Extraction to where? The safe room is where you go to wait out an attack. Every diplomat’s house has one. In an embassy, it’s generally the communications vault. How do you anticipate a fire with choking smoke? It’s all too easy to armchair-quarterback a situation like this, which is what the right has been trying to do over the past couple of months. I don’t know what people envision overseas posts to be like, but I suspect that it’s far removed from reality.
The main security force for US (and other) embassies in almost all countries is the local police/army. You get Baghdad/Saigon style in-country military protection only in very exceptional cases, usually involving actual wars going on around you.
Unless I am mistaken, the point you make here has been made several times in this discussion. Each time it has been ignored or hand waved away by those hellbent on finding some wrong doing on the part of the Obama Administration. I suppose you can keep repeating it but I doubt it will do much good. The truth is of little interest to some folks when it comes to this topic.
That’s the ticket! We’ll staff all our embassies with highly-trained, heavily armed commandoes, who can go from cultural attache to Rambo in five seconds flat. Why, a bunch of fanatics armed wtih RPGs, automatic weapons and mortars? Child’s play.
Well, according to the Senate’s resident ace pilot and climate scientist:
Biggest coverup in history. So there.
It would be nice if one of the conservatives believing the misinformation would actually look at the facts and retract their silliness.
It would be nice.
It took me a while to grasp the pathology here, but I think I’ve got it down.
See, Obama is a wimp and an appeasing weakling, like all Dems and lefties. He is sucking up to radical Islam with all this shit about “tolerance” and “perversity”. OK, “diversity”, whatever, like it matters…
That’s why he went on the Apology Tour, bad mouthing America to our enemies all around the world. You never heard of the “Apology Tour”? Not from the liberal media you didn’t! Now, since blaming America for everything wrong in the world is crucial to his spineless groveling, the Obama Administration seized upon this historical documentary as an excuse to kiss some more turbaned butt.
Terrorists were overjoyed at this display of weakness, and struck at the crucial Benghazi consulate, only a few hundred miles away from the Embassy. And had free reign, since Obama had ordered the armored division that usually guards a consulate office to stand down!
And they had to cover that up, so they changed the word “terrorist” to “extremist”! And Ms Rice (the other Ms Rice, not the honest, straight-forward Condi…) parroted their line. And that’s why she is unsuitable for SecState. Better someone with solid credentials, someone who’s record for patriotism has never been questioned. Like John Kerry.
It worries me some that I understand this stuff. Not good mental hygiene.
- Republicans cut administration requests to beef up embassy security: For fiscal 2013, the GOP-controlled House proposed spending $1.934 billion for the State Department’s Worldwide Security Protection program — well below the $2.15 billion requested by the Obama administration. House Republicans cut the administration’s request for embassy security funding by $128 million in fiscal 2011 and $331 million in fiscal 2012. (Negotiations with the Democrat-controlled Senate restored about $88 million of the administration’s request.) Last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that Republicans’ proposed cuts to her department would be “detrimental to America’s national security” — a charge Republicans rejected.
Ryan, Issa and other House Republicans voted for an amendment in 2009 to cut $1.2 billion from State operations, including funds for 300 more diplomatic security positions. Under Ryan’s budget, non-defense discretionary spending, which includes State Department funding, would be slashed nearly 20 percent in 2014, which would translate to more than $400 million in additional cuts to embassy security.
-
The best diplomats are a lot like soldiers, except they don’t carry arms. It’s possible to turn every American embassy abroad into a bunker. But this might not advance the national interest.
-
I trust there is scope for an investigation into the 4 deaths that occurred in Benghazi, just as the $3 trillion mistake in Iraq and the 4,282 American soldiers lost deserves a detailed review.
-
But delusional made-up crapola about Obama not calling it a terrorist attack (false - he did actually) or Rice saying that the attack might have been related to the video (as it happens, the latest info says that it played a role) takes us far off the mark. America deserves a better opposition party.
“Free rein,” I think it is.
Oh, and, BTW, it’s “straitlaced,” not “straightlaced”; “strait and narrow path,” not “straight and narrow path”; “dire straits,” etc.
And “painstaking” is compounded of “pains taking,” not “pain staking,” so voice the s.
Doprz we iz.
This makes sense, and seems to have some support from the very old original King James text, but I think this is a battle you won’t win. The other version, “Straight and Narrow” is so very widely accepted as to have overwhelming support. You aren’t wrong, but people who say it the other way aren’t wrong either.
You forgot a “whose” which came out as “who’s”
Am I not paying attention or has Benghazi fallen down the fiscal cliff? It’s not getting much press now that everyone is worried that their favorite millionaire might have to pay an extra two percent on their income.
Looks like Susan Rice has more serious problems than Benghazi in the way of her confirmation. If it’s true that she’s been protecting Kagame and torpedoing efforts to condemn his actions, she should be axed for SecState.
the final word is this: Who cares? Fox news has conflated this relatively minor issue for their political expedience so far outside it’s context that the issue has lost all meaning.
Fox News is now throwing something else at the wall to see if it sticks.
Well, the words “strait” and “narrow” being near-synonyms, the phrase “strait and narrow” is a more Biblical way of saying something – in the Old Testament tradition of Hebrew poetry, which is just full of parallelism, i.e., saying the same thing twice in succession in slightly different ways – e.g., “I am neither a prophet nor a prophet’s son”; “for three transgressions and for four”; “I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt”; “riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.”*
*
Apparently this was taken as a messianic prophecy, and referenced in accounts of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem:
But the Gospel of Matthew, OTOH, apparently was written by a Greek who did not understand Hebrew poetic parallelism, and included two donkeys in the story.
Ain’t nuttin’ gonna stick to that wall unless they clean the benghazi off it first.
This latest stuff could likely stick, since she’s been criticized by international human rights groups and other UN ambassadors for her failure to name Kagame as the responsible party in the Rwanda/Congo mess. The fact that in the past she worked for a company that supported Kagame isn’t helping things.
Susan Rice has withdrawn her name from consideration as of today.