Bodies of six militiamen found in Benghazi after attacks on bases

The Guardian reports: 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.

The interior minister, Fawzi Abdul Al, who was criticised for his failure to launch a full investigation of the murder of Stevens and three fellow diplomats, criticised the action of the crowds, saying the militias should have been given more time to incorporate into the official security forces.

The mood in Benghazi is one of both triumph and sorrow at the toll of dead and wounded. Mohammed El Kish, whose cousin was killed by a stray bullet more than a mile from the clashes, said: “He was not even involved in the actions, it is terrible.”

City hospitals were braced for more violence after the Rafallah al-Sahati militia reoccupied its looted base. Several hundred unarmed people gathered outside. “This is not good, they should not be here. When the funerals have finished there will be trouble,” said Ashraf Saleh.

Police remained in control of the Ansar al-Sharia compound, which is now a looted ruin. A spokesman for Ansar al-Sharia, whose units have dispersed outside the city, insisted they had withdrawn rather than confront protesters “for reasons of security”.

The chaos at the heart of Libya’s government remains, with some angry that Rafallah was attacked after it had formally been incorporated into the Libyan army. Such designations are lost on many ordinary Libyans, who say many militias from last year’s revolution have simply cut deals with ministries, enabling them to form what are in essence private armies.

Facebooktwittermail

MEK decision: multimillion-dollar campaign led to removal from terror list

The Guardian reports: Supporters of a designated Iranian terrorist organisation have won a long struggle to see it unbanned in the US after pouring millions of dollars into an unprecedented campaign of political donations, hiring Washington lobby groups and payments to former top administration officials.

A Guardian investigation, drawing partly on data researched by the Centre for Responsive Politics, a group tracking the impact of money in US politics, has identified a steady flow of funds from key Iranian American organisations and their leaders into the campaign to have the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran removed from the list of terrorist organisations.

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, is expected to notify Congress that the MEK will be removed from the terrorism list in the coming days.

The campaign to bury the MEK’s bloody history of bombings and assassinations that killed American businessmen, Iranian politicians and thousands of civilians, and to portray it as a loyal US ally against the Islamic government in Tehran has seen large sums of money directed at three principal targets: members of Congress, Washington lobby groups and influential former officials.

Prominent among the members of Congress who have received fund is Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the chair of the House of Representatives foreign affairs committee. She has accepted at least $20,000 in donations from Iranian American groups or their leaders to her political campaign fund.

Other recipients include Congressman Bob Filner, who was twice flown to address pro-MEK events in France and has pushed resolutions resolutions in the House of Representatives calling for the group to be unbanned. More than $14,000 in expenses for Filner’s Paris trips were met by the head of an Iranian American group who also paid close to $1m to a Washington lobby firm working to get the MEK unbanned.

A Texas Congressman, Ted Poe, received thousands of dollars in donations from the head of a pro-MEK group in his state at a time when he was a regular speaker on behalf of its unbanning at events across the US, describing the organisation as the ticket to regime change in Iran.

Mike Rogers, chairman of the House of Representatives intelligence committee, has also received the backing of individuals and groups that support the unbanning of the MEK. Rogers has been among the strongest supporters in Congress of delisting the group, sponsoring resolutions and pressing other members of Congress to support the cause.

A leading advocate of unbanning the MEK and chairman of the foreign affairs committee’s oversight subcommittee, congressman Dana Rohrabacher, has received thousands of dollars in donations from supporters of the banned group this year alone. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Islamist militias kicked out of their bases by Benghazi protesters

The Libya Herald reports: Hundreds of protesters demanding an end to militia rule in Libya have stormed the compound of the Ansar Al-Sharia brigade, the Islamist group suspected of involvement in last week’s murder of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

The demonstrators arrived at the Ansar Al-Sharia headquarters on Nasr square yesterday evening (formerly Kish square), and demanded the brigade leave immediately or the facility would be destroyed.

The brigadesmen initially pleaded that they were comparatively few in number, firing warning shots into the air, but were evicted in clashes that left several people wounded.

It has been reported that the demonstrators released four prisoners inside the base and carried away weapons found inside whilst chanting “Libya, Libya” and “No more Al-Qaeda”.

Part of the compound was set alight by the demonstrators before the national army arrived and took control of the scene.

Members of Ansar Al-Sharia were also confronted at Al-Jalaa hospital, where they operate as guards, and told either to leave or face the use of force.

An administrator at the hospital subsequently told the Libya Herald that all of the Ansar Al-Sharia brigadesmen had fled.

Ansar Al-Sharia have reportedly put out a statement accusing those involved of being drunk and on drugs, a claim that has been likened by local people to one formally issued by Muammar Qaddafi against the revolutionaries as a means of discrediting them.

Protesters also took control of a base belonging to the Abu Salim Brigade in Benghazi as well as the headquarters of the Rafallah Al-Sahati brigade, located at a farm in Hawari district, some 15 kilometres from Benghazi’s city centre.

At least four people were reported to have been killed and 40 wounded in clashes at the Rafallah Al-Sahati base, according to AFP, and there are also reports of prisoners being released inside that facility.

Leaders of the Islamist brigade, which is notionally under the control of the Ministry of Defence, accused Qaddafi loyalists of instigating the violence and said they had video evidence to prove it.

The events follow an unprecedented demonstration in Benghazi earlier in the day, when an estimated 30,000 people participated in a rally calling for the disbanding of militias and the establishment of a regular army and police force.

Time magazine adds: The militia and Islamist phenomenon exists in other parts of the country. But Libyans there will find it harder to replicate Benghazi’s example. The city of Misrata with its dozens of militias is a state onto itself, running several prisons and preventing foreigners from entering. The city of Zintan has equally powerful brigades and has refused to turn over Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam to the national government. In both towns the brigades are admired for their role in the revolution and do not suffer from the militia backlash that has become widespread in Benghazi in the wake of the consulate attack. And as long as such brigades retain their societal support, it will be a long time before the scenes in Benghazi will be repeated in other parts of Libya.

Facebooktwittermail

Religious intolerance on the rise worldwide, says U.S. report

The Guardian reports: Three-quarters of the world’s human population of seven billion live under strong government curbs on religion, or among serious “social hostilities” involving faith issues, find researchers.

The US and UK, say the researchers, are among countries showing a worrying rise in religious discrimination.

The conclusions of the project, conducted by the Pew Research Centre, an American thinktank,’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, were published on Thursday. The analysis, of 197 countries and territories, identifies a sharp rise in religious limits globally and a 6% increase in restrictions in the four years until 2010.

The survey, The Rising Tide of Restrictions on Religion, is the second successive one by Pew to note increasing intolerance worldwide.

Painting a stark picture of a “rising tide” of intolerance and government restrictions on religious matters, the report cites evidence including “crimes, malicious acts and violence motivated by religious hatred or bias, as well as increased government interference with worship or other religious practices”.

The project notes an acceleration in intolerance, reporting a 63% rise from mid-2009 to mid-2010 in numbers of countries that increased government restrictions, in comparison with Pew’s last survey that had noted a 56% rise.

Remarking on the trend, the report says: “The number of countries where harassment or intimidation of specific religious groups took place rose from 147 as of mid-2009, to 160 as of mid-2010.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Pakistan minister announces $100,000 bounty on anti-Islam film maker

Dawn reports: A Pakistani federal minister has announced a bounty of $100,000 on the maker of the American film “Innocence of Muslims” disrespecting the Holy Prophet (PBUH), DawnNews reported.

Speaking here at a press conference on Saturday, the Federal Minister for Railways Ghulam Ahmed Bilour said that he was aware that it was a crime to instigate the people for murder, but he was ready to commit the crime. He added that there was no way to instill fear among blasphemers other than taking this step.

The minister also called on members of the Taliban and al Qaeda for their support, saying that if members of the banned militant organisations kill the maker of the blasphemous movie, they will also be rewarded.

Facebooktwittermail

Medical professionals who torture

Steven Reisner and Kathy Roberts write: In the history of state-sponsored torture, a rarely acknowledged truth is that accountability only takes place in countries where the torturing government has fallen from power. Victors tend neither to acknowledge nor to hold themselves accountable for torture.

In the United States, apparently we are no different. Recently, Attorney General Holder dismissed the final two of 100 cases of alleged torture under investigation. But, as the recent death of Adnan Latif reminds us, our nation’s struggle with torture is far from resolved. During his years at Guantánamo, Mr. Latif was subjected to extensive solitary confinement, often with his hands in cuffs and his arms pinned. Because of his suicide attempts and hunger strikes, he was also housed in a psychiatric ward and force-fed through tubes in his nose. Since 2002, at least six detainees have successfully committed suicide, and hundreds have tried. Thus, while abusive interrogations may have stopped, their effects continue to reverberate in the lives of those subjected to them. Like the majority of the 167 men who remain in indefinite detention at Guantánamo, Mr. Latif was never charged with any crime. His freedom was taken from him; his mind was broken, and he never saw justice.

Much has been written about the lawyers and CIA personnel involved in water-boarding and other cruel punishment of detainees. There is less public awareness of the prominent role that medical professionals and in particular psychologists played at every stage of the development and implementation of the abusive interrogation techniques and detention conditions. And this, sadly, is not unusual. We know from trials in other countries where torture is practiced that medical professionals, including psychologists, frequently play a role in attempting to extract information from prisoners because torture is at its core a psychological process. In fact, the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims reports that a health professional was involved in 50% of the cases they’ve seen. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The Washington Post dreams about Israel bombing Iran

The editors of the Washington Post must be in funk as Mitt Romney’s chances for electoral success rapidly dwindle. Maybe that’s why they decided to indulge in their favorite fantasy: an imminent Israeli attack on Iran. But rather than bore themselves and their readers with the tedious ruminations of national security experts, they think the topic can be handled more colorfully through the medium of fiction, providing post-strike views from Washington, Tel Aviv, and Tehran.

Azadeh Moaveni’s effort in presenting the view from Tehran is commendable. Karim Sadjadpour and Blake Hounshell demonstrate why if either ever took a creative writing class they got an F, and the contribution coming from the Israeli criminologist, Anat Berko, is nothing less than delusional.

Berko writes: [After hearing explosions from incoming missiles] I bring my mother, who lives nearby, over to the house so she won’t be alone. Her 72-year-old face is lined from age and decades of worry and war. “They will never leave us alone,” she mutters. “Your father was in Iran for two years when he fled Iraq on his way to Israel. It was different then [under the Shah]; the Iranians loved us. Why did everything change?”

Together, with my three children, we go to our safe room. Almost every house in Israel has a room like this: a bomb shelter with thick, concrete walls, stocked with food and water, a radio, TV, and Internet, sometimes in the basement, but often a spare room used as a bedroom.

In late August the Israeli government distributed booklets on civil defense with the happy face of a muppet on the cover. They warn Israelis they would have “only between 30 seconds and three minutes to find cover and hunker down between the time air raid sirens sound and rockets slam into their area.” But the Los Angeles Times reported many Israelis don’t have anywhere to take cover:

Less than half the population has gas masks and only 30% have reinforced safe rooms, officials estimate. More than 25% lack access to a bomb shelter.

In Tel Aviv, probably a primary target of missiles, city officials this month designated 60 underground parking garages to serve as emergency shelters, capable of temporarily shielding 800,000 people, nearly twice the city’s population. The move came after critics noted that the city’s 241 public bomb shelters could accommodate only about 40,000 people.

Sadjadpour and Hounshell obviously missed the recent poll which showed most Americans are in no doubt that in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran, then Israel should bear responsibility for the consequences.

When gas prices soar after Israel bombs Iran, the average American can be credited with having enough intelligence to understand who to blame — though apparently some in Washington assume otherwise.

When the stock market closes [after the Israeli attack], oil prices are up nearly 40 percent, the largest 24-hour increase in history. CNN interviews Americans at gas stations across the country, notably in swing states such as Florida and Ohio; most blame Iran, not Israel or Obama, for the price jumps.

By Friday evening, leaks have emerged from within the U.S. government and military saying that the United States had no prior knowledge of Israel’s actions.

Obama manages to break away from his national security team to join his family for a quick dinner. Sasha and Malia are talking about their schoolwork. “I don’t like physics,” Malia says. “It’s too complicated.”

“I know just how you feel, honey,” Obama says. “I’ve got a few problems like that, too.”

Azadeh Moaveni presents the view from Tehran through the eyes of “Hamid,” a political science professor.

He flicks on the television at home; the state channel shows emergency workers in white hazmat suits carrying stretchers out of the dusty rubble outside Isfahan. All 1,000 workers at the plant have been killed, and winds are sweeping toxic smoke toward the nearby city. The supreme leader’s war council must be sitting on a woolen rug at Khamenei’s guarded house, appraising the damage to the nuclear sites and calibrating its response. The ticker at bottom of the TV screen says the price of crude oil has jumped to $130 a barrel.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki condemns the attacks and warns that his country’s airspace is off limits to “further aggression.” Iraq and Iran have grown friendlier since the end of the U.S. war, and Maliki might be willing to look the other way should some Iraqi pipelines mysteriously explode, diverting millions of barrels from the market. Hamid knows that the clerics want to avoid a regional war, but they can destabilize the world economy without going to such lengths. He thinks of the relief that Bashar al-Assad must be feeling in Syria, his regime bought precious days by Iran’s misfortune.

In the morning rush hour, cars whiz past billboards of smiling clerics on the expressway; everyone’s moving fast save for those in the two-block-long line at the nearest gas station. Hamid’s political-theory class starts at 10 a.m., but he has left early to see if he can get online at work; he must e-mail his daughter in Los Angeles to say he’s safe.

The authorities have shut down the cellphone network, worried that Israel’s agents will report back via the phone lines and that the Iranian opposition will scramble to exploit the chaos. The radio reports that the Islamic Association of Students has gathered outside the Swiss Embassy, which looks after U.S. interests in Iran, chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” pelting rocks and tossing gasoline bombs over the concrete walls. These are the Basij front line, Hamid knows, the militiamen organized by the government.

He parks his Kia in the staff lot, wondering which former student he can reach to find out how officials are reacting. Most of Hamid’s students go on to key posts in the diplomatic corps and the Revolutionary Guard; he has supervised at least 20 theses gaming out precisely what might happen in this scenario, watched as his students defended their conclusions with glistening eyes, their fervor evident. Not all of them had itched for war with Israel, he reminds himself. Maybe just half.

After his class, in which rattled students argued that Iran should move to weaponize its nuclear program immediately, Hamid watches the supreme leader address the country, transfixed by the elderly mullah’s forceful calm. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has never captured even a glint of his predecessor Ruhollah Khomeini’s legendary fire. Today, however, his oratory is masterful. He vows that Iran will not be defeated, that the great nation will retaliate and bring the Zionist enemy to its knees.

The speech is over, and the broadcast cuts to images of Tehran’s snow-capped Alborz Mountains and the Caspian Sea, set to “Vatanam,” a patriotic song of his youth. Hamid’s eyes fill with tears. He is a secular aristocrat by birth, the grandson of a shah’s cabinet minister, trained in Weber and Rousseau, but he is not above being moved by nationalism. Today it is not propaganda; it is genuine solidarity.

Facebooktwittermail

The waning of the Modern Ages

Morris Berman writes: La longue durée — the long run — was an expression made popular by the Annales School of French historians led by Fernand Braudel, who coined the phrase in 1958. The basic argument of this school is that the proper concern of historians should be the analysis of structures that lie at the base of contemporary events. Underneath short-term events such as individual cycles of economic boom and bust, said Braudel, we can discern the persistence of “old attitudes of thought and action, resistant frameworks dying hard, at times against all logic.” An important derivative of the Annales research is the work of the World Systems Analysis school, including Immanuel Wallerstein and Christopher Chase-Dunn, which similarly focuses on long-term structures: capitalism, in particular.

The “arc” of capitalism, according to this school, is about 600 years long, from 1500 to 2100. It is our particular (mis)fortune to be living through the beginning of the end, the disintegration of capitalism as a world system. It was mostly commercial capital in the sixteenth century, evolving into industrial capital in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then moving on to financial capital — money created by money itself, and by speculation in currency — in the twentieth and twenty-first. In dialectical fashion, it will be the very success of the system that eventually does it in.

The last time a change of this magnitude occurred was during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, during which time the medieval world began to come apart and be replaced by the modern one. In his classic study of the period, The Waning of the Middle Ages, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga depicted the time as one of depression and cultural exhaustion — like our own age, not much fun to live through. One reason for this is that the world is literally perched over an abyss. What lies ahead is largely unknown, and to have to hover over an abyss for a long time is, to put it colloquially, a bit of a drag. The same thing was true at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire as well, on the ruins of which the feudal system slowly arose.

I was musing on these issues some time ago when I happened to run across a remarkable essay by Naomi Klein, the author of The Shock Doctrine. It was called “Capitalism vs. the Climate,” and was published last November in The Nation. In what appears to be something of a radical shift for her, she chastises the Left for not understanding what the Right does correctly perceive: that the whole climate change debate is a serious threat to capitalism. The Left, she says, wants to soft-pedal the implications; it wants to say that environmental protection is compatible with economic growth, that it is not a threat to capital or labor. It wants to get everyone to buy a hybrid car, for example (which I have personally compared to diet cheesecake), or use more efficient light bulbs, or recycle, as if these things were adequate to the crisis at hand. But the Right is not fooled: it sees Green as a Trojan horse for Red, the attempt “to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism.” It believes — correctly — that the politics of global warming is inevitably an attack on the American Dream, on the whole capitalist structure. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Will the Arab Spring destroy Hezbollah?

Thanassis Cambanis writes: Hassan Nasrallah has always been more sophisticated than the caricatured nightmare featured in the breathless propaganda of Hezbollah’s many enemies. Even at his most noxious he usually managed to present himself as a man of principle. That’s why it was almost sad to see Nasrallah this week pandering like an old-time Arab despot to public anger over the misbegotten Prophet Mohammed YouTube clip.

“America, which uses the pretext of freedom of expression needs to understand that putting out the whole film will have very grave consequences around the world,” Nasrallah said at a Hezbollah rally on September 17, one of the exceedingly rare occasions on which he appeared in public since he went into hiding during the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon. Though the message sounds militant, it was actually just a flailing attempt to catch up to developments elsewhere in the region. Hezbollah, which used to set the Arab world’s trends, now finds itself forced to opportunistically jump on the latest global Islamist bandwagon.

In fact, Hezbollah’s embrace of the controversy over the video marks a final stage of its speedy evolution from revolutionary militant resistance movement to Machiavellian establishment power center. Lebanon’s Party of God once literally threw bombs at those who stood in the way of its ideology, attacking powerful enemies like America and Israel as well as smaller rivals at home. Today, Hezbollah represents the very sort of power it used to oppose. It dominates Lebanese politics as the majority party, choosing the prime minister; it commands a formidable standing army; its complicity in domestic political assassinations no longer is credibly debated; and it remains comfortable with its deep, compromised embrace of Bashar Al-Assad’s criminal regime in Syria.

There’s no mystery here: Hezbollah has become essentially conservative, fearful of the status of its political interests and financial and military networks. The very fact that Nasrallah felt compelled to risk emerging from his underground safe haven suggests that he fears very seriously for his organization’s future. It’s a remarkable change for a movement that was once confident in its ideological rigor and in its ability to earn unparalleled popular support in the region. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

How does Bashar al-Assad view Syria?

David W. Lesch, author of Syria: The Fall of the House of Assad, writes: I got to know Assad fairly well over the years. I do not see him as either an eccentric or as a bloodthirsty killer, along the lines of Muammar al-Qaddafi or Saddam Hussein. People I know who have met all three readily agree with this assessment. There are those, however, who differ, viewing Bashar as a corrupt tyrant from the very beginning. Many of these people have never even been to Syria. Many of them have agendas that have been — or still are — assisted by this characterization. And almost none of them have ever met Assad or any other top Syrian official. They often base their position on the evidence of continued repression and repeatedly delayed reform. This is understandable. If they said that the Syrian system had been corrupt and repressive from the beginning of Assad’s rule, then I would wholeheartedly agree.

If they said that he was bound eventually to succumb to this system, even if he was altruistic in the beginning, then they would be correct. But Bashar was different from the typical Middle Eastern dictator, and this led many people, including me, to hope for the best — and maybe even indulge in a little wishful thinking. That Bashar was perceived by most who met him as a relatively ordinary person, and that this ordinary person then sanctioned a brutal crackdown on the uprising in what seems to have been a very matter-of-fact manner says something about human behavior and about how even normal people can become corrupted under the pressure of power and delusion.

Somewhere along the road, Assad lost his way. He either convinced himself, or was convinced by sycophants, that his well-being was synonymous with the well-being of the country, and that his brutal response to the protests was a necessary response. A self-reinforcing alternate reality was orchestrated and constructed around him, and there was no way of testing it against what was real.

A friend of mine, Ayman Abd al-Nour, is a prominent voice on things Syrian. He went to college with Bashar in Syria and got to know him well as a friend. Ayman was forced into exile several years ago because of his criticisms of the regime that appeared on his blog, All4Syria. “After he became president, when people showered him with compliments and inflated his ego, he became totally different — as if he was chosen by God to run Syria,” he told me. “He believed he was a prophet and started to build his own world.”

While the rest of the world thinks Assad has been delusional since his March 30 speech, it is my contention that he and his inner circle really believe — more than most people can imagine — that they have indeed been battling foreign conspiracies from the very beginning. The Syrian leadership simply has a different conceptual paradigm that frames the nature of internal and external threat to the country. From the Western point of view, it appears extremely paranoid; from the perspective of Damascus, it is based on historical circumstances. And the violence Assad has unleashed has helped to create a context in Syria whereby external forces are, in fact, involving themselves in the uprising — it has, to some extent, become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Syrian government’s crackdown is a push-button, convulsive reaction to domestic threat. It is not that Bashar does not control the security forces — this is simply the way Syria has worked under the Assads. Syrian leaders reached into their pockets and pulled out what worked for them in the past, in this case what they found was much closer to Hama in 1982 than to anything else. The regimes of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad have always refused to make concessions from a perceived position of weakness — they will only do so from a perceived position of strength. Cracking down hard on demonstrators while offering political reforms are two sides of the same coin.

Thus, there was never much U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration could do to change Bashar’s response to the revolt. The United States tried to squeeze blood from a stone: It pushed for dramatic political reform from a system that simply is not built for it.

Assad’s removal perhaps will just be a matter of time — although it may take longer than many want. Unfortunately, it is unlikely to be a pretty sight. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Nearing end of term, Obama’s snared no big Wall Street fish

McClatchy reports: Running for re-election, President Barack Obama frequently blames Wall Street and the deep financial crisis it caused for the underperforming economy. He doesn’t advertise that no major honcho of finance has been jailed under his watch for the mess, however.

The lack of a high-profile arrest and trial is all the more surprising given that Obama has tried to stain his Republican rival, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, as a creature of Wall Street.

Past financial crises have always had antagonist. The savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s had banker Charles Keating. The CEO of collapsed energy trader Enron, Kenneth Lay, became the face behind a drive to revamp accounting laws in 2002. Both men were prosecuted for and convicted of financial crimes.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007-08 and the subsequent Great Recession, there’ve been plenty of scapegoats but no important actor fitted for pinstripes.

Why not? [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Was the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi a ‘terrorist’ attack?

Louis Klarevas writes: After days of holding back, the White House on Thursday labeled the Sept. 11 assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi a “terrorist attack.” The incident, which involved heavy gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), killed four Americans including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens. Highlighting the suspected presence of militia and terrorist elements in Libya, White House spokesperson Jay Carney told the press corps, “It is, I think, self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack.”

The declaration comes one day after Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC), told a Senate committee that — despite the absence of “specific intelligence that there was a significant advanced planning or coordination for this attack” — the four Americans “were killed in the course of a terrorist attack on our embassy.”

It all sounds like common sense, right?

But there’s just one problem with these statements: All acts of terrorism, by federal statute, require premeditation. If, as Carney acknowledged, there is “no information at this point to suggest that this is a significantly pre-planned attack,” then the plotting criterion has not been met. No premeditation, no terrorism. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail