House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) compromised the identities of several Libyans working with the U.S. government and placed their lives in danger when he released reams of State Department communications Friday, according to Obama administration officials. – Josh Rogin, Foreign Policy
THIS IS an example of what happens when you have circus performers like Darrell Issa running “oversight” committees that are actually predicated on politics instead of fact-finding. You also end up exposing allies through choosing a hyper partisan witch-hunting lens that has the sole goal of damaging President Obama’s reelection chances. Enveloping it all is the continued failings of U.S. intelligence, with American ignorance of foreign policy how we get in these messes in the first place.
That the Administration has aided adversaries like Issa is an understatement, through explanations that have been disjointed, at best, counterproductive and confusingly misleading, at worst.
Also unfortunate, in defending themselves against Rep. Darrell Issa’s latest blunder, the Administration utilized the example of Wikileaks, which is a very bad case to compare to what the right-wing political machine is doing. It should come as no surprise that the official comparing what Issa did to Wikileaks is inadvertently revealing the Administration’s aversion to openness.
Now that Issa and his oversight committee have been caught with their ineptitude endangering allies, they’re hunting for someone to blame. The State Department is their target, which is adamantly rebutting the line out of Issa’s world. Also from Josh Rogin, posted in an update after State was made aware of the allegations against them:
“Many of the documents the committee posted weren’t provided by State. So there wasn’t any discussion about their sensitivity prior to the committee revealing them for all to see,” the official said. “Had State been given that opportunity, we’d have taken it and pointed out what documents needed to be handled with extreme care so as not to endanger anyone.”
In other news on Benghazi, David Ignatius writes about the scapegoating U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, which CIA “talking points” revealing exactly what Rice offered on the Sunday shows.
“Talking points” prepared by the CIA on Sept. 15, the same day that Rice taped three television appearances, support her description of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate as a reaction to Arab anger about an anti-Muslim video prepared in the United States. According to the CIA account, “The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate and subsequently its annex. There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.”
The CIA document went on: “This assessment may change as additional information is collected and analyzed and as currently available information continues to be evaluated.” This may sound like self-protective boilerplate, but it reflects the analysts’ genuine problem interpreting fragments of intercepted conversation, video surveillance and source reports.
Our government and any political administration is not predisposed to full transparency, which is the case no matter if a Democrat or Republican is in office. What invariably happens is they get ensnared in their own ongoing lack of candor trap. So when someone like Susan Rice comes out to tell the story of the administration for whom they’re working, there is always skepticism that whatever is being said is malarkey.
In 2012, the second decade of the 21st century, this is the state of trust in government institutions and those who run them, and the relationship between we the people and these entities, as well as the media, who is supposed to be the arbiter of facts, but too often chooses political sides at the expense of educating the citizenry.
The breakdown of these important lines of communication is seen in the resulting shambles played out to full affect over Libya. It includes the fumbling lack of coherency from all sides about how the assassination of Chris Stevens occurred and the partisan witch hunt atmospherics that pit us against one another.
The gaping maw of why the American people weren’t made aware of the dangerous state of play in Benghazi, where U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens was allowed to move and take up work on our behalf, reveals the stunning lack of attention to what our country is doing in far off countries in our name. It’s how we went to war in Iraq on a lie, but also are being forced to accept staying in Afghanistan until 2014 and worse, funding efforts there until 2024.
The ignorance of the American people and their nonchalance to care about foreign policy until a U.S. ambassador and three others lay dead is as much a part of the problem as is our national media for not providing foreign policy coverage in every single nightly broadcast, because it doesn’t pay, but is necessary to hold our president, both political parties and ourselves accountable.
We know the enemy and it is our own ignorance.
Valerie Plame all over again!
No, it’s not.
Ms. Plame was a CIA NOC exposed because her husband, Amb. Joseph Wilson, told the truth about the WMD claims in Iraq on the op-ed pages of the NY Times.
moving on…
Putting politics above national security and in the process exposing American intelligence assets. Your right. Completely different. What was I thinking?
A better analogy would be the Pakistanis exposed by Obama doing his victory dance after disposing of Bin Laden. Obama was wrong to do so, and so is Issa.
BS.
What he said!
A thought-provoking counter-argument indeed.
It wasn’t a counter- argument, it was a statement.
actually, it’s not a statement either…no verb
Maybe you’d like me to spell it out to you? Would that make it all better?
No “thought provoking argument “is needed whenever utter male bovine fecal matter is spewed.
DaGoat October 20, 2012 at 1:09 pm
hehhehehe…
You know from how often I talk about “accountability” and holding-feet-to-the-fire, that I strongly I agree with this, that it’s “necessary to hold our president, both political parties and ourselves accountable.” We the Electorate need a crash course in accountability, maybe especially regarding our own responsibilities in why there is such “ignorance” and “nonchalance” related to foreign policy, as you say. I think it’s very nearly the same case related to domestic policy. Maybe we just don’t want to know …
You need a crash course on the ability to make distinctions.
Solo October 20, 2012 at 12:58 pm
You need a crash course on the ability to make distinctions.
Pot meet kettle.
Joyce isn’t the one with the inability to make distinctions.
Hmmm! How many “they are all the same” articles have you written?
Joyce writes: ” Maybe we just don’t want to know …”
Almost certainly. I was going to write that what I think is most dangerous about our ignorance is that it is a willful ignorance – we just don’t seem to care, as a culture. That’s true of what we know about other cultures, but it’s also true of how we view science and technical subjects. Couple that with the natural tendency of people to not believe the things they don’t want to believe, and you have a recipe for the kind of disastrous decisions we’ve made in the last few decades.
Yes, it takes a really long time to become an expert in any of those subjects, but not caring about them is something we can avoid doing. That, and having a basic understanding of critical thinking, is a must. “I don’t know” are the three words that lead to knowledge, but they only do that if you’re willing to learn.
I think you’re right, Cujo, about the “willful” part, at least for some of it.
Maybe we just don’t want to know …
AMEN.
Thanks for your spot on analysis, Taylor.
Joyce said, “We the Electorate need a crash course in accountability, maybe especially regarding our own responsibilities in why there is such “ignorance” and “nonchalance” related to foreign policy, as you say. I think it’s very nearly the same case related to domestic policy. Maybe we just don’t want to know …” End of quote
Joyce, I think you nearly nailed it with “Maybe we just don’t want to know.” I think most people are so focused on just surviving every day, not only do they not want to know, they don’t care as long as what is going on doesn’t touch them.
They aren’t paying attention, which is why two people with extremely thin resumes like BOTH Mitt Romney AND Barack Obama wind up being our choices for our President.
This is why they wait until 2 months before the election to start paying attention and then let a few hours of debate help them decide which guy they like better and who puts on the better performance of being the guy who will do a better job.
Except for the 1%, those who are considering voting for Romney couldn’t possibly have been paying attention to his whiplash-inducing switching on just about everything. Otherwise, why would they trust anything that comes out of his mouth about what he will do about taxes when he is giving us no specifics?
In addition, he was an abysmal failure as Governor of Massachusetts, the one and only real government job he ever held. I just cannot fathom why anyone would vote for him, and before the Republican primary and all of those debates, I actually considered him a viable alternative to Obama because Mitt seemed to be one of the few moderate sane Republicans left. However, Mitt completely lost me during this campaign with his Dr. Jekyll – Mr. Hyde act and his own surrogate painting him as Mr. Etch-a-Sketch.
Obama, on the other hand, has been weak and incompetent in many ways falling very short on all of that hope he served up during his 2008 campaign. Granted, the only job the Republicans in Congress have been doing for the last 4 years is to submarine his Presidency, but he has also continued many of the disastrous Bush policies especially as far as foreign affairs go and domestically, is willing to serve up Social Security and Medicare in the grand bargain.
People have not been paying attention. Those that support Obama believe staying the course will make everything better. Those that support Romney, think that any change is better than Obama, even if there is no clear picture of what that change will be except we know that the 1% will be much better off.
But, a warning: The Romney supporter continue to spew the trickle down BS, which is a total lie and myth. They claim that if the already wealthy get even wealthier, the water will rise and lift us all up.
That is such total BS. My take is quite different. This country is more like the Titanic heading foolishly too fast into dark waters. If and when we hand the helm over to Romney, it will be déjà vu all over again: When he slams us into the iceberg, the 1% will commander the life boats and be just fine while the rest of us freeze to death in the water.
Maybe we all have it coming for being so involved with just surviving that we just haven’t been paying attention to anything at all that isn’t in the moment.
start quote:
People have not been paying attention. Those that support Obama believe staying the course will make everything better. Those that support Romney, think that any change is better than Obama, even if there is no clear picture of what that change will be except we know that the 1% will be much better off.
end quote
The 1% will be better off either way. The Democrats buy into voodoo economics nearly as much as the Republicans do. Even the Progressive Caucus accepts the frame about how devastating deficit spending is, even though it’s been conclusively proven (via the American Experiment) that it’s not only helpful in a depression, but necessary. It’s in the Democrats’ interests to do so, because as long as they do the Wall Street money will still find its way into their coffers. At least, it’s in their interests until progressives finally figure that out and stop supporting them. Fat chance of that, but that’s probably the least harmful of the ways that situation will change.
Meanwhile, at the risk of repeating myself, one of the biggest signs of how ignorant we are generally is how support is divided between Romney and Obama. If that support were actually based on their records, Obama would own the conservative vote, and some moderates. Romney would be a minor party, with a few percent of the electorate, and the rest of us would be voting for someone else. That this isn’t even close to how things are is a reflection of how little we understand what’s going on, at least as a society.
Cujo, just to agree, with your focus on the significance of the acceptance of the deficit framing, and with the “Obama would own the conservative vote” point. The thing is, to some extent or the other, that “conservative vote” now describes the “progressive vote,” if not the progressive policies.
Ladywalker, pointing to the focus of many people on “just surviving” is very important. Obviously lots more people have had to focus in that kind of way over the last several years. But, as you also say, there’s still that “as long as what is going on doesn’t touch them” ignore it, factor in play. I really don’t know what it would take to get beyond this,
Yes. After spending the day commuting, working, counting pennies, looking after family, it is very difficult to focus on much else other than laying your head on the pillow each night in exhaustion, relieved that you managed to make it through one more day.
Yet another example of the criminal behavior by the dommestic terrorists in the repugnantklan/teabagger mob in their war on America!!
And incidentally…..
Just released CIA documents show Ambassador Rice, Hillary Clinton and President Obama WERE correctly stating what intelligence told them at first about the attack.
Ah! Yes! The President and his people were right and all the Obama haters were wrong! Again!
I see Solo is at it again, offering not much more than snark. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I’m not surprised by the clown car that Issa is driving. Issa was from my old back yard of San Diego, and he was brass plated idiot from way back.
Unfortunately he is a perfect representative for CA 49. The district is Hillbilly Heaven and chock-a-block full of reactionaries. These folks take Limbaugh as gospel and are deep-dyed red. Therefore Issa will face no consequence for this, and may even get praise for “sticking it to the” Nig-CLANG.
He’s just a good repugnantklan/teabagger!!