"60 Minutes had an absolutely devastating report on the Obama administration’s failure to protect Ambassador Chris Stevens and other Americans in Benghazi."

Writes Professor Jacobson, observing that "the heart of the report is that there were clear and unequivocal warnings which were ignored, and the Obama administration lied about these warnings after the attack."

Here's the video:



From the transcript:

Andy Wood: I made it known in a country team meeting, "You are gonna get attacked. You are gonna get attacked in Benghazi. It's gonna happen. You need to change your security profile.... Shut down operations. Move out temporarily. Ch-- or change locations within the city. Do something to break up the profile because you are being targeted. They are-- they are-- they are watching you. The attack cycle is such that they're in the final planning stages."

Lara Logan: Wait a minute, you said, "They're in the final planning stages of an attack on the American mission in Benghazi"?

Andy Wood: It was apparent to me that that was the case. Reading, reading all these other, ah, attacks that were occurring, I could see what they were staging up to, it was, it was obvious. We have learned the U.S. already knew that this man, senior al Qaeda leader Abu Anas al-Libi was in Libya, tasked by the head of al Qaeda to establish a clandestine terrorist network inside the country. Al-Libi was already wanted for his role in bombing two U.S. embassies in Africa.

"America wants to help the extremists to control Syria, but they are wrong because we will defend our sect."

"They will commit a big mistake if they think it will be easy to strike Syria and change everything. We all have faith that God is on our side, and we will show them that the Shiites in all the world are able to fight their proxies from Al Qaeda and Nusra and the hated Free Syrian Army."

A quote that reflects what the NYT says is the view of the Shiite majority in Iraq.

"Republicans and Democrats alike feel the Syria resolution would not pass today, even after party leaders endorsed it."

Says Politico, "[b]ased on talking to the smartest members and aides we know."

House Republican staffers tell us that several key members are unsatisfied so far by the classified briefings from the administration. A top aide said the administration has failed to make a compelling case “beyond spasmodic moral outrage.”

"Nobody has really heard how this is going to either improve the situation on the ground in Syria, improve the situation for pro-democracy groups, not play into al-Qaeda’s hands, not play into Russia’s hands, not play into China’s hands,” the aide said. “Members felt the administration hasn’t made a case about how this is going to stop it from happening again. They’re putting a lot of chips on: ‘We have to do this for Israel,’ or, ‘We have to do this because it’s unacceptable.’”

"8 Reasons Not to Go to War in Syria."

"1. If the rebels win, it’s bad news for the U.S.... 2. If Assad wins, it’s bad news for the U.S...."

"Canadians ask what 'inspired by Al Qaeda ideology' means."

As Mounties say they've uncovered a pressure-cooker bomb plot by John Stewart Nuttall and Amanda Marie Korody of Surrey, B.C., who were "self-radicalized" but "inspired by al-Qaeda ideology."

Nuttall and Korody are said to be "recovering drug addicts and recent converts to Islam." Obviously, other Muslims in Canada aren't pleased to look connected to them. Musa Ismail, president of the B.C. Muslim Association, says:

"We don't know these people, we've never seen these people.... We are proud citizens, we are proud Canadians. These two individuals have nothing to do with Islam, as far as we know."

And while the entire B.C. Muslim community is "absolutely delighted" that Mounties intervened to stop a "potentially huge disaster," Ismail said the RCMP's description of the Canadian-born duo as inspired by Al-Qaeda is an "ill-worded reference" that will focus undue attention on Muslims.

"These are just individuals who copied whatever happened in Boston," he said.

"PRISM Stopped Najibullah Zazi From Blowing Up Backpacks in the Subway."

New York Magazine reports:

But amid all the uproar yesterday and today, a report from CBS's John Miller — formerly of the FBI and a fairly plugged-in guy — went largely unnoticed.

"If you look at the Najibullah Zazi case, you have a classic example there. So on September 6, 2009, around dawn, an e-mail comes from an IP address to another IP address. One of them is nothing we're paying attention to. The other is one that has been flagged as an al Qaeda mail drop that is rarely used."

"And so when that bell rings, they say, 'Hey, they hardly ever use this account, but it's associated with Rashid Rauf, who is al Qaeda's master bomb maker, behind the plot to blow up all the airplanes, 'Who's he talking to?' And when they find out the other IP address on the other end resolves to Aurora, Colo., outside Denver, it connects them to Zazi, it takes them to the plot to blow up the New York subways, it's all prevented. That's how a program like this is supposed to work."...

Do you want that or not?

ADDED: Here's an article that questions whether PRISM is what caught Zazi. (Via Instapundit.) I'd seen that kind of questioning before I put up this post, but the New York Magazine piece says:

For what it's worth, the Telegraph has previously reported that Scotland Yard intercepted the e-mail, however, the U.K. reportedly also has access to PRISM.

Of course, opponents of PRISM have reason to want to deny that it's working to fight terrorism, even as its defenders are going to want to claim that it is. I'm not a proponent or an opponent at this point. I don't know enough, and — like Obama the President as opposed to Obama the Candidate/Senator — I believe it to be a complicated balance.

"How Twitter Is Messing With Al-Qaeda's Careful PR Machine."

"Individual jihadis are increasingly taking to social media with their own opinions, sparking disputes within the terrorist organization."

It's a marketplace of ideas. As Justice Holmes famously said:

If you have no doubt of your premises or your power, and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law, and sweep away all opposition.... But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.

Good luck shopping. 

"The minute you knew what happened, you knew it was a terrorist attack."

Said Dianne Feinstein, on yesterday's "Meet the Press," where she was the one defending the Obama administration, but even she moved to get some distance between her and them.

 “When you see a group going up with RPGS and weapons to break into one of our facilities, you can assume it’s a terrorist attack. Unfortunately, the word extremist was used which is not as crystal clear as terrorist. The real-time video which we have all seen reveals that there was virtually no defense. The militia from Libya sent to guard the embassy disappeared the minute these people came down the street. These people just walked right into the facility.”

Why was the word "extremist" preferred to "terrorist"? I don't think either word is "crystal clear." I think both words are "not a crystal, transparent and unchanging, [but] the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in colour and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used" (to quote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.).

Considering the the circumstances and time in which "extremist" was used and "terrorist" was actively avoided, what was the living thought within each of those 2 words?

Terrorist relates to the war on terrorism. A terrorist seems connected to a network of terrorism, specifically al Qaeda. It suggests organization and it connects a problem of violence to an entire religion. It seems to magnify the significance of the attacks as the leading edge of a group that has been elevated for 12 years as a military enemy, an enemy the Obama administration would like to say it has defeated. One way to claim victory is to stop using the word that is connected with the long war, to demote these violent characters from the status of terrorist. A terrorist terrifies. We are not terrified. We won. We need to get that message out: We won! And we're going to keep winning. We need to win... the war and the election.

Extremist relates to the mind of the individual who's moved into an extreme form of ideation, who's gone from the normal way of thinking about power and politics and has become a crazy nut who will cross the line — perhaps suddenly and insanely — into murderous violence. This misguided individual may have heard a lot of talk — perhaps suddenly, perhaps via YouTube — that he cannot process properly. He's gone into furious thinking and loses control. There's no global network of organized action — nothing like a military enemy in a war — but just the network of disordered thinking within the small globe of a man's skull. This is, unfortunately, something that happens. It happened to Jared Loughner and to Timothy McVeigh. We need to reach and soothe the minds of young men that might burst out into violence. Let them know we care, perhaps through the political theater of distancing ourselves from a disgusting and reprehensible video.

"Investigators sharpen focus on Boston bombing suspect’s widow."

The Washington Post reports today:

Federal law enforcement officials are sharpening their focus on [Katherine Russell, 24, the widow of Tamerlan Tsarnaev] after finding al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine and other radical Islamist material on her computer, according to law enforcement officials....

On Monday, FBI special agents spent about 90 minutes inside the North Kingstown, R.I., home of Russell’s parents. The agents left with bags of material and a sample of Russell’s DNA.

Two law enforcement officials said that investigators found fingerprints and female DNA on fragments of the pressure-cooker bombs that exploded at the marathon....

I was skeptical about her back on April 22:

I see you've got your brand-new leopard skin print hijab....

It's Katherine Russell, the widow Tamerlan Tsarnaev.  "She was just this All-American girl who was brainwashed by her super-religious husband. Nobody understands what happened to her." She was the daughter of a Rhode Island doctor and nurse. She "dreamed of going to college and joining the Peace Corps."

Brainwashed. Are you buying that or do you think that Peace Corps aspirationalists are just the kind of American kids who feel drawn to the idea of becoming the other?



I tend to think people are responsible for their own choices.

UPDATE: "Katherine Russell... has stopped co-operating with authorities as it emerged female DNA found on one of the detonated bombs does not belong to her."

Highlights from "Meet the Press."

Here are the things that jumped out as I watched "Meet the Press." this morning.

1. At the end of a discussion of the Boston bombing, David Gregory asks "[W]hat are you really focused on that you’d like the intelligence community and the FBI to answer?"

REP. PETER KING: I think it’s important to know are there other people involved in this threat? Are there others that are still out there?... Are there family members or people in-- in the community? That’s very important to find out. Also, what did cause them to radicalize? Was it done here? Was it done overseas? Was it done over the internet? What caused that to happen? How can we stop it in the future? Also ask why the FBI is not cooperating more with the law enforcement? Why they did not give vital evidence to the NYPD about another possible attack.

GREGORY: This is that you think a failure that needs to be learned from?

REP. KING: Absolutely. Absolute failure.

2. Chuck Todd, talking about Obama's routine at the Washington Correspondents Dinner:

...I wonder how many people realized at the end when he did his-- you know, there’s always this part at the end where they get serious for a minute, and it’s usually the part where president say, you know, I think the press has a good job to do and I understand what they have to do. He didn’t say that. He wasn’t very complimentary of the press. You know, we all can do better. He was-- it did seem-- I thought his pot shots joke wise and then the serious stuff about the internet, the rise of the internet media and social media and all that stuff. He hates it. Okay. He hates this part of the media. He really thinks that the sort of the buzzification, this isn’t just about BuzzFeed or Politico, and all the stuff, but he thinks that sort of coverage of political media has hurt political discourse. He hates it. And I think he was just trying to make that clear last night.

3. Gregory asks Tony Blair about his "now infamous meeting in the Azores" with George Bush, "at a very delicate time for [Blair] politically back home." Referring to the Iraq invasion, did Bush tell Blair: "back out if you need to, don’t do this, don’t stand by me when you have to go back and address parliament if it’s going to cost you your leadership"? Blair says:

He did say that. I mean, he-- he made it clear that, you know, he understood the-- the huge political difficulties I had and that-- that I shouldn’t, as it were, put my own premiership on the line. It was more important in-- in a way, to him, I think, that I stayed. But my attitude was that, you know, there are lots of things in politics where-- where you-- you’ll compromise and you’ll maybe back off exactly what you think you should do and, you know, these are often the run of the mill everyday types of issues. When it comes to issues of war and peace and-- and life and death, I think your-- your-- I came to the conclusion your proper obligation to your own country is to do what you think is right....

GREGORY: In this library, the president has decided not to separate Iraq-- out Iraq. Iraq is presented as part and parcel of the war on terrorism, which is how he saw it. But won’t history judge that as a false impression that this was a war of choice that became a misadventure in the eyes of so many?

MR. BLAIR: I think, you know, the controversy around that, I mean, around how you categorize it, will remain. But what I found was that, you see, removing Saddam happened within a matter of weeks. You then spent the next, you know, eight-- nine years in a different type of battle and that was a battle against precisely the forces that are trying to destabilize the Middle East today al Qaeda on the one side, Iran on the other side, and this toxic cocktail, if you like, of religion, politics, ethnicity, tribalism. So, I mean, I never said the two things were linked in that direct sense, 9/11 and Iraq, I think the difficulties we ended up encountering in Iraq were difficulties that arose from precisely this-- this force of terror unleashed by religious extremism and I think that’s the, you know, frankly, what we still face today...

4. I thought "toxic cocktail... of religion, politics, ethnicity, tribalism" was a very helpful phrase to those of us who shrink from criticizing anything that contains an element of religion (other than America's majority religion). Blair also used the phrase "an ideology based on a perversion of religion" and equated it to the violent political ideologies that are not religious and that we don't hesitate to criticize:

[There] are various groups, Islamist groups, that I’m afraid don’t have the same concept of democracy or freedom that we do....  I'm afraid, that this-- this ideology is being pumped around websites, is being encouraged by people in many different parts of the world and it’s-- and it’s there and it’s very hard for us to deal with. The first obligation of a government is to try and protect its people, but then you’ve got to-- you’ve got to cast out this ideology. I mean, I think this is very similar to the fight we faced in the 20th century against first of all fascism and then revolutionary communism. You know, it’s an ideology. It’s not got one command and control center, it's not a-- you know, you’re not talking about a country, but you are talking about an ideology based on a perversion of religion... which has an enormous force. If you don’t deal with this issue, this long-term question, this ideology based on-- on a perversion of the religion of Islam, you are going to end up fighting this for a long time.

5. And here's a nice tribute to Bush from Blair:

And President Obama actually put his finger on it when he said it’s impossible to know George Bush and not like him. So, you know, often people say to me back home, they say, come on, you didn’t like him really, did you? And I say, you can totally disagree with him but as a human being he is a someone of immense character and genuine integrity. So, you know, you can say-- people have different views about decisions, but there’s a very few people who-- who don’t like him and respect him as a person.

"Canada terror suspect does not recognize 'criminal code.'"

NY Post headline after Chiheb Esseghaier said: "My comment is the following because all of those conclusions were taken out based on criminal code and all of us know that this criminal code is not a holy book.... We cannot rely on the conclusions taken out from these judgments."

The headline makes Esseghaier sound confused or nutty and the words are garbled, but it's easy to perceive the age-old argument that the accused doesn't recognize the authority of the court because he answers to what is to him a higher authority. It's a great argument when facing an evil authority and a legal code that's insufficiently connected to morality.

"[I]f the bomber ends up being a white anti-government extremist, white privilege will likely mean the attack is portrayed as just an isolated incident..."

"... one that has no bearing on any larger policy debates. Put another way, white privilege will work to not only insulate whites from collective blame, but also to insulate the political debate from any fallout from the attack."

Writes Salon's David Sirota:

It will probably be much different if the bomber ends up being a Muslim and/or a foreigner from the developing world. As we know from our own history, when those kind of individuals break laws in such a high-profile way, America often cites them as both proof that entire demographic groups must be targeted, and that therefore a more systemic response is warranted. At that point, it’s easy to imagine conservatives citing Boston as a reason to block immigration reform defense spending cuts and the Afghan War withdrawal and to further expand surveillance and other encroachments on civil liberties.

This is just about exactly the opposite of what Rush Limbaugh was saying yesterday.

"Terrorists want large, splashy attacks on specific sorts of targets that have high emotional resonance..."

"... for both the victims and the people on your side who you hope to recruit, or tap for money.  This helps explain why Al Qaeda was so obsessed with the Twin Towers, a place that — until they fell — most New Yorkers regarded as a rather ugly landmark containing some so-so office space.  To a terrorist group looking for publicity, on the other hand, it had immense symbolic value: the tallest building in America's biggest city, with the hubristic name of 'World Trade Center.' That's why we don't get high-frequency, low-intensity attacks on crowded spaces near some Texas town that no one in Abottabad [sic] has ever heard of.  When attacks on those places happen, they tend to be the provenance of local lunatics for whom the nearby mall, or primary school, has some immense symbolic emotional importance."

Says Megan McArdle. This reasoning suggests that if only we'd avoid prideful spectacles we could deflect the Qaeda crowd. But there will always be local lunatics, and it's impossible to avoid all the tiny targets like schools and shops that every town has....

Adam Lanza was bullied while he attended Sandy Hook Elementary and his mother Nancy considered suing the school for turning a blind eye to the abuse, an unnamed Lanza family member told the New York Daily News.

“Adam would come home with bruises all over his body,” the relative told the Daily News. “His mom would ask him what was wrong, and he wouldn’t say anything. He would just sit there.”

Know your local lunatics. And for God's sake don't torment them. Don't create them out of whatever raw material you find around. Here's a pressure cooker. What can we put in it?

Now, these local lunatics tend to show their faces. It's a showdown. They die or get captured quickly. We know who did it.

On 9/11, every building I saw seemed shockingly vulnerable. I wondered if all buildings would come down. How deceptively solid these things seem, but there are people in the world who would destroy everything anybody builds. And yet so many buildings have remained standing all these years. I didn't think it would work out this well. Terrorists in my town bombed a minor spectacle of a building 40 years ago, but since 9/11, the building have held up.

After 9/11, I obsessed about what the terrorists would do next and, naturally, I thought of the things that would hit me and the people I knew. I pictured a day when 100 suicide bombers, one by one, in 100 different college towns stepped into a crowded café or movie theater or sports event and blew up. But that never happened. McArdle's theory suggests why. That's local-lunatic level. Too lowly for the Qaeda-type brand.

But is a crowd waiting at the finish line of the Boston Marathon such a spectacle? Are crappy pressure-cooker bombs the mark of a prideful organization that once commandeered 4 jet planes and piloted 3 of them into major landmarks?

We don't yet know who the Boston bomber is or even whether it's bomber or bombers. Using McArdle's reasoning, one wonders who fixates on the Boston Marathon. Do the people in Abbottabad care about our lengthy footraces? And why target the spectators? Or was the first bomb, planted in the spectators, supposed to make the runners run toward the second bomb? That's an evil trick, but hardly anything that seen from the other side of the globe could look like glory.

"CIA begins sizing up Islamic extremists in Syria for drone strikes..."

"The strategy is part of the agency's secret contingency planning to protect the U.S. and its allies as the violence there grows."

Well, it's obviously not part of the secret contingency planning. Who knows what the secret part is? But: Get ready for the drones. We can and will take you out as you sleep in your bed at night. That's a message we're choosing to put out there.

CIA targeting officers normally assemble bits of intelligence — including agent reports, cellphone intercepts, video footage, public records, tips from foreign spy services — to create folders known as "targeting packages," for a variety of reasons....

Identifying possible threats in Syria would be "a logical step if the policy community sends a signal that, 'Hey, you guys might want to think about how you would respond to a possible request for plans about how you would thin the herd of the future insurgency,'" said a former CIA officer with experience in the Middle East.