State Department accountability over Benghazi worse than thought

imagesCAXO4B77By

Upon release of the Accountability Review Board’s (ARB) report on what happened in Benghazi, it was learned that the group singled out no individuals for discipline – the bureaucracy itself was identified as the party most responsible. There were, however, four State Department employees who reportedly resigned in the wake of the report.

Aside from the fact that none of the four individuals who allegedly ‘resigned’ were individuals who claimed to accept responsibility (Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton), it appears they haven’t really resigned at all.

Via the New York Post:

The four officials supposedly out of jobs because of their blunders in the run-up to the deadly Benghazi terror attack remain on the State Department payroll — and will all be back to work soon, The Post has learned.

The highest-ranking official caught up in the scandal, Assistant Secretary of State Eric Boswell, has not “resigned” from government service, as officials said last week. He is just switching desks. And the other three are simply on administrative leave and are expected back.

The four were made out to be sacrificial lambs in the wake of a scathing report issued last week that found that the US compound in Benghazi, Libya, was left vulnerable to attack because of “grossly inadequate” security.

State Department leaders “didn’t come clean about Benghazi and now they’re not coming clean about these staff changes,” a source close to the situation told The Post., adding, the “public would be outraged over this.”

Some might remember an exchange between Rep. Sandy Adams (R-FL) and Deputy Assistant Secretary Charlene Lamb at a House Oversight Committee in October. At the time, Adams pressed Lamb for the names of those who had the authority to deny requests for security in Benghazi. Lamb named both Eric Boswell and a man named Scott Bultrowicz. For some reason, all of the video excerpts from that hearing – once posted to the Oversight committee’s YouTube channel, now get re-directed to an unrelated Darrell Issa speech but here is the exchange from another source (the relevant portion occurs within the first minute):

Ok, so Lamb admitted to Adams that the former didn’t have sole authority to deny security. She pointed up the ladder to Boswell and Bultrowicz. The next logical question is: Did they have sole authority? If yes, then the ARB report would have erred by not naming either man as being responsible for security being withheld. If no, then someone above them had that sole authority.

The Post article only names three of the four individuals that were singled out for non-disciplinary discipline / resignation / re-assignments. They are:

  1. Eric Boswell
  2. Charlene Lamb
  3. Raymond Maxwell
Via the Post:

The other officials — Deputy Assistant Secretaries Charlene Lamb and Raymond Maxwell, and a third who has not been identified — were found to have shown “performance inadequacies” but not “willful misconduct,” Pickering said, so they would not face discipline.

So who is the fourth individual? Could it be Scott Bultrowicz?

Read more at Shoebat.com

 

“They’re Killing Us Because We’re Infidels”

AP Photo: Lance Cpl. Greg Buckley Jr.’s father Greg, foreground, and mother
Marina are escorted from St. Agnes Cathedral after his funeral Mass, Saturday,
Aug. 18, 2012, in Rockville Center, N.Y.. Buckley Jr. was
barely 21 years old when he was killed in an attack by a policeman in
Afghanistan.

by: Diana West

Paul Sperry rakes the Pentagon response to jihad inside the wire — more “sensitivity” training — in the New York Post this week (must have been Prince Talal’s day off).

Top officials believe culturally offensive behavior is the motivation behind the killings, so it’s stepped up Islamic sensitivity training for our troops.

“Top officials” should be relieved of duty, ASAP. They have lost their minds if they ever had any. Or, to be more accurate, they have adopted, internalized the Islamic mindset to a point beyond apology and beyond reason. Reality check: Normal, mainstream Afghan culture includes child rape, pederasty, “seven-day shit suits,” cruelty to animals, enslavement of women, and death to apostates, just to hit some highlights. Such institutional  depravity, however, is the New Normal to the ideological zealots in charge. They don’t see it, and can’t imagine the effect of it on Western troops, even when their own internal reports flag such native practices as dog torture as “stressors” that lead to “serious social altercations” between US and Afghan soldiers. These and other resounding features of culture clash are officially hushed up lest the irreconcilable differences between Islam and the West become openly acknowledged, and the bankruptcy of the past decade of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan becomes the open national scandal that it should and must become.

Thus, our generals burble on about nose-blowing and shoe bottoms, announcing that deviations from the Islamic way of nose-blowing and handling shoe bottoms (“cultural affronts”) are motivations for murder. (This is the same Islamic mind-set that informs the White House and media position that the Mohammed video is “causing” the Islamic attacks on US embassies.)

Sperry’s op-ed continues:

If you don’t want to be shot in the back by your Afghan training partners, the Pentagon advises, don’t offend their religious sensibilities. Don’t kick your feet up on a table, for instance, and never ask to see a picture of their wives and kids. “There’s a percentage [of attacks] which are cultural affronts,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said in a recent interview.

“Cultural affronts,” general? Read about the hostility Marine LCPL Greg Buckley Jr. encountered in an Afghan trainee before Buckley’s murder by an Afghan policeman last month. Greg told his father he didn’t think he would make it home alive — from the war zone of his own base. He told his superior officers that “one day they are going turn around and turn those weapons on us.” His superiors forced him to apologize. Two other Marines were killed in the same attack that took Buckley’s life.

Dempsey has no answer to this jihad because he has been trained, meticulously conditioned, not to see a jihad. As a result, he presses more “Islamic traditions and values” (child rape? pederasty? baksheesh?) on our troops. More Islam, more deference to Islam, becomes the only “solution” he and his brother brass and civilian leaders  can think of. They are all hostages to jihad and prisoners of Islam.

Dempsey echoes the concerns of Gen. Sher Mohammad Karimi, the Afghan National Army’s chief of staff, who earlier this month argued both sides need to do more to “teach” foreign troops Islamic traditions and values to reduce the chance of violent reactions to cultural slights.

“It is our duty to teach this to them. Our indifference about these issues causes the incident,” he said.

How about just converting Western forces to Islam and be done with it? Then, Gens. Dempsey and Allen could lead a Muslim US-ISAF and serve the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan as modern-day “janissaries.” (Janissaries were elite troops of the Ottoman Turkish empire comprised of Christian boys cruelly seized as “tribute” from their Christian parents and forcibly converted to Islam and Ottoman allegiance.) “Insider” attacks would cease because an Islamic US military would be “insiders,” too.

It’s happening:

To avoid offending them, US commanders are putting troops through intense Muslim sensitivity training. Among other things, they’ve been ordered to:

* Wear surgical gloves whenever handling a copy of the Koran.

* Never walk in front of a praying Muslim.

* Never show the bottom of boots while sitting or lying across from a Muslim, which in Islam is considered an insult.

* Never share photos of wives or daughters.

* Never smoke or eat in front of Muslims during the monthlong Ramadan fasting.

* Avoid winking, cursing or nose-blowing in the presence of Muslims — all viewed as insults in Islam.

* Avoid exiting the shower without a towel.

* Avoid offering and accepting things with the left hand, which in Islam is reserved for bodily hygiene and considered unclean.

Troops who violate the sensitivity rules face severe punishment.

Sperry does find a couple of sane military sources. Would that “President Romney” puts them in charge.

Military officials who have done tours in Afghanistan are outraged that brass would even suggest US troops are partly to blame for their own murders.

“I would like to see a public affairs officer explain to the press where showing the bottom of your shoe to a Muslim or shaking with your left hand was legitimate grounds for murder,” growled one US Army official.

They say their Muslim partners would still resent them even if they followed their Islamic protocols to the letter.

“The cultural affronts excuse is a bunch of garbage,” a senior US Army intelligence official told me. “The Afghans that know we’re doing all this PC cultural sensitivity crap are laughing their asses off at our stupidity.”

Explained the intelligence official: “They’re killing us because we’re ‘infidels’ occupying Islamic lands. It’s what the Koran and every imam over there is telling them, and no amount of cultural sensitivity is going to stop that or change the fact that we’re ‘infidels.’ ”

They’re killing us because we’re “infidels.” Period. The only solution is immediate separation and withdrawal to a new line of battle: the West.