Benghazi

I’m not one to fall for or put out conspiracy theories, but I have to wonder whether the attacks at the Consulate and annex in Benghazi weren’t cover for the alleged disappearance of several hundred anti-aircraft missiles more affectionately known as MANPADS (man portable air defense systems).

We know that Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi at the request of the Secretary of State to oversee a special project. That project, per various media sources, turned out to be the buyback of weapons used during the civil war in Libya. The idea behind the program was to keep those weapons out of the hands of the more radical elements involved in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, lest they migrate to other parts of Africa, the Middle East, or even further afield.

The Administration has been slow in bringing the perpetrators of these attacks to justice. After having identified one of the planners, and knowing that this individual had been conducting interviews with the international press, I find it difficult to believe that we cannot gain access to this terrorist or his cohorts. The administration is blaming the Libyan government for being obstructionists and keeping us from putting either law enforcement or military personnel on the ground in Benghazi. Why?

The 2012 election cycle has come and gone. The President is still in office, so there’s no longer any reason to maintain the façade of being a tough guy on foreign policy. Is he protecting Hillary Clinton and her possible bid for the presidency in 2016? Had she come clean about what really happened that night, her chances of gaining her party’s nomination would have not taken much of a hit since almost four years would have passed between Benghazi and the 2016 election season. I keep coming to the conclusion that something bigger is going on here, something so big that its coming to light would add even more fuel to the fire and embroil the administration in an even larger scandal.

I alluded earlier to the attacks being cover for the theft of anti-aircraft weapons. Here’s why I think this a plausible scenario:

•  We know that Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi to oversee the progress of a weapons buyback program. It was deemed important enough for him to be in a part of the country where the Brits and a slew of NGOs had pulled out due to how dangerous things had become.
• Requests for additional security were denied at the highest levels of the State Department chain of command. Why? Possibly because they didn’t want to draw any unwarranted scrutiny from outside sources, especially if this program was supposed to be one that flew under the radar. There are reports that a number of locally hired security personnel either walked off the job the day of the attacks or just failed to show up for work. I find that extremely interesting, even more so when you couple that with reports of these facilities being under surveillance by unknown individuals in the days leading up to the attacks. 
•   The witnesses who were on the ground in Libya and personnel manning crisis rooms and command posts at Foggy Bottom and Langley had been conspicuously absent in the halls of Congress when it came to testifying about what happened that night. The Administration has been dragging its feet in allowing these folks to go before House and Senate committees and tell them what they knew and when they knew it. Why?

 

The loss of four American lives in Benghazi, including the first U.S. Ambassador since the 1980s, opened another wound in the American psyche that has yet to be closed. Had this just been another attack by a group of jihadis looking for payback on a day they felt held some sort of symbolism for this nation, I might be able to understand it. But this was more. I have a sneaking suspicion that they knew those weapons were there and they had a plan in place to acquire them. I’m reminded of the Bruce Willis “Die Hard” movies where the villains contrived some sort of crises where the attention of the authorities and public were diverted elsewhere while they carried out attacks on their true objectives. Rather than boil this down to life imitating art and an implausible scenario, it would be prudent to keep in mind that diversionary tactics have been an essential part of military campaigns since men first learned how to make spears.

Fast and Furious dealt with a gun walking scheme involving Mexican drug cartels that was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Mexican nationals and a U.S. Border Patrol agent. The Administration, specifically the DEA and the Attorney General have been excoriated by Congress over this failed attempt to track where these guns were supposedly going in the wider War on Drugs. Imagine what would happen if these anti-aircraft weapons wound up in the hands of jihadis or other unsavory groups who used them to damage or bring down military, law enforcement, or commercial aircraft in Africa, the Middle East, or even Europe. Not a pretty picture, is it? So one can imagine the Administration’s reluctance to be forthright and candid about what really happened in Benghazi, especially if those weapons can be traced back to that State Department buyback program.

Just a little food for thought.

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”  -Sherlock Holmes-

Hostages of the Boomer Brain Trust

Why is it that our modern society is being held hostage by the peccadillos of a single generation? I’m not just talking about a few things here and there. I’m talking about wholesale failures that affect our culture and country, things that have been occurring over the course of this generation’s adult lives.

I alluded to the fact that the Baby Boom generation (see Boomers) was at fault for a lot of what we’ve been subjected to over the course of the past 45 years.  I’m now going to make the claim that they, not unlike big government types (they’re nearly synonymous, since they’re now in charge, for the most part), have been trying to undo everything that they may have caused, only to create even worse problems in the process.

Let’s look at the individual versus the collective good, for starters. The phrase “it’s your thing, do what you wanna do” was emblematic of how Boomers came to think in the mid to late sixties and onwards. Prior to that, society reigned in the sort of self-centered, hedonistic, deviant behavior that this generation became known for. Societal mores/values and norms, the very things that helped police a society and keep it from decay, were being challenged on a continual basis. Now we hear that the individual needs to become subservient to the demands of the group.  Initiative, self-sufficiency, boot-strapping, and acting in one’s own self-interests have become virtually taboo concepts because they supposedly promote the same kind of behavior that boomers were synonymous with, and we can’t have that, can we?

What if I said that sexual promiscuity, out of wedlock births, and the crime rate are all interrelated? Sexual promiscuity is, by its very nature, a risky behavior, and there are consequences for any behavior (good, bad, or indifferent). In this case, one of those would be an unwanted/unexpected pregnancy. When it happens to individuals in at-risk groups, such as poor, uneducated teens who are unable or unwilling to care for those children, then it becomes problematic. Those children run the risk of a troubled childhood, one that may eventually lead to a life of crime. Rather than address the root cause (sexual promiscuity), the Boomer brain trust went after the unwanted pregnancy aspect of things, which is why contraception, abortion, and a woman’s right to choose have become political third rails.

The number of high profile mass shootings by deranged individuals over the past 18 months (especially the shootings of elementary school children and their teachers in Connecticut) has renewed the debate over gun control. I’m going to go out on a limb and hypothesize that the two high profile deaths in the NY subways were also the handiwork of the same type of individual, but you won’t hear much about those cases because they don’t add to the gun control narrative. Those who advocate more stringent gun control measures at the state and federal level continually overlook the fact that this sort of event is infinitesimally small when compared to the deaths that occur on the streets of our major cities on a daily basis. Anyhow, back to the mass shootings. In just about every case, the assailant has been someone who was known to have some sort of psychological issue/defect that would have in days past, kept them isolated from the general public. Nowadays, the mentally ill roam our streets with nowhere to go. You see them in parks, on street corners, and in my case, riding the local transit system here in Chicago. Again, rather than looking at the pathology driving these individuals and what can be done to help them, the Boomer brain trust focused on the weapons used as the root cause of the problem. Sort of like the carpenter blaming his tools for shoddy workmanship.

We now shift to education, the third of the four horsemen of the Boomer apocalypse. It wasn’t that long ago that we turned out some of the best minds anywhere. From kindergarten through grad school, our educational system was the envy of the world. But something happened at the elementary and secondary school levels to change all of that. More folks from the Boomer brain trust got the idea that they could change how kids learned and that certain curricula they were studying were superfluous to where they were trying to take things. Physical Education (gym class), music, and art became relics of a bygone era. New math, whole word reading systems, and the wholesale abandonment of the skill of cursive writing supplanted the traditional mainstays of readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmatic. Recently, sedentary lifestyles, ever expanding waistlines, and plummeting test scores have forced quite a few of the so-called experts to jump on the “getting back to basics” bandwagon and bring back some or all of the programs that had been previously cut. But all of that seems to have come with a hefty price tag. There will be a need to increase the funding of already bloated budgets to make it happen, despite the fact that before everything went away, it was all done without anywhere near the monetary outlays we see that are either planned or taking place today. Worst of all is the fact that given our current economic malaise, there are going to be very few of these programs that see the light of day.

The generation gap was something that played out across the cultural landscape of this country back in the late sixties and early seventies. The mistrust that existed between the Boomers and previous generations (i.e. the establishment), was the result of a lack of clear communications channels (misunderstandings), as well as the influence of certain sources within and outside of this country’s borders. Today it’s the boomers, who instead of trying to make genuine, constructive connections with the younger generations, have sold them a bill of goods since they became the establishment. Late stage Gen-Xers and Millenials have expressed the feeling in poll after poll that the American dream seems to be slipping through their grasp, why? They’ve been bombarded by academia, the media, and politicians with the message that things are the worst they have been since the Great Depression. The situation is hopeless, the system is broken, and no amount of effort or initiatives on the part of anyone will change that. Just like the depression era proposals put forth to pull America out of its malaise, government is being touted as the only solution that’s going to work. Yet this is the very same government/establishment that the boomers railed against.

The Boomer brain trust has an Achilles heel, hubris. They decided that previous generations, when they held the reins of power, had no clue as to what they were doing. Now that they’re in power, things are going to be different. They know what needs to happen and will brook no dissent when it comes to accomplishing their agenda. The previous mistakes that they made were part of the learning curve and are inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Remember the no consequences part because that plays a big part in their philosophy (or rather pathology). Someone or something else is at fault for why you are in your current predicament, but have no fear, they can extricate you from your situation if you will only entrust them with the keys to the kingdom.

So, if arrogance is stupidity taken to new heights and hubris is arrogance run wild, just what does this tell us about the Boomer brain trust and their ability to muck things up for the rest of us? You can draw your own conclusions.

Immigration Reform Now?

 I’ve been watching the immigration reform debate taking place in the halls of Congress, the media, and amongst the public and I’m struck by one thing. Why another piece of sweeping legislation and why now?

We all know that illegal immigration has been a longtime problem that keeps getting pushed off for another day, but do we really need to address this issue now, given all of the problems we have with laws being passed that we’ve come to regret?

The Patriot Act was enacted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. It was supposed to give law enforcement agencies and the national security establishment new tools to be able to go after those who would do us harm. We’ve come to find out in the wake of a former federal contractor leaking details of specific programs to certain press outlets (after he hightailed it to Hong Kong) that our privacy was one of the first casualties in the Global War on Terror.

The Internal Revenue Service is supposed to be the Federal Government’s enforcement arm for the Affordable Care Act (more “affectionately” dubbed Obama Care). This law was rammed through Congress without much in the way of debate, introspection, or inspection. We now have a monstrosity on our hands that will do very little of what had been touted by its supporters and cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars. It recently came to light that the IRS targeted conservative groups in the run-up to the 2012 election cycle, was responsible for leaking confidential info on one organization’s tax records to a rival group, and has been embroiled in additional scandals ranging from extravagant conferences to employees behaving badly when it came to taking care of their financial obligations. So the question that comes to mind is: do we really want to put the fox in charge of the hen house?

The financial crisis that put us in the worst recession since the Great Depression was the impetus for the banking and finance reform law known as Dodd-Frank. The problem here is that it really does nothing to keep the very same big banks and investment houses from going down the same road that got us into trouble in the first place. The folks who will suffer the most are the small banks that can’t possibly comply with the mandates of this law (many of which have yet to be written) which by default, means not much competition for the big banks and the legions of compliance folks they have at their beck and call.

Regardless of your politics or party affiliation, as far as any pending legislation on immigration reform goes, ask yourselves these questions:

• Are the immigration laws that are currently on the books being enforced? If not, why not?  
• Do the reforms being planned address loopholes in current immigration law? If not, why not?
• Do the reforms being planned impose additional costs on an already strained federal budget?

My guess is that not much good will come out of any new legislation, since the push to get this out seems more geared towards a lead-in to the 2014 mid-term elections. So here we go again, rushing to pass more legislation that doesn’t look like it’ll stand any chance of genuine debate or scrutiny because one side feels that they could gain political advantage with its passage and the other fearful about what passing or not passing it will do to their chances in future elections.

Here’s my advice to Congress. Quit thinking about your job prospects and start thinking about doing your jobs. You might actually figure out that taking care of the latter enhances your chances at the former.

 

The Falcon and the Snow-Man

Our friends Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden are nothing but a couple of useful idiots. Regardless of your politics and whether you consider them traitors or heroes, both of these knuckleheads basically prostituted themselves to what they considered a version of the truth, despite the fact that whatever info they planned on releasing (not withstanding any debate as to whether it jeopardized our national security) will prove to be definite embarrassments for the United States Government.

With Manning, it was Wikileaks and Julian Assange, an individual who had an axe to grind, not only with the US of A, but with western society as a whole. What came out of it all was a series of documents that did very little to jeopardize our personnel in the field or give away our methods, but cast doubt on our ability to keep secret, things that could prove potentially embarrassing to our friends and allies. As a result, they had little incentive to tell us anything in confidence, knowing what could possibly happen to that information.

Snowden’s revelations as to what the NSA and the government by default, were collecting on American citizens, is breathtaking in its scope. The idea that he would seek refuge in Hong Kong due to the fact that it had a record of defending individual liberties is laughable. Hong Kong is a Chinese possession and as such takes its marching orders from Beijing. The idea that even Russia was willing to offer him asylum should speak volumes as to what both of these countries want out of him. Most of us would guess it was intelligence or national secrets, not so. Snowden is a PR/propaganda “dream come true” for both the Russians and Chinese. They can do much more damage pointing to what Snowden has to say about our programs and the hypocrisy that the United States is guilty of when it uses the bully pulpit to promote the democratic process and the rule of law. As we used to say in the military, a mission kill is as good as a hard kill any day of the week.

Now, on with the rest of this sorry story.

There have been and will be those who claim that Snowden should have used official channels to air out his gripes, but then again we’ve seen what happens to whistleblowers at the federal government under this administration. The counter-argument here will most likely be that he was a contractor and not a civil servant. So what? All that it would have taken would have been a well-placed phone call to his employer to try and cut him off at the knees and that would have been that. More to the point, there have been previous NSA whistleblowers under the George W Bush Administration who did file a complaint against the agency about the very program that is making headlines now. They had put together a smaller, less intrusive, less costly program that did everything necessary to keep us safe. That went nowhere as well. Too many of the powers that be at the NSA wanted a bigger piece of the pie that was getting divvied up in the post 9/11 world we came to live in. To them, as with most government agencies, a bigger rice bowl meant more relevancy.

We’ve seen that as the size and scope of government grows, so do the opportunities to abuse that corresponding power. Think IRS personnel targeting conservative and Tea Party groups. Think leaking donor lists from an organization’s tax returns (a criminal offense). Think DOJ targeting AP and FOX news reporters, including going to a judge for warrants based on scant information. Think a health care law so encompassing and unwieldy that we are now only starting to discover all of its ramifications.

I’m thinking that we’ve finally hit that saturation point where even the average citizen who’s been caught up in their own little world has to sit up and acknowledge in the words of Buffalo Springfield, “there’s something happening here”.