The Damning Dozen: Twelve Revelations from the Benghazi Hearings
Much of the media and liberal establishment simply ignored yesterday's Benghazi hearings. They were content to see, hear, and speak no evil -- which is typically the fastest way to kill a story in Washington. Others framed the proceedings as just another quixotic, partisan effort to hype a long-resolved story. Selling that template requires adherence to two fallacious assertions: First, that no major questions remain regarding the 9/11 terrorist assault on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya -- and second, that no new information emerged from the whistle-blowers' hours-long testimony. The former claim is outright insulting. The latter betrays either aggressive ignorance or wishful thinking. House Oversight Committee Republicans' focused questioning extracted quite a few nuggets of relevant information. For their part, many committee Democrats were focused on unseemly efforts to attack, distract and smear -- all employed as they cynically groused about Republicans "politicizing" the investigation. Cutting through the nonsense and dissembling, here's what we now know:(1) Murdered US Ambassador Chris Stevens' second in command, Gregory Hicks, was instructed not to speak with a Congressional investigator by Sec. Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, Cheryl Mills. Hicks said he'd "never" faced a similar demand at any point during his distinguished 22-year diplomatic career. When he refused to comply with this request, the State Department dispatched an attorney to act as a "minder," who insisted on sitting in on all of Hicks' discussions with members of Congress (higher quality video is available here):
(2) When Hicks began to voice strenuous objections to the administration's inaccurate talking points with State Department higher-ups, the administration turned hostile. After being lavishly praised by the president and the Secretary of State for his performance under fire, Assistant Secretary of State Beth Jones instantly reversed course and launched into a "blistering critique" of Hicks' leadership. He was subsequently "effectively demoted." Hicks called Rice's talking points "stunning" and "embarrassing."
(3) Secretaries Clinton and Rice (the president's hand-selected messenger on Benghazi to the American people) repeatedly stated that the attack arose from "spontaneous protests" over an obscure YouTube video. This was never true. Hicks called the YouTube a "non-event" in Libya. He and others on the ground -- including Amb. Stevens -- recognized the raid as a coordinated terrorist attack from the very beginning. Hicks testified that he personally told Sec. Clinton as much at 2 am on the night of the attack, along with her senior staff. Days later, Rice recited bogus talking points on five American television networks, and Clinton denounced the video while standing next to the flag-draped coffins of the fallen. Hicks said there he never mentioned any "spontaneous demonstrations" related to a video in his phone call with Clinton:
Questions: How, why, and by whom did the administration's talking points get scrubbed and re-written? Why did the president refuse to identify the attack as terrorism in an interview with CBS News on September 12, and why did he allow Sec. Rice to disseminate patently false information on his behalf?
(4) A small, armed US force in Tripoli was told it did not have the authority to deploy to Benghazi in the midst of the attack. Flight time between the two cities is less than an hour. Members of the would-be rescue contingent were "furious" over this obstruction. The witnesses said they did not know who ultimately gave the "stand down" order, or why. If it was not the Commander-in-Chief calling the shots, why not, and where was he? Whistle-blower Mark Thompson, a career counter-terrorism official at State, said he called the White House to request the immediate deployment of a Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST) to Benghazi. He was told it was "not the right time" to do so, then was cut out of the communications loop.
(5) The US' security chief in Libya, Eric Nordstrom, averred that Sec. Clinton "absolutely" would have been briefed on his (and Stevens') repeated requests for an increased security presence in Libya. This claim undercut committee Democrats' nitpicking over whether Clinton's signature appeared on the memo denying those requests:
Furthermore, the Benghazi compound was operating below the bare minimum global security standard for US diplomatic missions -- despite being in an exceedingly dangerous place, and having been subjected to previous attempted attacks. Only the Secretary of State has the authority to grant exemptions for minimum security requirements.
(6) Amb. Stevens was stationed at the vulnerable Benghazi compound on a dangerous symbolic date at the behest of Sec. Clinton, who wished to make that diplomatic mission a permanent outpost. This detail should only intensify questions as to why the consulate was so poorly protected (see item #7).
(7) Nordstrom stated that elements of the lightly-armed Libyan militia group tasked with protecting the consulate were "certainly" complicit in the attacks. No US Marines were present at the time. Hicks estimated that at least 60 terrorists swarmed into the compound during the attack. Eight months later, zero arrests have been made.
(8) A mortally wounded Amb. Stevens was taken to a hospital controlled by the Islamist extremist group (Ansar Al-Sharia) primarily responsible for the assault. Administration officials initially pointed to locals rushing Stevens to a local hospital as evidence of local goodwill from protesters who didn't approve of the mob spinning out of control. Hicks said the American contingent did not go to retrieve Stevens from said hospital during the fight because they were fearful that it was a trap.
(9) The US government did not seek permission from the Libyan government to fly any aircraft into Libyan airspace, aside from a drone. The witnesses testified that they believe the Libyan government would have complied with any such request. The fact that none was even made indicates that there was never a plan or intention to rush reinforcements to Benghazi. This renders the "would they have made it on time?" argument largely irrelevant -- the facts in item #4 notwithstanding. Another important point about the "they wouldn't have made it" defense: The assault lasted for eight hours and took place into two waves at two different compounds. How could anyone have known how long the fighting would last? How could they have anticipated that ex-Navy SEALs Woods and Doherty wouldn't have been able to stave off the enemy for a few more hours? Help was not on the way. It was never sent.
(10) Despite committee Democrats' repeated claims and leading questions, reduced funding or "austerity" had absolutely nothing to do with the inadequate security presence on the ground. The State Department itself made this fact crystal clear at previous hearings, as did the administration's internal "ARB" review. Why did multiple Democrats flog an obsolete, thoroughly-debunked explanation, if not to muddy the waters?
(11) Oversight Democrats tried to cast doubt on Mark Thompson's credibility, suggesting that he'd declined to participate in the administration's ARB probe. Thompson corrected the record, noting that he "offered his services" to those investigators, who in turn did not invite him to testify. Democrats also claimed that the House hearings were slanted because the leaders of the ARB investigation were not invited to participate. In fact, Chairman Issa explicitly did invite them, as confirmed by letters obtained by ABC News. They chose not to participate. Democrats were dead wrong on both counts.
(12) During her Congressional testimony on Benghazi, Sec. Clinton memorably asked, "what difference does it make?" in regards to the provenance of the administration's incorrect talking points. Gregory Hicks and Eric Nordstrom both attempted to answer that question. Hicks did so in granular detail (the false explanation opened a nasty rift between the US and Libyan governments, impeding the FBI's investigation for weeks). An emotional Nordstrom was more general (we lost friends; the truth matters):
One of the few points of bipartisan agreement was that the number of unresolved issues merit additional hearings on Benghazi.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2013/05/09/the-damning-dozen-twelve-revelations-from-the-benghazi-hearings-n1591336
The Difference It Made
On Wednesday, Representative Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee convened the ninth round of hearings on the lethal September 11, 2012, attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, a number of iterations made necessary by the administration’s manifold efforts to stall, stymie, and deflect the investigation.
Testifying were Mark Thompson, acting deputy assistant secretary of state for operations, counterterrorism bureau; Eric Nordstrom, former State Department regional security officer for Libya; and Gregory Hicks, a foreign-service officer and former deputy chief of mission in Libya, who, after Ambassador Chris Stevens’s death that night, became America’s senior diplomat in country. Rightly identified as “whistleblowers,” the three men came forward at considerable professional risk because, as a choked-up Nordstrom testified in his opening remarks, “it matters” that we find out what happened before, during, and after the attacks that left four Americans dead.
Mr. Hicks began the hearing with a harrowing and moving account of the attacks as they unfolded, from his vantage point at the embassy in Tripoli. He spoke of a first wave of some 60 attackers inside American walls in Benghazi — driven out by a mere six Americans, but not before they could set the fire that likely killed Ambassador Stevens. Unidentified people soon called American personnel using Stevens’s cell phone, saying they had the ambassador. “We suspected we were being baited into a trap,” Hicks testified, “and we did not want to send our people into an ambush.”
The jihadists launched another assault on the U.S. compound, this time killing two Americans with mortar fire. Hicks spoke with emotion of the heroism of the few left standing to fight, including a Special Forces operative climbing down a ladder with a badly injured man strapped to his back.
Later, Hicks testified, he asked military commanders to send a Special Forces attachment led by one Lieutenant Colonel Gibson back to Benghazi, but was denied by the brass at U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM):
People in Benghazi had been fighting all night. They were tired. They were exhausted. We wanted to make sure the airport was secure for their withdrawal. As he and his three personnel were getting in the cars, he stopped, they called them off. He said that he had not been authorized to go.Hicks quoted Gibson as saying then that it was the only time in his career he saw a diplomat have “more balls” than the United States military.
Lieutenant Colonel Gibson was furious. I had told him to bring our people home. That is what he wanted to do.
Calling off the reinforcements was just one of many questionable tactical and strategic decisions made both before and during the attack. Nordstrom testified, for instance, that although the government recognized Benghazi as an acutely dangerous post, the consulate’s security apparatus did not meet the minimum standards for such installations, and that by statute, the only person who can waive security protocols in such situations is the secretary of state. As we already knew, not only did the security situation fail to improve in the months leading up the attack, it actually deteriorated, and security personnel were reassigned even as the number of violent incidents against the Western presence increased. (In its after-action reports, Hillary Clinton’s State Department either dismissed these security failings or laid them at the feet of middle managers below the level of Senate confirmation.)
But perhaps more disturbing than the bad calls leading up to the attack were the cynical and negligent calls made after it, none more notorious than the administration’s ponderous and preposterous decision to blame the American deaths on a “spontaneous” demonstration against a fourth-rate YouTube video, seen by few and regarded by fewer.
Hicks testified, starkly and matter-of-factly, that “the YouTube video was a non-event in Libya.” So naturally, he was “stunned” by Ambassador Susan Rice’s Sunday-show appearances blaming the attack on it. “My jaw dropped,” said Hicks. “I was embarrassed.” On follow-up questions from Democrats desperate to find some fleeting suggestion of a nexus, Hicks was adamant: No American serving in Libya mentioned the video as a concern, either to one another or to their bosses in Washington.
By contrast, Hicks said, he “was jumping up and down” when Libyan president Mohammed Magarief promptly and forcefully called the Benghazi assault an act of terror, within hours of the attack and well ahead of the Obama administration. When confronted by committeemen with Secretary Clinton’s now infamous “what difference does it make” ejaculation in earlier congressional testimony, Hicks responded calmly but forcefully that the administration’s continued insistence that the attack was related to the video caused an “immeasurable” amount of damage. It angered an ally in President Magarief and hurt his credibility in Libya, and, far more critically, it delayed an FBI team from arriving in Libya for 18 days, during which time the crime scene in Benghazi was completely unsecure and precious evidence may have been lost forever.
Not only was the video not the proximate cause of the attack, but we have every indication that the administration knew that it was not and yet perpetuated the lie, either in the hopes that it would stick with an uncurious media, or merely to buy itself time. When the truth started to emerge from the spin, the administration resorted to more, shall we say, active measures.
In his 22 years of diplomatic service, Hicks testified, every congressional delegation he has ever received has been afforded one-on-one meetings with chargés d’affaires. But in the aftermath of Benghazi, State Department lawyers explicitly instructed Hicks not to speak to Representative Jason Chaffetz, nor to allow Chaffetz to speak with security personnel, without their presence as babysitters — a massive breach in protocol. When lawyers were nevertheless excluded from one meeting because they lacked appropriate security clearance, Hicks received an angry phone call from Cheryl Mills, Secretary Clinton’s chief of staff and chief fixer (whom you may remember as Bill Clinton’s attorney before the United States Senate). Said Hicks of the call: “She demanded a report on the visit and she was upset.”
The whistleblowers’ testimony is recounted here with little adornment, because to read it is to understand its import. It shows an administration characterized ex ante by incompetence and ex post facto by panic and cold calculation, willing to subvert national security for campaign-season politics. And it paints Hillary Clinton’s inner circle as eager to shift blame from political appointees to mid-level career employees, to intimidate foreign and civil servants into toeing the company line, and to punish those who refused (Hicks was demoted).
Throughout the proceedings a mostly tone-deaf and bewildered Democratic minority attempted limply to impeach the witnesses — failing to land a single blow — and to cling to obsolete talking points about budget cuts and military logistics’ being solely to blame for this tragedy. They provided no substantive rebuttal to the most disturbing and damaging testimony of Messrs. Thompson, Nordstrom, and Hicks. Perhaps because there is none.
After nine hearings, we are only now starting to get a true picture of September 11, 2012, and the days that followed in Benghazi. But the breakthrough is no reason to stop. On the contrary, Wednesday’s testimony provided new leads and suggested new witnesses — the military leadership on the ground, the interpolative State Department lawyers, Cheryl Mills, Assistant Secretary Beth Jones, Undersecretary Patrick Kennedy, Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering, and Susan Rice, to name but a few — and we encourage Representative Issa to redouble his efforts. The seriousness of the claims leveled against administration figures should compel President Obama to cooperate fully in these efforts, but since it almost certainly won’t, we urge the committee to use its prerogatives and all legal means to fill out the record. We’re closer than we’ve ever been, but we’re still not at the bottom of Benghazi.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/347811/difference-it-made/page/0/1
Benghazi makes Watergate 'look like kindergarten'
General: 'A dereliction of duty this nation has never seen before'
Revelations in Wednesday’s congressional hearings on the Benghazi terrorist attacks prove it is a massive scandal that will carry significant consequences for those involved in the cover-up, according to retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney.McInerney served at the highest levels in the Air Force, including time as assistant vice chief of staff and vice commander in chief of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe. He believes the Obama administration deliberately misled the American people on the motivation for the attack and is now covering its tracks on decisions to prevent a military rescue in Benghazi. He told WND that is more clear than ever following Wednesday’s testimony of former Deputy Chief of Mission Gregory Hicks and two others before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
“This is going to be the biggest scandal. It is going to make Watergate look like kindergarten because Watergate was primarily limited to the Oval Office. This cuts across the whole national security apparatus, where people were lying and covering up,” McInerney said. “It is a dereliction of duty that this nation has never seen before.”
So what consequences could that mean for the highest levels of the administration?
“Well, just see what the consequences were in Watergate. If it’s far worse than Watergate, the consequences will go right into the Oval Office,” he said.
McInerney said the tell-tale sign of Obama’s dereliction of duty can be determined in the admitted White House narrative of the president’s actions as the terrorist attack played out the night of Sept. 11, 2012.
“When is the exact minute he knew? We don’t have the timeline, and it was well before the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff went over there. He only talked to the secretary of defense one time, so it’s obvious he knew that he had given the stand-down order and did not need to talk to the secretary of defense or anybody else after that,” McInerney said. “Then he goes the next day out on a fundraising campaign to Las Vegas. That is a low for the commander in chief of this great nation.”
He also insists the stand-down order could only come from one source: the president himself.
“The only person who could have given it was the president, and he had to give it through the secretary of defense, secretary of state. The word came out so it came from the combatant commands and other unites below, but nobody could have given that except the president of the United States, and that is very clear,” said McInerney, who noted that the State Department’s own Accountability Review Board likely reached a similar conclusion in its report, which is why so few have seen it and the leaders of that study refuse to appear before Congress. McInerney believes they should be subpoenaed.
While he believes Obama has a lot to answer for, McInerney made it clear that many top-level subordinates deserve a lot of the blame too, and that’s what makes the scandal so troubling.
“It’s going to have significant consequences because it impacts two CIA directors, two secretaries of state, two chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, two secretaries of defense that are all involved now with the cover-up,” he said.
The general also singled out former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her comment at congressional hearings in January in which she bristled severely at accusations the administration concocted a plan to blame the attack on a spontaneous demonstration over an anti-Islam YouTube video that got out of hand. Clinton slammed Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, saying, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
McInerney sees that as a low point in American history.
“That is one of the most despicable statements that any American has said about such a tragic incident when you lose people like that. It makes a huge difference that our troops know that they will always be protected as much as they can and we’ll do anything to protect them,” he said. “She says, what difference does it make? That will live with her til the day she dies. I can tell you, all the people I know, both active and retired, think that is one of the most despicable statements we have ever heard a civilian leader say in our country’s history.”
McInerney said the administration’s story is full of holes on a number of fronts, including the narrative about the supposed video protests. But the general said his own experience serving in that theater convinces him there was plenty of time and opportunity to deploy U.S. forces to protect Americans in Benghazi.
“We have never done that, that I know, in our military history, where we just abandoned and did not try to send in rescue forces. They could have gotten there from Aviano (Air Base in Italy) the F-16s. I used to fly F-16s out of Aviano when I was vice commander in chief of U.S. Air Forces in Europe. I know that scene very well. They could have made it. They said they didn’t have tankers. They could have dropped their tanks. They could have recovered at a nearby Italian air base on an island,” he said.
“So it is unacceptable to me that we didn’t send those forces from Tripoli that we had there. We didn’t send F-16s and the FEST team to go in and to try to rescue those people. That was unacceptable, but from the get-go they had a narrative that they wanted to stick with that was a political narrative that the war was over, they had defeated al-Qaida,” he said.
http://www.wnd.com/2013/05/benghazi-makes-watergate-look-like-kindergarten/?cat_orig=politics
Benghazi Hall of Shame
Remembering the officials and commentators who inaccurately blamed a murderous attack at least in part on an obscure YouTube trailer.
Yesterday's dramatic congressional testimony about the deadly Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on U.S. interests in Benghazi, Libya convincingly corroborated what was widely reported within days of the attack: that senior American officials on the ground knew immediately, despite the Obama administration's storyline to the contrary, that the assault did not arise out of a "spontaneous" demonstration outside the U.S. Consulate in protest of an obscure YouTube trailer of a homemade anti-Islam movie called Innocence of Muslims.Falsely assessing partial blame for the violence on a piece of artistic expression inflicted damage not just on the California resident who made it—Nakoula Basseley Nakoula is currently serving out a one-year sentence for parole violations committed in the process of producing Innocence—but also on the entire American culture of free speech. In the days and weeks after the attacks, academics and foreign policy thinkers fell over themselves dreaming up new ways to either disproportionately punish Nakoula or scale back the very notion of constitutionally protected expression.
Fourteen days after Ambassador Chris Stevens was murdered by Islamists, President Barack Obama stood up in front of the United Nations and declared that the "message" of a movie virtually no one will ever see "must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity," that "the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam," and that we all should "condemn incitement against Sufi Muslims, and Shiite pilgrims."
It should give even Obama's strongest supporters pause that the same administration so wary about characterizing Benghazi as a "terrorist attack" was simultaneously so eager to characterize an artistic provocation as a (potentially criminal) incitement.
What follows is a partial timeline of statements made in the first two weeks after the attack, from government officials and media commentators who lent credence to the now-discredited notion that Ambassador Stevens and three other U.S. personnel died because of a YouTube video. If we are to robustly defend the American culture of free speech, it's important to remember those who so quickly chose to throw the First Amendment under a bus.
Sept. 11, 2012: U.S. Embassy in Cairo:
U.S. Embassy Condemns Religious IncitementSept. 12, 2012: Anthea Butler, associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania:
The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.
How soon is Sam Bacile going to be in jail folks? I need him to go now.When Americans die because you are stupid...Sept. 12, 2012: Rev. Steven D. Martin, CEO of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good:
I have no sympathy for anyone who would assassinate a U.S. ambassador. But I have even less sympathy for filmmakers who spread hatred and for pastors who knowingly incite violence.Sept. 13, 2012: Hillary Clinton, secretary of state:
I also want to take a moment to address the video circulating on the Internet that has led to these protests in a number of countries. Let me state very clearly – and I hope it is obvious – that the United States Government had absolutely nothing to do with this video. We absolutely reject its content and message. America's commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. And as you know, we are home to people of all religions, many of whom came to this country seeking the right to exercise their own religion, including, of course, millions of Muslims. And we have the greatest respect for people of faith.
To us, to me personally, this video is disgusting and reprehensible. It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage.
We also need to understand that this is a fairly volatile situation and it is in response not to United States policy, not to obviously the administration, not to the American people. It is in response to a video, a film that we have judged to be reprehensible and disgusting. That in no way justifies any violent reaction to it, but this is not a case of protests directed at the United States writ large or at U.S. policy. This is in response to a video that is offensive to Muslims.
Sept. 14, 2012: Bill Press, radio host:
What, if anything, should happen to the people who made this video? I gotta tell you, I think they are as guilty, that's my opinion, I think they are as guilty as the terrorists who carried out those attacks against our embassy in Libya. Look, we don't know everybody who was involved, but we've seen, I've seen some of them on television. This is a group of extremist, Muslim-hating, so-called Christians in southern California who are using their religion to stir up hatred against Islam. They're basing this on their Christian beliefs. They are, I believe, every bit as guilty as al Qaeda members who, think about it, who use the Koran and abuse their religion to stir up hatred against the United States. [...]
I think we...ought to be identifying the people who made this video and go after them with the full force of the law and lock their ass up.Sept. 14, 2012: Anthea Butler:
The "free speech" in Bacile's film is not about expressing a personal opinion about Islam. It denigrates the religion by depicting the faith's founder in several ludicrous and historically inaccurate scenes to incite and inflame viewers. [...]
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called Jones on Wednesday to ask him to stop promoting Bacile's film. Clearly, the military considers the film a serious threat to national security. If the military takes it seriously, there should be consequences for putting American lives at risk.
While the First Amendment right to free expression is important, it is also important to remember that other countries and cultures do not have to understand or respect our right.Sept. 16, 2012: Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations:
[B]ased on the best information we have to date, what our assessment is as of the present is in fact what - it began spontaneously in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo, where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy sparked by this hateful video. [...]
[T]his is a spontaneous reaction to a video, and it’s not dissimilar but, perhaps, on a slightly larger scale than what we have seen in the past with The Satanic Verses with the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.Sept. 18, 2012: Sarah Chayes, former special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
While many 1st Amendment scholars defend the right of the filmmakers to produce this film, arguing that the ensuing violence was not sufficiently imminent, I spoke to several experts who said the trailer may well fall outside constitutional guarantees of free speech. "Based on my understanding of the events," 1st Amendment authority Anthony Lewis said in an interview Thursday, "I think this meets the imminence standard."
Finally, much 1st Amendment jurisprudence concerns speech explicitly advocating violence, such as calls to resist arrest, or videos explaining bomb-making techniques. But words don't have to urge people to commit violence in order to be subject to limits, says Lewis. "If the result is violence, and that violence was intended, then it meets the standard."Sept. 18, 2012: Tim Wu, The New Republic:
When Censorship Makes Sense: How YouTube Should Police Hate SpeechSept. 20, 2012: President Barack Obama:
A better course would be to try to create a process that relies on a community, either of regional experts or the serious users of YouTube. Community members would (as they do now) flag dangerous or illegal videos for deletion. Google would decide the easy cases itself, and turn the hard cases over to the community, which would aim for a rough consensus. Such a system would be an early-warning signal that might have prevented riots in the first place.
Here's what happened. ... You had a video that was released by somebody who lives here, sort of a shadowy character who -- who made an extremely offensive video directed at -- at Mohammed and Islam.Sept. 25, 2012: President Barack Obama:
In every country, there are those who find different religious beliefs threatening; in every culture, those who love freedom for themselves must ask how much they are willing to tolerate freedom for others.
That is what we saw play out the last two weeks, as a crude and disgusting video sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world. I have made it clear that the United States government had nothing to do with this video, and I believe its message must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity. It is an insult not only to Muslims, but to America as well – for as the city outside these walls makes clear, we are a country that has welcomed people of every race and religion. We are home to Muslims who worship across our country. We not only respect the freedom of religion – we have laws that protect individuals from being harmed because of how they look or what they believe. We understand why people take offense to this video because millions of our citizens are among them.Sept. 25, 2012: Eric Posner, professor at the University of Chicago Law School:
The vile anti-Muslim video shows that the U.S. overvalues free speech. [...]
Americans need to learn that the rest of the world—and not just Muslims—see no sense in the First Amendment. Even other Western nations take a more circumspect position on freedom of expression than we do, realizing that often free speech must yield to other values and the need for order. Our own history suggests that they might have a point. [...]
So symbolic attachment to uneasy, historically contingent compromises, and a half-century of judicial decisions addressing domestic political dissent and countercultural pressures, prevent the U.S. government from restricting the distribution of a video that causes violence abroad and damages America’s reputation. And this is a video that, by the admission of all sides, has no value whatsoever.http://reason.com/archives/2013/05/09/benghazi-hall-of-shame
Friends in High Places
Schweitzer wins seat on board of company he intervened on behalf of during auto bailout
Schweitzer and a New York hedge fund won four of eights seats on the board of Stillwater Mining Co. last week, one of multiple companies in which Schweitzer personally invested after using his official position to advance their financial interests.
Critics say the deals raise questions about a potential abuse of power.
“Schweitzer is apparently quite a wheeler-dealer, and his business dealings merit further scrutiny,” said Matthew Vadum, editor at the Capital Research Center.
Schweitzer is considering a run for the Senate seat being vacated by the retiring Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.).
“I think [Schweitzer’s critics] will use this if he does decide to run for higher office,” predicted Steve Stanek, a financial expert at the Heartland Institute.
“I’d say he has looked for ways to enrich himself,” Stanek said. “It would certainly not be the first time that someone in office has done that.”
Schweitzer has been mentioned as a potential dark horse presidential candidate.
Political observers say Schweitzer’s populist credentials could be an asset in a presidential run. Those credentials were on full display in 2009, when he exercised his sway as governor to preserve a lucrative contract for Stillwater.
As the federal government bailed out General Motors (GM) in July 2009, the automotive company announced that it would kill a contract with Stillwater for palladium and platinum in favor of cheaper foreign sources.
The GM contract was important to Stillwater’s financial success, since the “overwhelming majority” of platinum and palladium produced by the company was used in automotive catalytic converters, according to the Associated Press.
“GM officials made it clear they are not interested in reconsidering the terminated supply contract,” Stillwater said in a news release at the time.
Schweitzer was enraged. “Damn right, I’m mad,” he said. “They reached into my pocket [via the bailout] so they can stay in business and then they take actions to put Montanans out of business.”
Schweitzer even said he would stop driving his Chevy pickup truck in protest.
He sent letters to then-Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and chief White House economist Larry Summers, who co-chaired the administration’s automotive task force, expressing his displeasure at GM’s decision.
GM renewed its Stillwater contract the following year.
Within two months of leaving the governor’s mansion, Schweitzer purchased 25,000 shares of Stillwater stock. He later joined the hostile takeover attempt of the New York hedge fund the Clinton Group. The hedge fund did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
Stillwater executives see opportunism in Schweitzer’s attempt to take over the company. “We’re going to have a higher share price, and these guys see that and on the cheap they want to take control of a company as well-positioned as we are,” CEO Frank McAllister told the Associated Press.
Montana political experts say Schweitzer’s investment in a company whose interests he advanced as governor reflects his leadership style.
“Schweitzer ruled Montana’s state bureaucracy and political class with an iron fist during his tenure as governor,” said Carl Graham, CEO of the Montana Policy Institute.
“His reputation among insiders for rewarding friends and punishing enemies rivaled that of the Copper Barons in Montana’s history books,” Graham said.
Just as the populist appeal of Schweitzer’s work on Stillwater’s behalf obscures perceptions of cronyism, his advocacy for the wildly popular Keystone XL Pipeline involved a deal that enriched a company in which Schweitzer subsequently invested.
Schweitzer said he spent 18 months of his governorship convincing TransCanada, the company building the pipeline, to build an “on-ramp” to the pipeline in Montana. The goal was to enable Montana oil producers, many of which draw crude oil from the Bakken shale formation, which sits below Montana and North Dakota, to cheaply ship oil to refineries and export terminals.
The president of Oklahoma-based Continental Resources, which owns more North Dakota drilling acreage than any other oil company, met with TransCanada in 2008. Continental CEO Harold Hamm said “they weren’t interested” in hauling Bakken oil via the pipeline.
That all changed after Schweitzer went to bat on Continental’s behalf. He threatened to tie up the pipeline, which was slated to run through Montana, in red tape. “I said, ‘Tell you what I’ll do to TransCanada. I’ll tie one leg up there, and they’ll start listening,’” Schweitzer told the Washington Post. “That’s exactly what I did.”
“Guess what, the next thing we know we’re having a meeting,” Hamm said. “TransCanada, producers, [Schweitzer] was present, as was the governor of North Dakota. And TransCanada felt that an on-ramp seemed pretty feasible. It’s amazing how some of those things come about.”
Schweitzer personally brokered the meeting that resulted in an agreement between TransCanada and Bakken producers, according to TransCanada CEO Russ Girling. “The spark was the governor,” Girling told the Post. “He said: ‘I can see growth and a pipeline coming through my back yard. You, TransCanada, and producers have to get together.’ He pushed it, and we’re all glad he did.”
Hamm called Schweitzer his “new best friend.” The Bakken on-ramp was officially announced in September 2010.
At some point between December 2010 and December 2012, Schweitzer bought stock in Continental Resources, according to biennial financial disclosure forms filed with the Montana Commission on Political Practices.
Schweitzer did not return requests for clarification on when he bought the stock or how much he owns. Continental also did not respond to a comment request.
http://freebeacon.com/friends-in-high-places-2/
Grade School Graduation Canceled After Anonymous Complaint About Prayer — and Christian Parents Have a Backup Plan
The Riverside School District in Lake
City, Arkansas, has canceled its 6th-grade graduation ceremony after a
parent protested over the inclusion of Christian prayer in the
festivities. After officials received a letter from the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) on the behalf of the parent, the event was
canceled.
Parents who revere the traditional
ceremony found themselves surprised and frustrated by the development.
One parent, Kelly Adams, said that prayer had never been an issue before
and that the cancellation has some people in the district very upset.
“As Christians and a mainly Christian town I think, there were a lot of people hurt that our rights were taken away,” Adams told KAIT-TV. “My daughter graduated last year from 6th grade and my son is graduating this year from 6th grade, and we had a pastor open our ceremony and my daughter actually closed the ceremony in prayer.”
While parents understand that the
district made the best decision it could at the time, she also decried
the notion that rights would be taken away from Christian parents and
afforded to non-believers.
But Adams claims that all hope isn’t
lost. Rather than accept no graduation ceremony for their 6th graders,
parents have another plan. They are getting together this week to find a
church where the event can still be held. Collectively, they plan to
host their own version of the graduation — and it’s open to everyone,
regardless of belief — so that student achievement can be properly
recognized, KAIT-TV reports.
“We are including everyone, everyone is
invited, we want everyone to come and be a part of it,” Adams
continued. “We’re not trying to be pushy or ugly to anybody, we just
want them to know there is a God who loves them.”
Starnes reports
that it was the Freedom of Religion Foundation (FFRF), a church-state
separatist group, that sent a letter to officials. It’s unclear if two
separate letters were sent by the ACLU and the FFRF, but this would not
be the first time that the two groups have intervened simultaneously on a
First Amendment issue.
“It makes no difference how many
families want prayer or wouldn’t be offended by prayer at their
graduation ceremony,” FFRF attorney Patrick Elliott wrote in his letter
to the Riverside School District. “The Supreme Court has settled this
matter — school graduations must be secular to protect the freedom of
conscience of all students.”
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/09/school-district-cancels-grade-school-graduation-after-parent-complains-about-prayer/
Feds Help Fund Pole Dancing – For Linemen
An Austin, Texas dance company has received a $10,000 National
Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant for its upcoming performance
featuring electricity linemen dancing on utility poles.
The working title for the “PowerUP!” performance was “Journeyman” and it’s under that title that Forklift Danceworks received a $10,000 Art Works dance grant from the NEA.
“This is the third in a series of large-scale civic spectacles and will include original music by Graham Reynolds performed by the Austin Symphony and led by conductor Peter Bay, and feature 75 employees performing on 35-foot utility poles and ten bucket trucks and cranes,” the April, 23 NEA grant announcement says.
“The NEA funding really helps,” Allison Orr, Artistic Director of Forklift Danceworks tells CNSNews.com, “First of all, it’s a vote of confidence, it gives us a certain amount of respect and credibility that helps us to bring in dollars from other organizations.”
Orr estimates the cost of the two free performances to be about $100,000. The PowerUP! Project has received over $22,000 from its Kickstarter project fundraising efforts and additional funding has come in through donations and other private grants.
“We’re a non-profit organization, so we are fundraising all the time. We have a hard working board and we have individuals and other businesses in the community who are working with us,” Orr says, “We’ve received a lot of interest. It’s a family-friendly, free, fun event so people get excited.”
Orr says the two performances planned for September 21and 22 would happen even without the grant from the NEA, “We are dedicated to this art and bringing it free to the public. So yes, we are going to make it happen, but the NEA grant is a real vote of confidence.”
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/feds-help-fund-pole-dancing-linemen
The Other Big Winners in Gang of Eight Immigration Bill: Lawyers, Lobbyists and Advocacy Groups
Some of the interests that stand to gain the most from the Senate Gang of Eight immigration bill, S. 744, are obvious.
Within six months of enactment of the bill, millions of illegal aliens would be eligible for Registered Provisional Immigrant (RPI) status – the first and most important step in the amnesty process. They would be granted permission to remain and work in the United States while they wait for green cards and eventual citizenship.
Also obvious winners in the 844-page bill are business interests that would gain easier access to foreign labor. S. 744 provides for significant increases in guest workers who would be made available to businesses, as well as new flows of low-skilled and skilled permanent immigrants.
But there are still others who would hit the jackpot if S. 744 were to become law: lawyers and an array of groups that advocate on behalf of illegal aliens.
The bill provides what amounts to an engraved invitation for illegal aliens to sue the government for amnesty, individually or as part of a class action, and in many instances authorizes the Attorney General to appoint attorneys to represent illegal aliens at taxpayers’ expense.
Not only does S.744 serve up potentially millions of new clients for immigration attorneys, the bill encourages illegal aliens to challenge a denial or revocation of RPI status. The bill authorizes illegal aliens to avail themselves of the federal court system, all the way up to the appellate court level, if they are turned down for amnesty.
Tying the federal court system in knots can be expensive, so S.744 also obligates American taxpayers, in many cases, to pay lawyers’ fees. First, the bill strikes the existing language that states that an alien’s right to counsel in an immigration case must be “at no expense to the government.”
The bill then goes on to grant the Attorney General “sole and unreviewable discretion, [to] appoint or provide counsel to aliens in immigration proceedings.” In cases involving unaccompanied minors, the legislation requires the Attorney General to appoint taxpayer-funded representation. Given Attorney General Eric Holder’s stated position that “creating a pathway to earned citizenship” for illegal aliens “is a matter of civil and human rights,” it is reasonable to assume that he will exercise his “sole and unreviewable discretion” rather broadly.
S.744 also provides lavishly for “community, faith-based or other immigrant-serving” organizations to conduct public information campaigns to promote amnesty, and to assist applicants through the process. The bill authorizes that the Secretary of Homeland Security “may use up to $50,000,000” from the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Trust Fund to finance what amounts to a get-out-the-amnesty drive. The Trust Fund, which would be created by S.744, authorizes the transfer of $6.5 billion from “from the general fund of the Treasury.”
These same “eligible public or private, non-profit organizations” would also be permitted to dip into the Trust Fund to “provide direct assistance” to aliens who are applying for amnesty and “any other assistance that the Secretary or grantee considers useful to aliens who are interested in applying for registered provisional immigrant status.”
Thus, the illegal alien advocacy network not only gets just about everything they wanted politically out of the bill, but potentially hundreds of millions of dollars from the Treasury to make sure that the amnesty is carried out to their satisfaction.
S.744 is not just a bill that rewards illegal aliens with amnesty. It’s way worse than that. It is a cynical attempt to dress up the giveaway of billions of taxpayer dollars to lobbyists and assorted other special interests as “immigration reform.” Even those Americans who might support amnesty as the least bad way of dealing with 12 million, or so, illegal aliens living in the U.S., would be appalled at the taxpayer funded pork the bill serves up to lobbyists and advocacy groups.
The Gang of Eight bill is emblematic of what is wrong with Washington. It creates new opportunities for special interests to gorge themselves at the public trough, while doing nothing to rectify the fundamental flaw of current U.S. immigration policy – namely, the lack of any definable public interest objective. This bill has only one objective: to advance the political and economic objective of illegal aliens and the people who profit from them.
http://townhall.com/columnists/iramehlman/2013/05/09/the-other-big-winners-in-gang-of-eight-immigration-bill--lawyers-lobbyists-and-advocacy-groups-n1591689/page/full
PK'S NOTE: Great piece, read the whole thing.
iPencil
Nobody knows how to make a pencil, or a health-care system
We treat technological progress as though it were a natural process, and we speak of Moore’s law — computers’ processing power doubles every two years — as though it were one of the laws of thermodynamics. But it is not an inevitable, natural process. It is the outcome of a particular social order.When I am speaking to students, I like to show them a still from the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street in which the masterful financier Gordon Gekko is talking on his cell phone, a Motorola DynaTac 8000X. The students always — always — laugh: The ridiculous thing is more than a foot long and weighs a couple of pounds. But the revelatory fact that takes a while to sink in is this: You had to be a millionaire to have one. The phone cost the equivalent of nearly $10,000, it cost about $1,000 a month to operate, and you couldn’t text or play Angry Birds on it. When the first DynaTac showed up in a movie — it was Sixteen Candles, a few years before Wall Street — it was located in the front seat of a Rolls-Royce, which is where such things were found 25 or 30 years ago. By comparison, an iPhone 5 is a wonder, a commonplace miracle. My question for the students is: How is it that the cell phones in your pockets get better and cheaper every year, but your schools get more expensive and less effective? (Or, if you live in one of the better school districts, get much more expensive and stagnate?) How is it that Gordon Gekko’s ultimate status symbol looks to our eyes as ridiculous as Molly Ringwald’s Reagan-era wardrobe and asymmetrical hairdos? That didn’t just happen.
In his classic short story “I, Pencil,” economist Leonard Read considers the incomprehensible complexity involved in the production of a simple No. 2 pencil: the expertise in design, forestry, mining, metallurgy, engineering, transportation, support services, logistics, architecture, chemistry, machining, and other fields of knowledge necessary to create a product so common, so humble, and so cheap as to have become both ubiquitous and disposable. Read’s conclusion, which is one of those fascinating truths so obvious that nobody appreciates them, is that nobody knows how to make a pencil. Nobody is in charge of the operation, and nobody understands it end to end. From the assembly-line worker to the president of the pencil company, thousands or millions of people have tiny, discrete pieces of knowledge about the process, but no coordinating authority organizes their efforts.
That is the paradox of social knowledge: Of course we know how to make a pencil, even though none of us knows how to make a pencil, and pencils get made with very little drama and no central authority, corporate or political, overseeing their creation. A mobile phone is a much more complicated thing than a No. 2 pencil, but both are the products of spontaneous order — of systems that are, in the words of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Adam Ferguson, the “products of human action, but not of human design.”
Complex though it is, the iPhone is also a remarkably egalitarian device: The president of the United States uses one, as does the young Bengali immigrant who sold me my coffee this morning. But you can bet that her children do not attend schools as good as those that instruct the Obama daughters. The reason for that is politics: not liberal politics, not conservative politics, not bad politics, but politics per se.
The problem of politics is the problem of knowledge. The superiority of market processes to political processes is not in origin moral but technical. The useful knowledge in any modern society is distributed rather than centralized — and, as Read intuited and as modern scholars of complexity studies confirm, there is no way to centralize it. Ludwig von Mises applied that insight specifically to the defects of planned economies — the famous “socialist calculation problem” — but it applies in varying degrees to all organizations and all bureaucracies, whether political, educational, religious, or corporate. Markets work for the same reason that the Internet works: They are not organizations, but disorganizations. More precisely, they are composed of countless (literally countless, blinking into and out of existence like subatomic particles) pockets of organization, their internal structures and relationships to one another in a constant state of flux.
Market propositions are experimental propositions. Some, such as the iPhone and the No. 2 pencil, are wildly successful; others, such as New Coke or Clairol’s Touch of Yogurt Shampoo, are not. Products come and go, executives come and go, firms come and go. The metaphor of biological evolution is an apt one, though we sometimes draw the wrong conclusion from that — Social Darwinism and all that nonsense.
Conservatives like to say “Markets work,” as though that were an explanation of anything. What we really are saying is: “Failure works.” Corporations are mortal. Failure is not only an important part of the market process, it is the most important part of the market process.
U.S. Steel was at the height of its power a behemoth, the largest American business, the first corporation in the world to have a market value in excess of $1 billion. It was formed out of the union of J. P. Morgan’s business interests and Andrew Carnegie’s steel empire. When Carnegie took payment for the interests he sold to Morgan — the equivalent of $6 billion in contemporary dollars — he received it in the form of 50-year gold bonds, documents that took up so much room that the bank in which they were deposited had to build a special vault to house them. U.S. Steel seemed to be a permanent thing, but it is today a shadow of itself, reduced to a mere division of another firm, surviving mainly in name, and that name reduced to grandiosity: U.S. Steel Corporation indeed, as though it were the U.S. Mint or the U.S. Army. It produces barely more steel today than it did in Morgan’s time, and it is well below Staples and Rite Aid on the Fortune 500. The decline of U.S. Steel was bad for the company’s shareholders and its employees, but it was good for people who use steel — meaning everybody else in the world. U.S. Steel was itself the product of an improved business model that had displaced older, less efficient competitors. Without the pressure and opportunity created by the possibility of failure, the U.S. steel industry — and the entire U.S. economy — would be (at best) stuck in the early 19th century. It seems paradoxical, but failure is what makes us rich. (And we are, even in these troubled times, fabulously rich.) We’d all be a lot worse off if corporations such as U.S. Steel lived forever (which is one more reason not to engage in bailouts).
Politics creates the immortal corporation. Amtrak and the U.S. Postal Service are two institutions that would have failed long ago if not for government support — subsidies for Amtrak, the government-chartered monopoly on letter delivery for the postal service. The cost of their corporate immortality is not only the waste associated with maintaining them, but also the fact that their existence prevents the emergence of superior alternatives. No sane person would invest 12.5 percent of his income in Social Security in 2013, but we are compelled to do so, and so the bankrupt enterprise continues as though it were not tens of trillions of dollars underwater. A political establishment is a near-deathless thing: Even after the bitter campaign of 2012, voters returned essentially the same cast of characters to Washington, virtually ensuring the continuation of the policies with which some 90 percent of voters pronounced themselves dissatisfied. No death, no evolution. Outside of politics, human action is characterized by evolution and by learning. And what are we learning? How to take care of one another, which is the point of what we sometimes call capitalism. (Don’t tell Ayn Rand.)
It is remarkable that we speak and think about commerce as though competitiveness were its most important feature. There is, as noted, a certain Darwinian aspect to economic competition — and of course we humans do compete over scarce resources. But what is remarkable about human action is not its competitiveness but its almost limitless cooperativeness. Competition is one of the ways in which we learn how best to cooperate with one another and thereby deal with the problem of complexity — it is a means to the end of social cooperation. Cooperation exists elsewhere in the animal kingdom, but human beings cooperate on a species-wide, planetary level, which is a relatively new development in our evolution, the consequences of which we have not yet fully appreciated. If you consider the relationship of the organism to its constituent organs, the relationship of the organ to its cells, or the relationship of the single cell to its organelles, it would not be an overstatement to say that the division of labor is the essence of life itself: Birds do it, bees do it, but human beings do it better. The size and complexity of our brains evolved in parallel with the size and complexity of our social groups, which are just as much a product of evolutionary processes as our bodies are.
Thus, we do not have the U.S. Steel Corporation, a tightly integrated and hierarchical operation overseen by a CEO with an omniscient command of his operation. We have lots of U.S. steel corporations, and a worldwide steel industry, and many worldwide industries making products that are substitutes for steel, from aluminum to carbon fiber to nanotubes. But we do have the U.S. Postal Service, the Social Security Administration, and the government-school monopoly in your home town. These agencies underperform consistently when compared with such benchmarks of innovation as the software industry or the biotech industry. They fail because they attempt to substitute a single brain, or a relatively small panel of brains organized into a bureaucracy, for the collective cognitive firepower of millions or billions of people. Put simply, they attempt to manage systems that are too complex for them to understand. Complexity is humbling, but politics is immune to humility.
Which is something to keep in mind the next time somebody promises to “solve” our health-care challenges or unemployment. Washington is packed to the gills with people who believe that they have the ability to design an intelligent national health-care system, but there is not one who does — no Democrat, no Republican, no independent. The information burden is just too vast. Washington is not only full of people who do not know what they are talking about, it is full of people who do not know that they do not know what they are talking about. That is no model for social change. Your pencil and your phone are.
https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/347190/ipencil
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