2012 Benghazi Press Release Versus 2002 Yemen Bombing Betrayal

In November 2002, to boost Republican chances in the midterm elections, according to Yemen expert Gregory Johnsen, the Bush administration blew the  cover story on a bombing in Yemen,  badly embarrassing the Yemeni President and hurting the US position there.  (See Johnsen interview below)

Did you hear anyone complaining about this use of confidential information and souring US long term interests in the Middle East to affect the November 2002 election?  Me neither.  And I can't find anything on McCain's website listing his press releases for November 2002 and December 2002  that mentions this serious breach of national security.  But he has three press releases on Benghazi for November 2012.

From what I can tell so far, the Obama administration's announcements on Benghazi were a mix of lack of information during a crisis, an attempt to reassure the public, and a possible spin just before an election.  But I haven't seen any evidence that what was done jeopardized US policy, strategy, or lives. There is evidence that the administration had asked Congress for more money for embassy and consulate security, and been turned down.  We'll see.

But Senators John McCain's and Lyndsey Graham's attacks on Susan Rice look like the Republicans are going to continue their rabid attacks on the Obama administration over anything.  There's no 'we'll see' in their language.  There's lots of judgment and condemnation.  And what are they claiming?  That she should have said "I don't know" instead of reading the information she was given.  Did they tell Colin Powell that after he told the United Nations Iraq had weapons of mass destruction which led us to war?

Whether their bullying is simply a tactic to distract the administration into wasting time defending itself against trumped up charges, or it's Republicans still living in their own fact-free and/or fact-distorted ideological bubble, I can't say.  Maybe they're sure Obama had Rice do this because it's exactly what they would have done and can't believe he would have acted better than they.  But it's disturbing.  I suspect it's a mix of all those.  Create a crisis that doesn't exist to weaken the president.  If they had the country's interest in mind, shouldn't they be working on a bill to avoid sequestration and the automatic end of the Bush era tax cuts? 


Below is the account of how Wolfowitz claimed Bush administration credit for killing an al-Qaida leader in Yemen just before the US election and after Yemen's President had repeated to various international media outlets the agreed-on cover story that the terrorists had detonated the bomb themselves by accident.  The cover story was intended to protect the US and the Yemeni governments and keep the loyalty of most Yemeni people.

We can argue the ethics of the government lying to cover up the US participation in the raid for strategic benefit and to protect a local leader cooperating with the US.  But we often hide our strategy during war.   But what the Bush administration did at that time to help win seats in Congress is far more egregious than what I've heard Rice and Obama did in the days after the Benghazi attack.

Can we trust Johnsen's account?  There are other accounts of this. Time magazine mentions it in 2010, for example.  Read key parts of the Fresh Air transcript yourself: 

GROSS:  . . . You write about how during the Bush administration, the administration got the cooperation of then Yemeni President Saleh to cooperate with, you know, airstrikes against terrorists and presumed terrorists. And got the Yemeni government to cover-up the U.S. role in those strikes, so the U.S. wouldn't look like it was actually behind those airstrikes. And so there was like some airstrikes and the Yemeni government told the BBC and the Associated Press that the bomb was actually the bomb that militants were transporting and had accidentally exploded killing them all.
JOHNSEN: Mm-hmm.
GROSS: OK. So cover story in tact.
JOHNSEN: Correct.
GROSS: But then the Bush administration wants to take credit for that attack because it's right before the 2002 midterm election...
JOHNSEN: Mm-hmm.
GROSS: ...and people in the Bush administration think it'll be good for the party if the administration can take credit for this. You know, good work in the war on terror. So Paul Wolfowitz, who was then deputy secretary of Defense, goes on CNN and takes credit for those attacks, saying that the Hellfire missile strike was a very successful tactical operation from the U.S. So what kind of position did that put the Yemeni government in after the Yemeni government had, you know, went along with this cover story?
JOHNSEN: Right. I remember this very well. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Jordan at the time that this happened in November 2002. In fact, this is really the moment when I first had the idea for the book, almost a decade ago. And you're exactly right. There was a cover story in place. There was a U.S. drone strike that took out the head of al-Qaida in Yemen at the time. A Yemen spokesperson told the BBC, the Associated Press, all of the news and wire services that a bomb the militants had been transporting had exploded. And then what we have is a situation where the Yemenis really felt as though they were sold out for domestic U.S. political concerns. So this happens right before the midterm elections. The Bush administration wants to use this to give its congressional allies sort of a leg up to show that the Bush administration is really serious, this is an early victory in the war on terror. And essentially what happens is - I mean, there's a scene in the book in where this Yemeni political official is just screaming at the United States, and he's saying, you know, this is why people really hate to work with you. This is why it's so difficult to work with the United States, is because you take one victory and you attempt to exploit it. And you can't give the enemy; you can't tell the enemy what's going on. And this is really the moment where that initial period of goodwill between President Saleh and then President George Bush came to an end. It's after this that you see President Saleh being much more cagey about his interactions with members of al-Qaida and assisting the United States. So this is one of those old things that our mothers and our grandmothers used to tell us, sort of penny wise but pound foolish.

You can read the whole transcript from the whole Terry Gross' Fresh Air interview today.  Or you can listen to it.

Obama Wins Debate in First Five Minutes

The debate isn't even ten minutes old, but for me Obama won this debate when he said his choice for Treasury Secretary is Warren Buffet. He did say there were other qualified people, but that Buffet was one of his advisers and a great choice.

The economy is the biggest problem as we go into the election. I can't think of anyone who is more respected in this country in the area of business and investing than Warren Buffet.

OK, I know there's still about 75 minutes left in this debate.

Democrats Have Developed Anti-Swift Boat Attack Weapons System

Sarah Palin and others have been talking about Obama's supposed close friendship with Bill Ayers, who back in the 60's was a member of the Weather Underground involved in anti-war bombings.

She doesn't mention that Ayers was never convicted of anything and is now a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois - Chicago. The Washington Post Fact Checker looks at the whole story if you want more on this. As many have pointed out, Obama was eight years old when Ayers was in the Underground.

This sort of sniping from the Republicans - piecing together the flimsiest facts and blowing them up into a completely new and blatantly false, out of context, accusation - has a long history in US presidential campaigns, from Willie Horton, to Swift Boat, and to stuff like this.

What's new, is that the Democrats seem to have been ready for this and in response have released a very slick - music, shots, story - video about McCain's involvement in the Keating Five affair.




We'll see how the facts of this video play out, but the narrator was a banking regulator who was intimately involved in the trying to regulate Lincoln Savings. He's now a professor at the University of Kansas and the author of at least two books on this subject. Here are book reviews the University of Missouri Kansas City Law School Web Page on Black cites:

His book, The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One (University of Texas Press 2005) has been called “a classic” by George Akerlof, the Nobel Laureate (Economics, 2001).

More directly related is this:

Robert Kuttner, in his Business Week column, proclaimed:


Black's book is partly the definitive history of the savings-and-loan industry scandals of the early 1980s. More important, it is a general theory of how dishonest CEOs, crony directors, and corrupt middlemen can systematically defeat market discipline and conceal deliberate fraud for a long time -- enough to create massive damage.

Just compare the Palin speech and accusations to the Obama campaign produced video with Professor William Black. You can't help but believe that Black knows a lot more about Keating and McCain than Palin knows about Ayers and Obama. And that Black's motivation seems a lot less self serving than does Palin's.

The real story in my mind, though, is the Obama campaign seems to have developed an anti-swiftboat weapon. Do they have others ready and waiting in case the McCain campaign decides to keep fabricating more stories about Obama?

"The boy whose descendants came on the Mayflower..."

[This is when I turned on the tv]

So last night, Palin blasted Obama. Tonight it sounds like McCain is blasting the Bush administration. For example, he's not going to pass problems on to future generations. He just isn't mentioning any names.

OK, now McCain is going after Obama, in the most simplistic terms possible. "My plan will cut taxes, his plan will raise them."

Part of me would love McCain to win just to see how he's going to handle all the bills coming due from the Bush administration. And those bills are going to make it much harder for an Obama administration as well.

"Immigration is the civil rights issue of this century." And they applauded. Do they know what he said? He's slid into school reform. So what was he trying to say about immigration? School choice, mmmmm. Vouchers. That means the best students can get out of the public school system, leaving the public schools with the kids the private schools won't deal with.

Now he's attacking unions. Didn't Palin proudly say her husband was a union member?

We're going to stop sending money to countries that don't like us very much. Lots of cheering.

We'll produce more energy at home. We'll drill those off shore oil wells now. Lots of cheering.

Nuclear power, clean coal, wind, solar, electric automobiles. (These are things a candidate should have been pushing ten years ago.) Obama says we can do this without nuclear and coal. But Americans know better than that. (Obama's apparently not an American.)

I will do all I can to build the foundations for a stable and enduring peace. (I can support that.)

We need to change the way government does almost everything. (Hmmmm, Bush takes it on the chin here I guess.) We have to catch up to history and change the way we do business in Washington. The constant partisan rancor that stops us from solving the problems isn't the cause, it's a symptom. It's people coming to Washington to serve themselves that's the problem. (This is pretty good.)

I have the scars to prove it. Obama does not. (Is he going to pull open his shirt and show the scars?)

A bi-partisan pitch. (Good. I remember Bush saying he'd do that too. But I believe McCain more than I believed Bush.)

There was a lot of good stuff in the speech - mostly the stuff that called for change in Washington, for working together, going beyond partisanship. Hmmm, sounds familiar. Isn't that what Obama's been talking about all this long campaign?

Meanwhile Democracy Now is reporting that the police state outside the convention is arresting protesters. Last night they said there were broken windows. Given what we've learned about the Bush administration, I wouldn't be surprised if we learned that they also infiltrated the protests and instigated the violence so there would be a good reason to crack down on the protesters. (It's amazing how the Republicans can say how bad government is and come up with all sorts of conspiracy theories, but when Democrats complain they are delusional.)