White House Negligence

  Americans have a long tradition of healthy disagreement on just about every issue.  We don’t expect our politicians or our news media to be perfect.  There has always, however, been a general consensus that our key elected officials should be, at a minimum, hard working; that they should be reasonably honest with the public, and that they should put the national interest above their own careers. Similarly, while we acknowledge that journalists are human and have their own perspectives, we do expect them to separate their biases from their reporting.

   The stunning spectacle of the White House failure to take necessary precautions in Libya after clear warnings, its insincere and overtly false blaming of the incident on a little-seen video, and the worrisome failure of the press to honestly report this are cause for concern for all.

   Here are the facts:  three days before the assault on the Libyan Embassy, the U.S. Government was warned of a planned 9/11/12 attack, and did nothing about it. This resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.  The attacks were a specific response to the June drone attack on al-Qaeda leader Abu Yahya al-Libi and, perhaps, other key Al Qaeda leaders.   This has been corroborated by the President of Libya, Mohamed Yousef El-Magariaf, and a Libyan security official, Jamal Mabrouk.  On the day of the attack, there was absolutely no “spontaneous demonstration,” there was a well-coordinated military maneuver including rocket propelled grenades and machine guns by well prepared militants.  On the same day, a well-planned assault on our embassy in Cairo coordinated by Islamic extremists and attended by major Al Qaeda leaders took place.

   Despite these clear and explicit facts, the White House intentionally deceived the American public and blamed the tragedy on a little-seen video.  Even Al Jazeera, the Arab news service, noted that the YouTube trailer was barely known. The White House did this to intentionally hide its negligence in this particular instance as well as its numerous failures in the Muslim world. 

Among these failures are the irrational rendering of apologies for offenses our nation never committed, and his abandonment of our ally Israel in this quest. It includes his enthusiastic backing of the overthrow of a pro-American Egyptian government by Islamic fundamentalists and al Qaeda personnel who hate our country, advocate for war in the Middle East, and who threaten to kill Coptic Christians in their own nation. It includes the failure to prevent Iranian interests from gaining the upper hand in Iraq.  It also includes his failure to take any effective steps to slow Iran’s headlong rush to gain a nuclear weapon, and the President’s reluctance to take a firm stand against the ongoing human rights disaster in Syria.  Perhaps most devastating, the amateurish step of announcing our departure date from Afghanistan has given rise to a resurgence of the same forces that mounted the original 9/11/01 attacks. 

   The White House sought to distract the public from the fact that the President utterly failed to attend intelligence briefings for a full week before the attacks and ignored warnings about them. Indeed, even the day after the attacks, the President delivered a dispassionate statement about the Libyan assault, and totally ignored the Egyptian incident.  Immediately afterward, he skipped yet another intelligence briefing, and hopped aboard his plane to fly to Vegas for his latest campaign fundraiser.  The President’s nonchalance about the Middle Eastern crisis was further exemplified by his claim to be too busy to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, and instead appearing at (yet another) fundraiser with an ex-drug dealing rap star, and a radio show with a DJ nicknamed “The Pimp with a Limp.”

   As a result of the White House’s relentless publicizing of the little-known YouTube video in its attempt to deflect attention from its failures, Muslims throughout the world who knew nothing of the film before now became aware of it and, led by militants, used it as an excuse to attack western embassies throughout the world.

   The major media outlets, instead of reporting these facts, did everything possible to assist the Administration’s deception.  As it has now been proven,  a number of reporters even worked together to insure that any response from challenger Mitt Romney would be severely criticized no matter what the candidate said. 

    The criticism of the media’s biased and dishonest response doesn’t just come from Republicans or others who dislike President Obama.  In the aftermath of the 9/11/12 embassy attacks, I spoke with radio hosts across the United States and Canada; all were dismayed over the complete rejection of journalistic ethics by the major media outlets.

   As a nation, we can and should have healthy disagreements about what the best policy choices for the Middle East are.  But we all should agree that our President must at least show up for work, attend intelligence briefings, and that, when his policies fail, as they clearly have, he should be prepared to honestly disclose that to the public and to a media that has a bare minimum of journalistic ethics.