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THE HILLThe Obama administration is sticking to its position that Tuesday's deadly attack in Benghazi wasn't premeditated, contradicting U.S. lawmakers and Libya's own president.
Speaking on several Sunday shows, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice placed the blame for violence that has spread to two dozen countries across the Muslim world squarely on a U.S.-made anti-Islam video.
Republicans and many others are dubious, with some lawmakers suggesting the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi was a coordinated attack by a militant group.
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Libya's own leader, interim president Mohammed Magarief, has said that foreigners infiltrated Libya over the past few months and planned the attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
“The idea that this criminal and cowardly act was a spontaneous protest that just spun out of control is completely unfounded and preposterous,” Magarief told NPR in Benghazi on Sunday. “We firmly believe that this was a pre-calculated, pre-planned attack that was carried out specifically to attack the U.S. Consulate.
“The intention was there from the beginning, for it to take this ugly barbaric, criminal form,” he said.
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He told CBS that about 50 people have been arrested in conjunction with the attack on the U.S. consulate, which he said was “definitely planned by foreigners” who entered Libya several months ago and immediately started plotting the assault. He said “a few” of the perpetrators were from Mali and Algeria while others were Libyan “affiliates” and “sympathizers.”
“These ugly deeds, criminal deeds … do not represent in any way, in any sense, the aspirations and feelings of Libya toward the United States and its citizens.”
“The way these perpetrators acted and moved and their choosing the specific date [of Sept. 11] for this so-called demonstration, I think this leaves us with no doubt that this was pre-planned, pre-determined.”
Magarief said the security situation “is difficult, not only for Americans but for Libyans themselves.”
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Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told CBS he didn't buy the notion that the attack in Libya was spontaneous.
“Most people don't bring rocket-propelled grenades and heavy weapons to a demonstration,” McCain said. “That was an act of terror. And for anyone to disagree with that fundamental fact I think is really ignorant of the facts.”
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a former FBI official, told Fox News the violence in Libya had “all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda-style attack.” {Read More}
USA Today - Many college students watching the party conventions were probably dissatisfied — neither party directly matched their beliefs. Partly this is an unfortunate effect of any two-party political system.
However, significant changes in our national political outlook create a growing segment of the population with beliefs that cut across the current conception of the conservative vs. liberal debate.
A growing number of people, particularly youth, identifies as socially liberal while being fiscally conservative. Earlier this year, a Reason poll showed that 61% of people aged 18-29 would be open to electing a president who is socially liberal and fiscally conservative.
This should have major implications — not just in this election, but also for the foreseeable future. A survey conducted late last month by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation showed that the “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” voting bloc was essentially the only persuadable group in 2012. While so-called independents make up about one-third of the electorate, most lean toward one party or the other.
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To many, creating a coalition catering to fiscal conservative/social liberals may appear illogical.
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The stirring visions that essentially founded both parties have cooled from their once white-hot magma, calcifying into the hard rock that characterizes today’s political paralysis.
The current political alignment produces stalemate after stalemate in Congress and the myth of an America split between two minds. But however toxic today’s polarization may be, it’s hard to imagine it’s any scarier than uniting a racially-divided party during segregation.
Both parties have chance to forge a coalition that re-shuffles the deck in a way that fiscal conservatives and social liberals can be a part of a big-tent coalition.
Whichever gets to it first is the party that will “win the future.”
MEDIAITE - MSNBC host Chris Matthews said on his program that he thought Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was displaying a suspicious level of arrogance by thinking that he could run for president against Barack Obama. He said he “didn’t like the look” of what Romney could have been thinking, although he said he opted to refrain from getting “into his head on this.”
“I thought the decision by Romney to run for president, even as this president had not yet even been inaugurated, Mayor, showed a certain kind of disdain,” said Matthews. “I don’t want to get into his head on this – I don’t like the look of it – but he seemed to think, ‘Well, this guy could be beat by me.’”
Matthews said that Romney’s suspicion that he could defeat President Obama in 2012, even though he knew that he was not “a first-rate politician,” was an “arrogant point of view.”
“I’ve got a message for Mitt Romney – I wouldn’t do any head games with Barack Obama,” said former San Francisco Mayor Willy Brown. “He’s not smart enough, I don’t think he’s clever enough and he clearly has no street about him at all.”
How long had it been since President Obama attended his daily intelligence meeting in the lead-up to the Sept. 11 attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Egypt and Libya? After all, our adversaries are known to use the anniversary of 9/11 to target the United States.
According to the public schedule of the president, the last time the Obama attended his daily intelligence meeting was Sept. 5 — a week before Islamist radicals stormed our embassy in Cairo and terrorists killed our ambassador to Tripoli. The president was scheduled to hold the intelligence meeting at 10:50 a.m. Wednesday, the day after the attacks, but it was canceled so that he could comfort grieving employees at the State Department — as well he should. But instead of rescheduling the intelligence briefing for later in the day, Obama apparently chose to skip it altogether and attend a Las Vegas fundraiser for his re-election campaign. One day after a terrorist attack.
When I asked National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor if the president had attended any meetings to discuss the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) since Sept. 5, he repeatedly refused to answer. He noted that Obama had attended a principals meeting of the National Security Council on Sept. 10 and reiterated that he reads the PDB. “As I’ve told you every time you ask, the President gets his PDB every day,” Vietor told me by e-mail, adding this swipe at Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush: “Unlike your former boss, he has it delivered to his residence in the morning and not briefed to him.” (This new line of defense was echoed this morning by my Post colleague, Dana Milbank, who writes that Bush was briefed every day by his intelligence advisers because he “decided he would prefer to read less.”)
Vietor’s reply is quite revealing. It is apparently a point of pride in the White House that Obama’s PDB is “not briefed to him.” In the eyes of this administration, it is a virtue that the president does not meet every day with senior intelligence officials. This president, you see, does not need briefers. He can forgo his daily intelligence meeting because he is, in Vietor’s words, “among the most sophisticated consumers of intelligence on the planet.”
Truly sophisticated consumers of intelligence don’t see it as a sign of weakness to “be briefed” by the experts. Most of us, if we subscribed to a daily report on, say, astrophysics, would probably need some help interpreting it. But when it comes to intelligence, Obama is apparently so brilliant he can absorb the most complicated topics by himself in his study. He does not need to sit down for up to an hour a day with top intelligence officials, or hold more than 100 “deep dives” in which he invites CIA analysts into the Oval Office and gives them direct access to the commander in chief to discuss their areas of expertise. Such meetings are crutches this president does not need.{Read More}
(AP Photo/Hani Mohammed) |
Yahoo News - SANAA, Yemen (AP) — Chanting "death to America," hundreds of protesters angered by an anti-Islam film stormed the U.S. Embassy compound in Yemen's capital and burned the American flag on Thursday, the latest in a series of attacks on American diplomatic missions in the Middle East.
American missions have been attacked this week in three Arab nations — Yemen, Egypt and Libya — that have faced persistent unrest and are struggling to restore law and order after last year's revolts deposed their authoritarian regimes.
The protests in Yemen and Egypt point to an increased boldness among Islamists who have become more powerful amid the turmoil since the revolts. In the past, protests have broken out over perceived insults to Islam from the West, but in Arab countries they never escalated to the degree of breaching embassies, suggesting now Islamists feel they can act with impunity.
The violence this week in Libya was of a different degree altogether. While protesters in other countries were unarmed, a crowd bristling with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades overwhelmed the American Consulate in Benghazi late Tuesday, killing the ambassador and three other Americans and ransacking the building. U.S. officials suspect the assault may have been a planned operation rather than a spontaneous mob assault.
In the Yemeni capital on Thursday, protesters smashed windows as they breached the embassy perimeter and reached the compound grounds, although they did not enter the main building housing the offices.
Angry young men brought down the U.S. flag in the courtyard, burned it and replaced it with a black banner bearing Islam's declaration of faith — "There is no God but Allah."
Yemeni security forces who rushed to the scene fired in the air and used tear gas to disperse the demonstrators, driving them out of the compound after about 45 minutes and sealing off the surrounding streets. It was not immediately clear whether anyone was inside the embassy at the time of the attack.
Demonstrators removed the embassy's sign on the outer wall, set tires ablaze and pelted the compound with rocks.
The Yemeni Embassy in Washington condemned the attack and vowed to ensure the safety of foreign diplomats and to step up security measures around their missions in the country.
It was similar to an attack on the U.S. Embassy in the Egyptian capital on Tuesday night. A mob of Libyans also attacked the U.S. consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi on Tuesday, killing American Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
Yemen is home to al-Qaida's most active branch and the United States is the main foreign supporter of the Yemeni government's counterterrorism campaign. The government on Tuesday announced that al-Qaida's No. 2 leader in Yemen was killed in an apparent U.S. airstrike, a major blow to the terror network.
The spreading violence comes as outrage grows over a movie called "Innocence of Muslims" that mocked Islam's Prophet Muhammad. The amateurish video was produced in the U.S. and excerpted on YouTube. {Read More}