US State Department: 'So we lied'
The State Department has now confirmed that it
deleted a question from James Rosen of Fox News from a December 2013 briefing by Jen Psaki. I first reported the story
three weeks ago.
This is from the second link. It's a follow-up to the story about Ben Rhodes orchestrating a
campaign of lies to push the Iran nuclear deal forward.
After Samuels’s story kicked up a Washington mediastorm, Rosen asked a
colleague to check for the video of Psaki answering his question about
diplomatic mendacity. The colleague came back with an eerie response:
The exchange was gone from the videotape, replaced by a flash of white
light. The gap was evident not only on the State Department website, but
also on its YouTube page. State Department officials, in a series of
briefings, struggled to explain the matter. Trudeau talked about a
glitch but also noted that there was no evidence that this glitch had
selectively attacked any other embarrassing moments from the press
briefings. Kirby later expressed deep concern about the subject.
Today, Kirby brought the goods:
A
portion of the State Department’s December 2nd, 2013 press briefing was
missing from the video that we posted on our YouTube account and on our
website. That missing portion covered a series of questions about U.S
negotiations with Iran. When alerted to this, I immediately directed the
video to be restored in its entirety with a full and complete copy that
exists and had existed since the day of the briefing on the Defense
Video and Imagery Distribution system website otherwise known as DIVIDS.
I also verified that the full transcript of the briefing which we also
post on our website was intact and had been so since the date of the
briefing. I asked the office of the legal advisor to look at this
including a look at any rules that we had in place. In so doing, they
learned that a specific request was made to excise that portion of the
briefing. We do not know who made the request to edit the video or why
it was made. To my surprise, the Bureau of Public Affairs did not have
in place any rules governing this type of action therefore we are taking
immediate steps to craft appropriate protocols on this issue as we
believe that deliberately removing a portion of the video was not and is
not in keeping with the State Department’s commitment to transparency
and public accountability. Specifically, we are going to make clear that
all video and transcripts from daily press briefings will be
immediately and permanently archived in their entirety. In the unlikely
event, that narrow compelling circumstances require edits to be made
such as the inadvertent release of privacy protected information, they
will only be made with the expressed permission of the Assistant
Secretary of Public Affairs and with an appropriate level of annotation
and disclosure. I have communicated this new policy to my staff and it
takes effect immediately.
Those are worthy commitments, for the future.
As
for the past, more must be known — though it probably won’t. Followup
questions to Kirby drilled in on the whodunnit aspect of the video
disappearance. Would the department do more investigating to determine
precisely how this happened? No, said Kirby, who noted that the
individual who received the phone request for video elimination doesn’t
remember “anything other than that the caller was passing on the request
from somewhere else in the bureau.” Furthermore, said Kirby, “There
were no rules in place to govern this sort of action, so while I believe
it was an inappropriate step to take, I see little foundation for
pressing forward with a formal investigation.” Spoken like a true
bureaucrat.
In other words, the cow has escaped anyway so why bother checking who was responsible for leaving the barn door open. I'm old enough to recall a President named Nixon who was impeached for similar offenses. He was also forced to resign when the enormity of what he had done came to light as a result of a Supreme Court order that what remained of his tapes be disclosed.
Obama is now in his 8th (and thankfully final) year in office. He will never be impeached. He would never resign even if the enormity of what he did were to come out while he is still in office. He has no shame.
And as a result he has brought shame to America. May he rot in hell.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Ben Rhodes, Iran Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran sanctions regime, Iranian nuclear threat, Jen Psaki, lies, US State Department
How the Obama administration paid J Street to push the Iranian nuclear sellout
The Obama administration through its National Security Council passed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Ploughshares Fund, an NGO that favors allowing Iran to have nuclear weapons. And
the Ploughshares Fund paid J Street over $500,000 to push its agenda last summer. That's what came out over this past weekend.
A group the White House recently identified as a key surrogate in
selling the Iran nuclear deal gave liberal Jewish lobbying organization J
street $576,500 to advocate for the deal.
...
J-Street, a liberal Jewish political action
group, undertook a comprehensive campaign last year to support the
nuclear deal, amid lobbying by Jerusalem and other pro-Israel groups to
convince Congress to block the landmark pact.
Ahead of a crucial congressional vote to either ratify or block the deal, J Street in July 2015 took out a full page advertisement in The New York Times supporting urging Congress to refrain from “sabotaging” the Iranian nuclear agreement.
J Street also created TV ads and built a wesbite to stump for the accord.
The group said called the New York Times ad
was “the latest phase of [our] multimillion dollar campaign to ensure
that the US Congress does not sabotage the nuclear deal.”
The Ploughshares Fund’s mission is to “build a
safe, secure world by developing and investing in initiatives to reduce
and ultimately eliminate the world’s nuclear stockpiles,” one that
dovetails with President Barack Obama’s arms control efforts. But its
behind-the-scenes role advocating for the Iran agreement got more
attention this month after a candid profile of Ben Rhodes, one of the
president’s top foreign policy aides.
Waiting to hear regrets from Senate Democrats over their votes in favor of letting Iran become a nuclear power.
Here are some more Ploughshares donees.
The Arms Control Association got $282,500; the
Brookings Institution, $225,000; and the Atlantic Council, $182,500.
They received money for Iran-related analysis, briefings and media
outreach, and non-Iran nuclear work.
Other groups, less directly defined by their independent nuclear expertise, also secured grants.
More than $281,000 went to the National Iranian American Council.
Princeton University got $70,000 to support
former Iranian ambassador and nuclear spokesman Seyed Hossein
Mousavian’s “analysis, publications and policymaker engagement on the
range of elements involved with the negotiated settlement of Iran’s
nuclear program.”
The Ploughshares grant to NPR supported
“national security reporting that emphasizes the themes of US nuclear
weapons policy and budgets, Iran’s nuclear program, international
nuclear security topics and US policy toward nuclear security,”
according to Ploughshares’ 2015 annual report, recently published
online.
Oh yeah, and NPR got $100,000 too. Because government funding isn't enough.
There's much more -
read the whole thing.
The self-hating Jews at Saudi and Iranian funded J Street are
quite proud of their role in selling out Israel.
J Street didn’t deny receiving the funds and
said it “acted in order to advance the nuclear deal with Iran out of
faith that it was an important deal, that it had a great contribution
also to the security of Israel.”
“(This) faith is shared by us as well as many
sources, both in the American government and in the Israeli security
establishment, as well as among the Jewish public in the US, most of
whom supported the nuclear deal,” the group said in a press release on
Sunday.
“The nuclear deal with Iran has blocked Iran’s
pathways to a nuclear weapon for the coming years,”said J Street,
adding “we are proud of the activities of the organization to advance
the nuclear deal between the world powers and Iran, a deal that we
believe is of the utmost importance for the security of the state of
Israel.”
Among those J Street cites as Israeli supporters of the deal is
pathological liar Ami Ayalon. The endorsements of the deal have already been proven false.
One day, this will all be part of Obama's legacy - along with his infesting American politics with sleaze.
#ThanksObama. You mamzer.
Labels: Ami Ayalon, Barack Hussein Obama, Ben Rhodes, Ephraim HaLevy, Iran Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran sanctions regime, Iranian nuclear threat, J Street, Ploughshares Fund, pro-Israel pro-peace
Rosemary Woods comes to the State Department, doctors press briefing on Iran
How many of you are old enough to remember Rosemary Woods, the Nixon secretary who '
accidentally' erased a critical 18 minutes from the tape of a conversation that took place in the President's office? Woods, who passed away in 2005, has apparently come back to life to work in the State Department.
Let's go to the videotape.
The Washington Examiner provides a
transcript of what the video originally said.
QUESTION: Please, Jen, can we stay on Iran, please?
MS. PSAKI: Sure. Let's stay on Iran and then we can go to China.
QUESTION: On the 6th of February in this room, I had a very brief exchange with your predecessor, Victoria Nuland —
MS. PSAKI: Mm-hmm.
QUESTION: — about Iran. And with your indulgence, I will read it
in its entirety for the purpose of the record and so you can respond to
it.
"Rosen: There have been reports that intermittently, and outside
of the formal P5+1 mechanisms, the Obama Administration, or members of
it, have conducted direct secret bilateral talks with Iran. Is that true
or false?"
"Nuland: We have made clear, as the Vice President did at
Munich, that in the context of the larger P5+1 framework, we would be
prepared to talk to Iran bilaterally. But with regard to the kind of
thing that you're talking about on a government-to-government level,
no."
That's the entirety of the exchange.
As we now know, senior state department officials had, in fact,
been conducting direct, secret bilateral talks with senior officials of
the Iranian Government in Oman, perhaps dating back to 2011 by that
point.
So the question today is a simple one: When the briefer was
asked about those talks and flatly denied them from the podium, that was
untrue, correct?
MS. PSAKI: I mean, James, I – that – you're talking about a
February briefing, so 10 months ago. I don't think we've outlined or
confirmed contacts or specifics beyond a March meeting. I'm not going to
confirm others beyond that at this point. So I don't know that I have
any more for you.
QUESTION: Do you stand by the accuracy of what Ms. Nuland told
me, that there had been no government-to-government contacts, no secret
direct bilateral talks with Iran as of the date of that briefing,
February 6th? Do you stand by the accuracy of that?
MS. PSAKI: James, I have no new information for you today on the
timing of when there were any discussions with any Iranian officials.
QUESTION: Let me try it one last way, Jen —
MS. PSAKI: Okay.
QUESTION: — and I appreciate your indulgence.
MS. PSAKI: Sure.
QUESTION: Is it the policy of the State Department, where the
preservation or the secrecy of secret negotiations is concerned, to lie
in order to achieve that goal?
MS. PSAKI: James, I think there are times where diplomacy needs
privacy in order to progress. This is a good example of that. Obviously,
we have made clear and laid out a number of details in recent weeks
about discussions and about a bilateral channel that fed into the P5+1
negotiations, and we've answered questions on it, we've confirmed
details. We're happy to continue to do that, but clearly, this was an
important component leading up to the agreement that was reached a week
ago.
QUESTION: Since you, standing at that podium last week, did
confirm that there were such talks, at least as far back as March of
this year, I don't see what would prohibit you from addressing directly
this question: Were there secret direct bilateral talks between the
United States and Iranian officials in 2011?
MS. PSAKI: I don't have anything more for you today. We've long
had ways to speak with the Iranians through a range of channels, some of
which you talked – you mentioned, but I don't have any other specifics
for you today.
QUESTION: One more on Iran?
QUESTION: The Los Angeles Times and Politico have reported that
those talks were held as far back as 2011. Were those reports
inaccurate?
MS. PSAKI: I'm not sure which reports you're talking about. Are
you talking about visits that the Secretary and others made to Oman, or
are you talking about other reports?
QUESTION: I'm talking about U.S. officials meeting directly and
secretly with Iranian officials in Oman as far back as 2011. The Los
Angeles Times and Politico have reported those meetings. Were those
reports inaccurate?
MS. PSAKI: I have nothing more for you on it, James, today.
You mean the Obama-Kerry State Department lied? Well, I'll be darned....
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Ben Rhodes, Iran sanctions regime, Iranian nuclear threat, Jen Psaki, lies, Richard Nixon, uranium enrichment, US State Department
Why Obama and Rhodes abandoned Syria
I don't know whether my friends at @Free_Media_Hub and @Paradoxy13 noticed, but the @rhodes44 story is a devastating indictment of
Obama administration policy in Syria.
There is nothing at all remarkable about 'John Q. Citizen' looking back
on invasion, occupation, and insurgency in Iraq and saying, in effect,
"Don't touch it with a ten-foot pole; let the natives have at it and
sort it out on their own." It is something else, however, for an
official channeling the president of the United States to say, "I
profoundly do not believe that the United States could make things
better in Syria by being there. And we have an evidentiary record of
what happens when we're there—nearly a decade in Iraq." This is the
official alibi for not having protected, over the course of five years,
one single Syrian civilian from the murderous assaults of Bashar
al-Assad.
Yet the official alibi lacks one critical ingredient:
the truth. A "decade in Iraq" did not dissuade the Obama administration
from protecting Syrian Kurds from a massacre by the Islamic State (ISIS,
ISIL, Daesh) in Kobani. Disaster in Iraq did not deter American
military forces from protecting Yazidis in Iraq itself. The Iraqi fiasco
has not stopped the Obama administration from establishing an anti-ISIS
American military presence in both Iraq and Syria: yes, boots on the
ground. No: the Rhodes-Obama fear and dismissal of making things better
in Syria "by being there" applies only to those parts of Syria
experiencing mass murder and massive displacement at the hands of Bashar
al-Assad. Why? Iran.
For an American president and his
principal subordinates to avert their gazes from mass homicide and from
doing anything at all to mitigate or complicate it is far from
unprecedented. In this day and age, however, knowing what we know about
twentieth century failures to protect civilians thanks to the research
and writings of Samantha Power and others, it is stunningly remarkable
and regrettable. For a man of Barack Obama's evident humanity and
values, surely there has been something of transcendent importance that
has stayed his hand from protecting Syrian civilians; something of
paramount national security significance that has stopped him from
acting in support of American friends and allies trying desperately to
deal with the hemorrhage of humanity from Syria. Thanks to Ben Rhodes
and his chronicler we know now what it has been: pursuit of a nuclear
agreement with Assad's premier long-term enabler and partner in mass
murder: Iran.
The following passage from the Samuels piece clarifies why it was
important for President Obama to protect no one in Syria, to risk his
own reputation in the red-line climb down, and even to assure Iran's
Supreme Leader in writing that the Ayatollah's murderous Syrian
subordinate would not be touched by (anti-ISIS) American military
intervention in Syria:
"By eliminating the fuss about Iran's nuclear program, the
administration hoped to eliminate a source of structural tension between
the two countries, which would create the space for America to
disentangle itself from its established system of alliances with
countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, and Turkey. With one bold
move, the administration would effectively begin the process of
large-scale disentanglement from the Middle East."
To complicate the ability of Iran's man in Syria to commit war
crimes and crimes against humanity would have placed at risk nuclear
negotiations aimed ultimately at dissolving American relationships of
trust and confidence with key regional powers. Yes, the Blob—the foreign
policy establishment—would have had a problem with this. Hence an
information operation headed by Rhodes aimed at avoiding head-on debates
with the Blob or, for that matter, the representatives of the American
people in Congress.
Were it not for their enormous suffering, millions of Syrian civilians
might find humor in the reason for their abandonment: a desire by the
American president to disentangle the United States from long-term
cooperative regional relationships. Were it not for the tens of
thousands of rockets and missiles pointed at them by Iran's Lebanese
militia, Israelis might enjoy the irony of it all. The only players in
this drama who need neither humor nor irony to appreciate the importance
and value of what is being undertaken are Iran and Russia.
One cannot help but hope that this is not what 60% of the American people have in mind when they demand an "
America First" foreign policy.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Bashar al-Assad, Ben Rhodes, Iran sanctions regime, Iranian nuclear threat, Syrian uprising
Flashback: When the White House accused AP of 'trutherism' on Iran
In light of Ben Rhodes' revelation over the weekend that he led a White House effort to lie about the Iranian nuclear deal, it is useful to look back at last summer, when the White House attacked the Associated Press and its diplomatic reporter, @APDiplowriter (Matt Lee) for
asking too many questions about the deal, particularly about the side agreement that allows the Iranians to 'self-inspect' their weapons production facility at Parchin.
What this story is really about is the
politicization of expertise, and how far things can go when one group of
experts (arms controllers) decides to fight by impugning the expertise
of another group (in this case, reporters) for the sake of public
theater. This is almost entirely a phenomenon of new media and the speed
of the news cycle in the modern era.
The Iran Deal supporters knew
there was no point in trying to rebut the substance of the claim: The
story was out, people had already read it, and politicians had already
reacted. A careful analysis of whether the document said what the AP
headline said it did would take too long, and most people wouldn’t
bother with it.
Instead, the story had to be
discredited and flushed, as soon as possible. There wasn’t time to
explain that “monitor” might mean different things to a lay reader and
to an expert. Better simply to throw an array of charges at the
Associated Press and its reporters and see what sticks.
In
the end, the most disturbing question of all is to ask what would have
happened if an institution of less prominence and reputation had
published this report. The Iran Deal truthers didn’t count on the AP
firing back, and despite Fisher’s testy accusation that reporter Matt
Lee was having a “meltdown,” the entire company stood behind the story.
The backlash-to-the-backlash has begun, and while the IAEA has said the
story is a “misrepresentation,” they haven’t said it’s false, either.
Neither has the White House. So far, the AP and its story are still
here.
The warning shot to other
journalists is clear, however. Reporters with one of the most reputable
news organizations in the world had to fight off odious charges for
doing their job. This is apparently the price to be paid for reporting
anything that challenges support for a deal that has reached, among its
adherents, the status of a dogma that tolerates no heresy.
After Friday's news, it's difficult to rebut the argument that the Iran deal has the status of a dogma that tolerates no heresy in the eyes of its supporters. But that won't stop them from trying. After all, Big Brother knows best what's good for us. And now that the fight is over, we can all read the bill.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Ben Rhodes, Iran sanctions regime, Iranian nuclear threat, Leon Panetta, lies, United States Senate
Congress didn't 'buy' @rhodes44 lies either - they looked to him for cover
Shavua tov, a good week to everyone.
In a comment to
this post, Nancy B writes, "Quite disturbing that so many in Congress bought this fiction hook, line and sinker!"
They didn't buy it. The Republicans opposed the Iran deal up and down the line. The Democrats were willing to do anything -
anything - to avoid voting against their President. They were looking to avoid rocking the boat without risking the destruction of their careers. They were looking for cover for not opposing Obama. Rhodes provided it.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Ben Rhodes, Iran sanctions regime, Iranian nuclear threat, Leon Panetta, lies, United States Senate
Ouch! Foreign Policy slams @rhodes44
It's worth clicking through this link to
see the headline in the ordinarily staid Foreign Policy Magazine.
Perhaps the key sentence is this: “His lack of conventional
real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility
for the fate of nations — like military or diplomatic service, or even a
master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative
writing — is still startling.”
Rhodes comes off like a real asshole. This is not a matter of
politics — I have voted for Obama twice. Nor do I mind Rhodes’s contempt
for many political reporters: “Most of the outlets are reporting on
world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27
years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around
political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
But, as that quote indicates, he comes off like an overweening little
shmuck. This quotation seems to capture his world view: “He referred to
the American foreign policy establishment as the Blob. According to
Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other
Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the
collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.”
Blowing off Robert Gates takes nerve.
I expect cynicism in Washington. But it usually is combined with a
lot of knowledge — as with, say, Henry Kissinger. To be cynical and
ignorant and to spin those two things into a virtue? That’s industrial
strength hubris. Kind of like what got us into Iraq, in fact.
Rhodes and others around Obama keep on talking about doing all this
novel thinking, playing from a new playbook, bucking the establishment
thinking. But if that is the case, why have they given so much foreign
policy power to two career hacks who never have had an original thought?
I mean, of course, Joe Biden and John Kerry. I guess the answer can
only be that those two are puppets, and (as in Biden’s case) are given
losing propositions like Iraq to handle.
Fact check: Obama’s hasn’t been an original foreign policy as much as it has been a politicized foreign
policy. And this Rhodes guy reminds me of the Kennedy smart guys who
helped get us into the Vietnam War. Does he know how awful he sounds?
Kind of like McGeorge Bundy meets Lee Atwater.
Ouch.
Shabbat Shalom everyone.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Ben Rhodes, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Robert Gates, US foreign policy
.@rhodes44: 'So I lied'
In an article appearing in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, White House speechwriter Ben Rhodes (@rhodes44) admits what Israel supporters claimed all along:
He lied to Congress in order to sell the nuclear sellout to Iran.
Rhodes’s innovative campaign
to sell the Iran deal is likely to be a model for how future
administrations explain foreign policy to Congress and the public. The
way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal
presented — that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with
Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political
reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought
moderates to power in that country — was largely manufactured for the
purpose for selling the deal. Even where the particulars of that story
are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to
take away from those particulars are often misleading or false. Obama’s
closest advisers always understood him to be eager to do a deal with
Iran as far back as 2012, and even since the beginning of his
presidency. “It’s the center of the arc,” Rhodes explained to me two
days after the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action, was implemented. He then checked off the ways in which the
administration’s foreign-policy aims and priorities converged on Iran.
“We don’t have to kind of be in cycles of conflict if we can find other
ways to resolve these issues,” he said. “We can do things that challenge
the conventional thinking that, you know, ‘AIPAC doesn’t like this,’ or
‘the Israeli government doesn’t like this,’ or ‘the gulf countries
don’t like it.’ It’s the possibility of improved relations with
adversaries. It’s nonproliferation. So all these threads that the
president’s been spinning — and I mean that not in the press sense — for
almost a decade, they kind of all converged around Iran.”
In
the narrative that Rhodes shaped, the “story” of the Iran deal began in
2013, when a “moderate” faction inside the Iranian regime led by Hassan
Rouhani beat regime “hard-liners” in an election and then began to
pursue a policy of “openness,” which included a newfound willingness to
negotiate the dismantling of its illicit nuclear-weapons program. The
president set out the timeline himself in his speech announcing the
nuclear deal on July 14, 2015: “Today, after two years of negotiations,
the United States, together with our international partners, has
achieved something that decades of animosity has not.” While the
president’s statement was technically accurate — there had in fact been
two years of formal negotiations leading up to the signing of the
J.C.P.O.A. — it was also actively misleading, because the most
meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran had begun in mid-2012,
many months before Rouhani and the “moderate” camp were chosen in an
election among candidates handpicked by Iran’s supreme leader, the
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The idea that there was a new reality in Iran
was politically useful to the Obama administration. By obtaining broad
public currency for the thought that there was a significant split in
the regime, and that the administration was reaching out to
moderate-minded Iranians who wanted peaceful relations with their
neighbors and with America, Obama was able to evade what might have
otherwise been a divisive but clarifying debate over the actual policy
choices that his administration was making. By eliminating the fuss
about Iran’s nuclear program, the administration hoped to eliminate a
source of structural tension between the two countries, which would
create the space for America to disentangle itself from its established
system of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and
Turkey. With one bold move, the administration would effectively begin
the process of a large-scale disengagement from the Middle East.
...
The person whom Kreikemeier credits with running the digital side of the
campaign was Tanya Somanader, 31, the director of digital response for
the White House Office of Digital Strategy, who became known in the war
room and on Twitter as @TheIranDeal. Early on, Rhodes asked her to
create a rapid-response account that fact-checked everything related to
the Iran deal. “So, we developed a plan that was like: The Iran deal is
literally going to be the tip of everything that we stand up online,”
Somanader says. “And we’re going to map it onto what we know about the
different audiences we’re dealing with: the public, pundits, experts,
the right wing, Congress.” By applying 21st-century data and networking
tools to the white-glove world of foreign affairs, the White House was
able to track what United States senators and the people who worked for
them, and influenced them, were seeing online — and make sure that no
potential negative comment passed without a tweet.
...
When
I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed
from rational debate over America’s future role in the world, Rhodes
nodded. “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse
the [expletive] out of this,” he said. “We had test drives to know who
was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use
outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So
we knew the tactics that worked.” He is proud of the way he sold the
Iran deal. “We drove them crazy,” he said of the deal’s opponents.
Yet
Rhodes bridled at the suggestion that there has been anything deceptive
about the way that the agreement itself was sold. “Look, with Iran, in a
weird way, these are state-to-state issues. They’re agreements between
governments. Yes, I would prefer that it turns out that Rouhani and
Zarif” — Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister — “are real
reformers who are going to be steering this country into the direction
that I believe it can go in, because their public is educated and, in
some respects, pro-American. But we are not betting on that.”
In
fact, Rhodes’s passion seems to derive not from any investment in the
technical specifics of sanctions or centrifuge arrays, or any particular
optimism about the future course of Iranian politics and society. Those
are matters for the negotiators and area specialists. Rather, it
derived from his own sense of the urgency of radically reorienting
American policy in the Middle East in order to make the prospect of
American involvement in the region’s future wars a lot less likely. When
I asked whether the prospect of this same kind of far-reaching spin
campaign being run by a different administration is something that
scares him, he admitted that it does. “I mean, I’d prefer a sober,
reasoned public debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take
a vote,” he said, shrugging. “But that’s impossible.”
But it wasn't just Congress that was told lies. So was Obama's Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta.
One
of the few charter members of the Blob willing to speak on the record
is Leon Panetta, who was Obama’s head of the C.I.A. and secretary of
defense and also enough of a product of a different culture to give
honest answers to what he understands to be questions of consequence. At
his institute at the old Fort Ord in Seaside, Calif., where, in the
days before he wore Mr. Rogers sweaters, he served as a young Army
intelligence officer, I ask him about a crucial component of the
administration’s public narrative on Iran: whether it was ever a salient
feature of the C.I.A.’s analysis when he ran the agency that the
Iranian regime was meaningfully divided between “hard-line” and
“moderate” camps.
“No,”
Panetta answers. “There was not much question that the Quds Force and
the supreme leader ran that country with a strong arm, and there was not
much question that this kind of opposing view could somehow gain any
traction.”
I
ask Panetta whether, as head of the C.I.A., or later on, as secretary
of defense, he ever saw the letters that Obama covertly sent to
Khamenei, in 2009 and in 2012, which were only reported on by the press
weeks later.
“No,”
he answers, before saying he would “like to believe” that Tom Donilon,
national security adviser since 2010, and Hillary Clinton, then
secretary of state, had a chance to work on the offer they presented.
As
secretary of defense, he tells me, one of his most important jobs was
keeping Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his defense
minister, Ehud Barak, from launching a pre-emptive attack on Iran’s
nuclear facilities. “They were both interested in the answer to the
question, ‘Is the president serious?’ ” Panetta recalls. “And you know
my view, talking with the president, was: If brought to the point where
we had evidence that they’re developing an atomic weapon, I think the
president is serious that he is not going to allow that to happen.”
Panetta stops.
“But would you make that same assessment now?” I ask him.
“Would I make that same assessment now?” he asks. “Probably not.”
So another victim of the lies was Israel - specifically Netanyahu and Ehud Barak. Except that in Panetta's telling the story, he didn't know he was lying to them. And Panetta now admits what everyone in Israel felt at the time: There was no way in the world Hussein Obama was going to use military force to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Read the whole thing. You'll never trust another politician.
PS I left this out, but it turns out that Laura Rozen - likely the biggest cheerleader for the Iran deal on Twitter, is described as the White House's RSS feed for the deal. Think about that the next time you read something in al-Monitor, which she edits.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Ben Rhodes, Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, Iran sanctions regime, Iranian nuclear threat, Leon Panetta, lies
'The Obamacare of the second term'
In a tape uncovered by the Washington Free Beacon, White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes tells a private meeting of 'progressive activists' how the Obama administration intends to
circumvent Congress to make a deal on Iran's nuclear program (you can hear the tape
here).
"Bottom line is, this is the best opportunity we’ve had to resolve the
Iranian issue diplomatically, certainly since President Obama came to
office, and probably since the beginning of the Iraq war,” Rhodes said.
“So no small opportunity, it’s a big deal. This is probably the biggest
thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy. This
is healthcare for us, just to put it in context.”
Rhodes made the comparison as the White House was reeling from the botched rollout of the $2 billion Healthcare.gov. Polls continue to show that the health law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, remains unpopular.
Rhodes also said the White House wants to avoid congressional scrutiny of any deal.
“We’re already kind of thinking through, how do we structure a deal
so we don’t necessarily require legislative action right away,” Rhodes
said. “And there are ways to do that.”
That is similar to what an unnamed senior administration official told David Sanger of the New York Times last week for a piece headlined “Obama Sees an Iran Deal That Could Avoid Congress”: “We wouldn’t seek congressional legislation in any comprehensive agreement for years.”
White House spokesman Eric Schultz denied the Times story. But it is not as though the Obama White House has fallen out of love with executive action.
Matthew Continetti is seriously concerned.
And I am going to express fear. Fear that the chances of some sort of dangerous and misguided détente with Iran are high, and that they increase if Republicans capture the Senate and improve their majority in the House. Fear that the worse things get for Obama at home, the better the odds that he will hand the keys of the Middle East to Ayatollah Khamenei.
Fear that Obama sees an Iran deal not just as health care reform for the second term, but as his version of George W. Bush’s surge: a Hail Mary pass thrown in the fourth quarter in a long-shot attempt to salvage a legacy.
Bush ordered the surge despite having just lost an election. Obama is on the verge of losing another. And Obama will be no different from Bush in the pursuit of his desired ends.
Iran is Obama’s Iraq. It occupies the same place in the thinking of his administration that Iraq held in his predecessor’s. The desire for détente with Iran, for comity and diplomatic accord between longtime enemies, for a new Middle East in which security is left to regional stakeholders, and Shiite and Sunni alike see the United States as “evenhanded” in its treatment of Israelis and Palestinians, holds immense sway over the alliance of progressives and realists that conduct American foreign policy. It has for a decade.
He's not the only one who's concerned. Here's the Weekly Standard's Steve Hayes on Fox News.
Let's go to the videotape.
I have to disagree with one thing Hayes said. Hayes said that Obama would regret making a deal to allow Iran to have nuclear weapons.
“A top U.S. official boasting about having stopped an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities are not going to look good when Iran has a nuke.”
I disagree. Obama is betting that by the time Iran threatens to use or uses a nuclear weapon on the United States, Obama will be out of office and will not be blamed.
What could go wrong?
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Ben Rhodes, Iranian nuclear threat, Islamic State
This is President Hussein Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser
No, this isn't a post about Benghazi, although perhaps the connection illustrated above could explain why CBS News is so consistently anti-Israel.
Last week, Ben Rhodes made a statement about as dumb as any I have ever heard from a national security adviser. In an interview with
Candy Crowley, Rhodes
said the following:
Interviewed by CNN's
Candy Crowley,
Mr. Rhodes offered the now-standard administration line that
Israel has a right to defend itself but needs to do more to avoid
civilian casualties. Ms. Crowley interjected that, according to Israeli
Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu,
the Jewish state was already doing everything it could to avoid
such casualties.
"I think you can always do more," Mr. Rhodes replied. "The U.S. military does that in Afghanistan."
In the Wall Street Journal (same link as above), Bret Stephens rips Rhodes some new body parts over that statement.
How inapt is this comparison? The list of
Afghan civilians accidentally killed by U.S. or NATO strikes is not
short. Little of the fighting in Afghanistan took place in the dense
urban environments that make the current warfare in Gaza so difficult.
The last time the U.S. fought a Gaza-style battle—in Fallujah in
2004—some 800 civilians perished and at least 9,000 homes were
destroyed. This is not an indictment of U.S. conduct in Fallujah but an
acknowledgment of the grim reality of city combat.
Oh,
and by the way, American towns and cities were not being rocketed from
above or tunneled under from below as the Fallujah campaign was under
way.
So why did Rhodes make the comparison? Stephens has an explanation for that too.
Or maybe he was just another victim of what I call the Palestine
Effect: The abrupt and often total collapse of logical reasoning,
skeptical intelligence and ordinary moral judgment whenever the subject
of Palestinian suffering arises.
In other words, you have to be dumb to support the 'Palestinians.'
But Stephens says it goes beyond the question of the intelligence of 'Palestine's supporters.
But let's assume for argument's sake that
the numbers are accurate. Does this mean the Palestinians are the chief
victims, and Israelis the main victimizers, in the conflict? By this
dull logic we might want to rethink the moral equities of World War II,
in which over one million German civilians perished at Allied hands
compared with just 67,000 British and 12,000 American civilians.
The
real utility of the body count is that it offers reporters and
commentators who cite it the chance to ascribe implicit blame to Israel
while evading questions about ultimate responsibility for the killing.
Questions such as: Why is Hamas hiding rockets in U.N.-run schools, as
acknowledged by the U.N. itself? What does it mean that Hamas has turned
Gaza's central hospital into "a de facto headquarters," as reported by
the Washington Post? And why does Hamas keep rejecting, or violating,
cease-fires agreed to by Israel?
A
reasonable person might conclude from this that Hamas, which started the
war, wants it to continue, and that it relies on Israel's moral
scruples not to destroy civilian sites that it cynically uses for
military purposes. But then there is the Palestine Effect. By this
reasoning, Hamas only initiated the fighting because Israel refused to
countenance the creation of a Palestinian coalition that included Hamas,
and because Israel further objected to helping pay the salaries of
Hamas's civil servants in Gaza.
Let's
get this one straight. Israel is culpable because (a) it won't accept a
Palestinian government that includes a terrorist organization sworn to
the Jewish state's destruction; (b) it won't help that organization out
of its financial jam; and (c) it won't ease a quasi-blockade—jointly
imposed with Egypt—on a territory whose central economic activity
appears to be building rocket factories and pouring imported concrete
into terrorist tunnels.
Yes, these are the people that the Obama administration and the Leftist American media love.
What could go wrong?
Labels: anti-Israel media bias, Barack Hussein Obama, Ben Rhodes, civilian casualties, Gaza, Hamas, human shields, IDF, Operation Protective Edge
