Okay. You didn’t very clearly express that.
No, you just failed to comprehend. I didn’t say, “There are two primary reasons a ‘stand down’ order was given.” I said, “(T)here are two primary reasons given for a ‘stand down’ order”
Sure it does. The chain of command is not uniform, nor necessarily unified. [Assuming the existence of a stand-down order,] Ockham tells me that guy lower in the chain of command says, “There’s an attack! Let’s roll now!” without getting necessarily authorizations; as word goes up the ladder, guy higher in the chain of command says “Not so fast. Have you considered practicality/timeliness/UCMJ/CIA mission/diplomatic relations/whathaveyou? Stand down until the people that need to weigh in, do so.”
Thank you Ravenman, “Indiscriminate” was a poorly used word in this context.
You can’t say it’s a general example when you make specific references. Pick one.
Just to inject facts, that “guy higher in the chain of command” telling people to “stand down” until a policy decision is made: that didn’t actually happen. The guys higher up told the Special Forces in Tripoli that they were needed in Tripoli. “Stand down” means stop what you are doing – as opposed to being told to do something else, which is actually what happened.
For what it’s worth, I understood perfectly clearly that Smitty wasn’t speaking for his own opinion, he was speaking for others who he probably didn’t agree with.
Okay. Not to hijack, but I read that post as (meaningless constructed parallel follows):
"People are banned from SDMB for many reasons:
[ul]
[li]Smitty was banned for making nasty personal insinuations.[/li][li]Ravenman was banned for repeatedly posting spam."[/li][/ul]
…he seemed to go from a general declamation to oddly specific “explanations” that assumed validity of their premises. Not similarly general reasons for any stand-down order.
Maybe it’s just me.
I still don’t understand why anyone would think that Obama et al would lie about the motive, as if it sounds so much better to say “We didn’t have security sufficient to repel a rag-tag group of spontaneous protestors,” instead of saying “We didn’t have security sufficient to repel a planned attack from heavily armed al-Qaeda troops.”
The idea, as I understand it, is that a crowd wins by its mass. This crowd was supposedly fueled by righteous indignation over the film and thus swelled well beyond a ragtag group to a mighty raging force.
In any event, there are multiple factual rebuttals to these theories, but they are not without a claimed motive.
We live in a world where “the officer wasn’t trying to shoot the black guy, he was trying to shoot the severely autistic guy with a toy truck” was offered as a “better” excuse. Anything’s possible when it comes to people hoping to make palatable excuses.
September 11th, 2012 … maybe some election year politics colored this event? Seems outlandish but it’s something we need to keep in the back of our minds.
Tangential Question: Do you believe that the UCMJ codifies “the Law of Armed Conflict”?
The UCMJ provides for punishment of violations of the “law of war,” but you can search all the articles and you won’t find details on proportionality and discrimination. To say it another way, in a general sense the UCMJ provides for punishment of vague behavior - war crimes - but you have to look elsewhere to define what acts of war are prohibited.
US criminal statutes are actually more specific it regard to the punishment of war crimes.
It’s certainly not impossible.
But as with any claim, the proponent of the claim has the burden of providing the proof. Here, the Clinton accusers have provided no proof; the factual allegations they have offered have been generally shown false and they are left with the ever-vague, “Where there’s smoke there’s fire,” insinuation.
The facts are that security was not handled correctly, but not for any insidious reason, and Rice’s claim that there was an “Innocence of Muslims” protest was not true, but she reasonably believed it to be true when she said it, because that’s what the CIA was telling her at the time.
In other words: people made some mistakes, not out of gross negligence or hating America or election year concerns, but because people sometimes make mistakes. End.
I think this view is shared by most commentators here.
I entered the thread not to add my voice to that conclusion – it hardly needs more support – but to rebut the claim that the Clinton accusers offered no motive. They did. It was simply a theory that could not sustain when the facts were adduced.
Ok, thank you for the reply.
I served a long time ago, and I was pretty sure the UCMJ doesn’t attempt to define “Rules of Engagement” or “Laws of War”.