The senior leadership of the US Navy’s SEAL community—the commander and force master chief of Naval Special Warfare Command (NSWC)—have officially distanced themselves from a so-called SEAL Team Six member, labeled in the media as ‘The Shooter’.
The man claims to have been the operator who shot Osama Bin Ladin in the 2011 raid that killed the Al-Qaeda leader. Eyewitnesses on the scene have since contradicted the White House’s story of the raid.
Thousands of sailors on the US aircraft carrier from which Bin Laden was said to have been dumped into the Indian Ocean also wrote home that no such burial took place.
In a letter signed by both the senior commander and enlisted man of Naval Special Warfare Command, the SEAL leadership denied that the so-called Shooter was part of their team, pointing out that to reveal such classified information is a violation of the law.
Rear Admiral Brian Losey, Commander of NSWC, and Force Master Chief Michael Magaraci state that violators of that ethos “are neither teammates in good standing, nor teammates who represent Naval Special Warfare.”
Osama bin Laden became the only human in history to survive renal failure for ten years. There was no dialysis machine in what was said to be Bin Laden’s hideout. The Obama administration have also ignored the numerous obituaries of bin Laden’s death in December 2001.
It was reported earlier that 22 Navy SEALs, most of whom belonged to Team 6, died after their helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan. This was the largest loss of life in a single day since the 2001 invasion.
Several more members of the team that allegedly carried out the dubious raid on Bin Laden’s compound, have also wound up dead.
Unlike Bradley Manning who received jail time for leaking classified military information, SEAL Team Six members who speak out are somehow not punished.
More evidence suggesting the entire story surrounding Osama bin Laden’s death is a fabricated lie.
A newly-released email shows that 11 days after the (alleged) killing of terror leader Osama bin Laden in 2011, the U.S. military’s top special operations officer ordered subordinates to destroy any photographs of the al-Qaida founder’s corpse or turn them over to the CIA.
The email was obtained under a freedom of information request by the conservative legal group Judicial Watch. The document, released Monday by the group, shows that Adm. William McRaven, who heads the U.S. Special Operations Command, told military officers on May 13, 2011 that photos of bin Laden’s remains should have been sent to the CIA or already destroyed. Bin Laden was killed by a special operations team in Pakistan on May 2, 2011.
McRaven’s order to purge the bin Laden material came 10 days after The Associated Press asked for the photos and other documents under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. Typically, when a freedom of information request is filed to a government agency under the Federal Records Act, the agency is obliged to preserve the material sought — even if the agency later denies the request.
On May 3, 2011, the AP asked Special Operations Command’s Freedom of Information/Privacy Act Division office for “copies of all e-mails sent from and to the U.S. government account or accounts” of McRaven referencing bin Laden. McRaven was then vice admiral.
A May 4, 2011 response from the command’s FOIA office to the AP acknowledged the bin Laden document request and said it had been assigned for processing. AP did not receive a copy of the McRaven email obtained by Judicial Watch.
The Department of Defense FOIA office told the AP in a Feb. 29, 2012 letter that it could find no McRaven emails “responsive to your request” for communications about the bin Laden material.
The healthiest and most intuitive response to deep-seated, irreconcilable unhappiness—political or personal—is not to hold a constitutional convention, Mark Levin, but to leave; to exit the abusive relationship.
It is indeed inexplicable how the famous broadcaster trashes secession but, at the same time, looks to the states for salvation.
To reclaim the republic, Levin and his listeners hold out hope for the atrophied states and their unexercised role in the amendment process, as stipulated in Article V of the Constitution.
Never mind that the states, contrary to the mistaken predictions and hopes of the Constitution makers, have never initiated a constitutional amendment; and never mind that even in the event that the states demand a constitutional convention, there is no mechanism to compel Congress to act.
The great constitutional scholar James McClellan was no “neo-confederate.” Yet even an ardent defender of the Constitution as was McClellan conceded that, sadly, “the Framers relied on the good faith of Congress for the observance of the requirement” and that, when it came to a constitutional convention, “there was no way to force Congress to act.” (“Liberty, Order, And Justice: An Introduction to the Constitutional Principles of American Government,” p. 310.)
Ultimately, the legislatures of two-thirds of the states have to unite to call on Congress to hold a national constitutional convention for the purpose of amending the dead-letter Constitution. Levin and his listeners are deluded if they think that the states, which are hardly bastions of freedom, will unite for this purpose; salvation is more likely to come from dissolving dysfunctional political bonds.
Still, what a force for liberty Levin would be were he a libertarian.
Alas, in one of his magnificent rants against the regime the radio mouth wanted to know why no Democrat had protested Obama’s overweening ways.
This is not quite true. As this column has pointed out, the late, great, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd was driven to distraction by Big Man Obama and said as much. Byrd, RIP, was “a stern constitutional scholar who always stood up for the legislative branch in its role in checking the power of the White House.”
This old Southern gentleman, whom Republicans continually berated for his past indiscretions, warned about Obama’s executive-branch power grab and the extra-constitutional creation of a number of new White-House fiefdoms: on health reform, urban affairs policy, energy and climate change, on and on.
In 2009, “Sen. Byrd issued this warning regarding the procedural shenanigans the Democrats tried to deploy to pass the healthscare bill”:
“I oppose using the budget reconciliation process to pass health care reform and climate change legislation…. As one of the authors of the reconciliation process, I can tell you that the ironclad parliamentary procedures it authorizes were never intended for this purpose.”
The frail senator had taken to the floor of the United States Senate on October 14, 2009, “to discuss the situation in Afghanistan and voice his concerns over the possibility of a major increase in U.S. forces into Afghanistan”:
“General McChrystal, our current military commander in Afghanistan, has requested 30,000-40,000 additional American troops to bolster the more than 65,000 American troops already there. I am not clear as to his reasons and I have many, many questions. What does General McChrystal actually aim to achieve?” “So I am compelled to ask: does it really, really take 100,000 U.S. troops to find Osama bin Laden?”
Magnificent too has been liberal constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, who has protested the emergence of the Über-Presidency in the person of Barack Obama.
Then there is WND columnist Nat Hentoff. I know not whether he is a Democrat, but Hentoff has long been considered liberal and now labels himself a libertarian. He has accused Obama of “an unprecedented abuse of powers,” calling him the “most un-American president in the nation’s history.”
… The journalist said he doesn’t think any other president has acted so lawlessly as a matter of habit.
“So, if this isn’t a reason for at least the start of an independent investigation that would lead to impeachment, what is?”
Hentoff is baffled that Obama should escape such scrutiny when former President Bill Clinton faced impeachment just for being “a lousy liar.”
A big part of the problem, the journalist believes, is what he calls the utter ignorance of a huge portion of the population, which is not outraged at losing its basic right to be self-governing.
Obama “doesn’t give a damn, because he can get away with whatever he wants.”
And that’s why Hentoff surmised—and Levin would indubitably agree—that this was the worst state the country has ever been in: “Even worse than Woodrow Wilson’s regime, when people could be arrested for speaking German.”
“Us against al-Qaida”: This has been—still is—the narrowly conceived narrative among neoconservatives. As the politically provincial neoconservative foreign-policy paradigm has it, those were the forces that played out in the Benghazi affair, in which the American mission was left undefended, resulting in the slaughter of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans (who, given the pecking order in the Empire, generally go unnamed).
Hillary Clinton, the woman who cracked the whip at Foggy Bottom at the time, had clearly resolved to run the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya, as one would an open community center. This was meant to signal that her war on Libya had been a success, when in fact Hillary’s adventure there had as much “host-nation support” as George Bush’s faith-based forays into Iraq and Afghanistan.
Indeed, “a central figure in the attack,” reports David D. Kirkpatrick of the New York Times, “was an eccentric, malcontent militia leader, Ahmed Abu Khattala.” Once persecuted and imprisoned by Gadhafi, Abu Khattala is a Libyan Islamist from the el-Leithi region, who considers “the United States not far behind Col. Gadhafi on his list of infidel enemies.”
Understandably, Fox-News neocons have been fuming over “A Deadly Mix in Benghazi,” Kirkpatrick’s exposé in the Times. In their focused blindness, Republicans believe religiously that, to quote Kirkpatrick, “Mr. Stevens died in a carefully planned assault by al-Qaida to mark the anniversary of its strike on the United States 11 years before.” Accordingly, the Obama administration has been “covering up evidence of al-Qaida’s role to avoid undermining the president’s claim that the group has been decimated, in part because of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.”
Uncovered by The Times’ investigation, however, was a very different reality in Benghazi—”murkier than either of those story lines suggests. Benghazi,” contends Kirkpatrick, “was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs.”
In particular are neoconservatives fulminating over the findings that “turned up no evidence that al-Qaida or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault,” and that “the attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Col. Gadhafi.”
How can that be? Easily: The history of Libya is festooned with similar ransacking and burning of consulates by angry local mobs. Alas, in the ignorance it cultivates about the past, America is Cicero’s perpetual child. By the definition of the great Roman statesman, “Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.”
Based on the annals of U.S. intervention in the region, it is fair to say that, to the extent the American-made video lampooning Islam triggered the hatred harbored by the invaded Libyans for the invading Americans—to that extent it is true that the YouTube clip, more so than the mythical al Qaida, was a catalyst for the attack on our embassy in Benghazi.
Still, the NYT has hardly been unsparingly honest. Rather, the Gray Eminence is as dishonest and politically provincial as the opposing faction.
Discounted in the Kirkpatrick essay is that al Qaida has devolved into many decentralized operations that mirror the aspirations of the indigenous population to be free of meddling Westerners—unless of course said militia and tribesmen (the Ansar al-Shariah, for example) can get us to bankroll their Baksheesh economy.
Predictably, the double-crossing neoconservative and neoliberal entities cross-pollinate each other.
So wrong was the Times on Iraq that the reporter who piped lies straight from the Bush White House to her Times readers was recruited to Fox News: She is Judith “Chalabi” Miller. (Ahmed Chalabi was the Iraqi exile who agitated for American intervention in Iraq. In the ramp-up to war, Chalabi fed Ms. Miller, the New York Times’ birdbrain now perched at Fox News, with the pro-invasion “intelligence” she then presented to the public.)
The facts in the Benghazi affair have likewise been unwoven and retied into two contradictory narratives to suit the respective sides.
Think of lab rats racing through a maze, as you watch the sub-intelligent, dual-panel “dialogue” conducted on the teli. Hosts Stephanie Cutter (left-wing, social-democratic rat) and S. E. Cupp (right-wing, social-democratic rat): Each rat runs with a designated, neatly bifurcated (Republican or Democratic) political orthodoxy. Each is a “maze-bright” rat, and not the possessor and giver of any truth.
“Left” and “right” are bamboozling you on Benghazi.
Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider.
It doesn’t take much to fire up Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by the Republican party as “the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist”.
He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.
Don’t even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends “so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would” – or the death of Osama bin Laden. “Nothing’s been done about that story, it’s one big lie, not one word of it is true,” he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011.
Hersh is writing a book about national security and has devoted a chapter to the bin Laden killing. He says a recent report put out by an “independent” Pakistani commission about life in the Abottabad compound in which Bin Laden was holed up would not stand up to scrutiny. “The Pakistanis put out a report, don’t get me going on it. Let’s put it this way, it was done with considerable American input. It’s a bullshit report,” he says hinting of revelations to come in his book.
The Obama administration lies systematically, he claims, yet none of the leviathans of American media, the TV networks or big print titles, challenge him.
“It’s pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama],” he declares in an interview with the Guardian.
He is certain that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden “changed the whole nature of the debate” about surveillance. Hersh says he and other journalists had written about surveillance, but Snowden was significant because he provided documentary evidence – although he is sceptical about whether the revelations will change the US government’s policy.
“Duncan Campbell [the British investigative journalist who broke the Zircon cover-up story], James Bamford [US journalist] and Julian Assange and me and the New Yorker, we’ve all written the notion there’s constant surveillance, but he [Snowden] produced a document and that changed the whole nature of the debate, it’s real now,” Hersh says.
“Editors love documents. Chicken-shit editors who wouldn’t touch stories like that, they love documents, so he changed the whole ball game,” he adds, before qualifying his remarks.
“But I don’t know if it’s going to mean anything in the long [run] because the polls I see in America – the president can still say to voters ‘al-Qaida, al-Qaida’ and the public will vote two to one for this kind of surveillance, which is so idiotic,” he says.
The 76-year-old Hersh is on full throttle, a whirlwind of amazing stories of how journalism used to be; how he exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, how he got the Abu Ghraib pictures of American soldiers brutalising Iraqi prisoners, and what he thinks of Edward Snowden.
He was hired by the New York Times to follow up the Watergate scandal and ended up hounding Nixon over Cambodia. Almost 30 years later, Hersh made global headlines all over again with his exposure of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
For students of journalism his message is put the miles and the hours in. He knew about Abu Ghraib five months before he could write about it, having been tipped off by a senior Iraqi army officer who risked his own life by coming out of Baghdad to Damascus to tell him how prisoners had been writing to their families asking them to come and kill them because they had been “despoiled”.
“I went five months looking for a document, because without a document, there’s nothing there, it doesn’t go anywhere.”
Hersh is adamant that Obama is worse than Bush.
“Do you think Obama’s been judged by any rational standards? Has Guantanamo closed? Is a war over? Is anyone paying any attention to Iraq? Is he seriously talking about going into Syria? We are not doing so well in the 80 wars we are in right now, what the hell does he want to go into another one for. What’s going on [with journalists]?” he asks.
“Like killing people, how does [Obama] get away with the drone programme, why aren’t we doing more? How does he justify it? What’s the intelligence? Why don’t we find out how good or bad this policy is? Why do newspapers constantly cite the two or three groups that monitor drone killings. Why don’t we do our own work?
“Our job is to find out ourselves.”
Asked what the solution is for the sorry state of journalism, Hersh says: “I’ll tell you the solution, get rid of 90% of the editors that now exist.”
Hersh is currently on a break from reporting, working on a book which undoubtedly will make for uncomfortable reading for both Bush and Obama.
“The republic’s in trouble, we lie about everything, lying has become the staple.” And he implores journalists to do something about it. – The Guardian
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