Romney in 2007:

"I do not concur in the words of Barack Obama in a plan to enter an ally of ours... I don't think those kinds of comments help in this effort to draw more friends to our effort," Romney told reporters on the campaign trail....

"If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will," Obama said.

Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who is one of the Republican front-runners, said U.S. troops "shouldn't be sent all over the world." He called Obama's comments "ill-timed" and "ill-considered."

I do get a kick out of how the Republicans are all upset that the President is taking credit for the Obama kill. And they should be upset. It was one hell of a victory, and something George Bush failed to accomplish in eight years in office (not to mention, Bush actually let Osama get away at Tora Bora). So it's understandable, and typical, that the GOP would freak out over Obama even mentioning Osama. It's what they do - go after you on your strengths so you're afraid to mention them. Remember who the Republican party demonized John Kerry for being a war hero? That was his strength, so they had to take it down. Same goes for Obama taking out Osama.

Romney didn't even want to go after Osama in the first place, he said he wouldn't go into Pakistan to get him, and that's exactly what Obama did, go into Pakistan and kill him. So the Republicans need to do everything they can to neutralize the issue lest the public catch on that under President Romney Osama bin Laden would have gotten away again.

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Wikileaks: Pakistan intelligence was in regular contact with bin Laden

The Wikileaks Stratfor email dump is telling us what most (if not all) suspected all along. The US is in a bad position if they're counting on any cooperation from Pakistan. The Telegraph:

According to one of the e-mails, the firm was shown the information papers collected from bin Laden's Abbotabad compound after the US special forces attack last May that resulted in his death. The e-mail, from a Stratfor analyst, suggested that up to 12 officials in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency knew of the al-Qaeda leader's safe house. The internal email did not name the Pakistani officials involved but said the US could use the information as a bargaining chip in post raid negotiations with Islamabad.

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Assassination is state terrorism

CNN reports that Iran is suspected of being behind a recent plot to bomb the Israeli embassy in Bangkok:

The video, shot by a bystander, is horrific. A man lies on a Bangkok street, his legs severed below the knee. He is Saeid Moradi, a 28-year old Iranian, injured on February 14 as he tried to throw a device at police.

Minutes earlier, an explosion had rocked the house rented by Moradi and two other Iranians in the Sukhumvit Road area of the Thai capital. (Watch one of the suspects take Thai police to the scene of the explosion)

The circumstantial evidence pointing to Iran is strong, as strong as the circumstantial evidence linking Israel to an earlier assassination in Dubai.

This type of behavior should be condemned for what it is: State acts of terrorism. It is terrorism when Iran commits these atrocities and it is terrorism when Israel does.

Terrorism was a favorite tactic of various communist countries during the 1970s. It was much cheaper than conventional warfare and the difficulty of attribution gave the activities plausible deniability. Reagan funded right wing death squads in Latin America and East Germany funded the Red Army Faction (aka the Baader-Meinhof gang).

The main reason terrorism came to a halt was the collapse of the Soviet system and the end of the cold war. But even during the 1970s it was clear that it was a game both (or rather all) sides could play.

The CIA and KGB stopped targeting each other's operatives for assassination sometime back in the 1950s when it became clear that both sides were prepared to respond in kind. Hopefully the Israeli and Iranian groups will work this out at some point.

Unless of course it turns out that these turn out to be false flag operations.

In August 1980, the train station in Bologna was bombed, killing 85 people. At first the attack was attributed to leftist splinter groups but the investigation soon led to a neo-fascist group with connections to the Italian secret service. The generally accepted theory today is that this was in fact a false flag operation intended to provide the pretext for a fascist takeover, possibly as part of a series of attacks. Read the rest of this post...

FBI arrests would-be suicide bomber near US Capitol building

Wow.  Good job, FBI.  But creepy.

CNN:

U.S. Capitol Police and the FBI on Friday arrested a Moroccan man who was planning a suicide attack on the Capitol, police and a federal law enforcement official said.

Authorities identified the man as Amine Khalifi.

He received what he thought was a vest with explosives, but the materials in the vest had been rendered inoperable by law enforcement, Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said.

The man was arrested as soon as he accepted the vest from undercover officers, according to the federal law enforcement source.

More from the Wash Post:

Amine el-Khalifi, 29, was picked up while carrying an inoperable gun and a fake suicide vest provided to him by undercover FBI agents posing as al-Qaeda associates, U.S. officials said. They said he entered the United States when he was 16 and was living as an illegal immigrant in Arlington, Va., having reportedly overstayed his visitor’s visa for years.

The Associated Press, quoting a law enforcement official, said Khalifi changed his mind about his intended target several times but ultimately decided on the Capitol. He is not believed to be associated with al-Qaeda, AP said.

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Homeland Security monitoring HuffPost, Drudge, blogs

Weird report. Sounds innocuous and creepy all at the same time. From Reuters:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's command center routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks and news and gossip sites including the Huffington Post and Drudge Report, according to a government document.

A "privacy compliance review" issued by DHS last November says that since at least June 2010, its national operations center has been operating a "Social Networking/Media Capability" which involves regular monitoring of "publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites and message boards."

The purpose of the monitoring, says the government document, is to "collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture."

Yeah, that's clears things up.  Again, this could be innocuous.  But it does sound odd. Read the rest of this post...

Nigeria declares state of emergency following bombings

What a way to start the new year. Al Jazeera:

"While the search for lasting solutions is ongoing, it has become imperative to take some decisive measures necessary to restore normalcy in the country, especially within the affected communities," Jonathan said in the nationwide broadcast. "The temporary closure of our borders in the affected areas is only an interim measure designed to address the current security challenges and will be resumed as soon as normalcy is restored," he said. Jonathan said the move was necessary "as terrorists have taken advantage of the present situation to strike at targets in Nigeria and retreat beyond the reach of our law enforcement personnel".

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Terrorist attacks claim at least 65 in Nigeria

Even in a country that is familiar with violence, this is enormous. The Guardian:

At least 65 people were killed in a spate of coordinated gun and bomb attacks in the Nigerian city of Damaturu on Friday, with witnesses describing dozens of bodies piling up in morgues.

Gunmen raided the city and nearby village of Potiskum – both in Yobe state in the north east – on Friday evening, and engaged in several hours of running gun battles with security forces, witnesses said.

Militants bombed churches, mosques and police stations.

Though no one has claimed responsibility, the Islamist sect Boko Haram has been behind previous attacks.

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