New Disclosures on Benghazi

[RandFan]

Yeah, I said that you lied when you said the emails were doctored, because they had not been released yet.

What the hell does that even mean. Why does that give the GOP the right to doctor the emails. And what do you mean I "lied"? Lied about what? Were they altered or not? Yes or no? Is Major Garett lyng?

You ever addressed the fact that the Administration admitted they acted like idiots?

Did you ever learn what a loaded question is? If not then you should know it's fallacy.

Oh, and again, your citations are missing. No surprise there.

 

[RandFan]

So? The Republicans had seen the emails long before the White House released them, and the Republicans lied to the press about what those emails said.

I wonder how many Republicans would look at the evidence and deny it? I think that is a problem particularly with many in the GOP right now. Far more than the Dems. You can show them evidence and they will flat out deny it. Truther territory. Sorry but that's exactly what this is. It's the willful denial of facts to preserve a belief.

It's a fact that the Republicans had seen the emails and they doctored them in a light not favorable to the administration.

 

[A'isha]

What the hell does that even mean. Why does that give the GOP the right to doctor the emails. And what do you mean I "lied"? Lied about what? Were they altered or not? Yes or no? Is Major Garett lyng?

He's splitting hairs over the fact that the Republicans didn't release scanned images of printed-out emails, therefore the fact they distributed what they claimed were quoted excerpts and descriptions of the content of the actual emails that were false doesn't count as "doctoring".

 

[RandFan]

He's splitting hairs over the fact that the Republicans didn't release scanned images of printed-out emails, therefore the fact they distributed what they claimed were quoted excerpts and descriptions of the content of the actual emails that were false doesn't count as "doctoring".

Thanks ANTPogo, understood, it's a fact that the emails were edited in a manner not favorable to the Administration.

 

[elbe]

Thanks ANTPogo, understood, it's a fact that the emails were edited in a manner not favorable to the Administration.

I don't think it was a wholly inaccurate paraphrase, but it certainly gives a different message to people who are already looking for any and all wrongdoings.

 

[RandFan]

ABC’s Botched Reporting on White House Benghazi Emails Becomes Deepening Problem For the Network

In a bizarre twist this week, it was discovered that ABC’s recently reported emails in regards to the Benghazi controversy were actually doctored by Republican aides.
In light of these new developments, the network has come under scrutiny for claiming it had “obtained” emails that, according to CBS News, were actually notes taken by GOP aides who were being briefed on the emails. Making matters worse for ABC, the characterization of the White House emails by the GOP aides were inaccurate.

 

[marplots]

ABC’s Botched Reporting on White House Benghazi Emails Becomes Deepening Problem For the Network

Accuracy in news reporting? Come on. That's so 20th century. We've moved past that.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

Yeah, I said that you lied when you said the emails were doctored, because they had not been released yet.

Again, I call shenanigans. If you think it's wrong for us to now refer to the material allegedly doctored by Republicans and released to the news as "the emails" then it was wrong of you to keep pointing to "the emails" as evidence of whatever scandal or CT you're alleging. The point is, the evidence (whatever you want to call it) that you've been relying on seems to have been manufactured.

 

[The Big Dog]

I've been focusing on the failure to send the FEST to Benghazi. While there has been lots of after the fact rationalizations, the bottom line is that

1. The team was ready to go.
2. The administration admits they were idiots for not sending them.

 

[RandFan]

I've been focusing on the failure to send the FEST to Benghazi. While there has been lots of after the fact rationalizations, the bottom line is that

1. The team was ready to go.
2. The administration admits they were idiots for not sending them.

[citations missing] A.) begging the question. B.) The experts do not agree.

Robert Gates "Some critics have a cartoonish view of our military capability".

 

[RandFan]

All Three GOP-Manufactured Scandals Falling Apart

The crucial ingredient for a scandal is the prospect of high-level White House involvement and wide political repercussions. Government wrongdoing is boring. Scandals can bring down presidents, decide elections and revive down-and-out political parties. Scandals can dominate American politics for months at a time.

On Tuesday, it looked like we had three possible political scandals brewing. Two days later, with much more evidence available, it doesn’t look like any of them will pan out. There’ll be more hearings, and more bad press for the Obama administration, and more demands for documents. But — and this is a key qualification — absent more revelations, the scandals that could reach high don’t seem to include any real wrongdoing, whereas the ones that include real wrongdoing don’t reach high enough. Let’s go through them.

 

[RandFan]

alizations, the bottom line is that

1. The team was ready to go.
2. The administration admits they were idiots for not sending them.

[citations missing] A.) begging the question. B.) The experts do not agree.

Robert Gates "Some critics have a cartoonish view of our military capability".

Instead of silly rhetoric (the bottom line is that", why won't you provide evidence of your claim? I was involved with the CT forum for a few years. This is so typical to post claims without citations. It is typical of you 16.5 to fail to post citations and when people are insistent you finally play the martyr and accuse everyone of attacking you for doing what you should have done in the beginning.

Posting citations is your responsibility and you shouldn't have to be reminded of it in nearly every post. So, how 'bout doing us a solid? Instead of "lolz" and all of the empty rhetoric. Perhaps you could post evidence, sources, citations.

Not only would it be the honest and responsible thing to do but it would be courteous and demonstrate that you are not simply trolling.

It would be appreciated.

 

[RandFan]

You ever addressed the fact that the Administration admitted they acted like idiots?

You ever address the fact that A.) You are begging the question. B.) As you so typically do you fail to source your claim.

Please have the decency to stop doing that. Most here know that this is a skeptics forum. Most are willing to take responsibility for their posts and meet their burden of proof. In the faint hope that you don't get it, in a skeptics forum the onus is on the person making the claim to support the claim. Now, all of us forget to do so from time to time. But you do most of the time. Worse yet, when it's pointed out to you that your citations are missing you ignore that and simply repost the claim without providing sources.

This demonstrates a willful dishonesty.

 

[The Big Dog]

I've been focusing on the failure to send the FEST to Benghazi. While there has been lots of after the fact rationalizations, the bottom line is that

1. The team was ready to go.
2. The administration admits they were idiots for not sending them.

The emergency response: "I wish we'd sent FEST"

The Foreign Emergency Support Team known as "FEST" is described as "the US Government's only interagency, on-call, short-notice team poised to respond to terrorist incidents worldwide." It even boasts hostage-negotiating expertise. With U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens reported missing shortly after the Benghazi attacks began, Washington officials were operating under a possible hostage scenario at the outset. Yet deployment of the counterterrorism experts on the FEST was ruled out from the start. That decision became a source of great internal dissent and the cause of puzzlement to some outsiders.

Thursday, an administration official who was part of the Benghazi response told CBS News: "I wish we'd sent it."

...

Here is the CITE to the link I posted in this thread (despite misrepresentation to the contrary)

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162...e-made-mistakes-but-without-malice/?tag=socsh

....

FEST's own mission statement describes a seasoned team of counterterrorism professionals who can respond "quickly and effectively to terrorist attacks... providing the fastest assistance possible" including "hostage negotiating expertise" and "time-sensitive information and intelligence." In fact, FEST leader Mark Thompson says Benghazi was precisely the sort of crisis to which his team is trained to respond.

 

[RandFan]

The emergency response: "I wish we'd sent FEST"

The Foreign Emergency Support Team known as "FEST" is described as "the US Government's only interagency, on-call, short-notice team poised to respond to terrorist incidents worldwide." It even boasts hostage-negotiating expertise. With U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens reported missing shortly after the Benghazi attacks began, Washington officials were operating under a possible hostage scenario at the outset. Yet deployment of the counterterrorism experts on the FEST was ruled out from the start. That decision became a source of great internal dissent and the cause of puzzlement to some outsiders.

Thursday, an administration official who was part of the Benghazi response told CBS News: "I wish we'd sent it."

...

Here is the CITE to the link I posted in this thread (despite misrepresentation to the contrary)

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162...e-made-mistakes-but-without-malice/?tag=socsh

....

FEST's own mission statement describes a seasoned team of counterterrorism professionals who can respond "quickly and effectively to terrorist attacks... providing the fastest assistance possible" including "hostage negotiating expertise" and "time-sensitive information and intelligence." In fact, FEST leader Mark Thompson says Benghazi was precisely the sort of crisis to which his team is trained to respond.

A.) I don't see the word "idiot" in anything you posted. B.)

"Frankly, had I been in the job at the time, I think my decisions would have been just as theirs were," said Gates, now the chancellor of the College of William and Mary.

"We don't have a ready force standing by in the Middle East, and so getting somebody there in a timely way would have been very difficult, if not impossible." he explained.

Suggestions that we could have flown a fighter jet over the attackers to "scare them with the noise or something," Gates said, ignored the "number of surface to air missiles that have disappeared from [former Libyan leader] Qaddafi's arsenals."

"I would not have approved sending an aircraft, a single aircraft, over Benghazi under those circumstances," he said.

Another suggestion posed by some critics of the administration, to, as Gates said, "send some small number of special forces or other troops in without knowing what the environment is, without knowing what the threat is, without having any intelligence in terms of what is actually going on on the ground, would have been very dangerous."
"It's sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces," he said. "The one thing that our forces are noted for is planning and preparation before we send people in harm's way, and there just wasn't time to do that."

 

[The Big Dog]

A.) I don't see the word "idiot" in anything you posted. B.)

That because you didn't read the link that you repeatedly accused me of not posting.

"We're portrayed by Republicans as either being lying or idiots," said one Obama administration official who was part of the Benghazi response. "It's actually closer to us being idiots."

FEST is an multiple agency team that is not under DoD but rather NSC, so Gates's comments aren't worth the electrons they are wasting.

 

[A'isha]

That because you didn't read the link that you repeatedly accused me of not posting.

That's because this CBS link doesn't say what you claim it says, especially the part where you're attributing their statements to "the administration" as a whole - the article cites a number of different officials and specifically notes "they do not all agree on the list of mistakes".

Here, for example, is what else the article says about FEST:

Whoever made the decision, it came amid sharp disagreement over the FEST's true capabilities. Kennedy and others at the State Department view the team as one that primarily restores communications at besieged embassies.

[...]

While it was the State Department that's said to have taken FEST off the table, the team is directed by the White House National Security Council. Those officials expressed the same limited view of FEST's capabilities when CBS News asked on Nov. 1, 2012, why FEST hadn't deployed. The officials argued that FEST teams were "used in the past to re-establish infrastructure, communications, etc. after a devastating attack...That wasn't the need here."

[...]

It's unclear what assistance FEST might have provided on site in the hours and days after the Benghazi attacks. In the end, Obama administration officials argue that its quick deployment would not have saved lives because, while the U.S.-based team might have made it to Tripoli, Libya, before the attacks ended, they most certainly wouldn't have made it to Benghazi in time.

In other words, yet again things are not nearly as clear-cut as you think they are.

 

[RandFan]

That because you didn't read the link that you repeatedly accused me of not posting.

That's because this CBS link doesn't say what you claim it says, especially the part where you're attributing their statements to "the administration" as a whole - the article cites a number of different officials and specifically notes "they do not all agree on the list of mistakes".

Here, for example, is what else the article says about FEST:

Whoever made the decision, it came amid sharp disagreement over the FEST's true capabilities. Kennedy and others at the State Department view the team as one that primarily restores communications at besieged embassies.

[...]

While it was the State Department that's said to have taken FEST off the table, the team is directed by the White House National Security Council. Those officials expressed the same limited view of FEST's capabilities when CBS News asked on Nov. 1, 2012, why FEST hadn't deployed. The officials argued that FEST teams were "used in the past to re-establish infrastructure, communications, etc. after a devastating attack...That wasn't the need here."

[...]

It's unclear what assistance FEST might have provided on site in the hours and days after the Benghazi attacks. In the end, Obama administration officials argue that its quick deployment would not have saved lives because, while the U.S.-based team might have made it to Tripoli, Libya, before the attacks ended, they most certainly wouldn't have made it to Benghazi in time.

In other words, yet again things are not nearly as clear-cut as you think they are.

16.5 Could we stick with reality?

 

[The Big Dog]

That's because this CBS link doesn't say what you claim it says, especially the part where you're attributing their statements to "the administration" as a whole - the article cites a number of different officials and specifically notes "they do not all agree on the list of mistakes".

Here, for example, is what else the article says about FEST:

In other words, yet again things are not nearly as clear-cut as you think they are.

My view is there is no way those insiders are not talking to CBS without the express permission of Senior Administration officials.

I am a little disturbed that Kennedy made the call to stand down FEST, it does not seem to have been his call.

 

[RandFan]

It's a cartoonish view.

"Frankly, had I been in the job at the time, I think my decisions would have been just as theirs were," said Gates, now the chancellor of the College of William and Mary.

"We don't have a ready force standing by in the Middle East, and so getting somebody there in a timely way would have been very difficult, if not impossible." he explained.

Suggestions that we could have flown a fighter jet over the attackers to "scare them with the noise or something," Gates said, ignored the "number of surface to air missiles that have disappeared from [former Libyan leader] Qaddafi's arsenals."

"I would not have approved sending an aircraft, a single aircraft, over Benghazi under those circumstances," he said.

Another suggestion posed by some critics of the administration, to, as Gates said, "send some small number of special forces or other troops in without knowing what the environment is, without knowing what the threat is, without having any intelligence in terms of what is actually going on on the ground, would have been very dangerous."

"It's sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces," he said. "The one thing that our forces are noted for is planning and preparation before we send people in harm's way, and there just wasn't time to do that."